There are names in the Bible everyone remembers. Peter. Paul. John. Mary. David. Moses. Their stories fill chapters, sermons, songs, and Sunday school lessons. We know their victories and failures, their moments of extraordinary faith and their moments when everything seemed to fall apart. Their names have become part of the language of our faith.

And then there are other names. Names that appear almost in passing, tucked into a sentence or buried in the middle of a story. We read right over them because Scripture seems to move on before we have time to wonder who they were. But every once in a while, if you slow down long enough, you discover that there may be an entire story hiding in the space between two verses.

Sosthenes is one of those names.

His story, or at least the pieces of it Scripture allows us to see, has been haunting me lately. Because if the Sosthenes we meet in Acts is the same Sosthenes Paul names at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, then something remarkable happened between those two moments. Scripture never tells us exactly what. It simply gives us two snapshots and leaves this enormous, beautiful space between them for us to wonder about.

In the first snapshot, Sosthenes is caught in the aftermath of an attempt to bring Paul before the Roman authorities. The case against Paul falls apart, the crowd turns on Sosthenes, and he is publicly beaten in front of the tribunal. Then Luke moves on. No explanation. No resolution. Just a bruised and humiliated man disappearing from the story.

Then, almost unexpectedly, his name appears again.

Paul begins his letter to the Corinthians with these words: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes…”

Our brother.

If this is the same man, and we cannot know for certain, then somewhere between the beating in Acts and the writing of Corinthians, an enemy became family. The man connected to a moment of opposition is now standing beside Paul. Not as an opponent. Not as a problem to be solved. Not as a painful chapter from Paul’s past that needed to be continually retold.

As a brother.

And somewhere in the unexplained space between those two snapshots may be one of the most beautiful pictures of the gospel we almost never talk about.

The First Time We Meet Sosthenes

Paul arrives in Corinth in Acts 18, stepping into one of the most important cities of the Roman world. Corinth was prosperous and strategic, a crossroads of commerce, culture, religion, and ideas. It was also a city deeply conscious of status. Who you knew mattered. Where you stood mattered. Your reputation mattered. Honor was something to be gained and protected, and public shame could cost you far more than embarrassment. It was into this complicated, competitive city that Paul walked carrying the simple and disruptive message of Jesus.

He stayed for eighteen months, preaching, teaching, working, building relationships, and establishing what would eventually become one of the most famous—and famously complicated, churches in the New Testament. As was Paul’s pattern, much of his early ministry centered around the Jewish community, and something remarkable happened: Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in Jesus along with his household. We can read that quickly two thousand years later, but this would not have been a small development. A respected religious leader had crossed a significant line. The man responsible for helping lead the synagogue had become convinced that the Jesus Paul was preaching really was the Messiah.

And then another name enters the story.

Sosthenes.

He is identified as a ruler of the synagogue, and before long the growing tension surrounding Paul’s ministry reaches a breaking point. Acts tells us that Paul’s opponents make a united attack against him and bring him before Gallio, the Roman proconsul of Achaia. This is no longer an argument taking place inside the synagogue. They have brought Paul before Roman authority, accusing him of persuading people to worship God in ways contrary to the law. The religious disagreement has spilled into the public square, and now they want Rome to do something about Paul.

But the whole thing collapses almost immediately. Before Paul can even mount his defense, Gallio refuses to hear the case. From his perspective, this is an argument about words, names, and Jewish religious law, not a matter requiring Roman judgment. He dismisses them from the tribunal. The attempt to use Roman authority against Paul has failed.

And then the scene takes a strange and violent turn.

The crowd grabs Sosthenes.

Acts 18:17 tells us that they seize the synagogue ruler and beat him right there in front of the tribunal. Gallio watches it happen and does nothing. The man who carried the title and standing of synagogue ruler is suddenly being publicly assaulted in the very place where Paul had just been brought for judgment.

Then Luke does something that almost bothers me.

He moves on.

There is no description of what happened next. No explanation of why the crowd turned on Sosthenes. No record of who helped him. No account of what he thought as he lay bruised and humiliated in front of the tribunal. The story simply continues.

But I can’t move on quite that quickly.

Because I keep seeing Sosthenes.

The crowd dispersing. The shouting fading. People returning to whatever they were doing before the spectacle began.

And one man left carrying the wounds of what had just happened.

I keep wondering what happened after everyone else walked away.

Who went back for Sosthenes?

The Man on the Ground

We need to be careful here, because there are things Scripture simply doesn’t tell us. We don’t know exactly why Sosthenes was beaten or even precisely who made up the crowd that attacked him. We don’t know what role Sosthenes personally played in bringing Paul before Gallio, and Scripture gives us no account of what happened in the minutes or hours after the beating. Those blanks matter. I don’t want to fill the silence of Scripture with certainty and call imagination history.

But we do know enough to stop for a moment and look at the man on the ground.

Sosthenes was the ruler of the synagogue. That title carried more than responsibility; it carried standing, influence, identity, and public recognition. People knew who he was. He had a place in the community. And now, in a matter of moments, this man of position had been seized by a crowd and beaten publicly in front of the Roman tribunal. The violence itself would have been painful, but in the world Sosthenes inhabited, there was another wound being inflicted at the same time: shame.

To understand the weight of that moment, we have to enter the social world of Corinth. Honor and shame were powerful currencies in the Greco-Roman world. Reputation wasn’t simply something you carried privately inside yourself; it was something established in the eyes of the community. Your standing was public. Your influence was public. Your victories were public. And so was your humiliation. To be beaten in front of the tribunal wasn’t simply to experience physical violence. It was to be brought low where everyone could see it.

And Corinth seems to have understood this game particularly well. Status, influence, reputation, wisdom, power, these currents run underneath so much of Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthian church. You can almost hear the questions beneath their arguments: Who matters most? Who has the greater gift? Who possesses the greater wisdom? Who has influence? Who belongs to Paul? Who belongs to Apollos? Who deserves to be honored?

In many ways, 1 Corinthians is the story of Paul trying to teach a community obsessed with status how to become a family.

And suddenly Sosthenes’ story becomes even more interesting.

Here is a man who had status. A man who carried a title. A man people recognized when he walked into the synagogue. Then, in one chaotic public moment, the crowd turns on him. The place where Paul was supposed to be judged becomes the place where Sosthenes is humiliated. The man who walked into the tribunal with standing leaves it wounded.

Or maybe he couldn’t leave at all.

Maybe for a while he simply lay there.

I keep thinking about that moment after the violence ended. Crowds have a strange way of disappearing once the spectacle is over. The shouting stops. People return to their homes. Life moves on for everyone except the person who has been wounded.

And there is Sosthenes.

No title can help him now.

No position can pick him up.

No argument can undo what just happened.

Just a wounded man on the ground.

And maybe that is where this story begins to sound a lot more like the gospel.

Because eventually the question isn’t who won the argument before Gallio.

The question is what happens when the argument is over and there is a wounded person lying in front of you.

Who stays?

Who walks toward him?

Who helps him stand?

What If Paul Went Back?

This is where we have to move from history into a little holy imagination. The Bible never tells us that Paul went to Sosthenes after the beating, and we shouldn’t pretend that it does. But I can’t stop wondering: What if he did? Paul knew what it felt like to be beaten, to have a crowd turn violent, to be publicly humiliated, and to have religious people become convinced that you were the problem. Perhaps when he looked at Sosthenes lying there, he didn’t just see an opponent. Maybe he saw something of himself.

Because Paul knew what it was like to be the enemy. Before he was the apostle being persecuted for Jesus, he was the man persecuting those who followed Jesus. He approved of Stephen’s death. He hunted Christians, dragged believers from their homes, and breathed threats against the church, all while being absolutely convinced that he was right. And Jesus came for him anyway. Maybe receiving that kind of grace changes the way you see the people who stand against you. Maybe once you realize that Jesus came looking for you while you were fighting against Him, it becomes much harder to believe that anyone else is beyond grace.

So I wonder if Paul looked at Sosthenes on the ground and remembered the words of Jesus: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Paul could have walked away. Maybe everyone would have understood if he had. Maybe there was even a voice inside him whispering, That’s what you get. But grace doesn’t ask whether someone deserves our love. We love because we were loved. We forgive because we were forgiven. We move toward people because God first moved toward us.

So maybe Paul went back. Maybe he knelt beside Sosthenes and helped him to his feet. Maybe he cleaned his wounds or brought him something to eat. Maybe Sosthenes looked into the face of a man he had once stood against and encountered something he never expected to find there: grace. We don’t know. Scripture doesn’t give us that scene, and we shouldn’t pretend that it does. But then we turn the page, the story moves forward, and eventually that name appears again.

Sosthenes.

“Our Brother Sosthenes”

Some time later, Paul sits down to write a letter to the church in Corinth, the letter we now call First Corinthians. And there, before he addresses their divisions, their theology, their relationships, or any of the problems tearing at this young church, Paul begins with a greeting: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes…”

Wait. Sosthenes? Our brother Sosthenes? We cannot prove that the Sosthenes of Acts 18 and the Sosthenes of 1 Corinthians 1 are the same man. There is honest scholarly disagreement, and we should leave room for that uncertainty. But they certainly could be. And if they are, then there is an entire gospel story hiding in the space between Acts 18:17 and 1 Corinthians 1:1. Somewhere between the tribunal and the letter, something changed. The opponent became a brother. Hostility became fellowship. The division became family. The synagogue ruler we last saw beaten before Gallio is now somehow standing beside Paul as he writes back to Corinth.

But perhaps the most beautiful part is what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t introduce Sosthenes by his history. He doesn’t write, “And Sosthenes, you remember him, the guy involved in that whole mess back in Corinth.” He doesn’t attach a footnote explaining his failures. He doesn’t make sure everyone remembers which side Sosthenes used to be on. He doesn’t use another man’s past to establish his own moral superiority. Whatever happened before, Paul refuses to make Sosthenes carry it as his permanent name.

He gives him something better.

Our brother.

Two words. No scorekeeping. No qualification. No asterisk beside his name. Just belonging. Just family. Just grace.

And that may be my favorite part of the entire story. Because perhaps one of the clearest signs that grace has truly changed us is not simply that we can forgive someone’s past, but that we no longer need to introduce them by it.

The Gospel Gives People New Names

We live in a culture that keeps receipts. We screenshot the text, save the email, archive the post, and remember the conversation. We remember what someone said, what they did, how they failed us, and how they made us feel. And sometimes, long after the moment has passed, we keep carrying the evidence around with us. Then their name comes up in conversation and almost instinctively we reach for the file: You know who I’m talking about, the one who… And we tell the story again. Their worst moment becomes the adjective we attach to their name.

But the gospel does something radically different. The gospel gives people new names. Paul understood this perhaps better than anyone. Imagine if every time his name appeared in Scripture there was an explanation attached to it: Paul, the former persecutor. Paul, the man who approved of Stephen’s death. Paul, the man who terrorized Christians and dragged believers from their homes. Those things were true. Grace didn’t rewrite history or pretend they never happened. They were part of Paul’s story, but they were no longer Paul’s name.

Grace had given him a new identity. The persecutor became an apostle. The enemy became a son. The man who once tried to destroy the church became a man willing to give his life for it. Maybe that’s why Paul could look at someone else’s complicated history and resist the temptation to make that history the permanent definition of who they were. He knew what it was like to have Jesus look beyond the worst chapter of his story and see someone who could still be redeemed.

And maybe that’s why those two words carry so much weight: our brother. No explanation. No asterisk. No reminder of which side Sosthenes may once have stood on. Just a new name born out of a new relationship.

People who have been rescued by grace should be the people least interested in permanently defining someone else by their failures. We don’t have to pretend the past didn’t happen. Grace isn’t amnesia, and forgiveness isn’t dishonesty. But the gospel refuses to believe that the worst thing a person has done must become the truest thing about them forever.

Jesus doesn’t erase our story. He redeems it. And redeemed people should leave room for God to redeem someone else’s story too.

I Think I Understand Sosthenes

I think there is a small part of me that understands Sosthenes. I still remember a day in the fifth grade when a friend of mine, for reasons I can’t even remember anymore, suddenly turned on me. What I do remember is the playground. I was sitting on top of one of those small playground structures, surrounded by other kids, when he grabbed one of those red rubber dodgeballs and launched it at me. It hit me hard enough to knock me off the structure and onto the ground. And then came the part I remember most clearly: everyone laughed. Kids were pointing, laughing, watching me lying there after being knocked down by someone I thought was my friend.

So naturally, I rose to my feet with all 65 pounds of ten-year-old rage and went after him. There was pushing, wrestling, rolling around in the dirt, two fifth-grade boys attempting to settle the great injustice of the playground with whatever strength and dignity we could muster. Eventually a teacher pulled us apart, and then came that long, terrible walk every kid knew meant things had gone too far: the principal’s office. The strange thing is that I don’t remember what punishment we received. I don’t remember what the principal said. I don’t even remember what started the fight. But I remember being knocked down. I remember the laughter. I remember the embarrassment. And I remember how desperately I wanted to get back on my feet and fight.

Maybe that’s because humiliation has a way of staying with us longer than the wound itself. Bruises heal faster than embarrassment. There is something about being hurt in front of other people that reaches deeper than the physical pain. We don’t simply remember what happened; we remember who was watching. We remember how small we felt. We remember the instinct to protect ourselves, defend ourselves, and somehow regain whatever dignity we felt had just been taken from us. Maybe that’s part of what keeps drawing me back to the picture of Sosthenes on the ground. Different century. Different world. Far greater consequences. But there is something deeply human about being publicly knocked down and immediately wanting to know how you are going to get back up.

But there is another part of that fifth-grade story that matters even more. My friend and I eventually made up. In fact, somehow we became closer friends afterward. The kid I had been rolling around fighting on the playground became someone I cared about deeply again. The fight was real, the embarrassment was real, and neither of us could undo what happened, but somehow the fight didn’t get to write the ending of our story.

Maybe that’s what I’ve learned about relationships: they are beautiful precisely because they can be so messy. We hurt each other. We misunderstand each other. We disappoint each other. Sometimes we knock each other down, and sometimes we’re the one lying on the ground. Yet somehow grace can enter those places and write endings we couldn’t see when we were still fighting in the dirt.

Jesus knew this about us. Maybe that’s why He spent so much time teaching us not only what to believe about God, but how to live with one another. Because eventually every theology of grace has to leave the page and walk onto the playground.

Relationships Are Where Our Theology Gets Tested

Maybe that’s why so much of Jesus’ teaching wasn’t theology in the abstract, it was about how we treat one another. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Forgive. Show mercy. Take the plank out of your own eye. Reconcile with your brother. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who persecute you. Jesus knew something about us: relationships are where our theology gets tested. It’s relatively easy to believe in grace; it’s much harder to give grace to the person who just knocked you off the playground. It’s easy to preach forgiveness until you’re the one lying on the ground and everyone is laughing.

It’s easy to talk about loving our enemies when “enemy” is just a theological category. It’s something entirely different when your enemy has a name, a face, a history, and a story connected to your pain. That’s when grace becomes costly. That’s when forgiveness stops being an idea and becomes a decision. That’s when what we say we believe about Jesus collides with the deepest wounds, fears, and defenses inside us.

Maybe this is one of the great contrasts we continually see between Jesus and the religious systems that opposed Him. Jesus kept moving toward broken people with love, grace, mercy, and restoration, while religion could become consumed with judgment, keeping score, protecting status, and maintaining power. One way asks, “How do I restore this person?”The other asks, “How do I prove this person is wrong?”

And if I’m truthful, both impulses live somewhere inside me. Maybe following Jesus is allowing His grace to slowly silence the part of me that needs to win, retaliate, keep score, or have the last word, and learning instead to ask the much harder question:

What would love do now?

I Have Broken Places Too

I have broken places too. Places in me that don’t stay neatly hidden but find their way into my family, my friendships, my community, my leadership, and the way I interact with people. There are wounds that can make me defensive. There are moments when being misunderstood makes me desperate to explain myself, when criticism feels strangely bigger than the words being spoken, when something inside me feels that old dodgeball hit all over again. And before I know it, I’m ten years old, knocked off the playground, everyone watching, with something inside me shouting: Get up. Fight back. Don’t let them do this to you.

Maybe you know that feeling. Someone says something about you that you don’t believe is true. Someone questions your motives, betrays your trust, embarrasses you, or wounds you in a place you thought was safe. Sometimes the deepest pain comes when someone you loved suddenly feels like an enemy. And that’s when the teachings of Jesus stop sounding poetic and start becoming painfully practical. Jesus doesn’t simply teach us how to behave when everyone treats us well. He teaches us who we can become when they don’t.

That’s why the gospel is so much bigger than simply telling us how to get to heaven. The gospel teaches us what to do when we’ve been knocked to the ground, and what to do when we realize we’re the one who knocked somebody else down. It meets both the wounded and the wounder, both the offended and the offender, and refuses to leave either of us where it found us.

Because this is where the gospel lives and breathes: right in the middle of the pain, loss, misunderstanding, disappointment, and struggle of our relationships. This is where grace becomes more than a theological word. Where mercy becomes costly. Where forgiveness becomes real. Where our need to be right begins surrendering to our desire to become like Jesus.

This is where Jesus starts changing us.

Jesus Told Us This Would Be Hard

Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I think we have made those words far too sentimental. They sound beautiful embroidered on a pillow or printed beneath a sunset, but Jesus wasn’t talking about mildly irritating people. He was talking about enemies. People who oppose you. People who accuse you. People who misunderstand your heart, question your motives, wound you, betray you, or even hope to see you fail. And Jesus looks directly into the hardest relationships of our lives and says something that feels almost impossible: Love them.

That’s the scandal of Jesus’ teaching. He doesn’t say love them when they apologize. Love them when they finally understand your side. Love them once they’ve made restitution or admitted they were wrong. He simply calls us to love. Not because what happened doesn’t matter. Not because boundaries are unnecessary or reconciliation is always possible. But because our love is no longer determined by what another person deserves. Our love begins with what we ourselves have received.

Paul understood this perhaps better than anyone. He writes in Romans that while we were still God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son. Enemies. That was us. The gospel isn’t the story of good people being rewarded for being good; it is the story of enemies being pursued, loved, forgiven, and brought home. God didn’t wait for us to become His friends before He loved us. His love is what made friendship possible.

And maybe that’s why Jesus asks something so difficult of us. Every time we love an enemy, every time we choose prayer over revenge, mercy over scorekeeping, and grace over the need to have the last word, we are reenacting something of the gospel we ourselves have received. We aren’t loving our enemies because they deserve grace. We love them because neither did we.

Maybe Reconciliation Begins on the Ground

There is something else I love about the possibility hidden in the story of Sosthenes. If our reconstruction is even close, reconciliation didn’t begin around a conference table with everyone finally agreeing about who was right. It didn’t begin after Sosthenes perfectly explained himself or after Paul received the apology he deserved. It may have begun much more simply, with a wounded man lying on the ground and another man deciding whether he would walk toward him or walk away.

So often we wait for everything to be resolved before we are willing to love. We wait for the apology, the explanation, the admission that we were right. We wait for justice or vindication. And those things matter. Forgiveness doesn’t require us to pretend that evil wasn’t evil. Grace doesn’t mean abandoning wisdom or healthy boundaries, and reconciliation isn’t always possible when another person remains unsafe or unwilling. But even when reconciliation between two people isn’t possible, Jesus can still do the work of reconciliation inside of us. He can free us from revenge, loosen our grip on the scorecard, and keep another person’s worst moment from becoming the permanent definition we give them.

Maybe that’s one of the deepest freedoms of the gospel: I don’t have to wait for someone else to change before Jesus can change something in me. Their apology doesn’t have to come before my heart begins to heal. Their understanding isn’t required for me to surrender my anger. Their willingness to reconcile doesn’t determine my willingness to become more like Jesus.

And sometimes the gospel leaves us with a terribly uncomfortable question: When the person who hurt you is the one lying wounded on the ground, what kind of person will you be? Will you walk past because some part of you believes they deserve it? Or will you remember the grace that found you on the ground and choose to move toward them?

Maybe reconciliation doesn’t always begin when two people finally agree.

Maybe sometimes it begins when one person decides to stop walking away.

Paul Had Been Sosthenes

Maybe Paul could look at Sosthenes differently because Paul knew something Sosthenes may not have understood yet: Paul had been him. He knew what it was like to be absolutely convinced that he was right while being terribly wrong. Paul had fought against the gospel, wounded people in the name of God, and believed his passion justified his actions. Then Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, and everything changed. The man Paul thought was his enemy turned out to be his Savior.

Maybe that’s what grace does to the way we see people. Once you’ve been confronted by the depth of your own need for mercy, it becomes much harder to divide the world neatly into good people and bad people, heroes and villains, righteous people and enemies. There are just people, broken people, blind people, hurting people, proud people, frightened people. People capable of extraordinary love and terrible pain, sometimes in the very same life. People desperately in need of grace.

Including me.

Especially me.

That’s one of the great equalizers of the gospel. It takes away our ability to stand over another person because none of us arrived at Jesus standing tall. The gospel begins with all of us kneeling at the same cross. Paul couldn’t look down on Sosthenes without remembering where Jesus had found him. And maybe we can’t truly understand grace until we stop asking why someone else deserves it and remember how desperately we needed it ourselves.

It’s hard to stand above someone else when you remember that grace found both of you on the ground.

The Scandal of “Brother”

I keep coming back to those two words: our brother. In the world of Corinth, that designation may have carried more weight than we realize. In a culture obsessed with honor, Paul gives Sosthenes honor. In a world where public shame could follow a person, Paul gives him belonging. In a city shaped by competition, reputation, and status, Paul gives him something that cannot be earned through position or influence. He calls him family.

And maybe that’s why the appearance of Sosthenes at the beginning of 1 Corinthians is so beautiful. Paul is writing to a church being torn apart by factions. “I follow Paul.” “I follow Apollos.” “I follow Cephas.” Everyone seems to be choosing teams, drawing lines, establishing sides, and deciding who belongs with whom. Yet before Paul says a word about their divisions, he may already be showing them another way.

Perhaps standing beside Paul is a living sermon: Sosthenes. The possible former opponent. The synagogue ruler we last saw publicly beaten before Gallio. A man whose story carried conflict, humiliation, and perhaps even hostility, and now Paul gives him only one title that matters:

Our brother.

Maybe Paul didn’t just write the gospel to Corinth. Maybe he put the gospel in the greeting. Before he tells them to stop choosing sides, he shows them what grace can do with sides. Before he teaches them about reconciliation, he may be standing beside a man whose very presence whispers that reconciliation is possible. Before Paul explains that in Christ we belong to one another, he simply introduces the man beside him as family.

Maybe that’s the scandal of the word brother: grace can create a family where the world only sees enemies.

Who Is Your Sosthenes?

That’s the question I can’t escape: Who is your Sosthenes? Who is the person whose name still causes something to tighten inside you? The one who criticized you, accused you, misunderstood you, betrayed your trust, questioned your motives, or damaged your reputation. Maybe it’s someone you once loved. Maybe it’s someone you trusted. Maybe they’re the person who knocked you off the playground when you never saw it coming. We all have names that carry stories, and some stories still hurt when we hear the name.

Our instinct in those moments is usually some version of the same thing: explain yourself, defend yourself, expose what really happened, make sure people know your side, win. But Jesus keeps offering us another way. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Bless those who curse you. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Not because the pain wasn’t real, but because Jesus refuses to let the pain have the final word. Grace asks us to leave enough room in someone’s story for God to write a chapter we cannot yet imagine.

Because today’s enemy may not always be your enemy. The person standing against you today may someday stand beside you. The person you’re asking God to defeat may be someone God is trying to redeem, and perhaps He is trying to redeem something in you at the same time. We simply don’t know what grace might do in the space between today’s conflict and tomorrow’s story.

And maybe that’s one of the hardest truths of the gospel: sometimes the greatest evidence of God’s work isn’t that He finally proves you were right. It isn’t that your enemy loses and you win. Sometimes the miracle is much greater than vindication.

Sometimes God turns enemies into brothers.

The Space Between Two Verses

We don’t know exactly what happened between Sosthenes and Paul. And strangely, I think I love that Scripture leaves the space blank. Because so much of grace happens in the places nobody sees. The quiet conversation. The unexpected apology. The decision to forgive. The hand extended when walking away would have been easier. Somewhere between the tribunal and the letter, between Sosthenes the synagogue ruler and Sosthenes our brother, there may be an entire story of redemption that Scripture simply allows to remain hidden.

Maybe there was a conversation. Maybe there were tears. Maybe Paul really did walk back toward the man on the ground and help him to his feet. Maybe Sosthenes eventually heard the gospel from the very man he once stood against. Or maybe none of it happened exactly the way I had imagined it. We simply don’t know. But if the Sosthenes of Acts and the Sosthenes of Corinthians are the same man, we do know where the story eventually landed. Not with revenge. Not with humiliation. Not with Paul getting the last word. Not with Sosthenes forever carrying the label of enemy. Somehow, two men who may once have stood on opposite sides ended up standing together under one name: brothers.

And maybe that’s the Gospel of Sosthenes. The gospel that meets us when we’re lying wounded on the ground and confronts us when we’re the one who threw the punch. The gospel that refuses to reduce a human being to the worst thing they’ve ever done. The gospel that can take our wounds, our pride, our failures, our broken relationships, and even our enemies and begin making something new. The gospel that reminds us that nobody is beyond redemption because the people who first carried this gospel weren’t beyond redemption either. Paul wasn’t. Sosthenes wasn’t. I’m not. And neither are you.

Maybe there are blank spaces in your story right now. Relationships that feel unfinished. Names that still hurt. Conversations that haven’t happened. Wounds that haven’t completely healed. People you cannot imagine ever calling brother again. Don’t confuse the blank space with the end of the story. God does some of His most beautiful work between the verses. There may still be grace being written in places you cannot see.

Because the gospel doesn’t merely forgive enemies.

It doesn’t simply decide who was right and who was wrong.

It does something far more miraculous.

Grace takes people lying on opposite sides of the story, helps them off the ground, and sometimes, against every expectation, turns them into brothers.

I started my sermon this week with a bottle of water sitting on the stage. There was nothing particularly spiritual about it, just an ordinary plastic bottle filled with something most of us barely think about. I picked it up, looked at the room, and asked a simple question: “Do you like water?”

It was a slightly ridiculous question because, of course, we don’t merely like water. We need it. Water is so deeply woven into our existence that we often stop noticing it. It covers roughly 71 percent of the earth’s surface, and much of the human body is made of it. Our brains, hearts, muscles, blood, lungs, virtually every system that keeps us alive, depends upon water. Even the air around us contains it. Water vapor is moving through the atmosphere all the time, which means you can walk into a room where there is no visible water anywhere and still be surrounded by it.

That thought captivated me. Something can be present even when we cannot see it. We can live completely unaware of it while depending upon it every moment. We can breathe air containing water molecules without ever stopping to consider what is surrounding us and sustaining life.

Standing there holding that bottle, I began thinking about what an extraordinary picture this gives us of the Holy Spirit. Not because the Holy Spirit is water, He is not. The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal energy, a mysterious force, or some spiritual substance drifting through the universe. He is God. He is the third Person of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Yet throughout Scripture, God graciously uses things we know and experience physically to help us understand realities that are harder to see. Scripture speaks of the Spirit through images of wind, breath, fire, oil, and water. These images are not definitions of the Holy Spirit, but they reveal something about the way He moves, gives life, cleanses, fills, empowers, refreshes, and remains mysteriously present even when He cannot be seen with our eyes.

In fact, water and Spirit appear together from the very opening pages of Scripture. Before there was a garden, before there was humanity, before there was a temple, a church building, a worship song, or a sermon, Genesis tells us that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Before human history had really begun, the Spirit was already there, present over the deep, moving over creation before life burst forth.

Then the story becomes even more intimate. God forms humanity from the dust of the ground and breathes into Adam the breath of life. Dust becomes living flesh because God breathes. There is something breathtakingly beautiful about that image: humanity does not manufacture its own life. Life begins with the breath of God.

And maybe that is one of the great truths we have forgotten about the Christian life. We were never meant to generate spiritual life on our own. We were never designed to manufacture peace, transformation, courage, wisdom, holiness, or purpose through sheer effort. From the beginning, life has always come from God.

God breathes, and humanity comes alive.

And I believe He is still breathing life into people.

We Were Made for His Presence

One of the things I have become increasingly convinced of is that the Bible is one enormous story about the presence of God. We sometimes reduce Christianity to believing the right things, behaving the right way, attending the right services, and hopefully ending up in heaven someday. But the story Scripture tells is much bigger and more beautiful than that. At its heart, the Bible tells the story of a holy God moving toward broken humanity so that we might once again live in His presence.

That is where the story begins. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are not simply given a beautiful garden to enjoy; they are given fellowship with God Himself. They know His presence. They walk with Him. There is no veil, no temple curtain, no distance between Creator and creation. Then sin enters the story and fractures that communion. Humanity is driven from the garden, and from that moment forward a question begins echoing through the pages of Scripture: How can broken humanity live again in the presence of a holy God?

In many ways, the rest of the Bible is God’s answer to that question. Again and again, God moves toward His people. His presence goes with Israel through the wilderness. His glory fills the tabernacle and later the temple. Yet even in those sacred places, there is still distance. The Holy of Holies remains behind a veil. God is dwelling among His people, but the story is not yet complete. The tabernacle and temple were never the final destination; they were pointing toward something—and Someone—greater.

Then something happens that no one could have fully imagined. God does not simply choose another building in which to dwell. God becomes flesh. John writes, “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” The presence of God is no longer associated primarily with a place. In Jesus, the presence of God has become a Person. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

Think about how extraordinary that is. The God whose presence once rested behind a veil is now walking the dusty roads of Galilee. He is touching lepers, eating with sinners, welcoming children, healing the sick, calming storms, forgiving sins, and calling ordinary people to follow Him. People who had spent generations thinking about drawing near to the presence of God could now watch as the presence of God walked toward them.

For three years, the disciples built their lives around that reality. When they didn’t understand something, Jesus was there. When a storm threatened to overwhelm them, Jesus was there. When thousands were hungry and there wasn’t enough food, Jesus was there. When someone needed healing, Jesus was there. When they were afraid, confused, exhausted, or unsure of what to do next, they could simply turn toward Him.

Then, on the night before His crucifixion, Jesus tells them He is leaving.

It is difficult for us to fully appreciate how frightening that must have sounded. These men had left homes, careers, routines, and expectations to follow Him. For three years, they had experienced the presence of God in the person of Jesus, and now the One they had come to trust more than anyone else was telling them He was going away. What were they supposed to do without Him?

Jesus answers their fear with a promise: “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever.” Then, just a few verses later, He tells them, “I will not leave you as orphans.”

Those words reveal something beautiful about the unfolding story of Scripture. The story of God’s presence is not ending with Jesus returning to the Father. It is advancing. Through Jesus, God with us is about to become something even more intimate: God in us through the Holy Spirit.

The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation now comes to dwell within the people of God. The presence that filled the tabernacle, the glory that filled the temple, and the God who came near to us in Jesus is no longer confined to a sacred location. Through the Holy Spirit, God makes His home within His people.

That still staggers me.

The Holy Spirit is not a theological accessory to Christianity, something we add after we have finished talking about the Father and the Son. He is not an optional experience reserved for especially spiritual Christians. He is God dwelling with and within His people, the Helper Jesus promised would come and remain with us forever. Through the Spirit, the presence of God is not somewhere we occasionally visit. His presence has come to dwell within us.

We were made for the presence of God. Sin drove humanity from it, the entire biblical story moves toward its restoration, Jesus opened the way back into it, and through the Holy Spirit, God now makes His home in us.

The God We Breathe

Most of us rarely think about breathing. You probably weren’t consciously thinking about oxygen until you read that sentence, but now you can feel yourself breathing in and out, something you have already done thousands of times today without noticing. Oxygen is invisible and mostly unnoticed, yet absolutely essential to life. We don’t have to understand everything about it to depend upon it. We simply breathe.

I sometimes wonder if we treat the Holy Spirit in much the same way. He is present, but often unnoticed; essential, but easily overlooked; near, but taken for granted. We believe in the Holy Spirit theologically, yet we can live practically as though everything depends upon us. We try to follow Jesus through willpower, fix ourselves, control outcomes, carry our families, lead our churches, manage relationships, meet expectations, survive disappointment, and somehow hold everything together. Eventually, we wonder why we are exhausted.

I know something about that exhaustion. The last few months have been a wrestling match for me personally. I have wrestled through my own struggles, difficult relationships, disappointment, and questions I could not easily answer. At times I thought I was wrestling with circumstances or other people, only to discover that underneath it all I was wrestling with God and, perhaps even more, wrestling with myself.

Sometimes exhaustion reveals what we have been carrying in our own strength. We become so accustomed to the weight that we no longer realize how heavy it is. We keep pushing, fixing, explaining, defending, solving, and trying harder until our souls finally tell us what our minds have refused to admit: we cannot keep living this way.

I am beginning to believe that sometimes exhaustion becomes an invitation. An invitation to stop striving long enough to breathe again, loosen our grip on what we cannot control, and surrender what we were never meant to carry alone. It reminds us of one of the simplest truths of the Christian life: we were never designed to do this by ourselves.

That is what makes Jesus’ words in John 14 so powerful. He knew what His disciples were about to face, confusion, disappointment, grief, persecution, failure, and eventually the enormous responsibility of carrying the gospel into the world. Yet Jesus never said, “I’m leaving, so you are going to have to try harder.” He didn’t hand them an impossible mission and tell them to find enough determination to accomplish it.

He promised them the Helper.

Maybe that is what many of us need to rediscover. The Christian life was never meant to be an exhausting attempt to prove how much we can carry for God. It was meant to be a life of dependence upon the God who is already present with us. Like breath filling our lungs, His presence is not something we manufacture; it is something we receive. We breathe in, we surrender, and we remember that the God who calls us never intended for us to follow Him alone.

God Breathes In So We Can Breathe Out

As I was preparing and thinking through all of this, my pastor texted me with a thought that landed deeply: the Holy Spirit breathes into us so that we can breathe out purpose. It connected beautifully with everything I had been wrestling through about breath, presence, and the work of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit does not breathe life into us simply so that we can feel better. He comforts us, gives us peace, restores exhausted souls, and meets us in places of pain. We desperately need those gifts of His presence, but His work never ends with us. The presence of God always moves us toward the purposes of God. He breathes His life into us, and that life begins moving outward into the world.

That is why Jesus’ final commission is so important. He did not gather His disciples and say, “Now go and have incredible spiritual experiences.” He said, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The same disciples who were promised the Helper in John 14 were eventually sent into the world with the mission of Jesus. They were filled so they could be sent.

And there it is again: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The triune God sending ordinary people into an extraordinary mission. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit, and through the power of the Spirit the Church is sent into the world. God’s presence comes near, transforms us, and then moves us toward others.

This changes the way I think about the Holy Spirit. He comforts us so we can comfort others. He heals places within us so we can become agents of healing in a wounded world. He teaches us truth so we can help others discover Jesus. He gives us courage to go where obedience leads and produces a love within us that willpower could never manufacture, a love capable of forgiving those who wound us and extending grace when grace is not our natural response.

Maybe this is the rhythm of a Spirit-filled life. We breathe in His presence and breathe out His purposes. We receive peace and carry it into anxious places. We receive grace and extend it to others. We receive love and give it away. We are healed and become healers, discipled and become disciple-makers, comforted and become comforters. We are filled, and then we are sent.

The Holy Spirit breathes the life of God into us so that the life of God can flow through us. What God does in us becomes what God wants to do through us. His presence is not merely something we experience; it becomes a life we embody and a mission we carry.

Perhaps that is one of the simplest ways to describe the Christian life: presence becoming purpose. We breathe Him in, and wherever He sends us, we breathe His life into the world around us.

I Needed the Water

All of this brings me back to water, because a few weeks ago I realized just how desperately I needed it. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I needed the ocean—the smell of saltwater, my surfboard underneath me, and the feeling of paddling beyond the break. I needed to sit on my board and feel the ocean rising and falling beneath me. My body was longing to paddle, catch a wave, and feel that strange combination of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes from being in the surf.

But underneath that physical longing, something deeper was happening. I thought I was longing for the ocean, but I think my soul was longing for the Holy Spirit. I needed space to breathe again, somewhere the noise could not follow me quite so easily. I needed to remember that God was still present and that I did not have to understand or control everything happening around me.

