A lot of us learned how to pursue God.

We learned how to pray more, fast more, serve more, give more, press in more, believe harder, and keep reaching for the next breakthrough.

And many of those things can be beautiful.

But somewhere along the way, it is possible to become very sincere about following Jesus while still living as though the deepest things He accomplished are waiting on us to finish them.

That is one of the reasons Chris Berglund and I created Behold School.

Our first twelve-week track is called ABIDE — The Gospel From Which We Live, and it brings together three courses that we believe belong in conversation with one another.

In The Gospel From Which We Live | Romans 5–8, I’ll be walking slowly through these four chapters with you as we look at union with Christ, freedom from sin, life in the Spirit, sonship, grace, and what it means to actually live from what God has already accomplished in Christ.

In The Melchizedek Lens, Chris will teach on Jesus as our eternal Priest-King and help us see the New Covenant through the order of Melchizedek: covenant, communion, righteousness and peace, sonship, rest, and the power of an indestructible life.

And together, Chris and I will teach Apostolic Architecture | The Indicative and the Imperative, drawing from the book we are writing together. This course asks what happens when the finished work of Christ becomes the actual foundation for the way we live, obey, lead, build community, and understand the Church.

The three courses are different, but they are deeply connected.

Romans reveals the life we have received.
Melchizedek reveals the Priest-King through whom we receive it.
Apostolic Architecture explores what it looks like when that life begins to form and build a people.

And this isn’t meant to be information you simply consume.

We’ll memorize Scripture together. We’ll have live online beholding gatherings every other week. Formation groups will meet on the alternating weeks. There will be practices, reflection, conversation, and space to actually let these truths become part of the way we live.

The entire school is online, so you can participate from anywhere.

Our Founding Class begins September 14, and we would love to have you with us.

Tuition is $299.

We also have a limited number of partial and full tuition scholarships available. If finances would keep you from participating, you can request assistance here:

Request Tuition Assistance

You can learn more and register at:

Join the Founding Class

Chris and I have been building toward this for a long time, and I am deeply expectant about what can happen when a group of people gives twelve weeks to letting the Gospel reshape the place from which they live.

If you know someone who would resonate with this, would you send this to them?

We begin September 14.

Leah

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By Leah Ramirez & Chris Berglund

This is our first attempt at really co-writing something together, and we thought it might be worth telling you that before you start reading.

In some ways, that is surprising even to us. We co-pastor The Gathering, teach alongside one another, and spend a lot of time every week talking through Scripture, challenging each other’s assumptions, adding another passage to the conversation, and following ideas wherever they lead. We are very accustomed to thinking together out loud. Writing together is different. We are learning how to take what happens so naturally in conversation and form it into one piece without losing either voice along the way.

This is becoming especially important as we build Behold School. For our first track, we are co-writing a course together called Apostolic Architecture, and that process is opening up a new kind of partnership for us. We are discovering what it means to bring different histories, language, insights, and ways of seeing Scripture into the same teaching and allow something shared to emerge from it. We are still learning how to do that, and we imagine our process will keep developing as we go.

This article is part of that process. It began as a write-up of Chris’s message from Sunday, Revelation-Shaped Imagination Unto Conception, but as we began working through it together, Chris added thoughts that have been forming in him for years, Leah developed some of the implications that surfaced after the teaching, and it gradually became more than a sermon recap. What you are reading is our first attempt to take a teaching that began in the room on Sunday and continue forming it together for you here on Substack.

That is also a little picture of what we hope to do in Behold School. We do not simply want to hand people conclusions. We want to stay with Scripture long enough for the questions to open, for old assumptions to be challenged, and for the truth to move beyond information into the way we actually see God and ourselves. Our first twelve-week track begins September 14, and much of our time will be spent in Romans 5–8, alongside the Apostolic Architecture course we are building together. If you want to walk through that process with us, you can learn more at BeholdSchool.com.

Chris has used the phrase “imagination unto conception” for years, particularly in communities where people had spent a great deal of time studying Scripture, waiting on the Lord, praying, and learning to behold Christ together. In that kind of shared life, a few words can carry years of context. Outside of it, those same words can land very differently.

Imagine speaking with someone who has no knowledge of Jesus or the Bible. If they asked what we did that morning and we simply answered, “I spent time beholding the Lamb,” it could sound strange or even ridiculous. The problem would not be with the phrase itself, but with the absence of the biblical context that gives the phrase its meaning.

That is part of why we have begun using the fuller phrase revelation-shaped imagination unto conception. The addition of revelation-shaped is important. We are not talking about creating a reality through the power of the mind or imagining a desired future until we somehow cause it to come into being. We have no desire to generate or express a spiritual reality that originates in ourselves. We are talking about what happens when God reveals something that is already true and we stay with that revelation long enough for it to begin changing the way we see.

The starting point is always God. We want to keep asking: What is the source? What is the context? What is the object? In revelation-shaped imagination, the source is the Spirit, the revelation is Christ, the object of our beholding is Christ, and the resulting formation is the life of Christ expressed in us. This is not independent life; it is participation in His life.

God speaks. God reveals Christ. The Holy Spirit illuminates something in Scripture or opens our understanding to something that has been there all along. We then have something to behold. Our imagination is not producing the revelation. It becomes part of our inward capacity to see, ponder, remain with, and eventually live from what God has shown us.

That distinction becomes especially important because all of us already have an inner picture of reality. We have ideas about who God is, how He relates to us, who we are to Him, what prayer is, where He is, where we are, and what we expect to happen when we approach Him. Those pictures may have been shaped by Scripture, but they may also have been shaped by disappointment, family, church culture, fear, trauma, shame, or simply years of thinking the same way without ever examining it.

It is entirely possible to believe something doctrinally while imagining something very different. We can say that God loves us and still approach Him as though He would rather we stayed away. We can believe that Christ reconciled us to God while continuing to picture a great distance between us and the Father. We can say that we are “in Christ” while living most of our Christian lives as though Jesus is somewhere outside of us and our job is to get closer to Him.

This is one reason Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1 is so interesting. He is writing to believers, people who have already heard the gospel and believed it, yet he prays that God would give them wisdom and revelation and that the “eyes of your hearts” would be enlightened. There are things that can be true of us before we know how to see them.

This is the space we are trying to give language to.

What we stay with begins to shape us

Chris went back to the Old Testament word yetzer and the language in Genesis about the imagination or intention of the heart. Scripture recognizes an inner life that is being formed over time. The thoughts, images, desires, assumptions, and realities we continually return to do not simply pass through us without effect.

He connected that with Isaiah 26 and the person whose mind is stayed upon God. There is a steadiness that develops because attention has found a place to rest.

That helps explain the distinction between a glance and a gaze. Most of us know what it is to glance at Scripture. We can read a chapter, underline something, agree with it, and move on with our day. There is nothing wrong with reading quickly at times, but beholding is something different. Beholding stays long enough for the truth to begin pressing against whatever inside of us does not yet agree with it.

Beholding, then, is more than looking. It is staying before what God has revealed until it begins to work its way into us. We remain with the truth long enough for it to press against everything in us that does not yet agree with Him, and we remain with the picture long enough for what is hidden within it to begin to open. What was first only a word becomes sight. What was first only sight begins to become our inward reality. As we behold, something in us begins to yield. Old ways of seeing lose their strength. False conclusions are displaced. Faith rises as the Spirit makes the revelation a lived reality within us.

We are no longer merely trying to believe what God has said; we are beginning to see from within the reality He has revealed. This is the mystery and power of beholding: we do not produce transformation by effort. We behold the glory of the Lord, and the Spirit forms in us the very image we are seeing. When a people behold Him together, that revelation begins to shape a corporate people, bringing us into one sight, one desire, and one mind, until the Christ we have been beholding begins to be expressed through His Body.

This formation process is the fruit of the heart holding what God has said until it takes form. The call is not to try harder, but to remain longer. This is deeply connected to abiding. We stay with what God has revealed, giving the seed of that revelation time to take root, deepen, and begin forming something within us. Revelation shows us the seed; sanctified imagination beholds what the seed contains; faith receives it; and the Spirit brings it unto formation.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18:

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV

Paul does not say we transform ourselves by beholding. The verse ends by locating the work where it belongs: “For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

That matters. Beholding is not a spiritual technique for self-improvement. We are not trying to concentrate on Jesus so intensely that we manage to make ourselves more like Him. The Spirit is the One who transforms us. But Paul still joins beholding and transformation together. Faith receives what God reveals, and beholding gives that revelation our sustained attention while the Spirit does the work of forming it in us. Our attention participates in something the Spirit is doing.

This is why one of the simplest things Chris said Sunday carried so much weight: we are not trying harder; we are staying longer.

There is a kind of Christianity that turns everything into effort. If we are not loving enough, we try harder to love. If we are anxious, we try harder to have faith. If we do not feel close to God, we pray harder, worship harder, read more, confess more, or find something else to do that we hope will close the distance.

Beholding begins somewhere else. It begins with what God has already revealed and asks us to stay there. Sometimes the problem is not that we need another truth. Sometimes the truth we already know has never been allowed to reach the places in us that still live as though it were not true.

Jesus taught us with pictures

One of the things we keep coming back to is how often Jesus communicates through images. Jesus spoke in word pictures that invite us to see inwardly what He was communicating.

He could have given His disciples abstract definitions for nearly everything He taught them, but He rarely did. He talked about vines and branches, shepherds and sheep, seed and soil, bread, water, lamps, doors, houses, rocks, sand, vineyards, wedding feasts, treasure, pearls, children, fathers, servants, fields and harvests.

He gave people something they could see.

Consider John 15. Jesus says:

“I am the vine; you are the branches.”
John 15:5, ESV

That is a very simple sentence, but we can spend a long time inside it.

A branch does not visit the vine. It does not stand next to the vine hoping to become more vine-like. It does not receive a weekly supply of vine life and then go off to produce fruit on its own. The branch lives because it is joined to the vine.

Jesus could have given us a theological definition of union and dependence, but instead He gave us a picture.

If we stay with that picture, our understanding of the Christian life begins to shift. We start to notice how often we imagine ourselves as independent people who need to acquire something from Jesus. We need more life, more grace, more power, more presence, more strength. Our basic picture is still separation, and Christianity becomes the means by which we try to get what we lack.

The vine and branches tell a different story. The branch has no independent life to improve. Its life is in the vine. Fruit is not a separate accomplishment the branch offers back to Jesus. Fruit is the life of the vine becoming visible in the branch. There is a deepening of rest. When the heart begins to see this, something settles within us. We are not trying to get closer to Life; we are awakening to the wonder that His life is already flowing in us.

The branch becomes unfruitful when it is disconnected from its source. This helps us see that whatever is produced outside of abiding union with Christ may appear fruitful for a time, but it does not carry eternal substance because it was not initiated by His life in us. For the believer, there is no fruitfulness worth pursuing apart from the life of Christ as its source.

That is not a small distinction. It changes the way we understand growth.

The same thing happens with so many of the pictures Jesus gives us. When He talks about a house built on rock, He gives us more than a statement about sound doctrine. We can see the house. We can see the storm. We can see what remains when everything around it is being shaken. The image continues teaching us if we stay with it. As we remain with the picture, the heart begins to feel the safety and rest of being held in something stronger than the storm.

Chris had some fun demonstrating what would happen if Jesus had taught only in abstract theological language. Jesus could have said something technically correct about relational dependence upon a necessary source, but few of us would remember it thirty seconds later. Instead, Jesus says, “I am the vine.”

That is not Jesus making theology less serious. It is Jesus understanding how human beings know. There is a difference between knowing the definition of something and seeing it.

This is where imagination, properly understood, becomes part of discipleship. Jesus Himself has supplied the image, so we are not inventing a private spiritual world. We are allowing the words of Christ to furnish our inward world with what He has said is true.

Why “revelation-shaped” matters

One concern that naturally comes up when we use language about imagination, meditation, light, inner sight, or spiritual formation is that some of these words also appear in New Age spirituality or other religious systems. We do not think that concern needs to be dismissed, but neither should a counterfeit be allowed to define the original.

The question is whether we stop using words because someone else has twisted them, or whether we allow Scripture to define them. We need to discern the source. We never want to abandon a biblical reality simply because someone has counterfeited it. God originates; the enemy imitates. We are not borrowing from the world. We are returning to God’s original design.

Scripture talks about meditation. Scripture talks about light and glory. It speaks of the eyes of the heart. It speaks of transformation, renewal of the mind, and Christ being formed in a people. We do not have to abandon biblical language simply because those words have been borrowed, distorted, or detached from Christ.

The real question is where the life originates.

A spirituality centered on the self eventually makes the self the source. We determine the reality we want and use spiritual practices to move ourselves toward it. Even God, if He is included at all, can become part of a larger system for obtaining the life we have imagined.

The gospel runs the other direction. God is the source. God reveals. We receive.

Our imagination has to remain submitted to revelation precisely because imagination by itself is not trustworthy. We can imagine almost anything. Fear can give us pictures. Shame can give us pictures. Ambition can give us pictures. Religion can give us pictures. Our own desires can give us a very convincing picture of God approving something He never said.

So we do not follow imagination wherever it leads. We allow Christ to govern it.

This is why the word revelation cannot be removed from what we are describing. This is not a Christian form of manifestation. It is an inward response to something that has originated in God.

Mary is one of the clearest examples. Gabriel comes to her in Luke 1 with a word she did not originate and a future she could never have imagined into existence. The initiative belongs completely to God. Mary hears the word, asks how this can happen, and then responds:

“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
Luke 1:38, ESV

That is faith, but it is not faith as a force Mary generates to make the incarnation happen. God has spoken. Mary receives His word.

Chris connected this to conception for obvious reasons, but the pattern extends well beyond Mary. Revelation comes from God, faith agrees with what He has said, and something begins to take shape.

Abraham has a similar encounter. God takes him outside and tells him to look toward heaven and number the stars. The promise comes from God, but God also gives Abraham something to see.

Years will pass. Abraham and Sarah’s bodies will eventually look like evidence against the promise. The stars do not cause the promise to come true, and Abraham does not create descendants by visualizing them. The stars become a reminder of the One who spoke.

Paul says of Abraham in Romans 4 that he was:

“fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Romans 4:21, ESV

That puts faith in its proper place. Abraham’s confidence is not ultimately confidence in his own believing. His confidence is in the character and ability of God.

This is why we can describe faith as agreement with grace. Grace has already moved. Grace has already spoken. Faith says yes to what God has revealed.

Until Christ is formed in you

The word conception in this phrase is not simply about having an inward spiritual experience. We are talking about formation.

Paul writes in Galatians:

“my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!”
Galatians 4:19, ESV

Chris has understood that verse for years primarily through the lens of intercession. He saw Paul laboring in prayer for Christ to be formed in people. Over time, though, he began to see that Paul’s labor could not be reduced to prayer alone. Paul labored in the way he preached the gospel, in the way he suffered, in his relationships with the churches, and in the way his own life was becoming an embodied witness to Jesus.

Paul wanted more than people who could explain Christ correctly. He wanted Christ formed in them.

That gives beholding a very practical end. If we behold Jesus, something of Jesus should eventually become visible.

If we spend years contemplating mercy but remain merciless with people, we have to ask what we have actually been beholding. If we talk endlessly about union with Christ but become increasingly preoccupied with ourselves, something has gone wrong. If we say we are being transformed by the love of God but are growing less able to love anyone who wounds or inconveniences us, there is a disconnect somewhere between the Jesus we say we are seeing and the life that is being formed.

The goal is not a sophisticated interior spirituality. The goal is Christ.

Chris shared about people who had spent years beholding individual attributes of God. They might spend a very long season with mercy, then love, then another aspect of His nature. Eventually they came to a wonderfully simple realization: they could behold Jesus.

Everything they were seeking to see was present in Him.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:6 that the knowledge of the glory of God is found “in the face of Jesus Christ.”

The glory has a face.

If we want to know what mercy looks like, we can look at Jesus. If we want to understand holiness, we can look at Jesus. If we want to understand the heart of the Father toward sinners, we can look at Jesus. If we want to know what God does with enemies, shame, sickness, failure, hypocrisy, pride, suffering and death, we look at Jesus.

That also keeps our imagination anchored. We are not trying to develop an increasingly elaborate interior spiritual world. We are looking at a Person.

As Chris came toward the end of the teaching, he gave language to the movement we have been describing. Grace gives revelation. Revelation gives us Christ to behold. Beholding fills our inward sight with His beauty. Faith receives what grace has revealed and rests in what Christ has finished. From that place of rest, the Spirit forms Christ within us.

We appreciate that way of saying it because the entire movement remains dependent on God. There is no point at which the Christian becomes the independent source of the life being formed. The Father reveals, the Son is the One we behold, and the Spirit works Christ into us.

Where are we actually located?

After the recorded portion of the teaching, Leah brought us to Ephesians 2 because it gave us a very concrete place to practice what we had just been considering.

Paul says that God made us alive together with Christ and then says:

“and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
Ephesians 2:6, ESV

We have heard language like “seated with Christ in heavenly places” for so long that we are not sure we always hear it anymore. It can become Christianese, something we know how to say without ever allowing ourselves to ask what Paul actually means.

These verses are not simply theology for the head. They are our inheritance for life.

Paul is not describing a position we may achieve someday after enough spiritual maturity. He is telling us what God has done in Christ. We were made alive with Him. We were raised with Him. We were seated with Him.

One way Leah described this on Sunday was very simple: “I am here in Colorado Springs. I have a body here. I live here. There is a chair under me here, a city around me here, and an ordinary earthly life happening here. And Scripture tells me that I am also there.”

That is worth sitting with.

We are here, in very real embodied lives, and Scripture also says that we have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places. We do not picture ourselves there because seeing it will make it true. We allow ourselves to see it because God says it is true.

That is a very concrete example of revelation-shaped imagination.

Leah also shared that when she prays, she often allows herself to see what Scripture says is true: herself in Christ, seated in that heavenly reality, face to face with the Father and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. This is not an attempt to travel somewhere spiritually. It is allowing Scripture to correct our sense of location.

There is no distance left for us to make up.

That matters because so much Christian language can still assume distance. We talk about trying to get into God’s presence, trying to get closer to Him, trying to get heaven to open, trying to reach God in prayer. We understand what people mean by much of that language, but we also think we need to let the New Testament challenge the picture underneath it.

Paul says only a few verses later:

“For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
Ephesians 2:18, ESV

Through the Son, in the Spirit, to the Father. That is the Christian life.

Jesus has not merely made it possible for us to begin a long journey toward God. In Himself, He has brought us to the Father.

That is why Leah moved from Ephesians 2 to the beginning of the prayer Jesus taught His disciples:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew 6:9–10, ESV

She asked everyone to stay with the first two words for a moment: “Our Father.”

Jesus does not say only My Father. Of course, His sonship is unique. He is the eternal Son, and we do not become part of the Trinity. But the gospel does something staggering: the Son brings us into His relationship with the Father.

After the resurrection Jesus speaks of “my Father and your Father.” Paul tells us in Romans 8 that the Spirit of adoption causes the cry “Abba! Father!” to rise in us. The New Testament does not leave us outside admiring the intimacy between the Father and Son. In Christ, we are brought into communion with God.

Then Jesus says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

We find that fascinating alongside Ephesians 2. Jesus teaches us to have some awareness of heaven because He teaches us to ask that what is true according to the Father’s will there would become visible here. Then Paul tells us that in Christ we have already been seated in the heavenly places.

We do not think this removes us from earthly life at all. It tells us where the life we bring into earthly life comes from.

