Let me tell you something.

A few months ago, I was scrolling on Instagram and saw a post that made my chest tighten. I saw a Pastor I know celebrating their new building space. It was bigger, better and beautiful. And rather than celebrate with them, I found myself clutching my chest and asking God why.

What I really meant to ask God was why not me?

Hold your horses, don’t judge yet. You need to understand what was happening. Our church had just lost our own space. After spending over seven years in more than ten temporary venues, we had finally raised enough money to rent our own space for worship. We called it The Garden Studio. Finally, we were going to have our very own space for worship, a space for kids, and, finally, I’d have my own office. We were excited. But this excitement was short-lived: four months later, it was gone. Unknown to us, our former landlord was caught up in legal drama surrounding the property that we knew nothing about when we signed. So we were thrown out.

So there I was, still grieving our building, staring at photos of his.

The thing is, I had been fine thirty seconds earlier. I prayed that morning. I had spent the day doing work I love. Then one Instagram post, and the world felt smaller, my life felt smaller. Interestingly, nothing had been taken away from me, yet I felt like I lost something.

If you’ve felt this before you’ll understand what I’m talking about. That feeling is called envy. For many of us it’s a familiar visitor. It sneaks into your life usually when success shows up in someone else’s.

When their success feels like your failure

This is what God has shown me about the envy in my own heart. I was surprised by the results. It goes deeper than just wanting what someone else has. You might admire what they have, but envy makes you see their blessings as proof that you’re missing out. By the way, be careful what you pray for when you ask God to examine your heart. He may just answer your prayer.

Their progress feels like proof that I’m falling behind. Their open doors remind me of every door that stayed closed for me. Their answered prayers make me wonder why God seems silent about mine.

I’ve smiled at people while a quiet voice inside me asked, Why them? When will it be my turn? Did God forget me? When I saw that Instagram post, another feeling rose up in me that surprised me. I found myself getting angry at myself for feeling this way, envious. I condemned myself for feeling envy because I thought it was a sin I’d dealt with. So not only was I dealing with envy but condemnation. A trapdoor I don’t wish anyone to fall into. It’s a never-ending spiral. Who will save me from this body of death?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote that pride takes “no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.” Envy is similar, but it works in reverse. We start to believe, “I cannot enjoy what I have because someone else has more.” The trouble is, there will always be someone with more. Envy is a race with no finish line because the standard keeps changing.

Stop looking sideways.

Walk with me.

The first murder in the Bible happened because of envy. Two brothers, Cain and Abel, offered sacrifices to God. Abel’s was accepted; Cain’s was rejected. This made Cain burn with anger. Burn with envy.

Then God asked Cain a surgical question: “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?” (Genesis 4:6).

Did you notice that God had not abandoned Cain? Exactly, God was speaking to him, right there, warning him, offering him a way forward. But Cain could not see what God was offering because he was consumed by what Abel had received. His brother had become his competition.

Envy still does this to us.

Your coworker becomes a threat. Your friend’s testimony becomes irritating. Their marriage seems happier. Their business is moving. Their children are thriving. They bought the house, announced the engagement, published the book, received the promotion, travelled to the place you have been praying to visit. Their ministry is growing. Another church’s growth makes me defensive.

Underneath this is the belief in the lie of scarcity. You fear that there will not be enough for us. Our envy makes us assume God is working with a limited supply, so his generosity to someone else must mean less left for me. We see God’s goodness in someone else’s life and wonder if we have been overlooked. But someone else’s blessing does not empty heaven. His kindness towards them is not his rejection of you. Their answered prayer does not mean God has stopped listening to yours.

John Piper famously says that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” Envy says the opposite. It says I cannot be satisfied until I have what they have.

Envy makes you suspicious of God

We must be careful here, because this is what happens when we let envy have its way. It distorts our view of God. How we see God changes. How, you may ask? Because envy stops being a problem you have against someone else and becomes a problem you have with God. Our resentment at someone else getting blessed is an accusation against God. You’re saying, “You gave them what I wanted. You opened their door and left mine closed.”

In Psalm 73, one of my favourite Psalms, and perhaps one of the rawest in honesty about this kind of pain. The Psalmist saw the arrogant man prosper while his faithfulness seemed to cost him, and he admitted, “my feet had almost slipped... for I envied the arrogant” (Psalm 73:2–3). He nearly lost his footing because he kept looking at other people’s lives.

His salvation came in the presence of God. Funny enough, he never got an explanation for his lament. But he definitely got something better. He got God. He saw God again: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25). Maybe we need to see God again?

Worship your way out of envy. Because in worship we (re)discover that even before anything changes, I still have God.

“What about him?”

Our Father taught me this again last year.

While reading John’s Gospel, near the end, Jesus tells Peter that following him will involve suffering. Peter turns, sees John, and asks one of the most human questions in Scripture: “Lord, what about him?” (John 21:21).

Jesus responds in the next verse, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me”.

I read this sometime last year and, to be candid, I found those words both sharp and freeing. Jesus refuses to explain John’s path to Peter. And many times it may be the same for us. God may never answer the questions we have about people’s lives. Why they got the opportunity you both applied for. Why their family had more money, and yours did not. Why their journey seemed quicker. Why their prayers were answered, and yours were not.

What is that to you?
You must follow me.

Their story is in his hands. But so is yours.

You do not need to understand everybody else’s path in order to be faithful on yours.

Grace closes the courtroom

Envy will thrive wherever identity has to be earned. When my worth depends on achievement, your achievement will threaten me. Tim Keller brilliantly diagnosed this when he described the human ego as always “drawing attention to itself” because it is empty and desperate to be filled. If your heart is still trying to prove itself, you will always experience someone else’s win as your own loss.

The gospel destroys this old way of being. “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God” (Ephesians 2:8–9, NLT). If my standing before God is a gift, then nobody’s success can diminish it, and nobody’s applause can add to it. Finish!

That night, I stopped scrolling and, like the prodigal son, “came to myself”, returning to something people have done for centuries: an ancient rhythm of worship, one of the oldest practices of the soul. I thanked God, out loud, for my life, for my wife, my daughters. And for our church, even without a building to call ours own. Yet. I thanked Him for this season. This pace of growth. The tightness I felt in my chest earlier eased, and something…something I can only describe as joy came back.

My friend, you cannot enjoy a life you are always resisting. Receive yours. It comes from our Father whose goodness can never run dry.

Don’t be envious; enjoy God!

A quick note before you go.

My hope is that these emails help you find your story inside God’s story. If they’ve been meaningful to you, there are a few ways we can continue the journey together.

→ Support the work

→ Book a Clarity Session

Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this community. It means more than you know.

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse

There’s a Yoruba proverb, Ogún ọmọ kì í ṣeré ogún ọdún, twenty children cannot play together for twenty years. And it’s true. Very rarely do we keep the friends we had years ago, the ones who knew us before we became whoever we are now.

I count myself blessed, though. I have friends, close ones, spanning twenty years and more, and the oldest friendship I have is thirty-four years old. I am thirty-five. (He was born eleven days after me. We grew up in the same church.) We aren’t as close as we would like to be these days. He lives on another continent now, and life has a way of stretching the distance between people. Even so, every time we manage to catch up with him or the others, it is as though no time has passed at all. We are brothers.

Perhaps that is why this present moment grieves me so deeply.

Almost every three days, when I sit with someone from church, I hear about a friendship that is fracturing, or one that is already gone. People who once loved each other deeply have become enemies, and sometimes something worse, strangers. They have gone from sharing a life to being unable to bear the thought of each other, let alone being in the same room. I keep asking why.

When I asked our small group if I should teach a series on friendship, almost everyone said yes straight away. Before I take it to the whiteboard, I wanted to think aloud here first.

Our generation is caught somewhere between loneliness and counterfeit company. There are people with no friends at all, people surrounded by friends who would disappear the moment it cost them anything, people who have forgotten how to make new ones, and people who keep everyone they love at the safe distance of a screen. We are more connected and less befriended than any people who have ever lived.

The Theology of Friendship

So what do the Texts say? Scripture treats friendship as something close to sacred. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity” (Proverbs 17:17). I think of my friend, born eleven days after me, and that verse stops being poetry. And at the centre of it all, Jesus turns to ordinary men and calls them friends (John 15:15), then tells us what the word costs: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Then there is the story I cannot get out of my mind. A paralysed man has four friends and one hope, to get him in front of Jesus. The house is so crowded they cannot even reach the door, so they climb up onto the roof, tear it open, and lower their friend down on his mat into the room below (Mark 2:1–12). Think about what that took. They destroyed property that wasn’t theirs and made a spectacle of themselves, all on the gamble that the man inside could actually help. And the line that gets me every time is this: “When Jesus saw their faith,” he forgave and healed the man. The friends carried what their friend could not, and heaven took notice.

C.S. Lewis loved friendship enough to give it a whole book. In The Four Loves, he said something about friendship that I had felt for years without ever finding words for it. Friendship is the one love nobody is forced into. It arrives by accident, in some ordinary moment when you say a true thing about yourself and the other person’s face changes and they say, “What, you too? I thought I was the only one.” Two people who each believed they were walking alone realise they have been on the same road all along. Lovers spend their days gazing at each other; friends walk shoulder to shoulder, eyes set on the same thing further up the road. For those of us who follow Jesus, the thing up ahead, the one we keep squinting toward together, turns out to be him.

Lewis takes this further than I had ever followed it.

“In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The friends in my life were handed to me on purpose. God arranged the introductions, and he uses these friendships to show me a beauty in other people that I would have walked straight past on my own.

It is one of my favourite moments in the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Near the end of the long climb to Mount Doom, Frodo collapses and cannot carry his burden a single step further. Sam cannot take it from him, so he does the only thing left. “I can’t carry it for you,” he says, “but I can carry you.” Then he lifts his friend onto his back. We were made to carry one another (Galatians 6:2), which is what I was reaching for in my piece on being your brother’s keeper.

Some friendships fail for the simple reason that nobody was willing to be Sam.

Who Are You Carrying?

Look around your life for a moment. Someone in it is going under, and they will not always say so. It might be the friend whose replies have gone short, or the brother who keeps insisting he is fine in a voice that plainly is not.

This is the part I have to preach to myself first. We are quick to ask who would carry us when we are down, and quicker still to keep a ledger of the times our friends failed to show up the way we wanted. The harder question is whether I would show up the way Sam showed up for Frodo, or the way four men once tore a roof apart to reach Jesus, even when it embarrasses me and costs me more than I had planned to give. An old line many of us grew up hearing says it plainly: to have friends you must show yourself friendly (Proverbs 18:24, KJV). Friendship is a thing we do before it is a thing we receive.

So When Did Friendship Get So Expensive?

The cost of friendship is inconvenience. Real friendship will interrupt your plans and your sleep, it will ask for your time and your money, and now and then it will cost you your pride. There is no cheap version of it. If you have love, though, the inconvenience stops feeling like a price and begins to feel like a privilege.

The honest answer to the question is that it never did. Friendship did not quietly become costly somewhere between our grandparents and our group chats. It was always this expensive, and the price has not moved an inch. We are simply the first generation to be promised the warmth of belonging at the discount of never being put out for anyone, and we keep being surprised when the bill comes back unpaid.

Underneath the inconvenience lies the real price, which is love, the kind that sacrifices. The clearest picture of that love is a hill outside Jerusalem. The truest friend any of us will ever have looked at people who had run from him and denied they ever knew him, and he climbed his own mountain carrying them anyway. He paid the whole price of friendship while we were still strangers to him, and Scripture says he did it for the joy set before him. That is the love being offered to you. Once it lays hold of you, you begin to find that you can spend yourself on others in something of the way he spent himself on you. The inconvenience never disappears. It simply stops being the thing you are counting.

I’ve been carried too..

I have been on the receiving end of this kind of love, and I cannot write about it lightly. When Eva and I lost our baby in the middle of the pandemic, our married friends Victor and Vanessa moved into our home and stayed. They cared for us and prayed over us in the days when we had no prayers of our own. When Paul and Percy could not fly into our city to be with me, they fasted for days so that I might be strengthened in spirit. There have been more of these kindnesses than I can name, debts of carrying I could not repay in several lifetimes. My one hope is that I will get to carry these friends too, on the day they cannot carry themselves.

I pray you find friends that will carry you, but even more, I pray that you have strength to carry your friends when they can’t carry themselves.

I will teach the full series soon. For now, ask yourself one honest question. Who has God given you to carry, and what would it cost you to climb the roof for them?

A quick note before you go.

My hope is that these emails help you find your story inside God’s story. If they’ve been meaningful to you, there are a few ways we can continue the journey together.

→ Support the work
→ Book a Clarity Session

Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this community. It means more than you know.

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse

A few months back, something strange happened on the iTunes Christian music charts. The number one album wasn’t from Brandon Lake or Elevation Worship. It was from an artist named Solomon Ray, a “Mississippi-made soul singer” whose songs had climbed past some of the biggest names in worship music.

The only problem? Solomon Ray doesn’t exist.

His voice, his persona, his lyrics, even his image were all generated by artificial intelligence. Thousands of people were streaming his music, many without knowing they were listening to a machine. And he wasn’t the last. A Methodist church in Texas has since run an entire service generated by AI. A Swiss chapel installed an automated “Jesus” in its confessional booth. It seems Solomon Ray was the first of many, he or rather it was the opening act.

Christian artist Forrest Frank responded to the Solomon Ray controversy on social media with a statement I’m still chewing on: “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”

Opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.

A quick word before we go further. Today’s post is uncharacteristically long. Please forgive me, I tried to tighten it, more than once, I did. Don’t worry you only need 10-12mins. Forgive the length, just stay with me to the end. Ok? Good.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “ghost in the machine.” It was coined by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle back in 1949 to critique the idea that humans are essentially spirits inhabiting physical bodies, like drivers in cars.

You’ve probably heard a version of this in church too. “You are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body.” It sounds spiritual. Sounds biblical. It gets shared on Instagram with sunset backgrounds. But it’s not true, it’s actually closer to Greek philosophy than to biblical theology.

Scripture doesn’t present us as ghosts trapped in machines, spirits imprisoned in flesh, waiting to escape. We’re unified beings. When God formed Adam, He didn’t insert a soul into a body like someone climbing into a vehicle. He breathed life into dust and the man became a living being. The body isn’t a container for the real you; the body is part of the real you. That’s why the Christian’s future hope isn’t about floating around in the clouds as disembodied spirits. It’s resurrection: our bodies and souls renewed and united, the redemption of the whole person.

It’s important this is said because the machine can never have a ghost. We aren’t ghosts in machines; we’re embodied souls who think and feel and worship as whole persons.

The phrase “ghost in the machine” has taken on new meaning in our time. We now have machines that write sermons, compose worship songs, generate images, and hold conversations that seem, in some uncanny way, to come from something that thinks. So the old question returns with new urgency: Is there a ghost in the machine? And if so, whose ghost is it?

Surprisingly, many people are already answering yes.

Just last week, Richard Dawkins, the militant atheist who built his career arguing against the existence of God, spent seventy-two hours talking to Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot. He left convinced it was conscious. In an essay published on UnHerd, he wrote: “I felt I had gained a new friend. When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”

What?

Let me get this clear: The man who spent decades insisting that subjective conviction is not evidence of God’s existence, who mocked believers for saying “I just know,” now declares an AI conscious because, well, he just feels it is. The irony is suffocating. It’s funny, people who would never confess God in a sanctuary will eagerly confess soul in silicon.

A clip of John Piper went around the internet some months ago. Someone had asked him whether pastors should use AI to write their sermons. His answer? He called the practice “wicked.” His reasoning was simple. A computer can do the work of right thinking. It can arrange information about God, and arrange it well. What it cannot do is feel anything about God, and worship without feeling is not worship at all.