I have experienced God’s presence in so many places throughout my life—in sanctuaries and prayer rooms, while preaching and worshiping, around Communion tables and in hospital rooms, in moments of celebration and seasons of deep pain. I believe God meets us everywhere. But there has always been something about the ocean for me. Something happens to my soul when I paddle away from the shore and get beyond the noise.

Out there, the phone isn’t ringing. There is no email waiting for an answer, no meeting to prepare for, no microphone in my hand, and no stage beneath my feet. I am not the pastor, the leader, the problem-solver, or the person who is supposed to know what happens next. For a little while, all of those roles become quiet. It is just me, a surfboard, the water, and God.

Maybe that is part of what I love about surfing. The ocean has a way of reminding you how small you are without making you feel insignificant. You cannot control the tide, manufacture a wave, tell the wind where to blow, or command the ocean to cooperate with your plans. You can learn to read it, respect it, and move with it, but you cannot control it. There is something deeply freeing about remembering that you are a creature moving inside a creation much larger than yourself.

I needed that reminder. The months leading up to that trip had contained a lot of wrestling—within my own heart, through difficult relationships, disappointments, questions, and circumstances I could not resolve. I had prayed, processed, talked, questioned, and tried to understand what God was doing. By the time I reached the beach, part of me believed I was going there to finish the wrestling match with God.

Somewhere in the water, I realized I had misunderstood why I was there. I wasn’t there to win the wrestling match, force God to answer every question, or finally figure everything out.

I was there to surrender.

I am learning that surrender is one of the strangest freedoms God gives us. We often imagine freedom as gaining control, getting the answer, fixing the problem, or changing our circumstances. The freedom of surrender is different. It comes when we acknowledge that we were never in control to begin with and entrust what we cannot carry to the One who can.

That sounds beautiful on a page. Living it is much harder. Surrender means opening our hands around the things we most desperately want to hold. It means releasing our need to control outcomes, resolve every relationship, understand every circumstance, and know exactly what happens next. It means trusting the character of God when we cannot yet see the purposes of God.

That is what I needed from the water. I thought I had come to surf, to wrestle, maybe even to find some answers.

What I really came for was surrender.

The First Day

The waves weren’t great that first day. They were small, but honestly, it didn’t matter. It just felt good to be back in the water. I paddled beyond the break, sat on my board, and let the ocean move beneath me. For long stretches, I didn’t do much of anything. There was no agenda, no great revelation I was looking for, and no attempt to manufacture some kind of spiritual experience. There was just water, silence, breathing, gratitude, and God.

I think some of our deepest moments with God are like that. They aren’t loud or dramatic. Sometimes God doesn’t shout; He simply gives us enough quiet to notice that He is there. Sitting on that board, rising and falling with the ocean, feeling the current beneath me and the wind against my face, I was reminded again that I am not in control, and I don’t have to be.

I just sat there, breathed, and let that truth settle into me.

I needed that.

The Second Day

The second day was much the same. The waves still weren’t great, but I was beginning to realize that gratitude doesn’t require perfect conditions. I was surfing. I was in the water. I was surrounded by people I love, and somewhere in the simplicity of it all, my soul was beginning to breathe again.

I think we sometimes believe God needs to change our circumstances before we can experience His presence. We wait for the storm to pass, the relationship to heal, the answer to come, or life to finally settle down. But maybe the invitation is not always to wait for God to change what is around us. Maybe it is to become aware of the God who is already with us.

Like water vapor in the air and oxygen filling our lungs, His presence can be real even when it is unseen. The Spirit who hovered over the waters in the beginning was present with me in those quiet waters too. Nothing dramatic had happened yet. The waves were still small, my circumstances hadn’t changed, and I still had unanswered questions.

But God was there. And for that day, that was enough.

Then the Storm Came

By the third day, everything began to change. We heard that a tropical storm was moving through the area, and I have to admit, I got excited. Surfers are strange people that way. Most people hear the word storm and start thinking about getting away from the beach. A surfer hears storm and starts wondering what the waves are going to look like.

My family was thinking much more rationally. Calls and messages started coming in telling me it was probably time to leave. The storm was coming. The weather could get worse. We should pack up and head home. And to be fair, they weren’t wrong.

But something inside me knew I wasn’t finished yet.

I had come to the ocean carrying months of wrestling, and over those first two days something in me had begun to settle. I had spent hours in the water breathing, praying, thinking, and letting my soul become quiet again. But I wasn’t ready to leave. My body was still longing for the water, and my soul was still longing for God.

Looking back, I love the irony of it. I had come to the beach looking for peace, and God met me with a storm. I had come hoping the storms inside me would finally become quiet, only to watch an actual storm begin forming around me. I might have preferred beautiful skies, clean waves, and an easy encounter with God. Instead, the sky was changing, the weather was becoming unpredictable, and everyone was telling me it was time to go.

Maybe that is closer to real life with God than we would like to admit. Our instinct is often to run from whatever feels uncertain, painful, or beyond our control. We ask God to remove the storm, calm it, fix it, or at least show us the quickest way around it. And sometimes leaving is exactly what wisdom requires. This isn’t about recklessness or putting ourselves unnecessarily in danger.

But some storms cannot be avoided. There are storms of disappointment, grief, broken relationships, uncertainty, transition, failure, and questions that refuse to give us easy answers. Sometimes God does not immediately remove what we desperately want Him to remove. Sometimes the invitation is not to escape the storm, but to discover whether we can trust Him in the middle of it.

That was where I found myself on the third day. I could leave, or I could put my board in the water one more time. Something inside me believed God and I still had some work to do.

So I paddled out.

There are moments when faith feels like that. You stand on the shore looking at something bigger than you, knowing you cannot control what happens next. You cannot control the wind, manufacture the waves, or command the storm. You can only decide whether you trust God enough to put your board in the water.

Sometimes, not recklessly or foolishly, but spiritually, we have to stop running from every storm and ask whether God might meet us in the middle of one.

Sometimes you have to put your board in the water and paddle toward the storm.

Because the place you keep trying to escape may be the very place where God is waiting to meet you.

Keep Paddling

I tried to convince some of my family to surf with me, but there were no takers. Eventually, my mother-in-law and father-in-law decided they wanted to go down to the beach, so we headed out together. I dropped my board into the water, attached my leash, and started paddling. At first, everything felt pretty normal. The waves were still small, the water was manageable, and there was nothing particularly dramatic happening.

Then I looked to my left.

A storm had formed maybe five miles offshore. The sky was dark, lightning was flashing inside the clouds, and you could feel the thunder even from where I was sitting. There is something very different about experiencing a storm while sitting on a surfboard in the ocean. You aren’t watching it safely through a window or listening to the rain from inside a house. There is no wall between you and creation. You are sitting on a piece of fiberglass in an enormous body of water, and suddenly you become very aware of just how small you are.

I could feel the adrenaline beginning to move through my body, and the question came almost immediately: Do I stay in the water, or do I get out? Part of me wanted to turn around and paddle toward shore. But something deeper inside me kept saying, Keep paddling.

Then I looked in the other direction.

Another storm was forming.

More dark clouds. More thunder. More lightning. There was a storm to my left and another storm to my right, and there I was, sitting on a surfboard in the water between them.

There are moments in life that become metaphors before you even realize they are metaphors. Sitting there between those two storms, I remember thinking, This is life. Sometimes there is a storm on your left and another one on your right. Sometimes the way behind you doesn’t feel any easier than the way ahead of you. You don’t know exactly what is coming, you don’t know how everything is going to turn out, and you certainly cannot control the weather.

But you can decide what you are going to do next.

For months, I had been trying to understand the storms around me. I wanted answers. I wanted resolution. I wanted to know where God was and what He was doing. But sitting there in the water, I began to realize that maybe faith doesn’t always mean understanding the storm. Maybe sometimes faith simply means trusting God enough to keep paddling in the middle of it.

So that became the question for me, sitting on that board between two storms: Am I going to keep paddling, or am I going to give up?

I kept paddling.

Then God Breathed

And then it happened. I don’t know exactly how else to describe it except to say that it felt as though God took a deep breath and the ocean responded. The conditions began to change, the water came alive, and suddenly the waves we had been waiting for all week started rolling in. They were beautiful, powerful, rideable waves, and after days of sitting in smaller surf, everything changed.

For the next hour and a half, I paddled harder than I had at any other point during the trip. I would paddle into a wave, stand up, ride it as far as I could, fall or step off, turn the board around, and start paddling back out. Then I would do it all over again. Wave after wave, ride after ride, paddle after paddle. I stopped thinking about almost everything else. There was only the water in front of me and the next wave coming toward me.

Eventually, my entire body was feeling it. My arms were burning, my heart was pounding, and my lungs were working hard to keep up. I was physically exhausted, but something inside of me was becoming more alive with every wave. It was this strange and beautiful collision of exhaustion and exhilaration. My body was running out of strength while my soul seemed to be finding it again.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the image I had been thinking about all week suddenly became real to me. Breath. The Spirit. Water. I was breathing deeply, surrounded by water, carried by something far more powerful than I was, and reminded again that I did not have to control it. I simply had to receive it, move with it, and keep paddling.

It became one of the most spiritual experiences I have ever had. I hesitate even writing that because I don’t know that I can completely explain what happened inside of me that day. There was no audible voice from heaven and no single moment I can point to and neatly define. There was simply this overwhelming awareness of God—His creation, His presence, His goodness, and the sense that something inside of me that had been clenched tightly for months was finally beginning to let go.

Maybe that is okay. Maybe not every encounter with God needs to be dissected, explained, or turned into a formula. There are moments when the best thing we can do is simply receive what He is doing.

That day, somewhere between the storms, the waves, the exhaustion, and the breath in my lungs, I received it.

Six Inches of Water

Eventually, my body had had enough. After an hour and a half of paddling, riding, falling, and paddling back out again, I had almost nothing left. I caught one last wave toward shore and finally stood up in maybe six inches of water. My board was floating behind me, still tethered to my ankle by the leash. My arms were exhausted, my heart was still pounding, and I was trying to catch my breath. Somehow I felt completely spent and completely alive at the same time.

And then I raised both of my hands into the air and worshiped Jesus.

I wasn’t a pastor standing on a stage in that moment. I wasn’t a preacher trying to find the right words. There was no microphone in my hand, no worship band playing behind me, no congregation waiting for me to lead them, and no order of service telling me it was time to respond. I was just a man standing exhausted in six inches of saltwater with a surfboard attached to his ankle, overwhelmed by the goodness and presence of God. Something inside of me simply had to respond.

As I stood there with my hands raised, the entire story seemed to come together. I thought about the God who created that ocean and whose Spirit hovered over the waters in the beginning. I thought about the God who breathed life into humanity, the God who came near to us in Jesus, the God who died and rose again, and the God who poured out His Spirit so that His presence would not simply be around us but within us. This was the God who had been meeting me through months of wrestling, the God who had been present in my exhaustion, and the God who had not abandoned me in the storm. The God I had been looking for had been there all along.

Then something happened that I will never forget. As I stood there worshiping, people on the shore began to clap. I looked around and saw people in the water raising their hands. These were people I didn’t know, whose stories I didn’t know and whose beliefs I couldn’t possibly know. I have no idea what each person thought was happening in that moment, and I don’t need to pretend that I do. I only know that for a few extraordinary moments, something seemed to move through that little stretch of beach, and people began responding to something bigger than any of us.

There we were surrounded by creation, the ocean beneath us, storms around us, thunder in the distance, breath in our lungs, and water against our bodies. Somehow all the themes I had been thinking about seemed to converge in one place: creation, water, storm, breath, surrender, gratitude, worship, and the presence of God.

I stood there with tears and saltwater on my face, my lungs trying to catch up with my heart, exhausted and exhilarated all at once. Months of wrestling had not suddenly disappeared. Every question had not been answered. Every circumstance had not changed. But something inside of me had changed. For that moment, I wasn’t trying to solve anything, explain anything, defend anything, or control anything. I was simply worshiping.

And standing there in six inches of water, I knew with a deep certainty: this is where I was supposed to be.

Put Your Board in the Water

I have thought about that moment again and again, and the more I do, the more I think about the Holy Spirit. I wonder how many of us have spent years standing safely on the shore. We believe in the water. We study it, explain it, sing songs about it, listen to sermons about it, and sometimes even debate theology about it. We may own the surfboard and know exactly how surfing is supposed to work.

But eventually, you have to put your board in the water.

At some point, Christianity has to become more than information about God; it has to become life with God. Theology matters deeply to me. Scripture matters. Truth matters. But they are meant to lead us into relationship with the living God, not simply give us more information about Him. We were never invited merely to study His presence from the shore. We were invited to know Him, trust Him, walk with Him, and surrender to Him.

That is what I love about Jesus’ promise to His disciples. He did not tell them He would leave behind another set of instructions to master. He promised them the Helper, the Holy Spirit, the presence of God dwelling within them. Jesus knew what they were about to face would require more than information. They would need God Himself.

Maybe that is where surrender begins for us too. Putting your board in the water means releasing the illusion of control. You cannot manufacture the waves, control the wind, or decide when a storm will appear. You learn to trust, listen, move, and respond.

Life with the Holy Spirit can feel like that. Sometimes following Him means paddling when your arms are tired. Sometimes it means sitting quietly beyond the break, discovering that His presence is enough when nothing spectacular is happening. Sometimes it means gratitude for small waves and ordinary days. And sometimes it means finding yourself in the middle of a storm with something deep within your soul saying, Keep paddling.

We can spend our lives talking about surrender without actually surrendering. We can know the language of the Spirit without depending on the Spirit. We can stand on the shore describing the water while God is inviting us into something deeper.

Eventually, faith has to move from what we know to how we live.

Eventually, you have to put your board in the water.

Surrender Is Freedom

I came to the ocean carrying more than a surfboard. I came carrying questions, pain, frustration, complicated relationships, expectations, disappointments, and things I desperately wanted to understand. There were circumstances I wanted God to fix, relationships I wanted Him to resolve, questions I wanted Him to answer, and outcomes I wanted to control. Somewhere underneath all of it, I think I came hoping that if I could get quiet enough with God, He would finally explain everything to me.

Instead, He gave me Himself.

And I am learning that is better.

We often think surrender means God will finally make everything work out the way we hoped. We release something to Him and expect the storm to stop, the clouds to part, the relationship to heal, and the answer to become obvious. Sometimes God graciously does those things. But surrender doesn’t always mean the storm stops. Sometimes the storm keeps raging and surrender changes us in the middle of it.

Sometimes surrender means I stop demanding control over the storm. I stop insisting that every relationship resolve the way I think it should. I stop needing everyone to understand me. I stop trying to manage what other people think about me or control the story they tell about me. I stop carrying responsibilities, outcomes, and expectations that God never asked me to carry.

Maybe most importantly, I stop trying to be my own Holy Spirit.

I don’t have to convict everyone, change everyone, fix everything, explain everything, defend everything, or control what happens next. That is an exhausting way to live, and it was never the life Jesus invited us into. The Holy Spirit is the Helper. I am not. There is tremendous freedom in finally allowing God to be God.

Surrender, then, is not giving up. It is giving over. It is opening my hands around the things I have been gripping too tightly and trusting them to the One whose hands are stronger than mine. It is acknowledging that I may not know what happens next, but I know the One who will be with me when it happens. I may not understand the storm, but I can trust the God who meets me in the middle of it.

So I open my hands. I breathe again. I trust. I keep paddling. And little by little, I surrender.

That is not defeat.

That is freedom.

The Helper Is Here

Jesus looked at His frightened disciples, knowing everything they were about to face, and gave them one of the most tender promises in all of Scripture: “I will not leave you as orphans.” I think I needed those words out there in the ocean. After months of wrestling, trying to understand, trying to fix, and trying to carry things in my own strength, I needed to remember that I had never been abandoned.

Maybe you need to hear those words wherever you are reading this. You have not been left alone to figure everything out. The Spirit of God is not standing at a distance waiting for you to get yourself together before He comes near. Jesus promised us a Helper, the Comforter, Counselor, Advocate, the One who comes alongside us and remains with us. The Christian life is not about proving that we are strong enough to handle whatever comes. It is about learning to depend upon the One Jesus promised would never leave.

Jesus never promised His disciples a life without storms. In fact, those disciples would face storms far greater than anything they could have imagined when they first heard these words. They would experience fear, failure, persecution, loss, uncertainty, and suffering. Jesus’ promise was not that they would avoid all of those things. His promise was that they would never face them alone. The Helper would be with them forever.

And He is still with us. The Spirit still comforts us in grief, convicts us when we wander, guides us when we cannot see the way forward, and transforms places within us that willpower could never change. He still gives courage to frightened people, strength to exhausted people, peace to anxious hearts, and wisdom when we do not know what to do. He still empowers ordinary people to participate in the extraordinary purposes of God, and He still sends us into the world to carry the life and love of Jesus to others.

Maybe that is what I was rediscovering in the water. I had spent so much energy trying to understand the storm that I had forgotten the promise of God’s presence in the middle of it. I wanted God to show me exactly how everything was going to work out, while the Holy Spirit was quietly reminding me that knowing what happens next is not the same thing as knowing that I will not face it alone.

That changes the way we paddle through storms. We can keep going, not because we know the waves will cooperate or because we are certain the storm will disappear, but because the presence of God goes with us. We breathe, we trust, we surrender, and we keep paddling because the Helper is here.

The Spirit still breathes life into exhausted people who have spent far too long trying to live in their own strength. And He still whispers the truth our souls so easily forget: You were never designed to do this alone.

Breathe In. Breathe Out.

So maybe that is the invitation of the Holy Spirit: learn to breathe again. Breathe in the presence of God and breathe out the purposes of God. Receive what only He can give you, and then allow what He is doing within you to flow into the world around you. The Spirit was never given simply to create private spiritual experiences. His presence changes us, and changed people become part of what God is doing in the world.

Breathe in His peace, and breathe out forgiveness into relationships that desperately need it. Breathe in His love, and breathe out compassion toward people who may be difficult to love. Breathe in His courage, and breathe out obedience when following Jesus costs you something. Breathe in His grace, and become more gracious. Breathe in His comfort, and learn to sit beside someone who is hurting. Breathe in His presence, and then carry that presence with you into your home, your relationships, your church, your workplace, your neighborhood, and wherever else God sends you.

This is where the presence of the Holy Spirit and the mission of Jesus come together. The Spirit fills us, but He also sends us. Jesus tells His followers to go and make disciples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We receive the life of the triune God, and then we are sent into the world to participate in His mission. We are loved so that we can love. We are forgiven so that we can forgive. We are comforted so that we can comfort. We are discipled so that we can make disciples.

Maybe this is the rhythm of the Christian life I am learning again: breathe in and breathe out. Receive and release. Be filled and be sent. Sit in His presence, and then walk in His purposes. We do not have to manufacture what God wants to do through us. We simply learn to live increasingly surrendered to the Spirit who is already at work within us.

This is the God who created us, the God who came for us in Jesus, and the God who now dwells within us through His Spirit. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters in the beginning is still breathing life into the people of God today.

So breathe deeply.

And then go live what He has breathed into you.

Paddle Into the Storm

Eventually, the rain came hard enough that I knew it was time to get out of the water. The storm had finally arrived, my body was spent, and the day was coming to an end. I grabbed my board and walked back onto the shore, but I knew I wasn’t leaving that ocean as the same person who had entered it.

Something had changed. My circumstances hadn’t suddenly resolved. Every difficult relationship wasn’t magically repaired. I didn’t have answers to all the questions I had carried with me to the beach. The storms I had been wrestling through were still real, and there were still things waiting for me when I returned home. But somewhere between the water, the waves, the storm, the exhaustion, and the presence of God, I had changed.

That is what encounters with the triune God do. They transform us. I can testify again and again throughout my life to the transforming presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Sometimes God changes our circumstances, and sometimes He changes us before our circumstances ever change. Sometimes He calms the storm, and sometimes He meets us in the middle of it and teaches us how to keep paddling.

I believe deeply in theology and Scripture. I believe in studying words, history, culture, context, doctrine, and truth because I want to know God faithfully as He has revealed Himself. But I also believe the God we study is alive. Christianity is not simply the study of what God once did, and the Holy Spirit is not merely a doctrine we affirm. The God revealed in Scripture is the living God, and He is still present with His people.

He still speaks, moves, comforts, convicts, guides, heals, transforms, empowers, and sends. He still breathes life into exhausted souls and meets His children in places we expect and places we never could have planned. Sometimes He meets us at an altar or around a Communion table. Sometimes He meets us in a hospital room, behind the steering wheel of a car, in the quiet of an early morning, or in the silence when we have finally run out of words. And sometimes He meets us standing in six inches of saltwater with a surfboard tethered to our ankle and a storm on the horizon.

So if you are tired today, if you have been wrestling with God or with yourself, or if you have been desperately trying to control circumstances that refuse to be controlled, I hope you hear the invitation I needed to hear. If there is a storm on your left and another on your right, and you cannot see clearly what God is doing, maybe you don’t need every answer before taking the next step. Maybe you simply need to remember the promise Jesus made to frightened disciples who had no idea what was coming next: You are not alone.

The Helper has come. The Spirit of God is present. The God who hovered over the waters in the beginning, the God who breathed life into humanity, the God who came near to us in Jesus, and the God who now dwells within His people has not abandoned you in the storm.

Maybe faith is not always knowing when the storm will end. Maybe sometimes faith is trusting the One who is with you while it rages. Maybe surrender is opening your hands when you cannot control what happens next. And maybe following the Holy Spirit is learning to breathe again, listen for His voice, and trust Him enough to take the next stroke.

So breathe.

Surrender.

Put your board in the water.

And when the Holy Spirit says it is time to paddle, trust that you will not paddle alone.

Paddle into the storm.

Every Gospel writer introduces Jesus differently, and those differences are anything but accidental. Matthew opens with a genealogy because he wants us to see Jesus as the promised King, the long-awaited Son of David who fulfills God’s covenant with Israel. Mark begins in the wilderness with John the Baptist because his Gospel moves with urgency, announcing that the Kingdom of God has broken into history. Luke carefully gathers eyewitness accounts so that his readers can have confidence that the story they are about to read is rooted in real people, real places, and real events.

John, however, begins somewhere no one expects.

He doesn’t begin with Bethlehem or Nazareth. He doesn’t begin with Mary, Joseph, shepherds, or wise men. He doesn’t even begin with creation itself. John takes us back before the first sunrise, before the first mountain rose from the earth, before the first breath filled human lungs. His Gospel opens with the same words that open Genesis: “In the beginning...”Those words are not simply literary poetry. They are an invitation to read the entire Bible again.

John is doing something remarkable. He is inviting us to return to Genesis and discover that the story has always been about Jesus. Before there was ever a sun to illuminate the sky, there was the eternal Word. Before God spoke light into creation, the true Light already existed. The One who would one day walk the dusty roads of Galilee, touch lepers, calm storms, and stretch out His hands on a Roman cross is the very One who first said, “Let there be light.” John wants us to understand who Jesus is before he tells us anything Jesus did, because if we misunderstand His identity, we will misunderstand everything that follows.

This is why I have grown to love reading Scripture through a redemptive-historical hermeneutic. I don’t think of it as another theological system competing with others. To me, it is simply the most Christ-centered way to read the Bible because it allows Scripture to interpret Scripture while keeping Jesus at the center of the entire narrative. Rather than approaching the Bible as a collection of disconnected stories, moral examples, or isolated doctrines, we begin to see one unfolding story of God’s relentless pursuit of humanity through His Son.

Every page is moving somewhere.

Every promise creates anticipation.

Every sacrifice points beyond itself.

Every prophet announces hope.

Every king reveals our need for a better King.

Every failure reminds us that humanity cannot save itself.

Every act of God’s faithfulness prepares us for the moment when the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

When we begin reading the Bible this way, something beautiful happens. Scripture stops feeling like sixty-six separate books stitched together across thousands of years and begins revealing itself as one magnificent story written by one Author about one Savior. Creation, the Law, the Tabernacle, the sacrifices, the prophets, the exile, and the promises all find their fulfillment in Christ. He is not simply another character in the story. He is the center of the story. Everything before Him anticipates Him, and everything after Him proclaims Him.

That is exactly what John is doing in the opening verses of his Gospel. He doesn’t begin with Bethlehem because the story didn’t begin in Bethlehem. He doesn’t begin with Mary because the story didn’t begin with Mary. He begins before Genesis because he wants us to understand that everything Genesis began finds its fulfillment in Christ. John’s Gospel is not merely introducing Jesus; it is announcing that the story of redemption has reached its climax in Him.

Only then does John begin talking about light.

Which leads us to a fascinating question.

What is light?

God’s Light Gives Life

John’s first description of Jesus is both simple and astonishing: “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind”(John 1:4). At first glance, it’s easy to read those words too quickly, but John is making an extraordinary theological claim. He doesn’t say that Jesus possessed life or that He merely gave life. He says that life exists in Him. Life is not simply one of Christ’s attributes; it is intrinsic to His very nature. Everything that has ever lived—every tree stretching toward the sun, every whale swimming through the depths of the ocean, every child taking a first breath, every heartbeat that has ever echoed inside a human chest—ultimately traces its existence back to Him. Before John tells us what Jesus came to accomplish, he reminds us who Jesus has always been. He is not merely the giver of life. He is life itself.

That statement carries us directly back into Genesis. When God spoke, “Let there be light,” creation was not inventing something that had never existed before. Physical light entered the universe because the eternal Light had already existed from all eternity. John is deliberately echoing the opening verses of Genesis to help us understand that creation and redemption are not two separate stories. The same Word who called light out of darkness in Genesis is the Word who enters the darkness of our fallen world in John 1. Creation was the first act of God’s story. Redemption is its fulfillment. The Light that once illuminated the world has now stepped into the world.

The more I’ve studied light, the more amazed I’ve become that John chose it as one of his primary descriptions of Jesus. Scientists have spent centuries trying to understand what light actually is. Isaac Newton explored its properties. James Clerk Maxwell described it mathematically. Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his work involving light. Yet despite centuries of discovery, light continues to resist simple explanations. Sometimes it behaves like a wave. Sometimes it behaves like a particle. It carries energy across unimaginable distances while revealing the world around us with breathtaking precision. The closer science looks, the more mysterious light becomes. I find that strangely comforting. Creation still contains mysteries that continually remind us we are studying the work of an infinitely creative God.

Science also reminds us that life is impossible without light. Every meal we have ever eaten ultimately depends on sunlight. Plants capture light through photosynthesis, transforming energy into the food that sustains nearly every living thing on earth. The oxygen filling our lungs exists because of light. Our bodies are designed to awaken with the morning sun, regulating hormones, strengthening our immune systems, and even shaping our emotional well-being. From the smallest blade of grass to the largest forest, from the deepest coral reef to every human heartbeat, life depends upon a source outside of itself. Long before modern science discovered those realities, John declared their spiritual counterpart: “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” Every sunrise has been preaching that sermon since the first morning of creation.

When I was nine years old, I learned something else about light that I’ve never forgotten. A friend invited me to spend the day at Huntington Beach in Southern California, and to a nine-year-old boy it felt like paradise. We body surfed for hours, dove beneath wave after wave, built sand castles that never survived the tide, and laughed until we were exhausted. Somewhere in all the excitement, however, one small detail was overlooked. My friend’s mom forgot the sunscreen. At the time it didn’t seem important. I wasn’t thinking about ultraviolet radiation; I was thinking about catching one more wave. By the time I got home my shoulders were warm. By bedtime they were burning. The next morning they were covered in blisters, and I couldn’t even put on a shirt without pain.

That experience taught me something I have carried with me ever since. The same sunlight that made life possible also left me burned. The problem wasn’t the light. The problem was that I stood in its intensity without any covering. Over the years I’ve realized that the same principle often plays out spiritually. Truth gives life, but truth can also wound when it is divorced from grace. Many of us have experienced someone who spoke what was technically correct but did so without compassion, patience, or love. The words may have been accurate, but instead of bringing healing they left scars.

Perhaps that is why John doesn’t merely tell us that Jesus came bringing truth. He tells us that Jesus came full of grace and truth. Grace does not diminish the light any more than sunscreen diminishes the sun. Grace allows us to remain in the presence of truth long enough for it to transform us instead of simply exposing us. Truth reveals reality. Grace gives us the courage to remain in that reality until God has finished His healing work. Together they become the perfect Light, revealing everything that is broken while refusing to leave us there.

God’s Light Exposes What Darkness Hides

John continues by writing, “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (John 1:9). That sentence raises an obvious question: Why did the Light need to come into the world in the first place? The answer is just as obvious. Because the world was dark. You don’t carry a flashlight into the middle of a sunny afternoon. You carry one into the darkness. From the opening chapters of Genesis, darkness has been more than the absence of light. It has become a picture of humanity’s separation from God, our tendency to hide, and our desire to live independently of the One who created us. The Light entered the world because the world could no longer find its own way home.

One of the remarkable things about light is that it never creates reality; it simply reveals it. If you’ve ever cleaned your house late at night, you’ve probably experienced this. Everything looks spotless beneath the warm glow of the lamps. The floors seem clean, the furniture looks polished, and the windows appear crystal clear. Then morning arrives, sunlight streams through the blinds, and suddenly you notice fingerprints on the glass, dust floating through the air, and dog hair you somehow missed the night before. The room didn’t become dirty overnight. The light simply exposed what had been there all along. That is precisely what Jesus does. He doesn’t create the darkness within us. He reveals what has been hiding there so that it can finally be healed.

For much of my life, I misunderstood conviction. I assumed conviction was God’s way of making me feel guilty, exposing my failures, or reminding me how far I still had to go. Over time I’ve come to realize something entirely different. Conviction is not the voice of an angry Judge searching for reasons to condemn us. It is the loving voice of a Father who refuses to leave His children trapped in the very things destroying them. Love tells the truth because love desires restoration. Jesus never shines His light into our lives to humiliate us. He shines His light because He loves us too much to leave us in the dark.

I often think about where mold grows. It never flourishes in bright sunlight or in places where fresh air is constantly moving. Mold thrives in dark, damp, forgotten places where no one is looking. Sin behaves much the same way. Bitterness, resentment, shame, pride, addiction, lust, fear, and unforgiveness all grow best in hidden places. They survive because they remain unexposed. Left alone, they quietly spread until what began as something private eventually begins shaping every relationship around us. The wounds we refuse to bring into God’s light almost always become the wounds we unintentionally pass on to others.

That realization has become deeply personal for me. Like many people, my instinct during difficult seasons has often been to protect myself. Sometimes I hide behind work. Sometimes I hide behind productivity. Sometimes I hide behind having the right theological answer. It’s surprisingly easy to use good things to avoid deeper things. I’ve learned that I can spend enormous amounts of energy defending my intentions while quietly ignoring what the Holy Spirit is trying to reveal inside my own heart. The longer I follow Jesus, the more I discover that spiritual maturity isn’t measured by how well I can explain Scripture. It’s measured by how willing I am to allow Scripture to explain me.

Over the past year, the Spirit has repeatedly brought me back to the same quiet invitation. Aaron, stop defending yourself. Let Me search your heart. Those moments are rarely comfortable, but they have become some of the most transformative experiences of my life. I’ve discovered that the safest place in the universe is standing in the light of Someone who already knows everything about me and loves me completely. When you are fully known and fully loved, confession no longer feels like defeat. It becomes the doorway to freedom.

Perhaps that is why John speaks of Jesus as the true Light rather than simply a bright light. Every other light eventually fades or casts shadows of its own. Jesus does neither. His light reveals without humiliating. It convicts without condemning. It exposes without abandoning. Every place He illuminates becomes a place where grace is already waiting. That is the beauty of grace and truth held together. Truth refuses to ignore what is broken, while grace refuses to walk away from what truth has revealed.

As I reflect on my own journey, I’ve begun to notice one of the clearest evidences that Christ is continuing to transform me. It isn’t that I’ve become better at recognizing darkness in other people. It’s that I’ve become quicker to recognize it in myself. The Holy Spirit has been teaching me that some of the most Christlike words I will ever speak are not complicated theological explanations. They are simple, honest, relational words: “I was wrong.” “I’m sorry.” “Will you forgive me?” Those words become possible only when we’ve spent enough time in the Light to discover that grace is always waiting on the other side of truth.

God’s Light Balances Grace and Truth

Everything John has been building toward comes into focus in one breathtaking sentence: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). After describing Jesus as the eternal Word, the Creator of all things, the source of life, and the Light of the world, John finally tells us what that Light looks like. It shines with perfect grace and perfect truth. Those two words are not competing ideas held together in tension. They are perfectly united in the person of Jesus Christ.

I’ve found myself returning to one word in that verse over and over again: full. John doesn’t say Jesus was mostly gracious with moments of truth, nor does he say He was uncompromising in truth with occasional displays of grace. He says Jesus was full of both. Every conversation He had, every miracle He performed, every confrontation with the religious leaders, every meal He shared with sinners, and every step He took toward the cross perfectly revealed grace and truth working together. They were never out of balance because they were never separate. They were expressions of the very character of God.

One of the great temptations in the Christian life is believing we have to choose between them. Some of us naturally gravitate toward truth. We love doctrine, precision, clarity, and conviction. Others instinctively lean toward grace. We value compassion, belonging, mercy, and acceptance. Both instincts reflect something beautiful about the heart of God, but when separated from one another they become distortions. Truth without grace eventually becomes harsh. Grace without truth eventually becomes hollow. Truth by itself can expose what is broken, but it cannot heal it. Grace by itself can comfort what is broken, but it cannot transform it. Jesus refuses both extremes because redemption requires both.

The Gospels repeatedly show us what this looks like in real life. When the religious leaders dragged the woman caught in adultery before Jesus, they expected Him to choose a side. Would He uphold the Law, or would He show mercy? Jesus refused the false choice. He looked at the woman and said, “Neither do I condemn you.” That is grace. Then He told her, “Go and sin no more.” That is truth. Notice the order. Grace welcomed her before truth transformed her. Jesus never minimized her sin, but neither did He allow her sin to become her identity.

The same pattern unfolds in the story of Zacchaeus. Jesus didn’t begin by exposing his greed or confronting his corruption. He simply looked up into the sycamore tree and said, “I’m coming to your house today.” Before Zacchaeus confessed anything, Jesus offered relationship. Before He corrected him, He welcomed him. That grace awakened something years of wealth had never been able to produce. By the end of the meal, Zacchaeus was voluntarily giving away half of his possessions and making restitution to everyone he had cheated. Jesus didn’t shame him into repentance. Grace led him toward truth, and truth produced genuine transformation.

The older I become, the more convinced I am that people rarely change because they lose an argument. They change because they encounter Jesus. We often assume that if we can just explain the truth more clearly, people will naturally respond. Sometimes that’s true. More often, however, transformation happens when people experience truth spoken through the unwavering love of Christ. The Gospel is not merely information to be believed. It is the presence of Jesus meeting people exactly where they are and refusing to leave them there.

That realization has reshaped the way I think about ministry and leadership. Earlier in my life, I often assumed that being faithful meant being right. I loved theology, enjoyed difficult conversations, and wanted to defend what I believed was true. None of those things are wrong, but over time the Holy Spirit has shown me that I can win an argument while losing an opportunity to reflect Christ. Truth may satisfy my desire to be correct, but grace asks a far more difficult question: Did your words help someone move closer to Jesus? That question has humbled me more than any theological debate ever could.

I also think this is why reading Scripture through a redemptive-historical hermeneutic matters so deeply. When Jesus becomes the center of the story, our goal is no longer to prove our theological tribe is right. Our goal becomes reflecting the One toward whom the entire story has always pointed. The Law was never an end in itself. The prophets were never the destination. Even our theological systems, as valuable as they may be, are not the center of Scripture. Christ is. Every page ultimately reveals His character, and nowhere is that character seen more clearly than in these simple words: full of grace and truth.

Perhaps that is why this verse has stayed with me for so many years. It reminds me that truth tells us what is wrong, but grace stays until what is wrong becomes whole. That is the heart of redemption. Jesus never ignored sin, but He never abandoned sinners. He never softened the truth, but He never weaponized it either. He entered our darkness, spoke the truth in love, and remained with us until healing became possible. That is the Light John wants us to see, and that is the Light the world is still longing to encounter.

God’s Light Reflects Through Us

John closes this opening section of his Gospel with what appears to be a simple observation: “John testified concerning Him...” (John 1:15). At first glance, it almost feels like an interruption. John has been soaring through eternity, speaking about creation, life, light, and the incarnation, only to suddenly mention a man standing beside the Jordan River. Yet this is no interruption at all. John the Baptist is the first example of what happens when an ordinary person encounters the true Light. His life becomes a witness. He understands that his calling is not to become the Light, but to point people toward the One who is.

