I’m hopeful that the example of Gaius - whose generosity was testified to by complete strangers (3 John 1:5-6) - fuels our own generosity. As John writes: “we ought to support people like these” (v. 8). You can give here.]

Pillar Two: A Multigenerational Vision

2 Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul. 3 For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in the truth.

Here’s the situation behind these verses. An apostle like John would invest in a region — for John, the latter part of his life was largely spent caring for, shepherding, and protecting the churches around Ephesus — and then people would travel back and forth carrying updates and news. Remember, no phones, no Facebook. When somebody moved away, you genuinely didn’t know how they were doing until a letter or a traveler arrived.

So some brothers came to John and gave a report about Gaius, and the report was: he’s faithful. He’s walking in the truth. And John rejoiced.

This is a deeply human moment. When we left the church we planted in Denver and moved to Nashville, I remember going back for the first time. It was basically a tour of people. “Oh — you’re doing okay. You’re still faithful to the gospel. You had prayed about getting pregnant, and now I’m holding your baby. You’d been diagnosed with cancer, and God healed you.” Unbelievable to see them, to be with them. In some small way, I got to taste of the joy John is feeling here.

And then he says it. One of the greatest little lines in all of Scripture, and one of the tragedies of 3 John never getting taught is that this verse gets overlooked:

4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

Consider the depth of that sentence. Every one of us has an “I have no greater joy than ______” running inside us. It’s what we daydream about. What we wish for. What we find ourselves fantasizing about on I-65 when we see the Powerball is up to $650 million. Recently for me, as I’ve prepared for the return of college football on the precipice of Autumn, it’s been something like, “I have no greater joy than the South Carolina Gamecocks (my alma mater) to prove all the doubters wrong and make it to the College Football Playoff.”

We all fill in the blank with something. And John fills it in with the next generation. His greatest joy isn’t even really centered on him. It’s that his spiritual children are walking in the truth. His multigenerational investment is bearing fruit that will outlive him.

There’s a famous little quote — it’s been attributed to about a dozen different guys, but a truly beautiful line reflected in John’s posture: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Contending against A Culture of Doom

Now, notice the radical juxtaposition with our cultural moment, because much of our environment is marked by anxiety about the future.

Recently, a survey of ten thousand 16-to-25-year-olds found that 56% agreed humanity is doomed. And when we get anxious, we get self-centered. Generosity — especially generosity toward a future you won’t see — is nearly impossible when you feel like everything is spiraling and there’s no hopeful future to invest in.

This is not a modern phenomenon. In Denver I heard it constantly: “I could never bring a child into this world. The world probably won’t even be around in five years.” I was hearing that back in 2011. Back in 1969, there was a famous valedictorian speech titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax” that opened with the line that our days as a species on this planet were, at that moment, numbered. The speaker, describing herself as an “ex-potential parent,” concluded the most humane thing she could do was have no children at all. People were saying it in 1798, when Thomas Malthus argued that population would always mathematically outrun the food supply. Every generation, the catastrophe changes. The conclusion never does.

And against all of it, C.S. Lewis’s counsel about living under the atomic bomb still stands: “if the bomb comes, let it find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, bathing the children, chatting with our friends — not huddled together like frightened sheep.”

Circumstances and God’s Character

My undergraduate degree is in history — my standing joke is that you never get hired for that, but you do learn a few helpful facts. And here’s one: if anybody in the span of history ever had justification to freak out and look after only himself, it was John.

He’s living in a first-century Roman context where his faith is illegal. Get the wrong leader angry and you would be burned alive. And yet John has such confidence in the character, nature, and faithfulness of God that he is investing his life, pouring out his life, giving away his life — for the next generation.

That’s not naive positivity. It’s genuine hopefulness. Chesterton said hope means hoping when everything is hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. What John models is a “truthful optimism” — a hopefulness rooted not in the circumstances of the news cycle, but in the character and faithfulness of God. Who God has been, He will be, until He deems it time to make all things new. One of the most striking ways we can be revolutionaries in this cultural moment is to manifest a non-anxious presence rooted in exactly that reality.

A few weeks ago, a non-Christian friend was over at my house and remarked about how I have so many kids, and then he commented about my neighbor who also has even more kids than us. “Is that guy a Christian too?” Yeah, as a matter of fact. His verbatim response: “Man — it’s only the Christians who are willing to have lots of kids, it seems like.”

I found that a fascinating observation. Not a mandate — but a tell. A confidence that the future is bright, not because of anything in the feed, but because of the character of God. Whether it’s physical or spiritual children, may we find no greater joy than investing in their future because the future belongs to God, and we want to do our part in preparing them to live fully and faithfully when their moment comes.

This non-anxious, multigenerational hopefulness is what healthy families, churches and communities are marked by. And for the anxious, may the words of E.B. White (in writing to a man who was sure the world was about to end in 1973) comfort you:

“Hang onto your hat. Hang onto your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E.B. White”

I’m hopeful that the example of Gaius - whose generosity was testified to by complete strangers (3 John 1:5-6) - fuels our own generosity. As John writes: “we ought to support people like these” (v. 8). You can give here.]

Pillar #1: Love that is Abundant and Clear

1 The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth.

“The elder” is John’s reference to himself. As one of the first followers of Jesus — a man who personally knew Him, learned from Him, walked in His ways, and sat under His authority — John was commissioned and sent out by Jesus to shepherd the early church: feeding, leading, protecting the movement so it would remain true to its founder.

That’s actually one of the many reasons we trust the Bible itself — the New Testament was written by men like John who had a personal relationship with Jesus, or by those who learned directly from someone who did. When we hear from John, we really are hearing from Jesus.

And then: “to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth.”

We don’t know much about Gaius. There are three other men named Gaius in the New Testament, but we don’t think any of them are this guy — Gaius was an extremely common name in the Roman Empire, like Joe or Steve today. So he was likely a standalone man, and we know almost nothing about him.

Except one thing. John really loved Gaius.

How do we know? He tells him. Over and over again. Right there in verse one. And then he calls him beloved again in verse two. And again in verse five. And again in verse eleven.

That’s kind of wild when you think about it. This entire book is fifteen verses — 296 words — and John keeps stopping to tell his friend that he is loved.

Why? Was John lacking for content? Was this like back when I was in high school, and I had to hit a 500-word count and I wrote “The Catcher in the Rye is a book about a man who has a coming-of-age experience in The Catcher in the Rye?”

No. In the first century, the prime value in letter-writing was efficiency — writing was expensive, difficult, arduous. You said what needed saying as economically as possible. Which makes it all the more astounding that the letters of the New Testament like this one put such regular emphasis not only on solid doctrine but energy and effort on persons and love.

Here we come to our first pillar of a life well-lived from 3 John: Healthy families, healthy churches, healthy communities are marked by a love that is abundant and clear.

Abundance

This past Summer, my second daughter turned nine, and on birthdays our kids pick the dinner. She wanted lasagna — my wife makes it once a year, and it is the absolute best.

So we’re sitting at her birthday dinner. We’re a decently big family — there are six of us — and the pan of lasagna is getting smaller and smaller. And you can start to see everybody positioning against one another. Who’s getting seconds? Who’s getting thirds? Don’t reach in with your hand too quickly or you might get a knife to the palm in the process. The lasagna is growing increasingly scarce…until my wife (thanks be to God) makes this amazing statement: “Hey, get as much as you want. There’s a second pan right over there.”

She had made a second pan. And you could watch the whole table go from competition to rest. There’s plenty to go around.

That’s the way love is meant to work in a home. Love is not scarce. It’s not a contest. But many grew up in environments where love operated like a limited resource. Scarcity, not abundance. Older brother got the love because he was bigger, faster, stronger and smarter, while younger brother received little because all the love was gone. There was a winner and a loser, and consequently everybody lost.

That’s not a healthy environment, and fortunately God’s love knows no such limits. You can be extravagantly loved, I can be extravagantly loved, and your co-worker can be extravagantly loved, and there’s still more lasagna on the table. There is no end to His love.

Clarity

Then there’s clarity rather than mystery.

In my work now, I spend my days counseling and coaching leaders, and one of my favorite questions to ask is: “Did you know you were loved growing up?”

If they say yes — and I hope they do — I follow with: “How did you know?”

It amazes me how often the answer requires detective work. They’ll think for a while. “Well… they had their own way of showing it.” Or: “If I did really well, they’d give me something.” Or: “I remember this one time at a party, my dad had drunk more than usual, and he called me over in front of his friend and told him how great I’d done in sports.”