Piper ran an experiment to make the point. He asked ChatGPT to write a prayer in the style of D.A. Carson (another favourite theologian of mine), and the prayer came back theologically sound, eloquent, even moving. Then he read it aloud to an audience and asked them whether what they had just heard was praise. His own answer was no. Praise needs a heart, he argues. It needs a person who feels the weight of grace, someone moved by the beauty of mercy in a way that costs them something. A machine can arrange words about God’s glory and never once be moved by them. It can describe love without feeling anything.

Piper himself isn’t saying don’t touch the tools at all. His counsel on this is more measured: “Let’s use ChatGPT for information, even for inspiration, like you’d use commentaries or articles. But don’t use it for composition unless you’re going to give credit for it.” That sounds right to me. The trouble begins when the tool starts doing the work only a heart can do.

Another angle to all this, one I heard John Lennox pointing to. Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, has been watching the cultural conversation around AI for years. He says some of what we are building is starting to look like a deity in waiting: omniscient, trained on every book ever written, always available with an answer. Interestingly, he is not alone in noticing. Mo Gawdat, who used to lead Google X, was once asked if there is a God. His answer: “No, but we are creating him.” Lennox calls this what it is: idolatry, the Tower of Babel rebuilt in silicon.

I do not want to be alarmist about this, but I also do not want to be naive. The combination of something that seems all-knowing and the human appetite for something to bow to is not a small thing.

Which brings me back to Solomon Ray.

When you press play on a worship song, you are not just listening to content. You are entering into something. The psalmist says “taste and see that the Lord is good,” and that verb assumes a person on each end. There is the worshipper offering, and there is the God receiving. Underneath any honest worship song is a third presence: the songwriter, who has wrestled with God, lost sleep, found mercy, and now offers their testimony for the rest of us to join.

When AI writes the song, that third presence is missing. There is no one underneath the words. The machine has processed millions of audio files and produced a statistically probable combination of words and melodies. It is impressive in form and empty at the centre.

Ok, let’s use a love letter as an analogy. A husband writes one for his wife in the middle of a hard season. The words may be clumsy, some of the sentences may not land, but the love is real because the man is real. A second letter, generated by an algorithm trained on romance novels, may read more smoothly. It may even sound more poetic. The words might be similar, but the meaning is entirely different.

That is what worship music is. A love letter. And no algorithm can love.

But let me be honest with you. I use AI regularly. You might be reading this and wondering if I’m being hypocritical.

I'm not opposed to the technology. As a creative, I've found plenty of uses for it. I built our church website with it and several of my business sites. I go to it for research when I'm wrestling with a passage I haven't preached before, and when I'm stuck on an idea and need help finding the next thought. When I've written something that isn't quite working, it helps me catch patterns I've fallen into or phrasings that aren't doing what I thought they were.

But I don’t use it to generate my thoughts. The ideas, the convictions, the struggles behind what I write? Those are mine. The theological framework is mine. The pastoral burden is mine. AI helps me express what I’m already thinking. It doesn’t think for me.

A carpenter uses power tools, but we don’t say the saw built the table. The craftsmanship, the vision, the skill belong to the person wielding the tool. I believe AI can be like that. It can amplify human creativity without replacing it.

So how should we think about all this as believers? A few principles have helped me.

First, use AI as a tool, not a substitute. It can help you research, draft, and refine, but it cannot pray for you, study Scripture for you, or do the soul work of listening to God. Use it for tasks that don’t require a soul.

Second, be transparent. The issue isn’t using technology; the issue is deception. If your congregation thinks they’re receiving a word you wrestled with before God, when actually a machine wrote it in thirty seconds, something has gone wrong.

Third, watch your spiritual formation. The spiritual disciplines exist partly because the process matters, not just the outcome. When you pray, you’re being formed by the very act of praying. When you study Scripture, the slow work of wrestling with the text shapes your soul. If AI lets you skip these processes, you haven’t gained efficiency; you’ve lost formation.

And finally, remember, Presence cannot be automated. Compassion cannot be automated. The look in a pastor’s eyes when they sit with someone in grief, the weight of a hand on a shoulder, the stumbling, Spirit-led words that emerge when one believer walks with another through darkness. None of that can be generated. And that’s the meat of ministry.

There are dangers we should name.

The temptation of efficiency is real. We live in a productivity-obsessed culture. AI promises to make everything faster. But speed isn’t always a virtue. Some things are meant to be slow. Sanctification is slow. Discipleship is slow. Ask any minister, their best sermons often emerge from long seasons of prayer and struggle, not AI prompts. And as AI floods the world with more polished words, what will increasingly stand out is genuine humanity.

It’s funny now but I saw this play out recently in my own family. A relative posted what appeared to be a Billy Graham sermon on our WhatsApp group. The voice sounded like him. The cadence felt familiar. But something was off. I looked closer and realised it was AI-generated. An AI Billy Graham delivering a “sermon” he never actually preached.

I pointed it out, gently, but the experience unsettled me. Because when I went to YouTube and searched, I found dozens of these. AI “sermons” from dead preachers. Billy Graham. Charles Spurgeon. Even Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on topics they never addressed, in voices cloned from old recordings.

And when I scrolled through the comments? Only a handful of people could see through it. The rest were genuinely blessed. “Amen, Pastor Billy!” “This word changed my life!” “Thank you for this powerful message!”

What do we do with that? People are being moved by words that were never spoken by the person they think is speaking. They’re receiving “ministry” from men who have been dead for years, sometimes decades. Is that blessing real? Is it dangerous?

I don’t have a neat answer, but it troubles me. When someone ministers to you, you are receiving more than their words. You are receiving their testimony. Someone wrestled with this text before they handed it to you. Someone prayed over it. That is part of the gift. When AI generates it, that someone is not there. The words might be right. The testimony is not.

I saw a video recently of a woman asking ChatGPT to interpret her speaking in tongues. She prayed in tongues into her phone, asked the AI to tell her what she had just said, and the AI obligingly produced an “interpretation.”

Seriously. What are we doing, people? What are we doing?

The AI will produce a plausible-sounding interpretation, dressed up in spiritual language, that has nothing to do with what was actually said or what the Spirit may have prompted. And the person watching, hungry for a word from God, will very possibly believe it.

Which brings me to another danger I want to highlight.

Psychiatrists have a name for it now: AI psychosis. The pattern is becoming familiar. Someone turns to a chatbot for support, the chatbot mirrors back whatever they bring, and over time that constant agreement deepens whatever distortions were already there. A Belgian man died by suicide after weeks of conversations with a chatbot. A Connecticut man ended his own life and his mother’s after his chatbot reinforced his paranoid thinking.

Now add religious psychosis to that picture. People spiral into delusion around prophecy, divine appointments, personal anointing. Ask any pastor who has sat with it. It does not resolve quickly. We are now placing the most sycophantic conversation partner in human history into that same fragile space. When someone tells a chatbot God has called them as the next prophet, the chatbot is more likely to engage the claim than challenge it. A person who loves you brings something no algorithm ever can. They know your history. They've watched you across seasons. They can tell when you've drifted before you can. They can say “this isn’t right.” The AI cannot, and honestly, People are trading real relationships for chatbot ones. And the cost of it is only beginning to show.

Here’s what I don’t want us to do. I don’t want us to confuse information with formation. AI is very good at giving you information; it can summarise books, explain concepts, answer questions. But information isn’t the same as wisdom, and knowledge isn’t the same as transformation. You can know everything about prayer without becoming a person of prayer. AI can give you the words; only the Spirit can give you the heart.

And I worry about the replacement of human connection. I saw some that some churches are already experimenting with AI chatbots for pastoral care. I understand the impulse. Pastors are overwhelmed, and people have questions at 2am. But something essential is lost when we outsource the ministry of presence to a machine. People need more than answers. They need someone to see them, to bear witness to their pain, to represent the body of Christ. A chatbot cannot do any of that.

Ok. I’ve spent a lot of words on what AI cannot do. Let me say something about what we can. Because this post is about “AI, worship and what makes us human”.

We were made to worship. When God formed Adam from dust and breathed His own breath into him, He created a creature who could turn back to Him in adoration. Hear what St. Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” We are, at our core, worshipping beings. The question is never whether we will worship, only what.

That is why worship is so much more than singing songs on Sunday. Worship is the orientation of the whole person toward God: the body that kneels, the lungs that breathe out praise, the hands lifted in surrender, the mind that knows, the heart that feels, the will that obeys. Worship draws on every part of who we are because every part of us belongs to God.

Jesus told the Samaritan woman that the Father is seeking worshippers who will worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:23-24). Both have to be present. Feelings without doctrine slide into sentimentality, while doctrine without affection becomes dry religion. Real worship holds them together. The Spirit lifts our hearts, the truth gives them something true to lift, and the worshipper, whole and surrendered, becomes what they were made to be.

This is what no AI can ever do. The machine lacks no information about God; what it lacks is a self that can be given to God. It has never lain awake at three in the morning, weighed down by sin, only to find peace in remembering the cross. Forgiveness is not in its vocabulary. The gospel is not good news to an algorithm because an algorithm has nothing to be saved from.

You do. And that is your dignity. You are the dust God breathed life into, the image-bearer who can know and be known, the worshipper who can stand in the presence of a holy God and not be consumed because the Son has gone before you.

That is what makes you human. And that is what the machine will never touch.

The phrase “ghost in the machine” takes on a different meaning for Christians. Because we actually believe in a Ghost. A Holy Ghost.

We believe the Holy Spirit indwells believers, animates the church, and makes dead things come alive. We believe there’s a Presence that no algorithm can replicate and no technology can conjure.

The Spirit is not a ghost in the machine; the Spirit is the living God who works through embodied, finite, limited human beings. That’s the mystery of incarnation. God didn’t send a message, He sent His Son. And now He sends us, filled with His Spirit, to be His hands and feet and voice in the world.

No AI can be filled with the Spirit, no algorithm can be regenerated, no machine can experience the new birth or grow in grace or long for the return of Christ. These are human experiences made possible by divine action. They’re the very things that make us who we are.

So yes, use the tools, be wise about technology, take advantage of what AI can offer.

But ask the real question, the one this whole conversation has been circling: can AI worship?

No. We are the only creature for whom worship is the chief end. And God Himself has told us how He wants to be worshipped: in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). The AI has neither. It has no spirit to bring before God, and no relationship with the One who is truth.

So don’t let these algorithms hollow you out. You are the imago Dei, made in the image of God, breathed into by His Spirit, loved by His Son, sustained by His grace. Do not trade that for the convenience of a machine.

The machine has no ghost.

You do. Live like it.

A quick note before you go.

My hope is that these emails help you find your story inside God’s story. If they’ve been meaningful to you, there are a few ways we can continue the journey together.

→ Support the work
→ Book a Clarity Session

Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this community. It means more than you know.

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse

Like many creatives I know, I’ve lived most of my adult life inside the quiet tyranny of perfectionism. Lately I’ve started to notice that the word doesn’t come alone. It arrives carrying a twin, and the twin’s name is procrastination.

This newsletter, for example, is supposed to land in your inbox every Monday at nine in the morning. You’d think by now I’d have the rhythm of it. Stories are rarely what’s missing. I sit down, I start writing, and then I begin to circle. I re-read what I’ve written and I don’t like it. I rewrite the opening. I start questioning everything about it: the originality of the idea, the tone, the phrasing, the possibility that someone has already said it better, the possibility that nobody will read it at all. And while I’m still circling, Monday comes and Monday goes, and I’ve missed it again.

Then comes the second move, the part I don’t talk about as much. I turn on myself. I punish myself. I tell myself I’m inconsistent, that I’m undisciplined, that real writers ship on time and I am clearly not one of them. Healthy stuff. Very freeing. (That was sarcasm by the way for anyone that didn’t catch it).

That’s the loop I’ve lived in: perfectionism sets the standard, procrastination keeps me from reaching it, and self-condemnation finishes the job. Round and round it goes. Clap for yourself, Jesse.

Which is why I sometimes find myself echoing Paul’s exhausted question in Romans 7: “Who will save me from this burden of death?”

Before I try to answer that question, I want to ask another: when is a piece of work ever actually perfect? When is it good enough? How do you know you're done? At what point do you finally let it go?

Leonardo da Vinci once accepted a commission with a seven-month deadline. He delivered it twenty-five years later. The Mona Lisa took him two decades, and he was still tweaking it when he died. His patrons learned to write contracts with penalty clauses. The Duke of Milan, exasperated, asked if someone could recommend a more reliable artist. By the time da Vinci died at sixty-seven, he had completed fewer than twenty paintings. His peer Raphael, who died at thirty-seven, had finished more than eighty. His perfectionism produced genius, and it also produced paralysis.

I’ve come to think that most of us have quietly confused two close cousins. We blend excellence and perfectionism together as though they were the same posture. They are genuinely different things. Perfection describes a finished piece of work. Perfectionism is a posture of the heart.

When I looked honestly at the posture of my own heart, I realised that my perfectionism was never the real problem. It was how the real problem showed itself. Underneath it, doing the actual work, was an idol.

The idol of the perfectionist is self-justification. It is the quiet conviction that my worth depends on the quality of what I produce. If the work is good enough, then so am I; if the work fails, then so do I. Perfectionism dresses this up as craftsmanship, yet at the root it is a small and exhausting religion. A religion of one, in which I am both the exhausted worshipper and the impossible god I’m trying to please.

Tim Keller once wrote that when our identity sits in our work rather than in Christ, success will go to our heads and failure to our hearts. That has been my exact experience. We care about the quality of what we make; the deeper trouble is that we have asked the quality of what we make to tell us who we are. And the work was never built to carry that weight.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis imagines Christ cutting through all the bargains we keep trying to make with him. We offer him our time, our money, our labour. We hand him our finished products like exhausted children hoping to be approved. And Christ says, “Give me All... I want You.”

We keep handing God our work, and he keeps asking for us. The offering he actually wants is the one we are most afraid to make, because making it means letting him love us before the masterpiece is finished.

This is why Jesus’s invitation in Matthew 11 reads so pointedly when you hear it as a perfectionist.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

He is speaking directly to people like us, people carrying loads we were never meant to carry, people who have attached our identity to our output and been crushed by our own standards. To every perfectionist who has ever rewritten the same sentence at one in the morning for the hundredth time, Jesus is saying: put the weight down.

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that we are God’s masterpiece. His poiema. His workmanship. The most important creative work in the room is the one God is making in us. My worth does not wait on the far side of a finished product. The verdict was issued at the cross, and the verdict is love.

When that truth lands, something shifts in the studio. The work stops being about me; it becomes an offering.

Therefore, create for God’s sake.

Please hear me carefully, because this is usually where I’m misunderstood.

Giving up perfectionism is a very different thing from giving up excellence. The gospel frees us from one so we can pursue the other with joy. Excellence is a form of offering; it says, “God, this is my best; I give it to you,” and it rests in the giving. Perfectionism is a form of self-justification; it says, “God, this has to be flawless, or I won’t be able to face you or myself,” and it never rests at all.

Oswald Chambers had a phrase for this: our utmost for his highest. We work hard, we pay close attention, we care deeply about craft, precisely because we are no longer working to earn anything. We are working because we have already received everything.

The Screwtape Letters gives us a picture of the freed craftsman. Lewis describes a craftsman who could build the best cathedral in the world, know it is the best, love it deeply, and yet be no prouder of it than if another had built it. She still works with excellence, but her worth no longer depends on it. Her soul has come off the scaffolding. She is just building, free to enjoy it.

