There’s a reason for that.

Over the years, whenever I’ve faced difficulty, I’ve executed a habit of reading the Psalms until I hear my own voice within the words. And when I do, whether it takes one, two, or 20 psalms, I camp there as long as I need. I read it over and over until it reads me. Indeed, the Word of the Lord is restorative1.

As such, this week’s article is a simple extension of that exercise.

That leads me to you, of course, because as I’ve prayed for you recently, I’ve had a profound sense that many of you have been wrestling with feeling like nomads in life, parched in soul, and desperate for the settled sense of “home” in your restless heart, even as you gaze across an open field of what looks like the wreckage of regret, disappointment, and confusion from your past and present.

Perhaps you’re reading this from such a depleted state that you’re unable to identify the source of your malaise. Or maybe you’re at your wits’ end, having reeled and staggered through a seemingly unending stretch of time that emptied every reserve you thought you had. If that’s you, I want you to know that I’m not writing from the other side. I’ve prayed the prayer of the depleted more than once, and I’ve watched the Lord meet me in it.

But it’s right there that I want to hover, because what many of us do when we reach that place of exhaustion is we go looking for a mirror—a reflection from outside of us that validates the chaos brewing within. Maybe like me, you want a psalm that will reflect your lassitude and assure you it all makes sense. Sounds particularly nice, doesn’t it?

Well, that’s exactly what I didn’t find in Psalm 107.

Four Roads Into the Dark, and No Two Are the Same

If you’ve never really sat in Psalm 107, let me paint a picture of its poetic arc before we go further (you might also take a moment to read the whole passage right now). It’s a song sung by people the psalmist calls “the redeemed of the Lord,” looking back on trouble they’ve already been carried through by the mighty hand of God.

And the psalm moves in a pattern that repeats four times. It goes like this: here is a kind of person in trouble; then they cried out to the Lord; then He delivered them; then let them give thanks for His steadfast love.

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Therein are four different troubles, one repeated rescue, and one repeated offering of thanks. And so, as we unpack this subject together, I want you to keep that cycle in your ear, because we’re about to watch it turn four times, and the people caught in it did not all arrive in the dark the same way.

The Portraits of Despair

What I find so fascinating is that the psalmist doesn’t give us one portrait of trouble. Instead, he gives us four; each of which will inevitably become personal to us at some point in time. But before you can appreciate the assurance of comfort in this psalm, you have to see something many of us will rush past, which is that these four sufferers did not all arrive at their place of despair the same way. Two of them can trace the road in with their own footprints, but two of them cannot. And the psalm isn’t unambiguous about any.

Some “wandered in desert wastes,” hungry and thirsty, as their souls fainted within them. Others went down to the sea in ships, doing honest business on the great waters, and yet it was the Lord Himself Who “commanded and raised the stormy wind” that reduced them to terror (yikes!). Nobody sinned their way into that desert or summoned that storm. One was simply lost, and the other was just doing his job when the deep waters rose. That’s a tough day.

Now, I want you to observe the other two, because the psalm is just as deliberate about describing them. Psalm 107, Verse 11 (in the ESV) tells us that the prisoners sat in darkness and the shadow of death “for they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.” And verse 17 says the afflicted were “fools through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction.”

Let’s be clear. These two groups of people are not lost travelers who caught a bad break. Their chains and their sickbeds have a root cause, and the Bible, without hesitation, tells us exactly what it is: rebellion, iniquity, and poor choices that came home to roost.

So, we have two groups who did nothing to earn their dark night, and two who can trace a road with their own footprints on it. What’s the point? Real trouble is usually mixed.

Here’s what I mean:

Your desert (whatever it is) may be partly the result of your choices and mostly a circumstance you never chose (or the other way around).

And the maddening part of it all is that you may not be able to tell where one ends and the other begins. That’s why we have to discern the two-sided mercy of the Lord in this. Scripture withholds blame from two of these people. And so, as it pertains to you, you are not required to obsessively and compulsively comb your wilderness for a hidden sin the Lord (or your community) has not made you aware of. You can lay down the false and unnecessary guilt He never placed on you.

But in the same breath, the psalmist names the sin of the other two plainly, which also means that you are not free to excuse genuine rebellion, or file your own iniquity under things that merely “happened” to you (these days, we’re quick to pathologize our wounds and create identities out of them, thus adopting the identity of “victim”). That’s why I love the thoroughness of this particular psalm. It keeps you out of the ditches of both false guilt and baseless excuses.

Now, let’s take our examination a bit deeper.

The Wanderer and the Sailor Were Not Handed a Verdict

Consider the wanderer first, as described in verses 4 and 5. The Bible tells us that “Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in, hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them.” And now, watch what the Lord does. Verse 7 says, “He led them by a straight way till they reached a city to dwell in.” Then, in one of the tenderest lines in the whole Psalter, verse 9 says, “For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”

The encouragement I take from this verse is that if your soul is fainting within you, and Scripture hasn’t handed you a specific reason for it, don’t invent one to torture yourself with (as is common for us overthinkers and perfectionists).

The Lord is not standing over you with a ledger and a worn-out wooden ruler like a cantankerous, itchy, past-the-expiration-date parochial teacher. Rather, He is the kind of God…the kind of Father…Who satisfies a longing soul.

Make no mistake about that.

Now, the sailor, as portrayed later in Psalm 107, is cut from the same cloth. He’s no rebel. He’s simply an honest working man doing legitimate business on deep water. And yet, verse 25 tells us plainly that it was the Lord Who “commanded and raised the stormy wind.”

What conclusion are we to draw from this example? I think it’s this: Sometimes the storm that has you reeling is not chastening for anything you did. It is simply the byproduct of living in a broken world awaiting redemption, and equally, the sheer essence of a God Whose wondrous works are faithfully exacted amid troublesome times.

The metanarrative, therefore, is that the wanderer wanted a city and the sailor wanted a harbor. And the God of steadfast love was at work in both, not because either had performed well enough to earn His redemption, but because a Redeemer is simply Who He is.

The Prisoner and the Fool Are Holding a Key They Won’t Turn

Now we turn the page to the harder of the four portraits, and I’m not going to bubble-wrap the description of either of them. Psalm 107 depicts the prisoner who sits in irons in darkness and the shadow of death. Verse 11 tells us why, of course. He “rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.”

In no surprising fashion, we live in a cultural moment that would rather call a situation like this anything other than sin. But that’s exactly what it is. And here, we witness a strong will that has looked squarely at the counsel of Heaven in decided defiance. Yet despite this, watch what the Lord does for the very one who spurned His word.

Psalm 107:14 tells us that the Lord “brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart.” Verse 16 continues, telling us that He “shatters the doors of bronze and cuts in two the bars of iron.” And of course, verse 20 brings it home: “He sent out his word and healed them.” This is the age-enduring kindness of the Lord at work. The very word they would not heed is the very word that heals them. He’s that good.

Of course, the fool is the one suffering the consequences of his own choices, and the psalm is unsentimental about it, informing us that he was a fool “through his sinful ways,” his iniquities brought the affliction, and that he’d ruined his appetite for everything until he was loitering at the gates of death.

If I can be so matter-of-fact, I’ll say that if that’s where you are right now—if you’re living inside the wreckage of decisions you actually made—I’m not going to placate you by pretending you landed there by accident. And yet, even in this place, the fool discovers that the same cry that saved the wanderer saves the fool. He cries, and the Lord delivers him.

The Same Cry Saved Every One of Them

Four times, the psalm turns on the same hinge, word for word, proclaiming, “Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.”

Wanderer, prisoner, fool, sailor.

Different roads in, one road out.

In every case, the cry of the broken is not a method. It’s the sound a soul makes when it stops trying to rescue or sustain itself. It’s the end of your self-protection, the end of your strategizing, and the end of the exhausting project of being your own deliverer.

Frankly, if you could have engineered your way out of the desert, you’d have done it by now. If you could have willed the storm quiet, it would already be still. But neither is true, is it? That’s why the cry is simply surrender to the only One Who can calm the storm within and without.

But where does a cry like that even come from when you’re too depleted to pray?

Read what the apostle Paul says in Romans 8:26 (ESV): “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” In other words, the Holy Spirit does not stand back and wait for you to compose yourself. He reaches into your fainting soul and helps you pray the prayer you cannot form in and of yourself. And even your groaning is not beneath His notice.

You Will Not Be Heard Because You Cried Well

So if the cry is not a learned technique, why does it work at all? Here’s the beating heart of the whole psalm, and if you miss what I’m about to show you, you’ll turn this scripture into a formula. And formulas will always fail you at the worst possible moment.

Four times, after each deliverance, the psalmist repeats a second refrain most of us read right past. Let’s look at it again: “Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!”

Steadfast love.