It reminds me of a scene back in The Office where Pam puts her art up at a show, vulnerably, and as soon as she steps away from the co-workers who have come to support her, Michael tells the group: “I would never say this to her face, but Pam’s a wonderful person and a gifted artist,” to which Oscar replies “Why wouldn’t you say that to her face?!”

When somebody has to be Sherlock Holmes — piecing together clues to arrive at the conclusion “I’m fairly certain I was loved” — something has gone wrong. And it is so other than what we see in this letter, where John just keeps saying it.

Gaius never had to wonder what John felt about him. Yet far too often, the people closest to us can often wonder what we actually feel about them.

The Heart of the Father

All of this points to something bigger than language or techniques — it points to the heart of God.

His love is abundant — “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.” And His love is clear — the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is the most explicit expression of love in history. He doesn’t make us guess, but in His kindness communicates it over and over again. Because that’s really what we need, don’t we?

So here’s a question to consider: Do the people closest to you know what you feel about them — or is there scarcity and mystery to your love? Don’t let the people you love the most have to wonder what you feel toward them, but cultivate environments of abundant and clear love.

I’m hopeful that the example of Gaius - whose generosity was testified to by complete strangers (3 John 1:5-6) fuels our own generosity. As John writes: “we ought to support people like these” (v. 8). You can give here.]

Family Values in the Kitchen

My family and I live in Franklin, TN. We moved here from Denver, CO several years ago. There were a diversity of factors that landed us in Franklin, but one friend in particular who moved here before us made a significant impact in our process.

I knew him professionally before I knew him personally — we had a few meetings in coffee shops and offices. Then he invited my family over to his house to eat and watch football.

When we came over, he invited me into the kitchen. That’s when you’re actually friends with somebody, right? When you go from the foyer into the kitchen. And there on the side of the fridge, his wife (who is an extremely gifted artist) had written out their family values in calligraphy. Beautiful.

*Here’s what marks our family. One, two, three, four, five, six.*

In many ways, that’s exactly what 3 John is. It’s the hidden heart of the movement — hidden because most of us don’t even know it’s in our Bibles — and it hands us six pillars of a life well-lived for the gospel. These are incredible values to give guidance to the kind of lives any intentional individual would want to live.

Two Kinds of Letters

I’m writing this not too long after the Fourth of July that celebrated America’s 250th birthday. With this milestone, my entire family dove deep into Founding Fathers history. My wife and I binge-watched an entire series about John Adams. And if you’ve ever gone back into the history of the founding of our nation, one of the things you learn about these guys is that they wrote. A lot.

Whether it was two hundred years ago or last Tuesday, we find that people write two kinds of letters: there are letters meant to be read publicly and there are letters meant to be read privately.

We do the same thing. There’s the email you write knowing the whole company will read it, and there’s the text you send a friend at 11pm with a gif that borders on maybe-funny, maybe-not-appropriate. One is polished for an audience and the other is just unfiltered. But the latter reflects more of the reality of who the man actually is.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are a famous example. Jefferson was Adams’s vice president while actively working to undermine him, and the falling out was so severe they barely spoke for decades. Then, near the end of their lives, they started writing to each other again. Adams opened the door in 1813: “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” What followed was 158 letters between two old men in their seventies and eighties — grief, theology, aging, books, their revolution, whether the country would hold. You can buy the collection on Amazon today. It’s about 700 pages. And it’s a window into their hearts that no public document could ever be.

When you read a letter that was really meant for private communication, you get a unique glimpse into somebody’s heart. Their affection. Their transparency. The kind of person they really are.

Hold all of that in your heart and mind, because it’s the doorway into some categories that help us make greater sense of what this little letter of 3 John is all about.

A First-Century Text Message

3 John is the shortest book in the entire Bible. Fifteen verses. 296 words. And at its heart, it’s simply one friend writing to another friend.

The author is John — the disciple, one of the Twelve, the one who leaned in close at the last supper. John wrote five books of the New Testament: the Gospel of John, which tells us about the life of Jesus; Revelation, which tells us about the end of the world; and sandwiched between those two enormous books, three little letters. Scholars believe 1, 2, and 3 John were likely written and delivered together, and you can picture them as concentric circles, each one smaller and more personal than the last. 1 John confronts a major heresy called Gnosticism threatening the whole movement around Ephesus. 2 John addresses a specific issue in a specific church. And then you get to 3 John — and it’s basically John texting his friend Gaius: *What’s up, my friend? I’ve got a few things on my heart to tell you.*

The values in the kitchen. The text messages on the phone. This is an intimate glimpse of an Apostle’s heart to help his friend, Gaius, live fully and faithfully.

What follows are six pillars of a life well-lived from the Bible’s shortest book.'

The idea of it is significant, yet simple: servants of society (pastors, educators, medical professionals, non-profit leaders, etc.) usually are underpaid while simultaneously over-stressed in the unusual demands of their work. As a consequence, they often have the highest needs for emotional/mental health resources yet lack the resources to pay for it. The result is unnecessary levels of transition, turmoil, and tumult in these crucial people’s lives, and we all suffer as a consequence.

In the background, we worked to create a non-profit where 100% of external donations would go to solve this problem. In the past year, we not only obtained our official non-profit designation from the IRS (I’ve never been so happy to receive mail from the IRS), but distributed around $25,000 of resources to both help these kinds of individuals and grow our proof of concept.

As this dream becomes a reality, we are inviting others to participate. You can do so by giving here. Again, 100% of external donations are given to those who are servants of society who have applied for a grant.

I’ve also thought about a way I can help raise awareness of our cause and settled on some writing to raise money for The Thrive Foundation. What will follow is a series of posts under the following framework:

The Hidden Heart: Six Pillars of a Life Well-Lived from the Bible’s Shortest Book

We’ll journey through 3 John, which is written to a man named Gaius who is himself marked by impactful generosity. I’m praying his legacy fuels our own generosity, and leads us to step into the gap to meeting this need.

There are three big aspects of getting a job done: Ability, Willingness, and Cheerfulness.

Consider your lawn needs to be mowed, and you’ve got a son you hope can take care of the job. There are three big questions that have to be answered that will make the difference between a well-manicured lawn and even taller grass:

1. Are you able? Does he possess the competency, equipment, and ability to use it in such a way that he won’t hurt himself and do a decent job in the process?

2. Are you willing? Does he possess the desire to put down the controller, get off the couch, and go outside?

3. Will you grumble? Even if you have the ability and willingness to mow the lawn, will you complain about it so much that we wish we’d never asked you in the first place?

It is glorious (and extremely rare) when ability, willingness, and cheerfulness intersect. A rare person helps with this sort of disposition.

And here we come to find Jesus embody this glory with six glorious words in the original language: I am willing; be you cleansed.

Think about what it means to hear those words if you’re the man in this story, especially when you’ve spent years facing a consistent stream of encountering others’ inability, unwillingness, and grumbling.

While we might not have his condition of leprosy, we do know what it’s like to be terrified to expose our neediness. We don’t like to be described as needy. Nobody has ever called someone “needy” and meant it as a compliment. We instinctively project self-sufficiency, strength, capability, even when we’re falling apart underneath. The reasoning for why is reasonable: we have history where our neediness has been met with inability, unwillingness and grumbling.

But here comes good news - this scene is all about the intersection of our neediness with Jesus’ cheerful willingness.

The Moment After the Sermon on the Mount

Matthew 8 opens with Jesus coming down from the mountain. He’s just delivered the most important talk in the history of the world. He now has a significant following - the hype is building, the energy is electric, people are pressing in from all directions. It’s like when a celebrity walks onto Broadway in Nashville on a Saturday night. The phones go up and the crowd closes in. That’s the energy here.

And into that crowd steps a leper. Which really kills the vibe.

Leprosy is a skin disease that still exists in parts of the world today. In the first century, it was maybe the most holistically devastating condition a person could have. Physically, it ravaged your appearance. You can Google image search it, but I’d warn you it’s not easy to look at. Socially, it made you a threat everywhere you went. You couldn’t pick when you looked sick and when you didn’t - it was always visible and alarming. Lepers were pushed to the margins, isolated into colonies, forced to announce their presence so others could get out of the way. Religiously, it was believed to be a sign of divine punishment. D.A. Carson summarized the Jewish perspective of a leper in the first century as being “one who was cursed by God.”

So here is Jesus, fresh off the greatest sermon ever preached, surrounded by crowds and momentum and noise, and the person who steps forward is the most unimpressive, most despised, most socially untouchable person in the entire scene.