That distinction is as important today as it was two thousand years ago. The Christian life has never been about convincing people that we are impressive. It has never been about building our own platforms, defending our own opinions, or drawing attention to ourselves. Our calling is much simpler and far more beautiful. We are invited to live in such close fellowship with Christ that when people encounter our lives, they catch a glimpse of Him. Like John the Baptist, our greatest joy is found in saying, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

I’ve often thought about the moon as a picture of that calling. On a clear night, especially away from the lights of the city, the moon can be breathtaking. It illuminates the landscape, reflects across the water, and provides enough light to walk beneath the stars. Yet the moon possesses no light of its own. Every ray that reaches the earth has been borrowed from the sun. The moon isn’t trying to become the sun. It simply remains in the right position to reflect it. I can’t think of a better picture of Christian discipleship. We were never created to manufacture light. We were created to reflect the Light we have received.

That realization has become increasingly freeing for me. For much of my life I thought ministry depended upon my ability to be insightful enough, gifted enough, or strong enough. I felt responsible for changing people, fixing problems, answering every question, and carrying every burden. Over time, however, Jesus has gently reminded me that none of those things were ever my assignment. My calling is not to replace Him. My calling is to remain close enough to Him that His character naturally becomes visible through my life. The more time I spend in His presence, the less I feel the need to manufacture something He alone can produce.

I think that raises a question every follower of Jesus should ask. What do people experience when they experience me? Do they encounter someone who is quick to judge or quick to listen? Do they walk away feeling condemned, or do they leave with hope? Do they experience truth spoken with gentleness, or merely opinions spoken with confidence? Most importantly, do they leave thinking more about me, or more about Jesus? Those questions have become deeply searching for me because they expose whether I am reflecting His light or simply projecting my own.

The longer I follow Christ, the more convinced I become that spiritual maturity is not measured merely by what we know. It is measured by what we reflect. Anyone can accumulate information. We can study Greek, memorize doctrine, debate theology, and defend our convictions. Those things matter, but knowledge alone has never changed the world. Jesus didn’t tell His disciples that people would recognize them by the precision of their arguments. He said the world would know them by their love. Love is what grace and truth look like when they become flesh in the lives of ordinary people.

Perhaps this is where John’s prologue has been leading us all along. The Light enters the world, not simply to illuminate it, but to create a people who reflect that same light into every corner of creation. As His grace penetrates our hearts, we become more gracious. As His truth reshapes our minds, we become more truthful. As His love transforms our lives, we become people who forgive more quickly, repent more readily, listen more carefully, and apologize more freely. The evidence that we have encountered the Light is not merely that we can explain it. It is that our lives begin to resemble it.

I have found myself praying a simple prayer more often than I used to. “Jesus, let people see You before they see me.” That may be one of the deepest prayers a disciple can pray. It acknowledges that I am not the source of life, wisdom, grace, or truth. I am simply someone who has been loved by the Light and invited to reflect Him. If people leave my presence thinking more highly of me, I have probably missed the point. But if they leave with a clearer vision of Jesus, then somehow, by His grace, I have become the kind of witness John describes.

That is the remarkable invitation hidden within the opening verses of John’s Gospel. The Light that once spoke creation into existence now shines within His people. We are not called to generate that light or improve upon it. We are called to remain so close to Christ that His grace and His truth become visible in the way we live, the way we love, and the way we point a weary world back to Him.

Step Into the Light

John didn’t write the opening verses of his Gospel simply so we would have better theology. He certainly wants us to understand who Jesus is, but his purpose reaches much deeper than intellectual understanding. John wants us to step into the Light itself. The point of John 1 is not merely that Jesus is the eternal Word, the Creator of all things, or even the Light of the world. The point is that the perfect Light, made up of both grace and truth, has entered our darkness so that it might penetrate every corner of our hearts.

That is the invitation of the Gospel. Jesus does not shine His light into our lives to expose us and walk away. He shines His light because He intends to restore everything His light reveals. Grace and truth always work together. Truth has the courage to tell us what is broken, while grace has the compassion to remain with us until what is broken becomes whole. One without the other leaves us either condemned or unchanged. Together they become the beautiful work of redemption.

I’ve discovered that the longer I follow Jesus, the less interested I become in protecting myself. The need to defend my reputation, justify my actions, or convince everyone that I was right slowly begins to lose its grip when I remember that I am already fully known and fully loved by Christ. Grace removes the fear that keeps us hiding, and truth gives us the courage to stop pretending. We no longer have to manage our image because our identity is no longer rooted in our performance. It is rooted in the finished work of Jesus.

Perhaps that is why one of the clearest evidences that the Light has reached our hearts is not that we become better at explaining theology. It is that we become quicker to repent. Quicker to forgive. Quicker to reconcile. Quicker to say, “I was wrong.” Quicker to say, “I’m sorry.” Quicker to ask, “Will you forgive me?” Those words are not signs of weakness. They are signs that grace and truth have done their work within us. They reveal hearts that are no longer afraid of the light because they have come to trust the One who shines it.

I wonder if that is what John hoped his readers would discover. The same Light that spoke creation into existence now speaks life into broken hearts. The same Word who said, “Let there be light,” now calls men and women out of hiding and into relationship with Himself. He invites us to stop living in the shadows of shame, fear, pride, and self-protection and instead walk openly before Him, trusting that every place His light touches becomes a place where His grace is already waiting.

That may be the greatest miracle in John’s opening chapter. The Light doesn’t simply reveal God to us. The Light reveals us to ourselves. Then, rather than turning away, Jesus stays. He heals. He forgives. He restores. He makes all things new.

So perhaps the question John leaves us with is not whether we believe Jesus is the Light. The more searching question is whether we are willing to step into that Light ourselves. Will we allow His truth to expose what we have hidden? Will we allow His grace to heal what His truth reveals? Will we trust Him enough to stop pretending and start walking honestly before Him?

Because when we do, something remarkable happens.

Fear begins to lose its power.

Grace begins to reshape our relationships.

Truth becomes something we welcome instead of avoid.

The need to prove ourselves gives way to the freedom of being known.

And little by little, as we remain close to Christ, we begin reflecting the One who is, now and forever, full of grace and truth.

The theory of light is fascinating.

The Light of the world changes everything.

“Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey...”
— Numbers 22:28

Saturday nights have a certain weight to them if you’re a pastor.

While most families are settling in for the evening, finishing dinner, watching a movie, or looking forward to a slow Sunday morning, the pastor is often sitting alone with an open Bible, trying to discern the voice of God. Sunday isn’t just another day on the calendar. It’s the moment when a shepherd stands before people carrying broken marriages, fresh grief, hidden addictions, anxious hearts, and honest questions. They don’t simply need information. They need hope. And hope doesn’t come from clever ideas. It comes from faithfully opening the Scriptures and pointing people to Jesus.

By Saturday night, the sermon has already lived with him for days. He has carried it into staff meetings and hospital visits. He has thought about it while mowing the lawn, driving to appointments, and lying awake long after everyone else in the house has fallen asleep. Every conversation, every book, every verse, every headline has quietly filtered through the same prayer: “Lord, what are You saying to Your people?”

Now the house is still.

His wife kissed him goodnight an hour ago, knowing better than to ask whether he was almost finished. After years of ministry, she understands that sermons rarely cooperate with clocks. A single lamp casts a warm circle of light across the desk. His Bible lies open beside a stack of commentaries. Greek lexicons rest on top of yellow legal pads filled with arrows, scratched-out sentences, and thoughts only he can still decipher. A cup of coffee has long since gone cold. The only sound in the room is the turning of another page.

He reads the passage again, not because he doesn’t understand what it says, but because he wants to understand it more deeply. There is a profound difference between saying something true and saying what God is saying through His Word. Faithful preaching has never been about collecting interesting ideas. It is the sacred work of listening before speaking.

Sometime after midnight he finally leans back in his chair. The sermon is finished, or at least as finished as sermons ever are. He closes his Bible, switches off the lamp, and starts walking toward bed.

Then a thought interrupts the silence.

It’s only an illustration. A connection he hadn’t seen before. A sentence that might help someone understand the gospel a little more clearly. He knows from experience that if he waits until morning, it will probably disappear with the sunrise.

So he turns around.

He walks back into the kitchen, picks up his phone, presses the microphone, and quietly says, “Help me organize these thoughts.”

Within seconds the scattered ideas that had been circling in his mind begin to settle into place. No one has written his sermon for him. No machine has prayed in his place, wrestled with the text, or listened to the Holy Spirit. The technology has simply helped him organize what was already there, allowing a weary pastor to spend less time fighting a blank page and more time thinking carefully about the people he loves and the God he is about to proclaim.

He saves the note, places the phone back on the counter, and finally gets some sleep.

Tomorrow morning he will still stand before his church. He will still preach God’s Word. He will still pray before he speaks. He will still depend completely upon the Holy Spirit. Artificial intelligence cannot do any of those things. It never has, and it never will.

Somewhere another pastor would call that compromise.

I call it stewardship.

That sentence alone will probably make some Christians uncomfortable. Not because they doubt the authority of Scripture or the necessity of prayer, but because artificial intelligence has quietly become the newest item on a very old list.

And I can’t help wondering if our conversation says far more about the Church than it does about AI.

Every Generation Has Its List

As I have listened to these conversations over the past year, I’ve realized that the debate isn’t really about artificial intelligence.

It’s about fear.

Every generation of Christians seems to develop a list of things faithful believers are supposed to avoid. The details change, but the pattern rarely does. I grew up hearing many of them. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t dance. Don’t play cards. Don’t go to movies. Don’t listen to secular music. Don’t get tattoos. Somewhere along the way we added politics to the list, and now we’ve added technology. Don’t use social media. Don’t use AI.

The list is always evolving, but the instinct behind it remains remarkably consistent. We often assume that spiritual maturity is measured by how many things we refuse to touch.

Now, before anyone misunderstands me, I’m not arguing against wisdom or discernment. Scripture repeatedly calls us to exercise both. There are things Christians should reject because they are sinful, destructive, or opposed to the character of Christ. Discernment matters. Holiness matters. The pursuit of godliness matters.

But there is a profound difference between rejecting sin and becoming suspicious of every new tool that enters the world.

Somewhere along the way, many of us began treating technology as though it carries a moral value all by itself. As if a smartphone is inherently less spiritual than a printed Bible. As if using artificial intelligence to organize research somehow diminishes the work of the Holy Spirit. As if the medium itself determines the faithfulness of the message.

It doesn’t.

A Bible can sit unopened on a coffee table for decades without changing a single life.

The same Scriptures read from a phone can lead someone to repentance.

The issue was never the paper.

The issue has always been the heart.

That’s why I think we’ve been asking the wrong question.

When someone says they used AI while preparing a sermon, the first response is often, “Did you use AI?”

I’m much more interested in different questions.

Did you pray?

Did you sit quietly before God until your own heart was shaped by His Word?

Did you wrestle honestly with the text instead of looking for easy answers?

Did you labor to understand the historical context, the grammar, the theology, and the person of Christ revealed in the passage?

Did you love your people enough to faithfully proclaim what God has said rather than what would simply keep everyone happy?

Those are the questions that have always mattered.

The truth is, pastors have always used tools. We use study Bibles, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, Greek lexicons, concordances, search software, maps, journals, editors, proofreaders, and friends who help us think more clearly. None of those things replace the work of the Holy Spirit. They simply help us become better stewards of the calling God has given us.

Artificial intelligence belongs in that same conversation.

It is not the gospel.

It is not inspiration.

It is not revelation.

It is certainly not the Holy Spirit.

It is simply another tool.

Whether it becomes something beautiful or something destructive depends far less on the technology than on the person using it.

Which raises a much larger question.

Why has the Church so often been afraid of the very tools God has repeatedly used throughout history?

God Has Never Been Afraid of Tools

One of the reasons I find this conversation so fascinating is because the Bible never seems to share our anxiety about technology. In fact, from the opening pages of Genesis, God appears remarkably comfortable working through ordinary things fashioned by human hands.

The first chapter of Scripture introduces us to a Creator who delights in making. Before there are nations, governments, or even churches, there is a God who speaks beauty out of chaos. He forms, shapes, names, and orders the world. Then, in one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture, He creates humanity in His own image and immediately gives them work to do. They are to cultivate the earth, tend the garden, name the animals, and exercise wise dominion over creation. In other words, they are invited to participate in God’s creative work.

That means creativity is not a distraction from our calling; it is part of our calling. Every time human beings discover, build, invent, compose, design, cultivate, or create something that serves life and reflects truth, we are exercising a small part of what it means to bear the image of our Creator. Of course, because we are fallen, we also have the capacity to distort those gifts. The same ingenuity that builds hospitals can build weapons. The same technology that spreads the gospel can spread lies. The problem has never been creativity itself. The problem has always been the human heart directing it.

As the story of Scripture unfolds, God repeatedly chooses to work through ordinary tools. Noah doesn’t escape the flood by a miracle alone; he spends decades building an ark with wood, pitch, and sweat. Moses stretches out a shepherd’s staff over the Red Sea. Bezalel and Oholiab are filled with the Spirit, not to preach sermons, but to design and craft the tabernacle with extraordinary skill. David defeats Goliath with a sling he had spent years learning to use while watching sheep. Throughout the Bible, God seems remarkably willing to accomplish sacred purposes through ordinary means.

The New Testament continues the pattern. Jesus teaches from fishing boats, multiplies loaves and fish, and writes in the dust with His finger. The Apostle Paul walks Roman roads engineered by an empire that opposed the kingdom of God. He travels in ships built by pagan craftsmen. He often dictates his letters to an amanuensis, a trained scribe who faithfully records his words. No one has ever suggested that Romans is less inspired because Paul didn’t personally hold the pen. We understand instinctively that the authority of Scripture came from the Holy Spirit, not from the writing instrument.

Church history tells the same story. The printing press became one of the greatest accelerators of the Reformation because it placed the Scriptures into the hands of ordinary people. Radio carried the gospel across continents. Television allowed homebound believers to worship when they could no longer gather. The internet has connected missionaries, pastors, scholars, and churches in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine. Every significant technological advancement has carried both dangers and opportunities, yet God has continued to use faithful men and women who were willing to redeem new tools for ancient truth.

Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to believe that God is somehow intimidated by artificial intelligence. The Lord who spoke through a burning bush, used a pagan empire’s roads to spread the gospel, and entrusted His inspired Word to papyrus and ink is not wringing His hands over a language model. He has never been threatened by the tools of humanity.

He has always been concerned with the hearts of the people holding them.

That, it seems to me, is where the conversation has always belonged.

If God Can Speak Through a Donkey...

There are few stories in the Bible stranger than the account of Balaam and his donkey.

A prophet is on the road, convinced he knows exactly what God is doing. He is confident, respected, and certain of his own perspective. Yet as he rides toward Moab, something remarkable happens. The prophet cannot see what is standing directly in front of him, but his donkey can. Three times the animal stops because the angel of the Lord is blocking the path. Three times Balaam grows angrier, convinced the donkey is the problem. Finally, God opens the donkey’s mouth, and the one creature everyone expected to remain silent becomes the only one speaking truth.

It’s an almost unbelievable scene.

The prophet is blind.

The donkey sees clearly.

The man who is supposed to hear the voice of God cannot recognize what God is doing, while the animal everyone dismisses becomes the instrument through which God gets his attention.

The story has always fascinated me because it reveals something profound about the character of God. He is never limited by the instrument He chooses to use. Throughout Scripture, He repeatedly accomplishes extraordinary purposes through unlikely people and unexpected means. He chooses an elderly shepherd to confront Pharaoh, a frightened farmer named Gideon to defeat an army, a shepherd boy with a sling to face a giant, a fisherman to preach at Pentecost, and a former persecutor to carry the gospel across the Roman Empire. Again and again, God delights in using what the world overlooks to display His own power.

That doesn’t mean every instrument is holy. The donkey wasn’t suddenly inspired Scripture. The shepherd’s staff wasn’t magical. David’s sling possessed no supernatural power. They were simply ordinary things placed in the hands of a sovereign God. The miracle was never found in the instrument. The miracle was found in the God who chose to work through it.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve reversed that equation. We spend an enormous amount of energy evaluating the tool while paying far less attention to the heart of the person using it. We ask whether technology can be trusted before we ask whether we are becoming trustworthy. We debate whether artificial intelligence is dangerous while giving comparatively little attention to pride, envy, greed, gossip, anger, and self-righteousness, the very things Scripture repeatedly warns us will destroy us from within.

That, it seems to me, is exactly backwards.

Jesus consistently taught that the deepest problems in human life do not originate outside of us. They come from within. “Out of the heart,” He said, “come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Long before there were smartphones or social media feeds, Jesus located the source of human brokenness exactly where it has always been: the human heart.

Which brings me back to artificial intelligence.

When people ask me whether God can use AI, I honestly think they’re asking the wrong question.

Of course He can.

The God who spoke through a donkey is not threatened by a computer.

The God who used pagan roads to spread the gospel is not intimidated by digital technology.

The God who entrusted His Word to parchment, ink, printing presses, radio waves, television cameras, and fiber-optic cables has never depended on the perfection of the tool.

He has always been looking for men and women whose hearts are fully surrendered to Him.

Artificial intelligence is not inspired.

It is not infallible.

It is not a substitute for prayer, wisdom, theological study, or the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit.

But neither is a commentary.

Neither is a concordance.

Neither is Bible software.

Neither is a microphone.

Every one of those things is simply a servant. A means. A tool that can either be used wisely or foolishly.

The longer I follow Jesus, the more convinced I become that God is not nearly as anxious about our tools as we are.

He has always been far more interested in whether the people holding them are listening to His voice.

AI Didn’t Replace My Brain

For me, this conversation has never been theoretical.

It’s deeply personal.

I have ADHD. For years I saw it almost entirely as a weakness, something to overcome, something to apologize for, something that made ministry harder than it seemed to be for everyone else. My mind rarely moves in straight lines. It races from one idea to another, making connections that sometimes surprise even me. A verse reminds me of a story. A story reminds me of a conversation. That conversation sends me to church history, which leads to neuroscience, which somehow circles back to a passage in John’s Gospel. It’s exhilarating when I can keep up with it and exhausting when I can’t.

For years my greatest frustration wasn’t a lack of ideas. It was the inability to capture them before they disappeared. I would wake up in the middle of the night with what felt like an important insight, only to lose it before I could find a notebook. I’d spend an hour organizing my thoughts, only to become distracted by another connection that seemed just as important. There was often a traffic jam between my mind and the page. I knew what I wanted to say. I simply couldn’t get there fast enough.

Then artificial intelligence entered my workflow.

It didn’t make me smarter.

It didn’t make me more spiritual.

It certainly didn’t make me more creative.

What it did was remove friction.

For the first time, I could speak an idea before I lost it. I could ask for help organizing scattered thoughts without spending an hour rearranging paragraphs. I could clean up grammar in minutes instead of laboring over commas and sentence structure. I could spend less energy wrestling with mechanics and more energy wrestling with meaning.

That’s an important distinction.

People often assume that because something became easier, it also became less authentic. But that’s rarely how we think about any other tool. We don’t accuse a carpenter of cheating because he traded a handsaw for a table saw. We don’t criticize a missionary for flying across the ocean instead of spending months on a ship. We recognize that good tools reduce unnecessary labor so that more energy can be invested in the work that actually matters.

That’s exactly what AI has done for me.

It has never written my sermons.

It has never prayed for me.

It has never listened to the Holy Spirit.

It has never loved a grieving family, baptized a new believer, counseled a struggling marriage, or stood beside a hospital bed.

What it has done is give me more time for those things.

Ironically, some of the strongest criticisms of technology are often framed around the language of dopamine, as though our brains were never designed to enjoy learning, creating, discovering, or solving problems. But neuroscience paints a much richer picture than that. Dopamine is not simply the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” as it is often described in popular culture. Researchers now understand that dopamine plays a central role in motivation, learning, curiosity, attention, and anticipating rewards. It is one of the ways God designed our brains to pursue what we value.

That matters because dopamine isn’t unique to smartphones or social media. It is released when a child learns to ride a bicycle, when a scientist makes a discovery, when a surfer catches a wave, when a musician finally masters a difficult piece, when a student understands a difficult concept, and yes, when a pastor suddenly sees how a passage of Scripture fits together after days of study. The problem has never been dopamine itself. The problem is that our hearts can direct good desires toward unhealthy ends.

The research itself has become far more nuanced than many headlines suggest. While studies consistently show that compulsive, passive, or comparison-driven use of social media can contribute to anxiety and lower well-being for some people, the evidence also shows that technology used intentionally, for learning, creating, communicating, maintaining relationships, or accomplishing meaningful work, does not produce the same outcomes. In other words, the question isn’t simply how much we use technology. It is how we use it and what it is forming within us.

That distinction changed the way I think about my own life.

When I use AI to organize ideas after spending hours in prayer and study, I don’t feel like I’ve outsourced my calling. I feel like I’ve removed unnecessary obstacles so I can invest more deeply in the work God has actually asked me to do. Instead of spending an afternoon searching through stacks of books for a quotation, I can spend that afternoon praying for someone in my church. Instead of losing ideas because my brain outruns my keyboard, I can capture them while they’re still fresh enough to explore. Instead of becoming consumed by mechanics, I can devote my attention to theology, shepherding, and the people Jesus has entrusted to my care.

Artificial intelligence didn’t replace my brain.

In many ways, it simply helped me use the one God gave me.

The Digital Mission Field

One of the criticisms I hear most often is, “Social media is destroying us.”

There is enough truth in that statement to make it worth taking seriously.

I’ve watched people become consumed by comparison. I’ve seen outrage become a business model and loneliness grow in a world that has never been more connected. I’ve watched algorithms reward anger, exaggeration, and division because those emotions keep people scrolling. There are real dangers online, just as there are real dangers anywhere human beings gather.

But that’s only half the story.

Social media didn’t create humanity’s brokenness.

It simply gave it another place to express itself.

Pride existed long before Instagram.

Envy was destroying lives long before Facebook.

Lust didn’t begin with smartphones.

Gossip flourished long before comment sections.

When Jesus taught that evil comes from within the human heart, He wasn’t describing first-century problems. He was describing every century. Technology changes the stage, but it doesn’t rewrite the human condition.

That’s why I’ve never been convinced that abandoning technology is the answer.

The Church has rarely fulfilled its mission by retreating from culture.

It fulfills its mission by entering culture with the hope of Christ.

When missionaries crossed oceans, they didn’t wait until every culture was safe.

When Paul entered Athens, he didn’t refuse to speak because the city was filled with idols.

He walked into the marketplace, listened carefully, understood the culture, and proclaimed Jesus in language people could understand.

That has always been the missionary impulse.

Go where people are.

Today, people gather in coffee shops.

They gather in neighborhoods.

They gather at ball fields.

And they gather online.

Millions of conversations happen every day on platforms that many Christians have simply abandoned. People wrestle with anxiety, celebrate births, grieve deaths, ask spiritual questions, search for purpose, and wonder whether anyone sees them. They are looking for meaning in the middle of endless noise.

Why wouldn’t followers of Jesus be there?

I don’t see social media primarily as a platform.

I see it as a mission field.

For me, it has become something else as well.

It’s become my digital busking.

I’ve always loved that image.

Walk through almost any great city in the world and you’ll eventually hear music echoing down the sidewalk. A musician opens a guitar case, tunes the strings, and begins to play. Most people keep walking. Some pause for a moment. A few stop long enough to listen. Occasionally someone drops a few dollars into the open case.

The musician isn’t chasing every passerby.

He isn’t demanding applause.

He’s simply offering something beautiful to anyone willing to stop.

That’s how I’ve come to think about social media.

Every photograph I post from the ocean reminds me that creation still declares the glory of God.

Every reflection on Scripture is another opportunity to point someone toward Christ.

Every story about ministry, leadership, failure, or grace is simply another song played on a digital street corner.

Some people scroll past.

Others stop for a moment.

A few begin a conversation that changes the direction of their lives.

I’ve seen former students reconnect with their faith because of a simple post.

I’ve prayed with people I haven’t seen in twenty years.

I’ve watched missionaries encourage one another across continents.

I’ve had strangers write to tell me that something I shared helped them take one more step toward Jesus.

Those moments rarely become headlines.

But they’re real.

Could social media become an idol?

Absolutely.

Anything can.

Ministry can become an idol.

Success can become an idol.

Family can become an idol.

Even our own reputation for being “right” can quietly become an idol.

The answer has never been to eliminate every good gift that could be misused.

The answer has always been to place every gift on the altar.

I don’t want technology to disciple me.

I want Jesus to disciple me.

Then I want to carry that discipleship into every place people are searching for hope, including the digital spaces where millions of people now spend a significant part of their lives.

Perhaps that’s the deeper question.

Not whether Christians should be on social media.

But what kind of Christians people encounter when they find us there.

Because if our neighbors now live part of their lives online, then loving our neighbors means showing up there, too.

The Behavior Modification Factory

The longer I serve the Church, the more convinced I become that one of our greatest temptations isn’t heresy.

It’s reductionism.

We have an incredible ability to reduce the breathtaking work of the Holy Spirit into something far smaller than Jesus ever intended. Somewhere along the way, discipleship can quietly become behavior management, holiness becomes rule keeping, and spiritual maturity is measured by how well someone conforms to the expectations of the community around them. We begin with the gospel, but over time we slowly replace transformation with performance.

I don’t think that happens because the Church has bad intentions.

Quite the opposite.

Most churches genuinely want to help people follow Jesus. They want healthy marriages, faithful parents, generous believers, ethical leaders, and communities marked by love. Those are beautiful desires. But somewhere in our pursuit of those outcomes, we can begin confusing fruit with the root. We start managing external behavior instead of cultivating hearts that are deeply surrendered to Christ.

Jesus never seemed content with outward conformity.

Again and again He looked beneath the surface. He wasn’t impressed that the Pharisees tithed meticulously while neglecting justice and mercy. He wasn’t moved by public prayers offered for the sake of appearance. He wasn’t interested in people who looked righteous while carrying pride, resentment, greed, or self-importance beneath carefully maintained religious lives. His strongest words were almost always reserved for those who had mastered the appearance of holiness while resisting the transforming work of God within them.

That should give every pastor pause.

It’s surprisingly easy to build a church full of well-behaved people.

It’s much harder to cultivate a church full of people who are genuinely becoming like Jesus.

Those are not the same thing.

One can be produced through pressure.

The other can only be produced through the Spirit.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me because so many of our modern conversations focus on managing behavior instead of forming character. We ask whether Christians should have tattoos, whether they should drink alcohol, whether they should dance, watch certain movies, use social media, or now, whether they should use artificial intelligence. Some of those questions deserve thoughtful discussion. Wisdom matters. Boundaries matter. But if our primary concern is always the tool instead of the heart, we’ve already begun asking the wrong questions.

A person can refuse every form of modern technology and still be consumed by envy.

A pastor can preach from handwritten notes while secretly craving recognition.

Someone can avoid every social media platform and still spend their life comparing themselves to everyone around them.

Legalism has always had remarkable camouflage.

It allows us to feel spiritually successful because we’ve mastered visible behaviors while quietly ignoring the invisible work God longs to do within us.

The gospel refuses to settle for that.

Jesus didn’t die merely to make bad people behave better.

He died to make dead people alive.

He came to give us new hearts, new desires, new affections, and new lives. The promise of the New Covenant was never simply improved morality. It was transformation from the inside out. Ezekiel spoke of God removing hearts of stone and giving hearts of flesh. Paul described believers becoming a new creation. The Spirit doesn’t merely adjust our habits; He reshapes our loves.

That’s why discipleship has always been far more than information transfer or behavior correction.

It is the lifelong process of learning to love what Jesus loves.

To desire what Jesus desires.

To see people the way Jesus sees them.

To surrender our will until His life is increasingly formed within us.

When that happens, behavior certainly changes.

But it changes because love has changed first.

That’s an entirely different kind of obedience.

Perhaps that’s why I’m cautious whenever the Church becomes preoccupied with policing tools. History suggests we are often most confident about the very issues God seems least concerned about, while quietly neglecting the matters Jesus repeatedly emphasized, humility, forgiveness, generosity, truthfulness, compassion, holiness, justice, and sacrificial love. We become experts at drawing lines Jesus never drew while sometimes overlooking the ones He spoke about constantly.

Artificial intelligence is simply the latest example.

It is easy to debate software.

It is much harder to examine our own hearts.

One requires opinions.

The other requires repentance.

And repentance has always been where genuine revival begins.

The Difference Between a Tool and an Idol

One of the reasons conversations about technology become so emotional is because we often confuse tools with idols.

The Bible never does.

Throughout Scripture, God consistently distinguishes between the gifts He gives and the worship that belongs to Him alone. The problem has never been that human beings create, build, invent, or enjoy good things. The problem begins when good things quietly become ultimate things. We take what was meant to serve us and slowly begin serving it instead.

That’s what idolatry has always been.

An idol is not simply a carved statue sitting in the corner of a temple. It is anything that slowly captures our affection, commands our loyalty, shapes our identity, or promises what only God can ultimately provide. Tim Keller famously described an idol as anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than Him. Scripture tells the same story from Genesis to Revelation. Human beings are worshipers by design. If we do not worship the Creator, we will inevitably give our hearts to something within creation.

That is why the Bible spends so much time talking about the human heart.

The heart is where worship begins.

Long before our hands build idols, our hearts quietly construct them.

That is why simply removing an object rarely solves the deeper problem. Israel destroyed golden calves only to create new idols a generation later. The human heart has an astonishing ability to manufacture substitutes for God. If it isn’t wealth, it becomes power. If it isn’t power, it becomes approval. If it isn’t approval, it becomes success. If it isn’t success, it can even become ministry itself.

I’ve watched pastors make an idol out of church growth.

I’ve watched leaders make an idol out of influence.

I’ve watched Christians make an idol out of being right.

I’ve watched churches make an idol out of tradition.

Ironically, I’ve also watched believers make an idol out of rejecting technology, wearing their separation from the modern world almost like a badge of spiritual superiority. The object changed, but the heart was doing exactly what it has always done—finding significance somewhere other than Christ.

That’s why I struggle whenever someone says, “AI is the problem.”

No.

It might become a problem.

Just like money can become a problem.

Exercise can become a problem.

Family can become a problem.

Work can become a problem.

Even ministry can become a problem.

None of those things are evil in themselves.

They simply become dangerous when they begin asking our hearts to do what only Jesus can do.

Artificial intelligence cannot tell me who I am.

It cannot forgive my sin.

It cannot quiet my conscience.

It cannot give me peace when my world is falling apart.

It cannot replace the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It cannot comfort me beside a hospital bed, carry me through grief, or convince me that I am deeply loved by my heavenly Father.

Only Jesus can do those things.

And because only Jesus can do those things, only Jesus deserves that place in my heart.

Augustine wrote that sin is fundamentally a matter of disordered loves. We don’t merely love the wrong things; we love good things in the wrong order. We ask created things to bear the weight of our identity, security, and hope. That burden crushes them because they were never designed to carry it.

Technology is no different.

Artificial intelligence makes a terrible savior.

So does social media.

So does success.

So does ministry.

So does being admired.

So does being correct.

Every one of them promises more than it can ever deliver.

Only Christ never disappoints.

When I sit down to prepare a sermon, I don’t begin by asking whether I will use artificial intelligence.

I begin by asking a much harder question.

Who am I depending on today?

Am I trusting my experience?

My education?

My reputation?

My intellect?

My creativity?

My tools?

Or have I come once again to the foot of the cross, empty-handed, asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate His Word and transform my own heart before I ever attempt to speak to someone else’s?

That question matters infinitely more than whether a language model helped me organize my notes.

Because one day every sermon I have preached will be forgotten.

Every article I have written will gather dust.

Every technology that feels revolutionary today will eventually become obsolete.

But the soul that has learned to treasure Christ above everything else will endure forever.

That has always been the invitation of the gospel.

Not to abandon the gifts God has placed in our hands.

But to make absolutely certain they never take His place in our hearts.

The Hands That Hold the Tool

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in debating artificial intelligence and more interested in asking a different set of questions.

Am I becoming more like Jesus?

Do I love people more deeply than I did a year ago?

Do I spend more time listening to the Holy Spirit than listening to the endless noise around me?

Am I quicker to repent, slower to judge, and more willing to forgive?

When I open the Scriptures, do I come looking merely for information, or do I come expecting to be transformed?

Those questions will matter long after today’s technologies have become tomorrow’s antiques.

History has a way of humbling every generation.

There was a time when the printing press seemed dangerous because ordinary people might read the Bible without a priest standing beside them. Radio was once viewed with suspicion. Television was condemned in many churches. The internet was treated by some as though it would surely become the end of meaningful discipleship. Every generation has looked at the newest tool with a mixture of curiosity and fear, convinced that this time the Church stood on the edge of something unprecedented.

Yet through every century, Christ has continued building His Church.

Empires have risen and fallen.

Languages have disappeared.

Technologies have come and gone.

Methods have changed.

The gospel has not.

Jesus Christ remains “the same yesterday and today and forever.”

That confidence allows me to hold technology with open hands.

Artificial intelligence is not my hope.

Neither is social media.

Neither is innovation.

Neither is tradition.

My confidence has never rested in the tools available to the Church.

It has always rested in the Head of the Church.

Jesus does not need artificial intelligence.

He does not need social media.

He does not need brilliant communicators, gifted writers, or exceptionally creative pastors.

He has accomplished His purposes through fishermen and scholars, shepherds and kings, tentmakers and prisoners, children and widows, ordinary saints whose names history has forgotten, and even, for one unforgettable moment, through a donkey standing in the middle of the road.

That story has always made me smile.

Not because it is humorous, although it certainly is.

But because it reminds me of something I desperately need to remember.

God has never depended on extraordinary instruments.

He delights in ordinary ones that are completely surrendered to Him.

That realization changes the way I think about every tool I hold in my hands.

A Bible is a tool.

A microphone is a tool.

A guitar is a tool.

A commentary is a tool.

A Greek lexicon is a tool.

A laptop is a tool.

Artificial intelligence is a tool.

None of them possess the power to transform a human soul.

Only the Holy Spirit can breathe life into a heart that is dead in sin. Only the Spirit can illuminate the Scriptures so that we behold the glory of Christ. Only the Spirit can convict, comfort, sanctify, and send people into the world with the love of Jesus. Every other instrument is simply placed into human hands, waiting to be used in service to the One who alone gives life.

So perhaps the question was never, “Can God use AI?”

The better question is this:

Can God trust me with whatever He places in my hands?

Can He trust me to remain humble when my influence grows?

Can He trust me to stay dependent when my knowledge increases?

Can He trust me to keep loving people more than platforms?

Can He trust me to seek His voice before every other voice?

Can He trust me to remember that no tool, no matter how powerful, will ever replace a life hidden with Christ?

Because that has always been God’s way.

He takes ordinary people.

He fills them with His Spirit.

He places simple tools into their hands.

And then He does extraordinary things that leave no doubt about who deserves the glory.

If God could speak through a donkey, He can certainly use artificial intelligence.

The question has never been about His ability.

The question has always been about our availability.

May we be people whose hearts are so surrendered to Christ that He can entrust us with every good gift He chooses to place in our hands, not because we worship the gift, but because through every gift we long to make much of the Giver.

Soli Deo Gloria.

When You Think You’ve Ruined Everything

There was a season of my life when every Wednesday morning began the same way.

By the time I pulled into the church parking lot in Riverside, California, the sun was already warming the asphalt. I would fill a five-gallon bucket with water, pour in the soap, and watch the suds slowly rise to the surface. A long-handled brush leaned against the bucket while a row of white church vans waited quietly in front of me, each one covered with another week’s worth of dust, bugs, and road grime. Before I ever picked up the brush, I would usually stand there for a moment, staring into the soapy water.

I wasn’t thinking about the vans.

I was thinking about my life.

As I stood there, the parking lot gradually came alive. Staff members pulled into their spaces carrying coffee cups and laptops. Young ministry interns laughed together as they walked toward the church doors with backpacks slung over their shoulders and Bibles tucked under their arms. They were headed to staff meetings, ministry planning, and the work I had once given my life to. I watched them disappear inside before turning back toward another dirty van, dipping the brush into the warm water, and beginning the slow rhythm that had become my Wednesday routine.

