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In my last article, One Question Cost Me My Church, I told the story of what happened when that hunger eventually collided with church leadership. I had asked why we didn’t hear the gospel preached more. That question led to other questions, and eventually to a meeting in my pastor’s office where I was accused of causing division, failing to support the church, and subverting leadership.

But something else had been happening during those months, something far more important than the conflict. I had fallen in love with my Bible. Not in the obligatory Christian way where you’re supposed to say you love reading the Bible because that’s what good Christians say. I mean I genuinely couldn’t leave it alone. I would read something and discover that it raised three more questions. Then I’d start chasing those questions through other passages, filling notebooks, listening to sermons and wondering how I had managed to miss so much.

Some of the questions were pretty basic. One that bothered me had to do with the Law. Paul could call the Law holy and good, then turn around and say that Christians weren’t under law but under grace. Jesus said he came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, but then I’d read the Sermon on the Mount and think, Fulfill it? He seems to be making it harder. Don’t murder became don’t hate. Don’t commit adultery became don’t lust.

How did all of that fit together? I remember asking my pastor. He smiled and said, “That’s a good question.” And that was pretty much it. I don’t tell that story to make him look foolish. It was a good question, and pastors aren’t walking systematic theology textbooks. But I was hungry. I wasn’t asking questions to show anyone how clever I was or to catch my pastor saying something wrong. I desperately wanted someone to help me understand what I was reading.

Then I started listening to people who could. Through other Christians who were asking some of the same questions, I discovered teachers like R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur. Following them introduced me to an older world of Christianity that I barely knew existed. Soon I was reading the Reformers and Puritans and encountering historic confessions of faith. Eventually I discovered Reformed Baptist systematic theology.

I know. Systematic theology. Try to contain your excitement. But I loved it. For most of my first six years as a Christian, I had encountered the Bible one piece at a time. There was David and Goliath. Noah and the ark. Jesus feeding five thousand people. Paul telling Christians to stop doing things Christians weren’t supposed to do. Proverbs giving us good advice. Revelation being... well, Revelation. There were sermons about marriage and parenting and being a better Christian. There were history lessons and character studies and principles for living. Some of them were helpful. But I couldn’t see what held all of it together.

Suddenly someone dumped the box of puzzle pieces onto the table and showed me the picture on the lid. That’s the closest description I can give you of what happened to me. Creation connected to the fall. The fall connected to the promise. The promise unfolded through covenant, law, sacrifice, kingdom, exile and Messiah. The Old Testament wasn’t merely a collection of inspiring stories that happened before Jesus showed up. It was going somewhere. And all those roads eventually converged on Christ: his life, his cross, his resurrection, and the promise that God was making all things new.

Even my questions about law and grace began to make sense. The Law wasn’t bad. It revealed something of the holiness and goodness of God. But it also revealed something about us. We couldn’t fix ourselves. We couldn’t climb our way back to God through morality, obedience, religion or sheer determination. And that’s where grace became more than a Christian vocabulary word. God came for us.

Jesus hadn’t come merely to give humanity a better set of rules or to demonstrate how good people ought to behave. Christ lived the life we could not live. He died for sinners, bore our sin and judgment on the cross, and rose from the dead. Salvation wasn’t something I could achieve by becoming sufficiently obedient, religious or respectable. It was a gift. For the first time, I understood why Paul could call the gospel “the power of God for salvation.” And after six years of being a Christian, I finally knew how I would answer the question that had started this whole mess.

What is the gospel? I no longer think there is one answer to this question. Everyone seems to have their own little spin on it. Paul’s gives a simple definition in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. I now even have a slightly different spin than I once did. But for the sake of this article, this is what I had learned at that time. God made us for himself. We rebelled against him, and sin broke something we could never repair ourselves. But God did not abandon us. In Jesus Christ, God came to rescue sinners. Jesus lived faithfully, died for our sins, and rose again, defeating sin and death. He offers forgiveness, reconciliation with God and new life as a gift of grace received through faith.