We are here in Colorado Springs, or wherever we happen to live, with jobs and children and meals and difficult conversations and responsibilities and bodies that get tired. We are fully here. Yet our life is in Christ, and Christ is seated with the Father.

What would it mean, then, to begin living here with a greater consciousness of where we are in Him?

That is the question Leah left with our church, and it is one we want to leave with you as well.

Spend some time with Ephesians 2:4–7 and Matthew 6:9–10. Do not race through them because they are familiar. Let them sit for a while. What does it actually mean that God has made you alive with Christ? What does it mean that you have been raised with Him? What does it mean that you are seated with Him? When Jesus teaches you to say “Our Father,” does your inward posture toward God agree with those words?

This is where the conversation becomes more than an interesting discussion about imagination. Revelation tells us what is true, but our inner world may still be arranged around another story. Beholding gives that truth time to reach the places where fear, shame, independence, disappointment, or religion have been telling us something else.

The Holy Spirit is not asking us to invent a better reality. He is teaching us to see the one that has already been given to us in Christ. As we stay there, Christ is formed in us.

Perhaps that is why some truths cannot simply be learned and checked off. We have to live with them for a while. We have to return to them when our emotions say something different, when circumstances argue with them, and when old ways of thinking rise again.

We stay because God has spoken. We behold because Christ has been revealed. And we trust the Spirit to make the life we see in Him increasingly visible in us.

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If you want to hear the teaching that began this conversation, you can watch Chris’s full Sunday message, Revelation-Shaped Imagination Unto Conception, here:

Come learn with us at Behold School

As we mentioned at the beginning, this way of thinking and writing together is becoming part of what we are building through Behold School. Our first twelve-week track begins September 14 and will take us deeply into Romans 5–8, alongside Apostolic Architecture, the course we are co-writing together.

Behold School is completely online, so you can join us from wherever you are and walk through these weeks with people from across the nation. If you have been hungry to understand the finished work of Christ, union with Him, life in the Spirit, and what it means to actually live from the gospel, we would love to have you with us.

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I don’t really have something new to say right now. I said that Sunday, and I meant it. There are a handful of passages I keep returning to, and instead of feeling like I am exhausting them, I feel as though they are slowly exhausting me. Every time I come back, something I was sure I understood gets opened a little further. Another assumption gets questioned. Another piece of scaffolding comes loose.

I’m curious by nature, so sitting still with something for months and years is somewhat unusual for me. I like learning new things. If I become interested in a subject, I want the books, the conversations, the footnotes, all of it. But I have been learning that there is a difference between gathering information about the gospel and allowing the gospel enough time to work its way through you. Some truths have to be sat with. They have to be allowed to confront the structures we have built around them, and if I’m being honest, there are structures in me that still need to come down.

I joked on Sunday that God seems perfectly comfortable playing Jenga with our theology. He pulls out one piece and lets us look at it. Then another. Some pieces we discover are precious and true and belong in the house. Others were holding up things God never built in the first place. I think that is part of what Paul means when he talks about the renewing of our minds. We are learning to see from somewhere new.

Lately I have been asking one question again and again: What does the Gospel ask me to see?

Learning to See Like an Architect

I have just returned from Florida, where I spent time with my family. Most of them are much better at renovating houses than Larry and I have ever been. We have flipped houses too, but our version is closer to, “That paint looks better. Great. Let’s move on.”

My family is different. They remove walls. They relocate kitchens. They stand in the middle of a house that looks almost unlivable and begin talking about what will be there when they are finished. My brother can point toward a wall that is very much still standing and start describing the room on the other side of it as though he is already walking through it.

I realized while I was with them that he is not ignoring the condition of the house. He sees the rot. He sees the bad layout. He knows exactly what needs to come down. But he is seeing all of it from the perspective of the finished design.

That stayed with me because there is something deeply Pauline about it.

2 Corinthians 5:14–21 (ESV)

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

There is so much in that passage that I almost don’t know where to begin, but notice where Paul begins: “We have concluded this.” That sentence gets me because Paul has reached a conclusion about what happened in Christ, and everything that follows flows from that conclusion.

One died for all, therefore all died. He died for all. From now on, because of that, we regard no one according to the flesh. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. He was not counting their trespasses against them. And now we have been entrusted with the message of reconciliation.

I told everyone Sunday that, if I am completely honest, I feel like I am still wrestling to come to Paul’s conclusion. I know these verses. I have preached them. But there is a difference between knowing the words and allowing their implications to dismantle your categories.

Almost immediately something rises up in me and says, Wait. Surely we need to qualify this. Surely we need to make sure nobody misunderstands. What about belief? What about repentance? What about sin? What about obedience?

Those are real questions. Paul asks some of them himself in Romans. But I am becoming convinced that we do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we rush to answer the objections before we have allowed the announcement to land.

One died for all. Therefore all died.

Stay there for a minute. Let the weight of that sentence do something to you before you start building a theological escape hatch.

“From Now On”

Then Paul says something that I think should profoundly alter the way Christians encounter human beings: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.”

Something has happened in Christ that changes the vantage point.

This is where my family’s houses came back to me. An architect can stand in the middle of a ruined building and tell the truth about every broken thing without ever allowing the brokenness to define the finished work. That matters because sometimes when we talk about seeing people according to God’s finished work, people hear denial.

Are you saying the walls aren’t crumbling? No. Are you saying sin is not destructive? By no means. Are you saying people cannot live in profound alienation, darkness, addiction, hatred, fear, and unbelief? Of course they can. I know that from my own life.

What I am saying is that I do not want to agree with the ruins over the plans of the Architect. I don’t want to spend my life repainting a wall God intends to remove.

Paul says there is a way of seeing that begins with Christ and then extends toward humanity. He has concluded something about the cross, and because he has concluded it, he refuses to regard people only according to what is presently visible.

This is faith.

Romans 4:17 (ESV)

“As it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Faith agrees with God. It does not require us to deny what our eyes can see. Abraham was not pretending his body was young, and he was not pretending Sarah’s womb had not been barren. Faith sees another reality because God has spoken.

I wonder how much of life in the Spirit is learning to agree with what God sees before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

The Old Self Was Crucified With Him

This is why Romans 6 has become so important to me. Read what Paul actually says:

Romans 6:6–14 (ESV)

“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

For one who has died has been set free from sin.

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.

For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.

Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.”

Look at Paul’s order. He does not begin, “Crucify your old self.” He says, “Our old self was crucified with him.”

When? With Him.

Then Paul gives the instruction: consider it true. Reckon it. Believe it. Live from it.

This is one of the places where I feel God dismantling something in my own thinking. I have been asking Him to expose every place where I have subtly inserted my contribution into what Jesus has accomplished. My faith matters. My response matters. My obedience matters. But none of those things travel backward through time to finish what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.

I do not believe in order to make the death of Christ true. I believe because it is true.

I used the example Sunday of a prisoner whose pardon has already been signed. The pardon exists before the prisoner receives the news. The messenger arrives and announces, “You are free.” The prisoner’s belief did not produce the pardon, but if he refuses the announcement, he will continue sitting in that cell as bound as ever.

Faith is not our contribution to Christ’s accomplishment. Faith is how we receive and participate in what has been given. That is why Paul can proclaim something enormous and objective in one breath and then say in the next, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

There is no contradiction there. Reconciliation has been accomplished in Christ, and now the appeal goes out: live in the truth of it. Turn toward the One who has already turned toward you.

Why the Gospel Creates Tension

This is the part I have been wrestling with as a preacher. If I stay with the finished work too long, will someone hear me saying sin doesn’t matter? Will someone hear, “Just keep sinning”? Will someone conclude there is no response to make?

I know those questions arise because they arise in me too. What is interesting is that Paul knew they would arise.

By the time we arrive in Romans 6, Paul has preached grace with such force that the obvious objection becomes, “So what are we saying? Should we continue in sin so that grace may increase?” Paul’s answer is emphatic: by no means.

But notice what he does not do. He does not say, “Clearly I overstated grace in the previous chapter. Let me back up.” He goes deeper into union. How can we who died to sin still live in it? Don’t you know what happened to you in Christ?

That is Paul’s answer. He does not weaken the indicative. He uses the indicative as the foundation for the imperative.

That distinction matters. The gospel does not begin with what you must do for God. It begins with what God has done in Christ. Then, because it is true, a whole new kind of life becomes possible.

If our preaching never creates Paul’s question, I sometimes wonder whether we have preached Paul’s gospel.

What Is Salvation?

People have asked me, “Are you saying everyone is saved?” I think we have to slow down and ask what we mean when we use the word saved.

Jesus describes eternal life in profoundly relational language:

John 17:1–3 (ESV)

“When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.

And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’”

Eternal life is not merely a legal status stored somewhere in heaven. It is knowing the Father. It is participation in the life of God. It is communion. Jesus does not define eternal life primarily as something we possess, but as a relationship we enter into: “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

This helps me understand how the New Testament can speak so expansively about what Christ has accomplished and still call us to believe. Our participation is required because participation is the very nature of relationship. That does not mean our participation completes what Christ has done, or that God is waiting for our response before He decides what His posture toward us will be. In Christ, God has already moved toward us. He has reconciled, forgiven, embraced, and opened His own life to us. But communion cannot be experienced from only one side. Love can be given without being received, reconciliation can be accomplished while someone continues to live as though they are estranged, and an open door can remain open while someone refuses to walk through it.

So faith is not the price we pay to make reconciliation possible. Faith is our yes to the reconciliation already accomplished in Christ. It is the awakening of the heart to what is true and our willing participation in the life that has been offered to us. This is why Paul can say that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself and, without contradicting himself, turn around and plead, “Be reconciled to God.” God has acted. His heart is open. The invitation now is to know Him, trust Him, receive His life, and live inside the relationship for which we were created.

John 3:16–21 (ESV)

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.

For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.

But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

The light has come. God loved the world. God gave His Son. The Son did not come to condemn the world. And yet people can love darkness rather than light.

I don’t feel a need to collapse one truth in order to preserve the other. The tragedy of unbelief is not that it causes God to withdraw His love. The tragedy is that we can live inside a lie about the God who loves us. We can resist the light while the light is shining. We can live as enemies while God is reconciling. We can choose the experience of separation while the heart of God is moving toward us.

I know we can because I have.

We Needed to See God

This brings me to the part of the message that surprised me most. A few days before Sunday, while I was in Orlando, I heard someone read from Isaiah 53:

Isaiah 53:1–3 (ESV)

“Who has believed what he has heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

I have read that passage countless times, but something about it hit me differently. Why didn’t we esteem Him? Why couldn’t humanity recognize God when God stood among us?

I found myself thinking: because He came in our form.

He entered our humanity. He clothed Himself in the humanity we had come to despise. We were so convinced that humanity was the place of abandonment, separation, uncleanness, and distance from God that when God immersed Himself in humanity, we did not know what to do with Him. We could not recognize Him or ourselves in His form.

John says:

John 1:17–18 (ESV)

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

Jesus makes the Father known. That means every image of God we carry must eventually submit to Jesus.

If my theology tells me God is one way, but Jesus reveals Him another way, Jesus wins. He is not God’s kinder representative trying to calm down an angry Father. He is the revelation of the Father.

He comes as the Son of Man, the Representative Man, the Second Adam. In Him we are seeing two things at once: the truth about God and the truth about humanity as God intended humanity to be. In other words, the truth about our original design.

Jesus reveals the Father, and Jesus reveals us.

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

Then we come to the cross, and I want you to look at it again.

Luke 23:33–34 (ESV)

“And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.

And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

For generations many of us have known the phrase Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. But when I behold the cross, I see the image reversed.

I see God in the hands of angry sinners.

Who is raging in this scene? Who is mocking, accusing, torturing, and killing? We are.

And while humanity pours its hostility onto God, what comes out of God?

“Father, forgive them.”

This matters enormously to me because the cross does not reveal that Jesus finally convinced an unwilling Father to be merciful toward us. The cross reveals the Father in the Son entering all the way into our hostility and answering it with forgiveness.

Romans 5:8 (ESV)

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

God is showing us something at the cross. He is revealing His disposition. He loved us while we were sinners. Paul goes even further a few verses later and says He loves us while we were enemies.

The cross is God’s answer to our accusation about Him. We thought He had abandoned us, so He entered our abandonment. We thought He was distant, so He came near. We thought He was withholding Himself from us, so He gave us His body and His blood. We thought there was hostility in God, and then when we finally got God in our hands and did everything our hostility wanted to do, He refused to become our enemy.

“Father, forgive them.”

I don’t know how to move quickly past that. I don’t want to move past that.

Repentance Begins by Beholding Him

This has been changing the way I think about repentance. I said Sunday that I can tell you from experience that a person can stop selling cocaine without seeing God accurately. I know because I did.

You can clean up behavior and remain deeply confused about the Father. You can stop sleeping around. You can stop drinking. You can stop lying. You can become respectable and go to church while still believing that God is standing far away from you, only tolerating you because Jesus managed to make you acceptable.

Behavior can change without the mind being renewed.

But when we behold Jesus, something else happens. The truth about God begins exposing the lie we have believed, and when I see Him clearly, I begin to see myself clearly too. That is why the kindness of God leads us to repentance.

His kindness is not God pretending sin is harmless. His kindness is what finally makes it possible for me to see sin without hiding. Accusation usually makes us defend ourselves. Love disarms us.

Have you ever been treated with real kindness when you knew you did not deserve it? There is something disarming about that kind of love. Accusation usually gives us something to push against. It makes us defend ourselves, explain ourselves, or harden. But undeserved kindness takes away the argument. Suddenly you are seeing both yourself and the other person more clearly. You see your own failure without needing to hide it, because you are seeing it in the presence of someone who has already chosen mercy.

That is why the kindness of God leads us to repentance. His kindness does not minimize what is wrong. It makes honesty possible. At the cross, we finally see the seriousness of our hostility and the depth of His love in the same moment. We see what is in us, and we see what is in Him. And that revelation is what changes the mind and turns the heart.

That is the cross. It is the goodness of God on display with such extravagance that our hostility finally loses its argument.

So What Is Our Message?

Paul tells us plainly. God has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

This is where I have been doing some serious rethinking about evangelism. For much of the church, evangelism has often begun with convincing another person that they are separated from God. But Paul does not say God entrusted us with the ministry of separation.

He says, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” And then, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

The announcement and the appeal belong together. The announcement is not, “God might reconcile you if you can figure out how to cross the distance.” The announcement is that God has acted in Christ.

Now turn toward Him. See Him. Believe Him. Come into the light. Stop living as though the One who has reconciled you is your enemy.

What would happen if we walked into every conversation carrying that message? What if instead of looking at someone and agreeing with everything broken in their life, we stood with the Architect?

I can see the broken wall. I’m not going to lie to you about it. But I am not going to agree that the wall is the final truth about you.

I am going to agree with Jesus.

Are You Their Enemy?

There is another consequence to all of this that I don’t think we can avoid. If God refuses to become our enemy while we are treating Him as an enemy, what does the cross ask of us?

Do you have enemies? Of course you do. People may oppose you, betray you, misunderstand you, slander you, or reject you. The question is not simply whether someone has made themselves your enemy.

The question is: Are you seeing yourself as theirs?

Let’s be honest with ourselves, that is much harder.

The gospel requires more than correct doctrine about reconciliation. It calls us to embody the reconciled life. Can I refuse to become your enemy even while you are acting like mine? Can the life of Jesus in me say, “Father, forgive them”?

That takes something stronger than niceness. It takes resurrection life.

Think About the One Who Went Away

Toward the end of Sunday, I asked everyone to think about someone they love who has gone far away, someone who is currently walking in estrangement. Maybe you have a child who walked away from you or from God. Maybe it is a friend. Maybe someone who once knew you deeply now considers you an enemy.

Think about them for a moment. Did their distance make you love them less? Or did something happen in your heart where you somehow became even more aware of them?

You pray more. You wonder how they are doing. You notice their absence. Your heart keeps extending itself toward the distance.

The distance is real, but it isn’t coming from you.

Sunday I found myself wondering: where did we learn to love like that? We are made in the image of God. We love because He first loved us. Could it be that some of the love we experience for people who have gone far away is giving us a tiny glimpse into the Father’s heart?

The prodigal can go to the far country. He can squander everything. He can live as though he has no father. But his leaving does not turn the father into his enemy.

When he comes home, the father is already looking down the road. There is a robe, a ring, and a table. The father does not need the son’s speech to convince him to love.

He was already convinced.

Come Home

So what is the gospel invitation? I think Paul says it beautifully: Be reconciled to God.

The Father does not need to be persuaded to open His heart to you. Look at the cross. His heart is already open.

Maybe you have lived for years convinced that God stands against you. Maybe your own sin has become the lens through which you interpret Him. Maybe you have assumed your shame tells you more about God than Jesus does.

It doesn’t.

Jesus is God’s mind made up about you, and He has come all the way into our humanity to reclaim what was hidden under all that dirt.

Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 13:

Matthew 13:44 (ESV)

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

I have preached this parable for years because I cannot get over the valuation. The treasure is treasure while it is still hidden. Its value is not established by whether it can see itself clearly. The purchaser determines what the field is worth by what he is willing to pay, and he pays the full price with joy.

What if the cross is God’s valuation of humanity?

You may be buried under things that make it almost impossible to see what He sees. He sees. He knows what He made, and He came for His treasure.

So I am not asking you to manufacture some great spiritual response. I am asking you to look. Behold the Son. Let Him tell you the truth about the Father, the cross, and yourself. Then believe Him.

Not because your belief makes His finished work true.

Believe because it is true.

And from there, learn to live.

I am still sitting in these passages. I am still asking the Lord to dismantle anything in me that detracts from what He has accomplished in His Son. I am still finding loose Jenga pieces in places I thought were settled theology, and maybe you are too.

I’m increasingly convinced we do not need to rush out of that process. We can sit here together for a while. We can keep looking at Jesus until the morning star dawns in our hearts. We can let God teach us to see what the Architect sees, and we can ask Him for the grace to agree.

I love walking with you,

Leah

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Watch the full Sunday message:
God in Our Hands | What the Cross Reveals About God—and About Us

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This is also why I am so excited about the first track of Behold School: ABIDE — The Gospel From Which We Live. Beginning September 14, we are giving twelve weeks to Romans 5–8, not because we need more information about these chapters, but because I think we need time for them to work their way into us.

The curriculum will open at the beginning of each week, with live online Beholding Sessions every other Tuesday and Formation Groups on the alternating weeks. The formation groups will be offered at different times so that people can find something that works with their schedules.

I have been sitting in these passages while preparing for the school, and they are doing something in me. I am expectant about what God will do as we sit in them together.

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You believe Jesus died for you. You believe you’re saved by grace.

And yet the Christian life can still sound like this:

Pray more. Believe more. Obey better. Get free. Stop struggling. Become who God has called you to be.

Without realizing it, the good news can start to feel like another version of try harder.

That is why Chris and I are beginning Behold School in Romans 5–8.

Paul starts somewhere very different. He starts with what God has already done in Christ.

What happened in His death and resurrection? What happened to us there? What does it mean to be dead to sin and alive to God? What does it mean that there is now no condemnation? What does life in the Spirit actually look like?

These are the truths we want to stay with long enough for them to become more than things we agree with.

ABIDE — The Gospel From Which We Live begins September 14.

For twelve weeks, we’ll walk slowly through Romans 5–8 together, along with Chris’s teaching on Melchizedek, Scripture memorization, reflection and practice, Formation Groups, and live Beholding Sessions.

I don’t want Behold School to become another place where we simply give people more things to listen to.