And he says: Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. (v. 2)

It’s interesting he doesn’t even question Jesus’ ability. He’s more curious about his willingness. He’s wondering if Jesus considers a leper like him worth the trouble.

Six Words That Change Everything

Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying: I am willing; be you cleansed. (8:3).

In this six-word response from Jesus, we discover six aspects of the kind of man Jesus is.

1. Compassion. People with power and influence tend to see outcasts as inconveniences. Not Jesus. His unique affection for the broken, forgotten, and overlooked is on full display here. He doesn’t dismiss this man or step around him. He presses in. The crowd sees a threat, but Jesus sees a person.

2. Association. Jesus didn’t have to touch him. We see throughout the Gospels that Jesus can heal with a word from across a room, or even from miles away. He speaks and it’s done. So the touch wasn’t medically necessary. It was a choice - a deliberate, public choice to associate with this man. To say not just I’ll help you but I’m with you. I’m not ashamed of you. I’m placing my hands on you in front of all these people. There’s something profound about that. In our hardest moments, what we often need most isn’t just solutions - it’s presence. Someone willing to reach through the mess and actually touch us where we are.

3. Substitution. When Jesus reached out and touched that leper, everyone watching would have gasped. Because in touching him, Jesus was risking contracting the disease himself. He was willing to take on the man’s brokenness so the man could be made well. That’s a glimpse of exactly what Jesus came to do. He takes on what’s broken about us so we can be made whole. He gets sick so we can be healed. He takes on the sin we deserve so we can be washed clean.

4. Power. Don’t miss the obvious point: Jesus healed a disease that had no cure. One word, and it was gone. There are nine different healing stories in Matthew that show the range of Jesus’ power over disease, death, nature, and the domain of the enemy. He speaks and touches and things that were broken become whole.

5. Willingness. The leper asks if you will and Jesus says I will. He is not only powerful enough, but he is willing. Eager, even. Unbothered. There’s no reluctance here, no sense that Jesus had to be coerced into action or bribed into caring. He just moves. And that willingness is the part we tend to doubt most. We can affirm that God is theoretically capable of helping us while quietly wondering if we’ve messed up too much, believed too weakly, wandered too far. The answer Jesus gives this man is the same answer he gives us: I will.

6. Authority. Jesus tells the man to go present himself to the priest - to show the religious authorities what true authority actually looks like. Not power leveraged to exploit and control, but power poured out to heal and restore. The leaders Jesus had confronted in the Sermon on the Mount were using their authority to take. Jesus uses his to give.

Who He Is Today

This is not just who Jesus was but is also who Jesus is. He’s not a historical figure we admire from a distance. He’s alive, present, and meets us today the same way he met that leper - in our weakness and neediness.

To be human is to be needy. And honesty about our need doesn’t drive God away, but invites a unique expression of his power and presence. Dependency leads to intimacy. And intimacy with God is where our deepest joy is actually found.

So consider this question:

Do you need his compassion - to believe that he doesn’t just love people generally, but that he sees you, specifically, individually?

Do you need his association - to believe that there’s nothing so broken or shameful about you that he isn’t willing to draw near, that he’s not embarrassed by you but proud to call you his?

Do you need his substitution - to receive that the way back to God isn’t something you achieve but something you receive? Jesus in your place. His record, not yours.

Do you need his power - a renewed confidence that he is actually able, that he’s not a distant deity watching the world run its course but a God who steps in, heals and redeems?

Do you need his willingness - not just to affirm that he can but to actually believe that he wants to? That he never grumbles to help you?

Do you need his authority - to stop trying to run your own life and joyfully surrender your powerlessness to his power?

That honesty in the midst of neediness isn’t a liability. It’s an invitation.

And his answer, today, is the same as it was then: I am willing.

I’m amazed at how practical the Bible is. How does an ancient text speak so relevantly to the real stuff of life today? I find this no more true than when Jesus speaks to anxiety in the Sermon on the Mount.

We live in a culture that loves to congratulate itself for “discovering” mental health. And while we can be grateful for the conversation, Jesus was talking about anxiety two thousand years ago. Not as a clinical category or cultural trend, but as a real human experience that his followers would face and needed help navigating. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a collection of nice religious sentiments. It’s Jesus speaking into the reality of the human experience, including the worry, the dread, the catastrophizing, the 2am spiral. He saw it coming and spoke to it directly.

It’s also worth naming that most of what gets said about anxiety today has a tendency to make us more anxious. We consume the articles and advice and somehow end up more aware of how anxious we are, yet no more equipped to do anything about it. What Jesus offers is profoundly different. It’s not mere information about anxiety. It’s an invitation to transformation.

Anxiety and the End of Its Inevitability

It’s hard to even imagine not carrying anxiety. Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the United States, affecting over 40 million adults (roughly 18% of the population) every year. And those numbers were climbing before a global pandemic, before the political temperature reached its current boiling point, before the housing market became impossibly inaccessible to most under 40. Add to this that anxiety is genuinely contagious - it passes between people like a virus, through tone, body language, and the general atmosphere of environment.

Despite all our conversations and cures, we are living in the most anxious age in history. Our solutions are only making us sicker.

Which is why it matters so much that Jesus doesn’t just acknowledge anxiety. He actually has something helpful to say about it.

What Anxiety Actually Is

Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, gives us something that doesn’t require a psychology degree to understand. He just tells us directly: do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on (6:25).

Notice the tense. Future. Everything Jesus names is future-facing.

At its root, anxiety is false future-predicting. As Chip Dodd puts it, anxiety is “reaching to the future in attempt to touch the untouchable and control the uncontrollable.” Consider it false prophecy - we look into a future we can’t see and decide, with great certainty, that what’s coming is going to harm us. And because we believe either that God isn’t in control, or that what he does with his control won’t be good for us, we decide we have to take over. We place on ourselves the burden of controlling what is impossible to control.

And the brutal irony is that the more we try to control anxiety, the more anxious we get. We can never acquire enough control. It’s a bit like drinking salt water to cure thirst - the false solution is tantalizing close to what we really need, yet only makes the problem worse.

So Jesus very plainly says…don’t do that.

Which might sound overly simple, or even harsh, for those who really struggle with anxiety. But it’s actually quite liberating. Because what Jesus is saying underneath the command is: you don’t have to live this way. Anxiety is not inevitability, even if to some it seems as natural as breathing. It’s not as powerful as it feels. Jesus is too kind to command us to do something we don’t have the power to do.

A Brilliant Action Step

Jesus doesn’t just tell us to stop being anxious and leave us there. He gives us a practice to empower our obedience.

Look at the birds of the air. Consider the lilies of the field (6:26, 28).

Notice the tense. He’s shifted from the future to the present.

You know those backpacks parents put on little kids at Disney World with a leash attached? They’re usually shaped like a monkey, but the tail is actually a leash? I know some people find them offensive, but I find them brilliant. The whole point is love: I love you too much to let you get so far ahead of me that you end up running into traffic or getting lost. Stay tethered to me - get back here.

That’s the image I have of what Jesus is doing. Anxiety shoves us into a future we were never meant to carry. Jesus pulls us back to consider God’s past faithfulness, to grow our expectancy of his future provision, and to let anxiety subside in the present as a result.

So he says: right now, go outside and look at a bird. Consider a flower. And I think if you actually do it, you end up marveling. The complexity of a single bird existing is astonishing. Millions of them, and the food is simply provided. None of them have an UberEats account, it’s the pure kindness of God’s provision. And you’re worth more than a bird.

The same is true of wildflowers. We spend hundreds of dollars and entire weekends at Home Depot trying to grow something beautiful in our yards, and half the time everything dies by mid-July. And yet you can drive through any middle Tennessee backroad and find wildflowers growing out of a random field in full bloom. No one planted them, watered them, or tended them. God just put them there. Solomon in all his wealth and glory, wasn’t dressed as well as one of those flowers. And you’re worth more than a flower.

Rejecting Paganism, Finding Fatherhood

In all this, Jesus is establishing a stark contrast between his Heavenly Father and the pagan deities of that day (and today). At the core of the worship of pagan deities was constant anxiety because their gods were so unpredictable and unknowable. They could demand anything at any moment and fly off the handle for no reason. Because you never knew what was coming, you were always braced for impact.

Jesus describes God not as mysteriously volatile, but a knowable and predictable Father. In three chapters of the Sermon on the Mount that bookend his teaching on anxiety, Jesus refers to the fatherhood of God seventeen times.

One of these times is just after this call to go look at birds and flowers. Jesus tells a group of dads to consider the kind of parent they want to be. Think about how much you enjoy giving gifts to your kids. Jesus is appealing to the innate desire in any father to be a good dad.