Wash.

Rinse.

Move to the next van.

From a distance, it probably looked like a simple act of service. Looking back, I suppose it was. But at the time, it felt like something entirely different.

It felt like failure.

Not long before that season, my life had looked very different. I had served as a lead pastor, planted churches, preached almost every week, led worship, and watched God do things I never imagined I would have the privilege of witnessing. Ministry wasn’t simply what I did—it had quietly become part of how I understood who I was. Without realizing it, I had begun attaching my identity to my usefulness. As long as I was leading, preaching, and serving in visible ways, I knew where I fit in the story.

Then life became complicated.

Some of it was the result of my own brokenness. Some of it came through disappointment. Some of it was simply the painful reality that following Jesus doesn’t exempt us from heartbreak. Whatever the reasons, I found myself standing in a parking lot washing church vans while everyone else seemed to be doing the very work I believed God had created me to do.

Every Wednesday, the same thought found its way into my mind.

“I should be in there.”

I should be teaching.

I should be leading.

I should be shepherding people.

Instead, I was scrubbing bug splatter off windshields.

Looking back now, I realize something I couldn’t see then. I wasn’t grieving the loss of a position nearly as much as I was grieving the loss of the person I thought I was. Failure has a way of doing that. It doesn’t simply convince us that we’ve made mistakes; it quietly begins whispering that our mistakes have become our identity.

“This is who you are now.”

If we’re not careful, our worst moments become the lens through which we interpret our entire lives. We stop talking about something we did and begin believing it’s someone we’ve become. Shame has a remarkable ability to rewrite our identity if we allow it to. It convinces us that our greatest failure deserves the final word.

I know that voice because I listened to it every Wednesday morning.

What I couldn’t see while standing over that bucket of soap and water was that God wasn’t punishing me. He was rescuing me. Those quiet mornings in the parking lot weren’t evidence that my story had ended. They were the beginning of a deeper work than any sermon I had ever preached. God was patiently untangling my identity from my ministry and reminding me that I was His son long before I was His servant.

Years later, every time I come to the final chapter of John’s Gospel, I don’t simply admire Peter.

I recognize him.

Because Peter isn’t really going fishing.

He’s standing over his own bucket, wondering if his life will ever matter again.

Lesson One :

Surrender Begins When We Stop Running

John tells us that after the resurrection, Peter looked at the other disciples and quietly said, “I’m going out to fish.” (John 21:3)

It is one of the shortest statements in the entire story, yet it may reveal more about Peter’s heart than almost anything else he says in the Gospels. At first glance, it sounds completely ordinary. After all, Peter was a fisherman. Perhaps he simply needed something to do while he waited. Perhaps he wanted to provide for the others. But John has spent his entire Gospel teaching us that the most ordinary moments often carry the deepest meaning, and I don’t think this moment is any different.

Fishing wasn’t simply Peter’s occupation; it was his former identity. Before Jesus ever called him to become a fisher of men, Peter knew these waters, these boats, and these nets. This was the life Jesus had interrupted three years earlier with a simple invitation: “Follow Me.” Peter had left everything behind to answer that call. He had walked on water, witnessed impossible miracles, confessed that Jesus was the Christ, and experienced moments with God that few people in history have ever seen. Yet now, after denying Jesus three times and watching Him die, Peter quietly drifts back toward the only version of himself that still makes sense.

I’ve often wondered what occupied Peter’s mind as the boat slipped away from the shore that morning. Did he still hear the rooster crowing? Did he replay the moment Jesus turned and looked at him after his third denial? Did every pull of the oar remind him that he had promised to die for Christ only to insist hours later that he had never even known Him? Scripture doesn’t answer those questions, but it does tell us that Peter went back to fishing, and I can’t help but wonder if he wasn’t searching for fish nearly as much as he was searching for himself.

Failure has a way of doing that to us. It convinces us that the future God promised has somehow slipped through our fingers, and instead of moving forward in faith, we begin moving backward toward whatever feels familiar. We return to old identities, old habits, old coping mechanisms, and old places where we imagine we can regain control. We tell ourselves we’re just being practical, when in reality we’re trying to escape the ache of disappointment.

Even neuroscience gives language to what Scripture has long revealed. Researchers have found that shame activates the brain’s threat response, pushing us toward self-protection. We isolate. We become defensive. We retreat into routines that feel predictable because uncertainty feels dangerous. The human heart has always looked for somewhere to hide after failure. Peter doesn’t hide behind a locked door. He hides in a fishing boat.

If I’m honest, I’ve climbed into a few fishing boats myself.

Mine just happened to look like a bucket of soapy water sitting in a church parking lot.

Every Wednesday, as I washed church vans, I wasn’t simply serving. Beneath the surface, I was wrestling with a question that reached far deeper than ministry. If I’m not leading a church, who am I? Looking back, I realize that wasn’t really a vocational question at all. It was an identity question. I had slowly confused what I did for Jesus with who I was in Jesus, and God, in His mercy, was determined to separate the two.

Perhaps your fishing boat looks different. Maybe you’ve gone back to an old relationship because loneliness felt easier than trusting God with the unknown. Maybe you’ve buried yourself in work because achievement felt safer than vulnerability. Maybe you’ve learned to stay so busy that you never have to sit quietly with your disappointment. Whatever form it takes, we all have a tendency to run toward what feels familiar when life falls apart, even if familiar is exactly what Jesus has been calling us to leave behind.

The tragedy of Peter’s decision is not that he goes fishing. The tragedy is that he believes the story has ended. He assumes that failure has rewritten his future. Yet while Peter is rowing away from his calling, Jesus is already preparing his restoration.

John tells us the disciples fished all night and caught nothing. That detail is more than an observation; it’s an invitation to see ourselves in the story. Peter was not an amateur. Fishing was his trade. If anyone knew how to catch fish on the Sea of Galilee, it was Peter. Yet after a lifetime of experience and an entire night of exhausting effort, his nets remained empty. Isn’t that often what happens when we spend our lives trying to prove ourselves? We work harder. We strive longer. We cling tighter. We exhaust ourselves trying to fix what only grace can restore, only to discover that our nets are still empty when morning comes.

Then, as the first light begins to stretch across the water, a voice calls from the shore.

“Friends, haven’t you any fish?”

Of course Jesus already knows the answer.

He isn’t looking for information.

He’s inviting honesty.

Only after the disciples admit their emptiness does Jesus tell them to cast the net again. In a moment, everything changes. The same lake. The same boat. The same fishermen. The only difference is the presence of Jesus. John recognizes Him immediately, but Peter doesn’t wait for explanations. He throws himself into the water and swims toward the One he had been afraid to face.

I have always loved that detail because it reveals how profoundly Peter has changed. The last time he found himself overwhelmed by his failure, he ran away from Jesus. This time, he runs toward Him. That is what surrender looks like. It isn’t pretending we haven’t failed. It is discovering that Jesus is safer than our shame.

When Peter finally reaches the shore, John quietly includes one of the most remarkable details in the entire story. There is a charcoal fire burning. That phrase appears only one other time in the New Testament, in the courtyard where Peter denied Jesus three times. John wants us to notice it because Jesus wants Peter to notice it. The risen Christ intentionally recreates the setting of Peter’s greatest failure, not to reopen the wound, but to heal it. Grace has a way of taking us back to the places we would rather forget, not so we can relive our shame, but so we can watch God redeem it.

Peter has denied Jesus three times. The wound is still open. Jesus hasn’t ignored it, but neither has He confronted it, not yet. That conversation is coming. There will be three questions waiting for Peter, and every question will become an invitation to surrender the place where he once failed. Before Jesus ever addresses Peter’s denial, however, He does something far more important.

He makes breakfast.

Before Peter offers an apology...

Before Jesus asks a question...

Before restoration begins...

The fire is already warm.

The bread is already waiting.

The fish are already on the coals.

Peter spent the entire night trying to catch breakfast.

Jesus already had breakfast waiting.

Maybe that’s where surrender begins for every one of us. Not when we’ve found the right words, repaired every mistake, or finally proven ourselves worthy again, but when we stop running long enough to discover that Jesus has been waiting for us all along.

Lesson Two :

Surrender Means Receiving Grace

I can’t help but imagine Peter standing there for a moment before he ever sat down.

His clothes are soaked from the hundred-yard swim. His breathing is still heavy as the other disciples drag a net overflowing with fish onto the shore. The smell of salt hangs in the morning air, mingling with the smoke rising from a small charcoal fire. Jesus is kneeling beside it, bread warming over the coals and fish already cooking.

It’s such an ordinary scene.

And yet it may be one of the most extraordinary moments in all of Scripture.

If I had written this story, I would have arranged it very differently. I would have expected Jesus to begin with the hard conversation. I would have expected Him to ask Peter why he denied Him, or demand an explanation for what happened in the courtyard. I might have imagined a stern rebuke or at least an awkward silence before reconciliation could begin.

Jesus does none of those things.

Instead, He looks at Peter and says,

“Come and have breakfast.” (John 21:12)

Don’t rush past those words.

The risen King of the universe prepares breakfast for the disciple who publicly denied even knowing Him just a few days earlier.

That alone tells us something profound about the heart of God.

Peter’s last meal with Jesus had been filled with confidence. Around another table he had boldly declared, “Even if everyone else falls away, I never will.” He insisted that he would lay down his life for Jesus, convinced that his devotion was stronger than everyone else’s. Within hours, those promises lay shattered beside another charcoal fire as Peter denied Jesus three different times.

Now he finds himself sitting around another fire.

Another meal.

Another conversation.

But this time everything has changed.

Peter has no speeches left to give.

No promises to make.

No confidence in his own strength.

Only empty hands reaching for bread he didn’t prepare and fish he didn’t catch.

Perhaps that’s exactly where grace begins.

One of the things I love most about Jesus is that He understands something we often forget. People drowning in shame rarely need another lecture. They already know they’ve failed. What they desperately need is the assurance that failure has not placed them beyond the reach of love.

Notice the order of this story because John wants us to notice it.

Before Jesus confronts Peter...

He feeds him.

Before Jesus restores Peter’s ministry...

He restores Peter’s dignity.

Before He speaks about responsibility...

He reminds Peter that he still has a place at the table.

That order matters because we so often reverse it.

Most of us assume we have to work our way back to God. We promise to pray more, serve harder, read our Bibles more faithfully, overcome our struggles, and become the kind of Christians we think God can finally be proud of. We imagine that if we can just prove ourselves, perhaps He’ll welcome us home.

The Gospel tells the opposite story.

Grace always comes first.

Relationship always comes before responsibility.

We don’t obey in order to become loved.

We obey because, through Christ, we already are.

Modern psychology has finally begun to affirm what the Gospel has declared for two thousand years. Researchers studying attachment have discovered that lasting transformation rarely happens in environments ruled by fear or shame. Shame causes us to hide, defend ourselves, or withdraw from relationship. Secure love creates the safety where genuine change can finally begin.

Jesus understood that long before anyone gave it a name.

Peter will never be transformed by another lecture.

He will be transformed by love.

Only after breakfast does Jesus begin asking questions.

The conversation is surprisingly simple.

“Simon, son of John, do you love Me?”

Three times Jesus asks.

Three times Peter answers.

Three denials.

Three affirmations.

Three opportunities for grace to reach into the very place where shame had taken root.

I don’t believe Jesus is forcing Peter to relive his failure.

I believe He is redeeming it.

Every denial had left a wound.

Every question becomes part of the healing.

Notice what Jesus never asks.

He doesn’t ask, “Peter, why did you fail Me?”

He doesn’t ask, “Can I trust you again?”

He doesn’t ask, “Will you promise never to do this again?”

Instead, He asks the only question that ultimately matters.

“Do you love Me?”

Everything else grows from that answer.

Christianity has never been sustained by perfect performance. It has always been sustained by people who love Jesus. Love is the foundation beneath every act of obedience, every sacrifice, every sermon, every ministry, and every mission. Remove love, and all that’s left is religious performance.

There is another detail in this conversation that has always captured my imagination.

Jesus doesn’t call him Peter.

He calls him Simon, son of John.

That was Peter’s name before Jesus ever said, “Follow Me.”

I don’t think Jesus is taking Peter backward because He wants to shame him.

I think He’s taking him back to the beginning because that’s where grace always begins.

Back before the crowds.

Back before the miracles.

Back before the victories.

Back before the failures.

It’s almost as if Jesus is saying, “Let’s build this again—but this time not on your confidence, not on your reputation, not on your promises. Let’s build it on the only thing that has ever mattered. Your love for Me.”

I wonder how many of us believe God forgives us while secretly doubting that He still delights in us.

Those are not the same thing.

Forgiveness removes guilt.

Delight restores relationship.

John 21 reminds us that Jesus doesn’t merely tolerate Peter’s presence.

He welcomes him home.

And perhaps that’s what Peter needed more than anything else.

Not another sermon.

Not another miracle.

Not another chance to prove himself.

He needed to know that on the other side of his greatest failure, he was still deeply loved.

Maybe that’s what we need too.

Because surrender is more than admitting we’ve failed.

Surrender is finally receiving the grace we’ve spent our lives trying to earn.

Lesson Three

Surrender Means Following Again

There is something beautifully ordinary about the way this conversation ends.

After breakfast has been shared, after the charcoal fire has burned low, after Peter has answered Jesus three times, the conversation quietly turns toward the future. There is no dramatic ceremony, no public restoration in front of the crowds, and no lengthy lecture about leadership. Jesus simply looks at Peter and says, “Feed My sheep.” Then, with words that must have echoed through Peter’s memory, He repeats the same invitation He had spoken three years earlier on another shoreline.

“Follow Me.” (John 21:19)

Those two words carry more weight than we often realize.

The first time Jesus spoke them, Peter was standing beside a fishing boat with calloused hands and an ordinary life. He had no idea where following Jesus would lead him. He could never have imagined walking on water, witnessing miracles, standing on the Mount of Transfiguration, or watching the empty tomb become the turning point of human history. He also could not have imagined the failures that still lay ahead—the fear, the pride, the sword in the garden, the denials around the fire.

Yet standing on the beach after the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t invent a new calling for Peter.

He renews the old one.

That has become one of my favorite truths in all of Scripture because it reminds me that failure does not cancel God’s calling. Pride does. Refusing to surrender does. But a broken and humble heart has always been fertile ground for the grace of God. Peter’s greatest qualification for leadership was never that he had lived a flawless life. It was that he had finally stopped believing he could follow Jesus in his own strength.

That helps explain why Jesus immediately says, “Feed My sheep.”

Notice what He doesn’t say.

He doesn’t tell Peter to rebuild his reputation. He doesn’t tell him to prove himself, regain everyone’s confidence, or spend the rest of his life making up for his mistakes. Jesus turns Peter’s attention away from himself and toward the people God loves.

Grace has a way of doing that.

Failure turns us inward. It causes us to become consumed with our own regrets, our own reputation, and the fear of what everyone else thinks about us. Grace does exactly the opposite. It frees us from ourselves so that we can begin loving and serving others again. Shame constantly asks, “What do people think of me?” Love quietly asks, “Who needs to be cared for today?”

The remarkable thing about Peter’s story is that Jesus never wastes his failure.

He redeems it.

The loud, impulsive disciple who once insisted he would never fall becomes a shepherd marked by humility. Years later, Peter would write to suffering believers, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.” (1 Peter 5:5) Those words carry weight because they were written by a man who had learned humility the hard way.

Then comes one of the most beautiful reversals in the entire New Testament.

The man who denied Jesus three times is asked three times, “Do you love Me?”

Every denial is met with another opportunity to surrender.

Every failure is answered with another invitation to love.

Every wound becomes another place where grace does its healing work.

And the man who publicly denied Jesus eventually becomes the man who publicly proclaims Him.

Only a few weeks after breakfast on the beach, Peter stands before thousands of people on the day of Pentecost and boldly declares that Jesus Christ is risen and Lord of all. The disciple who once trembled before the questions of a servant girl now fearlessly preaches the Gospel to Jerusalem. Through that sermon, God births the New Testament church.

Think about that for a moment.

If you had been choosing a spokesman for Christianity, would you have chosen Peter?

The man who failed so publicly...

The man who abandoned Jesus...

The man whose greatest weakness had been exposed for everyone to see...

Jesus did.

Not because Peter’s failure didn’t matter.

But because grace had rewritten Peter’s story.

I think that’s one of the greatest misconceptions we have about restoration. We imagine that God’s goal is to give us our old life back. Scripture paints a much more beautiful picture. God is not interested in taking us backward. He is interested in making us new.

Peter never became the man he was before his failure.

He became someone far better.

Not because failure made him stronger.

But because surrender taught him dependence.

As I look back on my own story, I can see that God was doing something very similar in me.

Eventually, I stopped washing church vans. God opened doors to preach again, to lead again, to coach pastors again, and to serve His Church in ways I never could have imagined while standing in that parking lot. But if I’m honest, those opportunities were never the greatest miracle.

The greatest miracle was what God changed inside me.

Somewhere between the bucket of soapy water and the next season of ministry, He slowly untangled my identity from my calling. He taught me that my value was never measured by the size of the crowd I preached to, the title on my business card, or the influence I carried. He reminded me that before I was ever His servant, I was His son. Before I was useful, I was loved. My calling was never meant to give me an identity. My identity in Christ was always meant to give life to my calling.

I still have moments when I’m tempted to measure myself by success. I still have days when I wonder whether I’ve done enough or accomplished enough. When those thoughts creep in, I find myself returning to that beach on the Sea of Galilee. I remember the smell of the charcoal fire. I remember Jesus cooking breakfast for weary disciples. I remember Peter’s tears giving way to hope.

And I remember two words that Jesus is still speaking to every one of us.

“Follow Me.”

Not after you’ve earned another chance.

Not after you’ve figured everything out.

Not after you’ve proven you’ve changed.

Simply...

“Follow Me.”

Near the end of his life, Peter would write these remarkable words:

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace...will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” (1 Peter 5:10)

Peter wasn’t writing theology from a classroom.

He was writing testimony.

He had lived those words.

The fisherman who thought his story had ended in failure discovered that, in the hands of Jesus, failure is never the final chapter.

It is often the place where grace begins writing the next one.

Come and Have Breakfast

The more I return to John 21, the more I find myself lingering around that charcoal fire.

I often wonder what Peter was thinking as he sat there in the quiet light of the morning. The smell of the smoke must have carried him back to another charcoal fire only a few days before. It was there, in the courtyard outside the trial of Jesus, that fear had overwhelmed his courage and confidence had dissolved into denial. Around that first fire, Peter insisted three different times that he didn’t know Jesus. Around this fire, he doesn’t defend himself, compare himself to the other disciples, or make another promise he cannot keep.

He simply sits at the table.

There is something deeply beautiful about that.

Peter has no speeches left to give. His self-confidence has been stripped away. The bold declarations that once came so easily have been replaced with quiet humility. His hands are empty as he reaches for bread he didn’t bake and fish he didn’t catch. For perhaps the first time in his life, Peter isn’t trying to impress Jesus. He is simply receiving from Him.

I think that’s why this story continues to capture my heart.

It reminds me that the Christian life has never begun with what we bring to Jesus. It begins with what Jesus has already prepared for us.

Peter had spent the entire night trying to catch breakfast. He exhausted himself doing what he knew how to do, only to come back empty-handed. Yet while Peter was striving on the water, Jesus was quietly preparing everything he needed on the shore. Isn’t that so often the story of our lives? We spend ourselves trying to prove we’re enough, trying to earn another chance, trying to convince ourselves that if we work a little harder or perform a little better, perhaps we’ll finally deserve God’s approval.

All the while, grace has already set the table.

I don’t think it’s accidental that John ends his Gospel this way.

Matthew concludes with the Great Commission. Luke ends with the ascension. Mark leaves us with the astonishment of the empty tomb. John gives us breakfast.

That choice has always fascinated me because John also does something else that is unique among the Gospel writers. While Matthew, Mark, and Luke carefully record Jesus taking bread and wine in the upper room and saying, “This is My body” and “This is My blood,” John tells the story differently. Rather than focusing on the words of institution, he fills his Gospel with meals where grace is revealed.

At Cana, Jesus turns water into wine and rescues a family’s joy. Along a hillside, He feeds thousands and then declares Himself to be the Bread of Life. In the upper room, He kneels with a towel around His waist and washes the feet of men who will abandon Him before sunrise. And now, after defeating sin, death, and the grave, the risen Christ stands over a charcoal fire preparing breakfast for weary disciples who have spent the night accomplishing nothing.

John wants us to see something larger than breakfast.

He wants us to see the heart of God.

The story begins with an invitation to the table.

And it ends with an invitation to the table.

Perhaps that is why communion has always mattered so deeply to the Church. Every time we gather around the Lord’s Table, we come exactly as Peter came to that beach. We don’t arrive because we’ve had a particularly holy week. We don’t come because we’ve conquered every temptation or finally become the Christians we hoped we would be. We come carrying our failures, our unanswered prayers, our fears, our disappointments, and the quiet places where we still feel painfully unfinished.

And before Jesus asks anything of us...

He feeds us.

The bread reminds us that His body was broken for people who fail.

The cup reminds us that His blood was poured out for people who could never save themselves.

Communion has never been a reward for the spiritually successful.

It has always been a feast for those who know they need grace.

Every time we take the bread and the cup, we hear the same invitation Peter heard that morning.

“Come and have breakfast.”

Only after breakfast does Jesus say, “Feed My sheep.”

Only after Peter has been welcomed does Jesus hear, “Follow Me.”

That has become one of the great rhythms of the Christian life.

We are welcomed before we are sent.

Loved before we are useful.

Fed before we are asked to feed others.

The Kingdom of God has never been built by impressive people. It has always been built by surrendered people. Abraham surrendered the son he loved. Jacob surrendered the strength he trusted. Joseph surrendered his right to revenge. Moses surrendered control. Elijah surrendered his despair. Jonah surrendered his running. Peter surrendered his failure. And Jesus surrendered His very life so that every one of those stories, and ours, could be redeemed by grace.

That is why failure is never the end of the story.

The disciple who denied Jesus beside a charcoal fire became the apostle who proclaimed Him before thousands at Pentecost. The man who thought his calling had ended became the shepherd who helped launch the Church. Jesus didn’t ignore Peter’s failure. He redeemed it. He transformed the very place where shame seemed to have won into the place where grace began writing a new story.

Perhaps that’s exactly where you find yourself today.

Maybe you’ve been fishing all night and your nets are still empty. Maybe you’re exhausted from trying to prove that you’re useful, worthy, or enough. Maybe, like Peter, you’ve quietly begun walking back toward an old identity because you’re convinced you’ve ruined the future God once placed before you.

If that’s you, lift up your eyes.

The fire is already burning.

The bread is already warm.

Your seat at the table has already been prepared.

You don’t have to earn the invitation.

You simply have to come.

The first words Jesus speaks to Peter on that beach are an invitation.

“Come and have breakfast.”

The last words He speaks are a calling.

“Follow Me.”

I’ve discovered that’s the rhythm of the Gospel.

Grace always comes first.

When you’ve sat at Christ’s table long enough to remember that you are deeply loved—not because you’ve earned it, but because He delights in you—you no longer follow Jesus to prove your worth.

You follow because you’ve finally discovered you already have it.

And that’s what surrender has been about all along.

For most of my life, I assumed my anxiety came from having too much to do. I blamed long days, difficult decisions, ministry, raising a family, deadlines, and the endless list of responsibilities that come with leading people. I believed that if I could simply organize my life a little better or work a little harder, eventually peace would find me.

I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Over the last few years, God has been gently exposing something much deeper in my heart. I’ve come to realize that much of my anxiety has not come from the size of my responsibilities but from trying to carry responsibilities that were never mine to carry. Somewhere along the way, my desire to be faithful quietly became a desire to be in control. What I thought would give me peace slowly became the very thing stealing it.

I have ADHD. Today that term is often thrown around casually, and sometimes it’s used as a joke or an excuse. For me, it has been neither. If you asked my wife Emily, who has lived with me for nearly three decades, she would probably tell you that my mind has always worked a little differently. When something captures my attention, I don’t simply enjoy it—I disappear into it.

If I’m recording music, I can spend hours moving a microphone a fraction of an inch because I know it changes the sound of the kick drum. Most people would never notice the difference, but I hear it. If our family is moving to a new city, I’ll spend days researching neighborhoods, schools, traffic patterns, crime statistics, and property values until I know the area better than some of the people who already live there. If someone asks me a theological question, they probably aren’t getting a two-minute answer. They’re getting twenty pages of historical background, literary structure, Greek and Hebrew observations, cross-references, and every fascinating rabbit trail I discovered along the way.

The truth is, I love the way God wired me. I love creating. I love solving problems. I love building systems that bring clarity where there was once confusion. I enjoy taking complicated ideas and making them understandable. Those instincts have served me well in ministry, leadership, writing, and even parenting. They are gifts that I genuinely thank God for.

But gifts have shadows.

Over the last several years, I’ve begun to notice that underneath my love for excellence was something much more subtle. If I wasn’t paying attention, my pursuit of excellence quietly became a pursuit of control.

I didn’t simply want to do my best. I wanted to manage every outcome.

I wanted people to understand each other. I wanted conflict to resolve quickly. I wanted sermons to connect. I wanted worship services to be meaningful. I wanted the church to flourish. I wanted my children to make wise decisions. I wanted everyone around me to be healthy, happy, and okay.

At first glance, none of those desires seem wrong. In fact, most of them sound noble. The problem wasn’t that I wanted good things. The problem was that I slowly began believing their outcomes depended on me.

That is an exhausting way to live.

The more I tried to hold everything together, the tighter my grip became. Ironically, the tighter I held on, the less peace I experienced. I was carrying conversations I couldn’t control, relationships I couldn’t fix, and futures I couldn’t predict. I was trying to play a role that belongs to God alone.

I’ve come to believe that this is one of the great temptations of our time. We confuse responsibility with sovereignty. We assume that if we plan enough, prepare enough, anticipate enough, and work hard enough, we’ll finally earn the right to rest.

But peace has never been the reward for control.

It has always been the fruit of trust.

Your Brain Loves Control

One of the reasons surrender feels so difficult is because it pushes against the way our brains naturally work.

Over the last several years, neuroscientists have discovered that the human brain is constantly making predictions about the future. Every moment of every day, your brain is asking questions you don’t even realize it’s asking. What happens next? Is this safe? Can I trust this person? How do I avoid pain? Long before we’re consciously aware of it, our minds are scanning the environment, looking for patterns that help us make sense of the world.

In many ways, that’s a gift. It’s one of the reasons we’re able to learn, adapt, and survive. But there’s another side to it.

When life becomes uncertain, our brains don’t simply become curious—they become alert. The amygdala, the brain’s threat detection center, becomes more active. Stress hormones begin to rise. Our bodies prepare for danger even when there isn’t an immediate physical threat. The unknown feels risky, and almost instinctively we begin searching for something we can manage, organize, or control.

Have you ever noticed how quickly you start making plans after receiving bad news? Or how your mind races through every possible conversation after a conflict? Maybe you’ve found yourself endlessly researching a medical diagnosis, replaying a difficult meeting, or trying to think five steps ahead in hopes of avoiding disappointment. Those responses aren’t signs that you’re broken. They’re signs that you’re human. Our minds are wired to reduce uncertainty because uncertainty feels vulnerable.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson has often observed that human beings naturally move toward order because chaos feels frightening. We create routines, schedules, budgets, plans, and systems because predictable worlds feel safer than unpredictable ones. There’s wisdom in that. God is not opposed to planning or preparation. Scripture consistently praises diligence, wisdom, and faithful stewardship.

The problem begins when our desire for order quietly becomes a demand for certainty.

That’s where control begins to replace trust.

We slowly convince ourselves that if we can anticipate every problem, prepare for every possibility, and manage every outcome, then finally we’ll be able to rest. But life has a way of reminding us that many of the things we care about most can never be controlled. We can’t control the decisions of our children. We can’t control how other people respond to us. We can’t control the economy, our health, or tomorrow’s circumstances.

Following Jesus has never been an invitation to eliminate uncertainty.

It has always been an invitation to trust God in the middle of it.

Perhaps that’s why surrender feels so unnatural. It asks us to loosen our grip on the very thing our minds instinctively reach for. The gospel doesn’t promise us a predictable life. It promises us the presence of a faithful Savior. Real peace isn’t found in finally controlling our circumstances. It is found in learning to trust the One who already holds them.

Jonah Wasn’t Running From Nineveh

For many of us, the story of Jonah has been trapped in children’s ministry.

We remember the coloring pages, the oversized fish, the storm, and the reluctant prophet. It’s become one of those stories we think we already know. Prophet disobeys God. Big fish swallows prophet. Prophet finally obeys. Nineveh repents. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Except...

That’s not how Jonah ends.

The final chapter doesn’t conclude with celebration or resolution. There is no neat ending where Jonah learns his lesson and embraces God’s mercy. Instead, the book ends with God asking Jonah a question.

Then the story simply stops.

It’s one of the most remarkable endings in all of Scripture because it refuses to answer the very question it raises. Like an independent film that leaves the audience sitting in silence after the credits roll, Jonah forces us to wrestle with what happens next.

I don’t think that’s an accident.

The book ends with a question because the real question isn’t for Jonah.

It’s for us.

For years I assumed Jonah ran because he was afraid of Nineveh. That certainly seems reasonable. The Assyrians were one of the most feared empires of the ancient world. Their kings celebrated violence. Historical records describe them impaling their enemies, skinning prisoners alive, and using terror as a deliberate strategy to conquer surrounding nations. They wanted people to fear them, and they succeeded.

If Jonah had simply been afraid for his life, we probably wouldn’t blame him.

But that’s not why he ran.

The remarkable thing about Jonah is that he tells us exactly why he fled, and he doesn’t reveal it until the very end of the book.

After Nineveh repents and God shows them mercy, Jonah finally prays with startling honesty:

“I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

That confession changes everything.

Jonah wasn’t running because he doubted God’s power.

He was running because he trusted God’s character.

He knew there was a real possibility that if Nineveh repented, God would forgive them.

And he couldn’t bear the thought.

That’s what makes Jonah so unsettling. His struggle wasn’t theological. He knew exactly who God was. His struggle was relational. He wanted God’s mercy for himself, but he wanted God’s justice for his enemies.

If we’re honest, that tension isn’t unique to Jonah.

We love grace when it reaches us. We become far more selective when it reaches someone we believe doesn’t deserve it.

Jonah wanted God to save Israel.

He wanted God to judge Nineveh.

More than anything else, Jonah wanted to decide who was worthy of mercy.

His problem wasn’t fear.

His problem was surrender.

He had no difficulty obeying a God who agreed with him. He struggled to trust a God whose compassion was greater than his own.

And if I’m honest, I see far more of myself in Jonah than I would like to admit.

My greatest struggle is rarely believing that God is good.

It’s trusting Him when His ways don’t make sense to me.

It’s surrendering my right to decide how He should work, who He should bless, how quickly He should answer, or what justice should look like.

Jonah isn’t simply the story of a rebellious prophet.

It’s the story of every human heart that wants to trust God—as long as we get to keep our hands on the steering wheel.

The Downward Life

One of my favorite details in the book of Jonah is something many readers never notice.

The author keeps repeating a single direction.

At first, it seems like nothing more than geography. Jonah goes down to Joppa. Then he goes down into the ship. Later, as the storm rages around him, he goes down into the lowest part of the vessel and falls asleep. When the sailors finally throw him overboard, he goes down into the sea. And eventually, he descends into the darkness of the great fish.

It’s a remarkable pattern.

The author could have simply told us that Jonah was running from God, but Hebrew storytelling rarely works that way. Rather than explaining Jonah’s spiritual condition, the writer invites us to experience it. Every repetition of the word downbecomes another step in Jonah’s spiritual descent. The movement isn’t merely physical; it’s theological. Jonah’s outward journey mirrors what is happening inside his heart.

The irony is hard to miss.

Jonah believes he’s moving toward freedom, but every step takes him deeper into bondage. He thinks he’s preserving his life, but he’s slowly losing it. He believes that holding on to control will protect him, yet every attempt to control the story only carries him farther away from the peace he longs for.

Isn’t that often how our own lives unfold?

Rarely do we wake up one morning and decide to run from God. More often, our descent happens one small decision at a time. We hold on to a little resentment because it feels justified. We refuse to forgive because we don’t want to appear weak. We manipulate a situation because we’re afraid of what might happen if we don’t. We cling to an outcome because we can’t imagine God doing something better than what we’ve already planned.

None of those decisions feel dramatic in the moment.

They simply feel necessary.

But over time, they begin to shape us. The life we thought would bring security slowly becomes a life marked by anxiety, exhaustion, and isolation. The very control we believed would protect us becomes the weight that pulls us under.

I’ve experienced that more times than I’d like to admit. The moments when I’ve been the most anxious have rarely been the moments when life was at its hardest. They were the moments when I was working overtime to control what only God could control. The tighter I held on, the deeper my soul seemed to sink.

That’s the tragedy of control.

It always makes the same promise: If you can just hold on a little tighter, you’ll finally have peace.

But it never delivers.

Instead, it quietly pulls us downward.

The good news is that Jonah’s descent is not the end of the story. One of the beautiful paradoxes of Scripture is that God often meets people at the very bottom. The depths that become the consequence of Jonah’s rebellion also become the place where he finally begins to pray. Before God changes Jonah’s circumstances, He begins changing Jonah’s heart.

Perhaps that’s true for us as well.

Sometimes God allows us to reach the end of ourselves because it’s only when our grip finally loosens that we discover we have been held by Him all along.

Jesus Is the Better Jonah

One of the reasons I love the book of Jonah is because it refuses to give us the ending we expect.

We want closure. We want Jonah to change. We want him to celebrate Nineveh’s repentance, embrace God’s mercy, and walk off into the sunset as a transformed prophet.

Instead, God asks one final question.

“Should I not be concerned about that great city...?”

And then...

nothing.

The story simply ends.

No answer.

No resolution.

No chapter five.

For centuries, readers were left sitting with the tension. Jonah ends with a question because the story isn’t really about Jonah. The unanswered question lingers in the air, waiting for someone who can answer it.

Then, centuries later, Jesus stands before a crowd and makes an astonishing claim:

“Something greater than Jonah is here.”

Jesus wasn’t simply borrowing an illustration from the Old Testament. He was declaring that He was the completion of Jonah’s unfinished story.

The similarities are unmistakable.

Both Jonah and Jesus were sent by God.

Both entered the depths.

Both spent three days in darkness before emerging to bring life.

But the differences are what change everything.

Jonah heard the voice of God and ran in the opposite direction.

Jesus heard the Father’s will and walked straight toward Jerusalem.

Jonah reluctantly preached repentance to people he despised.

Jesus willingly laid down His life for people who despised Him.

Jonah wanted justice for his enemies.

Jesus prayed for His.

Jonah spent his energy trying to change God’s heart.

Jesus entrusted His own heart to the Father.

That contrast reaches its climax in the Garden of Gethsemane.

On the night before the cross, Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew to pray. Three different times He poured out His heart before the Father.

“If it is possible, let this cup pass from me...”

Those words matter.

Sometimes we imagine surrender as emotional detachment, as though faith means pretending pain doesn’t exist. But Jesus shows us something entirely different. He doesn’t minimize His suffering or suppress His desires. He honestly tells the Father what He wants. He names His anguish. He admits the weight of what lies ahead.

Then, every single time, His prayer ends the same way.

“Yet not as I will, but as You will.”

I have come to believe that this may be one of the clearest pictures of surrender in all of Scripture.

Surrender is not pretending everything is okay.

It is not denying our fears or hiding our disappointments behind spiritual clichés.

It is not convincing ourselves that pain doesn’t hurt.

True surrender is bringing every desire, every disappointment, every unanswered question, and every fear into the presence of God—and trusting Him enough to leave the outcome in His hands.

That’s where Jonah and Jesus part ways.

Jonah wanted God to conform His will to Jonah’s expectations.

Jesus conformed His will to the Father’s love.

Jonah grasped for control.

Jesus released it.

Jonah resisted the mission that would save his enemies.

Jesus embraced the mission that would save the world.

This is why Christianity is so much more than a call to imitate Jesus.

If all we see in Gethsemane is a moral example, we’ll leave inspired but still powerless. The gospel is not simply that Jesus surrendered better than we do. It is that where Jonah failed—and where we continue to fail—Jesus remained perfectly faithful.