There it was. I finally had words for it. Would I explain some of that differently today? Sure. Twenty years of following Jesus should change the way you understand some things. The stuffy Reformers even had a phrase for that: Semper Reformanda. Always reforming. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

At the time, it felt like being saved all over again. Not because I had found a different gospel. I was finally beginning to understand the one I had believed all along. My growth accelerated almost overnight because I wasn’t merely collecting Christian information anymore. I had a framework for understanding where everything belonged. And I wanted more. So we went looking for a church.

The internet was a different place back then, but one of the great discoveries for a theology obsessed Christian was SermonAudio. Somewhere in all those hours of listening, we discovered a church within driving distance that seemed to be preaching the same things we had been learning. We were intrigued. We were also coming out of a painful church experience and weren’t exactly eager to blindly walk into another one. So we did what any reasonable family searching for a church would do. We did drive by. I’m serious.

Before attending a service, we got in the car and went to look at the place. Apparently we thought we’d be able to determine the theological and psychological health of an entire congregation from the parking lot. Mostly, I think we wanted to make sure it wasn’t... weird. You know the kind of weird I mean. Nothing particularly alarming presented itself, so eventually we took the much greater risk of actually going inside.

Almost immediately, we knew this place was different. There was liturgy. There were historic hymns and Scripture readings. The church had a confession of faith that clearly stated what it believed. Membership wasn’t just having your name added to a list somewhere. It was formal and taken seriously. There was structure and order to the service. There was a seriousness about the things of God that we had never experienced before, and instead of feeling stuffy or restrictive, it felt refreshing.

We liked that the service didn’t seem designed around us. Nobody appeared overly concerned with entertaining us. There wasn’t much effort to make Christianity seem cool. We weren’t the center of attention. God was. And after everything we’d been learning, we loved that.

Most importantly, they preached the Bible. The pastor would take a passage and actually stay there. He would work through the text, explain what it meant, connect it to the rest of Scripture and point us toward Christ. The gospel wasn’t something tucked away for an occasional evangelistic service or assumed because everyone in the room was already Christian. We heard it. Again and again. The very thing I had asked for at our previous church was now being preached to me every Sunday and it felt like fresh water.

We became formal members within a year. And then we stayed. For years. Good years. I want to make that clear because I know how stories like this usually work. Once you know someone eventually left a church, there’s a temptation to reread everything that came before through the lens of how it ended. Every disagreement becomes a warning sign. Every flaw becomes evidence that disaster was inevitable. Eventually the entire story gets rewritten until you wonder why the person ever stayed in the first place.

That’s not my story. I loved that church, like the first church. I grew there. My understanding of Scripture deepened dramatically. My theology matured. I learned to study the Bible carefully and to take ideas seriously. I learned that doctrine mattered, not because passing a theology exam gets anyone into heaven, but because what we believe about God changes the way we understand everything else. More importantly, I grew in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ.

And somewhere along the way, something happened that the guy who drove nervously past that church building would never have imagined. They started trusting me to lead. At first it was smaller things. Eventually I was helping lead Sunday services: giving announcements, reading Scripture, offering the call to worship and leading the congregation in hymns. I began teaching. Within a couple of years, I was occasionally preaching.

I wish I could go back and tell the version of me from a few years earlier what was coming. The guy who had sat in church for six years and suddenly realized he couldn’t explain the gospel was now standing behind a pulpit proclaiming it. That meant something to me. It still does. The theology I discovered during those years fed me when I was starving. It gave me language for grace. It showed me the beauty of a God centered faith and taught me to see Scripture as one magnificent story instead of hundreds of disconnected pieces. That church gave me opportunities to grow, serve, teach and discover gifts I didn’t know I had.

I am grateful for those years. Even now. Especially now, perhaps, because healing has taught me that gratitude doesn’t require pretending nothing painful happened later. Some of what I believed in those days I no longer believe. Some of the theological system that once seemed airtight eventually developed cracks. Years later I would take apart assumptions I once defended passionately and discover that grace was bigger than some of the categories I had built around it.