I want us to make room to actually lay hold of what is already ours in Christ.

Paul said:

“I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:12 NASB

That is the invitation.

If you’re tired of living as though everything still depends on you, I’d love for you to join us.

BeholdSchool.com

With love,
Leah

I’m still out of town with my family and will be traveling home today. It has been such a gift to have this time together, and I expect to get back into our normal rhythm next week.

Thank you to everyone who has been praying for my dad. He begins chemotherapy next week, and our family has genuinely felt so loved and carried by your prayers. Please keep him in prayer as he begins treatment.

Also, there will not be a new recorded teaching tonight for beholding prayer. With being away and traveling, I simply didn’t get everything figured out in time for this week. We’ll pick that rhythm back up when I’m home.

In the meantime, I want to pass along Chris’s teaching from Sunday.

Real Faith Rests and Real Rest Runs

How Faith, Works, and Rest Belong Together

Chris continued into the themes we have been working through together around the finished work of Christ, faith, righteousness, and what it means to actually live from what God has accomplished in His Son.

At the heart of the teaching is an important distinction:

Faith does not finish the work of Christ. Christ finished the work. Faith receives what He has accomplished.

From there, Chris worked through the relationship between Paul and James, faith and works, Romans 6, righteousness, sonship, and the way genuine faith produces fruit without turning our works into the basis of our acceptance with God.

I haven’t had the chance yet to really sit with the whole teaching myself, so rather than trying to give you a full recap this week, I want to send you directly to the message.

Watch here:

A Note About the Audio

Just a heads-up before you listen: the audio is very low in places, and the beginning of the message was cut off.

Several people asked Susan afterward for the statement Chris read at the beginning before the audio picks up.

Chris and I have been in a lot of back-and-forth lately, clarifying our own theology as we work through reconciliation, justification, faith, and the finished work of Christ. This statement was part of that back-and-forth.

Susan passed it along in the thread from Chris’s notes for those who were asking for it. It happens to be something I had written as part of one of those conversations, so I thought I would pass it along here as well:

Faith is the open hand that receives what God has already accomplished in Christ. It is not a work that completes the work of Christ, nor is it merely agreeing that certain facts about Jesus are true. It is trusting, resting in, and receiving the finished work of His death and resurrection.

God reconciled the world to Himself in Christ; nothing needs to be added to that finished work. But Scripture does not therefore say that every person is already justified or already in Christ regardless of faith. We are justified by faith. Faith does not cause Christ’s work to become finished; faith brings us into participation with the finished reality God has accomplished in His Son.

So we are not preaching universalism, nor are we preaching that God did His part and now man must complete the transaction. We are proclaiming a finished work that is freely received by faith. Christ accomplished it; faith receives it; and therefore no man can boast.

That should give you some context for where Chris begins once the audio picks up.

I’m looking forward to getting home, getting settled back in, and returning to our normal rhythm next week.

Much love,

Leah

Message and notes by Leah Ramirez

There is something God is doing among us that requires more than hearing another message. We need to get set in. It is very easy, particularly in charismatic and apostolic circles, to move continually toward the next revelation, the next prophetic insight, the next teaching, the next conference, or the next thing that feels spiritually significant. We can accumulate an enormous amount of information while never going back to ask whether the foundation underneath all of it is actually secure.

For me, that question has increasingly become very simple: Do we actually understand the Gospel from which we are living? Because if the foundation is wrong, eventually everything built upon it begins to lean.

1 Corinthians 2:1–2

“And when I came to you, brothers, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

Years ago, that passage stopped me. Paul could have said a thousand things. He carried extraordinary revelation. He understood the apostolic calling. He had encountered Christ. He had planted churches and moved in the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet when Paul describes the foundation of his proclamation, he does not begin with the apostolic gift. He begins with Christ, and more specifically, with Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

That has become increasingly sobering to me. The Gospel is a terrifying thing to preach, not because it is bad news, but because of what happens when we get the good news wrong. We can leave people trapped in condemnation, bondage, fear, and a sense of separation from God, not because God has failed to act, but because we have failed to discern and proclaim what He has actually accomplished. Our message must bring people into the liberty of Christ, and our loyalty is to One Man. His name is Jesus.

What Must Be Shaken?

Last week, Chris walked us through the book of Hebrews and the dismantling of the former order. I went home and read Hebrews again in one sitting, and it struck me differently when I remembered that the writer was speaking while the temple system still stood. The writer was not critiquing a religious structure that had disappeared centuries before. He (or she) was challenging a structure that was present, visible, powerful, familiar, and deeply embedded in the religious consciousness of the people hearing the letter.

That takes courage. It is easy for us to say today that the blood of bulls and goats cannot remove sin because there is no functioning Levitical temple system for us to confront. But there are structures in our own Christian thinking that are still standing. There are systems we inherited, systems we helped build, and traditions and assumptions that can actually obscure our vision of Jesus. Loyalty to Christ sometimes requires allowing those things to come down.

Matthew 24:1–2

“Jesus left the temple and was going away, when His disciples came to point out to Him the buildings of the temple. But He answered them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.’”

Within one generation, that system came down. Hebrews gives us language for understanding the shaking.

Hebrews 12:25–29

“See that you do not refuse Him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused Him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject Him who warns from heaven. At that time His voice shook the earth, but now He has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.’ This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

Sometimes we pray, “God, give me something that cannot be shaken,” but Hebrews is not telling us to ask God to give us something unshakable. He already has. His name is Jesus. The shaking reveals what remains, and I believe one of the things being exposed in this hour is a false gospel that has taught generations of believers to relate to God transactionally.

The End of Contract Christianity

I kept hearing certain kinds of ministry language this past week. We are told that if we honor the anointing correctly, we will receive from the anointing. We are told that if we sow into a particular grace, we can receive that grace. We are told that if we get under the right covering, position ourselves correctly, or honor the right spiritual person, then we will gain access to something from God.

Honor is biblical. Generosity is biblical. Spiritual leadership is biblical. Impartation is biblical. None of those categories are the problem. The question is what architecture we have built underneath them. If the underlying message is, “If I do the right thing toward the right person, God will do the right thing toward me,” we have quietly constructed a contract, and Christ becomes the reward at the end of a successful spiritual transaction.

But Christ is not the reward at the end of the correct transaction. Christ Himself is the covenant. He is the inheritance. He is the One in whom every spiritual blessing has been given. The Gospel does not begin with, “If you will, then God will.” The Gospel begins with, “God has acted.”

This is where Genesis 15 becomes so important.

God Walks Through Alone

Genesis 15 begins after Abram has encountered Melchizedek. Bread and wine have already been brought out. Abram has been blessed in the name of God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth. Abram has refused the wealth of Sodom because he will not allow an earthly king to claim responsibility for making him rich. His source has been identified.

Then God comes to Abram.

Genesis 15:1, 5–10, 12, 17–18

“After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: ‘Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’”

“And He brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ Then He said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ And he believed the LORD, and He counted it to him as righteousness.”

“And He said to him, ‘I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.’ But he said, ‘O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’”

“He said to him, ‘Bring Me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.’ And he brought Him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other.”

“As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram.”

“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram.”

Abram asks the question so many of us ask: How can I know that what God has promised will actually happen? God answers him with covenant. The animals are divided, the pieces are laid opposite one another, and the covenant ceremony is prepared.

Surely Abram now needs to walk through. Surely God does His part and Abram does his part. Surely the covenant depends upon the equal faithfulness of both parties. Except Abram never walks through. God puts Abram into a deep sleep, Abram is entirely passive, and God passes through the pieces alone.

Abram does not secure the promise. He does not stand next to God and pledge his equal contribution. God takes the covenant upon Himself, and suddenly we can begin to see the Gospel.

God Becomes Man

What begins in Genesis 15 reaches its fulfillment in the incarnation and the cross. God does not remain distant from humanity and simply establish the terms of another agreement. God becomes Man!

John 1:14

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In Jesus Christ, God enters completely into our humanity. The One who is fully God becomes the true and representative Man. This is where the covenant comes into breathtaking focus. In Genesis, God entered into Abraham’s covenant. In the New Covenant, God has entered in again, but now Man has entered in as well, and both meet perfectly in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the faithful Son of God and the faithful Son of Man. Both sides of the covenant are fulfilled in Him. Once again, when the covenant is brought to completion, we see the same pattern of divine faithfulness.

Isaiah 63:1, 3, 5

“Who is this who comes from Edom, with garments stained red?”

“I have trodden the wine trough alone, and from the peoples there was no one with Me.”

“I looked, but there was no one to help… so My own arm brought salvation to Me.”

Then look at Jesus. In the garden, the disciples cannot stay awake. They fall asleep. When Jesus is arrested, they scatter. Peter denies Him. No one contributes blood. No one contributes righteousness. No one climbs onto the cross beside Him and helps accomplish redemption. He goes alone. What humanity could not accomplish, He accomplishes. Jesus, the representative Man, completes the work.

“It is finished.”

But He does not accomplish it as God remaining separate from humanity. He accomplishes it as God in Christ, the representative Man. And here is where the Gospel becomes almost scandalous: He took our humanity into Himself.

The Gospel is not God doing His part and then waiting for humanity to complete ours. The Gospel is God fulfilling the covenant in Christ.

But How Are We Included?

This brings us to one of the most important passages in the New Testament.

2 Corinthians 5:14–21

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised.

“From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard Him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

“Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

“For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Look at the order. God acts, God reconciles, God does not count trespasses, God entrusts the message, and God makes His appeal. Then comes the response: “Be reconciled to God.” The imperative is surrounded by indicatives.

The Gospel does not begin with our response. It begins with God’s act in Christ. This is something I want to say carefully because language matters. I am not saying that faith is irrelevant. I am saying the opposite. We implore people to believe, but we implore them to believe what is true.

Faith does not make the Gospel true. Faith believes the Gospel is true.

God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. That is the announcement. Then Paul pleads with humanity to believe, receive, and participate in what God has accomplished in Christ.

We are not preaching, “If you will finally believe correctly, then perhaps God will reconcile Himself toward you.” We announce what God has done, and then we implore people to believe Him, receive His testimony concerning His Son, and come into the reality of the life that is found in Him.

This is not universalism. It is the universal announcement of what God has accomplished in Christ. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and that finished work does not become true because we believe it. The Gospel calls every person to believe what God has done, to receive His testimony concerning His Son, and to participate in the life that is found in Christ. This is why proclamation matters, why faith matters, and why Paul still implores, “Be reconciled to God.” We are not asking people to make the Gospel true. We are calling them to awaken to its truth, believe it, and enter into the life God has opened to us in Christ.

Grace Comes First

The order matters. The Gospel never begins with the demand. God’s nature comes first. His gift comes first. His action comes first. His Son comes first. His death comes first. His resurrection comes first. Grace comes first. Only then does the “therefore” come.

This does not eliminate human participation. It finally puts human participation in its proper place. We respond because God has acted. We obey because grace is working. We love because He first loved us. We do not offer our participation as payment for access to God. We participate because in Christ the way has been opened.

The New Covenant was not secured by our blood. It was secured by His.

What About Rest?

At this point, someone will inevitably become nervous. If you preach union with Christ this strongly, aren’t people going to become passive? If you tell people the work is finished, won’t they stop working? If you preach rest, won’t you create lazy Christians?

Hebrews addresses exactly this tension.

Hebrews 4:1–2, 11–13

“Therefore, while the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened.”

“Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

“And no creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”

I love the irony of Hebrews 4. Some translations say, “strive to enter that rest,” but the Greek word spoudazō carries the sense of being diligent, eager, prompt, or making haste. The invitation is to be eager to enter rest, to make haste to stop striving, and to be diligent about entering what God has already finished.

The writer is not telling us, “Work harder so that God will finally reward you with rest.” The argument of Hebrews is that God’s works were finished from the foundation of the world. Israel’s problem was not insufficient effort. Their problem was unbelief. The effort is not to accomplish something God has failed to accomplish. The earnestness is in believing what He has finished.

Grace Does Not Produce Laziness

The true Gospel does not produce spiritual passivity. It produces something entirely different from religious labor. It produces the life of Christ operating in us.

1 Corinthians 15:9–10

“For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

Paul worked, but notice how he understood his labor. He did not say, “I worked harder than everyone else, and therefore God gave me greater access.” He says, in essence, “I worked harder than all of them, and yet it wasn’t me. It was grace operating in me.”

This is entirely different. Grace does not make us inactive. Grace liberates us from the exhausting work of securing identity, significance, approval, position, or access to God. We become free to participate in the life that is already flowing from Christ.

We can go where He goes and say what He says. We can give without trying to purchase something. We can honor without turning honor into a spiritual mechanism. We can serve without using service to secure identity. We can work without becoming slaves to our work.

That is rest. Believing and receiving the Gospel is rest.

Do You Know Where You Are Located?

And this is where everything comes down to one question: Do you know where you are located? You cannot rest while believing you are somewhere God says you are not.

Paul gives us two locations.

1 Corinthians 15:22

“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.”

In Adam and in Christ are two locations. Where do you locate yourself?

You can believe a great deal of Christian doctrine and still live your entire Christian life from an assumption of separation. You can believe Jesus died on a cross, rose from the dead, and ascended. You can believe all of those historical facts while still living as though you remain at the bottom of a spiritual ladder trying to find your way to God.

You can think that more prayer might get you there, more fasting might get you there, another impartation might get you there, more anointing might get you there, or another conference might get you there. You can spend your life believing that eventually you will arrive.

But what if the Gospel is not primarily announcing where you need to go? What if the Gospel is announcing what happened to you in Christ?

Romans 6:6

“Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him.”

Then Paul says:

Romans 6:8

“Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.”

And then he tells us how to respond.

Romans 6:11

“So you too, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not tell you to go crucify your old self. He tells you to reckon according to what has happened in Christ. Consider it. Count it true. Believe God. This is faith in the truth of the Gospel.

And Paul does not stop with death.

Ephesians 2:4–6

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ… and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

You were made alive with Him, raised with Him, and seated with Him. For those who will believe it, Paul’s announcement is staggering: You are in Christ.

You are not standing at the bottom of a ladder trying to ascend to where Jesus is because you have been seated with Him. You are not trying to accomplish a death to self that Jesus somehow failed to accomplish because you died with Him. You are not attempting to manufacture resurrection life because you were made alive with Him. You are not working your way into union. You are learning to live from the reality of your life in Christ.

This Is What We Mean by Getting Set In

This is bigger than learning a new theological framework. It requires the rearrangement of the place from which we live.

If you still believe you are fundamentally separated, your entire Christian life will become an attempt to overcome the distance. If you believe Christ is somewhere you are continually trying to reach, you will keep climbing. If you believe God is withholding Himself until you perform correctly, you will keep negotiating.

But the Gospel interrupts all of it. Christ has come. Christ has died. Christ has risen. The covenant has been fulfilled in Him. The way is open. And when you believe this Gospel, you awaken to what God says is true of you in Christ: you died with Him, you were raised with Him, and in Him you now stand face to face with your Father.

The Gospel comes to us with an appeal: Believe what God has done. Receive His testimony concerning His Son. Stop living from a location that the cross has judged and left behind, and enter His rest.

There will certainly be a process of renewing our minds. There are lenses that may take time to dismantle. But we do not need to spend another ten years inspecting the doorway. There is an invitation before us now.

As Scripture says, today is the day of salvation.

So perhaps this is the question to sit with this week: Where do I actually believe I am located? Not where does my theology say I am located when I am answering the right question, but where am I actually living from?

Am I living as though Christ has finished the work? Am I living as though I have been brought near? Am I living as though my life is in Him? Am I still negotiating with God? Am I still climbing? Am I still standing outside of what He has accomplished, asking Him to do what He says He has already done?

The Gospel calls us home. It does not call us into passivity, universalism, or a life where faith and response no longer matter. It calls us into faith in the truth.

Faith does not make the Gospel true. Faith believes the Gospel is true.

And as we believe, we begin to live from our true location in Christ.

If this encouraged you, would you restack it or share it with a friend? There are so many people exhausted from trying to get somewhere in God. We want to keep announcing the good news that in Christ, God has acted, the way is open, and we are invited to believe and live from what He has accomplished.

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Watch the full teaching:
Getting Set In | Finding Your True Location in Christ — Leah Ramirez

A Note About Behold School

This is exactly the Gospel lens we are going to immerse ourselves in through ABIDE, Track One of Behold School, beginning September 14. For twelve weeks, we will work through a commentary on Romans 5–8, The Gospel From Which We Live, alongside The Melchizedek Lens and Apostolic Architecture. The track also includes live online Beholding Sessions and Formation Groups so that we are not merely learning these truths but becoming rooted in them together.

If you feel led to join us, you can learn more at BeholdSchool.com.

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Join us this Wednesday evening for our next Company 318 Live Beholding.

We’ll gather on Zoom for an evening of beholding, prayer, worship, and shared participation as we turn our attention together toward Christ and make room for what the Holy Spirit is revealing among us.

Wednesday, August 12
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For the last several weeks, I have been telling you that a big announcement was coming, and today Chris and I can finally share it with you:

Behold School is officially open for enrollment.

Our first twelve-week track begins September 14, 2026, and it is called ABIDE — The Gospel From Which We Live.

We created Behold School because we do not need more Christian information disconnected from formation. Many of us have spent years listening to teachings, reading books, taking notes, and sincerely trying to grow, while still living from a deep sense of separation from God.

We strive for what has already been given. We try to produce through discipline and willpower what can only flow from participation in Christ. We reach for a life that always seems just beyond us.

But the Gospel is not only how we begin the Christian life. The Gospel is the life from which we live.

Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith.
—Colossians 2:6–7 NASB

The way we received Christ is the way we continue in Him: by grace, through faith, living from the life we have already received. That is the foundation of ABIDE.

We are going to immerse ourselves in Romans 5–8

For twelve weeks, we are going to live inside these chapters together.

We will read them repeatedly, study them carefully, memorize the passages, behold Jesus within them, and allow the truth of union with Christ, freedom from sin’s dominion, life in the Spirit, adoption, and participation in His glory to move more deeply into us.

This will not be a course you simply watch. It will be a shared journey of Scripture, teaching, memorization, reflection, beholding, conversation, and practice.

Our desire is not merely that you understand Romans 5–8 better. We want these chapters to become part of the foundation from which you live.

Three courses, one formation journey

ABIDE brings together three connected streams of teaching.

The Gospel From Which We Live | Romans 5–8 will take us through these chapters one week at a time, helping us become established in what the death, resurrection, and indwelling life of Jesus have made true.

In The Melchizedek Lens, Chris will help us see Jesus according to the order of Melchizedek—a lens that reshapes how we understand covenant, priesthood, communion, sonship, rest, and the finished work of Christ.

In Apostolic Architecture, Chris and I will share chapters from the book we are writing together about the Gospel order of the indicative before the imperative. What God has already accomplished must become the foundation for how we live. Otherwise, obedience becomes another form of self-effort rather than participation in Christ.

What is included

The twelve-week founding track includes:

• Weekly teachings from me through Romans 5–8

• Scripture reading and Bible memorization

• Weekly Melchizedek teachings from Chris

• New chapters from Apostolic Architecture

• Live beholding sessions

• Small formation groups

• Reflection and formation practices

• Access to the Behold School online community

• Recordings and course materials

• A certificate of completion

We will move through the track together as a founding cohort, with a weekly rhythm, space for questions, and time to process what we are learning with others.

Is ABIDE for you?

ABIDE is for those who are tired of striving to become what God has already declared true in Christ.