And then he brings the good news: Your Father in heaven is better than that. How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him (7:11).

So much of anxiety is the crushing weight of believing we have to control an uncertain future because no one is out there looking out for us. Jesus is pointing us toward a far different reality: we don't really control anything, but in Christ we are fathered by the One who controls everything. We can trust an unknown future to a Father who is known (Corrie ten Boom). As a consequence, anxiety loses its grip. Not because our circumstances got easier or the future became less uncertain, but because we went from self-protective orphans to those able to rest in the safety and provision of the Father.

Back when we lived in Denver, my kids’ favorite spot for a homeschool field trip was the Butterfly Pavilion. Whenever we’d go, we spent most of our time admiring the monarchs - breathtaking, vivid, almost impossibly beautiful creatures drifting through the air.

But as any reader of The Very Hungry Caterpillar can tell you, what precedes that glory is the cocoon. Dark. Cramped. Immovable. A chrysalis that, from the outside, gives no indication that anything beautiful could possibly be happening inside it.

That environment - that particular crucible of constraint - is precisely where the transformation happens. It is not despite the darkness that the butterfly emerges beautiful. It is through it.

Most of us know this from our own lives. We can point to seasons we’d never wish on anyone - a loss, a failure, a relationship that fell apart, a year that broke something open in us - and yet, looking back, we can see that those were the very seasons where our most crucial character qualities were formed and our clearest sense of purpose came into focus. It feels upside down. It feels counterintuitive. But this is the beautifully strange way that God often works.

One of the most beautifully strange teachings in all of Scripture is found in what is called the Beatitudes - Jesus’ list of the “blessed,” the truly happy, the flourishing, the thriving.

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

Jesus’ opener is absolutely bizarre: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Not the strong. Not the self-sufficient. Not the ones who have it figured out.

The empty.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, commenting on this passage, puts it plainly: “you cannot fill with new wine a vessel that is already filled with old wine. The emptying has to come first.” And what the uncertain and painful moments of our lives do - whether cultural, familial, or deeply personal - with unsettling efficiency, is expose just how full of it we were. Full of the belief that we were in control. Quietly dismissive of our own powerlessness, and resistant to any real need to surrender.

And then a hard season arrives and offers an invitation for introspection: Does the way I show up in the world actually reflect reality? Is this the way I want to keep showing up? Could we empty ourselves and be filled instead with a holier, more whole way of encountering the world?

For a lot of us, that question is terrifying - and the fear is rooted in real experience. We’ve lived through moments where weakness was punished and mistakes led to exile. In the kingdom of man, you show weakness and you get left behind - discarded the moment you’re no longer useful, abandoned as soon as someone sees the worst of you.

But here’s the thing about the kingdom of Jesus: weakness isn’t punished here. In the kingdom of Jesus, you show weakness and you get drawn near. Jesus himself described his own disposition this way: “I am gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29) - a king whose posture toward the weak and needy is not impatience or disappointment, but tenderness. When our lack of power is exposed, the power of the Kingdom is positioned to break in.

If dependency on God and intimacy with God is the goal, then weakness is to our advantage. The emptying isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

Blessed are the Mourners

The Beatitudes don’t stop there. They have an order - a purposeful, cascading sequence. And following the poverty of spirit comes this: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Mourning gets a bad reputation. We live in a culture that wants to skip past grief as quickly as possible - to silver-lining our way through loss, to tell the story of our pain only from the safe distance of having already figured it out, rather than remaining honestly in the struggle. But Jesus doesn’t do that. He blesses the mourning. He honors the lament.

There’s a reason grief is so hard for us. We don’t actually hate sadness so much as we hate change - and sadness is what we feel in the presence of everything that changes, everything we lose, everything that doesn’t go the way we hoped. We’d rather skip the feeling than sit with what it’s telling us.

But in mourning, we finally feel the radical gap between the way things are and the way we long for them to be. That longing is not a weakness. It’s a compass. It’s pointing us toward what we were actually made for.

And what the Beatitudes promise is that this mourning will be met with comfort. Not comfort as a concept, but comfort as a Person - the Comforter himself, the Holy Spirit, who shows up in the emptied places and testifies to something that cuts right through the noise: You are beloved.

Blessed are the Meek

Jesus continues: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And then: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

C.S. Lewis once noted that what initially comes to mind with “meekness” is a kind of smarmy, self-deprecating falseness. But that’s not what Jesus has in mind. Meekness - true meekness - is what flows from actually believing that your worth is gifted, not earned. When you’re secure in the love of God, you don’t need to walk into every room performing and pretending. You don’t need to project invulnerability. You can simply be honest about what you need.

Here’s a practical challenge worth sitting with: ask for help this week. Not because you have to. But because meekness makes it possible. Because someone in your life needs to hear that you’re struggling too - and because there is genuine freedom in not having to maintain the fiction that you’re fine.

Blessed are the Hungry

And then, the hunger. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Jesus uses the image of starving and thirsting to describe what our orientation toward righteousness can feel like - not a casual preference, but a craving so deep you’ll rearrange your entire life around satisfying it, the way a desperate person will brave any obstacle to find food or water. That is the posture. That is the urgency. People are always reaching for whatever they believe will make things okay. What if we reached for the faithfulness of God with that same desperation?

Brokenness, Beatitudes, and New Beginnings

There is a scene in Matthew 8 where Jesus and his disciples are caught in a terrible storm. The disciples are terrified. And Jesus speaks - and the storm stops. The disciples are left asking each other: What kind of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?

The answer, as the children’s author Sally Lloyd-Jones beautifully notes, is that the wind and the waves recognized that voice. They’d heard it before - it was the same voice that made them.

That voice is still speaking. Into the storms raging outside of us. Into the storms raging within.

Here’s what I genuinely believe about seasons of struggle, for all their difficulty: God is cultivating something. In the dark, cramped, immovable cocoon of our particular crises, something is being shaped in you that could not have been shaped any other way. The question isn’t whether this experience will change you. It will. The question is whether you’ll learn to struggle well - with open hands, in expectancy that what’s being formed is something worth waiting for.

The cocoon is not the final word. It is an invitation and an initiation into glory.

I’m amazed at the influence a single statement can have over the trajectory of an entire life.

I’ve met people who became doctors because an elementary school teacher told them they were stupid and never be successful. That teacher has been dead for decades, and this person doesn’t even like medicine - but they “proved them wrong.” There are positive versions of this too. I met a guy a few years ago who had a lengthy stint in the NFL. He said the defining moment that forever altered the direction of his life was a coach pulling him aside during drills at a summer camp in 10th grade and telling him he had what it takes to play professionally. Until that moment, he’d assumed he was too undersized to even play in college.

The power of words - especially words spoken about us - is extraordinary. And because of that, many of us feel incredibly fragile. We can be one small comment away from wondering if we’re worth anything at all.

Deep inside every human heart is a longing for someone greater than us to bless us with their words - to look at us and say: I see you. I know you. I'm with you. I believe in you." To make a pronouncement of our belovedness.

Jesus' baptism allows us to see that this longing is not insecure or childish - it's childlike. Just as any child longs to receive the approval of their dad, one of the gifts given to us in the Gospel is the commendation from a loving Father.

A Different Kind of King

Before we get to the baptism itself, there’s a remarkable moment of confusion over the fact Jesus decides to get baptized at all.

Jesus walks up to John at the Jordan River and asks to be baptized. John - who has just spent considerable energy announcing to anyone who will listen that he is merely the opening act, that someone far greater is coming - nearly falls over. It’s so ironic and upside-down it feels like a scene from a sitcom. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

It makes complete sense that John was confused. Everything he, and everyone else, expected of the Messiah pointed toward a warrior. A conquering king. Someone who shows up, crushes the enemy, and reclaims the throne. The silhouette people expected to see emerge out of the sun was someone dressed for battle.

Instead, Jesus steps into the water.

His response to John is a whisper of what kind of king he actually is: “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” NT Wright puts it this way - Jesus is “humbly identifying himself with God’s people, by taking their place, sharing their penitence, living their life and ultimately dying their death.”

This is completely contrary to how power often works. We instinctively use privilege to separate - to insulate ourselves, to move away from what is broken. We spend our whole lives trying to get to cleaner, safer, better circumstances. And here is this King moving toward the broken. Not around it. Into it.

This is a different kind of king - one who empties himself of power to fully identify with the people he came to save.