In the Hebrew, the word for “steadfast love” is hesed, which is the covenant loyalty of a God Who has bound Himself to His people and will not renegotiate the terms. In practical terms, this means that you are not heard because you cried well, but because the One to Whom you cried is faithful. And His faithfulness was already moving toward you before the sound ever left your mouth.

He’s not a passive God waiting to be activated by your performance; He’s a faithful God Whose love goes first. And your cry is the answer to His initiative, not the initiator of it. Of course He hears; He is that kind of God. That’s good news for the depleted.

When the Storm Doesn’t Still on Your Schedule

Having said that, I have to tell you something, because I care for you too much to hand you a psalm your own life circumstance might seem to disprove by Thursday of this week. The four people in Psalm 107 are on the other side of rescue. They’re the redeemed, and shouting about it. And a thanksgiving song, by its very nature, is sung by the ones who lived to sing it.

We’re not hearing from the wanderer who died still thirsty, or the sailor who went down with the ship. This isn’t even the “hall of faith” we read about in Hebrews chapter 11—those who died in faith not having received their promise.

I say that not to frighten or discourage you, but to keep you from a misconception that has shipwrecked stronger faith than what you think you possess. The lie says if the deliverance hasn’t come by now, you must have cried wrongly (or not performed well enough to receive that which you require).

Hear me carefully. What this psalm guarantees is not a timetable and not a particular shape of rescue.

What it guarantees is hesed, the unfailing, incalculable, steadfast love of the Lord.

His hesed is certain and unflinching. You cannot separate His nature from His ways. Its arrival in your circumstance may look like a stilled storm, or it may look like strength to stand in a storm that keeps on raging, or it may, in the end, look like resurrection, when every earthly harbor has failed, and He brings you to the only home that was ever finally the point.

The point is, trust Him in the process, timing, and method.

God’s faithfulness is the promise. As I just said, the form and the timing are His to hold, and we trust Him in that. So in your circumstance, you don’t cry just because crying in and of itself moves the heart of God (though we celebrate the fact that He is near to the brokenhearted2). More specifically, you cry because He is faithful and unchanging, and He will not fail you3, even when deliverance is still on the way. Indeed, “all the paths of the Lord are mercy and steadfast love, even truth and faithfulness are they for those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.”4

Deliverance Was Never the Destination

Here’s what I don’t want you to miss, and it’s why the second refrain is as imperative as the first. The Lord does not rescue you so you can go back to running your own life with slightly better circumstances (preaching to myself here). He rescues you into thanksgiving, into belonging to Him, and into a life indexed around His steadfast love. That’s why…

Your deliverance is merely the doorway, not the room in which to abide.

And that’s why this ancient psalm about deserts and dungeons is not dusty literature you’re merely scanning with modern eyes. The Word tells us all Scripture (yeah, all of it) is “profitable... for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV), which means that this psalm intends to form you, and not merely console you. So please, my friend, let it.

But where is all of this headed? What’s the summit of the mountain we’re climbing?

Psalm 107 ends by handing you the one posture that turns all of this from mere information into effective spiritual formation unto maturity. Check out verse 43, which implores us thusly: “Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord.”

The wise, mature disciple learns to read his or her own affliction, whatever its cause, in the light of hesed. This disciple stops asking only how he/she gets out of this, and starts asking where the steadfast love of the Lord is in this, and what the Lord is forming in him through it.

It’s like this:

“Lord, Who do You want to be for me now in this season that I’ve not known You to be at any other point in my life?”

That question is the beginning of wholeness, and it’s available to you before one thing about your circumstance has ever changed. I know that’s uncomfortable to hear, but it’s true.

So I suppose here’s where I stop explaining things. Psalm 107 doesn’t end in analysis; it ends with a clarion call, and it’s this: The wise will do more than understand this teaching in principle. They’ll literally cry out to the Lord in their distress.

So…cry. Not beautifully or correctly, and not once you’ve finally assembled the right words. Cry the way a fainting soul cries when it finally quits trying to save itself.

If you’re the wanderer or the sailor, cry in raw dependence to a God Who was never holding a verdict over you to begin with. If you’re the prisoner or the fool, cry the cry that has a specific, repentant label, and let the identification be honest before the Lord. Call the rebellion what it is…rebellion. Own the mess you made. And then watch our gracious Lord send out the Word to heal you anyway on account of His faithfulness to His own Word.

And now, here’s the costly part, the part any exhausted disciple resists most: before a single circumstance has shifted, you must give thanks. Not for the circumstance you find yourself in, of course, but thanks for a steadfast love that endures forever and was already moving toward you in the dark.

The redeemed have always given thanks on the far side of the storm. But the wise? Oh, the wise learn to give thanks on the near side of it, while the waves are still loud and overwhelming.

If you’re still not convinced of my admonition today, I want you to know that I’m not asking you to do a single thing I’m not doing alongside you. So let’s lift the cry together, from whatever storm we’re standing in. Let’s “say so” with calculated determination, for He is good and His steadfast love endures forever.

You can stop bracing for impact.

Selah in His hesed.

I believe in you.

In many cases, we’ve built a version of Jesus who stays with people as they are (instead of calling them to pursue maturity and transformation). Frankly, though, I understand why. That version of Jesus is easier to follow and cheaper to offer to people. It’s almost like that Jesus is a progressive spiritual teacher at best. But my deeper concern is that what gets quietly removed in the construction of that persona is the side of His character that actually confronts and transforms us to become mature people of love. Well, I’ve been watching this happen for a couple of years, and as a pastor, I want to name the theological problem underneath it precisely, because the damage it’s doing is quiet and insidious.

There’s a phrase that carries this theological paradigm most efficiently, and it’s one you’ve almost certainly said yourself (or heard so many times it’s stopped sounding like a claim). Here it is:

“Meet people where they’re at.”

In many evangelical circles (particularly the seeker-sensitive/attractional models of ministry), it has become the hermeneutic we place over every difficult conversation, every uncomfortable truth, and every moment that asks something more of us than staying planted in the ways of the Lord, where His mighty hand of Fatherly correction is near our hearts. What’s puzzling to me is that if you push back on it (even a bit), you risk sounding like exactly the kind of person Jesus warned us about. That’s what I want to explore deeper with you.

In truth, the instinct isn’t entirely wrong, which is what makes this worth examining carefully. Jesus did eat with tax collectors, did cross every boundary the religious culture drew around the broken, and did receive people no one else would touch. That record is precisely what gets borrowed to build the construct.

What the construct quietly removes, however, is the fact of what Jesus did inside each of those scenarios. He named what was true, He sent people somewhere different from where He found them, and He never ever confused sitting with someone for substantiating their destructive lifestyle choices. And so, if you’ve wrestled with this yourself, allow me to be clear: The assumption underneath all of it (that His presence was the same as His endorsement) is simply not in your Bible.

They Came to Hear Him

Luke 15 is a famous passage for the story of the prodigal son. I love the first two verses of that chapter, and in my estimation, they’re the most underread entry point into this very conversation. Let’s look at the text together. Luke 15:1-2 (ESV) says, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’”

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Don’t miss the point here. Scripture says that they came to hear Him, not simply to be seen or to be held in warm, non-confrontational, you-do-you presence while they sorted things out at their own pace. They drew near with a hunger for the Word He carried. And what Jesus said, across every encounter in the Gospels, was not “you’re okay as you are.” What He essentially said was, Here is the truth about who you are; here is the truth about Who I am, and in the space between those two truths, everything can change.

And right there is the posture differential we keep missing as disciples of Jesus today. What draws the tax collectors and sinners toward Jesus looks, in my estimation, something like what He named at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3 (ESV), that is, poverty of spirit; that bone-deep recognition that you’re spiritually bankrupt without the Lord. This goes way beyond the emotion of exhaustion or the bewilderment of doing life alone. Poverty of spirit is a different condition entirely. People who are merely exhausted look for rest, but people who are poor in spirit look for rescue. And the difference between those two postures determines everything about what kind of Jesus you think you need.

Now watch this. In Matthew 9:12 (ESV), Jesus says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” In reading the text studiously, the physician metaphor Jesus used isn’t primarily a statement about His disposition toward the broken; it’s a statement about the condition of the person receiving Him. Point being, a physician is only useful to someone who knows they’re ill. The sinners who drew near in Luke 15 came because they knew. The Pharisees kept their distance because they were, in their own estimation, already well. That isn’t a story about two different Jesuses. It’s a story about two different postures toward the same Jesus. And one received transformation, and the other one didn’t.

Addressing The Pushback

Now, I can sense a little bit of pushback from you, and so, my most logical, honest counterargument to what I’m building doesn’t come from progressive theology; it comes from Paul himself. Look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:22 (ESV): “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” That sentence is the exegetical ground on which the “meet people where they are” instinct most likely plants its flag, and it deserves a careful answer.