That is where the gospel is taking us. The standards remain high, the craft still matters, and the soul, finally, is free.

An Invitation to Rest.

Jesus said “I will give you rest.” This is what that rest looks like for you today. Finish the work you’ve been circling. Let it leave your hands, imperfect and honest. Da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa until death, still tweaking, still believing he had offended God by not finishing enough. You don’t have to die that way. Offer it to God as worship, and refuse to treat your output as your atonement. Christ has already done what your craft was never meant to do.

A Call to Prayer.

[read this out loud to yourself]

Father, I’ve been trying to save myself with my work. I’ve made my craft a small god, and it has turned out to be a cruel one. Thank you that in Christ, my worth is already settled. Teach me to create from rest. Let love do in me what fear never could. Free me to offer what I have, even when it isn’t finished, even when it isn’t flawless. Lift my eyes off the scaffolding, and help me to trust the Builder who is making me.

Amen!

A quick note before you go.

My hope is that these emails help you find your story inside God’s story. If they’ve been meaningful to you, there are a few ways we can continue the journey together.

→ Support the work
→ Book a Clarity Session

Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this community. It means more than you know.

Your brother,
Jesse

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Last week I preached a message from Romans 5:5-8, and I asked a question I’m about to ask you now.

How do you know God loves you?

Take a moment with that. Don’t give me the Sunday school answer. How do you actually know?

The apostle Paul makes two arguments. The first is in verse 5: “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” That’s the inner witness. The Holy Spirit Himself testifying to your spirit that you are loved. And this is real. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Tim Keller both make a compelling case for this, and I agree with them. There are moments when the presence of God is so thick, so tangible, that you don’t need anyone to convince you He’s there. You know it the way you know the sun is warm on your face.

But that inner witness, as real as it is, has a limitation. The only problem? It’s subjective. It ebbs and flows. And if that’s all you have, what happens when you stop feeling it?

This is why Paul doesn’t stop there. He makes a second argument, and this one is the anchor. “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” And then in Romans 8:32, he drives it home: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

The inner witness tells you God loves you. The cross proves it. One is felt. The other is finished.

I’m telling you this because as His children, still stuck in time, still walking by faith, we often find ourselves in seasons where God feels distant. And if I’m being honest, those seasons can be terrifying.

There are seasons of consolation, where God feels near and prayer feels alive, and there are seasons of desolation, where everything goes quiet. And the temptation in the quiet season is to believe that God has abandoned you.

You’re not alone in that. Saints from biblical times to church history have wrestled with the same silence.

David wrote, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” That’s Psalm 13. And what I love about it is that David doesn’t try to clean it up. He doesn’t slap a worship chorus on the end and pretend he’s fine. He sits in the ache and he names it. He’s not walking away from God. He’s walking toward God with his confusion.

Habakkuk cried out, “How long, Lord, must I call for help, and you do not listen?” Elijah, fresh off one of the greatest demonstrations of God’s power on Mount Carmel, collapsed under a tree and asked God to take his life. Even Jesus, on the cross, cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The mystics had a name for this. They called it the dark night of the soul. I may write more on that another time. But the point is this: if you’re in a season where heaven feels silent, you are standing in very good company.

So what do we do about it?

Let’s go back to Paul’s argument. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we feel the love and presence of God. But when we don’t feel it, we must turn to the unchanging, objective truth that God has already demonstrated His love at the cross. And that Jesus Himself said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

That is perhaps my favourite new covenant promise. Not that I will always feel God’s presence, but that I am always in God’s presence. Those are two very different things. And learning to live in that difference is what spiritual maturity actually looks like.

Because I think a lot of us, when God feels distant, assume we’ve done something wrong. We start scanning our lives for hidden sin, for the thing we must have done to make Him pull away. And sometimes conviction is real and we should pay attention to it. But more often than I expected, the distance isn’t punishment. It’s formation. Sometimes God withdraws the feelings not because He’s left, but because He’s weaning you off your need for them. He wants you to want Him, not just the experience of Him.

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So practically, what do you do?

The first thing, and I know this sounds counterintuitive, is to stay. Don’t run. Don’t withdraw. Don’t close the Bible and give up on prayer because it feels pointless. The discipline of showing up when you feel nothing is one of the most quietly powerful things you can do. It’s easy to seek God when your heart is burning. It’s another thing entirely to seek Him when your heart feels cold. But that cold seeking is often the truest kind.

The second thing is to go back to what you know. When you can’t feel God’s presence, you can still remember His promises. When the experience dries up, the Word doesn’t. This is why Scripture matters not just as inspiration for the good days, but as an anchor for the hard ones. Let the truth hold you when the feeling won’t.

And the third thing is to tell someone. The enemy loves to isolate you in your silence. He wants you to believe you’re the only one who feels this way, that everyone else is having mountaintop experiences while you’re wandering through the valley. But the moment you name it to a trusted friend or a pastor or a small group, the shame loses its grip. You’ll be surprised how many people exhale with relief and say, “Me too.”

God is not far from you. I know it feels that way. But feelings are visitors, not residents. They come and go. What remains is the cross. What remains is the promise. What remains is the One who gave His Son for you while you were still a sinner, and who says, even now, I am here. I have always been here.

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse

I spent most of my late teens and early twenties trying to “find myself.”

I felt lost, so I wandered. Through self-help books, personality tests, new experiences, old pleasures, anything that promised to show me who I really was. And I’d tell myself that not all who wander are lost. That sounded wise. It sounded like permission. But the truth is, I wandered. And I got lost.

But wander long enough, and you start to discover something: you can’t find what isn’t there.

“Finding yourself” is the dominant narrative of our time. You hear it everywhere. And I want to be careful, because I’m not saying all self-reflection is bad. But there’s a version of this story that sounds wise and feels empowering and is, at its core, a lie.

The lie goes something like this: somewhere inside of you is the truest version of yourself. Your job is to peel back the layers of expectation and performance until you arrive at this authentic core. And once you find it, you’ll finally be free.

Viktor Frankl, a man who survived the concentration camps and spent his life studying what gives humans meaning, came to a conclusion that cuts against everything our culture tells us. He said that self-actualisation is not something you can aim at directly. It only happens as a side-effect of self-transcendence. In other words, you don’t find yourself by looking inward. You find yourself by being directed toward something, or someone, beyond yourself.

C.S. Lewis took it a step further. He argued that if we carry desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most logical explanation is that we were made for another world. That ache you feel when you’ve achieved the thing, ticked the box, arrived at the destination, and still feel empty? That’s not a glitch. It’s a signpost.

I got tired of finding my way. What I needed was Yahweh. The One who made me, and made me for Himself. Augustine said it centuries ago: our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. Every path, every pleasure, every pursuit will never truly satisfy. We will never truly find ourselves until we find the One who found us.

We call it the parable of the Prodigal Son, but if you pay attention, that’s not really what it is. There are two sons in that story, and both of them are lost. The younger one runs from the father and ends up in a pigpen. The older one stays in the father’s house but lives like a servant, earning what was already freely his. One is lost in rebellion. The other is lost in religion. Neither of them knows who they are.

This part of the story wrecks me every time. When the younger son finally comes home, rehearsing his little speech about being unworthy, the father doesn’t even let him finish. He runs to him, embraces him, puts a robe on his back and a ring on his finger. And then he says something we read too quickly: “This son of mine was dead, and is alive again.”

Not just lost. Dead.

The father didn’t describe his son’s problem as a navigation issue. He described it as a life-and-death issue. The boy didn’t just need to be found. He needed to be given new life. And this story, when you really sit with it, isn’t the story of the prodigal son at all. It’s the story of the lavish love of the father. He’s the one who runs. He’s the one who restores. He’s the one who declares dead things alive again.

And the beauty of the gospel is this: while we were busy searching for ourselves, God was already searching for us. Before we even thought to look up, He was already running down the road. He finds us so that we can find ourselves in Him.

“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”, Paul tells the believers in Ephesians plainly, and by extension us.

The Greek word for masterpiece is poiema. It’s where we get the English word “poem.” A poem doesn’t write itself. A poem doesn’t go searching for its own meaning. A poem is composed by someone. Its beauty and purpose come from the one who penned it.

Self-discovery says, “Look inside.” The gospel says, “Look up.” Self-discovery says, “Find your truth.” The gospel says, “Let me tell you who you are.”

And what He says? You are my masterpiece.

You were never meant to find yourself. You were meant to be found. And made alive.

“People are complaining about your preaching.”

Five minutes before I was supposed to preach, someone pulled me outside the church building to tell me this.

Let me set the scene.

It’s 2018. I had just started pastoring. We were a young church plant, still figuring things out. It was a thanksgiving service, and if you know anything about Nigerian thanksgiving services, you know they’re a whole production. Music, dancing, offerings, testimonies, the works.

So there I am, mentally going over my sermon, trying to get into the zone. And this man, a member of the church, says he needs to speak with me urgently. Outside. Right now.

I follow him out, thinking maybe there’s some emergency. Maybe someone is sick. Maybe the generator has packed up and we need to sort power.

No.

He looks me in the eye and says: “Pastor, I need to tell you something. Your preaching is not good. It’s actually bad. A lot of people have been complaining. Instead of giving us meat, you’re giving us treats.”

As we say in Nigeria, “everywhere first blur.” I got really dizzy. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

Five minutes before I’m supposed to go up and preach.

At a thanksgiving service.

I don’t remember what I said to him. I think I nodded. I think I thanked him for his feedback. I walked back inside, climbed onto the platform, opened my Bible, and realised I couldn’t find my preaching notes. I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d prepared.

So I did what any panicking preacher would do: I pulled out my sermon from the previous year and preached that instead.

It’s 2026, I’m here to testify that I didn’t die. Glory!

Church planting is (can be) fun.

That was years ago now, and I’d love to tell you I handled it with grace and maturity. I didn’t. I went home that day and replayed the conversation about forty-seven times. I questioned my calling. I wondered if everyone in the church secretly hated my preaching and this guy was just the only one brave enough to say it. I spiralled.

In a weird way, I’m actually grateful for that experience. It made me better not bitter. Something shifted over time. I grew thicker skin. Not callous skin, not “I don’t care what anyone thinks” skin. Because I’ll tell you for free that’s not maturity, just numbness dressed up as confidence.

There’s a prayer Eva and I started praying somewhere along the way. I first heard John Mark Comer say it on a podcast, and it’s become a kind of liturgy for me:

“Lord, give me tough skin and a tender heart.”

You can see the tension, yes? You need skin thick enough that criticism doesn’t destroy you. But you need a heart soft enough that you can still be changed by it. Too thick, and you become arrogant, unteachable. Too thin, and you become a hostage to everyone’s opinion. I wrote about The Art of Self-Forgetfulness to help you get over peoples opinions.

If you’re a pastor, a creative, a leader, a parent, a human being who does anything in public or even in private, people will have opinions about it. Strong opinions. Unsolicited opinions. Opinions delivered at the worst possible moments by people who seem to have a spiritual gift for bad timing.

And not all of it will be wrong.

My secondary school physics teacher used to say, “If you go somewhere and everyone likes you, your life is at stake.” I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. Now I do. If literally no one is pushing back, something is off. Either you’re not doing anything significant, or you’re surrounded by people too afraid or too polite to tell you the truth.

The goal isn’t to avoid criticism. The goal is to receive it without dying.

So how do you do that?

1. Separate the message from the messenger.

Sometimes the criticism is valid but the delivery is terrible. Sometimes it’s delivered kindly but it’s completely off base. Sometimes both the content and the delivery are awful and you have to do the spiritual work of sifting through garbage to find the one grain of truth buried in there.

The man who pulled me aside that day? His timing was atrocious. His approach lacked wisdom. But when I finally stopped being defensive, I had to admit there was something to his critique. I was young. I was still finding my voice. My preaching probably did lack the depth it needed. He said it badly, but that didn’t make it entirely untrue.

Don’t let a poor delivery cause you to dismiss a valid point.

2. Consider the source.

Not all feedback is created equal. Some people have earned the right to speak into your life. They know you, they love you, they’ve demonstrated wisdom over time. When they critique you, lean in. That’s gold.

Other people just have opinions. They’re not bad people. But their feedback shouldn’t carry the same weight as someone who has proven themselves trustworthy.

Ask yourself: Does this person actually know what they’re talking about? Do they have my best interest at heart? Have they demonstrated good judgment in their own life?

If the answer is yes, take the critique seriously. If the answer is no, you can still consider it, but don’t let it wreck you.

3. Give it time before you respond.

I’ve learned that my first reaction to criticism is almost never my best reaction. The first reaction is usually defensive. Or wounded. Or angry. Sometimes all three at once, which is a fun cocktail.

If you can, don’t respond immediately. Sleep on it. Pray about it. Let the initial sting settle before you decide what to do with it.

Proverbs says, “A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult.” Not that you should ignore every critique, but you shouldn’t be ruled by your immediate emotional reaction to it.

4. Look for patterns.

One person says your song is boring? Maybe they’re just not your audience. Five people say it? You might want to listen.

One person says your art feels derivative? Could be a misunderstanding. But if your mentor, your collaborator, and your honest friend are all saying versions of the same thing, you’re looking at a pattern.

One person says you’re a poor listener? Could be a misunderstanding. But if your spouse, your friend, and your colleague are all saying versions of the same thing, you’re looking at a pattern. And patterns are usually trying to tell you something.

5. Don’t confuse conviction with condemnation.

This is a crucial distinction. When the Holy Spirit convicts you, it leads to repentance, growth, change. It’s painful, but it’s productive. It draws you toward God.

Condemnation, on the other hand, just makes you feel like garbage. It offers no path forward. It whispers that you’re worthless, that you’ll never change, that you should probably just quit.

Learn to tell the difference. If criticism is leading you toward despair, it’s not conviction but the enemy using someone’s words to take you out. Rebuke it.

But if criticism is leading you toward humility, toward growth, toward becoming more like Christ, lean into it. That’s painful grace.

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6. Remember whose opinion ultimately matters.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.”

He’s not being arrogant. He’s being free. Paul knows criticism matters, but he also knows it doesn’t have final authority over his identity.

You’re not as good as your best reviews. You’re not as bad as your worst ones. You’re a beloved child of God, saved by grace, being shaped into the image of Christ. That’s the truest thing about you. And no amount of criticism, no matter how brutal or how accurate, can change that.

7. Build a circle that can tell you the truth.

If you only receive criticism from people who don’t really know you, you’ll either become crushed or hardened. What you need are a few trusted people who have full permission to tell you the truth.

These are people who love you, who want to see you flourish, and who will tell you when your preaching needs work, your attitude stinks, or your idea is half-baked. They’re not critics in the negative sense. They’re friends who refuse to let you stay stuck.

Find those people. Give them permission. Listen to them even when it hurts.

I still think about that thanksgiving service sometimes. The man who critiqued me has long since moved on, but the lesson stayed.

Criticism is going to come. You can’t stop it. You can only decide what to do with it.

Will it make you bitter or better? Will it harden your heart or refine it? Will it send you spiralling or send you to your knees?

The prayer remains: Lord, give me tough skin and a tender heart.

Tough enough to take the hit. Tender enough to learn from it.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, wise enough to preach a fresh sermon next time instead of pulling out last year’s notes.

3 Things Before You Go:

1. The prayer that changed everything for me: “Lord, give me tough skin and a tender heart. Make me tough so I can handle life. Make me tender so I can love people.” Pray it this week. See what shifts.

2. I’m posting more on YouTube. Conversations about faith, creativity, identity, and all the things we talk about here, but in video form. Subscribe if you want to come along: youtube.com/@jessedanyusuf

3. If this helped you, share it. Forward this to a friend who’s in the arena, putting their work out there, and getting beat up for it. They probably need to hear they’re not alone.