A Pronouncement over Jesus

As if the scene weren’t already dramatic enough, the real main event follows:

“And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” — Matthew 3:16-17

Three realities worth our consideration:

First, notice the full Triune Godhead on display - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - all present in a single moment. The Spirit descends on the Son while the Father speaks. One God, three persons, all here, all active. Theological concepts becoming lived reality.

Second, there’s something happening in that image of the Spirit descending like a dove. Anyone steeped in the Old Testament would feel the echo immediately - Genesis 1, the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters like a bird over its nest. This isn’t just a baptism. This is the inauguration of a new creation.

Third - and this is where it gets personal - after all of that, after the heavens split open and the Spirit descends and creation is re-inaugurated, the Father says: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Which, if we’re honest, might feel a little like overkill. Surely Jesus knew. Did he really need the whole public production?

But we celebrate and replicate what we love. The Father loves telling the Son he loves him. There’s no scarcity or stinginess in how much he communicates it. And notice the timing - this declaration comes at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, before the miracles, before the sermons, before the cross. The Father isn’t saying “well done” for a list of accomplishments. He’s saying, I love you because I love you.

Everything Jesus does from here flows from that secured identity. He doesn’t pour himself out hoping to finally be loved. He is loved - and so he can pour himself out.

Words over Us

Henri Nouwen, reflecting on this scene, said simply: “That which is said of Jesus is said of you.”

The Gospel of John puts it this way: “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” — John 1:12

Jesus didn’t just come to identify with us. He came to give us an identity. When we place faith in him, we are not simply recruited into an army, but welcomed into a family.

And that family comes with a new name: Beloved.

So let’s return to where we started. I’m amazed at the influence a single statement can have over the trajectory of an entire life. And I'm expectant for anyone who will let that single statement become the foundation of their identity - Beloved.

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” — Matthew 3:17

That’s what the Father says about Jesus.

And by grace through faith, that’s what he says about you.

Way back in the 1900s, email was invented.

I know I’m dating how old I am, but back then it was a big deal when your inbox pinged. You’d run through the house yelling: “I got an email! I got an email!”

Obviously, that’s an image so ridiculously distant from today’s experience it’s hard to believe it’s true. Today, we have to wade through endless junk, spam, and advertisements and often fantasize about the possibility of never having to look at our inboxes again.

But back then it really happened. I was there and lived it.

The reason an email meant so much back then is because it wasn’t just a bunch of words—but a bunch of words addressed to you. Only someone who knew you well would write to you.

That’s the difference between words, and words that were written to you. The former annoys us, while the latter captivates us. I’d love for you to consider that as we meet a guy named John, his words are actually as personal to any of us as we could imagine.

Meeting John

Matthew 3:1 says: “In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea.”

Three qualities you need to know about our new friend, John:

1. A Real Prophet, Not an Actor

“Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.”- Matthew 3:4

Sometimes we assume people who lived long ago were just weird and did weird stuff. So you see this guy dressed oddly, eating bugs drenched in honey, and it’s easy to think, “Yeah, people back then—especially in the Bible—were just strange.”

But anyone familiar with the Old Testament would recognize immediately—John is dressing and behaving exactly like an Old Testament prophet. He’s calling God’s people to repentance in anticipation of the arrival of the Messiah.

This is why in verse 7, the religious leaders send representatives to investigate. They’re trying to figure out: Is this Old Testament cosplay? Is this his Halloween costume? Or is this the real thing? And John is about to show us that he’s as real as they come.

2. Humility, Not Celebrity

Most admirable about John is his humility. We could learn from this in our current cultural moment. We’re led to believe that a life of purpose and meaning goes hand in hand with maximizing followers, influence, and platform.

But John? He’d prefer to remain as anonymous as possible if it would allow him to make as much of Jesus as possible.

He’s explicit about this in verse 11: “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

In John’s Gospel, he says it even more clearly: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30)

3. Ancient Practice, Fresh Expression

John is known as “John the Baptist” because he’s baptizing people. Verses 5-6 tell us: “Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.”

The word “baptize” comes from a Greek word baptizo, which means “to immerse.” People came out to the wilderness in overwhelming numbers—regardless of ethnicity, family of origin, or socioeconomic level—to be plunged underneath the water and brought back up, confessing their sins and preparing for the Messiah.

John didn’t actually invent baptism. Ritual washing was common enough in his day. But the major difference is those were all regular, repeated washings. John was calling for something substantially different—a single, initiatory baptism indicating the beginning of a new commitment.

And before we again disregard the scene because of its “bizarreness,” we must recognize we still practice ritualistic self-washing to deal with shame today.

A few years ago, an actor named Jamie Dornan was part of a movie called Fifty Shades of Grey. In an interview after creating the film, he expressed much of his regret and shame around the role—”I had to do stuff to Dakota Johnson that I would never choose to do to a woman. I’m a dad.” He went to a sex dungeon in preparation for his role, and “when he came home afterwards, he was careful to shower before touching his wife and infant child.”

Our hearts often carry a sense of shame so palpable that you literally have to take a shower to try to make it go away. Ritualistic self-cleaning—thousands of years old, still expressed in various ways today.

A Fresh Work

So John is doing something familiar, yet purposefully and radically different. This isn’t a regular, perpetual cleaning of oneself. This is a passive, once-and-for-all initiatory rite of passage.

This radical differentiation is pointing to the glorious declaration of the kind of work King Jesus has come to do. He has come to do a fresh work. A new thing. Something totally unlike any form of spirituality or religion we’ve yet seen in history (or since).

Up to this point, people washed themselves ritually and regularly because they acknowledged their need for cleansing to be in right relationship with God. But John proclaims: While you cannot actively clean yourself up, there is one coming who will not only walk alongside you but will plunge into the depths of death with you. And by grace through faith, his death is your death, and his victory is also your victory.

You no longer have to purify yourself daily. A greater cleansing is coming through the finished work of Jesus. He will do a once-and-for-all final work that will cleanse us and make us new. And he will not simply ritually and symbolically clean the outside of you—he will actually come to indwell you and transform you. Verse 11 says “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Fire That Transforms

Fire is a major theme in this scene. John references fire three times. Twice, he uses fire to give a haunting warning about the gravity of hell (verses 10 and 12). And then sandwiched in the middle is John telling us about a different kind of fire ushered by Jesus.

There is the fire that consumes and kills. And there is the fire that transforms and creates gold.

This King who is coming is doing something so fresh, he’s not simply going to clean around us, but he will allow God to dwell within us. If you’re in right relationship with this King, the fire that once consumed and destroyed will actually indwell, purify, and illuminate.

Yes, God is a consuming fire. But for the one with allegiance to King Jesus who welcomes the indwelling of his Spirit, all that is consumed within us is that which is bad for us. He’s not killing us—he’s transforming us and molding us into golden glory.

A Word to Us Today

So what is John’s personal word to us today? Two key words in verses 2-3—preparation and repentance.

Preparation

Verse 3: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.”

This is an incredibly rich image that first-century readers immediately recognized. Back then, even royalty traveled on foot. When a king’s royal caravan was coming through various towns, those towns would literally make the roads as hospitable as possible—they’d do road work, fill potholes, make straight the paths.

It’s no different today. The Queen of England, for example, made regular trips over several decades to Kentucky because she loved horses and had some there. You better believe that when the Queen of England came through Lexington, they were filling potholes, repairing roads, and making sure every inch of her journey through their city was as smooth and welcoming as possible. They weren’t about to let Her Royal Highness get a flat on an ill-repaired highway. At its heart, this is a posture of “we’re honored you’re here, you are wanted here, and we want you to know it by how well we’ve prepared for your arrival.”

John is announcing a time of preparation through self-examination. To examine each area of our lives and to ask if it carries a posture of hospitality and receptivity to the arrival of the King.

Repentance

Verse 2: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Repentance is often misunderstood as simply feeling bad about yourself or thinking about how terrible you are for an extended period of time. But really at the heart of repentance is the willingness to return home.

Luke 15 is repentance illustrated—the prodigal son who finds himself far from home, living in a pigpen, and suddenly comes to his senses. Repentance is that moment of turning away from the filth and coming home in expectancy, hope, and anticipation that kindness from a loving Father—and not a beating—is what awaits us.

A Palace Prepared

Often when we hear the word “repent” we are flooded with toxic shame. You might even be thinking, “the reason I don’t really engage faith is because I don’t like how Christianity just makes you feel bad about yourself.” But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of John’s words to us. This isn’t a word of condemnation, but expectation for the transformation we’ve longed for.

The reason God presses in on us and challenges us to cleanse ourselves of that which is bad for us is not because he hates us or is shaming us. It’s because he loves us more than we love ourselves.