What Paul is describing here is missiological flexibility in how truth is delivered, but never a softening of what that truth is in the first place. Does that make sense? He became like a Jew to win Jews and like one outside the law to win those outside the law. But in every single case, the purpose was to “win” them, which is to say, to bring them somewhere genuinely different from where they started. Thus, the “meet people where they are” cultural construct collapses Paul’s method with Jesus’s message, using missionary flexibility as a reason to quietly retire the call to repentance and ultimately, maturity. Well, that is not what Paul is doing, nor is it what Jesus does anywhere in the Gospels.

Jesus Did Not Separate Mercy from Commission

Luke 7 contains a moment that most of this conversation walks right past. In Luke 7:48, 50 (ESV), Jesus speaks to a woman who has entered a Pharisee’s home uninvited, washed His feet with her tears, and anointed them while the room watched in barely concealed contempt. Famously, He says to her, “Your sins are forgiven...Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

And right after the statement about how her faith saved her, the very next word is go. In other words, the mercy and the sending arrive together as one act; the forgiveness and the direction are bound in the same moment, inseparable in the text and inseparable in His intent. She is not only received; she is sent. And this pattern, in my estimation, holds across the whole Gospel testimony.

Still with me? Good. Consider John 5. Jesus heals a man at the pool of Bethesda and afterward, deliberately finds him in the temple. Let’s look at what He says: John 5:14 (ESV) captures Him saying, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” Here, the mercy had already been given, and the healing was complete. And Jesus finds the man to close the loop. Why? Because His nearness was never the conclusion of the story. The principle at hand is that there is a “sin no more” on the other side of every healing, every forgiveness, and every moment of grace He extends. And so, to treat His mercy as the destination rather than the beginning of something forward-moving and transformative is to misread every encounter in the Gospels where He touches human brokenness.

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Anchoring my argument, I want to now look at a case study in John 4. Here, Jesus travels through Samaria when no rabbi in His day would. He crosses every social and religious boundary to reach the famous conversation at the well. And then, at the most unhurried moment of the exchange, in John 4:17-18 (NKJV), Jesus tells the woman, “You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.” There’s no cruelty or condescension in it.

But there’s also no ambiguity.

He named what was true, and it was that truth, not His proximity alone, that made the encounter transformative.

Of course, this is what love actually does. And this is the posture I believe the Lord is calling us to embody in this day: one of truth in love that is anchored in eternal principles, founded upon the unchanging nature of our Creator.

Jesus Was Harder Than You’ve Been Taught in Church

I hope you’re tracking with me, because this next chess move of sorts dismantles the binary at its foundation.

Survey most evangelicals and you’ll easily see that we’ve constructed a category: that Jesus was confrontational with the religious elite and patient with everyone else; that His sharpness was Pharisee-facing, and His mercy was crowd-facing. Now, if that binary could hold, the tolerant-Jesus construct would survive. But because Scripture makes no provision for it to hold, 3…2…1… timber.

Not convinced? Check the text of Matthew 11:21 (ESV). Jesus says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.” Chorazin and Bethsaida are not specials at Chipotle, nor are they centers of religious establishment. No Pharisees are being addressed here. These are ordinary towns with ordinary people who witnessed the works of the Lord and declined to repent. And Jesus pronounced woe over them with the same word He used when He turned toward the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23. Then in Luke 13:3 (ESV), speaking to a crowd, Jesus says, “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” He said it once; then, barely a breath later, said it again in verse 5. The crowd didn’t get a different Jesus. They got the same One.

And if I can be so bold, the reading that says Jesus was hardest on the Pharisees because of their passionate commitment to truth is itself a prooftext misread. The precise indictment of Matthew 23:13 (ESV) isn’t about misdirected zeal. Read the verse for yourself: “You shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.” Their problem wasn’t that they cared too much about truth. Their problem was that they had exempted themselves from the very truth they required of others, weaponizing its appearance while fleeing its interior demands. In doing so, they became a barrier to the very kingdom they claimed to represent. They thought they were well. They refused the physician. And the Lord had no softer word for that condition…than woe.

Love Does Not Rejoice in Wrongdoing

That brings us to 1 Corinthians 13:6 (ESV). Paul instructs us that love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” The Greek word for wrongdoing here is ἀδικία. It means unrighteousness, everything standing out of alignment with the character and purposes of the Lord. Paul says plainly that love doesn’t rejoice over it and doesn’t settle into comfortable proximity with it while congratulating itself for the nearness.

Basically, it’s like this: if I tell myself that love means sitting with someone, then I don't have to say anything hard. And if I cannot be required to say anything hard, then I have made my comfort into a spiritual gift. And if my comfort is a spiritual gift, then the person across from me is being served by my silence, not abandoned by it. Why not? Because I have learned to call my inaction (read: abdication and passivity) mercy. And the result? A church full of people we’ve kept comfortable in immaturity while calling it a loving community. Enter many modern evangelical churches in America today.

Now, for the sake of my pastoral heart and my aim to always serve you with integrity, let me be precise about what I’m not saying, because the misreading of this argument is as dangerous as the problem it corrects. I’m most certainly not calling for confrontation as a default register of Christian relationship. I’m not endorsing the kind of truth-speaking that is, underneath its Scripture, really mean and self-righteous correction dressed in Sunday best. The Pharisees were expert practitioners of that mode, and the Lord had woe ready for them too. What Paul calls for in Ephesians 4:15 (ESV) is something far more costly than either passivity or confrontation. It’s what I mentioned earlier. Paul tells us, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” Truth in love isn’t two forces held in tension. It’s one single, integrated, and inseparable act that produces one unified outcome: maturity. See, that kind of truth-speaking flows from love, or it isn’t truth-speaking at all. And that kind of love includes truth, or it isn’t love at all.

And so, when we separate them (by keeping our proximity to people while quietly diminishing the truth), we don’t produce more gracious disciples. We produce disciples who’ve been handed a Jesus-shaped permission slip for their current condition, and who, as Hebrews 5:12 (ESV) says plainly, “need milk, not solid food” long after they should have moved past it.

Does that sting a little bit? Good. I hope it does. I’m frustrated by the soft serve messaging we’re serving up to broken people, while expecting them to think or act any differently than how they entered our doors. It’s not love, gang, it’s cultural appeasement.

Passivity Is Not a Virtue

Paul writes in Ephesians 5:15-16 (ESV), “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” He doesn’t say the days are complicated or that the cultural moment demands careful sensitivity. He says the days are evil, and that how we respond to the world is a matter of wisdom; the kind of wisdom that knows what time it is and refuses to answer the hour with passivity dressed as niceness.

Even the Lord Himself says in Revelation 3:19 (NKJV), “As many as I love, I rebuke and discipline. Therefore be zealous and repent.” Rebuke is not rejection. It’s the language of love from a good Father. A version of love that never finds its way to the hard, confrontational word isn’t imitating the Jesus of the Gospels. It’s imitating an idea of Jesus that the Gospels don’t contain.

I’ve said a lot today. That’s why I want to center our hearts before the Lord and ask you to pray with me.

Lord, this is what passive love has been doing in us. We’ve called our comfort mercy. We’ve learned to sit beside wrongdoing and name the sitting a spiritual gift. We’ve handed the people around us a Jesus who endorses rather than transforms, because endorsement costs nothing and transformation costs everything. Forgive us for it. Search us here. Correct us here. Bring us back to the whole Jesus…the One Whose presence was always the beginning of something, Whose mercy always had somewhere to send us, Whose love was too real and too wise to leave anyone exactly as He found them. Make us brave enough for the truth, and loving enough to deliver it. In Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.

The Holy Spirit is not content to leave you where you are, my friend. He never has been. Join me in coming to the Lord as someone who needs to be changed; not just comforted, not just seen, but genuinely healed, changed, and transformed for His glory. And as you do, you will love the people around you enough to finally mean it.

I believe in you.

Of course, he wasn’t talking about a lack of sleep. He was referring to a soul-and-spirit-deep exhaustion that had been accumulating within him for months without reprieve.

Maybe you’ve experienced this same “hit the wall” feeling that even eight hours of deep sleep can’t alleviate, even on a good day.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been there recently, too. And by recently, I mean last Thursday. Without my consultation, something in my soul said, “Enough,” and in what felt involuntary, tears streamed down my face.

Reflecting on the moment with the Lord, I’m coming to realize that there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that has absolutely nothing to do with how much sleep you are I have had. Instead, it’s the flavor of tiredness expressed through a soul that has quietly crowned itself the foundation of its own life. It’s the one, like my friend’s and mine, that wakes each morning already bracing for impact and dodging the onslaught of incessant mental chatter.