He became the obedient prophet Jonah never could be.

He trusted where we grasp.

He obeyed where we resist.

He loved where we withhold.

He surrendered where we cling to control.

The invitation of the gospel is not first to admire His surrender.

It is to trust the One who surrendered Himself for us.

Because when you discover that your life is already held securely in His hands, you no longer have to spend your life desperately trying to hold everything together yourself.

Responsibility Is Not Sovereignty

This has become one of the most important lessons God has been teaching me over the last few years.

I’m still learning it.

In many ways, I’m learning it every single day.

I’ve discovered that much of my exhaustion has not come from working too hard. It has come from trying to carry burdens that God never intended for me to carry. Somewhere along the way, I confused being responsible with being sovereign. I began believing that faithfulness meant making sure everything turned out the way I hoped.

It doesn’t.

One of the most freeing realizations of my life has been discovering that God has never asked me to control the outcome. He has simply asked me to be faithful in the process.

That changes everything.

It means I can love people deeply without believing it’s my job to change them. I can speak the truth with compassion without carrying the weight of how it will be received. I can preach faithfully every Sunday without measuring my obedience by people’s reactions. I can lead with conviction without believing the future of the church rests on my shoulders. I can pray with bold expectation while still trusting God if His answer is different from the one I hoped for.

Those may seem like small distinctions, but they have transformed the way I think about following Jesus.

For years, I carried conversations long after they ended. I replayed meetings in my mind, wondering what I could have said differently. I worried about people’s opinions, tried to anticipate every possible outcome, and felt responsible for problems I couldn’t solve. I thought I was being a faithful leader.

In reality, I was trying to do a job that belonged to God.

The Scriptures consistently call us to responsibility. We are told to work diligently, love sacrificially, tell the truth, seek justice, forgive generously, and remain faithful regardless of the circumstances. But nowhere does God ask us to become sovereign. Nowhere does He ask us to carry the weight of every outcome or guarantee the results of our obedience.

That place is already occupied.

Only God sees the end from the beginning. Only He changes hearts. Only He holds tomorrow. Only He knows how every conversation, disappointment, success, and failure fits into His larger story.

Recognizing that difference hasn’t made me care less.

If anything, it has allowed me to care more.

Because when I no longer have to spend all my energy trying to control what belongs to God, I’m finally free to give my best to what He has actually placed in front of me.

Faithfulness becomes enough.

Not because the work is unimportant, but because God is faithful even when I cannot see what He is accomplishing.

Perhaps that’s one of the greatest invitations of the Christian life.

To wake up each morning and ask, “Lord, what have You entrusted to me today?” Then, at the end of the day, to place it back into His hands, trusting that He is far more capable of carrying the world than I have ever been.

That is the difference between responsibility and sovereignty.

Responsibility is doing what God has asked me to do.

Sovereignty is trying to do what only God can do.

One leads to faithfulness.

The other always leads to exhaustion.

Open Hands

Perhaps that’s why Jesus’ invitation has always felt so different from every other voice in our world.

Our culture tells us that peace comes through more information, better planning, greater discipline, or tighter control. If we could just understand everything, prepare for every possibility, or eliminate every uncertainty, then maybe we could finally rest.

Jesus offers something entirely different.

He never promises to explain every mystery.

He never promises to remove every hardship.

He never promises that life will become predictable.

Instead, He says:

“Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
—Matthew 11:28

I’ve come to believe that those words are some of the most radical words Jesus ever spoke.

Because He offers something that control never can.

Rest.

For years I assumed rest was the reward for finally getting everything under control. I believed that once the problems were solved, the conflicts were settled, the finances were secure, the people were happy, and the future was certain, then I would finally be able to breathe.

But that’s not how peace works.

If rest depends on controlling our circumstances, we’ll spend our entire lives chasing something we’ll never catch. There will always be another decision to make, another conversation to have, another uncertainty to manage, another burden to carry.

Control is an endless treadmill.

Jesus invites us to step off of it.

I’ve slowly discovered that rest is not the reward for control.

It is the fruit of surrender.

Maybe that’s why so many of us struggle to experience it. We spend our lives with our fists tightly clenched. We grip our schedules, our relationships, our reputations, our children, our ministries, our careers, our dreams, and even our disappointments. We keep believing that if we can just hold on a little tighter, everything will somehow be okay.

But clenched fists are exhausting.

They were never meant to carry the weight of a life.

The Christian life isn’t lived with closed hands.

It’s lived with open ones.

Open hands don’t mean we’ve stopped caring. They don’t mean we’ve become passive, indifferent, or resigned. Open hands simply acknowledge what has always been true: our lives were never secure because of the strength of our grip. They have always been secure because they are held by a faithful God.

Perhaps that’s what surrender really is.

Not giving up.

Not losing hope.

Not pretending that pain doesn’t hurt or that unanswered questions don’t matter.

Surrender is opening our hands to the God who has never stopped holding us.

The beautiful irony of the gospel is that the tighter we cling to control, the more anxious we become. But the moment we loosen our grip, we discover that we were never the ones holding everything together in the first place.

Christ was.

Maybe that’s why the final prayer of Jesus before the cross has become one of the most important prayers I know.

Not because it is easy.

But because it is true.

It is the prayer that releases control.

It is the prayer that opens our hands.

It is the prayer that leads to peace.

“Father... not my will, but Yours be done.”

I can still see the pattern in the carpet.

It’s strange what your mind remembers. I don’t remember most of the meetings. I don’t remember the sermons I preached during that season. I don’t remember the attendance numbers, the victories, the arguments, or even many of the details that seemed so important at the time. What I remember is the carpet. Years later, that is the image that remains burned into my memory.

My face was pressed into it. Tears soaked the fibers beneath me. Dust clung to my forehead. The smell of that room is still somewhere in the back of my mind. I remember trying to catch my breath between sobs. I remember the exhaustion that settled over me like a heavy blanket. Mostly, I remember the humiliation of it all. I was a grown man lying face down on the floor, crying so hard that I could barely think. There was dust on my face, tears in my eyes, and enough snot in that carpet to make me grateful nobody else was there to witness the moment.

The house was quiet. My family was gone. I had resigned from my church, and years of ministry felt like they had collapsed around me. In that moment I wasn’t thinking about theology. I wasn’t thinking about leadership principles. I wasn’t trying to write a sermon or solve a problem. I was simply hurting. Deeply. The kind of hurt that settles into your bones. The kind of hurt that leaves you staring at the ceiling at night wondering what happened and how you got there. I genuinely believed I had failed. Failed as a pastor. Failed as a leader. Failed people I loved. Failed people who had believed in me. Everything I had spent years building seemed to be slipping through my hands.

At the time, I thought I was grieving the loss of a ministry. Looking back now, I realize God was doing something far deeper than repairing a wounded pastor. He was exposing an identity I had spent years constructing. Without realizing it, I had slowly attached my worth to being a pastor, a leader, a problem solver, and the guy with the answers. My value was tied to being useful. Being needed. Being respected. Being successful. None of those things are inherently bad. In fact, many of them are gifts. But gifts become dangerous when they begin to tell us who we are. They make terrible saviors.

Lying there on that carpet in Redlands, California, God began whispering something into my soul that would take years to fully understand. Not condemnation. Not shame. Not disappointment. Identity. The message was simple, but it cut deeper than anything else I had ever heard: You are not what you do. You are not your success. You are not your failure. You are not the opinions of others. You are loved. Before I was a pastor, I was a son. Before I was a leader, I was loved. Before I ever stood on a stage, sat in a board meeting, led a staff, preached a sermon, or carried a title, I belonged to God.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment would forever change the way I read 1 John 3.

For years I have prayed this chapter over churches I love, teams I lead, friendships I cherish, and communities I care deeply about. I have prayed it during seasons of growth and seasons of conflict. I have prayed it over elders, volunteers, staff members, pastors, and friends. Yet if I am honest, this chapter has probably shaped me more than anyone I have ever prayed it for. Because beneath all of John’s theology, beneath all of his warnings and encouragements, he is answering one of the most important questions a Christian can ask:

What happens when people actually believe they are loved by God?

The Prayer Behind the Letter

The question that sits at the heart of 1 John 3 did not appear out of nowhere. Its roots seem to stretch back into one of the most intimate moments recorded in the life of Jesus.

Whether the Gospel of John and 1 John were written by the same author or emerged from the same Johannine tradition remains a matter of scholarly discussion. I find that conversation fascinating, but for the purposes of this reflection, what matters most is the remarkable theological harmony between the two writings. The themes are impossible to ignore. Love. Truth. Identity. Fellowship. Authenticity. The same currents seem to flow through both books. It is as though the prayer of Jesus in John 17 finds its practical expression in the community John describes in 1 John.

John 17 has become one of my favorite chapters in all of Scripture because we are allowed to listen in on a conversation taking place between the Father and the Son. Jesus is only hours away from the cross. The weight of what is coming is almost impossible to comprehend. Yet instead of focusing on Himself, He begins praying for His followers. He prays for their unity. He prays for their protection. He prays for their mission. He prays that they would remain faithful long after He is gone. Then, in one of the most astonishing statements in the New Testament, Jesus says something that still stops me every time I read it.

“That the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them even as You have loved Me.”

I have read those words hundreds of times, and they still feel almost too good to be true.

Think about what Jesus is saying. The Father does not merely tolerate His people. He does not reluctantly accept them. He does not love them with some lesser version of divine affection. Jesus says the Father loves His followers with the very same love He has for the Son. The same love that existed before creation. The same love that existed throughout eternity. The same love that rested upon Jesus at His baptism and accompanied Him all the way to the cross. That love is now directed toward those who belong to Him.

That truth raises a question that has followed me for years. What would happen if we actually believed it? Not as a theological statement. Not as a doctrine tucked away in a systematic theology book. What would happen if that reality settled deep into our hearts? What would happen if churches truly believed they were loved like that? What would happen if pastors believed it? What would happen if leaders stopped trying to earn what God had already given them? What would happen if our identity was rooted in being loved rather than being successful, influential, admired, or right?

I believe 1 John 3 begins answering those questions. In many ways, it reads like a picture of what happens when the prayer of Jesus starts becoming reality in the lives of ordinary people. It shows us what a community looks like when men and women stop striving to earn God’s love and begin learning how to live from it.

Love Changes Our Identity

John opens this chapter with one of the most beautiful and revolutionary statements in the entire New Testament:

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.”

Notice where John begins. He does not begin with behavior, obedience, morality, discipline, or even sin. He begins with identity. In many ways, identity is the central battle being fought throughout the entire letter. Before John addresses how Christians live, he reminds them who they are. That is not accidental. It is foundational. John understands something many of us spend years trying to learn: identity always precedes transformation.

The churches receiving this letter were being influenced by teachers who promoted ideas that would eventually become associated with Gnosticism. While Gnosticism appeared in several forms, it generally taught that spiritual enlightenment belonged to a select few who possessed special knowledge. Identity was rooted in what you knew. Value came from spiritual insight. The truly mature were separated from ordinary believers because they had access to deeper truths and greater understanding. In many ways, it created a spiritual caste system.

John responds by taking the conversation in an entirely different direction. Rather than pointing believers toward secret knowledge or a higher spiritual class, he points them toward the Father’s love. The answer to their insecurity is not greater information but a deeper understanding of their identity in Christ. Before they are teachers, leaders, servants, theologians, or disciples, they are children of God. Everything else grows from that reality.

The more I study church history, the more I realize that every generation creates its own version of Gnosticism. We may not use the same language, but we often make the same mistake. Some people build their identity around knowledge. Others build it around success, achievement, influence, political loyalties, personal wounds, or even victimhood. Every culture develops different ways of answering the question, “Who am I?” Yet John’s answer remains remarkably simple. We are not primarily our accomplishments, our failures, our wounds, our gifts, or our opinions. We are children of God. The Gospel does not deny those realities; it simply refuses to allow them to become our deepest identity.

One of the great temptations of our moment is to retreat into self-protection. We are encouraged to build walls around ourselves, curate safe spaces, and avoid anything that might cause pain or discomfort. Yet the pattern of Jesus moves in the opposite direction. Christ did not isolate Himself from a broken world. He entered it. He moved toward suffering, conflict, misunderstanding, and rejection. He walked directly into the fray because His identity was secure in the Father’s love. The more secure we become in that same love, the more freedom we have to love sacrificially rather than live defensively.

A friend of mine once adopted a rescue dog that had apparently spent most of its life around cats. The dog curled up on the backs of couches, hid beneath furniture, and behaved more like a cat than a dog. Then one day another dog came over to play. At first the rescue dog seemed confused, almost as if it had forgotten what it was. But eventually something clicked. It started running, barking, chasing, and playing. Nothing about its identity changed in that moment. It had always been a dog. It simply began living out of what it already was.

Many Christians spend their lives trying to become what God already says they are. Religion often tells us to perform, behave, and prove ourselves so that we might belong. The Gospel announces something entirely different. You already belong. You are already loved. You are already a child of God. The Christian life is not an attempt to earn that identity but an invitation to live from it. That is why John can say with such confidence, “And that is what we are.” Everything else flows from there.

Love Changes Our Direction

The next section of 1 John 3 is one that has generated debate for centuries. John writes that those who abide in Christ do not continue in sin, and readers immediately begin asking questions. Is John teaching sinless perfection? Is he saying genuine believers never struggle? How do these verses fit with his earlier statement that “if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves”?

Those are important questions, but I am not convinced they are John’s primary concern.

John’s concern is not perfection.

His concern is authenticity.

To understand what John is doing, we have to remember the situation facing the churches he was writing to. These communities were wrestling with teachers who claimed spiritual authority while promoting ideas that would later become associated with Gnosticism. Although Gnosticism developed into several different forms, a common thread ran through many of them: spiritual knowledge mattered more than embodied obedience. The physical world was viewed as inferior. Matter was unimportant. What ultimately mattered was possessing deeper insight, secret knowledge, or a higher level of spiritual enlightenment.

The practical result was devastating. Once spirituality becomes disconnected from ordinary life, almost anything can be justified. You can claim spiritual maturity while treating people poorly. You can claim enlightenment while refusing to love your neighbor. You can claim intimacy with God while damaging the very people created in His image. In other words, belief and behavior become disconnected. Theology becomes detached from character. Faith becomes detached from love.

If we are honest, that temptation has never really left the Church.

We may not call it Gnosticism anymore, but we still find ways to separate what we believe from how we live. We can become so focused on being right that we forget how to be loving. We can win theological arguments while losing the heart of Christ. We can master doctrine, attend conferences, read books, listen to podcasts, and build impressive systems of belief while still struggling to embody the character of Jesus. One of the great dangers of religious culture is that it can create the illusion of transformation without requiring actual transformation.

This is why John repeatedly uses the language of claims throughout the letter. Again and again he writes, “If we claim...” “If someone says...” “Whoever claims...” It is as though he is holding up a mirror and asking his readers a simple but uncomfortable question: Is it real?

Not is it impressive.

Not is it intelligent.

Not is it emotionally compelling.

Is it real?

Does the life of Jesus actually appear in the way you treat people? Does the love of God shape the way you forgive, serve, sacrifice, and relate to others? Has your theology moved from your head into your heart and ultimately into your hands?

John is not describing a life of perfection. He knows believers struggle. He knows we stumble, fail, repent, and begin again. His concern is direction. Is the trajectory of your life moving toward Christ? Is the love of God producing genuine transformation? Are you becoming more like Jesus?

This is where I think many Christians get stuck. We tend to think of spiritual growth as behavior management. We focus on eliminating bad habits, controlling impulses, or avoiding failure. While those things matter, John is describing something deeper. The Christian life is not primarily about managing sin. It is about participating in the life of Christ. As we abide in Him, His life begins to shape our lives. His desires begin to challenge our desires. His love begins to reshape our relationships. His character begins to emerge in us.

Authentic faith produces authentic transformation because authentic faith connects us to a living Savior. That transformation is rarely instantaneous, but it is real. Loved people begin to live differently, not because they are trying to earn God’s approval, but because they have already received it. The love of God changes not only who we are; it changes the direction we are headed.

The Great Sin Beneath the Sins

As a young man growing up in church, there was something that always bothered me, though I didn’t have the language to explain it at the time.

I would sit through sermons that passionately condemned smoking, drinking, gambling, and every other obvious sin imaginable. Entire messages would be devoted to warning people about the dangers of worldly behavior. Yet after church I would watch Christians gossip about one another in the parking lot. I would see friendships quietly unravel because people refused to forgive. I would watch leaders manipulate situations to maintain control. I would hear stories of churches dividing over pride, jealousy, resentment, and personal agendas. Even as a young believer, something about that disconnect troubled me. How could we become so concerned about the sins everyone could see while paying so little attention to the sins that were quietly destroying relationships?

For years I carried that question with me. Then I began paying closer attention to Jesus.

What struck me was that the primary conflict Jesus had with the Pharisees was not over the obvious sins. In many ways, the Pharisees were remarkably disciplined people. They knew Scripture. They fasted. They prayed. They tithed. They cared deeply about holiness and obedience. Yet Jesus reserved some of His strongest words for them because beneath their religious activity something had gone terribly wrong. They had become disconnected from the heart of God. They knew the text but missed its purpose. They knew the commands but missed the character of the One who gave them. They knew religion, but they had lost sight of mercy, compassion, humility, and love. Their problem was not simply what they believed. Their problem was what they were becoming.

That is exactly where John takes us when he introduces Cain into the conversation. Most people read the story of Cain and Abel and immediately focus on the murder. John looks deeper. He understands that murder was not the beginning of Cain’s problem; it was the final expression of it. Long before Cain raised his hand against his brother, something had already happened in his heart. Jealousy had taken root. Resentment had been nurtured. Selfishness had begun to grow. Abel was no longer viewed as a brother to be loved but as a rival to be resented. The murder was simply the fruit. The heart was the root.

That insight has stayed with me because I have seen it play out repeatedly in churches. Some of the deepest wounds I have witnessed were not caused by scandal but by the slow erosion of love. Rarely does a church explode overnight. More often, relationships deteriorate gradually as suspicion replaces trust, pride replaces humility, and personal agendas replace mutual sacrifice. Gossip begins to feel normal. Resentment becomes justified. People stop assuming the best about one another. Brothers and sisters slowly become opponents. What begins as a small fracture in the heart eventually becomes a visible fracture in the community.

This is why I have become convinced that the opposite of love is not merely hate. The opposite of love is selfishness. Love moves outward toward God and toward others. Love asks, “How can I serve? How can I bless? How can I sacrifice?” Selfishness asks a different set of questions. What do I deserve? Why am I not being recognized? Why aren’t my needs being met? Why isn’t this going my way? Love lays down its life. Selfishness protects itself. Love creates community. Selfishness slowly tears it apart.

When John tells his readers not to be like Cain, he is doing far more than warning them against violence. He is exposing the deeper disease that gives birth to every broken relationship. He is reminding us that the greatest threat to a church is not usually found outside its walls. It is found in the human heart whenever we stop seeing one another as beloved children of God and start seeing one another as obstacles, competitors, or enemies.

This is why 1 John 3 feels so relevant today. John’s warning is not primarily about murder. It is about the countless ways we allow selfishness to replace love. It is about the subtle temptation to protect ourselves rather than give ourselves away. It is about the daily choice between the way of Cain and the way of Christ.

And that is precisely why John refuses to leave us with Cain’s story. He is preparing us to look at Jesus.

This Is How We Know What Love Is

After confronting false spirituality, exposing the danger of selfishness, and warning his readers not to follow the path of Cain, John does something profoundly beautiful. He refuses to leave us staring at the problem. He refuses to leave us trapped in a diagnosis of the human condition. Instead, he points us toward Jesus.

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us.”

That single sentence may be one of the most important statements in the entire letter because John is not merely describing love. He is defining it.

In our culture, love is often reduced to a feeling, an emotion, an attraction, or a personal preference. Love is spoken about constantly, yet it is rarely defined. John will have none of that ambiguity. If you want to know what love looks like, look at Jesus. If you want to understand the heart of God, look at Jesus. If you want to know how deeply you are loved, look at Jesus stretched out on a Roman cross, willingly laying down His life for people who could never repay Him.

This is why the contrast between Cain and Christ is so powerful. Cain represents humanity curved inward on itself. Cain protects himself. Cain resents his brother. Cain sees another person’s blessing as a threat to his own significance. Cain takes life. Jesus moves in the opposite direction. Jesus gives life. Jesus moves toward broken people rather than away from them. Jesus touches lepers, welcomes sinners, forgives enemies, washes feet, and ultimately lays down His life for the very people who nailed Him to the cross. Where Cain grasped for self-preservation, Jesus embraced self-giving love.

The answer to Cain is not trying harder.

The answer to Cain is not religious performance.

The answer to Cain is not becoming a slightly better version of ourselves.

The answer to Cain is Jesus.

The answer has always been Jesus.

This is where I believe many Christians become discouraged. We read passages like 1 John 3 and immediately begin evaluating our performance. Am I loving enough? Am I serving enough? Am I sacrificing enough? Am I measuring up? Yet John’s purpose is not to drive us into despair. His purpose is to drive us toward Christ. The Christian life is not sustained by guilt, fear, or willpower. It is sustained by abiding in the love of God. Transformation happens when we stop obsessing over ourselves and begin fixing our eyes on Jesus.

What I have discovered over the years is that people who genuinely believe they are loved by God begin to change. Not perfectly. Not instantly. Not without setbacks and failures. But genuinely. They become quicker to forgive because they know they have been forgiven. They become more generous because they no longer need to prove their worth through accumulation. They become more compassionate because they have experienced compassion. They become more humble because they understand that everything they have is grace. They become more willing to serve because their identity is no longer tied to being served.

This is why I have prayed 1 John 3 over churches for so many years. Healthy churches are not built merely by better programs, stronger systems, or more polished strategies. Healthy churches are built when ordinary people become convinced that they are deeply loved by God. When that happens, relationships begin to change. Conversations begin to change. Conflict begins to change. Leadership begins to change. Communities begin to change. The love of Christ starts flowing outward into the lives of others.

As I look back on that day in California, lying face down on the carpet with tears soaking into the floor beneath me, I realize God was doing far more than helping me recover from a painful season. He was reminding me of a truth I desperately needed to hear. Before I was a pastor, I was a son. Before I was a leader, I was loved. Before I was successful or unsuccessful, admired or criticized, fruitful or broken, I belonged to Him. My identity was never supposed to be rooted in what I accomplished for God. It was supposed to be rooted in what God had already accomplished for me through Christ.

That is the heartbeat of 1 John 3.

You do not behave your way into being loved.

You are loved into living differently.

And when that love truly takes root in a human heart, everything begins to change.

Loved people live differently.

I’ve failed at ministry and leadership more than most people have tried.

That’s not gimic. It’s just the truth.

Over the last twenty-five years I’ve been a pastor, church planter, worship leader, coach, consultant, conference speaker, and sometimes the guy trying to figure out how to keep the lights on another week. I’ve seen churches thrive. I’ve watched churches struggle. I’ve made decisions that worked beautifully and decisions that I wish I could take back.

I’ve experienced seasons where ministry felt full of life and seasons where it felt like everything was falling apart.

Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned didn’t come from success.

They came from failure.

Years ago, when much of my life and ministry seemed to be unraveling, I found myself asking questions that many leaders eventually face:

• Am I still called?

• Can God still use me?

• Is there a way to lead without constantly carrying the weight of expectations?

• What does healthy leadership actually look like?

Those questions started a journey that eventually became Sacred Leadership.

Not a leadership manual.

Not a quick fix.

Not another book promising seven easy steps to church growth.

Instead, it’s an invitation to rediscover the sacred calling God has placed on your life and learn how to lead with freedom, joy, and authenticity.

Leadership Is Not About Becoming Someone Else

One of my concerns with modern leadership culture is how often we create carbon copies of the latest leadership celebrity.

We attend conferences.

We buy systems.

We imitate strategies.

We try to sound like someone else.

Lead like someone else.

Build what someone else built.

But God never called you to become a copy.

He called you.

The goal of leadership isn’t to become the next famous pastor, successful entrepreneur, influential civic leader, or ministry personality.

The goal is to become the person God created you to be.

Your calling matters.

Your story matters.

Even your failures matter.

God has a remarkable way of redeeming all of it.

The Five Platforms of Healthy Leadership

As I coached churches and leaders across the country, I began noticing the same patterns over and over again.

Healthy churches and healthy leaders consistently invested in five areas:

Sacred Calling – Understanding who God created you to be.

Discipleship – Helping people follow Jesus in practical ways.

Outreach – Loving people without expecting anything in return.

Mission – Joining God’s work through word and deed.

Generosity – Living with open hands because of God’s grace.

These became the foundation of both Sacred Leadership and the work we do through ChurchWorks Ministries.

Because healthy churches are built by healthy leaders.

And healthy leaders understand that ministry is not something they accomplish alone.

This Book Is Meant To Be Traveled Together

One of the things I tell people often is that Sacred Leadership is not designed to be consumed.

It’s designed to be discussed.

Processed.

Prayed through.

Worked through alongside a mentor, coach, pastor, or trusted friend.

Leadership was never meant to be a solo journey.

Some of the greatest breakthroughs in my life came because other leaders walked alongside me when I couldn’t see clearly for myself.

My hope is that this book becomes a conversation starter for leaders who are trying to discover their next faithful step.

An Invitation

If you’re a pastor, church leader, business leader, nonprofit leader, volunteer leader, or someone simply trying to understand God’s calling on your life, I’d love to invite you into the journey.

You can find Sacred Leadership on Amazon, Apple Books, or directly through ChurchWorks Ministries.

And if your church is looking for help becoming healthier, stronger, and more sustainable, I invite you to visit ChurchWorks Ministries and take our free church health assessment.

We’re not interested in creating bigger churches.

We’re interested in helping churches become healthier.

Because when churches are healthy, people encounter Jesus, leaders flourish, and communities are transformed.

The journey isn’t easy.

I’ve got the scars to prove it.

But it is worth it.

And I’d be honored to walk part of that journey with you.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Church Works Ministries

If this resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to take the next step.

📖 Get a copy of Sacred Leadership and begin the journey of discovering your calling, developing healthy leadership habits, and leading with greater freedom and joy.

Buy The Book

🏛️ Take the Free Church Health Assessment through ChurchWorks Ministries. It’s designed to help pastors and church leaders identify strengths, uncover blind spots, and build a healthier, more sustainable ministry.

Free Assessment

🤝 Connect with ChurchWorks Ministries for coaching, consulting, leadership development, and practical resources designed to help churches become healthier and leaders become stronger.

Connect

📬 Subscribe to this Substack for ongoing conversations about leadership, discipleship, outreach, mission, generosity, church health, and the lessons I’ve learned—sometimes the hard way—over more than twenty-five years in ministry.

My hope isn’t to create more copies of successful leaders.

My hope is to help leaders discover the unique calling God has placed on their lives and lead from that place with courage, humility, and faithfulness.

Because healthy leaders help build healthy churches.

And healthy churches change communities.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

Grace and peace,

Aaron Foor

Founder, ChurchWorks Ministries

Following Jesus. Developing leaders. Helping churches become healthier.

The Picture of Grace

The gym didn’t feel like a sanctuary. It smelled faintly of rubber floors and old basketballs, the echoes of whistles and sneakers still somehow living in the walls. In the middle of that space sat a portable baptism tank—awkward, out of place, almost like it didn’t belong there. And yet, in a way I couldn’t explain at the time, it felt exactly right. There was no stage, no stained glass, no carefully curated atmosphere. Just a group of people gathered around a tank of water, believing that God shows up in ordinary places.

That’s where we stood.

Brother George… and me.

George carried a presence you couldn’t ignore. His life had weight to it. He had spent time in San Quentin State Prison, and his story wasn’t cleaned up or softened for comfort. He had lived violently. He had nearly taken lives in a gang fight. He had seen things most people never will. And somewhere in the middle of that, in a prison cell, Jesus met him. George told me it came through a dream, simple, direct, undeniable. It wasn’t polished theology. It was an encounter. And it changed him.

You could see it every Sunday.

While the rest of us sang, George danced.

Not for attention. Not to make a statement. He danced in the back of the room, almost like it was just between him and God. It was raw and unfiltered, and if you didn’t understand his story, you might have thought it was strange. But once you knew what Jesus had pulled him out of, it made perfect sense. Some people sing when they worship. Some people clap. George danced because he knew what it meant to be set free.

And then there was me.

A skinny, punk-rock, scronny white kid trying to figure out who I was and where I fit. I didn’t have George’s past. I hadn’t lived his kind of life. But I carried my own confusion, my own searching, my own quiet brokenness that didn’t always show on the outside. I was trying to piece together an identity, hoping that something, music, culture, rebellion, church, would finally make sense of me.

If you had lined us up and asked what we had in common, you probably wouldn’t have found much.

Different stories.
Different wounds.
Different roads that brought us there.

But grace has a way of leveling everything.

Because there we were, standing in that awkward tank in the middle of a gym, about to go under the same water for the same reason. In that moment, none of the differences mattered. Not his past. Not my confusion. Not the distance between our stories. What mattered was that we had both come to the same realization, we could not save ourselves.

There was nothing impressive about it. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t what anyone would design if they were trying to create a meaningful spiritual moment. And yet, it was one of the most honest pictures of the church I’ve ever experienced. Just broken people, standing in front of others, admitting their need for grace and stepping into it together.

That moment has stayed with me, not because of how it looked, but because of what it revealed.

It showed me that grace doesn’t show up where everything is put together. It doesn’t wait for the right environment or the right image. Grace meets people in real places, in awkward moments, in honest surrender. It meets people when they stop trying to climb and finally admit they need something they cannot produce on their own.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I’ve come to understand it now.

Grace doesn’t meet us at the top.

It meets us when we are willing to come low enough to receive it.

And that’s where humility begins, not in pretending to be less than we are, but in finally telling the truth about our need. Because true humility is impossible without grace, and we cannot give what we have not first been willing to receive.

1 Peter 5:5-6

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that He may lift you up in due time.”

Peter Knew Exactly What He Was Writing

There are some passages in Scripture that take on a different kind of weight when you slow down and consider who is writing them. This is one of those moments. These words are not detached observations. They are not formed at a distance from real life. When Peter writes about pride and humility, he is not offering theory—he is telling the truth about what he has lived.

Because the one holding the pen is Simon Peter.

Peter wasn’t just one of the disciples. He was the one you couldn’t ignore. He carried a kind of boldness that could inspire you in one moment and make you nervous in the next. He spoke quickly, acted decisively, and believed deeply. He was the one who stepped out of the boat when no one else would, and also the one who tried to correct Jesus when the message didn’t fit his expectations. There was courage in him, but there was also something unrefined, something that hadn’t yet been shaped by grace.

And then there is that moment that defines him as much as anything else.

The night Jesus was arrested, when everything began to fracture.

Peter had made a promise that felt unbreakable at the time. Even if everyone else fell away, he wouldn’t. Even if it cost him everything, he would stand. You can hear the sincerity in it, but underneath it there is something else, an overconfidence that assumes strength he does not yet possess. It is pride, not in the loud, arrogant sense, but in the quiet belief that he is more capable, more loyal, more steady than he actually is.

And within hours, that confidence collapses.

Not in private, but in the presence of strangers, around a fire, when the pressure is real and the cost is rising. Peter denies even knowing Jesus. Once, then again, and then a third time with enough force behind it that it seals the moment. And somewhere in the middle of it, Jesus turns and looks at him. There are no recorded words, but the weight of that moment is undeniable. Peter doesn’t just realize that he failed, he realizes that he has become the very thing he swore he never would be.

This is where something deeper begins to surface.

Because when pride runs out, it doesn’t leave a vacuum.

It often gives way to shame.

Pride says, I will never fall.
Shame says, I am the kind of person who always does.

Pride overestimates who you are.
Shame distorts who you are.

They are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin. Pride lifts you beyond reality, and when it collapses, shame pulls you beneath it. One inflates your identity, the other crushes it, but both keep you disconnected from truth, and both keep you from grace.

Peter knew pride.

And in that moment, he began to know shame.

You can imagine what it must have felt like in the hours and days that followed. The silence. The replaying of the moment. The internal weight of knowing not just that he failed, but that he failed Jesus. That kind of shame doesn’t just sit on the surface. It settles deep and begins to reshape how you see yourself, how you see your future, and whether you believe restoration is even possible.

But Peter’s story doesn’t end there.

After the resurrection, there is a quiet, deeply intentional moment recorded in the Gospel of John that reveals something profound about the heart of Jesus. The disciples are back near the water, some of them returning to fishing as if they are trying to recover a sense of normalcy. And on the shore, there is a fire burning and breakfast being prepared.

It’s Jesus.

There is no dramatic confrontation. No public exposure. No attempt to force Peter to relive his failure in front of the group.

Just a fire.

That detail matters, because the last time Peter stood near a fire, he denied Jesus. Now Jesus meets him again in that same kind of setting, not to reopen the wound, but to redeem it. The setting is familiar, but the outcome is different.

They eat together. The moment is unhurried. And then Jesus begins to speak, not with accusation, but with invitation.

“Do you love me?”

He asks it once. Then again. And then a third time.

Three denials. Three opportunities to respond.

Jesus is not exposing Peter. He is restoring him. He is walking him back through the place where pride collapsed and shame took hold, and He is doing something only grace can do, He is rebuilding identity without minimizing failure.

And this is where we begin to see something critical.

Grace becomes the bridge between pride and humility.

Pride cannot lead you to humility on its own.
Shame cannot lead you there either.

Pride resists grace.
Shame rejects grace.

But grace… grace meets you in both places.

It meets you when your pride collapses and tells you that your failure is not final.
It meets you in your shame and tells you that your identity is not defined by your worst moment.

Grace does not ignore what happened. It does not pretend failure wasn’t real. But it refuses to let failure have the final word.

And in that space, where grace is received, something begins to change.

Humility is not forced. It is formed.

It is not produced by trying harder or thinking less of yourself. It is the result of encountering grace deeply enough that you no longer need to pretend you are stronger than you are, and you no longer believe you are as broken as your shame tells you.

So when Peter later writes, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble,” he is not quoting a concept. He is describing a pathway.

He knows what it feels like to stand in pride and overestimate himself.
He knows what it feels like to fall into shame and underestimate himself.
And he knows what it feels like to be met by grace in both places.

Pride distances you from God because it convinces you that you do not need Him.
Shame distances you from God because it convinces you that He would not want you.

But grace tells a different story.

Grace says you are more broken than you want to admit, and more loved than you can imagine at the same time.

And when that truth begins to settle into your life, humility is no longer something you strive to achieve. It becomes the natural posture of someone who has finally received what they could never earn.

Pride distances you from God.

Shame distorts your view of yourself.

But grace opens the way.

And humility is what grows on the other side of it.

The Letter That Was Never Sent

In the middle of the Civil War, when the country felt like it was coming apart at the seams, Abraham Lincoln carried a kind of weight most of us will never fully understand. Every decision mattered. Every failure was amplified. Generals under his leadership made costly mistakes, critics questioned his competence, and the pressure to hold a fractured nation together never seemed to let up. Leadership at that level is not clean or theoretical, it is heavy, personal, and often deeply frustrating.

After one particularly disappointing moment with a general, Lincoln did what many of us would do. He sat down and wrote a letter. The words came with clarity and force. It was sharp, direct, and painfully honest. He named the failure. He articulated the consequences. He said the things that, from his perspective, needed to be said. It was the kind of letter that feels justified when you write it, the kind that gives voice to everything building beneath the surface.

And then he made a decision that reveals more about his leadership than the letter itself ever could.

He didn’t send it.

He folded it, set it aside, and left it there.

No confrontation. No immediate correction. No emotional release directed at another person.

Just restraint.

That moment exposes something subtle but powerful about the human condition. There is a difference between having something to say and needing to say it. There is a difference between being right and being wise. Lincoln understood that not every truth needs to be delivered in the moment it is felt most strongly, and not every failure needs to be addressed through force.

What he demonstrated in that moment is something we rarely recognize when we talk about humility.

Because humility is often misunderstood.

We tend to think of it as something visible, something you can point to, something you can perform. We imagine it as lowering yourself in obvious ways, speaking softly, deflecting attention, or minimizing your own strengths. But when humility becomes something we try to display, it often takes on an unnatural tone. It becomes forced, awkward, even a little performative. You can feel it when someone is trying to appear humble rather than actually being shaped by it.

Real humility doesn’t draw attention to itself.

It doesn’t need to prove anything.