There’s a popular cultural narrative that says: “If God really loved you, he’d let you do whatever you want.” But that’s not love, that’s apathy. We challenge and press into those we love. So often the most painful experience is imagining a future better for someone else than they can imagine for themselves.

This word of challenge isn’t about diminishing value, but actually elevating it. John is telling you in these words of preparation and repentance that you are so significant, seen, and valuable that the most powerful Being in the Universe looks at you personally, and desires good in your life. He observes even the quietest, most hidden evils that your closest friends don’t realize are there. And he says, “I see it and I want to cleanse it. I want to make room for myself to indwell even into that hidden room of your heart that you thought nobody saw. That’s how much you matter to me.”

C.S. Lewis put God’s higher vision for our lives this way:

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

The reason God is pressing into you—the reason he keeps bringing good people into your life to speak into and challenge that thing you’re clinging to—is not because he hates you or is mad at you.

It’s because he sees you as more valuable than you see yourself. We’re content to be messy cottages. He’s creating palaces.

Consequently, prepare and repent. The King is here, and he’s headed for our hearts.

“You have three seconds before they scroll.”

A friend with a billion (I might be exaggerating) social media followers told me that recently when I asked how you grow your platform. You have to “hook” someone’s attention. Before we lament ever-shortening attention spans, there’s a historical reality to this “you better open with a bang” philosophy. Opening lines matter—in talks, in books, in content. You’ve got a few lines before everyone gets bored and moves on.

And yet, the opening of the New Testament—the most purchased and read book in the history of the world—begins with a genealogy.

It basically begins with what reads like a phone book.

Four Scandalous Women

Not only does the New Testament open with a list of names, but this is a particularly odd genealogy. Genealogies in Matthew’s day never included women. This wasn’t just unusual—it was unprecedented.

So when Matthew breaks from centuries of tradition to name not one but four women in Jesus’ family line, everyone reading would have stopped and said, “Wait, what? Why would he do that?” And if that weren’t enough, we’re even more shocked to find who these women are.

Consider each of them:

Tamar (v. 3) - We meet her in Genesis 38. Her husband dies, but she still wants to have children through his family line. So she hatches this plan where she disguises herself as a prostitute and has sex with her father-in-law Judah, who’s quite sketchily looking for a prostitute. She gets pregnant with twins. Can you imagine the awkwardness? “Oh, congratulations! When are you due? Who’s the dad? How did you all meet?”

Rahab (v. 5) - We meet her in Joshua 2. She was a pagan prostitute—the first part of her name comes from Ra, the Egyptian sun god. She helps Israelite spies scope out the Promised Land. It’s reasonable to assume she was a woman who had been used, abused, and trafficked. Her story is marked by tremendous brokenness.

Ruth (v. 5) - We meet her in the book of Ruth. She’s also a pagan woman who marries an Israelite man, but he tragically dies. She’s forced to immigrate to Bethlehem, where she enters the city as literally the least significant person possible: a widowed, single-woman immigrant in a Jewish, patriarchal culture.

Bathsheba (v. 6) - She’s actually described as “the wife of Uriah.” Matthew’s putting the scandal of her life in flashing neon lights. We meet her in 2 Samuel 11. King David watches her bathing, decides he has to be with her, has sex with her, and then—as if that wasn’t terrible enough—murders her husband to put the scandal to bed (no pun intended).

Not only has Matthew done something unusual in including women in his genealogy, but these four women’s stories are so scandalous, so marked by shame and brokenness, that any respectable genealogy would have left them out entirely. Especially if you’re trying to announce and legitimize the family lineage of the long-awaited Savior.

But Matthew doesn’t leave them out. He goes out of his way to include them. In doing so, he’s telling us something we desperately need to hear.

A Hall of “Shame”

Matthew is doing more than giving us interesting historical details. He is telling us who Jesus is and the kinds of people Jesus came to save.

He’s declaring that this Jesus—this long-awaited Messiah who has descended from patriarchs and kings—is also the one who descended from the broken, the manipulative, the abused, the used, the discarded.

Can you imagine a more broken family line than this? A woman who made terrible sexual mistakes like Tamar and her father-in-law. A woman who was trafficked like Rahab. A woman who was widowed and discarded like Ruth. A woman who was the center of scandal like Bathsheba.

As much as we instinctually desire to skip the genealogies when we read the Bible, at their center is the proclamation of the faithfulness of God. Each of these names (including the men) reflects the intersection of life’s tragedies and God’s faithfulness.

The Terrible Dilemma

Another piece of Matthew’s explicit acknowledgment of the scandals is a piece of good news that confronts what might be our deepest fear. We find that Jesus not only comes from the broken, but he comes for the broken. He is not afraid to identify with or redemptively pursue those who carry the scars of doing life in a tragic place. Jesus came from a people who made absolute messes of their lives and/or knew the pain of being collateral damage.

My kids love throwing horrible hypothetical dilemmas at me. For example, they recently asked me: “Would you rather eat ice cream for every meal for the rest of your life and get sick of ice cream, or never be able to eat ice cream again?” I’m still considering my answer.

There is a very real dilemma most of us feel: would you rather be really known or really loved? Most of us believe we get one or the other. If you really knew me, you could never love me. If you say you love me, it’s only because you don’t know me.

Many of us have real experiences that legitimize this fear—war stories of people abandoning us who were supposed to love us unconditionally, friends who made sweeping promises of their love only to disappear. Our fears were realized and our worst nightmare became reality.

Yet, in the same way that green shoots appear following a forest fire reflect the beautifully stubborn resiliency of beauty, so this genealogy proclaims: where others have failed, Jesus is faithful.

Meeting Heart to Heart

Christianity is not just a body of intellectual information to affirm, but an invitation into relationship with a God who is alive and meets us in our place of deepest need. Matthew’s genealogy is the proclamation that the very thing we desire is afforded to us. Jesus’s arrival commences at the holy intersection of the sacred reality: life is tragic, God is faithful.

The Cry that Ignited a Revolution

Consider Israel enslaved in Egypt. For a time, it appears they tolerated the reality of their condition. Maybe they found a rational way to justify it wasn’t as bad as other people’s scenarios: “There are starving kids in Babylon - at least we’ve got meat and vegetables. Eat your food and be grateful.” They’d draw from this reasoning later in Numbers 11:5, looking back almost fondly on “the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

It’s not until the end of Exodus 2 that the people find their conditions so intolerable they’re willing to “cry out for help” (Exodus 2:23).

And here’s what’s stunning: they aren’t condemned for being ungrateful or told to focus more on what they do have. Their asking, seeking, and knocking is honored. This cry becomes the prayer that ignites God’s movement to initiate liberation.

This is a condensed symbol of so much of the Old Testament. To quote C.S. Lewis, God “finds our desires not too strong but too weak.” It is a story of God’s people longing and pursuing something more. Yes, a place. But more importantly, a person who will put the world back together in the way that it’s meant to be.

Don’t Should All Over Yourself

We love to shame ourselves for having desire. We tell ourselves we should be grateful for what we do have, and we shouldn’t want more, because the basics of food, water, and shelter should be enough to make us content.

And yet - as much as we “should all over ourselves” - the desire remains.

In the same way that wildflowers beautifully (and stubbornly) grow on the edges of the field that was recently paved, our heart’s desire for more remains. We won’t allow ourselves to settle for just being animals who only want food, water, and shelter. We want to be image bearers who live life fully.

Yes, we want to practice contentment (1 Timothy 6:8). But there’s a great difference between gratitude for the essentials and mistaking the essentials as the end game. Food and clothing aren’t the final course, but a mere appetizer intended to cultivate a holy longing for more.

The Search

The Old Testament is beautifully relevant because it addresses the fundamental questions that all of us are asking at some level to make sense of the human experience:

• Where did we come from?

• What went wrong?

• How will things get better?

• Is it reasonable for me to be hopeful about where everything is headed?

Every person - and culture - is answering these questions and building a life and society around the answers.

For all of its complexities, the Old Testament has at its heart a hunt. Not just a search for a place - although Israel is very much a people in search of a land - but even more importantly, a search for a person.

Who is this long-expected person? This prophet, priest, king, shepherd, savior - this one who will finally make things right? The one the prophets spoke of in whispers and the Psalms sang of in longing?

And here’s where we see that people haven’t really changed. We still long for someone to come and put the world back together again. Every election cycle, we place messianic expectations on politicians. Every cultural moment, we look to celebrities or innovators to save us. We are always profoundly disappointed.