As far as I can tell, beneath the noise and ground-swell of life runs a low, constant hum of dread you’ve learned to file under “that’s just how I am.”

Over 26 years of full-time ministry (including 10 as a pastor), the people I’ve watched live most afraid were rarely the ones whose circumstances were objectively the most unstable. Instead, they were the ones who had taken on a job that was never theirs to hold: the job of being their own self-protective bedrock.

Well, lucky for us, the prophet Isaiah, on behalf of the Lord, walks straight up to that person, in the middle of their personal wreckage, and speaks words of life.

Have a look at His approach. Isaiah 54:11 (AMPC) opens, declaring, “O you afflicted [city], storm-tossed and not comforted, behold, I will set your stones in fair colors...and lay your foundations with sapphires.” Notice that He doesn’t wait for the storm to pass before He speaks. Instead, He speaks to her exactly as she is—afflicted, storm-tossed, and disquieted. And in the very same breath, He begins to describe a foundation He is laying beneath her feet, one of beauty, stability, and restoration.

God Relays the Foundation While You Are Still Shaking

As we read a little further, the prophetic picture becomes more ablaze with redemptive promise. Isaiah 54:12 (AMPC) continues, saying, “And I will make your windows and pinnacles of [sparkling] agates or rubies, and your gates of [shining] carbuncles, and all your walls of precious stones.”

I want you to notice that every image portrayed here is something given, not something achieved (as if by self-help). In quite the opposite fashion, the whole architecture of her security is being spoken over her by the One who builds right the first time. Moreover, this is the same voice that, eleven verses earlier, told her to sing before she could see a single reason to do so. Let’s go to the verse.

Isaiah 54:1 (AMPC) commands, “Sing, O barren one, you who did not bear.” How in the world does that make sense? Well, His ways are not our own1, and in nine words, the Lord asks the desolate woman to rejoice over children not yet in her arms. Why? Because the promise rests on His unending faithfulness and not on her immediate evidence.

Now, before we make this personal, and for our edification, we have to be honest about who she is, because it will keep us from turning a covenant into a cute Sunday morning name-it-claim-it good-luck charm. She is not first an anxious individual; she is Zion, the covenant people of the Lord, addressed as a city. And here is where intertextuality in the New Testament hands us the key. The apostle Paul lifts this barren woman out of Isaiah and, in Galatians 4:26-27 (ESV), tells us who she has become. Scripture says, “the Jerusalem above...is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, ‘Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear.’” Here, Paul takes Isaiah’s desolate one and names her the mother of everyone who belongs to the Lord by promise. So this word does apply to you; but it speaks to you as a member of His people, joined to the Servant (Jesus), but never as a private guarantee you can pry loose and wave over your circumstances. I know that might be a little frustrating, but we have to divide the Word correctly, especially in this case, because it is the difference between covenant and superstition.

You Were Never Meant to Be Your Own Foundation

Having established that foundation, we now arrive at the verse that has been on my heart for the past month, and I have to slow us down to appreciate its richness, because everything turns on a single word. Isaiah 54:14 in the ESV and the NKJV reads, “In righteousness you shall be established.”

I was an English and grammar nerd all through high school, and so, you’re coming along for the ride. Here’s the phrase: you shall be established. That is in the passive voice, meaning something is being done to her by Another. The Amplified Classic (my favorite formal equivalence translation of Scripture) renders the same clause, saying, “You shall establish yourself in righteousness (rightness, in conformity with God’s will and order),” reaching for the reflexive sense the Hebrew verb permits. Both readings are defensible, as the verb can carry either. But I want to be honest with you, because this is exactly the tipping point where a soul in pain can be handed the wrong burden. If “establish yourself” lands on an already-crushed heart as stabilize yourself, fortify yourself, get yourself right, or do the work, then we’ve taken a promise of grace and turned it into one more thing you have to accomplish in and of yourself. Not only is that backwards, but it’s a dead end.

Now, watch what the passage does with the word “righteousness,” because it doesn’t let us make this about self-improvement. The city is founded in righteousness. Whose city? The esteemed commentator J. Alec Motyer, in his study of Isaiah, traces this righteousness back to the Suffering Servant of the previous chapter, to a righteousness of God undergirding the whole foundation.2 And chapter 53 tells us plainly what that means. Let’s look at the text. Isaiah 53:11 (ESV) says of the Servant, “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” Don’t miss what’s next. The righteousness in which you are established was quarried in chapter 53, not in your willpower. It is accounted to you. Put plainly, it was purchased by the Servant’s anguish and reckoned to your account as a gift you could never earn. So the reflexive reading, at its best, describes the posture of surrender, never the labor of self-repair. I hope that makes sense.

That said, the same chapter that gives you a grace-empowered free standing also promises a formed life (read: maturity). And to the best of my study for this article, this is where a purely textbook reading goes cold and stops short of what the Lord is actually after. Verse 14 defines righteousness as “conformity with God’s will and order,” and verse 17 (AMPC) speaks of a righteousness the Lord imparts.

So let’s do some math and hold the order carefully. You ready? Your right standing is received, accounted, unearned, and is the foundation. And then the Holy Spirit begins the slow, actual work of making you righteous from the inside out, conforming a real life to the Lord’s order. The gift is the foundation. The formation is the fruit. Are you following the progression Isaiah lays out?

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Miss the first, and you drown in self-effort; miss the second, and you’ll settle for a standing that never changes you (even though your behavior might be modified). Do you see the hinge, then? If not, I’ll make it clear: The reason so many believers live perpetually unsteady is not that they haven’t tried hard enough to be their own foundation; it’s that they’ve been trying to be their own foundation at all (okay, just me?). And no soul was ever built to bear that weight.

Peace Is the Presence of the Teacher, Not the Absence of the Storm

But here’s where our study gets sharper. How does this settled righteousness actually reach the person trapped in distress, even day by day? The answer sits one verse above, and I love verse 13 for this reason. Isaiah 54:13 (AMPC) promises, “And all your [spiritual] children shall be disciples [taught by the Lord and obedient to His will], and great shall be the peace and undisturbed composure of your children.” The lesson is that the peace of the next verse flows out of this one. It is the peace of the disciple; the taught one; the apprentice drawn near enough to the Lord to learn His voice. Motyer notes that these citizens are being shaped to resemble the Servant Himself, marked out as those who are taught. And this is why the peace of Isaiah 54 can never be reduced to a technique for managing your nervous system. It’s the fruit of formation. The Holy Spirit does this work, patiently, teaching a fearful soul to lean its whole weight on a foundation it did not lay. Isn’t that good?

Terror Has a Name, and It Has Been Given Its Marching Orders

Only now, having taken time to investigate the Scripture piece by piece, can we hear the great and everlasting promise the way it was meant. Isaiah 54:14 (AMPC) continues, saying, “you shall be far from even the thought of oppression or destruction, for you shall not fear, and from terror, for it shall not come near you.” The gorgeous phrase “even the thought of” is the amplification; the Hebrew simply says “be far from oppression.” But the two enemies here are precise. Motyer distinguishes them, teaching us that the first names oppression that disrupts a community from within. And the second names terror that assaults from without, though it can carry the note of inner alarm as well. The great treasure of this verse essentially tells us that the Lord who rules out the ruin of His people is the same Lord who meets the dread in you. And the grammar is not tentative in any way. Motyer observes that the command to be far from oppression expresses an undeniable and certain outcome, something so sure to happen that it can be commanded.3 My friend, this is not a wish. It is a decree spoken over the people of God, and you stand firmly inside it.

Let the Bible Interpret the Bible

Let’s keep unfurling the text, because it’s rich. Isaiah says terror “shall not come near you,” and the psalmist reaches for the same ordinary Hebrew word for drawing near when he writes in Psalm 91:10 (AMPC), “There shall no evil befall you, nor any plague or calamity come near your tent.” What I’m showing you is that two texts share one promise, and it’s a good one: the thing you dread will not finally draw near the one who belongs to the Lord.

As good as that promise is, it exists within the framework of two guardrails the psalm builds into itself. First, Psalm 91:15 (AMPC) says, “I will be with him in trouble.” Trouble is assumed, not abolished. Even Jesus told us that in this world, we’d have trouble. As such, the promise is His presence within it, which is the very posture of Isaiah’s storm-tossed woman who is called secure while she is still being battered.

Second (and this is perhaps the sharpest tool in the passage), Psalm 91 is the text the enemy quoted to Jesus in the wilderness, urging Him to throw Himself down because angels would bear Him up (See Matthew 4:6). Of course, Jesus refused, answering that we shall not put the Lord our God to the test. The devil’s move was to pry a promise loose from surrender and turn it into a lever for presumption and self-sufficiency, and if I can be so bold, it’s a counterfeit we must refuse. On the contrary, the promise belongs to the one who abides day and night, in good times and in bad times, in the secret place of the Most High.