But I’m not interested in mocking the younger version of myself for believing what he believed. That’s a strange way to talk about growth. The people and theology I encountered during those years nourished me when I needed nourishment. They answered questions nobody had been able to answer. They taught me to think. They taught me to study. They gave me a much bigger Jesus than the one I had understood before.

You don’t have to burn down every house you’ve outgrown. Sometimes you can simply be grateful that it sheltered you for a while. And for a long time, I wasn’t thinking about leaving anyway. I thought I had finally found what I’d been looking for: a church serious about Scripture, a theology centered on God rather than us, a gospel built on grace rather than performance, and a community where I could learn, serve and belong. For years, that’s exactly what it was. But something else was happening to me during those years, something I didn’t recognize as particularly significant at the time.

I was getting better at asking questions. Not cynical questions. Not questions designed to embarrass somebody or win an argument. The same kind of questions that had brought me there in the first place. I had learned to study carefully. I had learned to test ideas against Scripture, to follow an argument wherever the text seemed to take it, to examine assumptions and to believe that truth shouldn’t need to be protected from honest scrutiny.

Those habits had helped lead me out of my first church. They had led me to the Reformers. They had led me to systematic theology. They had led me to this church. Eventually, they would lead me somewhere else. Because it’s one thing to belong to a church where everyone agrees about the answers. It’s another thing entirely to discover what happens when you start asking different questions.

To be continued...

If this is your first time here, this personal Substack is the fountainhead for everything else I write. It’s where I tell the stories behind the stories, wrestle openly with faith, church, grace, doubt, healing, and the questions I’m still asking.

From here, those ideas take different forms. Scandalous Grace goes deeper into the theology of a grace far bigger than we’ve often been taught. Adventures in Grace explores those same questions through serialized fiction, following messy people trying to figure out God, themselves, and what grace actually looks like in real life. Holier Than Thou takes us inside an equally messy little church where spiritual and social outcasts are discovering what happens when grace gets out of the sermon and into the room. And The Transformation Project (TTP) explores how what we believe actually changes the way we live.

Different publications. Different voices. Different ways of telling the story. But they all come from the same place and keep circling the same conviction: you are not alone, you are deeply loved, and grace is bigger than you think.

If that’s a journey you want to take with me, subscribe here first. This is home base. Everything else flows from here.

But the longer I've lived, the more I have come to realize that version of grace can't handle real life.
It couldn't hold my questions. It couldn't hold my sin. It couldn't hold my desires, my shame, my secrets, or my story. And if we're being honest, it can't hold yours either. Because grace that only works when you're clean isn't grace at all. It's the worst kind of religion.

Real grace? The kind Jesus walked with, wept with, and bled for? It's raw, wild, and scandalous. It breaks into bedrooms and bar stools and boardrooms and BDSM clubs. It whispers "beloved" into the ears of addicts and cheaters and self-righteous saints alike. It kneels in the dirt with adulterers and touches the hands of lepers and calls them whole. It speaks to the ones who thought they were too far gone and says, "I'm not afraid of your messiness."

Somewhere along the way, we traded that wild grace for something much more manageable.
We made grace respectable. We tamed the lion. We quenched the fire. We dressed Jesus up in his Sunday best and asked him not to bleed on the carpet.

But grace was never meant to be polite. It was meant to ruin your performance and set you free. It was meant to break the rules of who's in and who's out. It was meant to scandalize you.
So if you've ever felt like the version of grace you were handed wasn't strong enough to hold your story, this is for you. Because the lies we've believed about grace are not just wrong. They're dangerous. And they've kept far too many people from ever knowing the real Jesus. Let's name them. Let's burn them down. And let's rebuild something real.