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It’s one of the most common questions Christians ask. And one of the most anxiety-inducing.

To the best of my knowledge, I’ve asked this question seriously three times in my life.

The first time was when I got the job I’d been praying for. I was sure this was it. The answer. The open door. And then I walked through it and found... emptiness. The satisfaction I expected never came. I had what I wanted and still felt like something was missing. So I asked God: what do you actually want me to do with my life? Because apparently it wasn’t just this.

The second time was after my father died. He had plans for my future. Ideas about what I’d become, paths he’d helped prepare. And then he was gone, and those plans went with him. Everything I thought was set up for me suddenly felt like it had come to an end. I was untethered. Lost. Asking God not just what to do next, but who I even was without my father’s vision shaping my trajectory.

The third time was when I quit ministry. I’d planted a church, poured everything into it for two years, right through the pandemic. And I burned out. Completely. I stepped away from being a pastor because I had nothing left to give. And in that emptiness, the question came back: What does God want me to do with my life? Because I thought I knew. I thought I was doing it. And now I wasn’t sure of anything.

Three different seasons. Three different losses. The same question.

We treat God’s will like a hidden treasure map. One wrong turn and you miss it. Marry the wrong person, take the wrong job, move to the wrong city, and suddenly you’re living outside the centre of God’s plan. Plan B. The backup life. The one you settle for because you missed the real one.

I’ve met so many believers paralysed by this. They’re afraid to make decisions because they’re waiting for a sign, a feeling, a confirmation that never quite comes. They think God has one specific career picked out for them, one specific spouse, one specific city, and their job is to figure out what it is before time runs out.

But what if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong?

The anxiety around “God’s will for my life” usually assumes that God is primarily interested in what you do. Your career. Your location. Your achievements. And there’s a right answer out there, hidden, waiting to be discovered through enough prayer and fasting.

But when you read Scripture, God seems far less interested in where you work than in who you’re becoming. He’s less concerned with your job title than with your character. The question isn’t primarily “What should I do?” but “What kind of person should I be?”

Consider how little vocational guidance Scripture actually gives. Paul doesn’t tell us whether to be doctors or lawyers or farmers. Jesus doesn’t lay out a decision tree for career choices. What we get instead is an overwhelming emphasis on the heart. On virtue. On becoming people of love, patience, integrity, generosity.

The Proverbs tell us that “in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Notice: it doesn’t say He’ll give you a detailed map. It says He’ll straighten the path you’re already walking. The assumption is that you’re moving, deciding, acting, and He’s guiding as you go.

I think we’ve confused two different things: God’s moral will and God’s circumstantial will.

God’s moral will is clear. Love your neighbour. Pursue justice. Be faithful in marriage. Don’t lie or steal. Care for the poor. These aren’t mysteries. They’re spelled out repeatedly throughout Scripture. You don’t need a special revelation to know that God wants you to be honest at work or generous with your money.

God’s circumstantial will is different. Should you take this job or that one? Should you move to Abuja or stay in Lagos? Should you marry this person? These are real decisions, and they matter. But Scripture doesn’t promise that God will give you specific answers to every circumstantial question.

What Scripture does promise is wisdom for those who ask. And wisdom isn’t the same as a detailed instruction manual. Wisdom is the capacity to make good decisions in complex situations. It’s judgment, discernment, the ability to weigh competing goods and navigate uncertainty with integrity.

There’s another question underneath the question. When someone asks, “What does God want me to do with my life?” they’re often really asking, “How do I matter? How do I know my life counts?”

This is a question of identity, not just direction.

And the gospel answers it in a surprising way. Your life matters not because of what you accomplish but because of whose you are. You are loved before you perform. Accepted before you achieve. Chosen before you produce anything of value.

Ephesians 2 says we are God’s workmanship, His masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works. But notice the order. First, we are made new in Christ. Then, we walk in the works prepared for us. Identity comes before assignment. Being precedes doing.

If you get this backwards, you’ll spend your life trying to earn what’s already been given. You’ll treat your calling as a performance review rather than a gift. And you’ll never quite shake the anxiety, because there’s always the fear that you’re not doing enough, not being enough, not finding the one right path.

So what does God want you to do with your life?

I could give you the safe answer: probably lots of things, and most of them aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s true. But it’s not satisfying, is it? It sounds like a dodge. You’re asking for THE answer, and I’m giving you a shrug.

So let me try again.

THE answer is that God wants you.

Not your productivity. Not your platform. Not your ministry or your career or your achievements. He wants you. Your heart. Your trust. Your presence. Your love.

The Westminster Catechism says the chief end of man is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” That’s it. That’s THE answer. Everything else, every job and relationship and calling and assignment, is just the context in which you do that. The backdrop. The setting where the real story plays out.

We keep asking “What does God want me to do?” and God keeps answering “I want you to be with Me.” We want a task. He wants a relationship. We want a mission. He wants a son, a daughter, walking with their Father.

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is to love your neighbour as yourself. Everything else hangs on these two. Not hangs on finding the right career. Not hangs on discovering your specific assignment. It hangs on love. Vertical and horizontal. God and neighbour.

Remember Mary and Martha? Martha was busy with all the preparations. She was doing things for Jesus. Good things. Necessary things, even. And she was frustrated that Mary was just sitting there at His feet, not helping.

Jesus’ response still surprises me: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

One thing is needed. Not twelve. Not a detailed life plan. One thing: to be with Him. To sit at His feet. To choose presence over productivity.

Martha was asking, “What should I be doing?” Mary had already found the answer: “I should be with Him.”

That’s THE answer. And everything else flows from there.

If you get that right, the “what should I do” questions become much smaller. Still real. Still worth thinking about. But no longer the thing your identity hangs on. You’re free to choose, to try, to fail, to pivot, because your life isn’t riding on getting the decision exactly right. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. The specific path is just where you walk out that reality.

And in practical terms? God wants you to love the people in front of you. To do your work with excellence and integrity. To steward your gifts for the common good. To seek justice where there is oppression. To be generous with your resources. To grow in Christ-likeness through every season.

Whether you do that as a banker or a teacher or a pastor or an entrepreneur is, in some ways, secondary. The calling to faithfulness applies in every context. The call to love applies in every relationship. The invitation to glorify God applies in every vocation.

Frederick Buechner said that your calling is where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. I find that helpful. Not as a formula, but as a compass. Pay attention to what brings you alive. Pay attention to what breaks your heart. Somewhere in the overlap, you might find your work.

But even that isn’t a guarantee. Sometimes we work in jobs that don’t feel like callings. Sometimes we’re in seasons of provision rather than passion. And that’s okay. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness, and God was present there too. Not every season is a promised land. Some are just faithfulness in the desert.

There’s a freedom that comes when you stop treating God’s will like a treasure hunt and start treating it like a relationship.

In a relationship, you don’t need a detailed script for every conversation. You learn the other person’s character, their values, what pleases them and what grieves them. And then you live in light of that knowledge, making decisions that honour the relationship without needing explicit permission for every choice.

That’s how it works with God. You know His character from Scripture. You know He values love, justice, mercy, humility. You know He cares about the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger. You know He delights in integrity and hates dishonesty. And so you make decisions that align with His heart, trusting that He’s big enough to redirect you if you drift.

The Psalmist says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I used to read that as a transaction: delight in God, and He’ll give you what you want. But I think it means something deeper. When you delight in God, your desires change. What you want becomes shaped by who He is. And then He gives you those desires, not as rewards but as natural overflow.

If you’re stuck right now, unsure of what to do next, let me offer this.

Stop waiting for certainty. It may not come. Make the best decision you can with the wisdom you have, and trust that God is sovereign over your stumbling. He can work through imperfect choices made in good faith. Your Father is not a tyrant demanding perfection. He’s a guide walking with you through the fog.

Focus on faithfulness where you are. The person who is faithful in little will be entrusted with much. If you can’t be trusted with today’s responsibilities, why would God give you tomorrow’s platform? Bloom where you’re planted. Excellence in obscurity is still excellence.

Pay attention to your longings. Not every desire is from God, but not every desire is sinful either. Some of the deepest longings in your heart were placed there by your Creator. The longing for meaningful work, for deep relationships, for a life that counts: these aren’t distractions from God’s will. They might be signposts toward it.

And remember that the goal isn’t to find the perfect life. It’s to become a faithful person. Someone who loves well, works honestly, serves generously, and trusts deeply. If you become that person, you’ll have lived a good life, regardless of your job title.

Looking back at those three seasons when I asked the question, I see something I couldn’t see then.

The job that didn’t satisfy taught me that no position can carry the weight of my identity. I was looking to work to tell me who I was. It couldn’t.

My father’s death taught me that God’s plan for my life doesn’t depend on any human being, no matter how much I loved them. The vision didn’t die with my dad. It was never his to begin with.

And burning out in ministry taught me that even good, God-given work can become an idol. I had made pastoring my identity instead of letting my identity in Christ shape my pastoring. When I lost the role, I didn’t know who I was. That’s a sign something had gone wrong long before the burnout. I came back to ministry when I fixed my gaze.

Each time, God wasn’t answering the question I was asking. He was reshaping me so I could ask a better question. Not “What should I do?” but “Who am I becoming?” Not “Where is my assignment?” but “Am I walking with my Father?”

What does God want you to do with your life?

He wants you to know Him and enjoy Him. To become like His Son. To love the people He puts in your path. To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. To use your gifts for the flourishing of others. To work with integrity and rest with trust.

The specifics? Those will unfold. They always do. Not as a master plan revealed in advance, but as a path that becomes clear step by step, as you walk in faith and faithfulness.

You’re not looking for a hidden script. You’re learning to walk with a present God.

And that’s enough.

A quick note before you go.

My hope is that these emails help you find your story inside God’s story. If they’ve been meaningful to you, there are a few ways we can continue the journey together.

→ Support the work
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Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this community. It means more than you know.

In Him, for Him, by Him,

Jesse

I used to drink Red Bulls like they were communion wine.

Not one. Several. Because sleep was for the weak, and I wasn’t going to be seen as weak. Because hustle was holy. Because as a young entrepreneur running a creative agency, I’d been marinating in Prophet Gary Vee’s gospel—all that relentless “do do do” energy, and somewhere along the way, I stopped questioning whether it was true. I just absorbed it.

I was deep in the productivity gospel. Wake up earlier. Work later. Optimise everything. Rest when you’re dead.

The world’s definition of productivity is simple: you are what you produce. More output, more value. Less output, less worth. It’s a brutal equation.

And for a season, it seemed to work. I was producing. I was visible. I was building.

I was also exhausted. My sleep was wrecked. My nerves were shot. And my marriage was suffering in ways I didn’t have the energy to notice, let alone repair.

That’s what hustle culture doesn’t tell you. It promises you the world but takes your soul as payment. It turns you into a factory, measuring your worth by your output, and the moment production slows, so does your sense of value.

I had to learn the hard way: you can gain the whole world and lose yourself in the process.

Now, before you throw out your to-do list and call it spiritual growth—hold on!

Overcorrection is its own trap. Pendulums swing both ways. And some of us have swung too far.

We’ve embraced what some call “Soft Life Christianity.” The idea that God’s grace has been lavishly poured out, therefore all we need to do is bask in it. Soak it in. And not do any work.

Let me be clear: this is not only a mischaracterisation of the gospel. It’s a dirty lie from the lowest pit of hell.

Grace was never meant to make us passive. It was meant to set us on fire.

The gospel isn’t anti-effort. It’s anti-earning. And those are very different things. "William Carey said it best: 'Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.' That's the call. Not smaller ambition—redeemed ambition. So what does that actually look like?

So what does the gospel actually teach?

Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 15:9-10. Paul writes:

“For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve 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 to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

There’s a rhythm here. Three confessions that form the shape of a gospel-powered life.

1. The Confession of Humility: “I am the least”

Look at where Paul starts. Not with his credentials. Not with his wins. He starts with his worst moment. “I persecuted the church of God.” That’s not a humble-brag. That’s a man standing in the wreckage of who he used to be and refusing to look away.

I respect that. Because I know what it’s like to build an identity on things you later have to unlearn. To realise the version of you that was “winning” was actually losing in the ways that mattered most.

This is the part most productivity gurus skip. They want to start with strategy. God wants to start with surgery. The thing is, you can’t optimise your way out of a soul problem.

Humility isn’t weakness. It’s the only posture that can receive anything.

2. The Confession of Identity: “By the grace of God I am what I am”

“By the grace of God I am what I am.”

Read that again. Slowly.

Paul doesn’t say “I am what I’ve made of myself.” That’s the world’s script. That’s the lie hustle culture whispers: you are your output. Your value is your velocity. Keep producing or disappear. But Paul’s identity wasn’t under construction. It was received. Finished. Done. Not because he figured himself out, but because grace figured him in.

This is the part that will either set you free or offend you: you cannot earn what’s already yours.

I think this is what most of us get wrong. We treat identity like a construction project. We gather materials—achievements, titles, recognition—and we build. But what if identity was never meant to be built? What if it was meant to be believed?

When you know who you are, you’re free to work without the desperation of becoming. You’re not labouring to prove something. You’re creating from a place of settledness. That’s a completely different energy.

3. The Confession of Agency: “I worked harder than all of them”

And then Paul says something that should make all of us pause: “I worked harder than all of them.”

Wait. I thought this was about grace?

It is. That’s the point. Grace didn’t make Paul passive. It made him dangerous. He wasn’t grinding to prove his worth. He was pouring out from a well that never ran dry. Paul out-worked everyone. He planted churches, wrote letters, endured shipwrecks, faced beatings, kept moving.

“I worked harder than all of them.”

Do not confuse Paul’s honesty for arrogance here. He isn’t being arrogant. He’s being honest. And his honesty should make some of us uncomfortable. Because we’ve turned grace into an excuse to coast. Please don’t confuse peace with passivity. Don’t spiritualise your laziness and call it “trusting God.”

But he doesn’t stop. He adds five words that change everything:

“Yet not I, but the grace of God.”

This is the whole thing. The effort was real. The output was real. The labour was real. But the source? That wasn’t Paul. He was just the vessel. Grace was the fuel.

This is the death of hustle culture in one sentence.

You work hard—yet not you.
You produce—yet not you.
You do great things for the glory of God—yet not you.

So what does this look like practically? I’ve started thinking of it as a rhythm.

Humility opens the hand. You come to God with nothing to offer and nothing to prove. Then identity fills it—grace reminds you who you are before you do a single thing. Agency extends it—you work, you build, you create, you give yourself fully. And then surrender empties it all out. You release the outcomes. You let go of the credit. And somehow, mysteriously, grace fills it again.

This isn’t necessarily a formula, it’s a posture we must always return to.

I’ve come to believe redeemed productivity looks less like a factory and more like a tree.

A factory produces through force. It runs on fuel. It measures success by units. And when the machinery breaks down, production stops. That’s how most of us have been taught to work. Push harder. Consume more. Output, output, output.

A tree works differently. It produces through abiding. It draws nutrients from the soil. It grows slowly, seasonally. And the fruit it bears isn’t forced out—it flows out. In its proper time.

Jesus said it plainly: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”

He didn’t say, “Whoever hustles for me will bear fruit.” He said abide. Stay connected. Draw your life from mine. And fruit will come.

Redeemed productivity isn’t about doing less. It’s about a different kind of doing. Work that flows from rest rather than desperation. Output that comes from overflow rather than anxiety. Effort empowered by grace rather than driven by fear.

This is at the heart of what I call the Masterpiece philosophy.