So, on what does this security rest? Where does your security rest?

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Not on the storm staying away, of course, but on the sovereignty of the Lord over the very source of the threat. Isaiah 54:16 declares that God created the blacksmith who forges the weapon and the destroyer to ruin; and verse 15 is careful to add that when assault comes, “it is not from Me.” So the attack is never the Lord’s doing, yet it is never outside His authority (touché to the unbelieving cessationist who ever calls sickness, disease, poverty, or destruction “God’s will.”)

That’s why (and this is so good) verse 17 in the New King James version can promise that “No weapon formed against you shall prosper...their righteousness is from Me, says the LORD.”

Boom. There it is again, the same thread pulled all the way through.

Their righteousness is from the Lord. Every single bit of it. The peace, the security, and the vindication are imparted, not attained, manifested, or even decreed. And undergirding all of it stands the covenant Isaiah 54:10 (AMPC) presents with resounding power: “My love and kindness shall not depart from you, nor shall My covenant of peace and completeness be removed.”

The Foundation Will Hold Even When the Storm Does Not Lift

I know I’m taking you through a lot of exegetical work this week (a work which I treasure), but I hope you’re tracking with me, because the comfort of this great chapter is far sturdier than the comfort both the world and cultural Christianity are selling you.

Isaiah 54 does not promise the people of the Lord a life with no weapons formed against them. In fact, the presupposition is that weapons will indeed be formed. But none of them (that’s right, none) will prosper in the end, because the One who covenants their peace holds authority over the forge itself, and He has ordained for us this great heritage.4

And as much as I wish it were different, the Word of the Lord from Isaiah does not promise the storm will lift on your timeline; it promises a foundation that will not move while the storm within (and without) rages. The counterfeit tells you to become stable enough to stop being afraid. But the Lord tells you that you are established in a righteousness you did not earn, taught by a great Teacher Who will not abandon you, kept by a covenant that cannot be removed. And that’s why, maybe for you today, you can finally stop bracing for impact. My friend, hear me clearly: you were never the foundation, and you never will be.

Psalm 51:6 (AMPC) admonishes us, “You desire truth in the inner being.”

Today, my friend, come down off the ground you’ve been straining to hold, and be established in the Lord. Stop laying your own self-protective, self-preserving foundation, and let Him lay it. It’s a foundation that will remain. I get that the storm may still be loud. But the unending covenant of the Lord’s faithfulness is louder. He will hold what you were never able to. Come and be established.

Let’s stop bracing together, shall we?

I believe in you.

It was a blamy July night when I found myself crying out to the Lord (literally) in extreme frustration. The hardest part was that I couldn’t sense His presence—which, for all intents and purposes, corroborated my inclination to go it alone. But then, sitting on my couch later that night, I had a bit of a breakthrough in my heart.

How arrogant of me to think that I had the full picture of what the Lord was doing in my life. How presumptuous of me to think that I could take the reins and manufacture an outcome that would be a futile attempt to stop the proverbial bleeding in my soul.

After all, as a young boy, I made a commitment to the Lord that Ishmael wouldn’t be an answer to my lack of trust in Him. And yet here I sat staring at my Ishmael square in the face. Again. Thank the Lord He knows our frame, and He factors in the frailty of our human condition as He trains us for maturity.

Now, if you read last week’s article, you hopefully understand the context from which I’m writing today. This edition is a drill-down of sorts, and I hope you’ll lean in.

Let’s get moving.

There is a silence that seemingly undoes us and drives us to the point of self-protection. And it is not the silence of the Lord’s absence. It’s the silence of His delay. I’ve walked with enough people through enough of these silent seasons, over enough years of pastoring, to tell you that faith rarely shipwrecks on the rocks of open doubt. Heck, the Lord welcomes our honest doubt as we wrestle in His presence.

Far more often, though, it runs aground in the long, quiet stretch after the promise comes and before the fulfillment arrives. And it’s from that premise that I want to write to you plainly today, because I think what happens in that stretch matters more than we have been willing to admit, and because the psalmist refuses to allow us to read his people’s history as though it were only theirs.

Psalm 106:6 (AMPC) says, “We have sinned, as did also our fathers; we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.”

For my Reformed friends, that’s not merely a history lesson. That’s an honest confession, and the psalmist includes himself in it. And because “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” that we “may be complete, [and] equipped for every good work,”1 that means we’re not off the hook, either.

The Rebellion That Sings on Sunday

Reading deeper into Psalm 106, pay attention to the charge the psalmist lays against his fathers (simply because it is subtler and more convicting than we might expect on the surface). Verses 13-14 declare, “They hastily forgot His works; they did not earnestly wait for His plans to develop regarding them, but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness and tempted and tried to restrain God with their insistent desires in the desert.”

What’s going on here? Well, the accusation is not that they renounced the Lord. Only a few lines earlier, these same people had watched the sea stand up like walls and collapse over their enemies, and they had believed His words and sung His praise. Scripture’s clear about that. The accusation is that they would not wait for the Lord’s timing. They forgot that “He who began a good work” would bring His purposes to pass; that they, like us, were a part of God’s unfolding eternal purpose. And maybe that’s why their rebellion was never loud, but rather a dysfunctional, self-consumed reflex.

In the language of the 17th-century French archbishop François Fénelon, this is functional atheism at its finest. Functional atheism, in practice, is not the outright denial of the Lord with our words, but instead, it’s the quiet reduction of Him with our hands and hearts. Sure, we keep Him in focus in the domains of life in which we “need” Him. But in other domains, we take the wheel. Why? Because somewhere in the delay, we decided He was either too slow or not truly engaged…or good.

Now, notice what that reveals, because it goes way deeper than impatience. Impatience is only the symptom of the real issue. And the real, more insidious issue is a quiet but embittered unbelief about the Lord’s character (the character that He says does not change, by the way). It’s an unsubstantiated suspicion that the Lord cannot be trusted with our timeline, and until we name the disease, we will keep treating the symptom and wondering why nothing changes.

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We Would Rather Have a God We Can Manage

What I’m trying to communicate to you is that when the waiting season stretches past our tolerance, do we abandon our faith in the Lord? Not usually. But we do shrink His place on the throne of our hearts. We quietly surrender His lordship over our lives, and in doing so, trade the God Who cannot be scheduled for a version of Him we can understand and control.

I want you to consider two moments from the biblical narrative.

As I taught last week, Abram and Sarai held a promise and an empty womb. And when the years piled up, they engineered a son they could produce by their own strength. You see, Ishmael is what waiting looks like when it dissolves into mere management (See Genesis 16).

Then consider Sinai. Look closely at the text in Exodus 32:1 (NKJV). The Bible tells us, “Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make us gods that shall go before us.’”

Notice the hinge word here: delayed. As far as I can tell, the golden calf was not born of doubt about whether God existed. It was born out of impatience with how and when God was moving.

Many of us might say that a golden calf holds one great “advantage” over the living God: it holds still and stays within our grasp. It can be seen, handled, scheduled, and controlled. And that is precisely why the human heart keeps reaching for it, even today.

Let’s zoom in. We are seldom building shrines to nothing these days. Instead, we’re building Ishmaels and golden calves and strong-willed initiative with Scripture and “Life Coach Jesus” ideologies duct-taped to it, particularly because a manageable god asks nothing of us that waiting and trust would require.

But what’s missing in that reflex is patience and humility. Why won’t we wait? Well, because pride can’t bear uncertainty and ambiguity. Add to that, pride blinds us, leading us to believe that our interpretation of God’s timeline is the true one and that the Lord’s pace is somehow a problem for us to solve.

My point is that humility sees. It can stand in the gap between the promise and the fulfillment without demanding control of the outcome (which is very difficult for me), because it has entrusted not only the outcome, but the calling and purpose itself, to the Lord.

The Mercy That Can Hollow You Out

I want to flip the deck for a moment. See, if you assume the great danger in waiting on the Lord is that He ultimately withholds, look closer, because the more sobering possibility is that He relents.

Let’s go back to the text in Psalm 106, verse 15 specifically, and watch what the psalmist records next. The Bible says, “And He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their souls and [thinned their numbers by] disease and death.”

We have to sit inside that verse for a moment. The Israelites demanded meat in the desert rather than trust the God who was already feeding them, and the Lord, in a mercy that reads almost like judgment, gave them exactly what they insisted upon; and the granted request was not painless, for it came with wasting and with death.

Please do not rush past that. Personally, I’m sobered as I re-read this verse even now. Their request was answered, but it cost them everything the answer was supposed to satisfy.