Lewis famously wrote that, “All that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

That’s what the Old Testament is really about and it’s the story we are still living today. What will finally satisfy? What will fill the ache? Who can I trust with my heart’s desire?

The Treasure is Found

This is where The Gospel according to Matthew begins. As much as a book beginning with a list of names (a genealogy) would never get published today, this is the most profound way the New Testament can begin. In what reads as a phone book is a pronouncement: The search is over. The treasure has been found. Your desire can be satisfied.

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

This is the one you’ve been waiting for. The one the prophets spoke about. The one the psalms sang about. The one every broken king and failed dynasty pointed toward.

He’s here, and our hearts can finally find their rest in Him.

Meeting Jesus and Finding Heart in Matthew

As we journey through Matthew together, we will see Jesus meet people in the places of their deepest desire, longing, and need. He tells people poor in spirit that his kingdom is theirs, those who mourn they will find comfort, and those who are pure in heart they will see God.

Do you hear the echoes of Jeremiah 29:13? “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” Jesus meets us heart to heart.

I’d love it if you join me in this journey through The Gospel according to Matthew to see, know, and feel how this is true for your life.

We don’t dictate the terms of life - we discover the terms, and then receive the invitation to thrive if we actually live like they are true. Conversely, we will unnecessarily suffer if we live in denial of this truth. Gravity is true, real and has very serious negative effects even if we jump off a building full of the belief that this law doesn’t apply to us.

This is why I believe the phrase, “I’m not emotional” is a statement of insanity (literally, “without health”). We’d never say, “I’m not intellectual” because it’s insulting, or “I’m not physical” because it’s nonsensical. But we think we can opt out of Heart - this significant component of how we were fearfully and wonderfully made. We don’t dictate these terms, we discover them, and to live in denial is akin to jumping off that building.

We tend to think that living with Head (Thinking) and Hands (Doing) is sufficient to compensate for our dismissal of Heart (Feeling). But that’s a bit like believing a car will drive just fine even though it’s “only” missing one of its tires. The harder you push the gas, the faster you’ll go into the ditch.

How can we seek God with all our Heart if we insist we don’t have one?

Necessities and Reality

But take God out of it for a minute. Regardless of religious worldview, the data constantly points to this reality: deal with your Heart, or your Heart will deal with you.

Consider the guy at the gym who always skips leg day in favor of bicep curls. He not only ends up looking ridiculous, but negates the components of functional fitness that matter the most - the core, back, and legs. These are the parts of us designed to do the heavy lifting.

Life is the same way. The stuff that matters most, the heaviest parts of life, requires the muscles and the aptitude of the Heart. To continue from the line of reasoning above, I genuinely believe this truth as much as I believe in gravity. The reality might be invisible, but to neglect its truthfulness is to choose pain.

The correlation between one’s lack of emotional health and adverse health consequences is stunning. Often this is framed within the language of “stress” - as in, “beware the adverse health consequences of chronic stress like heart disease, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, weight gain, lack of sleep, and more.”

But the word “stress” is used in the vaguest of terms - some unseen, unknowable deadly force. It’s like the monster killing everyone in the first half of a horror movie. You have no idea what it looks like, but it’s really, really bad.

Hans Selye, founder of modern stress theory, gave clarity to the mystery. He made this astounding conclusion: “It may be said without hesitation that for man the most important stressors are emotional.”

Translation: that stress that has life-altering physical consequences contains deeply emotional roots. Knowing how to live with Heart can literally prolong and boost your quality of life.

Gabor Maté elaborates on this: “Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal.”

He defines “emotional competence” as a two-fold skill:

1. The capacity to feel our emotions

2. The ability to express our emotions effectively

Did you ever consider that the ability to live with Heart would be the best way to combat the stress that everyone is telling us is going to kill us?

As much as we love dropping phrases like “I’m not very emotional,” there’s an inevitability to our reality: living with Heart is one of the most crucial skills we can acquire to live life well.

The Crucial Question

Let’s return to God.

Quite possibly the crucial question of our cultural moment - the one that orbits around so many contentious ethical and political issues - is this: Is identity, meaning, and purpose self-defined or God-defined? Do we dictate the terms of how we are made, or is that truth pre-determined and revealed?

The Christian believes that God is the one who gives us our understanding of meaning, our understanding of value, our understanding of the way we were made and the way we’re supposed to live. We’re the most precious thing made by the God who made everything. We’re not just animals - we’re image bearers.

Jesus Defining Humanity

I get where most people (usually men) are coming from when they say: “I’m not emotional.” Usually they mean something along the lines of, “I don’t have uncontrollable outbursts of crying several times a week.”

But listen: in the same way you can be physically healthy or unhealthy, in the same way you can be intellectually healthy or unhealthy, the Scriptures give us a vision for life that says we can be emotionally healthy or unhealthy - but there’s no opting out of it altogether.

We are not only image-bearers, but we are intended to understand identity through the lens of Jesus who is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). And if Jesus gives us a vision for what it means to be fully human - and if Jesus was a man of great Heart, then we must have a vision for life that incorporates emotion and expressiveness.

Jesus is a man whose interior world reflected, mirrored, and engaged the external realities around Him. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus, rejoiced in the presence of His Father, demonstrated anger at religious hypocrisy, knew loneliness in the abandonment of his closest friends, and was “greatly distressed and troubled” in anticipation of his crucifixion.

This is a man fully integrated: Head, Hands and Heart in perfect submission and obedience to the Father’s will. His emotions aren’t a liability to overcome but an essential component of His humanity and mission.

The Hunt for Heart

Full disclosure - I’ve never actually been hunting my entire life. But I did spend a dozen years in Denver, and consequently cosplayed a time or two as a legitimate outdoorsman when joining friends on camping and climbing trips. Even a novice like me knows that when you encounter the wilderness, you require proper resources if you’re going to survive the experience. You wouldn’t venture into the backcountry without water, shelter, and fire-starting materials.

Life on life’s terms is no different. As we do life in a broken and sin-torn world, we encounter certain inevitable realities. We live in a place of frustration and beauty, pain and wonder, loss and glory, injustice and mercy, change and constancy. To encounter all this without the resource - and gift - of Heart is to avoid engaging Reality as it actually is.

God made us as deeply-feeling image bearers, and it’s in the arena of Reality in which we meet God. And if we’re going to seek Him with all our Heart - if we’re going to find Him - we have to stop pretending we don’t have one.

In a few weeks, I’m leading a Men’s Retreat at a church for my friend, Keith. He titled it, “The Hunt” - short for “The Hunt for Heart.”

I am captivated by this title for a multitude of reasons, but the driving - and haunting - question has been this: How can we seek God with all our Heart if we insist we don’t have one?

Whether it’s viewing the Heart exclusively through the lens of liability (“it will only lie to you”) or outright denial of how we are made (“I’m not emotional”), we’ve simultaneously dismissed a significant component of our Personhood, yet are shocked that we are merely surviving and enduring our lives.

How can we live fully if we live in refusal of our full Personhood? How can we seek God with all our heart if we insist we don’t have one?

I’d love it if you join me here in this coming year as I’ll journey through The Gospel according to Matthew and look to Jesus to answer these questions. You can click the button below to subscribe and follow along.

Happy Hunting.

About a year ago, I hopped on Substack with the commitment to write 40 posts in honor of my 40th year of life. This is the practical (and frustrating) benefit of “building in public”—make a public oath because if you don’t, you’ll probably quit around post seven.

Since finishing in October, I’ve spent time prayerfully considering where this site goes and now have a glimpse of what’s next. This is my ask: please subscribe so you can stay up to date with all that’s ahead. You can do so by clicking this button right here:

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More on that in the New Year, but until then, a few places you can find me in 2026:

1. Awaken the Heart - If you’re in the Franklin/Nashville area (or ever wanted to come visit), join Dr. Chip Dodd and me for our second “Awaken the Heart” evening on Sunday, January 11. You can find more details and RSVP here.

2. Voice of the Heart Center - my coaching, consulting and speaking load has (in the kindness of God) grown to a place that it’s demanded the totality of my time as my full time work.

3. “Living with Heart” Podcast - our podcast celebrated hitting 300,000 streams!

4. The Thrive Foundation - we started a non-profit to help fund the mental and emotional health support of servants of society. Check out our mission and consider a year-end donation. 100% of donations go directly to support those in need.

See you in 2026 - very excited for all that’s ahead.

My son — age five — plans to one day make a living playing in the NBA in between missions as a real-life Space Ranger. You can call that cute or naïve, but I think it’s something much holier. It’s a glimpse of how God made us: to risk, to desire, and to dream.