It is for those who want to understand union with Christ, not simply as theological language, but as the reality from which we live.

It is for believers, pastors, leaders, teachers, and intercessors who want to become deeply rooted in the glorious Gospel.

And it is for those who sense that God is not merely improving individuals. He is forming a people through whom the life of His Son can be seen.

Founding-class details

September 14–December 11, 2026
Twelve weeks | Online
Founding-class tuition: $299

LEARN MORE ABOUT BEHOLD SCHOOL

ENROLL IN THE ABIDE FOUNDING CLASS

Paid Company 318 subscribers: We sent a private thank-you and founding-class discount to your inbox. Please look for that email before enrolling.

We have carried this vision for a long time, and we are so ready to begin.

Our desire is to see a people deeply rooted in the Gospel, established in the life they have received, and formed in Christ together.

We would love for you to join us.

With so much love and anticipation,

Leah and Chris
Behold School | Company 318

Message by Chris Berglund with Notes by Leah Ramirez

A Big Announcement Is Coming This Week

Before we get into this week’s teaching, we want to let you know that we are preparing to make a very big announcement.

For months, we have been quietly building something that will launch this September. It has grown out of the truths we have been pressing into together: our union with Christ, the finished work of Jesus, the Father’s eternal purpose, transformation through beholding, and what it means to live according to the life of another.

Toward the end of Sunday’s message, Chris shared something one of his spiritual fathers once told him:

“You have to stay with people until they are set in.”

Set in.

Not merely introduced to the truth. Not momentarily inspired by it. Not able to repeat the right language while continuing to live from an entirely different foundation.

To be set in is to become deeply rooted in the glorious gospel until it becomes the place from which we actually live. It is to become established in the reality that we have died with Christ, been raised with Him, and brought into participation with the Son and the Father. It is to remain with these truths until union is no longer only something we believe theologically, but the reality shaping our identity, our prayer, our relationships, and our entire way of life.

That is what we have been building toward.

This September, we will begin going much deeper into the gospel we have been laying out on Sundays. We are creating space for people to become rooted, formed, and set in—to remain with these truths long enough for them to become a lifestyle.

We will share all the details this week. In the meantime, would you begin praying about whether you are meant to be part of it?

This may be exactly what you have been looking for.

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Let’s get into the message!

What was in the Father’s heart before the foundation of the world?

The gospel is often presented beginning with humanity’s fall. We sinned, God sent Jesus, Jesus died so we could be forgiven, and those who believe will go to heaven when they die.

Those things matter, but they do not begin far enough back.

Before humanity fell, before sin entered the human story, and before there was anything that needed to be redeemed, the Father already had an eternal purpose.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.”
—Ephesians 1:3–4

Paul does not say that the Father first thought of placing us in Christ after Adam fell. He says that we were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.

Second Timothy says the same thing:

“He saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of His own purpose and grace, which He gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.”
—2 Timothy 1:9

Before the ages began, there was already a purpose in the Father’s heart. That purpose was given to us in Christ.

There was always a Father. There was always a Son. And within the Father’s heart was the desire to have many sons within His one beloved Son—sons who would enjoy the Son’s fellowship with the Father, participate in His life, and express His nature throughout creation.

The Father did not merely want forgiven servants. He wanted sons in the Son.

Salvation Restores Us to the Father’s Original Purpose

The cross is central to the gospel, but the cross was not the final destination of God’s purpose. The cross was the redemptive doorway through which the Father’s eternal desire could be fulfilled.

Sin had to be dealt with, but forgiveness alone was not the full objective. The old humanity in Adam had to be brought to an end so that humanity could be brought into the life of Christ.

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
—Romans 6:3–4

Jesus did not come merely to improve Adam’s life. He did not come to make the old humanity more disciplined, spiritual, or religious.

He brought that old order into His death and raised a new humanity in Himself.

Salvation is therefore much greater than receiving the forgiveness of individual sins. It is our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We have been brought out of Adam and placed in the Son. We have been joined to Christ so that His life may become the source from which we live.

This is why Paul continually uses phrases such as “in Christ,” “in Him,” and “in the Beloved.” The Father’s purpose is located in His Son.

We do not merely receive benefits from Jesus while remaining separate from Him. We have been brought into union with Him.

We are not standing outside the fellowship of the Father and the Son, hoping to be allowed near. Through Christ, we have been welcomed into the love, delight, and communion shared between them.

Hebrews describes the Father’s purpose this way:

“For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”
—Hebrews 2:10

The Father is bringing many sons to glory.

Glory is not merely a heavenly atmosphere or a future destination. Glory is the nature of Christ becoming visible in a people. The Father is forming sons who live from the Son and express the Son’s life within the earth.

Beholding Christ and Becoming What We See

Chris connected this eternal purpose to the transforming work of beholding.

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
—2 Corinthians 3:18

The image of the mirror is important because a true mirror does not create a different reality; it faithfully reveals what is already present before it. In the same way, when we behold the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, we are not looking at a distant ideal and wondering how we might one day become like Him. We are seeing Christ—the perfect image of the Father—and awakening to the reality that His life is already present within us through our union with Him.

We are not beholding an external example and attempting to imitate Him through willpower. We are beholding the One who lives in us and to whom we have been joined. As we see Him clearly, every distorted idea about God and every false identity we have believed about ourselves begins to give way to the truth of His life in us.

The glory of God is His nature. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, the Lord revealed His goodness, mercy, graciousness, patience, and truth. To behold the glory of Christ is to behold who He is.

And because we are joined to Him, we are also awakening to the life that has been given to us in Him.

His acceptance answers our shame. His mercy confronts our condemnation. His humility exposes our pride. His patience meets our frustration. His love frees us from competition, comparison, and offense.

We are not transformed by remaining preoccupied with everything that is wrong with us. We are transformed by seeing Christ, agreeing with the life He has given us, and allowing His nature to displace the false identities and old patterns that once governed us.

Beholding does not mean pretending the flesh does not exist. It means refusing to allow the flesh to define us. We bring every old pattern into the light of Christ’s life and surrender it to the truth of who we have become in Him.

Do Christians Still Have a Sin Nature?

One of the most significant implications of union with Christ is that the believer is no longer defined by the nature inherited in Adam.

Romans 6 does not simply command us to stop committing individual sins. It announces that our former master has been dealt with. We died with Christ, were buried with Him, and were raised into His life.

“We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”
—Romans 6:6

The old nature does not need to be rehabilitated. It has been brought to an end in the death of Jesus.

Christians still experience temptation. We still contend with learned habits, desires, reactions, and ways of thinking that Scripture calls the flesh. Those patterns must be renewed and brought into agreement with Christ, but they are not our deepest or truest identity.

The believer is not carrying two equal natures fighting for ownership. The old humanity in Adam was crucified with Christ. Our true life is now hidden with God in Christ.

“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
—Romans 6:11

Chris shared how spending three and a half years immersed in Romans 5 through 8 reshaped his understanding of the gospel. He began to see that sin in Romans 6 is repeatedly presented as a ruling power or former master, not merely as a collection of bad behaviors.

To reckon ourselves dead to sin is therefore not simply an instruction to try harder. It is an invitation to agree with what has already happened in Christ.

We are not attempting to crucify Adam again. We are learning to live from Christ.

Instead of continually declaring that sin is our nature, we renew our minds according to the nature of Jesus. We acknowledge the flesh without allowing it to name us. We put old patterns to death by yielding ourselves to the life already present within us.

What Is the Main Message of Hebrews?

The book of Hebrews was written to Jewish believers who had begun following Jesus but were facing pressure to return to the visible Temple system.

The Temple was still standing. Priests were still serving. Sacrifices were still being offered. The former covenant system was familiar, tangible, and established within their entire way of life.

Faith in an unseen High Priest was costly.

The writer of Hebrews therefore presents a sustained argument that Jesus is better. This is not a random collection of comparisons meant simply to praise Christ in general terms. The author is systematically dismantling confidence in the former covenant by showing that everything within it pointed toward Jesus and has now been fulfilled in Him.

The prophets carried messages from God, but Jesus is the complete revelation of the Father.

Angels were associated with the administration of the law, but Jesus created the angels and receives their worship.

Joshua led Israel toward a geographical place of rest, but Jesus Himself is our rest.

Moses served faithfully within God’s house, but Jesus is the Son over the house.

Aaron and the Levitical priests offered repeated sacrifices, but Jesus offered Himself once for all.

The Temple represented the place where God and humanity met, but Jesus is the true meeting place.

Animal blood provided ceremonial cleansing within the covenant, but the blood of Christ cleanses the conscience and opens the way into the presence of God.

The message of Hebrews is not that the former covenant was evil. It accomplished the purpose for which it was given. Its priesthood, sacrifices, washings, Temple, and ordinances testified prophetically to the coming of Christ.

But once the substance has come, we are not called to continue living in the shadows.

Jesus Is the Fulfillment, Not an Addition

Hebrews does not present Jesus as one more sacrifice added to a continuing sacrificial system. He is the fulfillment of the entire system.

His death was not another temporary offering. It was the final and complete sacrifice toward which every previous offering had pointed.

“And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
—Hebrews 10:10

And again:

“For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
—Hebrews 10:14

Once for all.

A single offering.

The work does not need to be repeated. No additional sacrifice can improve it, strengthen it, or complete it.

The finished work of Christ means that believers no longer live within a cycle of repeated cleansing followed by renewed condemnation. We do not move in and out of acceptance with God according to our latest success or failure.

We have been brought near through the blood of Jesus, and our confidence rests in Him.

The invitation of Hebrews is to draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. We draw near because our High Priest has completed His work, not because we have finally completed ours.

The Eternal Order of Melchizedek

Hebrews presents Jesus as a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

This priesthood is different from the Levitical order because it is not based on natural ancestry, temporary appointments, or repeated sacrifices.

“He has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life.”
—Hebrews 7:16

The power of an indestructible life.

This raises an important question. If the priesthood of Jesus is eternal, what does priesthood mean when sin has been completely removed?

The Levitical priesthood is usually associated with managing sin through sacrifices, washings, offerings, and ceremonial regulations. But an eternal priesthood must have a function greater than the continual treatment of sin.

The order of Melchizedek reveals a priesthood of communion, union, participation, and shared life.

When Melchizedek met Abraham, he brought bread and wine. The encounter pointed beyond the later Levitical order toward the eternal ministry of Christ, who shares His own life with His people.

Jesus is not eternally repeating His sacrifice. He is eternally ministering the fellowship, communion, and power of His indestructible life.

The eternal priesthood is not centered on keeping humanity at a distance because of sin. It is centered on bringing humanity into communion with God through the Son.

What Does Hebrews 6 Mean?

Hebrews 6:4–6 has caused many sincere believers to fear that they may have sinned too greatly to return to God.

The passage speaks of people who were enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Holy Spirit, and then fell away. It says that it is impossible to renew them again to repentance because they crucify the Son of God again and put Him to open shame.

When this passage is removed from the larger argument of Hebrews, it can sound as though a believer who falls into serious sin has permanently exhausted the mercy of God.

But that is not the situation the writer is addressing.

These Jewish believers were being tempted to turn away from Christ and return to the Temple sacrifices. They had received the revelation that Jesus was the fulfillment of the entire sacrificial system. To return to animal sacrifice would be to declare that His sacrifice had not been sufficient.

They would be attempting to begin the sacrificial process again, even though the Lamb of God had already offered Himself once for all.

The writer is not saying that a struggling believer who repents cannot be restored. He is saying that there is no cleansing available through returning to a system that has already been fulfilled.

Another animal sacrifice cannot add anything to the sacrifice of Jesus. Returning to the Temple would not produce a greater repentance because the only sacrifice capable of cleansing humanity had already been offered.

The warning is severe because rejecting Christ means rejecting the only sacrifice that can truly cleanse the conscience.

There is no second Lamb.

What Does “If We Sin Willfully” Mean?

Hebrews 10 contains another passage that has produced tremendous fear:

“For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins.”
—Hebrews 10:26

Nearly all sin involves some measure of the will. If this verse means that any intentional sin permanently places a believer beyond forgiveness, there would be very little hope for any of us.

But once again, the context is the temptation to reject Christ’s sacrifice and return to the former covenant system.

The willful sin in this passage is the deliberate rejection of the Son after receiving the knowledge of who He is and what He accomplished. To return to animal sacrifice would be to treat the blood of Jesus as common. It would place His blood on the same level as the blood of bulls and goats and deny that His offering was complete.

When the writer says that no sacrifice remains, he is not saying that the sacrifice of Jesus has become unavailable to a repentant person. He is saying that there is no other sacrifice beyond Jesus.

The Temple cannot provide another answer. Animal blood cannot finish what Christ left incomplete because Christ left nothing incomplete.

There is no better blood.

There is no more complete offering.

Everything has been fulfilled in Christ.

Leaving the Shadows Without Recreating Them

Most Christians today are not tempted to return to the physical Temple in Jerusalem and offer an animal sacrifice. Nevertheless, the temptation to rebuild former covenant patterns remains.

In all probability, one reason we do not feel the precise temptation faced by the original recipients of Hebrews is that there is no functioning Temple or sacrificial system to which we can return.

Hebrews appears to have been written while the Temple was still standing and its sacrifices were still taking place. The Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70, shortly after the period in which the letter was likely written. For nearly two thousand years, Christians have not lived with an operating Levitical priesthood and the continual offering of animals standing just down the street.

The original readers of Hebrews did.

Yet that makes a modern development worth examining honestly. Why is so much of the church consumed with praying, advocating, and sending money for the rebuilding of a Third Temple and the resumption of its sacrifices?

What does that desire reveal about our understanding of what Jesus accomplished?

This is not a question about whether Christians should love Jewish people, pray for Israel, or honor the Jewish roots of our faith. It is a question about the meaning of the finished work of Christ.

Hebrews does not tell us that Jesus temporarily interrupted the sacrificial order until it could begin again. It tells us that He fulfilled it. His offering was not one sacrifice among many. It was the once-for-all sacrifice toward which every priest, altar, animal, and offering had pointed.

When Christians anticipate the resumption of animal sacrifices as a hopeful or necessary spiritual development, does that not expose our own misunderstanding of the gospel? Have we truly understood that the former priesthood and sacrificial system were shadows pointing to Christ, or are we still waiting for the shadows to return and complete what Jesus has already finished?

If our vision of the future requires us to celebrate the restoration of what Christ fulfilled, then our vision of the future may be working against our gospel.

Most Christians are not preparing to place an animal on an altar, but we recreate the shadows whenever we live as though the work of Christ must be supplemented by our religious performance.

We recreate them when we treat condemnation as a sign of spiritual maturity, measure our acceptance by our behavior, or believe that enough fasting, striving, repentance, or self-punishment will finally persuade God to bring us near.

In charismatic circles, this can appear as the continual pursuit of an anointing that always seems to remain just beyond reach. The believer is told to pray harder, fast longer, surrender more completely, and strive for what God has supposedly withheld.

There may be sincere hunger within these practices, but hunger becomes distorted when it is separated from the finished work of Christ.

We are not trying to persuade God to place us in His Son. He has already acted in Christ.

We are not attempting to create union through spiritual effort. We are awakening to the union into which we have been invited and learning to live from it by faith.

Hebrews calls us away from every system that keeps the believer perpetually conscious of distance. It directs our attention toward the seated High Priest, the completed sacrifice, the cleansed conscience, and the open way into the presence of God.

Going On to Maturity

Hebrews urges us to go on to maturity.

“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity.”
—Hebrews 6:1

Maturity is not progressing toward flawless behavior through greater willpower. It is reaching the intended goal.

The intended goal is mature sonship.

Maturity is learning to live from the life of Christ in every circumstance. It is allowing His nature to be expressed when we are pressed, perplexed, disappointed, misunderstood, or faced with situations beyond our control.

Jesus told His disciples to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Him. Before the crucifixion, they would have understood the cross as an instrument of execution. Jesus was calling them away from independent life and into complete dependence upon Him.

After the cross, Paul explains that this death has already occurred in Christ.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
—Galatians 2:20

We died with Him. Our lives are now hidden with God in Christ.

Maturity is therefore not repeatedly crucifying ourselves in an attempt to become spiritual. It is surrendering every expression of independence and allowing the life of Jesus to become visible through us.

We have already died with Christ. Maturity is learning to live as though His life is truly our life.

Until We Are Set In

This brings us back to the phrase Chris shared near the end of the message:

We have to stay with people until they are set in.

To be set in is not merely to understand these truths intellectually or to recognize the language when we hear it. It is to remain with the glorious gospel until our own hearts become established in what Christ has accomplished and in who we have become in Him.

We keep returning to Romans 5 through 8 until we no longer instinctively understand ourselves through Adam. We remain in the revelation of union until separation is no longer the foundation of the way we approach God. We behold Christ until transformation is no longer driven primarily by self-examination and willpower, but by seeing Him clearly and agreeing with His life in us.

We stay with the finished work until condemnation loses its authority over our hearts. We remain with the Son until His relationship with the Father becomes the place from which we understand our own belonging. We give ourselves to this gospel until it is no longer one teaching among many, but the ground beneath our feet and the home from which we live.

This does not mean we stop learning or exploring the depths of God. The Lamb is inexhaustible, and we will be discovering Him for all eternity. But every revelation must deepen our roots in Christ rather than pull our attention away from Him. Spiritual knowledge was never meant to become a collection of ideas. It was meant to establish us in the life of the Son.

And once our own hearts are becoming set in, we can begin calling others into the same reality. We can invite an entire generation out of distance, striving, sin-consciousness, and religious performance and into the glorious gospel of participation with the Father and the Son.

We are not simply gathering people around another teaching.

We are calling a generation to become rooted in Christ, established in His finished work, and set in to the life that is already theirs in Him.

The Father Is Forming a Corporate Son

The Father’s eternal purpose is personal, but it is not individualistic. He is forming a glorious church, a corporate people through whom the life of Jesus can be seen.

The Father does not merely desire a collection of gifted individuals. He desires many sons in the Son expressing the Son together.

In Christ, competition and comparison lose their power because no one is the independent source of what they carry. Every member receives life from the same Son.

Our uniqueness is not erased by union. Like branches joined to one vine, each person remains distinct while drawing life from the same source. Our personalities, stories, gifts, and callings become most fully alive when they are animated by Christ rather than used to establish an identity separate from Him.

The Father is forming a people who are meek like the Lamb, rooted in communion, free from condemnation, secure in the finished work, and transformed through beholding.

He is forming a people who live from the Son so completely that when the world encounters them, it encounters the nature of Jesus.

This is the Father’s eternal purpose.

Many sons in the Son.

A people joined to Christ, sharing His life, displaying His nature, and becoming together the visible expression of the One who lives within them.

Watch the Full Teaching

There is so much in this message that deserves more than one hearing. I encourage you to listen again slowly and, if possible, read Hebrews alongside it.

Watch “Sons in the Son: The Father’s Eternal Purpose”

And watch your inbox this week.

We are getting ready to share what we have been building for September, and we are praying that those who have been searching for a place to become deeply rooted in this glorious gospel will recognize the invitation.

It is time to become set in.

Come Further With Us

If this message is strengthening and establishing you in the glorious gospel, would you consider supporting the work of The Gathering and Company 318? Your generosity helps us continue creating teachings and resources, forming people in the finished work of Christ, and calling a generation into the life of participation that is ours in the Son.

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And if you are in Colorado Springs, we would love to welcome you in person at The Gathering every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. We are becoming a people rooted in Christ, open to one another, and committed to seeing the life of Jesus expressed together.