In other words, there is a way of getting what you wanted that leaves you thinner in your character than you were before you had it, because the thing (whatever it is) was never the point. The greater idea here is that the waiting was forming something in you that the immediate gratification short-circuited. And this is the warning at the center of the whole passage, my friend, and I don’t want you to miss it. Read this diligently and with your full attention:

The Lord, acting as a good Father Whose long-range goal is your full-grown maturity, will sometimes let you keep Ishmael.

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But a granted demand and a received promise are not the same gift, and one of them is purchased with the health and integrity of your soul. And so, where does this trajectory finally arrive? A few verses on, the impatience has metastasized into open rivalry with the Lord’s own appointed order. Let’s go straight to the text: “They envied Moses also in the camp, and Aaron, the holy one of the Lord” (Psalm 106:16, AMPC; see Numbers 16).

What’s my point? The heart that will not wait on God eventually contends with God, and it does so while calling the contention righteousness. Korah did not believe he was rebelling. He believed he was correcting.

While You Were Grasping, He Was Leading

And yet, hear what mercy does in the middle of that rebellion, because if all you hear is the indictment, you will receive this admonition as a threat that could lead you back into self-protection and self-promotion, and yet, it was never meant as one.

When Nehemiah’s people rehearsed this same wilderness generations later, they did not flinch from the calf; they called it out plainly, labeling it, “great and contemptible blasphemies” (Nehemiah 9:18, AMPC). But watch what they stated directly beside the sin: “You in Your great mercy forsook them not in the wilderness; the pillar of the cloud departed not from them by day... You also gave Your good Spirit to instruct them, and withheld not Your manna from them... Forty years You sustained them in the wilderness; they lacked nothing, their clothes did not wear out, and their feet did not swell” (See Nehemiah 9:19-21, AMPC).

I’m stunned by the faithfulness and mercy of the Lord. While they were grasping for pleasure, He was leading. While they were building a god they could manage, the Holy Spirit was still instructing them, the manna was still falling, and their very shoes were being held together by a faithfulness they had not earned and could not deserve.

This is the heartbreak and the hope in a single breath of holy literature. There’s no doubt that the Lord grieves our unbelief. But He does not abandon us to it. He is, as Nehemiah confessed, “a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great steadfast love” (Nehemiah 9:17, AMPC).

What this means in practical terms is that the summons to wait on the Lord is not a demand to perform for Him (even in the waiting). Rather, it’s an invitation to trust a loving, wise, good Father who has already proven, time and time again, in every wilderness, that He will not leave you or forsake you. Praise the name of our living God!

The Rest We Keep Refusing

So now, we arrive at the real fork in the proverbial road. The writer of Hebrews reaches back into this exact wilderness and turns it into a warning aimed straight at us. Here’s Hebrews 3:12 (ESV): “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” Then he delivers the verdict that should stop us where we stand, writing in verse 19, “So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” Pay attention to this: They did not forfeit the Promised Land because they were weak. They forfeited it because they would not trust His timing. And the Holy Spirit, quoting Psalm 95, names the cost with precision, saying, “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts... So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest’” (Psalm 95:7-8, 11, NKJV).

Do you understand the principle? Impatience and unbelief are, in the end, the same sin wearing two coats, and the rest they lost was never the reward for striving harder. It was the inheritance of those who believed. That’s the pattern the Lord keeps repeating; the one you can stake your life on.

Point being, the people He forms are the people He first teaches to wait. Think of David, anointed as a boy and then left to wait for years in caves, refusing again and again to seize by force the throne that God had promised to give. The waiting was not the delay of his calling; it was the making of it. The Lord was doing in that wilderness what He does in every wilderness –– forming a heart that could hold what was coming without grasping for it.

And so, I want to encourage you that the desert you have been resenting may be the very ground on which He is preparing you for the great plan He has prepared for you.

Understand, then, that biblical waiting is not idleness, and it was never a life-hacked virtue you were meant to summon by willpower. It’s the fruit of trusting who He is. Heed the words of the prophet Isaiah, who wrote, “But those who wait for the Lord [who expect, look for, and hope in Him] shall change and renew their strength and power; they shall lift their wings and mount up [close to God] as eagles [mount up to the sun]; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint or become tired.” (Isaiah 40:31, AMPC). That is not the language of a people sitting on their hands in passivity and inaction. That is the language of a people whose strength is being renewed precisely because they refused to seize what the Lord had not yet released.

With all of that said, let me speak to you as directly as I know how, because I believe the implications here are far greater than another article to appreciate and set down.

We are people standing in a season of change and transition, called to maturity, and the temptation of every such season is to grab, to engineer, to build our own golden calf we can see simply because the waiting has become unbearable. But a prepared people is not first a people who have read the times correctly; it is a people who have repented of the grasping and learned to trust the Lord’s timing because they know His ways. The unprepared, you see, are not the ones who lack a strategy. They are the ones who, like our fathers, hastily forgot and would not wait. Join me, then, in the confession the psalmist will not let us skip.

Elijah once stood before a wavering people and asked the question that still finds us: “How long will you halt and limp between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him! But if Baal, then follow him.” (1 Kings 18:21, AMPC). That is the question underneath every golden calf we build.

We don’t usually choose Baal outright; we hedge, keeping the Lord’s name while fashioning a god we can manage for the days His answer is slow.

So today, even right now, name your Ishmael, whatever it is. Name the calf you keep re-gilding, and take your hands off it today, before He grants the demand and thins your soul to give it. Stop faltering. Please. If the Lord is God, follow Him, and follow Him into the waiting.

Do not harden your heart while it is still called today. Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord (Psalm 27:14, NKJV).

And so, we must answer the definitive question together. Is the Lord slow? By no means. He is preparing us, His people, for an awakening upon the earth. You feel the tremors of shaking all around you, don’t you? Lean in. Listen. Wait on the Lord. Obey. Respond.

I believe in you.

Let’s dive in.

Exactly ten years ago this month, nearly to the day this article was published, I was riding the greatest season of ministry I had ever experienced. I remember the specific feeling of it, too. I lived with the sense that I had finally arrived at the place I was made for as a pastor, running with some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. Leading a large team at a high level of industry-grade excellence (a value I’ve held since I was a child), I naively thought that season was the story of the rest of my life. In truth, I had hoped it was, because I was good at my job. I built plans on that assumption, and I definitely built my identity on it, too (probably more than I should have).

Well, fast-forward to the present moment, and I have a body of work I’m genuinely thankful to have been entrusted with (like my podcast, this writing platform, and the privilege of writing books with a major publisher).

But if I’m being completely honest, day to day, I feel further from my calling than I have in years, in every sense of the word. Some mornings it feels like the last decade folded in on itself and dumped me back at the very beginning. Except now, I’m tired in ways I wasn’t then, and I know with great specificity how dangerous that particular flavor of exhaustion is.

Is it burnout? Could be. Cynicism? Definitely, and I don’t like it.

All I know is that despite the residual emotions of betrayal, confusion, anger (read: unresolved disappointment), and grief still lingering in the recesses of my heart, I had to get to the root, and that’s the exploratory process I’m letting you in on.

Inspector Gadget Couldn’t Even Find This One

I went looking for the obvious explanation first, because it’s the one I know how to fix. I asked the people1 close enough to tell me the truth whether there was sin I wasn’t seeing or a dysfunctional pattern to which I’d gone numb. After everything I had walked through, I wouldn’t have been surprised if something was there.

Well, we went through it together, more than once, and my record came up clean. There wasn’t any hidden compromise nor any unrepentant thing I was protecting. No secret sin at bay, either. And to be totally honest, that uneventful revelation was almost more disorienting than finding something would have been, because at least with sin, I know how to spot it and respond quickly.

What surfaced instead was something harder to file away cleanly (which my type-A personality hates). And so, the nearest language I have for it is an identity issue, not a sin issue (keep in mind, I didn’t have this fully mapped out at the time of writing). In fact, I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing that resolves into a clear diagnosis at all. What I do have is a pattern I can name, even if I can’t yet see all the way to the bottom of it.

What I also have in my arsenal is a prophetic word my pastor gave me in September 2007 that’s coming to pass word-for-word right now.2 What follows is a shockingly accurate picture of my interior life today. He said:

“...You said you’ve come to the end of yourself, but you haven’t yet. But each step of the way, you have found My grace. And you will continue to find My grace, says the Lord. It will be God doing the work for you. It will be God doing the work in you. So don’t look at it as something that you have to accomplish within yourself. You’re a person that likes to see the project; write out the plan of action; fill in all the details and make every plan ahead of time so there aren’t any surprises. And the Lord has been taking you a route that’s filled with surprises. You don’t understand any of the details. And you’re wondering where you’re going. The Lord says you’re in My hands. I have lifted you up and I’m taking you in My hands, says the Lord. So sometimes you feel like you’re falling, but you’re actually going upwards, says the Lord. You need to understand that you’re not going down, but you’re going up. Sometimes the feeling of going up can be just as strong as the one going down, because there’s pressure on you. But the Lord says, I’m going to bring you forth for My hand is upon you…There is a great plan that I have for you that you could not even yet fully understand at this point in time. So don’t even try, says the Lord.”