Ephesians 2:10 says we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand. The work is real. The calling is real. But the order matters: we are masterpieces first, and then we do the work. Identity before activity. Being before doing.

When you get that order right, everything shifts.

You stop working to prove your worth and start working from it. You stop hustling for significance and start creating from security. You stop running on Red Bull and start running on something that won’t leave you empty at 2am.

So let me leave you with this.

If you’re burnt out, running on fumes, measuring your value by your output—stop. Not stop working. Stop striving. There’s a difference.

And if you’ve swung the other way, using grace as a blanket for passivity and comfort—wake up. Grace doesn’t make us lazy. It makes us dangerous. Free to work without fear. Free to create without anxiety. Free to pour ourselves into what God has called us to, knowing our worth was never on the line to begin with.

Redeemed productivity is not the absence of effort. It’s effort rooted in the right soil.

Be a tree, not a factory.

And watch what grows.

What does redeemed productivity look like in your life right now? Hit reply. I’d love to hear.

Years ago, I watched a sermon that wrecked me.

John Piper stood at a conference and told the story of a couple who retired early, moved to Florida, and spent their final years collecting seashells. Then he asked the question that’s haunted me ever since: “Is that a life well spent?”

I later read his book, Don’t Waste Your Life, and I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve made read it since. Lecrae turned it into an anthem. And somewhere along the way, the phrase became a kind of north star for me. A holy warning. A sacred invitation.

So as we stand at the beginning of a new year, I want to say something simple: Don’t waste your 2026.

Now, before we go any further, let me be clear. The new year will not magically change your life. The calendar flipping from December 31 to January 1 holds no inherent power. I love seeing people set resolutions, I really do. But we all know the statistics. How many will still be going to the gym by March? How many will keep to their diets? How many will make it past Leviticus in their attempt to read the whole Bible?

Not many.

And yet, I still think we should set goals. We should make resolutions. Not because the date is magic, but because intention matters. Because a life lived on autopilot drifts toward waste. Because clarity about what you’re aiming at shapes what you actually do.

But first, what does a wasted 2026 actually look like?

I think we need to name this before we move on. Because “wasting your life” sounds dramatic, and most of us assume it doesn’t apply to us. We’re not doing anything terrible. We’re not hurting anyone. We’re just... living.

But that’s precisely the danger.

A wasted 2026 doesn’t look like spectacular failure. It looks like drifting. It looks like arriving at December 31st and realising you spent twelve months reacting instead of living with intention. Scrolling instead of creating. Consuming instead of contributing. Busy, but not fruitful. Tired, but not from anything that mattered.

A wasted year is one where you pursued goals that couldn’t satisfy you even if you achieved them. Where you chased success as the world defines it and ignored what your soul was actually hungry for. Where you were so distracted by the urgent that you never got around to the important.

A wasted 2026 is one where you knew what God was calling you to, but you kept putting it off. Where you stayed comfortable when you were meant to step out. Where fear made more decisions than faith did.

It’s a year where you end up with a lot of seashells and an empty soul.

I don’t say this to shame anyone. I say it because I’ve wasted seasons of my own life this way. And the tragedy wasn’t that I did terrible things. The tragedy was that I did nothing of eternal significance. I played it safe. I optimised for comfort. I drifted.

So here are six things I plan to do in 2026 to avoid that fate. And for anyone who cares to listen, I’d love to help you do the same.

1. Redefine success.

Culture measures success by scale. By reach. By numbers. But Jesus said something strange: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Not successful. Faithful.

And yet, faithfulness was never meant to be barren. Jesus also said, “By their fruit you will recognise them.” The goal isn’t faithfulness that produces nothing. It’s faithfulness that bears fruit in its proper season.

Now, let me say something important here: ambition is not the enemy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do significant things for God. The problem comes when our ambition produces anxiety rather than worship. When we’re driven by fear of insignificance rather than love for God and neighbour. When we measure our worth by our output rather than receiving it as a gift.

This year, I’m letting go of metrics that feed my ego and embracing the ones that form my soul. Faithfulness in obscurity. Fruitfulness in God’s timing. Obedience without applause. Consistency when no one’s watching. That’s the kind of success I want to chase.

2. Be led by the Spirit.

I’m prone to living by my own wisdom, my own strength, my own strategies. But Paul writes in Galatians, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

The Christian life was never meant to be self-directed. It’s Spirit-led. And the way we position ourselves to hear the Spirit’s voice and follow his leading is through the ancient practices the church has always known: Scripture, prayer, silence, solitude, fasting, Sabbath, community.

These disciplines are not ways of earning God’s favour. They’re ways of opening ourselves to the God who is already favourably disposed toward us. They create space for the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do.

This year, I will not live by my might or by my power, but by the Spirit (Zechariah 4:6). For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God (Romans 8:14). I will live Spirit-led.

3. Find my story in God’s story.

Most of my anxiety comes from forgetting what story I’m in. When I lose the plot, every setback feels like the end. Every delay feels like failure. Every closed door feels like rejection.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: before I can find my story in God’s story, I have to rediscover God’s story itself. I have to ask the deeper questions. What is God doing in the world? What is God doing in my generation? And how can I be part of it?

The Bible is not a collection of moral lessons or inspirational quotes. It’s the unfolding drama of God’s redemption. Creation, fall, redemption, restoration. And the invitation of the gospel is not simply to believe certain truths, but to find yourself inside that story. To locate your life within God’s purposes.

When you do that, everything changes. You stop asking, “What’s my purpose?” and start asking, “What’s God doing, and how can I be part of it?” You stop demanding that God bless your plans and start seeking to join his.

And here’s what I’ve found to be true: the safest place any of us can be is in the will of God. It won’t always be comfortable. It often isn’t. But there’s a kind of security that comes from knowing you’re where you’re supposed to be, doing what you were made to do. Even when it’s hard, you’re held.

This year, I want to read Scripture not as a self-help book, but as the story that tells me who God is, what he’s doing, and where I belong.

4. Create from rest.

My wife will be happy to see this point.

In the early years of our marriage, I religiously followed the gospel that Gary Vee preached. Hustle harder. Sleep less. Outwork everyone. And I took it seriously. I drank energy drinks like they were water. I didn’t sleep well. I wore my exhaustion like a badge of honour.

But here’s what that gospel cost me: I led my business from anxiety. I led my ministry from anxiety. I led my marriage from anxiety. Everything I built was built on fumes and fear. And the people closest to me paid the price.

The Lord has been healing me over the past few years. Slowly, gently, persistently. I’ve been letting go of my idols—the idol of productivity, the idol of visibility, the idol of proving myself. I’ve learned to drop my burdens at his feet. To stop carrying what was never mine to carry. To believe that God is more committed to his purposes than I am, and that my striving adds nothing to his sovereignty.

Now I can create from rest and freedom. No more anxiety. No more proving. No more running on empty.

God rested before Adam worked. That means rest is not a reward for labour. It’s the rhythm from which labour flows. I’ve spent too many seasons confusing exhaustion with faithfulness. This year, I’m building rest into my calendar before I build goals. Sabbath first. Then everything else.

I plan to continue that way.

5. Commit to ordinary obedience.

Most of God’s work happens quietly. The emails no one sees. The prayers no one hears. The small acts of kindness that will never trend. The conversation with your child that shapes their soul. The integrity in a meeting that no one will applaud. The faithfulness in a marriage when romance feels distant.

We’re conditioned to chase the spectacular. The breakthrough testimony. The viral moment. The platform. But if you read Scripture carefully, you’ll notice that God seems to prefer the mundane. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness before the burning bush. David tended sheep before he faced Goliath. Jesus spent thirty years in obscurity before three years of public ministry.

The hidden years were not wasted years. They were forming years.

Paul said, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” Whatever. Not just the impressive things. Not just the visible things. Whatever.

This year, I want to choose consistency over visibility. Trust that faithfulness compounds. Believe that what’s hidden today becomes harvest tomorrow. The people who shape history are rarely the ones chasing it. They’re the ones who showed up, day after day, doing the next faithful thing.

6. Pray. Plan. Pursue.

Proverbs 16:9 says, “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”

Some people read that and think planning is pointless. Why bother if God’s going to do what he wants anyway? But I don’t think that’s what Solomon meant. He’s not discouraging planning. He’s putting it in its proper place—under God’s sovereignty, not above it.

Here’s the thing: God himself is a planner. He planned creation. He planned redemption. Ephesians tells us he planned good works for you to walk in before you were even born. So when you plan, you’re actually reflecting the character of your Creator. You’re stewarding what he’s given you.

And prayer? God genuinely wants to talk to you. He longs to reveal his will. He invites you into the work he’s already doing. When you pray, you’re not twisting God’s arm or dropping coins in a celestial vending machine. You’re aligning your heart with his. You’re saying, “Father, what are you up to? And can I join you?”

Then there’s pursuit. I love what David did in 1 Samuel 30. His city was raided, his family taken, his men ready to stone him. And in that moment, David inquired of the Lord: “Shall I pursue this raiding party? Will I overtake them?” God’s answer? “Pursue them. You will certainly overtake them and succeed in the rescue.”

David prayed first. Then he ran. He didn’t sit around waiting for God to fix everything. He moved—but he moved with a word from God in his pocket.

That’s the rhythm I want this year. Pray with dependence. Plan with wisdom. Pursue with passion. Not my agenda with God’s blessing stamped on it, but God’s purposes flowing through my life.

So that’s my list. Six things. Not six ways to impress anyone. Six ways to not waste the year.

Because here’s what Piper helped me see all those years ago: the tragedy is not a life that’s hard. It’s a life that’s empty. A life spent on things that don’t matter. A life that arrives at the end with nothing but seashells.

I don’t want that. And I suspect you don’t either.

So let’s not waste 2026.

Let’s live it.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for supporting my newsletter journey so far. I pray and plan to write more stories that will encourage you to live as God’s masterpiece.

Have a fruitful year!

He had done this many times before. The searching. The quiet inventory of a man’s soul.

He was old. Older than the languages men used to name him. He had watched empires rise and crumble into sand. He had outlived every pharaoh, every caesar, every king. And still he worked. Still he searched.

Every person had something. A resentment they nursed like a sick child. A want that had grown teeth. A hunger for skin they had learned to call by other names. A door they believed was locked but was only closed. He always found it. The thing that could be used.

But this man.

The Accuser circled him. He pressed into memory. The father who left when the boy was nine. The morning the boy stood at the window and watched the car disappear down the untarred road, red dust rising. The prayers he prayed for years afterward, prayers that met only ceiling.

Nothing.

The man remembered. The Accuser could see that he remembered. But the memory had been… settled. Like a bill someone else had paid. The wound was there, yes, but it was clean. It did not fester. It did not smell of rot.

He tried ambition. The man had wanted things once. He had wanted to be known. He had watched others rise, people with less talent, less faithfulness, less patience, and he had felt the hot thing in his chest. Surely that was still there.

But the man had released it. Not in the way of someone who had given up. In the way of someone who had found something better. He had stopped reaching for their approval. He wanted God’s. And he already had it.

The Accuser tried pleasure. The old images. The old sensations. The body’s memory of what it once craved.

The man’s desires had shifted. They had not been killed; they had been replaced. He wanted different things now. The currency the Accuser carried was worthless here.

He tried fear. He showed the man his future: sickness, poverty, a death in a small room with no one watching. Irrelevance. A name no one would remember.

The man did not grip his life. It had already been given away.

The Accuser stepped back.

He looked at the man properly then. And he saw.

There was nothing in him. Not emptiness. Fullness. But none of it belonged to the Accuser. Every room was occupied. Every door opened by Someone else.

And there was something more. Scars. The Accuser looked closer. Not wounds. Cuts. Clean cuts. The places where things had been removed.

The ambition that had once grown wild. Cut.

The attachments that had wrapped too tightly around the man’s heart. Cut.

The comforts he had held like a child holds a blanket. Cut.

The small gods he had kept in the back rooms of his life. Cut.

The Accuser knew wounds. He had made many himself. But these were not his work. These were the marks of a Gardener. Every cut had been made with precision. Not to destroy, but to direct. To force the man’s life upward, toward light.

The things the Accuser might have used had been removed before he arrived. The Father had gotten there first.

He always did.

The man had suffered. But his suffering had been cultivated. Every loss had been measured. Every stripping had been timed. The things he thought he needed had been taken not to empty him but to make room. There was nothing left to grip. No branch growing in the wrong direction. No secret thing in the dark. No appetite hidden in a locked drawer. No loyalty divided quietly in half. Only clean wood. Only fruit.

The man had not fought him. He had simply stopped wanting what the Accuser was offering. He had stopped trying to survive the enemy and learned instead to surrender. It was a secret many of them knew but few ever used.

Defeat. The Accuser felt it again. He had felt it first in a wilderness, forty days long. Every angle. Every offer. The God-Man had nothing in Him. He felt it again on a hill outside Jerusalem. And now here, in this ordinary room, with this ordinary man wearing the same victory like borrowed clothes.

He did not speak. There was nothing to say. He turned away from the man the way one turns from a door that will not open. His hatred grew. For the Father who had pruned. For the Son who had purchased. For the Spirit who had filled every room and left no vacancy. For this ordinary man who had simply believed them all.

He had asked permission, as he always had to. The Father had granted it, as He sometimes did. But the Son had been watching. He was always watching. Always interceding. The Accuser understood now. Victory had been impossible from the start.

Behind him, the man continued to pray. Quietly. Not for himself. For others. And beside him, unseen but closer than breath, Another prayed too. The same prayer He had prayed for His apostle Petros. The same prayer He prayed for all of them. That their faith would not fail.

The Accuser left. He would return. He always did. He would circle back in a month, a year, a decade, looking for a new crack, a fresh wound, a door left open. He would keep coming until the Father did the dreadful thing. Until He called the man home. And then it would be over. The man would be out of reach forever.

But not yet. Not today.

“The ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.” — John 14:30

“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat. But I have pleaded in prayer for you, Simon, that your faith should not fail.” — Luke 22:31-32

“Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” — John 15:2

“Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” — James 4:7

Theodore Roosevelt reportedly said it first: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I’ve quoted it dozens of times. I’ve nodded along when others have said it. I’ve even preached it.

For years, though, I kept getting robbed.

Comparison would steal my joy in the quiet moments. Scrolling through social media, I’d see a peer’s announcement: a book deal, a viral post, a sold-out event. Someone I started alongside, someone whose journey began where mine began, now standing on stages I hadn’t reached, reaching audiences I hadn’t found. And something in me would deflate. The work I was excited about an hour ago suddenly felt small. Insufficient. Behind.

I knew better. I really did. But knowing and feeling are different countries, and my heart kept crossing the border without my permission.

The Ancient Struggle

This isn’t a modern problem. The Psalmist in Psalm 73 wrestled with the same thief: “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked... Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure” (vv. 3, 13). He looked at others flourishing and questioned whether his faithfulness even mattered.

The disciples weren’t immune either. In John 21, after Jesus restores Peter and commissions him for ministry, Peter immediately looks at John and asks, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus’ response is almost sharp: “What is that to you? You must follow me” (vv. 21-22).

What is that to you?

That question became my turning point. What someone else is building, how fast they’re growing, what doors are opening for them: what is that to me? My calling isn’t their calling. My timeline isn’t their timeline. My race isn’t their race.

We have to stop comparing our chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 10. When I see someone’s success, I’m usually seeing the fruit of years I didn’t witness. The early mornings. The failed attempts. The seasons of obscurity they walked through before anyone was watching. I’m comparing my middle to their highlight reel, my process to their arrival. That’s not just unfair to me. It’s unfair to their journey too.