Learn More About The Gathering

Subscribe to Company 318 so you do not miss this week’s big announcement or the teachings and invitations still to come. And please share this article with someone who may be searching for a gospel that leads them out of striving and distance and into the finished work, union, and life of Christ.

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This Wednesday, we are opening the teaching portion of our Beholding time to our paid Company 318 community by livestream.

Beholding is more than a meeting or another teaching to add to our notes. It is a time to become still before the Lord, turn our attention toward Christ, and allow the truth of who He is—and who we are in Him—to become more deeply established in our hearts.

Chris recently shared that we must stay with these truths until we are “set in.” We want to become rooted in the glorious gospel: established in the finished work of Jesus, secure in our union with Christ, and awakened to the life of participation with the Father and the Son that is already ours in Him.

This Wednesday, you are invited to join us online for the teaching portion of our local Beholding gathering. Then, next Wednesday, we will gather with our paid subscribers live on Zoom for teaching, conversation, and an extended time of beholding together.

These gatherings are part of the ongoing access available to paid Company 318 subscribers. If you have been looking for a place to go deeper, remain with these truths, and allow this gospel to become more than language—to become the life from which you live—we would love for you to join us.

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Thank you to everyone who joined us tonight for Company 318.

If you missed the gathering—or simply want to go back and listen again—you can watch the Zoom recording here:

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Tonight, we continued reflecting on the …

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Before I get into the heart of this week’s message, I want to ask you to help us carry it a little farther. If something in this post speaks to you, please restack it, share it with a friend, or take a few minutes to leave a comment. I genuinely love hearing what the Lord is showing you, and your responses often become part of the conversation that continues shaping what we share.

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In fact, much of this week’s message was inspired by a response to last week’s post. Frank took the time to send several pages of what he was seeing in Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek. His thoughts caused me to slow down, look again, and begin seeing connections I had not previously considered.

That is one of the things I love most about this community. We are not merely releasing content for people to consume. We are learning to behold Jesus together, respond to what He is revealing, and allow the revelation of Christ to deepen among us.

Beholding This Wednesday

Beholding prayer is tonight! Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. Mountain Time on Zoom, and we would love for you to join us. Along with our time of beholding, prayer, and communion, we are going to share some of the things God has placed in our hearts that will begin unfolding and launching soon with this community in mind.

We believe the Lord is forming something among us, and we are excited to begin speaking more openly about what we see and what we are launching this September. These gatherings give us space not only to receive teaching, but also to listen together and respond to the Lord as a people. If you are able to make it, please do.

Why Did Melchizedek Appear at This Moment?

After Chris shared again about Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek, one question stayed with me: Why does this meeting happen when it does?

Melchizedek appears immediately after Abram has gone to war to rescue Lot. Lot was Abram’s nephew, but he was also much like an adopted son. Abram had no natural heir at this point, and the 318 men raised and trained in his household would likely have been far more than hired servants to him. They were the sons of his house. Together, they went into battle because Abram was unwilling to leave someone he loved in captivity.

There is something about this that I cannot stop pondering. Abram’s encounter with the Priest-King takes place in the context of his refusal to abandon another person to bondage. He is not pursuing a platform or attempting to prove that he is right. He is not fighting only for the fulfillment of his own calling. He is provoked for someone else.

I wonder whether there is something about becoming unwilling to leave a generation trapped in sin, shame, religion, or a false gospel that prepares our hearts to encounter Jesus as our true Priest-King. Perhaps there are revelations we will never fully grasp by studying them from a distance. Perhaps some things become visible only as we lay down our lives for others.

Abram comes to the Table after he has gone to war for his family.

Abraham’s Faith Was Formed Over Time

When we speak about Abraham, it is easy to reduce his life to a few great moments of faith. Scripture, however, gives us a much more honest and encouraging story.

In Genesis 12, God calls Abram out of his country and promises to bless him. Later in that same chapter, Abram encounters famine and responds in fear. In Genesis 13, Abram and Lot separate, and God restates the promise. In Genesis 14, Lot is taken captive, and Abram goes to rescue him. After the battle, Abram meets Melchizedek. In Genesis 15, Abram believes God, and it is counted to him as righteousness. In Genesis 16, Abram and Sarai attempt to produce the promise through Hagar. In Genesis 17, Abram is renamed Abraham. In Genesis 21, Isaac, the son of promise, is finally born. Then, in Genesis 22, Abraham lays that promise back upon the altar and declares that God Himself will provide.

This is not the story of one dramatic encounter that instantly transforms Abram into a man of perfect faith. It is the story of God calling him, promising him a future, and then spending years convincing him that He is actually able to bring that future to pass.

Abram’s faith is formed through a lifetime of God continually revealing Himself. The point is not merely getting Abram to the promise. The point is Abram coming to know and trust the God who made the promise.

I find this tremendously encouraging. Much of what we have heard in the charismatic church has made it sound as though the evidence that God has spoken is a clear path and immediate provision. Abram’s life does not read that way. God gives him a promise, and then there is famine. God restates the promise, and then Lot is taken. Abram experiences an extraordinary victory, and later he still attempts to fulfill God’s word through human effort.

God is not only bringing Abram somewhere. He is revealing Himself along the way.

The Battle Was Over, but Its Meaning Was Still Being Determined

Genesis 14 tells us that Abram gathered the 318 men trained in his house, divided his forces by night, pursued the kings, and recovered everything that had been taken. Lot was rescued, the women were rescued, the people were rescued, and the possessions were recovered. Against all reasonable odds, Abram won.

The battle was over, but the meaning of the battle was still being determined.

Abram knew that he had trained the men, formed a strategy, pursued the kings, and risked his life. He had experienced the victory, but he still needed heaven to interpret what had happened.

As Abram returned from battle, Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, came out to meet him carrying bread and wine.

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth;
and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”

Genesis 14:19–20

Melchizedek did not simply congratulate Abram for a battle well fought. He interpreted Abram’s story.

Abram could truthfully say that he gathered the men, formed the strategy, went out by night, and defeated the kings. Abram really did participate. He really fought, and he really risked his life. Yet Melchizedek revealed the truth underneath the truth: El Elyon had delivered Abram’s enemies into his hand.

Abram was there, but God was there too. Abram fought the battle, but God gave the victory. Abram participated in what happened, but Abram was not the source of what happened.

Melchizedek reframed Abram’s past by revealing that more had been happening in his story than Abram had been able to see. Before Abram fully understood who God was, God was already present. Before Abram knew how to name the One sustaining him, God was already moving through his life.

Experiences Do Not Interpret Themselves

Experiences do not interpret themselves. We live through something, and then we attach meaning to it.

We survive a difficult season and conclude that we got ourselves through it. We experience success and decide that we simply made all the right decisions. We come through a battle and believe that we were strong enough. Or we experience something painful and quietly decide that God must have abandoned us.

The event happens, and then an interpretation is attached to it. Whatever interpretation we accept begins to shape the way we see ourselves, the way we see God, and what we believe is possible in our future.

Melchizedek enters Abram’s story and, in effect, says, “Let heaven tell you what happened.”

This does not diminish Abram. It locates him within the story of God. Abram is not a self-made man. He is a man being upheld by God Most High, the Possessor of heaven and earth. The victory did not ultimately prove how independent Abram had become. It revealed how faithful God had been.

Abram needed to understand his past correctly because the interpretation he accepted would affect what he was able to receive and refuse in his present.

Two Kings Met Abram in the Valley

There were two kings standing before Abram. Melchizedek, king of Salem, came with a proclamation. The king of Sodom came with an offer.

Melchizedek told Abram who had given him the victory. The king of Sodom offered Abram the possessions recovered in the battle.

“Give me the persons, but take the goods for yourself.”

Genesis 14:21

Abram refused.

“I have lifted my hand to the Lord, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal strap or anything that is yours, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’”

Genesis 14:22–23

Notice what has happened to Abram’s language. Melchizedek proclaimed, “God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth.” Abram then confessed, “The Lord, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth.”

The proclamation of Melchizedek became Abram’s confession. Melchizedek declared it, Abram heard it, and then Abram began speaking from it.

The revelation was already changing him. The first evidence of that transformation was not that Abram received something. The first evidence was that Abram became able to refuse something.

Abram refused to allow the king of Sodom to write the story of his future. He would not allow Sodom to become the explanation for his blessing. Abram was not merely refusing possessions. He was refusing an interpretation.

Revelation Changes What We Are Able to Refuse

Abram had just been introduced to the Possessor of heaven and earth. If God possessed heaven and earth, Abram did not need Sodom to secure his future.

This is what revelation does. Revelation changes what we are able to refuse.

When we do not know our Source, every offer feels necessary. Every opportunity seems as though it must be taken, and every open door appears as though it must be God. We become afraid that if we say no, there will never be another provision. We make concessions because we do not trust that our future is truly held by God.

Abram had heard that he was blessed by the Possessor of heaven and earth. Because he knew who possessed everything, he could turn down the king offering him something.

Sodom would not be Abram’s source. Sodom would not own Abram’s testimony. Sodom would not be given the right to interpret Abram’s future.

There will be places where we must refuse an interpretation too. There will be offers that appear beneficial but come with the unspoken demand that someone or something other than God be credited as the source of our life. The revelation of Jesus gives us the freedom to say, “You do not have the right to write my story.”

God Secures Abram’s Present

Genesis 15 begins with the words, “After these things.”

After the battle, the victory, Melchizedek’s proclamation, the bread and wine, Abram’s confession, and Abram’s refusal to let the king of Sodom interpret his future, God spoke.

“Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”

Genesis 15:1

Abram had just defeated a coalition of powerful kings. It would have been reasonable for him to wonder whether they might regroup and retaliate. The battle was over, but Abram was back in his tents with the members of his household. He had no city walls, standing army, or human structure protecting his future.

God did not tell Abram, “I will send you a shield.” He said, “I am your shield.”

The God who was behind Abram in the battle was now surrounding Abram after the battle. The God who had delivered the kings into Abram’s hand had not disappeared when the victory was over. God was assuring him that He had been with him then and remained with him now.

Abram’s present was not unguarded.

God Holds Abram’s Future

God also told Abram that his reward would be very great. Abram had just refused the reward of Sodom, and now God spoke concerning his future reward.

God was assuring Abram that he had not lost anything by refusing the wrong source. He had not endangered his future by refusing to allow Sodom to own his testimony. God Himself was his shield, and God held the reward.

Melchizedek reframed Abram’s past by declaring that God Most High had given him the victory. God secured Abram’s present by declaring that He was Abram’s shield. Then God spoke over Abram’s future by promising that his reward would be very great.

The God who had been faithful behind Abram in the battle would remain faithful ahead of Abram in the promise.

What About the Promise?

Abram immediately brought God the deepest unresolved question in his life.

“O Lord God, what will You give me, for I continue childless?”

Genesis 15:2

Abram was not primarily asking about money. He was thinking about the promise. God had said that He would make Abram a great nation, but Abram still had no son. Years had passed. Abram had land, possessions, servants, and military victory, but he did not yet have the one thing through which the promise was supposed to continue.

When God told Abram that his reward would be very great, Abram was essentially asking, “What about what You said? What about the future You showed me?”

God brought him outside.

“Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.”

Then He said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

“And he believed the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.”

Genesis 15:5–6

Faith for Abram’s future began to rise as he recognized the faithfulness already present in his story. The God who gave the victory could fulfill the promise. The God who delivered the kings could give the son. The God who protected Abram in the battle could protect the future He had spoken.

God was faithful in Abram’s past. God was present with Abram in his tent. God also held the future that Abram could not yet see.

We Are Not Dragging an Absent Jesus Into the World

This has also been changing the way I understand evangelism.

For too long, many of us have approached evangelism as though our task were to take an absent Jesus and drag Him into someone else’s godless story. That is not the gospel. The incarnation announces that God has already invaded the darkness.

Our task is not to bring an absent Christ into the world. Our task is to reveal the Christ who has already come, listen for where grace has already been working, and help people reinterpret their stories in the light of Jesus.

This is what Melchizedek does for Abram. He enters the story carrying bread and wine and announces that God was already there. God was working before Abram understood what was happening.

As priests in the order of Melchizedek, we carry the bread and wine into another person’s story. We carry the announcement of the finished work of Jesus. We listen to people, not so that we can condemn them or force God into the conversation, but so that we can recognize where He has already been moving and announce the truth they have not yet been able to see.

This does not mean that every event was good or that God authored every wound and act of evil. It means that darkness never succeeded in creating a place where Christ was absent. The light has entered the darkness. The question is whether we can see Him there.

Jesus Points Peter to the Source of Revelation

There is another moment in Scripture that mirrors Abram’s encounter with Melchizedek. In Matthew 16, Jesus takes His disciples to Caesarea Philippi, a region marked by pagan worship, spiritual darkness, and a cave associated with the realm of the dead.

Everyone has an interpretation of Jesus. Some say that He is John the Baptist. Others say Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Then Jesus makes the question personal.

“But who do you say that I am?”

Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”

Matthew 16:15–17

Jesus, our great High Priest in the order of Melchizedek, does for Peter what Melchizedek had done for Abram. He reveals the true Source beneath what has just taken place.

Melchizedek did not allow Abram to interpret the victory as the product of his own strength. He pointed beyond Abram’s courage, strategy, and participation to El Elyon, declaring that God Most High had delivered the enemies into Abram’s hand.

In the same way, Jesus does not allow Peter to interpret his confession as the product of his own insight. Peter has seen something true, but Jesus immediately tells him where that revelation came from.

Peter spoke the confession, but Peter was not the source of the revelation.

Just as Abram truly fought the battle, Peter truly answered Jesus. Yet beneath Peter’s confession was the hidden activity of God. The Father had pulled back the veil. The Father had revealed the Son. Peter was participating in something heaven had initiated.

Melchizedek said to Abram, in effect, “Do not misinterpret your victory. El Elyon was at work.”

Jesus says to Peter, in effect, “Do not misinterpret your revelation. My Father was at work.”

Both Abram and Peter are being pointed away from themselves as the source. Abram’s victory did not originate in Abram, and Peter’s revelation did not originate in Peter. In both encounters, the Priest-King reveals the divine action underneath the human response.

Abram fought, but God gave the victory. Peter confessed, but the Father gave the revelation.

The Revelation of Jesus Reveals Peter

Once the true Source is revealed, both men begin to understand themselves differently. Abram begins speaking from the revelation of God Most High. Peter confesses the identity of Jesus, and then Jesus begins to speak Peter’s identity back to him.

“And I tell you, you are Peter.”

Matthew 16:18

Simon has confessed the identity of Jesus, and Jesus begins speaking concerning the identity of Simon. Peter says, “You are the Christ,” and Jesus responds, “You are Peter.”

The revelation of who Jesus is opens the revelation of who Peter is.

Peter does not rename himself. He does not construct an identity or decide who he would like to become. Jesus names him from within the revelation of Christ.

This is not self-discovery. It is identity received through revelation.

We can spend our lives asking who we are, what we are supposed to become, and what our purpose might be. Yet we do not truly know ourselves apart from knowing Christ. Our identity is revealed within His identity. When we see Him, we begin to see ourselves.

The revelation of who God is reframes Abram’s story. The revelation of who Christ is reframes Peter’s identity and future.

Jesus Speaks Into the Future

Jesus continues:

“On this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”

Matthew 16:18

Jesus is not only speaking about Peter’s present identity. He is speaking into a future Peter cannot yet see.

Peter does not yet understand the cross, the resurrection, or Pentecost. He does not know that he will stand in Jerusalem and preach or that thousands will respond. He also does not yet understand the depth of his own weakness.

Peter will misunderstand Jesus. He will rebuke Jesus. He will deny that he even knows Jesus. Yet Jesus speaks from the finished intention of God.

Jesus knows what He is building. Jesus knows who Peter is becoming. Jesus knows that the gates of Hades will not prevail.

This declaration is not based on Peter’s present perfection. It is rooted in Christ’s own faithfulness. Just as Abraham’s future did not rest upon Abraham’s flawless performance, Peter’s future did not rest upon Peter’s flawless performance.

It rested upon the One who said, “I will build My Ekklesia.”

The Meeting Reframes Everything

Abram stood in the valley after a battle. Peter stood with Jesus at Caesarea Philippi.

Abram heard that El Elyon had delivered his enemies into his hand. Peter heard that flesh and blood had not revealed the Son to him, but the Father in heaven.

Abram received a revelation of God, and Peter received a revelation of Christ. Abram began speaking the language Melchizedek had proclaimed, and Peter confessed what the Father had revealed. Abram was later renamed Abraham, and Simon was named Peter.

In both stories, revelation began to reframe the future.

Abram’s future would not be defined by the king of Sodom. Peter’s future would not be defined by the gates of Hades. The king of Sodom did not own the promise, and the gates of Hades did not own the Ekklesia.

God did.

The question is not only, “What happened to you?” The deeper question is, “Who has been interpreting what happened to you?”

Who has been telling you what your past means? Who has been interpreting your victories? Who has been defining your failures? Who has been telling you what is possible in your future?

Abram could have allowed the battle to become a testimony to his own strength. He could have allowed the king of Sodom to become the source of his future. Instead, Melchizedek stood in the valley and declared that God Most High had been present in the battle.

God had been faithful in Abram’s past. God was his shield in the present. God also held the future reward and promise.

Then Jesus stood before Peter and asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Everything changes when Christ is revealed. The Father reveals the Son, Peter confesses the Son, Jesus speaks Peter’s name, and then Jesus declares a future that hell itself cannot overturn.

Your past is not waiting for Sodom to interpret it. Your present is not unguarded. Your future is not owned by the gates of hell.

Jesus, our great High Priest in the order of Melchizedek, has come to interpret the whole story. He comes carrying the bread and wine of His finished work.

Some of us need Jesus to speak concerning our past. Some of us need to know that He is presently our shield. Some of us need fresh faith to believe that the future He has spoken is still safely held in His hands.

Give Him permission to enter even the lowest and most painful places of your story. Let Him change the way you see your victories and failures. Let Him reveal where His grace has been present all along.

He was faithful in your past. He is your shield in the present. He holds your future, and what He has spoken will not be overturned.

We are His.

With love,
Leah

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This Wednesday, we are gathering again for Beholding Prayer, and we would love to have you with us.

We will continue teaching and pressing into what the Lord is revealing about our priestly calling—what it means to behold Christ, receive His life, and grow together as a people formed in the order of Melchizedek.

These times are becoming increasingly precious to us. We are making room to see Jesus, listen together, pray, and respond to what He is revealing among us.

Wednesday, July 29

8:30 p.m. Eastern
7:30 p.m. Central
6:30 p.m. Mountain
5:30 p.m. Pacific

Access to the gathering is provided below for our paid subscribers. We hope you can join us!

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Before I get into this, if you have not already listened to Chris’ message from last week or read through the written post from that message, I cannot recommend it enough. Talk about a lens shift. I am still pondering both what he shared and the way he shared it, and my heart is overflowing with gratitude.

What follows is, in many ways, my response to that message. It is the fruit of the wrestling it stirred in me, the questions it awakened, and the revelation that began to unfold as I sat with the Scriptures afterward.

I hope it blesses you.

And remember as you read: The gospel is nothing but good news.

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The Shadows Help Us Recognize the Substance

Something Chris shared last week has continued to work on me, especially concerning the relationship between the shadows of Scripture and their fulfillment in Christ.

I have wrestled with this more than I have probably admitted. Jesus is what my message and prophetic ministry are all about. I do not want anything to obscure Him. I do not want to become fascinated with symbols, patterns, priesthoods, or biblical architecture in a way that causes me to miss the Man standing in the center of it all.