As I mentioned, this was spoken over me 19 years ago, and it’s as relevant today as ever before. It goes without saying that those words are literal life to my spirit and soul, especially when the temptation to walk away3 is profoundly fierce. Like…right now.4

And so, having provided you with the backstory, let’s pop the hood and get to the issue behind the issue.

In my estimation, a pattern like the one I’ve described doesn’t look like failure in the traditional sense. Rather, it looks like honest initiative, and that’s what makes it so hard to catch. Though the shortcuts I’ve taken this season weren’t moral compromises in the way I’d normally use that phrase, they were attempts to engineer outcomes I’d grown tired of waiting on, packaged in language like “stewardship,” “doing my part,” and “urgency,” because somewhere along the way, waiting (with waning patience) had started to feel indistinguishable from God’s neglect (which, fundamentally and theologically, I know is untrue).

That’s why I remember Abram and Sarai.

The Flesh Doesn’t Announce Itself

Genesis 16 records the story of Abram and Sarai doing what I just shared with you, and Scripture doesn’t let either of them off easy. Abram has heard the promise directly from the Lord that he will father a nation. The promise tarries long enough that he and Sarai decide they need to get involved because of its delay. That’s why Hagar is not an afterthought in their story. More accurately, she’s the documented outcome of two people who believed God enough to receive a promise and not enough to wait for it on His terms.

Now watch what Paul does with this account when he picks it back up in his own letter. He doesn’t treat it as gently as I want to treat my own version of it. Galatians 4:23 (ESV) says, “The son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.” Take note that he wrote flesh, not diligence or initiative, that got a little ahead of itself. Paul draws a straight line from Abram and Sarai’s shortcut to the category he elsewhere calls the flesh set against the Spirit. And later in the same passage, the Bible says, “cast out the slave woman and her son” (4:30, ESV). That’s not a soft verdict on managing your own outcome, gang. That is the paradigmatic study of it.

And so, I have to say this plainly (because it’s true) and because gentler language would be a shortcut in and of itself. Ready for it?

The self-reliant initiative I’ve taken this season was not a neutral thing that only became a problem in hindsight. It was a spirit of unbelief wearing the clothes of good stewardship, and it didn’t announce itself as unbelief because it never asked me to do anything that looked like blatant sin.

It only asked me to stop waiting on something that was not in my own timing. You don’t have to be a forensic scientist to know that that’s a more sophisticated deception than the kind that gets preached against on a Sunday, precisely because it never trips the alarms an ordinary audit is built to catch.

The Heir Who Already Owns Everything

Paul doesn’t leave you in the flesh-versus-promise contrast without also giving you the structure underneath it, and this is the part of the chapter that reframed my last several months entirely.

Now let’s look at Galatians 4:1-2 (ESV). Paul wrote, “I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.” I want you to read that again.

The heir already owns the estate. Inheritance was never the question, for Abram or for me. Instead, timing is the question, and the heir has no authority to move the date. He can hold full legal rights to everything and still function like a slave the moment he tries to claim it ahead of schedule.

As one would expect, Paul keeps going, writing, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son... to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5, ESV). The Father operates from a timing that is His prerogative alone, and He alone holds it. Thus is my point: if your season has stretched longer than you think it should, that is not automatically evidence that the promise was withdrawn. It may be evidence that you are still being prepared to steward what the Lord has for you. In other words, I’ve heard it said that God is preparing you for what He has prepared for you.5

Led, Not Leading

That said, Romans sharpens this further than I’d prefer, if I’m honest about my own case. Chapter 8, verse 14 ( in the NKJV) reads, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” Sonship is marked by being led, not by initiating or by moving when the silence has gone on long enough to justify acting alone.

Quite frankly, I have spent a season being good at moving. But I am only now learning that being led is a different skill entirely, and it’s the one Scripture actually requires of me. The shortcuts I keep naming to myself were not a failure of competence in any way. But they were errors of competence aimed in the wrong direction, applied to a problem that was never mine to solve by my own will.

And while I’m on the subject, I’m reminded of another verse from John’s gospel. In it, Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.”6

Perhaps the question at hand is, will we allow ourselves to be led by the Lord as our hearts are being purified and transformed for His purposes?

The Grip the Father Is After

And so, here’s a synthesis of what I think this season has actually been doing to me, studied as honestly as I know how:

It isn’t stripping my gifts. But it sure is stripping my need to be the explanation for my own outcomes and developing another level of perseverance in me.

You see, the Lord isn’t threatened by what I’ve built (what a silly thing to consider in the first place). But…He is after the grip I keep on being the reason it worked. I’ll add one caution here, mostly for my own sake, and it’s this: not every experience of exhaustion after a great season is the Father testing your grip. Some of it is simply the bill your body and soul run up after years of output, and it deserves rest before it gets handed a theological explanation. I don’t think that’s the whole of what I’m in right now. But I’m not willing to pretend I can always tell the difference from the inside, and neither should you.

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Wait, I Say, On the Lord

I don’t want to leave you with a passive picture, because there’s a cheap version of this teaching that turns waiting into passivity.

Psalm 27:14 (NKJV) says, “Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the LORD.”

That’s a command repeated for emphasis to a soul that wants to act, not a soul being told to go limp. Waiting on the Lord redirects the same energy I’d otherwise spend engineering an outcome and aims it at Him instead. Fasting, the way I’m practicing it right now, isn’t a hunger strike aimed at His hand; it’s my body telling my soul a truth I keep forgetting: that I was never sustained by my own initiative to begin with. Seeking Him with my whole heart isn’t a strategy for making the door open faster. It’s the entire point, whether or not the door moves on my timeline.

Waiting with expectation fortifies our focus, aligns our priorities, galvanizes our integrity, and develops perseverance.

If your audit has come up clean and you still feel years behind where you thought you’d be, stop searching for sin where the real issue is trust, and stop demanding of yourself a diagnosis more certain than the one you actually have. Confess the shortcuts you can name. Let the rest stay unresolved for now; some seasons aren’t solved, they’re entered.

Command your soul, the way the psalmist commanded his, to wait on the Lord instead of demanding He explain Himself on your schedule. That costs more than any shortcut I was tempted to take, because it costs the one thing I wanted most to keep: the feeling of being in control of my own becoming.

We can’t set the date, but we get to belong to the Lord Who sets it, and that is a better inheritance than anything either of us could engineer alone. Indeed, He is our exceedingly great reward.7 Join me in laying down the shortcuts, staying under the guardians a little longer, and trusting that the fullness of time is not the same as too late.

I want to leave you with a portion of Scripture from 2 Peter 1:3-11 (ESV). To me, it runs a thread through the heartbeat of this very personal article and sets the compass of our hearts due north to King Jesus. Here’s Peter:

“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,⁴ by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. ⁵ For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, ⁶ and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, ⁷ and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. ⁸ For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. ¹⁰ Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. ¹¹ For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Fix your focus, my friend. He Who began a good work in you will be faithful to bring it to pass for your good and for His glory. I trust that for myself, too. While we have breath, let’s praise the Lord.

I’m with you.

I didn’t say much at first. But after a few moments of leaning in, I did ask a question—and it’s one I’d like to ask you now.

What’s the point of showing up on a Sunday at all?

Their answer wasn’t wrong by any stretch. “We just want to figure out how the Bible fits into our everyday lives,” a woman said, as heads nodded around the circle in almost choreographed agreement.

At the outset, let me be clear. It’s a good answer. But it’s also a severely incomplete one, and I let them know as much.

So I asked again, this time with a little more probing in my tone. “For what reason, though? Applied to our everyday lives toward what end? And… what about our call to minister to the Lord in worship?”

Immediately, the backyard pow-wow went quiet. In fairness, I don’t know for certain what was behind that silence; it may have been the first time anyone had asked them to justify the goal, not just the method. But in my experience, more often than not, that silence exposes something we’ve stopped examining, which is that we’ve made quick life application the central point of our Sunday sermons, instead of the byproduct of a deeper aim, which, personally, I believe is a call to maturity.1 Simply stated, transformation takes time.

Let’s unpack this concept more substantially.

Sunday Morning Has Become a Vending Machine

What I think is actually happening is that we’ve quietly turned the gathered church into a vending machine. You put in an hour, you expect a product to drop, and the product had better be something you can use by Tuesday. And when it isn’t, you call it “disconnected,” “academic,” “too spiritual,” or “out of touch.” See, the vending machine approach never asks who you’ll become. It only asks whether you got what you came for.