Let's say it out loud: We've made a hierarchy out of sin. We say "all sin is sin," but what we really mean is "your sin is worse than mine." We've gotten really good at classifying brokenness into categories we can handle and ones we can't. Gossip? Pride? A little bitterness toward our spouse? That's normal. That's manageable. That's what prayer circles and confession times are for.

But sexual sin? Addiction? Rage at God? Trauma that left your boundaries frayed and your identity confused? Now that is too messy. That's "dirty." And we don't talk about that at Bible studies or anywhere polite Christians gather.

We've divided sin into two piles: the ones we can confess with a chuckle and the ones we don't confess at all. The ones we still feel in our bodies. The ones that have names and flashbacks and side effects we're still dealing with. And when we dare to whisper them? We're met with silence. Or pity. Or a warning disguised as a prayer request. "We're all sinners," they say. Right after wincing at your story.
"There's grace," they nod while subtly sliding their seat a little farther from yours.

But here's the truth we've forgotten: there aren’t just "clean" sins. And there aren’t just "dirty" people.
There's just humanity: aching, confused, wounded, and hungry. And a man who stepped into it all. He didn't write grace in the sky. He didn't lob forgiveness down from a throne. He put on flesh and entered the same temptations. And he didn't turn away in disgust. He touched the untouchable. Defended the guilty. Looked religious men in the eye and called them blind while kneeling beside women still dripping in shame. Not once did he say, "That sin's a little too much." Not once did he offer grace only after a twelve-step recovery program. He saw the wound and he touched it.
And then he called the person whole.

We created the categories. Jesus never did. If you've carried something that felt too heavy for grace... If you've been told your story is "too much," your desires are "too far," your past is "too dirty"... Let this be your moment to breathe. You don't need to clean your sin to be worthy of grace. Grace is the only thing strong enough to touch it and not be contaminated. And the truth is, some of us don't need another sermon on sin. We need to be reminded that Jesus already carried our shame. All of it. Even the kind we're still too afraid to say out loud.

He chose proximity over propriety. And He didn't just "minister" to people like projects on a mission trip. He defended them. He dignified them. And he spoke to them like they mattered. He flipped tables. He broke rules. He ate with the wrong people. And he did it all to reveal a different kind of kingdom. One where the last are first. One where the pure-hearted might have tattoos, records, or regrets. One where the doorway to redemption isn't locked by doctrine, but it's flung wide by grace.
If you've ever felt like the kind of person the church warned others about or you've been labeled "too much," "too broken," "too sexual," "too angry," or "too unchurched", you're in good company. The stories we tell kids in Sunday School are full of people just like you. The ones Jesus loved and defended.

So don't let sanitized religion convince you you're on the outside looking in. Jesus doesn't build His table with pews and polish. He builds it with grace and grit and scandal and mercy. And there’s a seat with your name on it. Even if you've never stepped foot in a church building. Even if you're still not sure if you ever want to. Even if you're still bleeding, still ashamed, or still unsure of who you even are anymore. You belong.

No matter how you came here: bloody, weary, doubtful, or defiant, grace isn't asking you to hide. It's asking you to come home. And right here, in the middle of the mess you thought disqualified you, is where grace rolls up its sleeves and says,

"Let's begin."

If this article encouraged you, I’d love to keep walking with you. Here are a few more places you might enjoy:

☕ Christopher David
My personal corner of Substack, where I write about faith, life, creativity, and the journey of being fully human.

📖 Scandalous Grace
Bold, grace-filled essays that challenge religious assumptions and invite you to rediscover the heart of Jesus.

📚 Adventures in Grace
A serialized novel about messy people discovering that grace is far bigger than they ever imagined

🌱 The Transformation Project
Research, conversations, and practical tools exploring one question: What actually helps people become more like Jesus?

Subscribe to one or all and let’s keep exploring the scandalous beauty of grace together.

(Yeah, AI has been used as a collaboration tool to brainstorm, research, challenge assumptions, and edit text and images. All ideas, convictions, interpretations, and final editorial decisions remain 100% human.)

“Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2:17)

I’ve heard this passage preached countless times. Usually it goes something like this:

“If your faith is real, you’ll read your Bible more.”

“You’ll pray more.”

“You’ll attend church more faithfully.”

“You’ll stop sinning.”

“You’ll become a better Christian.”

Those are all good things. Every follower of Jesus should desire them. But there’s one problem. That’s not what James says.

Read James Instead of Reading Our Assumptions

One of the most helpful questions we can ask when reading Scripture is this:

“What examples does the author actually give?”

James doesn’t leave us guessing. He tells us exactly what he means by “works.” His first example isn’t someone starting a daily devotional. It’s this:

“If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15–16)

That’s James’ first picture of living faith. Not religious activity. Compassion. A faith that notices suffering and does something about it.

Abraham Didn’t Impress God

James then points to Abraham. For many of us, this story has become another impossible standard.

“Would I be willing to sacrifice my son?”

But that’s not James’ point. Abraham wasn’t trying to earn God’s approval. Genesis makes that clear long before Isaac was born. Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” He was already in a relationship with God. Years later, when God asked him to offer Isaac, Abraham obeyed because he trusted the God he already knew.

His obedience didn’t create his faith. It revealed it. Faith became visible.

Then James Chooses... Rahab?

The second example is even more surprising. James could have chosen Moses. Or David. Or Elijah. Instead, he chooses Rahab. A Gentile. A prostitute (according to New Testament writers she was Rahab, the harlot). Someone with no religious pedigree whatsoever.

Why?

Because when Rahab heard what God had done, she believed. And her belief immediately changed her actions. She hid the Israelite spies at enormous personal risk. Her faith became visible through courageous love. Again, James isn’t talking about religious performance. He’s talking about trust becoming action.

What James Doesn’t Say

Something struck me as I read James again. Notice what examples he doesn’t use. He never says:

“The evidence of living faith is reading more Scripture.”

“The evidence of living faith is praying longer prayers.”

“The evidence of living faith is attending every church service.”

Those practices matter. They shape us. They nourish our relationship with God. But James doesn’t use them as the proof that faith is alive. Instead, he points to feeding hungry people. Helping those in need. Risking comfort for others. Treating people without favoritism. Speaking with kindness. Showing mercy. Living with humility. James is remarkably practical.He’s interested in how faith changes the way we treat people.

Fruit, Not Payment

This is why James and Paul are not enemies. Paul says we are justified by faith apart from works of the law. James says genuine faith produces works. Those aren’t competing ideas. They’re describing different sides of the same reality. Paul talks about the root. James talks about the fruit. Paul explains how a person is made right with God. James explains what happens after they have been.

Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question

Perhaps the question isn’t: “Am I doing enough Christian things?” Maybe the better question is:“Has the love of Christ begun to overflow into the people around me?” Because that’s what James cared about.

James wasn’t trying to make Christians feel guilty. He was showing us what grace looks like when it leaves the church building. A living faith cannot remain invisible. It naturally becomes compassion and generosity. Not because we’re trying to earn God’s love. But because we’ve already encountered it.

I was told I was causing division. That I wasn't supporting the church. That I was subverting leadership. Then came the ultimatum. Stop questioning things, start attending every service again, including Wednesday night adult prayer and youth group, and get back in line. Or else.

I chose "or else."

It wasn't a brave moment. It wasn't satisfying. It wasn't one of those scenes where someone walks away feeling victorious. A friend I met with after and who knew what was going on positioned me as a modern day Martin Luther standing bravely before the church magistrate. I told him I was no Martin Luther. I had walked away wondering how I had ended up there in the first place. Because I hadn't gone looking for a fight. I had gone looking for the gospel.

A few months earlier, a thought had unsettled me in a way I couldn't shake. I had been a Christian for six years, yet I realized that I couldn't explain the gospel. Not really. I mean, I could mumble something about Jesus loving us and dying for our sins. But I really had no idea what that meant or why it was necessary. That embarrassed me. Not because I thought Christians should have all the answers, but because the gospel isn't some obscure doctrine tucked away in Leviticus.