So I understand the question: Why spend time studying the Lamb, the temple, the Holy of Holies, the showbread, the altar, the priesthood, or Melchizedek when we already have Jesus? Why keep looking at the shadows when the Substance has come? Why not simply behold Him?

And yet, with Jesus standing directly in front of him, John the Baptist did not merely cry out, “Behold Jesus.” He declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

That has arrested me.

John’s entire message and prophetic ministry were about Jesus, and still, when the fulfillment appeared, John named the shadow. He understood that the Lamb did not compete with Christ. The Lamb gave language to what was true about Him.

Perhaps part of my wrestling has come from imagining that looking at the shadows might somehow take my eyes off Jesus. But Revelation describes His face as shining “like the sun in full strength” (Revelation 1:16). Have you ever tried to look directly into the sun? Its brightness overwhelms the eye. You know the light is there, but you cannot always discern its shape, movement, or detail by staring into it without mediation.

The shadows allow us to perceive what the light is revealing.

Jesus did not become the Lamb because Israel had sacrificed lambs. The order runs the other way. Christ is the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). The Son came first in the heart and wisdom of God, and then creation was formed in such a way that it would carry His testimony before He stepped into history.

God gave the lamb a particular nature. It does not fight, bite, or resist the hands that lead it to slaughter. And whose hands were those? Ours. Israel was instructed to choose a lamb without blemish and bring it forward as a sacrifice for sin. Human hands selected the lamb, bound it, and shed its blood. Something true about the Son was being written into creation and enacted through worship so that, when Jesus appeared, humanity would already possess language through which to recognize Him.

Yet John’s declaration reaches beyond the repeated sacrifices of Israel: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Not merely our many sinful acts, but sin itself—the condition, power, and alienation beneath them all. The Lamb does not simply cover the evidence of our ruin. He goes to its root and takes it away.

And the Lamb is only one witness.

The temple tells His story. The bread tells His story. The wine, the altar, the priesthood, the Sabbath, the garden, the rock, the fire, and the water all tell His story. All creation is carrying some testimony of the One through whom and for whom it was made.

The shadows were never the ultimate reality, but neither were they empty. They were divine previews, living prophecies, and visible witnesses to the Son who was always first in the heart of God. They taught Israel how to recognize Him when He came, and they continue to teach us how to discern Him now.

So I am learning not to be afraid of looking deeply into what God has revealed. When we behold the Lamb, the temple, the priesthood, the bread, the altar, or Melchizedek, we are not turning our eyes away from Jesus. We are allowing the whole testimony of Scripture and creation to help our eyes adjust to His light.

Everything tells His story.

And because we were created in Him, through Him, and for Him, His story is also revealing our own.

The shadows do not compete with Christ. They reveal Him. They help us see what is true about Him, and what is true about us in Him. The more clearly we understand what they were pointing toward, the more breathtaking the fulfillment becomes.

The Substance Came First

Hebrews does not introduce Melchizedek abruptly. The writer is building toward him by establishing a pattern: something appears in Israel’s story as a visible structure, practice, or person, and then the writer shows us that it was always pointing beyond itself to Christ. Once Christ is revealed as the Substance, we also begin to understand what the shadow was saying about us in Him.

The pattern begins with Moses and the house.

Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house.

For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.

Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.

—Hebrews 3:1–6

Moses was faithful in the house, but Jesus is the builder and the Son over the house. Then the writer makes the astonishing turn: “And we are his house.”

The tabernacle was real, and its architecture mattered. Moses was instructed to build it according to the pattern shown to him on the mountain (Hebrews 8:5). But the physical structure was never the final intention. The outer court, the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, the altar, the bread, the blood, the priesthood, and the glory dwelling behind the veil were all testifying to something that would be unveiled in Christ.

The blueprint did not create the reality. The reality came first in the heart of God, and the blueprint was given so we would eventually be able to recognize it.

God did not form humanity after studying the tabernacle. He gave Moses the pattern of the tabernacle because humanity had always been created to become His dwelling place. The structure was a shadow of the greater mystery: God dwelling in humanity and humanity brought into the life of God through His Son.

This is why the writer does not merely tell us that Jesus has entered a better temple. He tells us that Jesus is the builder of the house and that we are the house. The shadow reveals Christ, and then Christ reveals our true identity in Him.

Religion can become fascinated with the structure for its own sake. We can study every measurement, furnishing, sacrifice, and ritual while missing the announcement being made through the entire design: God has always desired a people in whom He could dwell.

The tabernacle was preaching incarnation. It was preaching union. It was revealing the eternal intention of God to make humanity His habitation.

The Sabbath Did Not Create Rest

The writer then moves from the architecture of the house to the command of the Sabbath, but the pattern remains the same. The visible thing came later as a witness to a reality that was already present in God.

Hebrews reaches back to the seventh day of creation:

For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.”

—Hebrews 4:4

God’s rest existed before Israel received a commandment concerning the Sabbath. Rest was not produced by the law. It belonged to the nature and finished work of God from the beginning.

The Sabbath command was given later as a sign, inviting humanity back into the rest from which we had been created to live. The command did not manufacture the reality. It pointed toward it.

The writer then declares:

So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

—Hebrews 4:9–10

We do not rest merely because a Sabbath was commanded. We rest because we were created in the image of the One who rests, and because we have now been brought into the finished work of His Son.

This does not mean inactivity. The rest of God is not passivity or the refusal to labor. It is participation in what Christ has already completed. We no longer work in order to arrive at union, acceptance, or completion. We live and labor from the reality that, in Him, the work has been accomplished.

The Sabbath was the shadow. Christ is the rest.

Again, the writer follows the same movement. First, there is the shadow within Israel’s story. Then the reality is unveiled in Christ. Finally, we are invited to discover our own life within that reality.

The tabernacle points to Christ as the true dwelling place of God, and then we discover that we are His house. The Sabbath points to the finished work of God, and then we are invited to enter His rest.

Only after establishing this pattern does Hebrews turn more fully toward Melchizedek.

So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him,

“You are my Son,
today I have begotten you”;

as he says also in another place,

“You are a priest forever,
after the order of Melchizedek.”

—Hebrews 5:5–6

Melchizedek is not introduced as an isolated biblical curiosity. The writer has already taught us how to read the shadows. Moses and the house were pointing to Christ. Sabbath and rest were pointing to Christ. Now the priest-king who met Abram with bread and wine is also being presented as a shadow that helps us recognize Jesus.

And, if the pattern continues, Melchizedek will not only reveal something about Christ. He will also reveal something about the life into which we have been brought in Him.

That is why the meeting in Genesis matters. It is not merely an ancient encounter between Abram and a mysterious king. The writer of Hebrews is inviting us to look through that meeting and behold our own eternal High Priest.

Why Did Melchizedek Appear After the Rescue?

This is where I needed to slow the story down.

Chris has spoken about Melchizedek for years, and I have often found myself asking the Lord to show me what he is seeing. I do not want to simply repeat the language. I want to understand why the Spirit is drawing our attention to this priest-king and why the writer of Hebrews lingers there for so long.

As I sat with Genesis 14, one question kept rising in me: Why does Melchizedek appear at this exact moment in Abram’s story?

The meeting happens before Abram is renamed Abraham. It happens before the covenant sign of circumcision. It happens before the promise of Isaac is fulfilled. Abram is still in the middle of becoming, still learning the God who called him out of his father’s house.

And yet this is when the priest-king comes to meet him.

To understand the timing, we have to go back to Lot.

Genesis 12 tells us that when Abram obeyed the call of God to leave his country and his kindred, Lot went with him.

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan.

—Genesis 12:4–5

Lot was Abram’s nephew, but he was also fatherless. Chris often describes him as something like an adopted son, and I think that helps us see the weight of the relationship. Abram was not merely traveling with a relative. He was carrying someone for whom he felt responsibility.

Later, when conflict arose between their herdsmen, Abram invited Lot to choose where he would settle.

Then Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.”

—Genesis 13:8–9

God had promised the land to Abram, and yet Abram opened his hand and extended that promise to Lot.

There is something beautiful in that. Abram was already revealing something of the nature of God before he fully understood the God he was revealing. He trusted the promise enough to be generous with it. In essence, he said, “If it is mine, then I can give it to you. Choose what you want, and I will take what remains.”

Lot chose the well-watered Jordan Valley and moved his tents toward Sodom. Then, in Genesis 14, war broke out among the kings of the region. Sodom and Gomorrah were defeated, their possessions were taken, and Lot was carried away with them.

They also took Lot, the son of Abram’s brother, who was dwelling in Sodom, and his possessions, and went their way.

—Genesis 14:12

When Abram heard that Lot had been taken captive, something in him was provoked.

He did not wait for another king to intervene. He did not distance himself from Lot’s choices or say that Lot had brought this trouble on himself. He gathered the 318 trained men who had been born in his own household and went after him.

When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, 318 of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. And he divided his forces against them by night, he and his servants, and defeated them and pursued them to Hobah, north of Damascus. Then he brought back all the possessions, and also brought back his kinsman Lot with his possessions, and the women and the people.

—Genesis 14:14–16

Abram did not rescue only Lot. He brought back the women and the people. What began as a response to the capture of one man became the liberation of an entire company.

This is the setting in which Melchizedek appears.

Abram has just come out of battle. He has risked his life for someone he loves. He has gathered the sons trained in his house and moved in rescue. He has refused to leave a captive generation in the hands of the enemy.

And immediately after that, the priest-king comes out to meet him.

That timing has arrested me.

I have wondered whether the rescue mission was not simply the event that happened before the encounter, but part of what prepared Abram to recognize the One who was coming toward him.

Perhaps there is something about being provoked for the captive that brings us into the revelation of the Priest-King.

Perhaps we do not encounter Melchizedek in isolation from the rescue of a generation.

Perhaps the battle itself is leading Abram to the table.

That does not mean we earn revelation through our courage or sacrifice. It means the longing to rescue may already be evidence that the Rescuer is at work within us before we know how to name Him.

Abram believed he was going after Lot.

But Melchizedek was about to reveal that God Most High had been present in the rescue from the beginning.

Melchizedek Reinterprets the Battle

Genesis 14 tells us that after Abram returned from the rescue, Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, came out to meet him with bread and wine.

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said,

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth;
and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”

—Genesis 14:18–20

I have read those verses before, but I had never really stopped to hear what Melchizedek was saying.

Abram has just returned from a rescue. He gathered the 318 men born in his house, pursued the enemy through the night, and brought back Lot, the women, the people, and the possessions. Yet nothing in the story suggests that Abram is congratulating himself or claiming the victory as his own. In fact, he refuses to enrich himself from what has been recovered. He seems to understand that the rescue was not an opportunity for personal gain.

Then Melchizedek speaks.

He does not simply bless Abram after the fact. He reveals what had been true within the battle all along: “God Most High…has delivered your enemies into your hand.”

The rescue did not originate in Abram as though he had acted independently of God and then received divine approval afterward. The compassion that rose in him, the refusal to abandon Lot, the courage to move toward the captives, and the victory itself were all held within the life and purpose of God.

Melchizedek is not correcting Abram’s pride. He is unveiling Abram’s participation.

Abram had been caught up into the rescue of God before he possessed the language to understand it fully. He had moved with something that originated in the heart of God, and now the Priest-King was revealing the source of that movement.

This is what captured me. The meeting is not merely an introduction to Melchizedek or to the name El Elyon, God Most High. It is the unveiling of the God who had already been active in Abram’s life before Abram could fully name what was happening.

Melchizedek does not merely explain how the battle ended. He reveals the life from which the rescue had come.

And then he brings out bread and wine.

He does not meet Abram with another assignment or a new demand. Abram is not told what he must now accomplish to secure the blessing. He is met with bread and wine—with the mystery of the body and blood of Christ already present in shadow.

This is the gospel before the Gospel is named.

The bread and wine are not merely religious symbols added to an encouraging word. They reveal the Son. Before the incarnation, before the cross appeared in history, and before Abram could have understood any of it, the body and blood of Christ were already being proclaimed.

And what they proclaim is more than the avoidance of punishment.

The cross is the revelation of our participation in the life of God. In Christ, humanity is taken into His death and His resurrection. His body is given so that we may become His body. His blood is poured out so that His life may become our life.

The table reveals union.

Abram had already been participating in the life of the Rescuer before he could explain that participation. He had been moved by the compassion of God, carried into the purpose of God, and included in a victory that belonged to God. Melchizedek came with bread and wine to unveil the mystery of that shared life.

God does not wait until Abram has complete theology before drawing him into His life. Abram participates before he understands. He moves with God before he can fully name God. Then the Priest-King reveals the source and substance of that participation.

The bread and wine do not merely commemorate a victory God accomplished for Abram.

They reveal the life of God in which Abram had already been included.

We Are Not Introducing Two Strangers

This revelation changes the way we understand evangelism because, in this story, we are invited to recognize ourselves first in Abram.

We are people who have been drawn into the movement of God before we fully understand what He is doing. We feel the provocation to rescue, the burden for those held captive, the refusal to leave people where darkness has taken them, and only later do we begin to recognize that the compassion moving within us did not originate in us. We were already participating in the heart of the Rescuer before we had language for that participation.

But the story also reveals the shape of the ministry into which we are being formed in Christ.

Jesus alone is the eternal High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek. He is the source, substance, and fulfillment of that priesthood. We do not become another Melchizedek, and we do not possess His priesthood independently of Him.

Yet because we have been joined to Christ, we participate in His priestly ministry. Scripture calls us a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9), and in union with Jesus we are sent to bear witness to what He has accomplished.

This means we are not being sent into the world to arrange an introduction between Jesus and people He has never encountered. We are not bringing an absent Christ into someone’s story as though He has been waiting outside of it. We are being trained to recognize where He has already been present, where grace has already been drawing, and where the encounter has already begun before it could be understood.

In the pattern revealed through Melchizedek, we learn to reinterpret the battle.

We listen for the places where someone has been carried by mercy without knowing how to name it. We listen for the compassion they cannot explain, the hunger for justice, the longing to rescue, the ache for truth, and the refusal to believe that darkness should have the final word. We pay attention to the places where the life of God may already be pressing against the veil.

Then we help them see the story differently.

Perhaps you thought you survived only because you were strong. Perhaps you believed the love that kept you fighting for your family came entirely from you. Perhaps you understood your hunger for truth as restlessness, your compassion as weakness, or your longing for home as dissatisfaction. But what if these were also places where God was already drawing you? What if the Rescuer was closer than you knew?

This is not an attempt to flatter human goodness or deny the reality of sin. Sin is real. It blinds, distorts, enslaves, and teaches us to live as though we are separated from God. But the darkness does not make Christ absent, and the veil does not mean He has abandoned the person standing behind it.

We are sent to unveil Him.

And we do not come carrying another demand. We present the bread and wine. We announce the body and blood of Jesus, the finished work of the cross, and the life of God opened to us through His death and resurrection.

The cross is not merely the mechanism by which punishment is diverted away from us. It is the revelation of union. In Christ, humanity is taken into His death and raised into His life. His death becomes our death to the old creation. His resurrection becomes the source of a new humanity. His body is given, and we are made His body. His blood is poured out, and His life becomes our life.

This is why evangelism in the pattern of the Priest-King is more than explaining how to avoid judgment. We reinterpret the battle in the light of grace. We name the encounter that was already unfolding before the person understood it. We announce the finished work of Jesus and invite them to awaken, believe, and consciously participate in the life He has opened to us.

So we are not claiming equality with Melchizedek or placing ourselves beside Jesus. We are recognizing that, in union with Christ, we participate in His ministry. We are first the ones whose lives are reinterpreted by the Priest-King, and then we are sent to help others recognize the One who has been present in their stories all along.

We are not introducing two strangers.

We are announcing the name of the One who has been drawing near from the beginning.

His name is Jesus.

The Encounter Before the Encounter

We see the same pattern revealed in Melchizedek appearing throughout the ministry of Jesus.

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God” (John 3:2). He believed he was bringing Jesus the conclusion he had reached from the signs. But Jesus answered by going beneath the conclusion to the awakening that made it possible.

The phrase Jesus uses in John 3 can mean both “born again” and “born from above.” Nicodemus had recognized something from above because something from above was already stirring within him. He thought he had found Jesus, but Jesus was revealing that he had first been drawn.

This is the pattern of the Priest-King. Jesus does not merely receive Nicodemus’ confession. He reinterprets the encounter. He reveals that the meeting did not begin when Nicodemus arrived at the door. God had already been at work in the hunger, the questions, the risk, and the journey that brought him there.

Jesus does the same thing with Nathanael. When Nathanael comes to Him, Jesus says, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you” (John 1:48).

Again, Jesus points to the encounter before the encounter.

Nathanael believed he was just arriving. Jesus revealed that he had already been seen. Nicodemus believed he had discovered something about Jesus. Jesus revealed that the Father had already been drawing him.

This is what Melchizedek did for Abram. He did not create the rescue after the fact. He revealed the God who had already been present within it.

And this is what Jesus does for us. He shows us that grace was already moving before we understood it, that the Father was already drawing before we knew His name, and that our story did not begin with our awareness of Him.

The introduction does not create the awakening.

It reveals the One who was already there.

The Gospel Frees Both Sons

The pattern we have been tracing brings us directly into the relationship between the indicative and the imperative.

The indicative declares what is true because of Christ. The imperative tells us how to live because that truth has already been established.

Religion almost always reverses the order. It begins with the command and leaves the person trying to produce the reality through obedience. Change your behavior. Become holy. Stop sinning. Prove your devotion. Make yourself acceptable.

The gospel begins somewhere else.

You died with Christ (Romans 6:8).

You were raised with Christ (Colossians 3:1).

Christ lives in you (Galatians 2:20).

You are alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:11).

You have been seated with Him in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).

You have been reconciled to God through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18–19).

Only then does the imperative come. Because this is true, live from it. Because you have died with Christ, do not keep submitting yourself to the old life as though it still owns you. Because you have been raised with Him, seek the things that are above. Because Christ lives in you, do not live as though your life is separate from His.

The order matters because the order is the gospel.

When the imperative comes first, obedience becomes an attempt to create union. When the indicative comes first, obedience becomes the fruit of union.

Jesus tells this same truth through the two sons in Luke 15. One son is bound in rebellion. The other is bound in religion. Both are living from a false understanding of the father, and both need the gospel to reinterpret their story.

The younger son believes freedom is found outside the father’s house. He demands his inheritance, leaves home, and squanders everything in a distant country. Eventually, when he is hungry and humiliated, he begins the journey back, but even then he is still thinking like someone separated from the father.

He prepares a speech.

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”

—Luke 15:18–19

He assumes the relationship has been destroyed and must now be rebuilt through labor. He is prepared to offer the father an imperative: Tell me what to do, and perhaps I can earn my way back into the house.

But while he is still a long way off, the father sees him and runs toward him.

“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

The father does not wait for the son to close the distance. He does not let him finish negotiating a lesser place in the household. He interrupts the speech with the truth.

Bring the robe.

Put a ring on his hand.

Put shoes on his feet.

Prepare the feast.

The son has returned believing he must become a servant, but the father receives him as a son before he can perform anything. The indicative comes first: You are mine. You are home. You are restored to the house.

Only from that place can the son begin to live differently.

The father’s embrace reinterprets the entire journey. The son believed he was making the long way back to the father, but the father had been watching the horizon and was already running toward him.

Then Jesus turns our attention to the older son.

He never left the property, but he is just as convinced of separation. He has obeyed, served, labored, and remained outwardly faithful, yet he thinks like a slave.