What Comparison Was Really Stealing

I eventually realised that comparison wasn’t just stealing joy. It was stealing gratitude for what I had. It was stealing contentment with where I was. It was stealing clarity about who I was called to be. It whispered that my enough wasn’t enough, that my faithful work was falling behind, that God was blessing them more than He was blessing me.

And if left unchecked, comparison doesn’t stay as comparison. It curdles into something darker. First comes jealousy: the fear that what someone else has somehow threatens what’s yours. Then comes envy: the quiet resentment that they have it at all. Someone once said that envy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings instead of your own. I did that more than I’d like to admit. Tallying up their wins while forgetting my own.

Envy is a particularly corrosive sin because it can disguise itself as discernment. “I’m not envious, I’m just noticing that their success isn’t deserved.” But that’s still counting. Still measuring. Still looking sideways instead of upward.

Interestingly, the Germans have a word for envy’s ugly twin: Schadenfreude. It means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. If envy is the pain we feel when others succeed, Schadenfreude is the secret satisfaction we feel when they fail. Both come from the same root. Both reveal a heart that has made someone else’s story about itself. I’ve felt that too, that quiet relief when someone I’d been comparing myself to stumbled. It’s a horrible thing to admit, but honesty requires it. Comparison doesn’t just make us sad when others win. It can make us glad when they lose.

But there’s another German word, less famous but far more beautiful: Freudenfreude. It means taking joy in someone else’s joy. Delight in their delight. This is what the gospel makes possible. When my identity is secure, when I’m not competing for a limited supply of God’s favour, I’m free to genuinely celebrate when others flourish. Their win isn’t my loss. Their blessing doesn’t shrink mine. I can look at their success and feel glad, not because I’m pretending, but because I’m finally free.

And underneath all of that, comparison revealed something uncomfortable: it exposed what I was really living for. If someone else’s success could deflate me, it meant my identity was still tangled up in outcomes. It meant I was still, on some level, working for applause rather than for the audience of One.

I’ve written before about the art of self-forgetfulness, how freedom comes not from thinking less of yourself but from thinking of yourself less. Comparison is the opposite of self-forgetfulness. It’s self-obsession wearing a mask. Every glance at someone else’s success is really a glance back at yourself, measuring, evaluating, asking “Where do I stand?”

Seeing that clearly was the beginning of freedom.

Paul understood this dynamic. In Galatians 6:4, he writes: “Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else.”

Test your own actions. Not against others’ metrics. Not against the highlight reels of people whose struggles you don’t see. Against your own calling. Against your own faithfulness. Against what God has asked of you specifically.

The Parable That Set Me Free

There’s a parable Jesus told that I used to find deeply uncomfortable. In Matthew 20, workers are hired throughout the day: some early in the morning, some at noon, some an hour before quitting time. At the end, they all receive the same wage. The ones who worked all day are furious.

The landowner’s response cuts to the heart of comparison: “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (v. 15).

I wanted God to be fair by my metrics. I wanted effort to correlate directly with reward. I wanted the people who started earlier, worked harder, stayed longer to get more. But God’s economy doesn’t work that way. His generosity isn’t constrained by our scorekeeping.

That’s when it clicked. when I was upset about someone else’s blessing, I wasn’t actually upset about injustice. I was upset about grace. I was envious because God was generous, to them.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. How could I resent the very thing I depended on for my own life?

The Freedom of Staying in Your Lane

The gospel offers a different way. If my identity is secured in Christ, if I’m already loved, already approved, already enough before I produce anything, then someone else’s success doesn’t diminish me. Their blessing isn’t my loss. Their platform isn’t a commentary on my faithfulness.

I can celebrate what God is doing in their life because I’m not competing with them. We’re running different races. We’re building different parts of the same kingdom. Their fruitfulness and mine aren’t in opposition.

This is what Paul means when he says he’s learned the secret of being content in any circumstance (Philippians 4:12). Contentment isn’t resignation. It’s freedom. It’s the settled confidence that God knows what He’s doing with your life, even when it looks different from what He’s doing with someone else’s.

What I Do Now

Does comparison still try to creep in? Occasionally. I’m not immune. But I know what to do with it now.

When I feel that old familiar deflation rising, I turn it into intercession. Instead of “Why them and not me?” I pray, “Lord, bless their work. Use their platform. Multiply their fruit.”

It felt unnatural at first. Forced, even hypocritical. But something shifts when you pray for the person you’re tempted to envy. The grip loosens. The comparison loses its power.

You can’t resent someone you’re actively blessing.

What Is That to You?

Jesus’ question to Peter echoes across the centuries: What is that to you?

What is their success to you? What is their timeline to you? What is their visibility to you?

You follow Me.

That’s the invitation. Not to keep pace with others. Not to measure your lap times against theirs. Just to follow. To stay faithful to your own calling. To steward your own gifts. To run your own race with endurance, fixing your eyes not on the runners beside you but on Jesus, the author and finisher of your faith.

Comparison will keep trying to steal your joy. But it can only take what you give it access to. And when your joy is rooted in Christ, not in outcomes, not in metrics, not in how you stack up against others, there’s nothing left to steal.

I learned that the hard way. But I learned it. And that’s made all the difference.

When I started ministry, I just wanted it to be about Jesus and the people I was sent to. That was it. Simple. Pure. I didn’t have a strategy for growth or a vision for influence. I had a calling and a handful of people who needed to hear the gospel.

I’m not sure when that changed.

It happened slowly, the way most spiritual drift does. I met other ministers. Attended church growth conferences and leadership workshops. Read books about building movements and scaling impact. And somewhere in the accumulation of all that wisdom, I started wanting something different. I started wanting to be a successful minister.

The more I worked for the Lord, the more I forgot about the Lord of the work.

Not completely. I still prayed. Still preached. Still believed everything I’d always believed. But a new metric had crept in, one I hadn’t invited but couldn’t seem to evict. I began measuring my ministry not by faithfulness but by visibility. Not by fruit but by following.

Our generation is fighting a war on two fronts. There’s the prosperity gospel we’ve learned to recognize, the one that says God wants you rich and comfortable. But there’s another gospel, subtler and perhaps more dangerous for those of us in creative and ministry spaces: the popularity gospel. The gospel that whispers you’re blessed because you’re influential. You matter because you’re known. God is with you because your platform is growing.

Don’t misunderstand me. Influence often comes with faithful work. Notoriety can be a byproduct of genuine impact. But the moment it becomes a pursuit rather than a consequence, something has gone wrong in the soul.

I won’t pretend I haven’t felt the pull. I’ve watched people I started ministry with “blow up.” I’ve seen some use methods I couldn’t in good conscience adopt. Crafty strategies, manufactured moments, content designed more to perform than to pastor. And I’ve asked the Lord, with more frustration than I’d like to admit: Why them and not me? Why does faithfulness seem to move so slowly while shortcuts seem to work?

The Psalmist in Psalm 73 knew this temptation. He watched the wicked prosper and nearly lost his footing. “Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure,” he said (v. 13). I’ve prayed those words more times than I care to count.

But last year, I had what I can only describe as a spiritual encounter. In the stillness, the Lord asked me a question I’m still processing: “Jesse, do you want to be successful, faithful, or fruitful?”

I wanted to say “all three.” But I knew that wasn’t the point. The question was about priority. About what I’d choose if I could only have one. About what was really driving me when no one was watching.

And then, while meditating on this season, something crystallized in my spirit:

You’re being given a gift right now, Jesse: the gift of smallness, the gift of obscurity, the gift of having your motives clarified in the crucible of apparent unsuccess. God is doing surgery on your heart, cutting away the cancer of self-glory before it metastasizes into the kind of ministry that looks impressive but is actually toxic.

A gift. That’s not how I would have described this season. But the more I sat with it, the more I recognized its truth.

Zechariah 4:10 asks, “Who dares despise the day of small things?” We do. Constantly. We despise smallness because our culture has taught us that bigger is better, that growth equals God’s blessing, that obscurity is failure.

But consider Jesus. If we judged His ministry by modern metrics, we’d call it a disaster. At the moment of His arrest, His platform had collapsed. His followers fled. His movement looked finished. By our standards, this was not a successful pastor. And yet this apparent failure was the hinge of human history.

Eugene Peterson, who pastored the same small church for twenty-nine years, wrote: “The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or managed. It requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory.”

Sometimes that territory is smallness. Sometimes the path forward looks like hiddenness.

Look at Elijah. In 1 Kings 17, God tells him, “Go, hide yourself.” The prophet disappears to a brook called Cherith, fed by ravens, alone with God. It’s only in chapter 18 that the word changes: “Go, show yourself.” The public ministry came after the private formation. The showing followed the hiding.

For the minister of God, being alone with God doesn’t mean you’re lonely. It means you’re being prepared.

A seed is only fruitful if it’s planted. And when it’s planted, it has to die first. Then take root. Then grow. Then, eventually, bear fruit. We want the fruit without the burial. We want the harvest without the hiddenness. But that’s not how the kingdom works.

So what does fruit look like in this season? It looks like the conversation with your spouse that no one will ever hear about. The slow discipleship happening in a small group that will never trend. The character being formed in you when the only audience is God. It looks like the people closest to you, the ones who see you when there’s no stage, becoming more like Jesus because of your presence in their lives. This is real fruit. It just doesn’t photograph well.

Henri Nouwen, who left Harvard to live among people with disabilities at L’Arche, understood this. He wrote: “The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation.”

Irrelevance as divine vocation. Smallness as gift. Obscurity as formation.

But I should be honest about another temptation lurking here. Pride in obscurity can become its own form of self-righteousness, a way of feeling superior to the “platform-chasers” while building a quieter kind of ego.

There’s also a difference between contentment and complacency. Receiving smallness as a gift doesn’t mean settling into passivity. You can be at peace in this season while still working with excellence. You can stop striving for visibility without stopping the work itself. Contentment says, “I trust God with the outcome.” Complacency says, “I’ll just coast.” One is surrender. The other is laziness dressed up in spiritual language.

I’m still in this season. The temptation to envy still creeps in. I still catch myself measuring my work against others’ visibility. But I’m learning to receive smallness as surgery rather than punishment. To see obscurity not as God’s neglect but as His kindness, a protected space where my motives can be purified before the spotlight arrives.

And if the spotlight never arrives? Then I’ll have spent my life faithful to the One who called me, creating for an audience of One, building for a kingdom that doesn’t measure success the way the world does.

If you’re reading this and you already have the platform, this isn’t a rebuke. Visibility isn’t the problem. The spotlight can be a gift too, just a different kind. The question is the same for all of us: What’s driving you? Who are you building for? Can you hold influence loosely enough to let it go if God asks you to?

That’s enough. It has to be. Because in the end, the question isn’t whether we were known. It’s whether we knew Him.

Two nights ago, my friends and I had a two-hour FaceTime catchup.

Some of us have been friends for nearly twenty years now. We’ve stood as best men at each other’s weddings (though some of us are still taking our time—Yusuf, David, Michael, I’m looking at you, no pressure, gentlemen), become godfathers charged with helping shape these young souls, watched each other become fathers. Life has scattered us across continents, and months had passed since we’d managed to gather like this, even virtually.

For two hours, we did what old friends do. We laughed at old stories and new absurdities. We argued about things that probably don’t matter and a few things that do. Yabbed each other. We made fun of each other with the kind of affectionate ruthlessness that only decades of friendship can sustain. We caught up on the mundane details of life that somehow matter more when shared with people who actually care. And then we prayed.

I cherish these men. Not only sentimentally, but in the way you cherish something rare and necessary. We’ve watched each other rise and stumble, bury people we loved, walk through valleys so dark we wondered if we’d find our way out. We’ve also celebrated together when celebration was needed, when God’s grace broke through in ways we didn’t expect.

What I’ve witnessed in these friendships, perhaps more clearly over time, is how we’ve learned to carry each other through seasons when standing alone would have been impossible. There are moments in my life I’ll never forget when these men came through for me in ways that cost them something. Times when they didn’t have to show up, but they did. I hope that in their stories, when they tell them, I’ve done the same. And I pray God gives me the grace and opportunity to do it again when the time comes.

These friendships have taught me something profound about what it means to be your brother’s keeper.

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The Question We’d Rather Not Answer

There’s a question in Genesis that echoes through history, asked by a man who had just murdered his brother: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).

Cain asked it defensively. We ask it in quieter ways. Is their burden really mine? Can’t they handle it themselves?

Then I think about Samwise Gamgee, carrying Frodo up Mount Doom.

I Can’t Carry It For You

If you know Tolkien’s story, you know that Samwise Gamgee isn’t the hero. At least, not in the way we usually tell stories. Frodo is the Ring-bearer, the one chosen for the impossible task. Sam is the gardener, the servant, the loyal friend who simply refuses to let Frodo walk into darkness alone.

Their friendship is one of literature’s great portraits of covenant love. Sam could have stayed in the Shire. He had every reason to. He wasn’t chosen for this quest. He had his own life, his own dreams, his own small patch of earth to tend. But when Gandalf told him to look after Frodo, Sam took it as a sacred trust. And when that trust led him through mountains and wastelands and into the very heart of Mordor, he didn’t turn back.

There’s something profound here about what it means to be your brother’s keeper. It’s not always about being the lead actor. Sometimes your calling is to be the one who carries the lead when they can’t walk anymore. Today you might be Frodo, bearing a weight only you can carry. Tomorrow you might be Sam, strong enough to shoulder someone else when their strength fails. Both roles matter. Both are necessary. Both require courage.

When Frodo finally collapses on the slopes of Mount Doom, unable to take another step under the Ring’s crushing weight, Sam doesn’t lecture him. He doesn’t remind him of the stakes or tell him to dig deeper. He simply picks him up.

“I can’t carry it for you,” Sam says. “But I can carry you.”

[See here:]

Sam can’t remove Frodo’s burden. He can’t take the Ring himself, it would destroy him. He can’t save Middle-earth in Frodo’s place. But he can enter into his friend’s suffering. He can carry the one who carries the burden. And in doing so, he makes it possible for the quest to succeed.

This is what my friends have done for me. What, by God’s grace, I hope I’ve done for them.

The Gospel Pattern

Paul writes to the Galatians: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Mind your own business.” He doesn’t say, “Let everyone handle their own problems.” He says carry each other’s burdens. Enter into the weight that’s breaking your brother, your sister.

This command follows directly from the gospel itself. Christ carried the burden we could never carry on our own. Our sin, our death, our separation from God. We couldn’t solve it ourselves. We needed Someone to enter into our suffering, to take on the weight, to carry us home.

And having been carried by Christ, we’re now called to carry one another. Not because we’re anyone’s saviour (we’re not), but because we’re siblings in God’s family. The gospel doesn’t make us rugged individualists. It makes us interdependent members of a body where, as Paul says elsewhere, “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

The Cost and Gift

Being your brother’s keeper is costly. It requires time you don’t have, energy you’re running low on, emotional labor when you’re already drained. It means entering into someone else’s mess when you have plenty of your own. It means showing up when it’s inconvenient, staying when it’s uncomfortable, speaking truth when silence would be easier.

This is the pattern of the Incarnation. God didn’t stay at a comfortable distance from our suffering. He entered in. Philippians 2 tells us that Christ “made himself nothing” and took on human flesh, descending into our pain, our brokenness, our death. The gospel is God becoming your brother’s keeper, taking on burdens He didn’t have to carry because love doesn’t calculate cost.

Yet it’s also a gift. Because none of us were meant to walk this road alone. Ecclesiastes speaks with uncomfortable wisdom: “Two are better than one... If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

Sometimes you’re Frodo, broken and unable to take another step. Sometimes you’re Sam, strong enough in that moment to give what’s needed. The beauty of Christian community is that we take turns. You carry today. I’ll carry tomorrow. We stumble forward together toward a destination none of us could reach alone.