At the beginning, we move toward life without hesitation. We fall, we fail, we get up, we try again. We live with unguarded hearts and wide-open imaginations.

But somewhere along the way, our vision for life shrinks. Usually, it’s because we’ve been wounded. Instinctively, we go from What could be? to How do I keep that from happening again?

We no longer know exactly what we want the future to look like, but we’re certain we don’t want the painful past to repeat itself. And so our vision shifts — from dreaming to self-protecting.

It’s understandable and even feels wise. But much like drinking salt water to stave off dehydration — the rationale is fairly sound and the intent is noble, yet the execution is fatal. A life built around self-protection at the expense of courageous risk is an express lane to regret.

It’s the other side of life — the very end — that reveals this most clearly. Hospice nurses have gathered the top regrets of the dying, and they echo with heartbreaking consistency:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish I’d let myself be happier.”

Do you see the similarity beneath the diversity of words? The absence of risk, courage and heart.

The bookends of life — the dreaming of our beginning and the potential regrets of our ending — both tell the same story: at the heart of living greatly is living courageously.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

I don’t want to live a small, careful life.

I want to live the ever-expanding life — the one that keeps risking love, telling the truth, and trusting the future to God.

So may we live fully.
May we dare greatly.
May we live with Heart.

Because the glory of God really is this: a human being, fully alive.

Life is a gift.

When we picture risk, most of us imagine a solitary hero - riding into the desert, armed with nothing more than grit and a half-loaded revolver. It’s cinematic. It makes for a great poster and an even better movie (hello, John McClane).

But here’s the problem: a man who wanders into the desert alone is usually a dead man.

Dreaming and risking in isolation isn’t bravery - it’s a death sentence.

There’s another kind of courage, quieter but truer: the courage that refuses to go alone.

Enter The Traveling Party. Contra the heroism of Die Hard, this is more akin to Sam’s response to Frodo when he declares he is going to Mordor alone:

“Of course you are, and I’m coming with you!”

We do brave things together.

Elsewhere, this is called a Circle of Security (from Chip Dodd - he and I actually did an entire podcast on this concept that you can find here). Arthur Brooks calls this having real friends instead of deal friends.

Whatever the label, it’s a group of companions who love each other without an exit plan - a circle of belonging where faithfulness matters more than performance.

If we’re going to hope profoundly and dare greatly, we need people who will walk beside us through the risk.

According to decades of research, the greatest indicator of a good life isn’t status, success, or acclaim. It’s the presence of The Traveling Party - those who walk with us in the risk and remind us that we were never meant to carry our courage alone.

This is simply how we were designed to dream.

Just as the eagle doesn’t feel shame for needing the wind to fly, nor does the tree apologize for needing the soil to stand, an image-bearer of God need not feel any shame in requiring companions for the journey.

We flourish together, or we don’t flourish at all.

“That’s awfully risky, isn’t it?” someone says in a disapproving tone. Sure it’s risky. But what in life isn’t?

Let’s consider a professional case study of this reality. The entrepreneur is told he’s crazy for trying to make it on his own - he should pick a safer, more stable path.

But what’s that risk-free path looked like in recent years? Work for an unshakable behemoth like Amazon, with its $2.3 trillion market cap? They’ve laid off 27,000 people in just three years. Follow the recently-popular advice to skip college for a coding bootcamp? Many of those skills have already been replaced by AI. Even the seemingly bulletproof job of an IRS employee — helping the government collect taxes! — has proven vulnerable, with that workforce cut by more than a quarter in just the past few months.

This is no disrespect to those affected, and no denial that some paths carry more risk than others. The point is this: there is no such place as “away” where you are immune from risk.

The question is transformed. It’s no longer the shame-tinged, “That’s awfully risky, isn’t it?” but the wiser, “Am I risking rightly?”

Here’s the irony (and tragedy): many who believe they’re avoiding risk are actually embracing the most dangerous gamble of all. They tolerate 100% misery because it offers 100% predictability. The truth? That’s the riskiest thing you can do.

The riskiest thing is to know, with absolute certainty, that nothing in your life will change and change nothing because of a fear of the unknown. The riskiest posture is to live within arm’s reach of refusing regret, yet too timid to tolerate the risk to do anything about it. The only security for the person avoiding risk is the security of misery.

And most significantly of all, risk is God’s preferred instrument to call, lead, and grow His people. His way is often what John Ortberg calls “strategic ambiguity.” Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household… to the land I will show you (Genesis 12:1).

Risk isn’t the enemy of faith; it’s the fabric of it — the very soil where the seeds of reward take root.

Do you remember that scene when all the power goes off in the island, the security systems are failing, the dinosaurs are roaming free, and Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) has to go into the maintenance shed to manually turn everything back on?

(“Hold onto your butts.”)

That’s a bit of a condensed symbol of what must transpire within each of us in pursuit of living fully (hopefully without any incident of death or dismemberment due to a Dino).

We were fearfully and wonderfully made - we are image bearers not animals. But somewhere along the way we’re taught that feelings are for the effeminate, needs are for the pathetic, and living with hope that it can be any different is for the ungrateful, selfish and naive. We think this mantra will make us strong, but the opposite transpires - the light quietly dims within us. The power is off.

To draw from a vastly different metaphor, we become something akin to a squirrel. The vision for life shrinks to mere survival. Scavenge some food, find a decent tree, get some sleep, do it again tomorrow. Maybe on a good day - if you’re particularly lucky - you’ll find a slice of pizza in the dumpster so you don’t always have to eat nuts. Survival.

But we were created to do more than survive, but thrive. And our pursuit of something more than mere survival is not selfishness or lack of gratitude, but rather worship. Faith is the willingness to pursue what’s true even if it’s the minority position in a world gone crazy, and Irenaeus said what’s true almost two millennia ago: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Just like Ray Arnold - it’s time to head into the maintenance shed, and turn the power back on.

How do we practically do this? One way to wake up is to walk down the path of our Feelings, Needs, Desire, Longings and Hope - Chip Dodd’s “Spiritual Root System.” It is a process similar to throwing back on a collection of breakers in sequence. We turn the lights back on as we learn to live with Heart.

We discuss this on the “Living with Heart” Podcast here if you desire to go deeper.

It’s always safe to come home, but we’re not meant to stay home. We are welcomed, celebrated, bandaged, and healed. And then we are sent back out.

Bizarrely (and beautifully), we often find our calling in our woundings.

There is a fault line here we must carefully traverse. We have to make sure we aren’t helping others in an attempt to heal, and we aren’t giving in an effort to get what we never got.

But for the one who has been broken to pieces by doing life in a tragic place, and returned Home to be put back together again by the Father, something sacred is formed in the fire: a Wounded Healer.

In their wounds, they possess compassion - they know what it’s like to suffer with someone. They understand that life is not a simple equation waiting to be solved by smart people who can eliminate struggle or pain through strategy, willpower, and listening to the right podcasts. In their healing, they are simply giving away what they have already received from the Father. A Wounded Healer.

Ironically, organizations, institutions, and corporations often quickly discard the one who falls short. Tragically, they’ve pronounced over them a final verdict, not realizing they may have just thrown away someone on the verge of becoming truly qualified to lead.

Because it’s not the unbroken who bring healing. It’s the ones who’ve been broken to pieces by life and put back together again by the Father.

I got goosebumps. It’s what any child longs to hear - even if it doesn’t go the way you planned, it’s always safe to return home.

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To continue our conversation from the previous posts, as we do life in a tragic place, we are greatly wounded. But we’re also the wounders. We’re not only victims—we’re offenders. The greatest threat actually comes from inside the house.

If we can accept this reality, a crucial question follows: Where do we go when we’re the ones who cause harm to others, ourselves and God?

Often, we prefer blaming our circumstances or believing continuing in what hasn’t worked will miraculously begin to produce different results. It might appear like insanity, but there’s good underlying motivation. We have previous experiences where it hasn’t been safe to return home. Our smallest mistakes have been spotlighted, and our greater failures to perform became justification for exclusion.

We tried to return home, only to spot a flickering “No Vacancy” sign far off in the distance. Why would it be any different this time?

Thank God that God is kinder than our previous experiences. The famous story of the “Prodigal Son” (Luke 15) isn’t just a story about a lost son - it’s repentance illustrated. It proves the point that it’s always safe to return home to the Father. The Porch Light is always on in anticipation of our arrival.

The son doesn’t come back with a polished apology or a flawless moral record.
He just comes home.

And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. - Luke 15:20