When he hears the celebration, he refuses to go inside. He tells the father:

“Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.”

—Luke 15:29

His whole relationship with the father has been interpreted through the imperative. I served. I obeyed. I worked. Therefore, you owe me.

The younger son tried to earn his way back into the house. The older son believed he had earned everything by never leaving it.

Both sons misunderstand the father.

And once again, the father comes outside.

He does not shame the older son or answer him with a stronger command. He gives him the indicative:

“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

—Luke 15:31

Everything I have is yours.

The older son has lived beside abundance while thinking like an orphan. He has been in the house, but he has not been living from the truth of the relationship. His obedience has not flowed from union with the father; it has become the evidence he presents in order to secure reward.

This is why the gospel must free both sons.

The younger son must be delivered from the lie that freedom is found outside the Father.

The older son must be delivered from the lie that life with the Father must be earned.

One is trapped in rebellion. The other is trapped in striving. One has gone far away in his actions. The other is standing outside the celebration while remaining physically close to the house.

But the Father comes out to both.

This is where the indicative and the imperative must remain in their proper order. The Father does not tell the younger son to clean himself up before receiving the robe. He does not tell the older son to work harder before assuring him that everything is already his.

He reveals the relationship first.

Then life can change from inside that revelation.

The gospel does not tell rebellious sons that sin does not matter. It tells them that freedom will never be found outside the life of the Father.

And the gospel does not tell religious sons that obedience does not matter. It tells them that obedience was never meant to purchase what the Father had already given.

The imperative is not removed. It is restored to its rightful place.

We do not obey in order to become sons.

We learn to live as sons because, in Christ, the Father has brought us home.

Life is not found in the law, and life is not found in the absence of law. Life is found in Christ. The younger son does not become free by escaping the father’s house, and the older son does not become whole by perfecting his performance within it. Both must discover their life in the Son.

“In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

—John 14:20

This is the truth beneath the indicative and the imperative. The gospel does not merely command us to behave like sons. It reveals that, in Christ, we have been brought into the life of the Son Himself. Obedience then becomes the fruit of union, not the price of belonging.

He Was Present in the Darkness

This is where the gospel becomes more than a theological framework for me. It becomes the only way I can tell the truth about my own life.

I can look back at the cocaine den, at the darkness I was living in, and say without hesitation that Jesus was there.

Not because the darkness was holy. Not because the sin did not matter. Not because bondage was somehow another form of freedom. I was blind, broken, and living under the power of things that were destroying me.

But I was not abandoned.

The psalmist says:

“If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”

—Psalm 139:8

That verse does not minimize hell. It magnifies the reach of God.

There is no darkness into which we can descend and find Him absent. There is no bondage so deep that His presence has been driven out. There is no place in the human story where He has surrendered His claim and walked away.

I did not know how to recognize Him then. I could not name the mercy that was preserving me or the love that was refusing to let death have the final word. But when I look back now, I can see that the encounter had begun long before I understood it.

He was present in the breath still in my lungs. He was present in the family who fasted and prayed. He was present in the ache that told me this could not be the end of my life. He was present in every interruption of death, every moment of mercy, and every unseen restraint that kept the darkness from swallowing me whole.

This is not an attempt to call darkness light. It is the refusal to call God absent.

Paul writes:

“In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”

—2 Corinthians 5:19

The gospel does not announce that God may eventually come near if we can climb out of the pit, pray the right prayer, or prove that we are serious enough to change. It announces that God has already come all the way into our darkness in Christ.

Jesus entered death itself.

He descended into the place we believed could separate us from God and filled even that place with His presence. The cross is not the moment the Father decided whether humanity was worth saving. It is the revelation of how far God had already determined to go to bring us into His life.

So when I say Jesus was present in that cocaine den, I am not denying the reality of sin. I am testifying to the greater reality of grace.

Sin was real, but it was not ultimate.

Darkness was real, but it was not empty.

Death was working, but Life had already entered the room.

This is why we do not preach an absent God. We preach the One who has entered the darkness, joined Himself to humanity, and now opens our eyes to recognize that He was closer than we knew.

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).

Can You See Him Now?

At the end of all this, we return to Melchizedek standing before Abram with bread and wine.

The battle has been fought. The captives have been recovered. Abram has moved in a rescue he could not yet fully interpret. Then the Priest-King comes and reveals that God Most High had been present in the story from the beginning.

That is what the bread and wine announce. They do not add God to Abram’s story. They unveil the God who was already there.

Jesus does not merely arrive at the end of our stories and ask whether we will allow Him to become part of them. He unveils Himself as the One who was already present—the One who formed us, sustained us, drew us, and awakened us before we understood what was happening.

There are places in our stories we have interpreted as abandonment. There are battles we believed we survived alone, longings we assumed were merely our own, and moments of mercy we did not yet know how to name. But at the table, our history is reinterpreted in the light of His body and blood. We begin to see that grace did not start when we finally recognized Him. Grace was carrying us toward recognition all along.

Some of us have stood far away because of sin, convinced that we disqualified ourselves from coming home. Others have remained close to the house but lived like servants, trying to earn what the Father had already given.

The Father comes out to both sons.

He comes to the one who ran, and He comes to the one who stayed but never learned to rest. He meets rebellion with mercy and religion with the same mercy. He does not ask either son to create the relationship. He reveals the relationship that was already His desire.

This is the gospel.

Not that we finally found our way back to God, but that in Christ, God came all the way into our story. Not that we persuaded Him to receive us, but that He was already moving toward us before we knew how to turn around. Not that He stood at a distance waiting for us to become worthy, but that He entered our darkness, bore our death, and brought us into His life.

So perhaps the question is not, “How do I get back to Jesus?”

Perhaps the question is:

Can you see Him now?

Can you see Him in the mercy that sustained you? Can you see Him in the love that kept reaching for you? Can you see Him in the battle, in the longing, in the interruption, in the hunger, and in the moment you finally realized there had to be more?

He was not absent. He was not waiting at the end of the road. He was already in the story.

And now, through the bread and wine, through the cross, and through the unveiling of His Son, He gives us eyes to recognize the One who has been speaking all along.

His name is Jesus.

And the gospel is nothing but good news.

Watch the Message

This article was developed from the message “Can You See Me Now? The God Who Was Already in Your Story Before You Knew His Name.” Watch it again and take some time to sit with the Scriptures and the questions this message opens.

Watch or rewatch the full message on YouTube

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Thank you for helping us keep proclaiming the gospel—the finished work of Christ, the life of union, and the good news that Jesus is already nearer than we knew.

This Wednesday, we are gathering again for Beholding with our Colorado community.

Over these past few weeks, the Lord has been bringing us into such a beautiful lens shift concerning the gospel, the finished work of Jesus, and the life we have been given in Him. I am continuing to feel so much gratitude for what He is revealing and for the way we are learning to wrestle through these things together as a community.

We will begin with a live teaching and discussion as we open the Scriptures and continue pressing into the revelation of Jesus. Afterward, we will end the livestream and move into an unrecorded time of beholding and prayer.

We are intentionally keeping that final portion private so that those participating can respond to the Lord, share openly, and receive ministry without being recorded.

Wednesday, July 22
7:15 p.m. Mountain Time

The livestream link is available below for paid Company 318 subscribers.

And remember, next week we will gather for our online Beholding time with our Company 318 community across the nation on zoom.

Read more

If you only take time to read through one article this week, let it be this one.

This message brought together so much of what we have been talking about, and I am so, so grateful.

If you can, please watch the video. I am going to do my best to capture the heart of what Chris was sharing Sunday, but it is worth the listen. You can begin at about 17:30 to skip the announcements and go directly into the message.

Watch the full message here.

That being said, we have some really exciting things coming up that we are preparing to launch with you.

Many of you have written to us expressing your desire to go deeper into this message, and we want to go in too. We do not want to skim the surface of what God is revealing. We want to understand it, live in it, and allow it to form us together.

Much more is coming in the weeks ahead, but please pray for Chris and me to hear from heaven. What we have heard so far is so thrilling to our hearts, and you are part of our yes.

Stay tuned.

The Blueprint and the Building

Chris began with a question about the architecture of the apostolic gospel.

What is God actually building in His people?

The question is not merely what we are preaching, teaching, attending, or producing. The deeper question is what kind of people the gospel is forming.

There is an architecture that produces striving, self-effort, comparison, spiritual hierarchy, and dependence upon gifted leaders. There is another architecture that begins with the finished work of Christ and forms a people who hear God, commune with Him, and participate in His life together.

That distinction matters.

A building can contain many true elements and still be built upon the wrong foundation. Holiness is true. Obedience is true. Prayer, fasting, sacrifice, discipline, and righteousness are all true. But when these become the foundation rather than the fruit of Christ’s life within us, the entire structure begins to lean toward human effort.

The gospel does not begin with what we must do for God. It begins with what God has done in Christ.

Why the Shadows Still Matter

One of the ideas Chris was responding to was the claim that because Jesus is the substance, the shadows of Scripture no longer need to be studied.

But the New Testament does not treat the shadows that way.

After the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the writer of Hebrews still spent considerable time unfolding the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the priesthood, and Melchizedek.

The substance had come, yet the shadows still mattered.

Why?

Because the shadows were not accidental comparisons attached to Jesus after the fact. They were formed in the heart of God to reveal His Son.

Paul writes of Christ:

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him.”
—Colossians 1:16 ESV

Everything was created through Him and for Him.

The lamb, the seed, the vine, the bread, the water, the priesthood, and the tabernacle were all created within a world that was already oriented toward Christ.

The shadows did not create the substance. The substance came first.

The shadows are portraits of what was already true in the heart of God concerning His Son.

This is why John did not simply say, “Behold Jesus,” when Jesus walked toward him. He said:

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
—John 1:29 ESV

Why speak of the shadow when the substance was standing directly in front of him?

Because the lamb reveals something about Jesus.

A lamb has no claws, armor, venom, or natural defense. Its strength is not found in its ability to protect itself, but in its trust in the shepherd. It knows the shepherd’s voice. It follows. It yields.

The lamb reveals the surrender and dependence of the Son.

The same is true of the seed. A seed goes into the ground and disappears before its life is manifested. Within something small and hidden lies the possibility of a tree, a harvest, or an entire forest.

We can look at a seed and see only a seed, or we can behold long enough to see Christ.

The shadows are not substitutes for Jesus. They are invitations to see Him more fully.

Melchizedek and the God Who Initiates Rescue

Melchizedek appears only briefly in Genesis 14, yet Hebrews returns to him again and again because he reveals something essential about the eternal priesthood of Christ.

Abram had just returned from battle after rescuing Lot and the others who had been carried away. Then Melchizedek came out to meet him.

“And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High.”
—Genesis 14:18 ESV

He did not first ask Abram to build an altar or prove his devotion. He brought bread and wine.

But Melchizedek did more than refresh Abram after the battle. He interpreted what had just happened.

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth;
and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”
—Genesis 14:19–20 ESV

Abram fought, but El Elyon delivered. Abram pursued, but the rescue had its origin in the heart of God.

Could this meeting be part of Abram’s introduction to the God whose own resolve had already been moving within him?

Something in Abram refused to leave Lot and the others in captivity. He gathered his men, pursued the enemy, and risked himself for their recovery. Yet when the battle was over, Melchizedek named the source: God Most High had delivered them into his hand.

Abram had not merely initiated a noble mission and then received God’s blessing upon it. He had participated in a rescue that was already alive in the heart of God.

This is the order of the gospel.

God initiates, and we respond. God places His desire within us, and we participate. God works through us, and then opens our eyes to recognize that it was His life moving in us all along.

The bread and wine are more than refreshment after battle. They are communion with the source of the rescue. They remind Abram that the resolve, the strength, and the victory all came from God Most High.

This may reveal something vital about our own participation in the priesthood of Christ.

The priestly life is not confined to private communion. Communion brings us into the heart of the Priest-King, and His heart moves toward those held captive.

Could it be that one expression of our participation in this priesthood is the refusal to abandon a generation to a false gospel?

A generation has been held beneath messages of separation, shame, performance, and religious striving. This is not merely bad theology. It is captivity.

The life of Christ within His people refuses to make peace with it.

We contend, not because we have appointed ourselves as rescuers, but because the heart of the Rescuer is moving within us. We speak, not to prove that we are right, but because the voice of the Shepherd is calling His people out of bondage.

This is not our battle offered to God. It is His rescue entrusted to us.

Jesus, our great High Priest, still meets us with bread and wine, reminding us that the rescue began in His heart, that the life is His, and that the victory will never belong to human strength.

The Tabernacle Reveals Participation

Every part of the tabernacle reveals Christ, but it does more than show us something about Him from a distance. It reveals our invitation to participate in His life.

He is the gate, and we enter through Him. He is the Lamb upon the altar, and Romans 6 tells us that we died with Him. He is the cleansing water, and we are renewed in the truth of who we are in Him. He is the bread of the Presence, and we receive His life as our own.

He is the light, yet He says to His people:

“You are the light of the world.”
—Matthew 5:14 ESV

He is the fragrant offering, yet Paul says that we are the aroma of Christ. He is seated in heavenly places, and we have been seated with Him.

The shadows do not merely reveal what Jesus accomplished for us. They reveal what we have been invited into with Him.

This is not only a gospel of observation. It is a gospel of union, communion, and participation.

The Indicative Before the Imperative

This may have been the most important part of the message.

Chris explained the difference between the indicative and the imperative.

An indicative is a statement of what is true. It declares what has happened, who Christ is, and who we have become in Him.

An imperative is a command. It tells us how to live or respond.

The apostles consistently placed the indicative before the imperative.

They first declared what Christ had accomplished and what was now true of the believer. Only then did they give instruction about how to live.

The apostolic pattern is clear. You died with Christ; therefore, do not let sin reign. You are alive to God; therefore, present yourself to Him. Christ lives in you; therefore, walk by the Spirit. You are in Christ; therefore, abide in Him.

The command does not create the identity. The identity makes obedience possible.

When we reverse that order, we create an architecture of striving.

We tell people to become holy without first revealing that the Holy One lives within them. We tell them to produce fruit without first teaching them that they are branches abiding in the Vine. We urge them to conquer sin through effort and willpower without first declaring that the old humanity was crucified with Christ.

Paul writes:

“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing.”
—Romans 6:6 ESV

Then, because that is true, he says:

“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.”
—Romans 6:12 ESV

The command rests upon the accomplished work. The imperative flows from the indicative.

We are not holy because we have successfully performed holy actions. We live in holiness because the Holy One lives in us.

Prayer, fasting, obedience, righteousness, and discipline all matter. But they are not the foundation. They are the expression of the life of Christ within us.

Dependence Rather Than Independence

When the imperative becomes the foundation, we begin to live independently.

We decide what should be done for God, and then we ask Him to bless it. We determine what to pray, how much to fast, where to serve, and what our lives should accomplish. We compare ourselves to missionaries, ministers, intercessors, and leaders, and we feel pressure to do something equally impressive.

But the life of Christ is not lived through comparison. It is lived through response.

The Father initiates. The Son reveals. The Spirit leads. We respond.

The question is not merely, “What can I do for God?” The deeper question is, “What is in the heart of God that He desires to express through me?”

God places something from His own heart within His people. Our calling is not simply a personal ambition that we ask God to support. It is a portion of His desire entrusted to us for manifestation in the earth.

We are not inventing something and inviting Him into it. We are being invited into His life.

That changes everything.

We pray because He is interceding within us. We serve because His love is moving toward someone. We labor because His grace is working through us.

Paul said:

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”
—1 Corinthians 15:10 ESV

Paul labored, but the source of the labor was grace.

This is not passivity. It is surrendered participation.

A Priesthood That Hears God

Chris also spoke about the difference between the prophetic ministry of the Old Testament and the priestly reality of the New Covenant.

In Eden, there was no need for a prophet to stand between God and humanity. Adam and Eve heard His voice.

At Pentecost, the fire that once rested upon the dwelling place of God divided and rested upon each person.

“And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.”
—Acts 2:3 ESV

Every believer had become a dwelling place, and every believer had been invited to hear.

This does not eliminate apostolic and prophetic ministry. It reveals its purpose.

The fivefold ministry does not exist to create dependency upon gifted leaders. It exists to equip the saints and bring the body into maturity.

“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry.”
—Ephesians 4:11–12 ESV

The highest function of prophetic ministry is not merely to announce what God is saying. It is to awaken a priesthood that hears Him.

God is forming a people who commune with Him, discern together, know the Shepherd’s voice, and reveal Christ.

Let the Scaffolding Fall

At the beginning of the message, we prayed that God would remove the scaffolding from past seasons that is no longer needed.

That prayer stayed with me.

Many of us have spent years within structures built upon the imperative. We were told to do more, pray harder, fast longer, try again, become worthy, prove our devotion, and earn greater access.

Even when we know better theologically, remnants of that architecture can still live in us.

This dismantling can feel painful because striving is familiar. We know how to measure effort. We know how to compare performance. We know how to judge ourselves by visible activity.

Dependence requires surrender. It requires us to trust the life of Another within us.

God is recovering the gospel of His Son.

He is not building a monument to human devotion. He is forming a habitation for Christ.

May every false foundation be shaken. May every structure built upon self-effort come down. May every shadow be illuminated in the face of Jesus. May we begin and end in His finished work.

May He receive what He has always desired: a people in whom He can live, move, and have His way.

Watch The Blueprint and the Building here.

Help Us Carry This Message

Abram was moved to pursue Lot and the others who had been taken captive. He did not leave them in bondage. He responded to a rescue that was already alive in the heart of God.

In the same way, we believe there is a generation being held beneath false gospels of separation, shame, performance, and religious striving. We want to contend for their rescue by proclaiming the finished work of Christ, our union with Him, and the life of the Priest-King within His people.

Please help us carry this message by sharing this article with someone who needs to hear it. A simple share may become part of someone else’s rescue.

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This Wednesday, we are gathering live on Zoom with friends across the nations for one unhurried hour of beholding, prayer, and communion with the Lord.

Chris will share a few things that are stirring in his heart, and then we will make room to behold Jesus and pray together.

These live gatherings have become precious to us. There is something powerful about people joining from different cities and nations, quieting our hearts together, and turning our attention toward the One who is already present.

We are not striving to reach Him.

We are responding to the reality that we are already seated with Christ in heavenly places.

And together, we are learning to live from that place.

Wednesday, July 15

Eastern: 8:30 p.m.
Central: 7:30 p.m.
Mountain: 6:30 p.m.
Pacific: 5:30 p.m.

We will be together for one hour.

Chris will share briefly, and then we will behold and pray with one another.

We would love to have you with us.

These live Beholding gatherings are part of our paid Company 318 community. If you have been longing to go deeper with us—not only by receiving teaching, but by gathering live to behold Jesus, pray, and grow together—you are warmly invited to join.

Your paid subscription gives you access to these live Zoom gatherings and helps support the teaching, writing, and equipping work we are building through Company 318.

Join the paid Company 318 community

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What do we believe Jesus intends to become through His people?

That question sits underneath so much of what we believe about the end of the age, the purpose of the Church, the meaning of authority, and even the way we pray. On Sunday, Chris opened a conversation that was not merely about ecclesiology as a theological category. It was about recovering a biblical vision of the Ekklesia — the Church as the body of Christ in the earth, called into union with Him, seated with Him, sent by Him, and invited to participate in His heart for creation.

The war of the world is not first over politics, culture, nations, systems, or headlines. The deepest war is over habitation. Will Christ have a people through whom He can express His life, His wisdom, His compassion, His authority, and His victory in the earth?