Paul calls it "the power of God for salvation." If that was true, how could I have spent six years in church and still struggle to explain the very message everything else was supposed to revolve around?So I started asking others in my church.

“Can you explain the gospel?"

The answers surprised me. Some talked about being freed from our sins. Some talked about the love of God. Some talked about asking Jesus into your heart. Most stumbled through an answer that sounded familiar but somehow incomplete. Maybe they were just caught off guard. Or maybe I wasn't the only one struggling with this. But maybe I was the only one willing to ask the question. It felt like a fresh revision of The Emperors New Clothes. Everyone knowing something isn't right, but no one wanting to be the one to call it out.

I opened my Bible with fresh eyes. I began reading differently. Slower. More carefully. I wasn't trying to prove anyone wrong. I wasn't collecting arguments. I was trying to understand what Scripture actually said. Instead of group prayer at the church, Wednesday nights became personal study nights. That wasn't an act of rebellion. It was desperation.

I wanted someone to teach me. I wanted my pastors to open the Scriptures and show me Jesus in a way that made everything click. I didn't need another motivational message or another history lesson. I needed the gospel to stop being a word I recognized and become a reality I understood and lived.

So I asked.

It didn't seem like a dangerous question. Could we hear the gospel preached more? Looking back, I still don't think it was. But somewhere between that question and that meeting in the pastor's office, my motives had been rewritten. The man who walked into that office wasn't treated like someone who was hungry. He was treated like someone who was dangerous.

Now, to be fair, I wasn't perfect either. People had encouraged me to start teaching the men, and I did. Looking back, I wasn't ready for that responsibility. There were probably better ways I could have handled some conversations. Better ways to express my concerns. Healing has a way of showing you your own blind spots too. But one thing has never changed. I didn't want to be the teacher. I wanted to be taught.

Eventually my family left that church. Not immediately. For me, leaving a church should never be the first option. Churches are supposed to be families, and families are worth fighting for. We stayed longer than many people would have. We hoped things would improve. They didn't.

What I didn't know then was that this would not be my last painful experience with church leadership. In some ways, the next chapter would be even harder. But that's a story for another day. For a long time, I didn't know what to do with any of it. I wasn't interested in becoming another angry ex-Christian. I wasn't interested in spending the rest of my life collecting stories about bad pastors or broken churches. There are enough echo chambers built on outrage already. At the same time, pretending none of it happened didn't seem very honest either. So I kept searching.

Somewhere along the way, two companions emerged. One became my Substack publication, Scandalous Grace: my attempt to wrestle honestly with Scripture, grace, the church, and the God who never seemed threatened by honest questions.

The other became another Substack publication, Adventures in Grace: a story about a person asking very real questions as she navigates real life. Sometimes stories tell the truth in ways arguments never can. Maybe that's why so much of the Bible is story and not merely doctrinal teaching. There are even more stories waiting to be told that I haven't yet gotten the courage to share. None started as a project. All of them started as survival.

If you've found your way here, maybe your story looks nothing like mine. I hope it does, in one important sense. I hope you're seeking. Maybe you've never been hurt by a church. Maybe you have. Maybe you're deconstructing everything you've ever believed. Maybe you're rebuilding. Maybe you're a pastor carrying burdens no one sees. Maybe you've walked away from Christianity altogether but can't quite walk away from Jesus.

Wherever you are, you're welcome here.

For me, this won't be a place to bash the Church, the gathering of believers. The Church is still Christ's bride, even when she bears the scars of her own brokenness. This also won't be a place where difficult questions are whispered in the parking lot but never spoken out loud. Questions are welcome here. So are doubts. So is hope.

Mostly, though, this is a place for seekers. Not seekers who are looking for the next trend. Seekers who are looking for the real Jesus. I'm still one of them.

Maybe we can keep walking together.