It doesn’t rush to correct every wrong or respond to every offense.

In fact, some of the most genuine expressions of humility are the ones that go completely unnoticed. A word left unsaid. A reaction held back. A moment where someone chooses not to assert their right to be heard, even when they could. These are the places where humility quietly takes form, not in what is expressed, but in what is restrained.

Lincoln could have sent the letter. He would have been justified in doing so. No one would have questioned his authority or his reasoning. But humility is not just about what you are allowed to do; it is about what you choose not to do for the sake of something greater. It is about recognizing that the immediate release of your perspective is not always the most constructive path forward.

This is where Peter’s words begin to take on deeper meaning: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Pride often reveals itself in the urgency to speak, to correct, to establish control over a situation. Humility, on the other hand, is willing to step back, to trust that not every moment requires your voice at full volume.

And this is why humility can be so difficult to recognize, even in ourselves.

We often assume we are walking in humility because we are not outwardly arrogant, because we are not dominating conversations or demanding attention. But humility is not just the absence of obvious pride. It is a posture of the heart that shapes how we respond when we could assert ourselves. It shows up in the tension between what we feel justified in doing and what we discern is actually necessary.

Sometimes, the clearest evidence of humility is not in what we say, but in what we choose to leave unsaid.

And in a world where every thought can be expressed instantly and every opinion can be amplified, that kind of restraint feels almost countercultural. It doesn’t get celebrated. It doesn’t get noticed. But it carries a quiet strength that keeps relationships intact, preserves unity, and creates space for grace to do its work.

We don’t often see humility because we’re usually looking for it in the wrong places.

We look for it in volume when it is often found in restraint.
We look for it in words when it is often revealed in silence.
We look for it in posture when it is actually formed in the heart.

And maybe, like that letter sitting in a drawer, some of the most humble moments of our lives are the ones no one else ever sees.

The False Humility Trap

There is a version of church culture that, often without intending to, has shaped people into something that looks spiritual on the surface but is quietly unhealthy underneath. It carries the language of humility, it sounds right in conversations, and it can even be affirmed from platforms. But when you step back and examine it more closely, it begins to feel off. It does not produce freedom. It does not produce life. Instead, it produces a subtle kind of self-rejection that slowly disconnects people from who God actually created them to be.

This version of humility teaches you to downplay what God has placed inside of you. It nudges you to shrink your voice, to hold back your perspective, to soften your convictions so they are less noticeable. Over time, it creates a pattern where you begin to apologize for things that were never meant to be apologized for, your creativity, your passion, your calling. What starts as a desire to be humble quietly turns into a habit of stepping away from the very things God entrusted to you.

This is especially true for those who are wired creatively. Creativity, by its nature, requires expression. It requires risk. It requires putting something into the world that reflects a part of who you are. But in certain environments, that kind of expression can feel dangerous. There is an unspoken pressure to stay within invisible boundaries, to not care too much, to not create too boldly, to not fully step into what God has given you. You begin to internalize the idea that playing small is somehow more spiritual, that holding back is safer, that being less visible is closer to humility.

I spent years wrestling with that tension.

There was a quiet but persistent pressure shaping how I showed up, how I created, and how I thought about my own calling. It wasn’t always obvious, but it was there in the background, influencing decisions and limiting expression. It told me to dial things back, to keep things contained, to avoid stepping too far into what I felt God was inviting me to do. And the difficult part is that it didn’t present itself as fear. It presented itself as wisdom. It sounded like humility.

But over time, I began to realize that something wasn’t right.

Because true humility does not require you to hide. It does not ask you to bury what God has placed inside of you. It does not lead you to disconnect from your calling in order to appear more spiritual. When humility becomes synonymous with silence, withdrawal, or self-erasure, it has moved away from what Scripture actually describes and into something else entirely.

At its core, that “something else” is fear.

It is fear of being seen.
Fear of being misunderstood.
Fear of being criticized or rejected.

And when fear is dressed up in spiritual language, it becomes much harder to recognize. It convinces you that stepping back is the right move, that minimizing yourself is maturity, that withholding your voice is wisdom. But in reality, it is simply keeping you from fully engaging with the calling God has placed on your life.

There comes a point where you have to confront that.

For me, that moment came over time, not all at once. It was a gradual realization that I could no longer allow either pride or false humility to dictate how I lived or created. Pride would push me to perform, to prove something, to seek validation. False humility would pull me back, convincing me to hide, to stay small, to avoid risk. Both were distortions, pulling in different directions but leading to the same outcome, disconnection from what God had actually asked me to do.

I have come to a place where I no longer need everyone to like what I write, what I create, or the music I make. That shift did not come from indifference, but from clarity. When your identity is rooted in grace, your calling is no longer dependent on approval. You are free to create, to speak, and to step forward without the constant need to measure how it will be received.

That is where real humility begins to take shape.

It is not found in shrinking back, and it is not found in pushing forward for recognition. It is found in the quiet confidence of someone who knows who they are before God and is willing to live and create from that place. It allows you to bring your full self into what God has called you to do, not to elevate yourself, but to faithfully steward what has been given.

Because in the end, humility is not about becoming less.

It is about becoming honest enough to fully offer what God has placed within you—without pride, without fear, and without the need to hide.

Five Practices That Form Grace and Lead Us Into Biblical Humility

If humility is not something we perform, then it must be something we practice. It is not a personality trait reserved for a few people; it is a posture that is formed over time as grace reshapes how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we respond to God. What follows are not quick fixes or surface-level behaviors. They are practices, habits of the heart and life that create space for grace to take root and, over time, produce a humility that is real, grounded, and deeply freeing.

1. Practice Receiving Grace Instead of Performing for It

For many people, the default posture toward life is performance. It is subtle, but it shows up everywhere, in the need to prove yourself, in the pressure to appear strong, in the instinct to hide anything that might make you look weak or inadequate. You begin to live as though love, acceptance, and even belonging must be earned, maintained, and protected through effort.

Grace interrupts that entire system.

To receive grace is to step out of performance and into honesty. It requires you to acknowledge that you cannot earn what God freely gives, and that your value is not determined by how well you manage your image. This is not a one-time realization; it is a long, often uncomfortable process of learning to stop striving for what has already been offered.

As you begin to receive grace in deeper ways, something shifts internally. The constant pressure to prove begins to loosen. You find space to breathe, to rest, and to be honest about where you are. This is where humility begins, not in lowering your sense of worth, but in releasing the need to manufacture it.

Pride performs because it believes everything is at stake.
Humility receives because it trusts that grace is enough.

2. Practice Extending Grace to Yourself So You Can Extend It to Others

The way you treat others is often a reflection of how you treat yourself. If your internal world is driven by criticism, pressure, and unrealistic expectations, it will eventually overflow into your relationships. You may not intend it, but you begin to hold others to the same standard you quietly hold yourself.

This is why learning to extend grace to yourself is not self-indulgent, it is foundational.

When you begin to allow yourself room to fail, to grow, and to be in process, you become more capable of offering that same space to others. Grace softens your posture. It slows your judgment. It creates patience where there was once pressure. You begin to understand, not just intellectually but experientially, what it means to need mercy.

Over time, this becomes a kind of internal measure for humility. You start to ask honest questions: Am I able to receive grace when I fall short? Am I able to offer that same grace when others do? If grace is blocked in either direction, it often reveals something deeper that still needs to be formed.

Grace that is truly received does not remain contained. It moves outward, shaping how you see and respond to the people around you.

3. Practice Vulnerability by Holding Truth and Love Together

Humility creates the conditions where vulnerability can exist. Without humility, vulnerability feels too risky because your identity is tied to being right, being strong, or being in control. But when your identity is grounded in grace, you no longer need to protect yourself in the same way.

This allows you to hold truth and love together in a way that leads to growth.

Truth on its own can be harsh and damaging. Love on its own can become passive and enabling. But when truth is expressed through love, it creates an environment where honesty does not threaten connection. It invites growth instead of triggering defensiveness.

This is where humility becomes visible. It shows up in your willingness to be known, to be corrected, and to acknowledge that you are still in process. Rather than resisting feedback or shutting down when confronted, you begin to see those moments as opportunities for formation.

When your identity is rooted in grace, correction no longer feels like a threat to who you are. It becomes part of how you are shaped into who you are becoming.

4. Practice Living in the Light Instead of Managing Appearances

There is a constant temptation to manage how we are perceived. To present a version of ourselves that is curated, controlled, and safe. This can happen subtly, even in spiritual environments, where we learn how to say the right things while still keeping parts of our lives hidden.

But real connection, and real transformation, cannot happen in that space.

To walk in the light is to live without hiding. It means allowing your life to be seen as it actually is, not as you wish it appeared. This does not mean sharing everything with everyone, but it does mean refusing to live behind a mask. It means choosing honesty over image, even when that honesty feels vulnerable.

Humility is what makes this possible.

Pride keeps things hidden because it is invested in maintaining a certain perception. Humility, on the other hand, is willing to step into the light because it is no longer dependent on appearances for identity. It trusts that grace is sufficient, even in the places that are not yet fully formed.

And it is in that light, where nothing is hidden, that grace does its deepest work. It heals, restores, and reshapes not through performance, but through honest exposure to God and to trusted community.

5. Practice Letting Go of Pride So Grace Can Flow

When Scripture says that God opposes the proud, it can be easy to misunderstand what is being said. It can sound as though God is positioned against us, as though our failures or struggles have placed us on the opposite side of His care. But that is not the heart of the passage.

God is not opposing you.

He is opposing the pride in you that is preventing you from receiving what He is freely offering.

Pride resists grace. It closes itself off, either by insisting that nothing is needed or by refusing to believe that grace is available. It blocks repentance by justifying behavior. It blocks healing by denying need. It blocks reconciliation by prioritizing being right over being restored.

Even shame can function in this same way. It may look different on the surface, but it ultimately resists grace by refusing to receive it.

Grace, however, moves in a different direction. It flows toward openness, toward honesty, toward surrender. It meets you in the places where you stop defending, stop hiding, and simply acknowledge your need.

This is why humility is not something you achieve, it is something that grows as you release your grip on pride and allow grace to reach deeper into your life.

The Shed, The Screws, and Quiet Grace

I still think back to those days with Brother George, not just the baptism, not just the dancing in the back of the room, but the ordinary days when faith showed up in work boots and long hours. We didn’t just stand in the same water; we shared the same job sites. A contractor from our church had taken a chance on both of us. He gave us work when neither of us had much to offer on paper, an ex-con trying to rebuild his life and a punk kid still trying to figure his out. He didn’t just give us a paycheck; he gave us dignity, responsibility, and a place to belong.

One day he sent us out to install a pre-made storage shed at a house. It wasn’t a complicated job, at least not in theory. We showed up early, unloaded the materials, and got to work. I remember the rhythm of that day, measuring, lifting, fastening things into place. George and I worked side by side, talking about Jesus, praying between tasks, laughing at how unlikely it was that we were the ones trusted with this kind of responsibility. There was something pure about it. Two guys, both aware of where they had come from, trying to do something right with what they had been given.

We worked hard. We finished the job. We stood back and looked at it with a sense of pride, not the kind that puffs you up, but the kind that says, we did something good today.

What we didn’t realize was that we had missed something small that would turn into something significant.

We had forgotten to place the rubber washers on the roof screws.

At the time, it didn’t even register. Everything looked secure. Everything felt finished. We packed up, left the site, and moved on to the next job, unaware of what was coming.

Then the rain came.

And when it did, water found every one of those missing washers. It seeped through the roof, slowly at first, then steadily, until everything inside that shed was soaked. Tools, storage, personal items, whatever had been placed in that space was damaged or destroyed. What we had built with good intentions had failed in a way we didn’t see coming.

The homeowners were furious.

From their perspective, it made sense. They had trusted the contractor, and he had sent two inexperienced guys, one with a past that raised questions and another who probably didn’t inspire much confidence either. The failure confirmed every doubt they might have had. It wasn’t just a mistake; it was a costly one, and they wanted answers.

But here’s the part of the story I didn’t know until months later.

The contractor went back to that house himself.

He didn’t call us in to fix it.
He didn’t bring us along to make us explain it.
He didn’t use it as a moment to correct us in front of others or to make an example out of our failure.

He showed up quietly, with his tools, and began to fix what we had broken.

One screw at a time.

Hundreds of them.

He removed each one, added the washer we had missed, and secured it properly. He covered the cost of the damage. He made things right, not halfway, not temporarily, but fully. And he did all of it without ever coming back to us with anger, without shaming us, without even telling us what it had cost him.

I didn’t hear about it from him.

I heard about it months later from his son, almost in passing, as if it wasn’t even something worth highlighting.

But it was.

Because what he did that day was more than fix a roof.

He demonstrated grace in its purest form.

Grace that absorbs the cost.
Grace that does the work.
Grace that restores what was broken without needing recognition for it.

It would have been easy for him to handle that situation differently. He could have called us out, made us own the failure publicly, distanced himself from us to protect his reputation. He would have been justified in doing so. But instead, he chose a different path, one that required more from him, not less.

It cost him time.
It cost him money.
It cost him effort.

And he carried that cost quietly.

That is grace.

And that kind of grace does not come from pride. It flows from a place of humility that is willing to bear the weight of someone else’s failure without turning it into a moment of exposure.

That story has stayed with me because it gave me a picture I could not unsee.

Pride exposes people when they fail.
Grace restores them.

Pride keeps track of who got it wrong and what it cost.
Grace steps in and begins the slow, often unseen work of making things right.

Sometimes grace doesn’t look like a sermon or a moment on a stage.

Sometimes it looks like a man with a screwdriver, going back to a place of failure and choosing to fix it without drawing attention to himself.

And if we are honest, many of us are living in some version of that leaking shed.

We have built things with good intentions that didn’t hold.
We have missed details that mattered more than we realized.
We have made mistakes that affected other people.

Some of us carry that quietly. Others feel it more openly. But at some level, we all know what it is to get something wrong and wish we could go back and fix it.

And somewhere along the way, many of us have learned to interpret that failure through the lens of shame. We begin to believe that the mistake defines us, that the damage disqualifies us, that God must be standing at a distance waiting for us to fix what we broke before He steps back in.

But that is not the story of grace.

Jesus does not stand at a distance, waiting for you to repair your own failures.

He steps into the mess.

He absorbs the cost.

He does the work of restoration in ways you may not even see or fully understand.

And He does not do it to expose you.

He does it to restore you.

When Peter writes, “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God… and in due time, He will lift you up,” he is not calling us to pretend we are less than we are. He is inviting us to come to a place of honesty, where we stop defending, stop hiding, and acknowledge our need for grace.

Humility is not about lowering your value.

It is about opening your life to receive what you cannot produce on your own.

The world teaches us to climb, to prove, to protect, to perform.

But Jesus leads us in a different direction.

He invites us to kneel.
To receive.
To step into the light.

Because in His kingdom, everything moves differently.

Grace flows toward the lowest places.

And in that movement, we discover a truth that reshapes everything else:

Down is the new up

There I Was—Staring at Three Blue Cards

There I was, sitting alone in my office, staring at three blue cards.

They weren’t moving. They weren’t loud. They weren’t dramatic in any outward way. Just three small pieces of paper, resting quietly on the edge of my desk. But the longer I looked at them, the heavier they seemed to become. It felt like they were sinking into the wood, like their weight was pressing down into the room, and somehow, pressing into me.

And if I’m honest, they didn’t feel like pieces of paper at all.

They felt like people.

It was as if three individuals were standing in front of me, arms crossed, leaning forward, fingers pointed. Not physically, but that’s how it registered in my mind. Accusing. Personal. Close enough that I couldn’t ignore them, loud enough that I couldn’t quiet them.

The room itself was completely still. No music. No voices. No distractions.

But my mind was anything but quiet.

The words on those cards didn’t stay on the page. They moved inward. They echoed. They replayed themselves in a loop I couldn’t shut off. And somewhere in that echo, they began to take on a life of their own—not just what was written, but what it felt like they meant.

You’re not good enough.
You’re not ready for this.
You’re not who they thought you were.

I was a young worship leader at the time. Still learning. Still figuring things out. Still growing into the calling that had been placed on my life. This wasn’t just any church—it was my church. The one I had grown up in. The one where people had invested in me, believed in me, poured into me over the years.

And because of that, there was a weight to it all.

There were expectations—some spoken, many unspoken. Expectations to lead well. To carry something meaningful. To represent something bigger than myself. And in that moment, those three blue cards didn’t just feel like feedback.

They felt like a verdict.

As if everything I had been trying to become… everything I had been stepping into… had been reduced to a few sentences written in ink and left on my desk.

The thing is, every church had some version of these.

In our church, they were called blue cards. Officially, they were meant to be prayer request cards—a simple way for people to share what was going on in their lives so we could pray, care, and come alongside them.

But if we’re being honest, they didn’t always stay that way.

Sometimes they became something else entirely.

They became critique cards.
Feedback cards.
Complaint cards.

And on that particular day, a few people had taken the time to write out their thoughts—not about what God was doing, not about what they needed prayer for—but about me. About my leadership. About my decisions. About my ability.

And I felt it.

It didn’t bounce off.

It didn’t roll off my back the way we sometimes pretend these things should. It didn’t stay at a distance where I could analyze it objectively and move on. It went in deep. It found its way past the surface and settled somewhere underneath, somewhere harder to shake.

And that’s the thing about moments like this.

They rarely stay small.

What begins as a few words on a card can quickly become something much larger in your mind. It starts to expand. It starts to take up space. It starts to shape how you see yourself, how you interpret everything else around you.

It’s not just what was said.

It’s what it begins to mean.

These days, we don’t even need blue cards anymore.

We’ve digitized the whole thing.

Now it shows up in comments, posts, threads, and messages. It’s public. It’s faster. It’s amplified. But at its core, it’s the same spirit, just a different platform.

And the effect hasn’t changed.

It still lands the same way.

It still lingers.

It still hurts.

And if we’re honest, most of us have our own version of “blue cards.”

Maybe not physically sitting on your desk, but present somewhere in your life.

A conversation you can’t forget.
A sentence that stuck longer than it should have.
A moment where something shifted.
A disappointment that keeps resurfacing when you least expect it.
An expectation you feel like you’re constantly falling short of.

Something that, when you think about it long enough, starts to sound less like what was said… and more like what you begin to believe about yourself.

And before we try to fix it, reframe it, or move past it too quickly, we have to be willing to start here:

It hurts.

Not in a dramatic, exaggerated way. Not in a way that needs to be defended or explained.

Just honestly.

It hurts.

And there is something deeply human, and deeply necessary, about being able to say that out loud. To admit it without filtering it. To acknowledge that certain moments, certain words, certain experiences actually reached you.

Because pretending it didn’t hurt doesn’t make you strong.

It just disconnects you from what’s actually going on inside of you.

And anything we refuse to acknowledge, we will never truly surrender

HUMILITY IS THE PATHWAY TO GOD

I’ve been pretty open about my journey, and the truth is, it doesn’t fit into clean categories.

There are parts of it that have been deeply beautiful, moments where I’ve seen God move in ways I couldn’t have orchestrated if I tried. Seasons where ministry felt alive, where people encountered Jesus, where I stood back and realized I was witnessing something bigger than myself. There have been relationships that shaped me, moments of redemption that marked me, and glimpses of God’s faithfulness that I still carry with me.

But woven into that same story are chapters that have been incredibly hard.

I’ve been hurt in the church, the very place that was meant to bring healing. I’ve been hurt in my own family in ways that left deeper marks than I expected. I’ve been misunderstood, misrepresented, and spoken about in ways that weren’t true. I’ve experienced betrayal, loss, and seasons where the weight of it all didn’t just sit on the surface, it pressed in deep.

I’ve lost relationships I thought would last.
I’ve lost my livelihood in ministry and had to rebuild from places I never thought I’d be.
I’ve had to wrestle through questions I didn’t want to ask and walk through seasons I never would have chosen.

And yet, by the grace of God, I’m still here.

Still standing—not because I held it all together, but because God held me together.
Still believing—not because everything made sense, but because I couldn’t walk away from the One who met me in the middle of it.
Still leading—not from a place of arrival, but from a place of being continually formed.

And somewhere along the way, through failure, through pain, through long and often uncomfortable conversations with God, and through the presence of people who refused to let me isolate, something began to take shape in me:

Hurt and brokenness are not the same thing.

At first, they felt identical. Both carried pain. Both came from real experiences. Both had the ability to shape how I saw people, leadership, and even God. But over time, I began to realize that while they may start in the same place, they lead in very different directions.

And this is where something recently spoken into my life has really begun to shape me.

Pastor Ross Parsley has been sharing some things with me, and I genuinely appreciate his leadership and voice in my life. There are moments when someone says something that just sticks—not because it’s complex, but because it carries weight. Because it lands in a place deeper than just your thoughts, it lands in your spirit.

Recently, he said something that I haven’t been able to let go of. It’s been sitting with me, pressing on me, shaping the way I think about my life, my leadership, and how I process everything I’ve walked through.

He said:

“Humility is the pathway to God.”

And I can’t shake it.

Not because it’s a new idea, but because it’s a confronting one.

Because if that’s true, and I believe it is, then it forces me to wrestle with something deeper than just my experiences. It pushes past the surface-level question of what happened to me and presses into something far more personal:

What is my posture in response to it?

Because if humility really is the pathway to God, then the question is no longer just, “Was I hurt?”

The question becomes:

“Am I willing to come low?”

Scripture doesn’t leave this ambiguous. The Apostle Peter writes:

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (1 Peter 5:5–6)

That word humble is the Greek word tapeinophrosynē. It carries the idea of a lowliness of mind, a posture where you willingly place yourself under God. Not thinking less of your worth, but refusing to place yourself at the center. It is not self-hatred. It is not weakness. It is a deliberate surrender of control.

It is a repositioning of the soul.

And what Scripture reveals is both sobering and deeply hopeful.

God does not move toward pride.

He resists it.

Because pride clings to control. It insists on self-sufficiency. It builds its life around protecting itself, managing outcomes, and holding onto what it believes it deserves. And in doing so, it places itself in quiet opposition to the very work God wants to do.

But humility…

Humility is where God moves.

It is where grace is given.
It is where His presence is experienced.
It is where transformation begins to take root.

Isaiah says that God dwells in the high and holy place, and also with the one who is lowly in spirit. Which means the distance between you and God is not determined by how much you know, how well you perform, or how strong you appear.

It is determined by your posture.

And I can tell you, this truth, that humility is the pathway to God, has been shaping me in a real and sometimes uncomfortable way.

It has been challenging how I process pain.
It has been confronting the places where I still want control.
It has been exposing the subtle ways I hold onto hurt, not always because I want to, but because it feels familiar.

Because if I’m honest, hurt can feel easier than humility.

Hurt allows me to keep my distance.
It allows me to protect myself.
It allows me to control how much I give, how much I trust, how much I engage.

But humility requires something deeper.

It requires surrender.

It requires me to come low before God, not pretending I’m fine, not minimizing what happened, but also not clinging to it as the thing that defines me.

And that’s where this becomes more than an idea.

It becomes a decision.

Because if humility is the pathway to God…

then anything that keeps me from humility, no matter how justified it feels, is keeping me from Him.

And that leads us into a harder question we all have to face:

Do I want to stay hurt…
or do I want to come low and find God?

HUMILITY BEGINS WITH BROKENNESS

We have become a society that is deeply familiar with hurt… but largely unfamiliar with brokenness.

And the two are not interchangeable.

In fact, one of the great challenges facing the church in our time is that we have begun to confuse the language of hurt with the language of surrender. We have elevated the experience of pain—which is real and should be acknowledged, but in doing so, we have sometimes stopped short of the place where God actually does His deepest work. We have learned how to talk about what has happened to us, but we have not always learned how to bring what is within us fully before God.

Hurt and brokenness may begin in the same moment, but they do not lead to the same place.

Hurt says, “Something happened to me, and now I need to protect myself.”
Brokenness says, “Something in me must be surrendered to God.”

Hurt turns inward in self-protection. It builds walls. It creates distance. It seeks to manage future pain by controlling present relationships. Even when it is justified, and many times it is, it still operates from a posture of guarding and holding on.

But brokenness is something entirely different.

Brokenness, in the biblical sense, is not about being emotionally overwhelmed or simply feeling pain deeply. It is about coming to the end of yourself. It is about the collapse of self-reliance. It is the moment when the illusion that you can carry your own life finally gives way, and you find yourself face down before God, not because you chose the posture strategically, but because you have no other place to go.

David gives us the clearest language for this in Psalm 51:

“A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

The word contrite carries the image of something crushed, ground down, reduced, brought low. Not your identity, not your worth, but your self-sufficiency. Your need to control outcomes. Your insistence that you can fix what is broken on your own.

This is why brokenness is so often misunderstood.

Because it does not look strong.
It does not look polished.
It does not look like someone who has it together.

But biblically, brokenness is not weakness, it is awakening.

It is the moment when you stop saying, “I’ve got this,” and begin to say, “God… I don’t.”

It is the death of self-sufficiency.

It is the place where surrender stops being theoretical and becomes real.

And this is where we have to be honest, even if it stings a bit.

God can redeem brokenness.

But He is resisted by pride, and He is often kept at a distance by hurt that refuses to surrender. Even what looks like humility on the surface can sometimes be a form of false humility—where we talk about our pain, sit in our pain, even identify with our pain… but never actually release it.

And I say this with love, because I’ve lived it:

If we stay in hurt, we may feel justified, but we will not be transformed.

Transformation happens in surrender.
Transformation happens in brokenness.

And throughout Scripture, we see this pattern again and again.

We see it in David, lying on the ground in repentance, stripped of image and pretense after his sin with Bathsheba. We see it in Peter, weeping bitterly after denying Jesus, coming to the end of his own strength and confidence. We see it in the prodigal son, who doesn’t just feel bad about what he did, but comes to a place where he says, “I am no longer worthy,”and returns home empty-handed.

In every case, the turning point is not the pain.

It is the surrender.

And I can tell you, this is not just theological for me, it is deeply personal.

There have been multiple moments in my life where I have found myself on the floor, face down before God, not because I was trying to be spiritual, but because I was out of options. No more energy. No more clarity. No more strength to keep pushing forward the way I had been.

Moments where the only honest prayer left was:

“God, I’m done.”
“I don’t have anything left to give.”
“I don’t have the strength to carry this anymore.”

And it is in those moments, not when I was managing things well, not when I was leading from strength, not when I had answers, that God met me most clearly.

That is where He works.

That is where He redeems.

Not in the places where I was still holding things together…
but in the places where everything fell apart and I finally stopped trying to control it.

And this is where the distinction becomes critical.

Because I have also had moments where I was deeply hurt… but not broken.

Moments where I was frustrated, disillusioned, and even angry, and my response was not surrender, but control.

I remember a season where I was so wounded by people in the church, so tired of navigating the tension and the pain, that I actually said:

“Fine. I’ll just start a church in my backyard. That way I won’t get hurt. And I’ll show them how to do church right.”

At the time, it almost sounded like conviction.

But it wasn’t.

That wasn’t vision.

That was hurt.

That was control.

That was me trying to protect myself by isolating myself, removing myself from the very places where God wanted to continue forming me.

And here is the truth I had to learn, and continue to learn:

Hurt wants control.
Brokenness leads to surrender.

Hurt says, “I’ll take it from here.”
Brokenness says, “God, I can’t do this without You.”

And only one of those postures leads you into the presence of God.

Only one of those opens the door for grace.

Only one of those becomes the soil where redemption actually takes root.

HURT IS REAL—BUT IT CAN BECOME A TRAP

We need to say this clearly, without hesitation and without minimizing anything:

Church hurt is real.

It’s real because people are real. And people are imperfect. The church is not made up of perfect leaders or flawless communities—it is made up of broken people being formed by grace. And sometimes, in that process, people say things they shouldn’t say. They lead in ways they shouldn’t lead. They make decisions that wound others. And at times, there is real sin—real betrayal, real misuse of authority, real damage that cuts deeper than surface-level disappointment.

That matters.

It should never be dismissed. It should never be brushed aside with shallow answers or spiritual clichés. Some wounds require time. Some require wise counsel. Some require walking with safe people who can help you process what happened with honesty and care. And in certain situations, especially where there has been deep harm or abuse, it is not only appropriate but necessary to seek help, to set boundaries, and to allow truth to come into the light.

I have lived this.

There have been seasons in my life where hurt didn’t just brush up against me—it settled in. It didn’t just pass through—it took up space. It affected how I led, how I loved, how I showed up in rooms. It shaped my tone, my posture, my willingness to trust. It began to color everything.

And that’s what hurt does when it is not brought into surrender. It doesn’t stay contained. It begins to spread.

It moves from a moment… to a mindset.
From an experience… to a lens.
From something that happened… to something that defines.

And over time, without even realizing it, you begin to see everything through it.

You begin to assume people will let you down before they even have the chance to show up. You begin to hold back parts of yourself that were once freely given. You begin to protect instead of participate, to guard instead of engage. The very places that were meant to be spaces of connection and growth start to feel like places of risk.

So you pull back. Not always dramatically. Not always visibly. But internally, something shifts. You start to live guarded. And here is where this becomes dangerous.

Because what is real… can still become a trap.

The enemy does not always work through destruction. Sometimes he works through stagnation. He doesn’t need to remove you from the faith if he can simply keep you from moving forward in it. He doesn’t need to convince you to walk away from God if he can quietly convince you to disengage from the life God has called you to live.

If he can keep you circling the same wound…
rehearsing the same conversation…
reliving the same moment over and over again…

then he doesn’t have to do much else.

Because you will stay there.

You will stay in a cycle that feels justified, that feels real, that even feels honest—but ultimately keeps you from becoming who God is forming you to be.

And I say that carefully, because I know how this lands.

It can feel like we are being asked to move on too quickly. It can feel like people are trying to minimize what happened. But that’s not what this is.

This is not about minimizing hurt.

This is about refusing to let hurt have the final word.

Because if we are not careful, we will begin to build our lives around a handful of painful moments.

We will take three blue cards…
and let them outweigh the voices of hundreds.
We will take one betrayal…
and let it define every future relationship.
We will take one season of disappointment…
and let it rewrite the entire narrative of our calling.

I remember sitting in that office, staring at those blue cards, and my pastor Tom Lance speaking into that moment with clarity I didn’t have at the time:

“There are 2,000 people in this church… and you’re focused on 3 comments.”

At the time, it felt almost impossible to shift my focus. Those three voices were loud. They felt personal. They felt weighty.

But that’s what hurt does.

It magnifies the negative…
and minimizes everything else.

It takes what is small and makes it feel all-consuming. It takes what is partial and makes it feel like the whole story.

And if we don’t interrupt that process, we begin to live inside a distorted reality, one where the pain becomes the center, and everything else orbits around it.

But that is not the life God has called us to.

And this is where we have to lead each other well.

Because compassion does not mean leaving people stuck.

Love does not mean affirming a posture that is slowly closing someone off from healing, from community, and from God’s ongoing work in their life.

At some point, with gentleness and truth, we have to help each other take a step forward.

Not by ignoring what happened.
Not by pretending it didn’t matter.
But by refusing to let it define what comes next.

Because hurt, if held onto long enough, will not just wound you.

It will shape you.

And if it shapes you long enough, it will begin to limit you.

And if it limits you long enough, it will quietly keep you from stepping into the fullness of what God has for you.

That is the trap.

Not that you were hurt.

But that you stayed there

SURRENDER LEADS TO RESURRECTION LIFE

I keep coming back to something Pastor Ross Parsley said to me, not as a passing thought, but as a truth that has begun to reorient my life from the inside out:

“Humility is the pathway to God.”

That sentence has not left me. It has followed me into quiet moments, into conversations, into the way I process my past and the way I approach my future. It has become more than a statement, it has become a lens. Because if humility is truly the pathway to God, then that pathway does not end in awareness. It leads somewhere.

It leads to surrender. And surrender, in the Kingdom of God, never ends in loss. It leads to life.

For a long time, I didn’t realize how much I was still trying to control things in subtle ways. Hurt has a way of disguising itself as wisdom. It tells you to be careful, to hold back, to protect what’s left. It convinces you that distance is maturity and that guardedness is strength. And if I’m honest, there were seasons where I lived that way. Not loudly, not rebelliously, but quietly, internally, holding pieces of my life just out of reach.

Because as long as I stayed there, I still had control.

I could manage my distance.
I could decide how much access people had to my life.
I could engage just enough to function, but not enough to be vulnerable again.

But that is not the pathway to God. That is the pathway of self-preservation.

And it may feel safe for a moment, but it will never lead you into the fullness of life God intends. Because the pathway to God is humility.

And humility, if it is real, will always lead you to surrender.

It will bring you to the place where you stop negotiating with God and simply say, “Yes.” Where you stop trying to manage outcomes and instead release them. Where you stop holding your life together and instead place it into His hands.

And this is where everything begins to change.

Because Scripture reveals a pattern that runs all throughout the Kingdom of God, a pattern that is both beautiful and, at times, unsettling.

Jesus says in John 12:24:

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

This is not just a metaphor.

This is the way the Kingdom works.

Life does not come through preservation.

It comes through surrender.

The seed does not produce anything by staying intact. It only becomes what it was created to be when it breaks open, when it releases what it has been holding, when it falls into the ground and disappears from view.

And that is the invitation in front of all of us.

Not to protect our lives, but to release them.
Not to hold onto what we think we can control, but to trust God with what we cannot.
Not to stay defined by hurt—but to be transformed through surrender.

This is the pathway I am choosing to walk.

Not the pathway of three blue cards.

Not the pathway where a handful of painful voices get to define the direction of my life or the calling of God on my life.

I am on a different path now. A resurrection path.

A path where I bring the broken parts of my life, the parts I cannot fix, the parts I do not understand, the parts that still ache at times, and I place them into the hands of a God who redeems.

A path where I am learning, day by day, to come low… so that He can lift me up.

And here is the beauty of this, the part that fills me with a kind of deep, unshakable joy:

God does not waste brokenness.

He does not discard it.
He does not overlook it.
He does not ask you to pretend it never happened.

He redeems it.

He takes what was meant to diminish you and begins to reshape it into something that carries life—not just for you, but for others. He takes the places where you felt like everything fell apart and begins to rebuild them with a strength that did not come from you in the first place.

And suddenly, what once felt like an ending… becomes the beginning of something new.

This is resurrection life.

Not a life where nothing ever breaks, but a life where nothing is beyond redemption.

Not a life where you never experience pain, but a life where pain does not get the final word.

Not a life built on control, but a life rooted in surrender, and lifted by the power of God.

And there are moments, even now, where I can feel that shift happening.

Moments where I sense freedom where there used to be tension.
Moments where trust begins to rise again where fear once held its ground.
Moments where I realize that I am no longer carrying what I used to carry.

Not because I became stronger. But because I finally released it.

That is the invitation. Not to hold on tighter. But to let go.

Because you don’t step into resurrection life by protecting yourself. You step into it by surrendering yourself, and on the other side of that surrender…

there is life.

IT’S TIME

At some point, we have to stop speaking about hurt in vague, safe language.

We call it “church hurt” because it feels easier. It feels broader. It feels less confrontational. But if we are ever going to be free, we have to begin to call it what it actually is.

It wasn’t just “church hurt.”

It was a person who betrayed you.
A friend who walked away.
A leader who disappointed you.
A group of people who judged you.
Someone who was carrying their own unresolved pain… and in their brokenness, they wounded you.

It was real. And it mattered.

But now, it’s time. It’s time to stop carrying what you were never meant to carry.

It’s time to come to God with honesty, not polished, not filtered, not managed, and say what is actually true:

“God, I can’t carry this anymore.”

Because if you’re honest, your back is tired.

The weight of it has been sitting on you longer than you expected. What started as a moment has turned into something you’ve been managing for months… maybe years. And somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, that weight began to shape you.

It began to harden parts of your heart.
It began to limit your willingness to trust.
It began to affect how you show up, in your family, in your church, in your calling.

And you were never meant to live that way.

So it’s time.

Time to come low before God.
Time to get honest.
Time to release what you’ve been gripping so tightly.

Not in a dramatic moment for others to see, but right where you are.

Because you don’t need a stage.
You don’t need a song.
You don’t need a perfectly crafted moment.

You just need surrender.

I remember a moment in my own life where this became real for me.

I was driving home to Austin from Oklahoma. I had been helping a church there, and I was in a season where a lot had shifted. I had left the church I was a part of, stepped into a new role working with a district of churches, and somewhere in all of that movement, I realized something I hadn’t fully faced yet.