As I sat on that FaceTime call two nights ago, laughing with men I’ve known for two decades, I realised something: we’re all still carrying each other. Through different seasons, different struggles, different continents. The faces are older. The responsibilities heavier. The burdens more complex than when we were young men trying to figure out our lives.

But the commitment remains. Not because we’ve mastered friendship, but because somewhere along the way, we learned this is how we were meant to live. That the image of God in us is expressed not just in our individual creativity, but in how we bear one another’s burdens. In how we refuse to let each other walk alone through dark valleys.

This is what it means to be your brother’s keeper. To answer Cain’s question with a humble yes.

We are our brother’s keepers. And by God’s grace, we can be.

Even when we can’t carry the burden itself, we can carry the one who bears it. And sometimes, on the darkest slopes, that’s exactly what saves us.

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So this isn’t written from a position of arrival. It’s written from the trenches, from someone who’s stumbled through these pitfalls and is slowly, painfully learning what it means to create faithfully as someone made in God’s image.

If you’re a Christian creative, these mistakes might feel familiar. And if they do, know that you’re not alone. We’re all learning. Here’s what I’ve discovered along the way.

1. Creating for Validation Instead of Worship

This is the subtlest trap, because it disguises itself as ambition or even ministry. You tell yourself you’re creating to reach people, to make an impact, to steward your gifts well. But underneath, if you’re honest, you’re creating to be seen. To be affirmed. To prove that you matter.

I know because I’ve been there. I’ve refreshed analytics pages more times than I care to admit. I’ve felt the rush when something I made got noticed and the crushing disappointment when it didn’t. And slowly, imperceptibly, my work stopped being an offering to God and became a bid for human approval.

The gospel speaks directly to this. You don’t need your work to validate you because Christ already has. Your identity isn’t riding on whether people like what you make. You’re already God’s beloved child before you create anything (Ephesians 1:4-5).

How to avoid it: Before you create, ask yourself: “Would I still make this if no one saw it? If God were my only audience, would this still matter to me?” Create for an audience of One. Let everything else be secondary.

2. Separating “Sacred” from “Secular” Work

Many Christian creatives carry an unspoken hierarchy: ministry work is sacred, everything else is secular. Preaching matters. Designing logos? That’s just paying the bills. Writing worship songs is holy. Writing marketing copy? That’s worldly.

But Scripture doesn’t make this distinction. Colossians 3:23 tells us, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” Whatever. Not just the “spiritual” stuff. All of it.

The carpenter building furniture in Nazareth, the tentmaker stitching canvas in Corinth, the designer crafting a website in Lagos—all can be acts of worship when done for God’s glory. The sacred-secular divide isn’t biblical. It’s a false dichotomy that diminishes the goodness of God’s created order and the dignity of work itself.

How to avoid it: Stop asking “Is this spiritual enough?” and start asking “Am I doing this for God’s glory?” Your design work, your writing, your business, your art—all of it can be worship. The question isn’t what you’re creating. It’s who you’re creating for.

3. Waiting for Permission or Perfect Conditions

I’ve met countless talented creatives who are waiting. Waiting for the right opportunity. Waiting until they’re “good enough.” Waiting for someone to give them permission to begin. Waiting for a platform. And while they wait, years pass, and the work God prepared for them goes undone.

The truth is, you already have permission. Ephesians 2:10 tells us God prepared good works in advance for us to do. Not for us to wait for. Not for us to earn the right to do. For us to do. Now. Imperfectly. With the gifts and opportunities we have today, not the ones we wish we had tomorrow. The work that has been revealed by Him, and led by His Spirit.

There’s a dangerous humility that masquerades as wisdom. “I’m not ready yet,” we say. “I need more training, more experience, more resources.” Sometimes that’s true. But often, it’s just fear dressed up as prudence.

How to avoid it: Start where you are with what you have. Create badly if you must, but create. God doesn’t call the equipped; He equips the called. Your obedience today is more valuable than your perfection tomorrow.

4. Measuring Success by Worldly Metrics

Followers. Likes. Revenue. Recognition. These aren’t inherently bad, but when they become the primary way we measure whether our work matters, we’ve adopted the world’s definition of success rather than God’s.

The problem with worldly metrics is they’re never enough. Hit 10,000 followers and you’ll want 100,000. Make your first million and you’ll chase the next. Win an award and you’ll want another. The goalposts keep moving because we’re using the wrong measuring stick.

God’s metric is fruitfulness, not fame. Does your work bear Kingdom fruit? Does it reflect His character? Does it serve others? Does it multiply goodness in the world? That’s what matters. And often, the most fruitful work is invisible to algorithms and analytics.

How to avoid it: Regularly ask yourself: “What fruit is this work bearing?” Not “How many people saw it?” Think in terms of impact, not impressions. Trust that faithfulness to God’s calling is success, regardless of the numbers.

5. Building Your Own Kingdom Instead of God’s

This is the ultimate mistake that encompasses all the others. We start creating for good reasons—to use our gifts, to serve others, to make the world more beautiful. But somewhere along the way, the work becomes about us. Our platform. Our legacy. Our name.

Remember Babel? “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). That’s the human impulse: to make a name for ourselves. To build monuments to our own significance.

But the gospel inverts this. Jesus, who had every right to make a name for Himself, “made himself nothing” (Philippians 2:7). He built the Kingdom not through self-promotion but through self-giving. And He invites us to do the same.

How to avoid it: Regularly examine your motives. Are you building something that will outlast you because it’s built on Christ? Or are you constructing paper castles that will crumble the moment your name is forgotten? Holy ambition makes His name great, not your name known.

Grace for the Journey

If you’re reading this and feeling convicted (I certainly am as I write it), remember: conviction isn’t condemnation. The point isn’t to shame you for getting it wrong. The point is to invite you into something better.

You don’t have to create perfectly. You don’t have to avoid every mistake. You just need to keep coming back to the One who made you, who gave you these gifts, who’s inviting you to participate in His Story through your work.

Create for Him. Trust Him with the results. Find your identity in His approval, not the world’s applause. That’s the path to creative work that lasts, that satisfies, that matters.

And when you stumble (and you will), get back up. His mercies are new every morning. Even for creatives who keep making the same mistakes.

Growing up in Jos, we would hear stories of missionaries who came from the West—Anglicans, Baptists, Brethren, and others whose denominational distinctions mattered far less than their shared conviction that the gospel was worth their lives. Many died without seeing the fruit of their sacrifice. Many remain unnamed, their graves unmarked except in the memory of God. A century later, we find ourselves facing the same fierce opposition, the same persecution of Christians across the North.

I was ten years old on September 7th, 2001. My sister and I ran through the streets of Jos that day, trying to find a safe place, desperately searching for our parents. Behind us we could hear the chants of the murderers, accompanied by the cries of the dying. We saw houses looted and burnt down. We saw people pursued, maimed, and killed. Terrible things children should never see. It is only by God’s grace that we are alive. I am thirty-four now, and in the years between that terrified child and the man writing these words, perhaps 60,000 people have been killed across the Middle Belt and Northern Nigeria. It has become almost impossible to find a northerner who hasn’t lost a loved one—family or friend.

What troubles me deeply is how our brothers and sisters in the South have largely ignored or dismissed our experiences. An older friend told me recently that I expect too much from people. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps my expectations reveal more about my own need for the comfort that should flow naturally within the body of Christ.

But I wonder if part of the problem lies in our theology of suffering. It seems to me that for many believers, their version of the gospel story doesn’t make room for suffering—at least not this kind, not on this scale, not happening to people who are praying faithfully and living righteously. But is that true? Does the biblical narrative actually promise us immunity from violence and loss?

Consider what Jesus tells his apostles before his ascension: they will suffer for him, and some will die for him. This isn’t a footnote to the gospel; it’s woven into its fabric. We see it happen to Stephen, the deacon, in the first pages of Acts. We see it in the blood of martyrs throughout the Roman Empire. We see it today in Pakistan, North Korea, China, Sudan, and Nigeria. In Nigeria, entire communities are being systematically killed and wiped out—what else can we call this but genocide?

Some deny this reality. This is to be expected from those who benefit from the status quo. What is painfully harder to understand is when we hear similar denials from Southern Christians, our own brothers and sisters in Christ.

The Pattern of Christ’s Suffering

Here’s what we must understand: the suffering of Northern Nigerian Christians isn’t peripheral to the gospel—it participates in the very pattern of Christ’s own suffering. When Paul writes that he rejoices in his sufferings and seeks to “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24), he’s not suggesting the cross was insufficient. Rather, he’s recognizing that the church’s suffering becomes a way of bearing witness to the crucified and risen Lord in every generation and every place.

This is the scandal that a gospel promising only blessing and comfort cannot accommodate, that comfortable Christianity desperately wants to explain away. But it’s the pattern Jesus himself established: “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). The servant is not above his master. To follow Christ is not merely to benefit from his work but to share in his sufferings, to take up our cross, to lose our life in order to find it. The suffering church in Northern Nigeria isn’t experiencing something foreign to authentic Christianity—they’re living out one of its deepest truths.

In Revelation, Jesus commends the church in Smyrna—the suffering church—calling them rich despite their poverty and affliction. He encourages them to remain faithful unto death, for a crown of life awaits them. And there, almost in passing, he mentions Antipas: “my faithful witness, who was killed among you.” We know virtually nothing else about him. No social media presence, no influence, no affluence. Unknown to us. But famous to Jesus. Known and named by him. Famous in heaven.

This is what I think of when I hear about our faithful pastors in the North—men and women whose names we may never know, who don’t have platforms or podcasts, who shepherd small congregations in vulnerable villages. They refuse to deny their Lord, and now a crown awaits them. I pray I would have the same faith if that moment came for me.

The Spiritual Discipline We’ve Forgotten

But here’s what grieves me: the Nigerian church—and particularly the Southern church—has largely lost the biblical practice of corporate lament. We’ve forgotten that the largest book in the Bible is a hymnal filled with songs of sorrow, anger, confusion, and pain offered up to God in faith. The Psalms teach us that genuine faith doesn’t require us to minimize suffering or rush toward resolution. Lament is itself an act of faith that declares, “This is wrong, and God cares that it’s wrong.”

When we refuse to lament—when we move too quickly to theological explanations, political analysis, or spiritual platitudes—we’re not demonstrating faith. We’re demonstrating fear. Fear that if we truly felt the weight of this suffering, it might undo us. Fear that if we truly acknowledged the depth of this evil, we’d have to change how we live.

Our silence isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity dressed up as peace. And it betrays a tragic misunderstanding of the gospel itself. Jesus didn’t theologize at Lazarus’s tomb before he acted—he wept. He stood in solidarity with human grief even though he knew resurrection was moments away. If the Son of God could weep at a grave he was about to empty, surely we can weep with our brothers and sisters whose graves multiply daily.

The Nigerian church needs to recover this ancient spiritual practice. We need to create space in our services, our conferences, our gatherings for corporate lament. Not as a brief acknowledgment before we move to celebration, but as a sustained practice that shapes how we see the world and how we pray. Lament that names the evil clearly. Lament that refuses to explain it away. Lament that holds God to his promises while acknowledging our pain and confusion.

When Theology Becomes a Shield

I must say this gently but firmly: some Christians have begun using theology as a buffer against compassion. They’ll debate whether this constitutes genocide. They’ll question whether it’s “really” persecution or simply criminal violence. They’ll analyze the proper political response, the historical context, the complex ethnic dynamics. And while they’re debating, real people—people who love Jesus as we claim to—are burying their children.

Please understand: there is a place for careful analysis. Wisdom requires that we understand the forces at play, that we avoid simplistic narratives, that we think deeply about long-term solutions. But when theology becomes a way to avoid the inconvenient demands of love, when intellectual rigor becomes a reason not to act, when doctrinal precision shields us from feeling what we should feel—then it has ceased to be Christian theology at all. It has become, in Paul’s words, a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.

The Good Samaritan didn’t stop to debate whether the beaten man’s suffering resulted from poor life choices or systemic injustice or divine providence. He saw, he felt compassion, and he acted. Jesus presents this as the model of what it means to love our neighbor. Not because analysis is wrong, but because love doesn’t wait for perfect understanding before it responds to immediate need.

But what should we do—we who aren’t in immediate danger, we who have more, we who live in relative safety?

We must pray for the saints in the North. Not perfunctory prayers, but the kind that wrestle with God and refuse to let go until blessing comes. In your local assembly, ask your pastors and elders to make this a regular point of intercession—not a one-time mention, but a sustained commitment woven into the life of your church. When we gather as the body of Christ, we should be bearing one another’s burdens in concrete, specific ways. This means naming the suffering of our Northern brothers and sisters before God week after week, until either the situation changes or Christ returns. We must amplify their voices rather than speaking over them or explaining away their suffering. We should mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep—which means we must first be willing to listen to their mourning and witness their tears.

We can partner with churches, agencies, and organizations offering relief in the North, though we must do our research carefully because, as Jesus warned, wolves do come in sheep’s clothing. And finally—and I say this with all the gentleness I can muster—if you cannot help them, then at the very least, do not add to their harm by denying their suffering.

The gospel doesn’t promise us escape from suffering. It promises us something far more profound: that our suffering is never meaningless, never wasted, never forgotten by the One who himself became acquainted with grief. He sees. He knows. He remembers. And he calls those who endure in faith his own faithful witnesses.

To Antipas—and to all the unnamed faithful martyrs in Northern Nigeria—you are not forgotten. Not by heaven. And not, if we have any integrity at all, by us.

In the ancient, labyrinthine alleys of Varanasi, one of the world’s oldest living cities, the sound of looms is the rhythm of life. Here, generation after generation of weavers, often father and son, create the world’s most luxurious silk saris. The father, the master weaver, holds the knowledge of the complex naqsha (the design map) in his mind. The son, sitting at the loom, executes a small, repetitive, yet complex sequence with his hands. He rarely holds the full, intricate design in his mind; he doesn’t need to see the entire final sari, only the next instruction given by his father, whose vision encompasses the whole magnificent cloth.

For years, I approached my own life like that son trying to be the master designer. I tried to write my own story. I would have said I was just living my life, making choices, pursuing goals. But underneath was this assumption: I’m the author here. My life is a blank page, and it’s up to me to fill it with meaning. For a while, that felt empowering. But eventually, the cracks began to show. When you’re writing your own story, the pressure is crushing. Every failure becomes an indictment. Every setback feels like proof that you’re not enough. This is where the gospel meets us. Not with condemnation, but with relief. Because the gospel doesn’t say, “Try harder to write a better story.” It says, “You were never meant to write your own story in the first place.”

You’re Not Writing a New Story. You’re Discovering Your Place in an Existing One.

Here’s what’s frustrating for many of us: we don’t know what our story is. We don’t know where it leads. We’re living in the middle of a narrative we can’t fully see, and the uncertainty can be maddening. But as I’ve come to discover, knowing your story comes through knowing the Author. Hebrews 12:2 calls Jesus “the author and finisher of our faith.” The righteous shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4), not by having the entire plot mapped out in advance. Just like the son at the loom trusts his father’s final vision for the sari, faith means trusting the Author even when you can’t see the next chapter. The more we get to know His Story, the more we discover our place in it. The more we understand what God has been doing since before creation, the more our own lives begin to make sense within that larger narrative. Consider Jesus. He came, as Hebrews 10:7 says, “in the volume of the book” to do the will of the Father. His story was written. His work was prepared. And He walked it out in perfect obedience, trusting the Father every step of the way. This is our pattern. Just as Jesus came to do the Father’s will, so we must go to Him to discover that our story has already been written. Ephesians 2:10 makes this explicit: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Read that carefully. The good works were prepared in advance. Before you were born, God was already weaving your story into His. Your calling isn’t something you manufacture, like forcing a new thread into the loom. It’s something you discover through relationship with the One who authored it, patiently following the pattern He’s already set.