That is an ecclesiology question. And our ecclesiology will shape our eschatology.

If we believe the Church is mostly passive, then our vision of the end will be mostly escape. If we believe the Church is called to act apart from union, then our vision of the end will become presumptuous, arrogant, and triumphalistic. But if we see the Ekklesia as the body of Christ — beholding, abiding, seated, and sent — then we begin to understand that the end of the age is not about a weak Church waiting to be removed from the story. It is about Christ coming into fullness in a people.

Melchizedek Begins With Bread and Wine

Chris began by touching briefly on the Melchizedek priesthood, and even though he said he was not going to fully go there, the lens matters deeply.

Melchizedek appears in Genesis 14 after Abram rescues Lot and returns from the defeat of the kings. Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, comes out to meet Abram with bread and wine. He blesses Abram, and he blesses God Most High, who had delivered Abram’s enemies into his hand.

Genesis 14:18–20, ESV
¹⁸ And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) ¹⁹ And he blessed him and said,

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor^[a] of heaven and earth;
²⁰ and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!”

And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

That detail is stunning. Melchizedek does not come out with an altar. He does not come out with sacrifice. He comes out with bread and wine.

The Melchizedek priesthood begins at the finished work. It begins with communion. It begins with union. It begins with participation. This is different from the Levitical priesthood, which was marked by repetition. Sacrifice after sacrifice. Offering after offering. The work was never finished.

Hebrews 10 says that every priest stands daily at his service, repeatedly offering sacrifices that can never fully take away sins. But Christ, after offering one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God. The Levitical priests stood daily because the work was never finished. There was no seat in the holy place for the priest. But Jesus, our great High Priest, completed the work and sat down.

So the priesthood we are being brought into is not rooted in striving, endless sacrifice, or trying to finish what Christ has already completed. It is rooted in union with the finished work.

Hebrews defines Melchizedek. John describes him.

John never uses the phrase “Melchizedek priesthood,” but his Gospel is full of the inner reality of that priesthood: abiding, remaining, eating His flesh, drinking His blood, union, communion, and oneness with Christ. In John 6:56, Jesus says that the one who feeds on His flesh and drinks His blood abides in Him, and He in them. In John 15:4, Jesus says, “Abide in me, and I in you.”

This is priesthood from the inside. It is not merely service to God, but participation in God. It is not merely ministry for God, but union with Christ.

Ecclesiology Shapes Eschatology

Chris said something that needs to be considered carefully: our ecclesiology will affect our eschatology.

Ecclesiology is the study of the Church. But we cannot reduce that to church structure, weekly gatherings, leadership models, or denominational frameworks. The real question is: Who is the Ekklesia? Who are we in Christ? What did Jesus intend to build?

Jesus said in Matthew 16 that He would build His Church, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18, ESV
¹⁸ And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

The word often translated “church” here is ekklesia — a called-out assembly. Jesus did not describe a passive people hiding from darkness. He described a people against whom the gates of Hades would not prevail.

That matters, because many read Matthew 24 and build an entire end-times vision around darkness increasing, wars and rumors of wars, deception, lawlessness, tribulation, and the need to be rescued. And yes, Jesus does speak plainly about shaking. In Matthew 24, He speaks of wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines, earthquakes, and tribulation.

But we cannot read Matthew 24 while ignoring Matthew 16. And we cannot read Matthew 24 while ignoring Matthew 28.

Right in the middle of that passage, Jesus says this Gospel of the Kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Matthew 24:14, ESV
¹⁴ And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

Not just any message. This Gospel of the Kingdom. A Gospel with a King. A Gospel that creates a people. A Gospel that forms priests and kings who participate in the reign of Christ.

And after His resurrection, Jesus says in Matthew 28 that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. Therefore, He sends His disciples to disciple nations.

The Church is not sent because she has authority independent of Christ. She is sent because all authority belongs to Christ, and she is His body.

The Body of Christ Is Not Only a Metaphor

One of the passages Chris referenced that carries tremendous weight is Acts 9. Saul is persecuting Christians. He is threatening the disciples. He is going after the Church. But when Jesus confronts him on the road to Damascus, He does not ask, “Why are you persecuting My people?” He asks, “Why are you persecuting me?”

That is staggering. Jesus so identifies Himself with His body that to persecute them is to persecute Him. This is not sentimental language. It is union language.

Paul later writes in Ephesians 1 that God put all things under Christ’s feet and gave Him as head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

Ephesians 1:22–23, ESV
²² And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

The Church is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. That does not sound like a weak, passive, irrelevant people waiting to disappear. It sounds like a people in whom Christ intends to be seen, known, and expressed in the earth.

Paul says something equally stunning in Ephesians 3: through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God is made known to rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

Through the Church. Not around the Church. Not apart from the Church. Through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God is made known to principalities and powers.

So when the Church sees herself as passive, defeated, or merely waiting for evacuation, what are the principalities and powers seeing? What are we displaying? What kind of wisdom are we making known?

A Mature Man

Paul continues this vision in Ephesians 4. The body of Christ is being built up until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

The goal is not a permanently immature Church. The goal is mature manhood. The goal is the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

In Ephesians 5, Paul says Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her so that He might sanctify her and present her to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Christ is not returning for a bride He failed to form. He is not returning because His life in His people was not enough. He is forming a glorious Church.

This does not mean we deny darkness. Isaiah says darkness will cover the earth and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon His people, and His glory will be seen upon them.

Yes, darkness covers the earth. But that is not the whole sentence. The Lord rises upon His people, and His glory is seen upon them. The darker the darkness, the more necessary it is for the sons of God to be revealed.

Creation Is Waiting

Romans 8 is central to this lens.

Paul writes that creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. Creation is not merely waiting for the removal of the Church. Creation is waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. Paul goes on to say that creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Romans 8:19–21, ESV
¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Creation is groaning, but not without hope. Creation is groaning for liberty, and somehow that liberty is connected to the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

This is not a call to arrogance. It is a call to maturity. It is a call to responsibility. It is a call to recover who we are in Christ.

Chris framed this so clearly: the Church has often been conditioned to think either too little or too much of herself. Either we are worms with no authority, or we are God with no need to listen. But the biblical vision is neither self-hatred nor self-exaltation. We are not worms with no authority, and we are not gods with no need to listen. We are sons, members of His body, and co-laborers who can do nothing apart from Him, yet are invited to participate in what He is doing.

Participation Is Everywhere

Chris walked through Scripture and showed that God repeatedly invites His people into participation.

When God was going to judge the earth by flood, He did not simply remove Noah from the story. He told him to build an ark. When Israel stood before the Red Sea, the Lord did not tell Moses to sit back and watch. In Exodus 14, He asked Moses why he was crying out, and then told him to tell the people to move forward, lift up his staff, stretch out his hand over the sea, and divide it.

There is a kind of prayer that is not faith, but avoidance. We can say, “God, do something,” while the Lord is saying, “I have put authority in your hand. Move with Me.”

Joshua did not merely ask God to extend the battle. In Joshua 10, he spoke to the sun and moon. Elijah declared in 1 Kings 17 that there would be neither dew nor rain except by his word. Ezekiel was told in Ezekiel 37 to prophesy to the breath. Again and again, God brings His people into the action. Not as independent agents. Not as self-appointed rulers. But as those who hear Him and obey.

Authority Without Presumption

This is where the distinction matters.

Chris was careful to say this is not arbitrary authority. It is not “we can do whatever we want because God is in us.” That is not biblical authority. That is presumption.

Jesus Himself gives us the pattern.

John 5:19–20, ESV
¹⁹ So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. ²⁰ For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel.

This is the pattern of the Son. Jesus is not powerless. He is perfectly yielded. He does not act from independence. He acts from union with the Father.

This gives us the right lens for understanding the signs and wonders of Jesus. When Jesus speaks to creation, sickness, death, demons, storms, and graves, He is not acting apart from the Father. He is revealing what He sees the Father doing.

That means John 11 is not an exception to John 5. It is an expression of it.

Before Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, He lifts His eyes and speaks to the Father. He thanks the Father for hearing Him and says that He knows the Father always hears Him. But He speaks aloud for the sake of the people standing around, that they may believe the Father sent Him. Then, from that place of union and confidence before the Father, Jesus cries out with a loud voice and commands Lazarus to come out.

John 11:41–44, ESV
⁴¹ So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. ⁴² I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” ⁴³ When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” ⁴⁴ The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

This is authority flowing from union. The Son can do nothing apart from what He sees the Father doing, and then, from that place of perfect union, He stands before death itself and commands Lazarus to come out.

In Mark 4, Jesus speaks to the wind and sea. He rebukes the wind, speaks peace to the sea, and there is a great calm. The disciples are left asking what kind of man this is, that even the wind and sea obey Him. And yet this same Jesus says the Son can do nothing of His own accord. So the issue is not whether authority is real. The issue is whether authority is flowing from union.

Psalm 103 says that the angels obey the voice of the Lord’s word.

Psalm 103:20, ESV
Bless the Lord, O you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his word,
obeying the voice of his word!

We are not commanding heaven out of our own imagination. But when the voice of the Lord is being spoken through yielded sons, creation listens. Angels listen. Storms listen. Mountains move.

Behold. Abide. Be Seated. Be Sent.

One of the most important parts of Chris’s message came from a dream in which a book was opened. The book was called something like “The Ecclesiology of the Bible,” and when it was opened, it was simply Scripture — verses and chapters.

Underneath the theme of biblical ecclesiology were four movements:

Behold. Abide. Be seated. Be sent.

That is a whole theology of the Church.

We behold Christ. We abide in Christ. We are seated with Christ. We are sent by Christ.

Paul says in Ephesians 2 that God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:4–7, ESV
⁴ But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, ⁵ even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— ⁶ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷ so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Notice the order. We are not sent because we are striving for a seat. We are sent because we have been seated. We do not move toward union. We move from union. We do not act to prove authority. We act from the place of abiding.

Any ecclesiology that begins with being sent but skips beholding will become activism. Any ecclesiology that talks about authority but skips abiding will become presumption. Any ecclesiology that talks about priesthood but skips compassion will become accusation. Any ecclesiology that talks about the end of the age but skips the fullness of Christ in His body will become escape.

The biblical order matters.

Behold. Abide. Be seated. Be sent.

Priests Carry Names, Not Accusations

Chris then turned to the priestly heart.

The high priest carried the names of the tribes of Israel on his shoulders and over his heart. In Exodus 28, the Lord commands that the names of the sons of Israel be engraved on two onyx stones, six names on one stone and six names on the other. Aaron was to bear their names before the Lord on his shoulders for remembrance. Then the names of the sons of Israel were also placed on the breastpiece over Aaron’s heart when he went into the Holy Place.

He did not enter the holy place carrying a list of accusations. He carried names. He carried them on his shoulders because the priest is a burden bearer, and he carried them on his heart because priesthood is not detached.

This is so important right now. It is easy to see sin. It is easy to expose failure. It is easy to identify what is wrong with another person, leader, movement, or part of the body of Christ. But priesthood asks a deeper question. Who was this person created to be? What name did God speak over them? What calling is buried beneath the ashes? What restoration is heaven after?

Zechariah 3 gives us a picture of this. Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan is standing at his right hand to accuse him. Joshua is clothed with filthy garments. The accusation has evidence. But heaven’s answer is restoration. The Lord commands that the filthy garments be removed and that Joshua be clothed with pure vestments.

The accusation was not necessarily false. Joshua’s garments were filthy. But heaven’s answer was restoration.

If our discernment has no restoration in it, it is not priestly. If we bring accusation without carrying the person on our heart, we are not functioning in the spirit of Christ.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that even if he speaks in the tongues of men and angels, but does not have love, he is only noise. We can be right and still be wrong. We can identify sin and still fail to carry the heart of Christ.

Jesus saw Peter’s denial before Peter committed it, and He prayed for him. In Luke 22, Jesus tells Peter that Satan demanded to have him, but He prayed that Peter’s faith would not fail. That is priesthood. Jesus saw what was coming. He carried Peter. He prayed for him. And He still saw his calling.

Kings and Priests for the Sake of the World

Revelation says that Jesus made us a kingdom and priests to His God and Father. The Church is not merely a gathered audience. We are kings and priests.

Priests carry the heart of God toward people. Kings carry the authority of God into creation. But the two must never be separated. Priestly compassion without kingly authority can become sorrow without movement, and kingly authority without priestly compassion can become domination.

In Christ, the two are one. He is the King-Priest, and we are being conformed to Him.

That is why this matters for regions, cities, fires, storms, families, leaders, and nations. If creation is groaning for the revealing of the sons of God, then the Church cannot keep outsourcing responsibility to heaven while denying the very authority Christ has entrusted to His body.

But neither can we rush into declarations without listening. The issue is not performance. The issue is participation. What is the Lord saying? Where is faith rising? What is the invitation? What are we doing together with Him?

The Fires and the Invitation

This became very practical as we talked about the fires that have been ravaging our region.

First, we want to thank those of you who have been praying with us from across the nation and the nations. We put out a request for prayer, and we have truly felt your agreement. There is something powerful about the body of Christ responding together — not only those in the room, but those joining their faith from afar.

As we gathered Sunday, the question was not merely, “Can we pray for God to help?” Of course we can, and we do. The deeper question was whether the Lord was inviting us to take responsibility with Him for our region.

Not in pride. Not in presumption. Not as though we command weather from our own will. But as sons who are learning to hear the Father and move in agreement with His heart.

Sarah, one of our young adult pastors, shared from a very personal place. Tyler, who serves alongside her in our young adult ministry, is also a wildland firefighter and is currently out with his crew responding to the fires. He explained that a typical Colorado summer downpour could actually make things worse. It could bring lightning, wind, and flash flooding over burned areas. What would truly help is something more like a northwestern heavy mist: saturated air, overcast skies, no wind, no lightning.

That detail matters because mature intercession is not careless. It listens. It learns. It loves. It asks what mercy actually looks like in the situation, and then it agrees with God.

So we are continuing to pray for the mercy of God to settle over the land like heavy mist — saturating the air, calming the winds, protecting the firefighters, covering the families, and bringing relief without destruction. We are not praying from panic. We are praying from participation. We are asking the Lord what He is doing, and we are saying yes with Him.

Could It Be God Is Waiting for Us?

I shared a story in response about a time years ago when Joel Wong spoke at our church in Florida after a devastating tsunami in Singapore and Indonesia. He told of being on a panel where people were asking the agonizing question: How could a loving God allow such tragedy?

As he prayed for an answer, he sensed the Lord say, “You need to take responsibility.”

Not because God was unloving, but because the Church had not yet learned how to take responsibility for nations, regions, cities, and creation. That thought stayed with me.

Shortly after, while leading a prayer room in Houston before a large evangelistic event, we faced a weather crisis. The stadium was open-air. The sky was black. Everything in the natural said the event was in danger. But in prayer, the Lord brought that message back to mind.

Was creation groaning? Was God inviting us to take responsibility with Him? Was this not merely about getting a result for the upcoming event, but about understanding something God was forming in His people?

The room erupted in faith. And as we prayed, the sky opened over the stadium. Light broke through and the evangelistic call to the city continued unhindered.

It marked me because the question was no longer simply, “Are we waiting on God?” The question became: Could it be that God is waiting on us to understand who He is in us? Could it be that He is waiting for a people to believe rightly about Him and rightly about themselves?

The biblical vision is neither self-hatred nor self-exaltation. We are not worms with no authority, and we are not gods with no need to listen. We are sons, the body of Christ, and co-laborers who can do nothing apart from Him, yet are invited to participate in what He is doing.

The Overcoming Church

The New Testament vision is not passive.

Paul says in Romans 16 that the God of peace will soon crush Satan under the feet of the saints. Revelation 12 says the saints overcome the accuser by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony, and because they loved not their lives even unto death.

And to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, Jesus repeatedly speaks to the one who conquers. To the one who conquers, He promises white garments. To the one who conquers, He promises authority. To the one who conquers, He promises the morning star. To the one who conquers, He promises the right to sit with Him on His throne.

This is not a picture of a powerless Church. It is a picture of an overcoming people. But overcoming in Revelation does not look like domination. It looks like faithfulness, witness, blood-bought victory, love that does not cling to self-preservation, and union with the Lamb. The Lamb overcomes by laying down His life, and the people of the Lamb overcome by participating in His life.

The Unshakable Kingdom

Hebrews says that everything shakable will be shaken so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Then it says we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Hebrews 12:26–28, ESV
²⁶ At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” ²⁷ This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. ²⁸ Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,

Everything shakable will be shaken. But Hebrews tells us that we are receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken. This means our confidence cannot rest in circumstances remaining calm. Our confidence rests in Christ becoming visible in His people in the midst of the shaking.

Darkness covering the earth is not the final word. Isaiah has already told us that the glory of the Lord will rise upon His people. Creation groaning is not the final word. Romans 8 has already told us that creation is groaning in hope, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. And the authority of Jesus is not in question. Matthew 28 has already settled that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Him.

The invitation before us now is to live as His body in surrendered union with that authority — to hear His voice, carry His heart, and move with Him in the earth.

This Is the Invitation

This is not a small theological adjustment. It is a change of posture.

We are not merely recipients of the Good News. We are co-laborers with Christ. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3 that we are God’s fellow workers, and in 2 Corinthians 6 he speaks of working together with Him, appealing to the Church not to receive the grace of God in vain.

We are not working for union. We are working from union. We are not trying to become the body of Christ. We are His body. We are not trying to earn a seat. We have been seated with Him. We are not trying to manufacture authority. We are learning to hear the Father. We are not trying to perform faith. We are responding to His invitation.

Behold. Abide. Be seated. Be sent.

That is the lens. That is the ecclesiology. And that is the war.

Will the Church see herself rightly? Will we believe rightly about Christ? Will we believe rightly about who we are in Him? Will we carry names instead of accusations? Will we take responsibility for our region without presumption? Will we listen, obey, and move together? Will we say yes?

Creation is groaning. The Spirit is inviting. The Son is seated. The body is being awakened.

And the invitation is open.

We are saying yes.

To sit with the full message, you can rewatch Chris’s teaching here:

This Week’s Practice

This week, take time to sit with Romans 8:18–25 and Matthew 28:18–20.

Read them slowly, not as distant theological ideas, but as an invitation. Creation is groaning. Jesus has all authority. And we have been joined to Him as His body in the earth.

As you pray, ask the Lord:

Where have I been waiting for You to do something You are inviting me to participate in?

What does it look like for me to take responsibility with You — not in striving, pride, or presumption, but in surrendered union?

Then take one area of real burden — your family, your neighborhood, our region, the fires, the Church, or someone you have been carrying — and bring it before the Lord as a priest. Do not begin with accusation or fear. Begin by asking Him what He sees, what He is saying, and what mercy looks like.

Listen until faith rises.

Then pray from that place.

Behold. Abide. Be seated. Be sent.

Help Us Carry This Further

If this word is stirring something in you, would you help us carry it further?

Restack this post, leave a comment, and share it with someone who is hungry for a fuller vision of the Church — not as a passive audience, but as the body of Christ in the earth.

Your comments matter. They help us know what the Lord is highlighting in you, and they help others enter the conversation. We really do believe each one carries a piece.

And this is not just a one-week conversation for us.

This is part of the ground we are laying for what is coming through Company 318. We are beginning to build toward a school of union, priesthood, maturity, and biblical authority — a place where we can slow down, open the Scriptures together, and be formed in the reality of what it means to behold, abide, be seated, and be sent.

More is coming soon.

For now, we are listening, gathering, and saying yes.

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