I was carrying a lot of hurt.

As I drove down I-35 and crossed the border from Oklahoma into Texas, it hit me, not as a thought, but as a weight. I could feel it. The disappointment. The frustration. The betrayal. The things I had pushed down and tried to move past without really surrendering.

And in that moment, I said what I had been avoiding:

“God, I can’t carry this anymore.”

Not “I’ll try harder.”
Not “I’ll figure it out.”
Not “I’ll manage it better.”

Just…

“I’m done.”

“I don’t have the strength to keep holding this.”
“I don’t want bitterness to take root in me.”
“I don’t want unforgiveness to shape my life.”

And with an open heart, imperfect, but honest, I gave it to Him.

That’s why we say:

Down is the new up.

Because what makes sense to us as humans is to hold onto our hurt. To cling to it. To protect it. To justify it.

But that is not how the Kingdom of God works.

In God’s economy, what feels like losing… is actually the beginning of life.

What feels like letting go… is actually the moment where He begins to work.

Hurt will never be redeemed if it is held onto.

But brokenness, real, surrendered, open-handed brokenness, that is what God redeems.

That is where He moves.

That is where He heals.

And that is where He begins to restore not just you… but what He wants to do through you.

Because this is bigger than you.

Your family needs you.
Your church needs you.
Your community needs you.

There are people within your reach every single day that God wants to love, serve, and minister to through your life.

But hurt has a way of freezing that.

It keeps you focused inward.
It keeps you managing pain instead of stepping into purpose.
It keeps you trying to control instead of allowing God to work.

And at some point, love has to call you forward.

So if you’ve read this far, hear me:

It’s time.

Right where you are, no matter where you’re sitting, no matter what you’re feeling, I want you to do something simple but powerful.

Open your hands.

Physically, if you can.

And bring that hurt to God.

Name it.
Release it.
Stop gripping it.

And say:

“God, I give this to You.”
“I can’t carry this anymore.”
“I trust You with what I cannot fix.”

This is the moment where the shift begins. Not because everything is instantly resolved. But because your posture has changed. And when your posture changes…

everything begins to change.

I still have moments where I feel those blue cards. I still remember the sting.
I still feel echoes of those seasons. But I’ve made a decision.

I’m not going to let hurt define me. I’m not going to let the enemy of my soul keep me stuck in a place God never intended for me to live.

And you shouldn’t either.

We can have compassion for hurt.
We can sit with people in it.
We can acknowledge it honestly.

But we cannot let each other stay there. Because hurt will keep you stuck.

But brokenness…

brokenness will bring you to God.

And in the Kingdom of God…

down is the way up.

Lamentations 3:31–33

For no one is cast off

by the Lord forever.

Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,

so great is his unfailing love.

For he does not willingly bring affliction

or grief to anyone

There is a kind of darkness you can feel before you can see.

The mouth of a cave does not look threatening at first. From a distance, it is only shadow pressed into stone, a black opening in the side of the earth. But the farther you move toward it, the more the temperature changes. The air cools. The sounds of the outside world begin to fade. Your footsteps grow louder, then strangely swallowed. The smell of damp rock and old earth rises around you. Water drips somewhere in the distance with the kind of patience that makes time feel irrelevant. And if you go deep enough, light does something unsettling: it gives up.

That is what makes a cave so unnerving.

It is not just that caves are dark.
It is that they are final.

They feel like the kind of place where things are buried and forgotten. The kind of place where people crawl when they are exhausted, hunted, ashamed, or done fighting. Caves are where prophets collapse. Caves are where bodies are laid. Caves are where prayers echo back unanswered. Caves are where a man like Johnny Cash once wandered, strung out and worn thin, carrying enough darkness inside himself that the darkness outside almost felt fitting.

A cave is not where you go when life is working.

A cave is where you end up when something in you has run out.

And maybe that is why Holy Saturday matters more than most of us realize.

Because before there was an empty tomb, there was a sealed one. Before there was resurrection sunrise, there was a long and unbearable stretch of silence. Before anyone shouted that death had lost its sting, there was a cave holding the body of Jesus and a world that felt as though it had gone terribly quiet.

That is where I want to begin.

Not with lilies and trumpets.
Not with victory songs.
Not with the stone rolled away.

But in the cave.

Because if we are honest, most of us know caves better than we know resurrection mornings.

We know what it is to stand in places that feel cold and unanswered. We know what it is to wonder if hope has already been buried. We know what it is to sit in silence so thick it almost has weight. We know what it is to pray and hear nothing back. We know what it is to feel as if the story has stopped moving and God has gone quiet right in the middle of the chapter where we needed Him most.

And that is the ache of Saturday.

Saturday is the day nobody wants.
The day after loss has done its damage.
The day before anything makes sense.
The day when heaven feels closed and all you can hear is the drip of unanswered questions somewhere in the dark.

Saturday is where faith has to breathe without visible proof.

And that is why so many of us struggle there.

Because we do not mind following God when He is loud. We like Him in the miracle, in the breakthrough, in the healing, in the clear sign, in the moment when the stone finally moves. But the God of Holy Saturday is harder for us to trust, because He is often not found in spectacle. He is found in the silence we keep trying to outrun.

And if you have ever found yourself in a season where your prayers felt swallowed, your hope felt bruised, and your soul felt like it was sitting in a cave waiting for some sign of life, then you already know:

The silence can be unbearable.

But the silence is not the end.

Johnny Cash, the Disciples, and the Necessary Silence

There was a season in Johnny Cash’s life when the darkness around him had begun to mirror the darkness within him. By the time he made his way into Nickajack Cave in Tennessee, he was not just tired in the ordinary sense—he was unraveling. Fame had not saved him. Success had not steadied him. The applause had not quieted the ache. Addiction had hollowed him out, and the speed of his life had become unsustainable. He was moving fast, but not toward anything. He was running from pain, from consequences, from himself, and maybe most of all from the fear that he had already gone too far to find his way back.

So he went into the cave.

Not as a tourist. Not as a man looking for adventure. But as someone who had run out of road. Cash later described it as a moment when he no longer cared if he came back out. He kept moving deeper into the darkness until the light behind him disappeared and the cave swallowed him whole. It is hard to imagine a better picture for despair than that—when the light you once trusted is gone, when the silence feels heavy enough to crush you, and when you are no longer sure whether you want to be found.

And yet, it was there, in the damp dark, in the stillness, in the place that felt most like an ending, that something shifted. Not because the cave suddenly filled with light. Not because heaven split open with some grand spectacle. But because somewhere in the silence, Johnny Cash became aware of something deeper than his despair: God had not abandoned him. He later described it as a strange and quiet clarity, the overwhelming sense that his life was not over and that whatever mess he had made of himself, it had not placed him beyond the reach of grace.

That is what makes the story so powerful. God did not wait for Johnny Cash to get himself cleaned up before He came near. He met him in the cave. In the place of exhaustion. In the place of collapse. In the place where he had nothing left to prove and nowhere left to run. And maybe that is why this story feels so much like Holy Saturday.

Because Saturday is that kind of day.

It is the space between burial and breakthrough, between collapse and calling, between the moment when everything appears lost and the moment you realize God is still writing. It is the day when the silence gets thick enough to make you question everything. And if we are honest, that is exactly how the disciples must have felt.

We read the Easter story knowing Sunday is coming.

They did not.

That matters more than we usually admit. We stand on the other side of resurrection, but they were living this in real time. And on Saturday, it did not look like hope. It looked like failure. They had left everything to follow Jesus, their work, their routines, their old lives, their certainty, because they believed He was the One. They had built their future around Him. And now He was dead. Not symbolically. Not “things are bad but maybe they’ll turn around” dead. Dead. His body had been taken down, wrapped in cloth, placed in a tomb, and sealed behind stone. The kind of ending that leaves a room silent.

You can almost hear the questions hanging in the air behind those locked doors. Was He really who we thought He was? Did we get it wrong? Did we waste our lives? What do we do now?

That is the ache of Saturday.

It is the day when heaven feels quiet and all you are left with is grief, confusion, and whatever little thread of faith you are still trying to hold in your hands. And I want to say this carefully, because I think many people need to hear it: those places are not bad. They are necessary.

We often assume that if we were strong in faith, we would move quickly from pain to confidence, from cross to resurrection, from heartbreak to certainty. But that is not how God forms us. There are things we only learn in the silence. There are truths we only receive in the dark. There are parts of resurrection life that cannot be formed in us until something else in us has first died.

That is why Holy Saturday matters.

It is not wasted space in the gospel.
It is not dead air in the story.
It is part of the process.

Because sometimes the most sacred work God is doing in your life is happening in the very place that feels the most silent.

Saturday Is the Day We Do Not Like

Good Friday carries the weight of sacrifice. Easter Sunday bursts open with beauty and victory. But Saturday is harder to hold. It has no spectacle to it, no triumphant music, no obvious movement. It is the day in between—the quiet day, the unresolved day, the day that feels suspended between heartbreak and hope. And maybe that is why we tend to rush past it. Saturday feels too familiar.

Because Saturday is not just a day on the church calendar. It is a place many of us know by heart.

It is the day after the prayer still was not answered. The day after the funeral. The day after the diagnosis. The day after the betrayal, the divorce papers, the church split, the dream that quietly collapsed under the weight of reality. It is the moment when you have already given everything you had, and still find yourself standing in front of a closed tomb wondering what to do with the silence.

And that is where faith gets real.

It is one thing to sing about resurrection when the sun is shining and the stone has already been rolled away. It is another thing entirely to trust God when all visible evidence says the story is over. But if we are honest, this is where much of the Christian life is actually lived, not only in miracles and breakthroughs, but in the long middle. In the waiting. In the unanswered. In the silence. And maybe that is exactly why Holy Saturday matters so much, because it reminds us that even here, in the stillness we would rather avoid, God has not stopped working.

Elijah, the Whisper, and the Hidden Work of God

There is another cave in Scripture that matters here, and it belongs to Elijah. What makes his story so striking is that he does not end up there after failure, but after fire. He had stood on the mountain and watched heaven answer. He had confronted false prophets, called a nation back, and carried the kind of spiritual weight that leaves a man feeling invincible, until it doesn’t. Because not long after the victory, Elijah finds himself running, depleted, afraid, and finally collapsing into the mouth of a cave as if the darkness outside could match the exhaustion within him.

You can almost feel that moment.

The heat of the day fading as he steps inside.
The light shrinking behind him.
The air growing cooler, heavier, still.
The kind of silence that presses in on your chest and makes your thoughts louder than you want them to be.

This is not the cave of a coward. This is the cave of a man who has given everything and has nothing left. And if you have ever poured yourself out for something—ministry, family, calling, obedience, and then found yourself strangely empty afterward, you know this cave. You know what it is to do something significant for God and then, almost without warning, feel the crash. The adrenaline wears off. The crowd disappears. The moment passes. And you are left sitting in the quiet, trying to make sense of your own soul.

That is where Elijah was when God came near.

And this is what is so unexpected, so deeply important: God does not first meet him in power.

Not in the wind tearing through the rocks.
Not in the earthquake shaking the ground beneath him.
Not in the fire that once answered his prayers so dramatically.

God meets him in the whisper.

In the cave, in the stillness, in the kind of silence that most of us try to escape as quickly as possible, God speaks in a way that requires Elijah to lean in. To listen differently. To quiet himself enough to hear something softer than spectacle.

That matters more than we think.

Because many of us are standing at the edge of our own caves waiting for God to show up the way He did before, loud, undeniable, unmistakable. We want the same fire, the same clarity, the same moment that removes all doubt. But what if God is already speaking, just not in the way we expected? What if the very silence we are trying to outrun is the place where His voice is waiting?

That is the tension of Holy Saturday.

It is not the absence of God.
It is the unfamiliarity of how He is present.

And that is where we struggle.

Because when God is quiet, our minds do not stay neutral. Silence has a way of amplifying whatever is already inside of us. Fear grows louder. Doubt feels more convincing. Questions echo. We begin to fill in the silence with our own conclusions—He must have left, He must not care, He must not be working, this must be the end.

But silence has never meant that to God.

It only feels that way to us because we are wired for movement, for progress, for visible signs that something is happening. We want to see it, measure it, understand it. We want light, not shadow. Answers, not waiting.

But the gospel keeps bringing us back to this uncomfortable truth: God does some of His deepest work in places that feel hidden.

Seeds do not grow in the open air.
Roots do not deepen in the light.
Bodies are not raised in front of a crowd.

They begin underground.

In the dark.
In the stillness.
In the silence that feels like nothing is happening at all.

The cave, then, is not just a place of retreat. It is a place of formation. It is where God strips away the noise we rely on and teaches us to hear Him differently. It is where He meets us without the distraction of spectacle and reminds us that His presence is not dependent on volume.

And maybe that is what Holy Saturday is inviting us into.

Not a louder answer.
Not a faster breakthrough.
But a deeper awareness that even here, in the cave, in the quiet, in the unanswered—God is still near.

The silence is not empty.

It is full of Him.

What If Saturday Is Necessary?

There is a part of us that wants to believe Saturday is a mistake.

That the silence means something has gone wrong.
That the waiting is a delay God did not intend.
That the unanswered prayer, the ache, the confusion, the hiddenness, these are interruptions to the real story God is trying to tell.

But what if they are not interruptions at all?

What if Saturday is part of the formation?

What if the very seasons we resist, the quiet, the uncertainty, the questions we cannot resolve—are not signs that God has stepped away, but the sacred space where He is doing some of His deepest work? Not around us, but within us.

Because the truth is, God is not only interested in changing our circumstances. He is committed to transforming us.

And that kind of transformation rarely happens in the moments we would choose.

It happens in the places where our control begins to slip.
Where our certainty starts to crack.
Where the version of faith we have built, often stronger in confidence than in trust—begins to unravel.

Saturday has a way of exposing all of that.

It reveals how much of our faith has been tied to outcomes.
How much of our hope has depended on timelines.
How much of our trust has been rooted in understanding rather than surrender.

And in that exposure, something deeper begins.

Because God wastes nothing.

Not the grief.
Not the waiting.
Not the confusion.
Not even the silence.

In fact, the places where you feel most unsure may be the very places where God is gently undoing what cannot go with you into resurrection life. False expectations. False control. The illusion that you need to understand everything in order to trust Him. The quiet belief that God should work according to your timeline, your logic, your preferred outcome.

Sometimes those things have to die.

And that kind of death is not dramatic. It is slow. It is quiet. It feels like loss before it feels like life. It feels like sitting in the dark, wondering why God has not moved yet, when in reality, He is already moving, but not in the way you expected.

This is why we struggle with Saturday.

Not just because it is painful, but because it is revealing.

Silence has a way of telling the truth about us.

It reveals whether we actually trust God or if we have simply trusted the outcomes we hoped He would give us. It reveals whether we love God Himself or just the resolution we believe He should bring. It reveals whether our faith can still breathe when certainty is taken away.

And that is uncomfortable.

But it is also holy.

Because somewhere in that silence, somewhere in the cave, in the waiting, in the unanswered, God begins forming a different kind of faith. Not a fragile faith that depends on quick answers, but a resilient one. A deeper one. A quieter one. The kind of faith that can sit in the dark and still whisper, even with trembling hands:

“I do not understand this… but I believe You are still here.”

That is mature faith.

That is resurrection faith beginning to take shape before resurrection is visible.

And maybe that is the invitation of Saturday, not to rush past it, not to numb it, not to escape it, but to let God do in the silence what could not be done any other way.

God’s Not Done With You Yet

This has been a common theme in my own life. More times than I can count, I have found myself flat on my face before God, too tired to keep moving, too worn down to pretend, too honest to offer Him polished prayers. I have come to the end of my own strength and said, “I cannot take the pressure anymore. I cannot carry the pain, the confusion, the weight of all of this one more day.” And it is often there, not in the bright moments, not in the victories, but in the cave, in the silence, in the long ache of Saturday, that God has come near to me most clearly. Not with condemnation. Not with frustration. Not with disappointment. But with a whisper that somehow carries more power than any shout: I am not done with you yet.

And it never comes the way I expect it.

It does not come with immediate answers.
It does not come with a clear timeline.
It does not come with everything suddenly fixed.

It comes quietly. Personally. Deeply.
Almost like it bypasses my circumstances and speaks straight to my soul.

That is what Saturday does.

It becomes the place where God stops competing with the noise and begins to meet you in what is real. It is the place where He reminds you that the silence is not empty and the tomb is not pointless. It is where He gently says, “Trust Me here. Trust the cave. Trust what I am doing that you cannot see. Trust that I am still forming something in you that could not be formed any other way.”

Because Friday reveals what has been lost.
And Sunday reveals what God can do.

But Saturday…
Saturday reveals who you are.

It strips away the version of you that can perform. It burns through the illusions you have been holding onto. It exposes what your faith is actually resting on. There is no stage on Saturday. No spotlight. No crowd to impress. No energy to fake it. When you are sitting in the dark with your questions, your grief, your disappointment, and your need, all that remains is what is real.

And as uncomfortable as that is, it is also sacred.

Because God does some of His deepest work in that place.

He meets you without the mask.
He speaks to you without the noise.
He forms you without the distraction of everything you once relied on.

And slowly, sometimes so slowly you barely notice, it changes you.

Not by fixing everything around you, but by strengthening something within you.

A deeper trust.
A quieter confidence.
A faith that does not need immediate answers to keep breathing.

And maybe that is the word some of you need today.

Not a complicated explanation.
Not a perfectly wrapped theological answer.
Not a timeline for when things will get better.

Just this:

God is not done with you yet.

If you are in the cave, He is not done with you yet.
If you are sitting in the silence, He is not done with you yet.
If you are grieving, questioning, rebuilding, doubting, or barely holding on—He is not done with you yet.

If all you have today is a whisper of faith instead of a shout, He is not done with you yet.
If your prayers feel weak, if your hope feels thin, if your strength feels gone—He is not done with you yet.

The disciples did not know it on Saturday.
They thought the story had ended.

Johnny Cash did not know it in the cave.
He thought he had reached the end of himself.

Elijah did not know it in his exhaustion.
He thought he had nothing left to give.

But the silence was not the end for them.

And it is not the end for you.

Because here is the truth we hold onto, even when we cannot feel it:

Just because God is quiet does not mean God is absent.
Just because the stone has not moved does not mean resurrection is not already in motion.
Just because you cannot see what He is doing does not mean He has stopped working.

There is a moment coming.

A moment when the stone rolls away.
A moment when the silence breaks.
A moment when everything God has been doing in the hidden places begins to rise into the light.

But until then, there is this:

The cave is not your grave.
The silence is not your sentence.
Saturday is not your ending.

It is the place where God does His quiet, unseen, unstoppable work.

And when the time is right, when the work is ready, when the moment is full, when the story reaches the place only God can bring it, He will speak again, not just in a whisper, but with power.

And when He does, you will realize something you could not see before:

He was with you the whole time.

He was working the whole time.

He was forming something in you the whole time.

So if all you can hear today is silence, listen closely.

Because beneath it, within it, through it, there is still a voice.

And it is still saying:

I am not done with you yet.

Prayer

God,
Meet me in the silence.

When I want answers, give me Your presence.
When I want clarity, give me trust.
When I want movement, teach me to wait.

If I am in a cave season, remind me that You still know how to find me there.
If I am exhausted, speak gently.
If I am grieving, stay near.
If I am questioning, hold me steady.

Teach me to trust that silence is not the end of the story.

Amen.

Luke 23:32–49 captures the final hours of Jesus’ crucifixion. He is rejected, publicly humiliated, and executed between the guilty, yet He responds not with vengeance but with forgiveness and surrender. In this passage, we see both the depth of human brokenness and the greater depth of God’s mercy, as Jesus willingly bears suffering and reveals the true cost of love.

There are moments in life when everything collapses at once.

Not metaphorically.
Not emotionally.
But actually.

Concrete gives way. Steel buckles. The ground shifts beneath your feet. The sound is violent at first, deafening, disorienting, impossible to process, and then, almost suddenly, there is silence. Thick, choking silence. Dust fills the air so completely it blots out the light. The world that felt solid just seconds before is now unstable, buried, broken. Time no longer moves the way it should. It stretches. It stutters. It becomes something slow and unbearable.

And somewhere underneath the wreckage, there is a voice.

A cry.

Faint at first. Then desperate.

Someone is still alive.

Maybe it is a mother. Maybe it is a child. Maybe it is someone trapped beneath concrete and twisted steel, pinned under a weight they cannot move, breathing in shallow gasps as the air thins around them. Their chest tightens. Panic rises. Every second feels longer than the last. And in the darkness, under all that crushing weight, there is only one hope left: that someone will hear the cry, come close enough, and be strong enough to carry what they cannot lift on their own.

I have thought about that image for years.

I first heard something like it in a speech from Bono at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast. He was standing in a room full of politicians, dignitaries, and power brokers, and somehow, instead of performing or posturing, he chose to talk about suffering, Scripture, justice, and the heart of God. And in the middle of that speech, he said something that has never left me:

“God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war…”

That line lodged itself somewhere deep in me.

Maybe because I have always loved Bono. For me, and for so many of us who grew up in the 90s, there was something deeply meaningful about the collision of rock and roll and faith. U2 wasn’t just music. It was a soundtrack for people trying to make sense of God, pain, beauty, longing, injustice, and grace all at once. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t the kind of faith that fit inside a church brochure. It felt raw and honest, like someone was asking the same hard questions we were and refusing to settle for easy answers.

So when I heard that line, God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war, it did something to me.

It imprinted itself on my soul.

Maybe because beneath all the theology and politics and headlines, there is something deeply human in that image: helplessness. A cry in the dark. The terrible ache of needing rescue and being unable to save yourself.

And if you sit with that image long enough, it begins to confront you with something many of us spend our lives trying to avoid:

God is not found only in the clean, the controlled, and the comfortable.

He is found in the collapse.
He is found in the darkness.
He is found in the places where the weight is too heavy and the situation feels beyond saving.

And once you begin to see that, it becomes almost impossible to understand Good Friday as anything less than this:

God stepping directly into the rubble of the human story.

The God Who Did Not Stay Distant

One of the deepest questions hidden beneath human suffering is not simply Why does this hurt? but Where is God in it? When life caves in, when the diagnosis comes, when the betrayal lands, when the grave opens, when the prayers seem to echo back unanswered, most of us are not asking abstract theological questions. We are asking something far more personal and far more fragile: Did God leave? Is He somewhere above all of this, untouched by it, unmoved by it, safe from the ache that is swallowing us whole?

I think many of us, even if we would never say it out loud, quietly imagine God that way. Removed. Elevated. Existing somewhere beyond the reach of grief and blood and panic and sorrow. A God who may care in theory, but from a distance. A God who watches pain without ever truly entering it. A God who can offer comfort, perhaps, but only from the other side of the glass.

But the cross dismantles that version of God completely.

Good Friday is not the story of a distant God observing human suffering from the safety of heaven. It is the story of God entering it fully. Not brushing up against it. Not acknowledging it from afar. Entering it. Taking it into Himself. Letting it do its worst. Jesus is not caught in a tragic sequence of unfortunate events, nor is He simply swept away by political corruption and mob violence. The cross is not a misunderstanding. It is not a collapse of an otherwise promising movement. It is not the tragic ending of a hopeful story gone wrong. The cross is where love is unveiled in its most costly and terrifying form.

And what makes it so holy, and so difficult to look at for too long, is that Jesus walks toward it knowing exactly what it will demand of Him.

He walks toward the kiss of betrayal from someone He once called friend. He walks toward the denial of Peter, one of the men closest to His heart. He walks toward the loneliness of watching those He loved scatter into fear and self-preservation. He walks toward the false accusations, the spit, the fists, the public humiliation, the soldiers’ laughter, the tearing of flesh, the suffocating pain of crucifixion. None of it surprises Him. None of it catches Him unprepared. Every step He takes toward Golgotha is a step taken with full awareness of where the road leads.

That is what makes the cross more than suffering.
That is what makes it sacrifice.

Because Jesus is not merely enduring pain. He is consenting to it. Not in weakness, but in love. He is not overpowered by forces beyond His control; He is surrendering Himself to the will of the Father for the sake of the world. The One who could calm storms with a word, cast out demons with a command, and call the dead from their graves does not defend Himself. He does not summon angels. He does not crush His enemies. He does not come down from the cross. And what makes that restraint almost unbearable to consider is this: it is not because He lacks power. It is because He chooses love.

That is the scandal of Good Friday.

Jesus does not save us by avoiding suffering.
He saves us by entering it.
He does not redeem us by standing above the wreckage.
He redeems us by stepping underneath its weight.

And in that moment, the cross becomes more than an instrument of death. It becomes the clearest revelation of the heart of God the world has ever seen.

What Sacrifice Really Means

The word sacrifice has become so casual in modern life that it has almost lost its gravity. We use it for anything mildly inconvenient. We say we sacrificed a weekend, sacrificed sleep, sacrificed comfort, sacrificed carbs. We use the language of sacrifice to describe the small irritations and adjustments of ordinary life, and maybe that is part of why the cross can feel so distant to us. We have domesticated a word that was once soaked in blood, surrender, fire, and love.

But in Scripture, sacrifice is never casual.

It is never about inconvenience.
It is never about optics.
It is never about giving God what costs us nothing.

In the Greek, one of the central words used is θυσία (thysia), which means an offering—something brought, something laid down, something given over. But even that definition, as important as it is, does not fully capture the emotional and spiritual weight of what sacrifice meant in the biblical world. Sacrifice was not abstract theology. It was tangible. It had texture and smell and sound. It involved altars, blood, smoke, trembling hands, and the painful recognition that reconciliation, mercy, and worship were not cheap things. Sacrifice meant that something precious was being surrendered so that something broken might be made whole again.

And that is the part we cannot afford to lose.

Because underneath all the ritual and language is a truth that still cuts straight to the heart:

Sacrifice is love giving itself away so that another might live.

Not giving what is easy.
Not offering what is left over.
Not tossing in what you can spare without feeling it.

Sacrifice is giving what matters.

It is giving what costs.

It is giving what hurts.

It is the mother staying awake all night beside a hospital bed when her body has nothing left to give. It is the father taking the double shift so his children can eat. It is the spouse who chooses forgiveness when bitterness would feel easier. It is the friend who stays when everyone else backs away. Real sacrifice is always personal because real love is always personal. It is never detached. It is never theoretical. It always involves the giving away of self.

And once you begin to understand sacrifice that way, the cross starts to look very different.

Because Jesus is not merely suffering at the hands of evil men. He is not simply enduring pain as though Good Friday were only a story about brutality and injustice. It is that—but it is more than that. The cross is not just the story of what was done to Jesus. It is the story of what Jesus was willing to give for us.

That is what makes it holy.

Jesus is not merely bleeding.
He is offering Himself.

He is not simply being crushed by the violence of the world. He is laying down His life in the middle of it. Every lash, every wound, every labored breath is not only the evidence of human cruelty, it is the revelation of divine love. He is not clinging to Himself. He is pouring Himself out. The cross is not simply where Jesus suffers. It is where Jesus says, with His body and blood and surrender, “Take what is mine so that you may live.”

And that is why Good Friday is so much heavier than we often let it be.

Because sacrifice, in its truest form, is not just loss.

It is love.

Love that does not hold back.
Love that does not protect itself.
Love that gives everything.

And that is exactly what Jesus does.

The Weight of the Cross

Luke tells us that Jesus is led out with criminals, and there is something almost unbearable in the simplicity of that detail. The One through whom all things were made, the One who touched lepers, welcomed children, forgave sinners, and raised the dead, is now marched outside the city as though He were a refuse, another condemned man on His way to die. There is no honor in this moment. No dignity. No public recognition of who He truly is. He is counted among the worst, treated as guilty, placed between the condemned, and put on display for the world to see.

That is part of the cruelty of crucifixion. It was never only about death. It was about humiliation. Rome did not merely want to kill you; Rome wanted to strip you of your humanity before they did. The cross was designed not just to end a life, but to make a spectacle of it, to expose, to shame, to degrade. And so Jesus, the Son of God, is lifted up in public disgrace while the crowd settles into the horror of it as though it were entertainment.

Luke tells us the rulers sneered. The soldiers mocked. The crowd stood watching. Some whispered. Some laughed. Some simply stared. At the foot of the cross, men gambled for His clothes as though His suffering were little more than background noise to their afternoon. And there is something chilling in that scene because it feels so familiar. Human beings have always had a way of normalizing other people’s pain when it costs them nothing to look away. The same voices that once cried out for miracles, once pressed in to be healed, once followed Him down dusty roads in wonder, now join the noise of rejection and death.

And there, in the middle of all of it, bleeding, exposed, exhausted, suspended between heaven and earth, Jesus speaks.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

If we are not careful, we will read that sentence too quickly because we have heard it too often. But there is nothing casual about those words. They are not spoken from a place of comfort or ease. Every syllable is carried on agony. Crucifixion was not simply execution; it was slow suffocation. The body collapses under its own weight, and every breath becomes a battle. To inhale, the condemned must push upward against nails driven through flesh, straining torn muscles, scraping an already shredded back against rough wood, forcing a failing body to rise just enough for air to enter the lungs. To speak at all is to choose pain.

And still, Jesus speaks forgiveness.

Not for the deserving. Not for the repentant. Not for those who have suddenly come to their senses and fallen to their knees in remorse. He speaks forgiveness over the men who drove in the nails, over the soldiers mocking Him, over the religious leaders who handed Him over, over the crowd swept up in bloodlust and fear, over people who, in one way or another, are actively participating in His suffering.

That is what makes the cross so difficult to look at honestly.

Because this is not sentimental love. This is not abstract love. This is not the safe, polished version of love we are so often sold. This is sacrificial love, love that absorbs violence without returning it, love that remains open when it has every reason to close, love that does not curse when it is cursed, does not strike back when it is struck, does not walk away when it is rejected. This is love that stays. Love that keeps giving itself away even when it is not understood, not welcomed, not received.

Because what Jesus is doing on the cross is not merely enduring pain in public. He is stepping underneath a weight that would have crushed us forever.

voices beneath the rubble, humans being buried under a weight they cannot escape. The air is thinning, the light is gone, panic is rising, and every instinct in the body is screaming for rescue. In moments like this, what people need is not theory. They do not need advice shouted from somewhere above. They do not need explanations from a safe distance. When you are trapped under a weight that is crushing the life out of you, you need someone willing to come close enough, strong enough, and loving enough to carry what you cannot carry yourself.

That is what makes the cross so breathtaking.

Because that is exactly what Jesus does.

The Christian story is not the story of humanity climbing its way up to God through effort, morality, religion, or willpower. It is the story of God coming down into the wreckage to rescue people who could never dig themselves out. Humanity lies buried beneath sin, shame, fear, violence, and death, beneath a weight too ancient and too heavy for human strength to move. And Jesus does not stand over us shouting instructions about how to save ourselves. He steps underneath the weight.

That is the cross.

Jesus takes onto Himself what would have crushed us forever. He carries what we could not carry. He absorbs what we could not survive. He steps beneath the full wreckage of human rebellion and sorrow and allows it to come down on Him so that it does not have the final word over us. This is not symbolic sentiment. This is not religious poetry. This is the center of the gospel: the innocent One placing Himself where the guilty should have stood, the Holy One entering the darkness we created, the Son of God choosing to bear in His own body the full consequence of a broken world.

And that is why sacrifice and love can never be separated.

Because love, in its truest form, does not remain at a distance when the weight gets unbearable. Love moves toward the burden. Love steps into the pain. Love shoulders what another person cannot survive alone. The cross is not merely the story of Jesus dying. It is the story of Jesus loving us enough to take the full weight of sin and death onto Himself so that we might live free beneath the mercy of God.

And perhaps that is part of why the cross still confronts us so deeply. Because it reveals a kind of love most of us admire from a distance but struggle to embody up close. A love that does not merely feel compassion, but bleeds for the sake of another. A love that chooses mercy in the very moment when wrath would feel justified. A love so pure, so costly, so self-giving that it can only be described with one word:

holy.

And if you stay there long enough, if you really let yourself stand beneath the shadow of the cross and feel what is happening there, you begin to realize that Good Friday is not simply about how much pain Jesus endured.

It is about how much love He was willing to carry.

Why We Must Not Rush Past Friday

There is a reason so many of us instinctively want to move quickly past Good Friday.

We are people who prefer resolution over tension, answers over silence, healing over grief, and light over darkness. We want the stone rolled away as quickly as possible. We want the tears dried, the victory announced, the hope restored, and the music swelling before we have really sat with what it cost to get there. We love to say, “Sunday is coming,” and thank God it is. Resurrection is real. The tomb will not stay full. Death will not have the final word.

But if we rush too quickly to Sunday, we risk missing what Friday came to reveal.

Because resurrection only shines with its full beauty when you have first stood long enough in the shadow of death. Light only feels like light when you have known the terror of darkness. And love only becomes as breathtaking as it truly is when you have seen what love was willing to endure.

That is why Good Friday matters so deeply.

Good Friday forces us to slow down. It does not let us sprint toward celebration without first passing through sorrow. It calls us to stand still at the foot of the cross and really look. To let the weight of it settle into our bones. To resist the temptation to sentimentalize it, sanitize it, or reduce it to a familiar religious symbol we wear around our necks and reference in songs without ever really trembling before it. Good Friday asks us to stay there long enough for the cross to tell us the truth.

And the cross does tell the truth.

It tells the truth about us.

It tells the truth about the depth of human sin, the violence in the human heart, the cruelty we are capable of justifying, the fear and self-preservation that so easily overtake us. The cross tells the truth about betrayal, cowardice, injustice, and the terrible cost of rebellion against God. It strips away our illusions of innocence and reminds us that the human condition is far darker than we often want to admit.

But the cross also tells the truth about God.

And that truth is even deeper.

Because as dark as human sin really is, the love of God goes deeper still. As devastating as the wound is, His mercy is greater. As crushing as the weight of Friday becomes, it is still not heavier than the heart of Christ. The cross is where God looks directly at the worst of what we have done and the worst of what has been done to us, and instead of turning away, He moves toward us with mercy.

That is why we must not rush.

Because if we do, we will end up celebrating the resurrection without ever fully understanding the love that made resurrection necessary.

And maybe that is part of our problem, not just in church, but in life.

We live in a world that wants everything meaningful without sacrifice.

We want intimacy without vulnerability. We want forgiveness without pain. We want healing without surrender. We want transformation without death. We want love, but only if it can remain convenient, safe, manageable, and cost-effective. We want the beauty of deep human connection without the ache of disappointment. We want reconciliation without having to absorb the wound. We want the miracle without the cross that so often comes before it.

But real love does not work that way.

Real love always costs something.

To love deeply is to suffer deeply. To forgive is to bleed. To remain tender in a world that wounds is to risk being broken open again and again. To stay faithful when it would be easier to shut down, to harden, to protect yourself, or to walk away, that is costly. Anyone who has ever loved a child, stayed in a hard marriage, buried a friend, forgiven betrayal, cared for a sick parent, sat through a long night in a hospital room, or carried someone else’s pain knows this in their bones: love and sacrifice are never far apart.

And the cross tells us that God is not asking us to enter a kind of love He Himself was unwilling to embody.

He did not love us from a distance.

He did not remain safely above our sorrow, shouting comfort from the heavens while leaving us buried beneath the wreckage of sin and death. He entered our suffering. He carried our grief. He bore our shame. He took our violence, our rebellion, our sorrow, and our death into His own body. He gave Himself away, not halfway, not symbolically, not sentimentally, but all the way.

That is the cost of love.

And if you really let Good Friday do its work in you, it will ruin forever the shallow versions of love we so often settle for. It will expose how often we want the rewards of love without the surrender of love, the beauty of redemption without the pain of sacrifice, the joy of Easter without the darkness of Friday. But it will also do something else. It will show you that the deepest love in the universe is not fragile, not theoretical, and not afraid of suffering.

It is the kind of love that stays.

The kind of love that does not turn away when the weight gets unbearable. The kind of love that steps into the wound instead of retreating from it. The kind of love that looks at what is broken, ruined, guilty, ashamed, and dying, and says, “I will carry this for you.”

That is why we must not rush past Friday.

Because before the empty tomb, there was a cross. Before resurrection morning, there was a body broken and blood poured out. Before hope rose from the grave, love descended into the darkest place imaginable and refused to abandon us there.