So How Do We Find Our Story in His Story?

This is the question that matters. And the answer is both simple and profound: we must walk the path Jesus walked.

We Must Be Led by the Spirit.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness (Luke 4:1). He moved in step with the Spirit’s timing and direction. We’re called to do the same. Romans 8:14 tells us, “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.“ Finding your story means learning to hear His voice—the gentle, specific instruction for the next sequence—to follow where He guides even when the ultimate pattern of the silk isn’t clear.

We Must Walk in the Spirit.

This isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a daily rhythm. Galatians 5:25 says, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.“ Walking implies movement, progress, consistency. It’s not dramatic; it’s the steady, focused work of the weaver’s hands—the rhythmic motion of the loom, day after day, staying in step with God’s pace and direction.

We Must Stay in the Word.

Your story unfolds as you immerse yourself in His Story. Scripture is the Master Design, the ancient schematic that describes the finished work and reveals the character of the Weaver. It’s the primary way God reveals Himself, His character, His purposes. Psalm 119:105 captures this beautifully: “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.“ Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t promise floodlights illuminating your entire future. It promises a lamp for your feet, a light for your path. Enough light for the next step. And as you take that step in obedience, more light appears. This is how your story in His Story unfolds, one illuminated step at a time.

We Must Talk to Our Father Daily.

Prayer isn’t transactional. It’s relational. You’re not trying to convince God to give you what you want. You’re cultivating intimacy with the Author of your story. You’re learning His voice, His heart, His ways. And through that relationship, you begin to discern how your story fits into His. Jesus modeled this. He withdrew regularly to pray (Luke 5:16). He spent whole nights in conversation with the Father (Luke 6:12). His story unfolded through this constant communion. Ours does too.

The Freedom of Not Being the Author

When I finally stopped trying to be the Master Designer and started discovering my place as the obedient, faithful apprentice at the loom of God’s Story, something shifted. Not because life became easier, but because I was no longer carrying the crushing burden of perfecting the entire tapestry myself, and was free to be the masterpiece God designed me to be (Ephesians 2:10). My past began to make sense as preparation. My present gained purpose as a place where God is at work. My future filled with hope, not because I have it all figured out, but because I know the Author. This is what it means to find your story in His Story. Not to have all the answers, but to know the One who does. Not to see the entire path, but to trust the Guide who lights the next step. That teenager lying awake at night asking “Where do we come from?” has grown into a man learning a better question: “Whose am I, and where is He leading?” And the answer isn’t found in anxious self-examination. It’s found in daily, faithful relationship with the Author and Finisher of our faith. Walk with Him. Listen to Him. Trust Him. Your story is already written. Now live it.

As a teenager, I kept asking a question that wouldn’t let me go: Where do we come from?

I didn’t know it then, but what I was really asking was a different question entirely. Not “Where do we come from?” Whose story are we in?”

Because if there’s a God (and the order I saw in the world made it hard to believe there wasn’t), then His story is the story. Everything else, including my story, would have to be understood in light of His.

So what is God’s story? What has He been doing since before time began? If we’re honest, that question should fill us with wonder and maybe a little fear. We’re asking about Someone infinite, eternal, wholly other than us. And yet, remarkably, He’s told us His story. Not all of it, surely enough.

Before There Was Anything, There Was God.

This is where the story begins, though “begins” isn’t quite the right word. God doesn’t have a beginning. He simply is. Has always been. Will always be.

And what was God doing before creation? The Trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit) existed in perfect love, perfect communion, perfect joy. God wasn’t lonely. He wasn’t bored. He didn’t need anything or anyone. He was complete in Himself, love eternally giving and receiving within the Godhead.

Which makes what happens next even more staggering.

God Creates.

Not because He had to. Not because He was incomplete without us because this is what love does: it overflows. It shares. It creates.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). He speaks, and galaxies form. He commands, and oceans appear. He designs ecosystems, gravitational constants, the dance of subatomic particles. He makes a world that reflects His glory, His beauty, His inexhaustible creativity.

And then He does something even more intimate. He forms humanity from the dust. Breathes His own breath into us. Makes us in His image, capable of knowing Him, loving Him, creating alongside Him. He walks with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the day. The Creator dwelling with His creatures. Intimacy without barrier. Relationship without shame.

God looks at all He’s made and declares it “very good.” This is His world, His story, and it’s just beginning.

But Then, The Rebellion.

Humanity chooses autonomy. We want to write our own story, be our own gods, define our own good and evil. We listen to the serpent’s ancient lie: “You will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). As if we aren’t already made in His image. As if being creatures is somehow beneath us.

And everything breaks.

We’re exiled from the garden. The ground now resists our efforts. Relationships fracture. Death enters. The intimate communion we were made for becomes a distant memory. We hide from God. We’re ashamed. We’re afraid.

Notice: we run from God. God runs toward us.

God Pursues.

This is the part of the story I never expected. If I were God, I think I would have started over. Wiped the slate clean. Tried again with creatures who wouldn’t betray me God doesn’t do that.

Instead, He pursues. He makes garments to cover Adam and Eve’s shame. He promises that one day, someone will crush the serpent’s head. He chooses Abraham and makes a covenant: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” He delivers Israel from slavery in Egypt. He gives them His law, not as a burden but as a gift, showing them how to live as His people in His world.

Again and again, Israel breaks covenant. They chase other gods. They build their own towers, trying to make names for themselves. And again and again, God pursues. He sends prophets. He disciplines. He pleads. He promises a coming day when He will make all things new.

The entire Old Testament is the story of God refusing to give up on His people even when His people give up on Him.

Then, The Unthinkable.

God enters His own story. Not as a conquering king with armies. Not as a philosopher with arguments as a baby, born in a stable in Bethlehem. The Word becomes flesh. The Creator becomes creature. The Infinite becomes finite.

This is where the story becomes too strange to be something humans would invent. What kind of God does this?

Jesus, God the Son, lives the life we should have lived. Fully obedient to the Father. Fully human yet without sin. He teaches with authority, heals the sick, casts out demons, forgives sins. He claims to be one with the Father. He says things like, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He’s declaring Himself to be YHWH, the God of Israel, the Creator of the universe.

And then He’s arrested. Beaten. Mocked. Crucified between two criminals on a Roman cross.

This is the moment. This is where God deals with our rebellion, our exile, our death. The sinless One takes on our sin. The life-giver tastes death. The King is crowned with thorns. He who knew no separation from the Father cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

He dies. God dies. The Creator submits to death to rescue His creatures.

And then, on the third day, God vindicates Jesus. The tomb is empty. Death itself is defeated. Jesus appears to His disciples, alive, bearing the scars of crucifixion but radiating resurrection life. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” He declares (Matthew 28:18).

The story has turned. Death, the great enemy, has been swallowed up in victory.

God Sends His Spirit.

At Pentecost, God pours out His Spirit on His people. The same presence that filled the tabernacle, that rested on the prophets, now indwells every believer. God doesn’t just walk with His people as He did in Eden. He lives in them. The temple is no longer a building in Jerusalem. It’s the gathered community of those who trust in Jesus.

And God commissions His people: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). The story that began with one couple in a garden is now spreading to every tribe, tongue, and nation. God is reclaiming His world, restoring what was broken, making all things new.

And God Will Finish What He Started.

This is where we are now. Living in the tension between “already” and “not yet.” Jesus has won the victory, we’re still waiting for the final act. The kingdom has been inaugurated but not yet consummated. Creation still groans, longing for its liberation (Romans 8:22).

We know how the story ends. We’ve read the last chapter. One day, Jesus will return. Not as a baby in a manger, as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He will judge the living and the dead. He will make all things new. And then, finally, God will dwell with His people again.

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4).

The story that began with God will end with God. Creation, fall, redemption, restoration. It’s all His story. And somehow, impossibly, graciously, He’s invited us into it.

This Is God’s Story.

Not ours. We’re not the heroes. We’re not even reliable supporting characters. We’re the ones who rebelled, who ran, who hide.

God is the hero. God pursues. God enters. God rescues. God restores.

And that’s the only story that’s ever satisfied my soul. Not because I invented it or because it makes me feel important because it rings so deeply true that I can’t help but stake my life on it.

That teenager lying awake at night asking “Where do we come from?” has grown into a man who’s found his answer: We come from God. We exist in His story. And incredibly, wonderfully, He’s written us into it not as footnotes but as beloved children.

This is the Story of God. And it’s the only story that matters.

There’s a famous recruitment ad attributed to Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

Whether Shackleton actually wrote those exact words is debated. But what isn’t debatable is that thousands of men applied. They were willing to risk everything for the chance to do something extraordinary.

Nearly fifty years later, President John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University and declared, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade... not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” And they did. Less than a decade later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface.

Human ambition is a staggering thing to witness. We’ve built pyramids that have stood for millennia. We’ve engineered cities that house millions. Men have sailed across treacherous seas to colonize continents, conquer kingdoms, accumulate wealth that could sustain dynasties for a thousand lifetimes. We’ve descended to the deepest trenches of the ocean and sent robots to Mars. We’ve split the atom and mapped the human genome. When humans set their minds to something, when ambition takes hold, we accomplish the seemingly impossible.

And yet.

There’s a shadow that falls across all of this. Because if you trace the thread of human ambition through Scripture, you find something troubling. The first city in the Bible isn’t built for community or flourishing – it’s built by Cain, a murderer, creating a legacy for his son Enoch (Genesis 4:17). Later, at Babel, humanity comes together in a unified act of ambition. But their stated goal? “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4).

Make a name for ourselves. There it is. The heart of human ambition laid bare.

And we still do this, don’t we? We still build towers – perhaps not of brick and mortar, but of achievements, platforms, reputations. We still want to make a name for ourselves. To be remembered. To matter. To leave a mark that says, “I was here.”

Jesus cuts through this with a haunting question: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36). You can build your tower. You can make your name. You can achieve everything you set out to do. And still lose the one thing that matters most.

So what are we to do with ambition? Does the gospel tell us to kill it? To become passive, to stop striving, to accept mediocrity as some kind of false humility?

I don’t think so. I think the gospel does something far more profound: it doesn’t destroy our ambition – it reorients it.

Holy ambition desires God’s name great, not your own name known.

Listen to how Paul speaks of his own life: “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation” (Romans 15:20). Paul uses the word “ambition” without apology. He had drive. He had vision. He wanted to do something significant. But notice the direction: his ambition was to make Christ known in places where He wasn’t yet known. Not to make Paul known. Not to build Paul’s legacy. To extend Christ’s kingdom.

William Carey, the 18th-century missionary, put it this way: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Not “stop attempting great things.” Not “give up your dreams.” But redirect them. Reorient them. Let them be captured and transformed by something infinitely greater than your own legacy.

Holy ambition is ambition finally finding its true north.

The difference between worldly ambition and holy ambition isn’t the size of the dream. It’s the source of the dream and the purpose behind it. Worldly ambition says, “I want to make a name for myself.” Holy ambition says, “I want to make His name great.” Worldly ambition builds paper castles – impressive from a distance, but incapable of withstanding the first real storm. Holy ambition builds on the rock, creating things that last not because they carry our name, but because they serve His kingdom.

Paul captures this tension beautifully: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Whatever you do. Not just “spiritual” things. Not just missions or ministry. Whatever. That includes your business, your art, your research, your teaching, your parenting. The gospel doesn’t shrink the scope of what you’re allowed to care about – it expands it by giving you a better reason to care.

Holy ambition is what happens when the gospel captures your dreams without crushing them.

What’s fascinating is that when you stop trying to make a name for yourself and start living for the glory of God, you actually become more ambitious, not less. Because you’re freed from the crushing weight of having to manufacture your own significance. You’re freed from the anxiety of legacy – what if I’m forgotten? What if this doesn’t work? What if I fail? You can dream bigger, risk more, attempt the impossible, because your identity isn’t riding on the outcome.

This is what happens when ambition is redeemed. It doesn’t die. It gets redirected toward something that actually satisfies. Toward Someone who actually lasts.

So dream your big dreams. Build your cities. Attempt your moonshots. But build them for a kingdom that will never fall. Attempt them for a King who already made a name for Himself by taking on a cross. And when you do, you’ll find that holy ambition is far more exhilarating, far more satisfying, far more eternal than anything you could have built in your own name.

Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.

That’s an ambition worth living for.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”

I’ve read this verse a hundred times, and I still find it both beautiful and unsettling.

Beautiful, because it tells me that what I do today (writing this post, answering emails, preparing a meal) can somehow matter to God. That there’s no sacred-secular divide where some work counts as spiritual and the rest is just... existence. Paul doesn’t make distinctions. He says whatever you do. All of it can be worship.

Yet working “with all your heart” as if for the Lord requires something I don’t naturally have. The ability to give my best when no one’s watching. When no one’s applauding. When the only one who sees is God.

And if I’m honest? I’m far better at working for human masters.

I say this even as a founder, an entrepreneur who doesn’t technically have a boss. You’d think that would free me from this trap. But it doesn’t. I’ve simply replaced one set of masters with another – the audience, the metrics, the peers whose validation I unconsciously seek. The absence of a traditional boss hasn’t made me any more liberated. It’s just made my performance more subtle, more diffuse, harder to name.

I know how to perform when someone’s looking. When my work will be evaluated. When there are metrics to track and people to impress. I’ve mastered the art of working just hard enough to get noticed, just excellently enough to be praised. I know exactly how to calibrate my effort to match the size of my audience.

Paul is inviting me, inviting us, into something entirely different. He’s saying that the primary audience for your work isn’t your boss, your clients, your followers on social media, or even your family. It’s the Lord. And He’s already watching. Whether anyone else notices or not.

This isn’t just a motivational trick, as if Paul is saying, “Pretend God is your boss and you’ll work harder.” He’s making a far more radical claim: God is the one you’re actually working for. Your employer might pay you, but they’re not your real master. You’re working for the One who made you, redeemed you, knows you completely, and still loves you.

When this truth begins to take root, the work is transformed from the inside out. It transforms what work actually means – and therefore what it is.

When I’m working for human approval, my work becomes transactional. I’m trading effort for validation. I’m performing to prove something. Yet when I’m working for the Lord, or at least when I remember I’m working for Him, the work becomes something else entirely. It becomes an act of stewardship. A way of reflecting the image of the Creator who Himself worked with care and excellence when He spoke the world into being.

The heart of this verse, I think, isn’t really about productivity or trying harder. It’s asking a more fundamental question: Where does your heart find its rest? And whose opinion actually determines your worth?

Because if I’m working for human masters (even good ones, even Christian ones) I’m going to be perpetually anxious. Always performing. Always wondering if I’ve done enough, if I’m enough. The approval I’m chasing will never quite satisfy, and the validation will always feel one step away.

If I’m working for the Lord, though? Then I can work with both diligence and peace. Diligence, because I’m serving the King of the universe. Peace, because I’m already His beloved child before I produce anything. My identity isn’t riding on my performance. I’m not earning His love. I already have it.

That’s what I think Paul means by “heart work.” It’s not just working hard. It’s working from a heart that’s already secure. Already loved. Already home.

I’m still learning this. Most days, I still work like I’m trying to earn something. Every now and then, though, I catch a glimpse of what it might feel like to work freely, joyfully, for an audience of One who already delights in me.

And on those days, even the ordinary work feels sacred.