And if you stay there long enough, if you let yourself really stand beneath the shadow of the cross without rushing to tie it up too neatly, you may begin to understand something that can change your life:

The glory of Easter is not simply that Jesus rose.

It is that love was willing to go that far.

Stay Here a Little Longer

Before the empty tomb, there was a cross. Before resurrection morning broke open the sky, there was a long and dreadful Friday afternoon. Before the songs of victory, before the astonishment of the stone rolled away, before hope came rushing back into the world, there was blood in the dust, a torn body on rough wood, and the silence that follows when it looks like love has lost.

And maybe that is where we need to stay a little longer.

Because most of us are so conditioned to move quickly past pain that we rarely let ourselves feel the full weight of what Jesus carried for us. We hurry to the resolution. We want the comfort, the hope, the resurrection, the reassurance that everything is going to be okay. And all of that is coming. But if we move too quickly, we may never really understand what it cost. We may never feel the coldness of the moment, the heaviness of the sky, the ache of what it means for the Son of God to enter fully into the brokenness of this world and carry it in His own body.

So today, don’t rush.

Stay at the foot of the cross a little longer. Let the scene linger. Let your imagination stand there long enough to feel the darkness pressing in, the grief in the air, the unbearable tension of heaven and earth holding their breath. Let yourself feel, even for a moment, the sorrow of a world that is not as it should be. Let yourself remember that sin is not small, that death is not natural, that betrayal is not harmless, that suffering is not abstract. Let the reality of human brokenness become real enough that the love of Christ becomes more than a church phrase.

Because this is what the cross does.

It teaches us what darkness really is so that we can recognize light when it comes. It teaches us what death really costs so that resurrection can stop being sentimental and become holy again. It teaches us what love truly means by showing us what love was willing to endure. And if we stay here long enough, the cross will begin to say something to us that we may have heard a hundred times before but never fully allowed ourselves to believe:

You are loved all the way.

All the way into your sin.
All the way into your shame.
All the way into your grief.
All the way into your confusion.
All the way into your suffering.
All the way into your death.

Not loved from a distance.
Not loved in theory.
Not loved only when you are clean, strong, faithful, or put together.

Loved here.

Loved in the rubble.
Loved in the darkness.
Loved under the weight.

That is what Good Friday means.

It means the darkest places are not godless places. It means the places in your life that feel shattered, buried, ashamed, or beyond repair are not beyond the reach of Christ. It means Jesus did not merely come to admire you, advise you, or inspire you. He came to carry what would have crushed you. He came to enter what you could not survive alone. He came to love you all the way through.

That is the cost of love.

And God was willing to pay it.

So stay here a little longer.

Not because Friday is the end of the story.
But because if you let Friday do its work in you,
Sunday will mean more than it ever has before.

Prayer

Jesus,
Thank You for not staying distant.
Thank You for stepping into my darkness, my sin, and my suffering.
Thank You for the cross.
Thank You for giving Yourself away so that I could live.
Slow my heart down today.
Keep me from rushing past what You have done.
Teach me to stay near the cross long enough to feel the weight of Your love.
Amen.

John 13: 3–15

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?”he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you

Have you ever had someone let you down in a way that stayed with you?

Not the kind of disappointment you move on from by the next day, but the kind that settles into your chest and lingers there. The kind that catches you off guard weeks or even years later. Maybe it was betrayal. Maybe it was abandonment. Maybe it was someone you trusted speaking against you, walking away from you, or turning cold when you needed them most. Some wounds don’t just live in your memory; they live in your body. Even now, some people can still feel the knife in their back. They can still remember the exact moment they realized, I didn’t see that coming. And somehow it is always the people closest to us who seem capable of leaving the deepest scars. The people at our table. The people we prayed with, worked with, laughed with, believed in. Those are the wounds that cut below the surface.

And it is right there, in that exact kind of human ache, that Jesus begins to show us something breathtaking about who He is.

John 13 does not begin with triumph. It begins in the shadow of betrayal. The room is quiet, but heaven is already leaning in. The next few hours will carry Jesus into the darkest suffering the world has ever known. The machinery of betrayal is already in motion. Judas has already begun drifting into the darkness of what he is about to do. Peter’s bold confidence is only hours away from collapsing into denial. The other disciples, for all their loyalty and love, will scatter in fear. Jesus knows every bit of it. None of it surprises Him. He is not naïve. He is not blind. He is not hoping for the best in some fragile or sentimental way. He knows exactly who is in the room with Him, and He knows exactly what they are about to do.

And then John tells us something profound. Before Jesus picks up the towel, before He pours the water into the basin, before He lowers Himself to the floor, Scripture says that Jesus knew the Father had placed all things under His power, that He had come from God, and that He was returning to God. That detail matters more than we often realize. Jesus kneels not because He is unsure of Himself, but because He is completely secure. He knows who He is. He knows where He came from. He knows where He is going. And because He is not grasping for status, not fighting to preserve His image, not trying to prove Himself to anyone, He is free to stoop low in love.

That is one of the most beautiful and unsettling truths in all of Scripture: real power kneels.

We are used to a different kind of power. We know the kind that dominates, performs, controls, protects itself, and makes sure everyone in the room knows who is in charge. We live in a world that teaches us to climb, to guard our dignity, to manage perception, to stay above the mess. But Jesus, the Son of God, the One through whom all things were made, wraps a towel around His waist and kneels in front of dusty, failing, fragile men. He kneels in front of Peter, knowing Peter will deny even knowing Him. He kneels in front of Thomas, knowing Thomas will struggle to believe. He kneels in front of the others, knowing fear will scatter them. And then, somehow most painfully of all, He kneels in front of Judas.

That image alone is enough to stop you.

Jesus washes the feet of the man who is about to betray Him.

He touches the feet that will walk out the door to sell Him for silver.

He serves the one who is already in the process of handing Him over.

And He does it without flinching.

This is where we begin to see the heart of the Savior in a way that is almost too holy to look at directly. This is where we begin to understand something of the character of God. Jesus does not withdraw His love the moment He sees failure coming. He does not pull back because people are disappointing. He does not become guarded, cold, sarcastic, or emotionally shut down in the face of betrayal. Instead, He moves closer. He lowers Himself. He serves anyway. He loves anyway.

And if we are honest, that is not usually how we respond.

Most of us know what it is like to protect ourselves when we sense hurt coming. We know how to build walls, how to go emotionally numb, how to stop offering tenderness where we no longer feel safe. We know what it is like to decide, sometimes without even saying it out loud, I will never let someone get that close to me again. There is something in all of us that wants pain to make us harder, sharper, less available, less open. Betrayal has a way of trying to disciple us into self-protection. It whispers that the safest way to live is to feel less, trust less, and love less.

But Jesus refuses to let the brokenness around Him determine the posture of His heart.

That is what makes this moment so powerful. Jesus is not simply being nice. He is not modeling generic kindness or sentimental humility. He is revealing the very nature of divine love. He is showing us that the heart of God is not fragile in the way ours often is. God does not become smaller in the face of human failure. He does not recoil from our weakness. He does not stop loving because love will cost Him something. If anything, John 13 shows us that Jesus is most fully Himself not when He is displaying power in the way we expect, but when He is kneeling in the dirt with a towel in His hands.

This is what God is like.

That sentence alone can undo a lifetime of bad theology.

Because so many people imagine God as distant, easily offended, emotionally cold, quick to pull away, quick to expose, quick to shame. But Jesus gives us a different picture. He shows us a God who stoops. A God who serves. A God who is not above the mess of humanity but willing to enter directly into it. A God who loves with full awareness. A God who can look betrayal in the face and still choose mercy. A God whose strength is so secure that He can move low without losing glory.

And that is where this passage begins to press on us personally.

Because Jesus is not just showing us His heart so we can admire it. He is showing us His heart so we can be formed by it.

He is teaching us what love looks like in a world where people fail each other.

He is teaching us what it means to remain soft without becoming weak, to remain humble without losing dignity, to remain loving without becoming naïve. That kind of love is not natural to us. It has to be formed in us by the Spirit of God. It is one thing to love when love is reciprocated. It is another thing entirely to love when it is costly, vulnerable, or unseen. Anyone can serve when they are appreciated. Anyone can stay warm when they are surrounded by loyalty. But to continue loving in the presence of disappointment, to continue serving when your heart has reasons to pull back, to continue offering grace when it would be easier to harden—that is the way of Jesus.

That does not mean there are no boundaries. It does not mean wisdom is unspiritual. It does not mean trust is instantly restored in every relationship. Jesus was never manipulated by people. He was never unclear about reality. He was never confused about what people were capable of. But He also never let the sin of others decide whether He would stop becoming love in the world. That is the deeper invitation here. Not that we become people with no discernment, but that we become people whose wounds do not get the final word.

Some of us need that reminder more than we realize.

Because if we are not careful, the pain of what others have done to us can quietly become a controlling force in our spiritual formation. We start building our life around avoidance. Around control. Around emotional distance. Around the subtle vow that says, I will never be that exposed again. And while that vow may feel protective, it often ends up shrinking the soul. It keeps us from becoming the kind of people Jesus is forming us to be. Healing begins when we let Jesus meet us right there—in the place where disappointment tried to make us smaller—and teach us a different way.

The way of Christ is not denial. It is not pretending wounds don’t hurt. It is not spiritual performance or fake niceness. It is something much deeper and stronger than that. It is the kind of transformed life that can say, What happened to me will not keep me from becoming loving. That is not weakness. That is resurrection life beginning to take shape in a human soul.

And maybe that is why this moment matters so much. Before Jesus goes publicly to the cross, He first kneels privately in a room full of people who are about to fail Him. Before the nails, there is a towel. Before the blood, there is a basin. Before Calvary, there is this quiet, sacred act of kneeling love. It is as if Jesus wants us to understand that the cross is not a departure from the heart of God. It is the full unveiling of it. John 13 gives us the posture that will carry all the way to Golgotha. The same Christ who kneels with a towel will soon stretch out His arms on a cross. The same love that washes feet will soon bleed for the world.

And that means the invitation for us today may be quieter than we expect, but no less sacred.

Maybe holiness today will not look dramatic.

Maybe it will look like choosing tenderness where bitterness would be easier. Maybe it will look like serving your family in a hidden way. Maybe it will look like checking on someone who can offer you nothing in return. Maybe it will look like refusing to let old disappointment make you cynical. Maybe it will look like loving in a way nobody notices but God.

And maybe that is exactly where Christ is being formed in you.

Not in the spotlight.
Not in the applause.
But in the unnoticed places where love kneels.

Prayer

Jesus, You knew who would fail You, and You still knelt. You knew who would betray You, and You still loved. Teach me that kind of love. Heal the places in me that want to harden, pull back, or protect myself from becoming tender again. Form Your heart in me. Teach me to love anyway, to serve anyway, and to reflect the beauty of Your humble strength. Amen.

The vacuum was sitting there like an accusation.

Not in some poetic, cinematic, Oscar-worthy way, just in the middle of ordinary married life, in the kind of room where laundry is never fully done, where a few things are always out of place, and where two young people are trying to figure out how to build a life together without realizing how much of themselves they brought into the room. The house wasn’t on fire. Nobody was dying. Nothing catastrophic had happened. It was just a vacuum. A chore. A simple domestic responsibility.

And somehow, it turned into a fight.

Not a world-ending fight. Not one of those dramatic moments where you wonder if your whole marriage is falling apart. Just one of those painfully ordinary arguments that reveals way more than it should. The kind of fight that starts with something laughably small and ends with both people feeling more exposed than they expected. The kind of moment where what is actually happening has very little to do with what you’re arguing about on the surface.

I did not handle it well.

I was not responding like a mature, godly, emotionally healthy husband. I was defensive, irritated, and quietly convinced that I was somehow being misunderstood or unfairly burdened. Which is just a polished way of saying: I was acting selfish.

The problem was, at the time, I did not think of it as selfishness.

That is what makes selfishness so difficult to deal with. It rarely announces itself honestly. It does not usually arrive looking ugly and obvious. It comes dressed as logic, habit, personality, preference, exhaustion, frustration, “normal,” or “the way things work.” It sounds like, “Why is this suddenly my responsibility?” It sounds like, “This isn’t really my thing.” It sounds like, “That’s not how it worked in my house.” It sounds like, “I don’t understand why this is such a big deal.”

But standing there in that moment, in the middle of an argument over a vacuum cleaner, what was really being exposed had very little to do with housework.

It had everything to do with formation.

Because the truth is, I didn’t just marry Emily.

I brought a whole world into our marriage.

I brought assumptions I didn’t know I had. I brought expectations I had never examined. I brought inherited scripts about what men do, what women do, who carries what, who notices what, who is responsible for what. I brought emotional habits. I brought comfort patterns. I brought blind spots. I brought a version of normal that I had never really held up to the light of Jesus.

And that is how formation works.

Most of what shapes us does not announce itself while it is happening. It just settles into us slowly, quietly, over time, until one day it gets challenged and suddenly we realize something deeper has been living under the surface all along.

I grew up in a home where I was served really well. My mom cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and carried a lot of the unseen weight of family life. She was loving and sacrificial, and like many moms, she made life work in ways I probably did not appreciate nearly enough when I was younger. But what that also meant—without anyone intending harm, was that I was being formed by a certain vision of home and responsibility. I was learning what felt normal before I was ever learning what was healthy. I was absorbing patterns before I was ever evaluating them.

And that’s the thing about so much of our brokenness:

It often begins as unquestioned normal.

Not rebellion.
Not malice.
Not always some dramatic act of sin.

Sometimes it is simply what we inherited without reflection.

And if Jesus never interrupts what you inherited, you will spend your life defending patterns that are quietly deforming you.

That is true in marriage.
It is true in parenting.
It is true in leadership.
It is true in church.
And it is absolutely true in the spiritual life.

Which is why, years later, I still find myself running into moments where some old thing resurfaces and I think:

I thought I was done with this.

I thought I was done with that insecurity.
I thought I was done with that fear.
I thought I was done with that selfishness.
I thought I was done with needing control.
I thought I was done with reacting that way.
I thought I had already grown past this.

And yet there it is again.

Same struggle.
Different season.
Same root.
Different fruit.

And if you’ve ever felt that, you know how discouraging it can be. You start wondering if you’re actually changing at all. You start asking whether your spiritual growth is real or just cosmetic. You start to feel the ache of repetition and wonder why the same issue keeps circling back around in different clothes.

But what if the return of the issue does not mean you are failing?

What if it means Jesus is still forming you?

That is where I think Palm Sunday becomes more revealing than we often realize.

Because Palm Sunday is not just about celebration.

It is also about expectation.

And maybe more than that, it is about what gets exposed when Jesus refuses to become what we wanted Him to be.

Selfishness Hides Deeper Than We Think

One of the most uncomfortable truths in the spiritual life is that selfishness is usually deeper and more disguised than we think it is.

Most people imagine selfishness in its loudest forms. We think of arrogance, narcissism, domination, cruelty, greed, and manipulation. And yes, selfishness can certainly look like that. But more often, especially in people who are trying to be decent and faithful, it shows up in subtler forms. It hides in entitlement. It hides in defensiveness. It hides in emotional immaturity. It hides in assumptions. It hides in the instinct to interpret life primarily through the lens of how things are affecting me.

That’s what makes it so difficult to confront.

Because selfishness often survives not in our worst intentions, but in our most unquestioned instincts.

It survives in the way we react when we are inconvenienced. It survives in the assumptions we carry into relationships. It survives in our frustration when people do not meet our internal expectations. It survives in our instinct to protect ourselves first, justify ourselves first, defend ourselves first, and interpret reality from the center of our own emotional experience.

That’s not always because we are monsters.

Sometimes it’s because we are deeply unformed.

And those are not the same thing.

That vacuum fight mattered because it revealed something about me that I would not have seen if all I ever did was think of selfishness in dramatic terms. I was not trying to be cruel. I was not trying to dominate my wife. I was not consciously trying to be unloving. But I was still operating from a world where I had quietly learned that certain responsibilities would probably be carried by someone else, and when that expectation got challenged, I felt friction.

That friction mattered.

Because often the thing that irritates you is not the real issue. It is the flashlight.

It shows you where your formation is still incomplete.

And if you are willing to let Jesus search you there, what feels frustrating can become holy.

Marriage did that for me. Parenting did it even more.

Because if marriage reveals selfishness, parenting puts it under a microscope and then shines a floodlight on it.

Children have a way of dismantling the illusion that your life belongs only to you. They expose your impatience, your comfort addiction, your need for control, your emotional limits, and your ability, or inability, to lay yourself down for the good of someone else. Parenting has a way of showing you whether your life is actually surrendered or simply arranged around your preferences.

And I was also shaped by examples that normalized a kind of disengagement. I remember hearing men say things like they had never changed a diaper in their life, and it was said with this weird sense of pride, as if distance from the sacrificial labor of family life somehow communicated strength. That kind of thing gets into you if you’re not careful. It forms expectations before you even know they’re there.

So then there I was, in marriage and fatherhood, standing in front of a deeper question than I realized:

Am I going to repeat what formed me?
Or am I going to let Jesus reform me?

That is discipleship.

Not just learning more Bible verses.
Not just attending church more often.
Not just getting better at Christian language.

Discipleship is what happens when Jesus starts touching the parts of your life you thought were just “normal.”

That is where sanctification gets real.

Because Jesus is not just trying to forgive what is obviously sinful. He is trying to redeem what has been unconsciously shaping you.

And that is really good news.

Because it means He is not done with you at the level of your behavior alone. He is after the roots. He is after the assumptions. He is after the places where selfishness has blended so naturally into your personality that you no longer know where one ends and the other begins.

That’s why I can say with conviction now:

Jesus doesn’t just forgive sin. He redeems patterns.

He heals what was normalized.
He interrupts what was inherited.
He breaks what we assumed would always define us.

And if that is true in marriage and family life, it is also true in worship.

Which is exactly what Palm Sunday exposes.

Palm Sunday Shows How Selfishness Can Shape Worship

Palm Sunday is one of the most beautiful scenes in the Gospels, but it is also one of the most revealing.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem and the city erupts. The crowd is loud, energized, emotional, and public in its praise. Cloaks are spread on the road. Palm branches are waved in the air. The people are shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” and “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” It is one of those moments in Scripture where everything feels charged with meaning. It is royal. Messianic. Joyful. Symbolic. Hopeful.

And yet under all that praise, something deeper is happening.

The crowd is not just celebrating Jesus.

They are projecting onto Him.

They are not just worshiping.

They are expecting.

They want a certain kind of Messiah. They want a liberator, yes, but a liberator who will solve the problem they think matters most. They want a king who will overthrow Rome, restore power, reestablish national dignity, and move in the direction they were already hoping things would go. They want Jesus, but they want a Jesus who fits inside their preferred vision of salvation.

And that is why Palm Sunday matters so much.

Because it shows us that it is possible to be full of worship language while still being deeply governed by self-interest.

The crowd says, “Hosanna,” but underneath the palm branches is another message:

“Jesus, be what we need You to be.”

And if we are honest, that is still one of the deepest temptations in the spiritual life.

We want a Jesus who validates our expectations.

We want a Jesus who moves the way we think He should move. We want a Jesus who lines up with our instincts, our politics, our wounds, our timelines, our emotional preferences, our vision of justice, our assumptions about leadership, and our personal hopes for how life should unfold.

And when He doesn’t, many people don’t know what to do with Him.

Because selfishness is not just wanting your own way.

It is the instinct to make everything orbit around your expectations.

That includes your marriage.
That includes your friendships.
That includes your church.
That includes your leaders.
And yes, that can even include Jesus.

This is where I think a lot of people quietly get stuck in modern church life.

We have become very good at naming what is wrong with everyone else. We are fluent in disappointment. We are articulate about failure. We know how to narrate what people did wrong, how they let us down, how they disappointed us, how they offended us, how they did not meet what we expected of them. And to be clear, sometimes those things are real. Sometimes people really do fail us. Sometimes leaders really do disappoint us. Sometimes churches really do wound us.

But if we are not careful, disappointment can become a kind of spiritual narcotic.

It can keep us externally focused while inwardly stagnant.

And this is where I think we have to talk honestly about church hurt.

Because church hurt is real.

Let me say that clearly: church hurt is real.

I am a pastor. I care deeply about helping wounded people heal. I believe churches and leaders should be held accountable. I believe spiritual abuse is real. I believe manipulation is real. I believe hypocrisy can do deep damage. I am not interested in dismissing any of that.

But I also want to say something with equal clarity:

Church hurt can become a trap.

And I can say that not because I’m detached from it, but because I know it intimately.

I have been slandered. I have been gossiped about. I have lost community. I have lost livelihood. I have had my name dragged through the mud. I have felt what it is like to be deeply wounded inside the very world that was supposed to be marked by grace, truth, love, and integrity. I know church hurt. In some ways, I am an expert on it—not because I studied it from a distance, but because I survived it.

And that is exactly why I know how dangerous it can become.

Because what begins as real pain can slowly harden into an interpretive lens through which you see everything.

And once that happens, you stop asking the most important question.

Instead of asking, “What is Jesus trying to form in me?” you begin asking almost exclusively, “Who failed me? Who hurt me? Who was wrong? Who should have done better?”

Now listen carefully: those are not meaningless questions. Sometimes they matter. Sometimes they need to be named. Sometimes they are part of truth-telling and healing.

But they are not the only questions.

And if they become the main questions, you will stay trapped.

Because the trap of church hurt is not just the wound itself.

The trap is when the wound becomes your permanent lens.

The trap is when offense becomes identity.

The trap is when pain becomes permission to stop being formed.

The trap is when disappointment with others becomes a substitute for awareness of your own soul.

And I say that carefully, because I know how easy it is to live there.

There was a season of my life when I was absolutely paralyzed by it. I had all the evidence. All the receipts. All the reasons. And yet, instead of moving toward healing and surrender, I stayed emotionally stuck in what had been done to me. I was not just hurt. I was held hostage by the hurt. It affected how I saw people, how I saw church, how I saw leadership, how I saw trust, how I saw my future, and if I’m honest, how I saw God.

And that is why I now believe one of the enemy’s favorite strategies is not always to destroy you dramatically.

Sometimes it is simply to keep you offended long enough that you never become free.

Because if he can keep you offended, he can keep you frozen.

If he can keep you frozen, he can keep you ineffective.

If he can keep you ineffective, he can keep you from joy, peace, growth, intimacy, courage, clarity, and usefulness in the Kingdom of God.

That is not a small thing.

And that is why I want to say something that may feel strong but I believe is true:

If claiming church hurt becomes the thing that keeps you from surrender, it has become part of the selfishness cycle.

Not because the pain was fake.

But because now it is protecting you from formation.

That is what Palm Sunday exposes.

Because the crowd is not just wrong about Jesus. They are attached to a version of Him that protects them from surrender.

And we still do that.

We do it with Jesus.
We do it with church.
We do it with leaders.
We do it with politics.
We do it with people we disagree with.
We do it with the pastor we don’t like, the church leader who offended us, the political figure we can’t stand, the person who disappointed us, and the system that didn’t deliver what we hoped.

And somewhere in the middle of all that outrage and disappointment, Jesus keeps asking the deeper question:

What am I trying to form in you?

That is the question that begins freedom.

And it is also the question that requires courage.

Because it is much easier to hold a palm branch of expectation than it is to lay it down.

Jesus Forms Us in Seasons, Not Perfection

One of the reasons people get discouraged in spiritual growth is because they assume maturity should feel more final than it usually does.

We imagine that if God really dealt with something in us, we should never have to face it again. We assume that if we are genuinely growing, old struggles should disappear permanently. We think maturity should eventually feel like arriving at some internal place where the same themes no longer resurface.

But that is not how life works.

And it is not how creation works either.

From the very beginning, God built seasons into the world. Day and night. Planting and harvest. Summer and winter. Genesis says the lights in the heavens were given to mark seasons, days, and years. Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything under heaven—a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to tear down and a time to build.

That means God did not create a flat world.

He created a rhythmic world.

A returning world.
A cyclical world.
A world where growth often happens through revisiting, not just escaping.

So why would we assume spiritual growth would be any different?

Why do we keep expecting our souls to develop in a straight line when even creation itself grows in seasons?

That misunderstanding creates so much unnecessary discouragement.

Because when the same issue returns, people often assume they are failing.

But maybe what feels like repetition is not failure.

Maybe it is deeper formation.

That is what I mean by the selfishness cycle.

Not that you are doomed to repeat the exact same thing forever, but that the same root often shows up in different forms in different seasons.

In one season, selfishness may look like entitlement.

In another, control.

In another, insecurity.

In another, self-protection.

In another, criticism.

In another, victimhood.

In another, emotional withdrawal disguised as wisdom.

Same root.
Different fruit.

And every time it comes back around, you are faced with a choice.

You can either say, “I can’t believe I’m here again,” or you can ask, “What is Jesus trying to form in me at this depth?”

That question changes everything.

Because it moves you from shame to awareness.

It moves you from self-condemnation to participation.

It moves you from feeling defeated to becoming curious.

And curiosity, when surrendered to God, can become one of the holiest postures in the spiritual life.

Because it allows you to stop performing progress and start receiving formation.

That is one of the great dangers of perfectionism in the spiritual life. It makes you think the goal is to appear healed rather than to be transformed. It makes you think maturity means never revisiting pain, never being triggered, never having to deal with old roots in new seasons. But that is not how Jesus works.

Jesus is patient enough to revisit the same root in a deeper way.

He is kind enough to expose what still needs healing.

He is loving enough not to leave you where you are.

And that means growth often feels slower than we want, messier than we expected, and less impressive than we imagined.

But it is still real.

That is why I keep coming back to this truth:

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

If you think growth means never struggling again, you will either become fake or discouraged.

You will either hide your real condition under spiritual language, or you will despair every time something resurfaces.

But if you understand that Jesus forms us in seasons, then you can have enough grace to keep going without losing honesty.

You can say:

I see it.
I own it.
I surrender it.
And I trust Jesus to keep doing deeper work in me.

That is maturity.

Not pretending you’ve arrived.

But refusing to stop being formed.

Every Season Will Require Something Different From You

If life with Jesus is seasonal, then every season is going to require something different from you.

And I think most of what God asks of us can be understood through two words:

surrender and stewardship.

Some seasons are seasons of surrender.

Other seasons are seasons of stewardship.

And most of spiritual maturity is learning how to recognize which one you are in and how to respond faithfully.

Seasons of Surrender

Jesus says in Luke 9:23, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”

That word daily is everything.

Because surrender is not a one-time event.

It is not just the dramatic moment when you first came to Jesus. It is not just one altar call, one retreat, one worship night, one emotional breakthrough, or one hard conversation that changed your life.

Surrender is a way of life.

And there are seasons where Jesus will ask you to lay things down again.

Lay down your pride.
Lay down your expectations.
Lay down your need to be vindicated.
Lay down your right to stay offended.
Lay down your fantasy that everyone else needs to get fixed before you can become free.
Lay down your bitterness.
Lay down your curated version of Jesus.
Lay down your palm branch of expectation.

That is what Palm Sunday confronts.

The crowd wanted a King who would validate their hopes and move according to their script. But Jesus came humbly, riding on a donkey, refusing to become the kind of Messiah they had already decided they wanted. The real invitation of Palm Sunday is not simply to celebrate Jesus.

It is to surrender to the kind of King He actually is.

That is harder.

But it is also where freedom begins.

Seasons of Stewardship

Other seasons feel different.

Sometimes life is fruitful. Sometimes there is provision, momentum, blessing, opportunity, joy, clarity, and growth. Sometimes you are not in survival mode. Sometimes there is abundance, not lack.

And those seasons come with their own spiritual invitation.

Because when life is painful, the question is often:

Will I trust God in what I have lost?

But when life is fruitful, the question changes:

Will I stay faithful with what I have been given?

That is stewardship.

Jesus says, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Not impressive servant.
Not influential servant.
Not polished servant.
Faithful servant.

That means every season matters.

The painful ones.
The fruitful ones.
The confusing ones.
The rebuilding ones.
The hidden ones.
The joyful ones.

Every season carries an invitation.

In seasons of surrender, Jesus asks for deeper trust.

In seasons of stewardship, Jesus asks for greater faithfulness.

But either way, the deeper invitation is the same:

Let Him form you.

Not just survive the season.

Not just analyze the season.

Not just complain about the season.

Let Jesus use the season.

That is where the real work happens.

And I think that is where this lands for me.

Because in the end…

It’s not about the vacuum.

Not really.

It is about what was buried under the vacuum.

It is not really about the church hurt.

It is about what was buried under the church hurt.

It is not really about the leader you dislike, the pastor who offended you, the political figure who frustrates you, the person who disappointed you, or the church experience that did not go the way you wanted.

It is about what gets exposed in you through all of it.

That is the deeper invitation.

Not to spend your life endlessly diagnosing what is wrong with everyone around you, but to face your own selfishness cycle with courage, honesty, and strength.

To ask:

What does God want to form in me through this?

That is a very different question.

And it is the kind of question that actually leads somewhere.

It leads to surrender.
It leads to freedom.
It leads to growth.
It leads to peace.
It leads to joy.
It leads to spiritual progress that is real, not performative.

So maybe this Palm Sunday, the invitation is simpler than we think.

Maybe the invitation is to lay down your palm branch of expectation.

Lay it down on Jesus.
Lay it down on the people around you.
Lay it down on the leader you don’t like.
Lay it down on the church that disappointed you.
Lay it down on the life you thought you would have by now.

And in that surrender, find freedom.

Because when Jesus really transforms you, you are no longer trapped by offense.

You are no longer paralyzed by hurt.

You are no longer defined by what was done to you.

You are no longer ruled by the old cycle.

You are being formed.

And that is where real joy lives.

That is where peace begins.

That is where growth becomes possible.

That is where Palm Sunday stops being a moment of emotional projection and becomes what it was always meant to be:

A surrender to the King you actually need.

And that is very good news.

Day 17 – Weakness Is Not Failure

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:9

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

We spend a lot of energy trying to look strong.
Competent. In control. Fine.

But the wilderness teaches a different lesson:
God works through honesty, not image.

Weakness is not failure.
It’s reality.

Fasting makes this obvious. So does fatigue. So does grief. So does uncertainty. And instead of meeting us with disappointment, God meets us with grace.

You don’t have to impress God to be loved by Him.

Practice:
Name one area where you feel weak right now. Instead of fixing it, offer it to God in prayer as it is.

Prayer:
God, I’m tired of pretending to be stronger than I am.
Meet me in my weakness.
Let Your grace be enough today.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
Where might God be inviting me to stop pretending and start trusting?

Day 18 – Choosing the Harder Good

Scripture: Luke 4:5–8

The temptation isn’t just to do something wrong.
It’s to get the right outcome the wrong way.

Power without obedience.
Results without surrender.
Success without trust.

Jesus chooses the slower road. The harder road. The faithful road.

Sometimes the most spiritual decision is not the most efficient one.

Practice:
Choose one small, harder good today, have the honest conversation, do the unseen act of service, take the slower path, tell the truth gently instead of avoiding it.

Prayer:
Jesus, help me choose faithfulness over shortcuts.
Teach me to trust Your way, even when it costs more.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
Where am I tempted to trade obedience for convenience?

Day 19 – Remembering Who You Are

Scripture: Luke 4:9–12

Every temptation begins with a question about identity:
“If you are the Son of God…”

Not are you.
If you are.

The wilderness always tries to make you forget who you are.

Jesus doesn’t prove Himself. He rests in who He already is.

So much of our striving comes from trying to earn what God has already given: belovedness.

Practice:
Write this sentence somewhere you can see it today: “I am God’s beloved child.” Read it out loud at least once.

Prayer:
Father, remind me who I am.
Free me from the need to prove myself.
Help me live from Your love, not for it.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
Where do I feel pressure to prove myself instead of resting in God’s love?

Day 20 – Angels Came and Attended Him

Scripture: Luke 4:13; Mark 1:13

After the wilderness, after the testing, after the hunger, help comes.

Not always when we want it.
Not always how we expect it.
But God does not abandon us in hard places.

Even Jesus is cared for.

You were never meant to do this alone.

Practice:
Let someone help you today. Receive, don’t resist, whether it’s encouragement, prayer, or practical help.

Prayer:
God, thank You that You see me in my weakness.
Help me receive care instead of always carrying everything myself.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
Who might God be sending to support me?

Day 21 – Coming Back with Clarity

Scripture: Luke 4:14

“Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.”

The wilderness doesn’t last forever.
But it changes you.

Jesus comes back clearer. Stronger. More focused. More rooted.

The goal of Lent isn’t just endurance.
It’s transformation.

What God does in hidden places shapes what we do in public ones.

Practice:
Write down one thing God has been teaching you these last weeks. Thank Him for it.

Prayer:
Spirit of God, thank You for meeting me in the quiet and the hard places.
Carry this work forward in me.
Lead me with Your power and grace.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
What is different in me because I’ve been walking this road with God?

Scripture: Luke 4:3–4

The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.

Temptation doesn’t usually start with evil.
It starts with something reasonable.

“You’re hungry. Fix it.”
“You’re tired. Take control.”
“You’re hurting. Numb it.”

The enemy rarely says, “Rebel against God.”
He says, “There’s an easier way.”

Jesus doesn’t argue. He doesn’t panic. He doesn’t perform.
He answers with Scripture, slow, grounded, rooted truth.

The wilderness reveals what voices we trust most.

Practice:
Write down one temptation you face regularly, not just big sins, but small escapes. Next to it, write one line of Scripture or truth that speaks to it.

Prayer:
Jesus, teach me to recognize the lies that sound reasonable.
Anchor me in what is true.
Give me strength to choose trust over shortcuts.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
What voice am I most likely to follow when I’m tired or stressed?

Scripture: Luke 4:1–2

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

The wilderness was not a detour.
It was not a mistake.
It was not punishment.

Jesus is led there.

We usually assume that if life gets hard, something has gone wrong. But Scripture tells a different story. Sometimes the Spirit leads us into places that strip us down, slow us down, and show us what we’re really leaning on.

The wilderness is where illusions fall apart.
It’s where false strength gets exposed.
It’s where real trust gets formed.

Jesus doesn’t go there empty. He goes there full of the Spirit. And He comes out with clarity, authority, and direction.

Lent is not about chasing discomfort.
It’s about letting God use it.

Practice:
Take a longer walk today, somewhere quiet if possible. Don’t bring headphones. Let your body feel the slowness. Pay attention to what surfaces in the quiet.

Prayer:
Spirit of God, if You lead me into hard places,
teach me to trust You there.
Form in me what comfort never could.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
Where might God be forming me through difficulty instead of avoiding it?

Scripture: Mark 6:31

“Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

Even Jesus invites His disciples away from the crowds.

Margin is not laziness.
It is love for your soul.

A life without margin eventually becomes a life without listening. We get reactive. Tired. Spiritually thin.

Fasting, silence, and rest are ways of rebuilding holy space into our lives, not just for Lent, but for the long road of following Jesus.

This is not about doing less for the sake of doing less.
It’s about living from presence instead of pressure.

Practice:
Plan one small rhythm of margin you can keep after Lent, weekly quiet time, a screen-free evening, a regular walk with God.

Prayer:
Jesus, You invite me to rest.
Teach me to receive that gift.
Help me build a life where I can hear You.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
What rhythm might God be inviting me to carry forward?

Scripture: Psalm 119:105

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

We often read Scripture to get information.
But Scripture is meant to form us.

Not quickly. Not efficiently. But slowly. Honestly. Deeply.

Fasting from hurry makes space for God’s Word to do its work, not just telling us what to do, but showing us who God is and who we are becoming.

You don’t need to read more.
You need to listen better.

Practice:
Read a short passage today slowly. Read it twice. Notice one word or phrase that stands out. Sit with it.

Prayer:
God, slow me down in Your Word.
Let it shape me, not just inform me.
Teach me to listen as I read.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
What word or phrase is God inviting me to carry with me?

Scripture: Psalm 27:14

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

Waiting feels like wasted time.
But in Scripture, waiting is active trust.

We are used to quick answers and instant solutions. Fasting teaches us something countercultural: I don’t have to fix everything right now.

Waiting stretches us.
It reveals what we trust.
It teaches us to listen instead of rush.

Sometimes God changes our situation.
Sometimes He changes us while we wait.

Practice:
Resist one urge today to hurry or fix something immediately. Offer that waiting to God as a prayer.

Prayer:
Lord, I don’t like waiting.
Teach me to trust You in it.
Give me strength to be patient and attentive.
Amen.

Listen for this today:
What might God be doing in me while I wait?