Now, none of us would eagerly admit to a self-centered, consumeristic mindset (even though few of us hesitate to speak our minds about…everything). We’d never say, “I attend church to consume content.” But we probably would say we want relevance, practicality, and something we can walk out the door and use.

That might sound reasonable, except for the fact that the notion of relevance as a prerequisite is often just consumerism wearing its Sunday best.

Am I pushing too many buttons yet?

See, the test isn’t whether you wanted something practical. Practical is fine. Jesus was practical (but he didn’t play it safe). And the apostle James has no patience for faith that produces nothing. It’s just that the test is what you thought the practical thing was for.

Allow me to extrapolate.

Jesus Was Not Trying to Be Understood by Everyone

Let’s look at Scripture, because Jesus already answered this question, and His answer should unsettle anyone who assumes clarity was always His goal. His disciples once asked Him directly why He taught in parables. Many of us wonder the same.

Luckily, Matthew, leaving nothing to chance, records His answer thusly: “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given... Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:11, 13, NKJV).

One of the reasons I love this text is because it destroys the assumption most of us carry into a Sunday service without ever examining it: that somehow, a message’s primary job is to be immediately, effortlessly graspable by everyone in the room.

But frankly, I think that’s an incredibly immature mindset. Here’s why:

While Mark tells us Jesus also adjusted His teaching “as they were able to hear it”2 (which shows the parables were both a filter for hardened hearts and a real accommodation to where people were), the disciples’ own question in Matthew 13—and Jesus’s own answer to it—make concealment and revelation the dominant note in this passage specifically. Remember that the crowd got a story about seeds and soil. And the disciples, the ones who stayed, who asked questions, who wanted more than a tidy takeaway, got the meaning underneath the story. Same words, but a totally different yield. The difference? It wasn’t intelligence. It was hunger.

What’s my point? Well, if some of Jesus’s own listeners walked away from a parable with nothing but a nice agricultural anecdote, then the goal of preaching was never universal, effortless application. The goal was to separate those who wanted a word from those who wanted their life choices validated and affirmed.

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Stewards, Not Consumers

That said, there’s a hinge the whole conversation turns on. In 1 Corinthians 4:1 (ESV), when Paul writes, “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” he’s defending his own apostolic ministry, not describing the Corinthians in the seats. I want to be precise about that because it would be easy to borrow his words for a point he wasn’t making. But the New Testament doesn’t let the hearer off the hook, either. Jesus tells His disciples plainly, “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48, NKJV). You don’t have to be an apostle for that verse to land on you. You only have to have been given something, and if you’ve ever sat under a message that named your sin or called you to obedience, you’ve been given something.

Moreover, Paul tells the Corinthians, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10, NKJV). That verse is about the whole of a life, not narrowly about how you received a sermon. Thus, if the whole of your life includes every Sunday you sat under the word and walked out unchanged, this verse touches that too, even though it wasn’t written to isolate it.

What’s my point? You are not the customer of the message you hear. You’re accountable for what you did with it.

Of course, I want to be careful not to make this sound like personal application doesn’t matter; it does (deeply), and a sermon divorced from lived obedience is just religious theatre. But my thesis is that life application aimed at a better week and life application aimed at faithful stewardship of the ubiquitous call to maturity in Christ are not the same target, even when they look identical from the outside. One asks the text to serve you. The other asks you to serve what you’ve been entrusted with.

The Milk That Does a Body Good

This is where our study gets sharper, so I hope you’ll keep tracking with me. The writer of Hebrews confronts a church that has been sitting under teaching for years and still can’t handle anything beyond the basics. In Hebrews 5:12-14 (NKJV), he writes, “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

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Notice what he says matures a person. It isn’t an information download. It’s “reason of use”: trained senses, exercised over time, through repeated engagement with something demanding.

We should know this about training in general. You don’t develop discernment by being handed easier material. You develop it by being handed real material and wrestling with it until it changes how you see. As such, a congregation that only ever wants the milk version of every Scripture passage isn’t protecting itself from confusion. It’s forfeiting the very exercise that would make it capable of teaching someone else. And that, my friend, is called discipleship.

Quite frankly, that’s the quiet tragedy underneath the complaint I heard at that barbecue. It wasn’t laziness. It was a group of people who had never been told that maturity—not comfort and convenient faith—was ever the goal.

Nobody had asked them Paul’s question in Ephesians, that we’re meant to grow up “in all things into Him who is the head, Christ” so that we’re “no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:15, 14, NKJV). Pointedly, a body of believers that only wants simple takeaways will eventually be the folks most easily blown over by whatever doctrine or fad is loudest that year, because it never trained the muscle that tells the difference.

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What a Mature Word Actually Costs You

As I land this plane, here’s the point I don’t want you to miss. A mature word will cost you something a cute, superficial takeaway never will. It will ask you to sit in a text you don’t fully understand yet and trust the Holy Spirit to keep working on you after the message ends. It will refuse to hand you an alliterative three-step plan for peace of mind and instead hand you a case study like Job, unresolved, honest, and hard. It will make you responsible for wrestling instead of merely receiving.

That’s not a flaw in the preaching. That’s the whole design; the same design Jesus used with the crowds who left His parables unmoved and the disciples who stayed and asked what He meant. And without question, that is the call to which we have been called: mature sonship3; those who ascend the mountain of the Lord with purity and power.4

So no, the point of Sunday morning was never simply to hand you something you could apply by Tuesday.

Application matters, but it was always meant to flow out of a deeper aim: that you would grow up, take seriously what you’ve been entrusted with, and give an account one day for what you did with it because you are part of God’s eternal purpose. That’s a heavier, better reason to show up than “give me something useful.” It’s the difference between eating and being fed; between consuming a service and stewarding what you’ve been given.

Please reject vending machine faith. Seek the mature word; the one that asks something of you before it gives you anything back. Let your senses be trained. Let the milk stop being enough.

Grow up. Steward this life well. And give a good account.

Let’s go.

I mean, let’s get real. He didn’t spend it carelessly. He didn’t lose it through negligence or run off with it for his own purposes. He received what the Master gave him, dug a hole, placed it inside, and covered it over with the same fervor with which a good Italian shoves money under the mattress. Then he came back on the day of reckoning with the same amount he started with — not a cent less, mind you (again, like a good Italian) — and presented it to the Master as responsible stewardship.

Heck, if I were him, I’d be pretty happy (and not just because I’m Italian).

But then the plot twist. Jesus called him wicked and lazy.

We’ve gotta chat about this.

I’ve been sitting with that indictment for a long time, not because it seems harsh, but because it seems all too familiar. I want you to understand that the third servant we’re talking about (from the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25) isn’t some distant villain; he’s a person who received a genuine gift, accurately calculated the cost of full investment, and decided the risk wasn’t worth the exposure. He took the safest option available, preserved what he’d been given, and called the preservation faithfulness. And Jesus looked at the perfectly intact talent and called the man who brought it lazy.

And guess what? That’s where everything this series has been building finally lands. Frankly, it hits me between the eyes, gang.

Over the previous five articles, we’ve been exploring the malignancies that live in the soul’s most defended places — the ones that never arrive by their real names. Bitterness hides itself under the guise of discernment. Cynicism cloaks itself as realism. Envy stands up as a justice warrior. Offense dresses itself as righteousness. And pride dons the cape of passionate conviction.

And so, if you’ve been following this series at any length, you know the move by now. You’ve probably felt it land in your chest more than once. This sixth condition is the deepest, the most intimate, and the one I believe is most pervasively present in the people who’ve read every prior installment and were quietly certain it was for someone else. It lives not between you and another person, but between you and the Lord — in the exact space where full surrender would have been — and it’s been there so quietly, so confidently, that most who carry it stopped questioning whether it belongs there years ago.

It is fear. And the costume it’s been wearing is diligence.

Over my decades of ministry, I’ve worked with people who had walked with the Lord for years, loved Him genuinely, and served faithfully. But somewhere along the way, they quietly decided that full surrender was more than they bargained for. Not because they didn’t believe, of course, but because they were afraid of what the Lord might ask of them if they made the full investment. And they had dressed that fear so carefully in the language of caution and realistic faith that they genuinely couldn’t see it for what it really was anymore. What they called discernment, the Lord was calling by a different name.

That’s what we’re investigating today.

Fear Has a Theology, and Jesus Called it Out as a Counterfeit

The Parable of Talents in Matthew 25 is one that I don’t think most of us have read carefully enough. Let me bring you to the closing act, from Matthew 25:24-25 (ESV). Scripture says, “He [the servant] also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’”

Now watch this: The third servant’s confession isn’t primarily an excuse for laziness. It’s a statement about his theological paradigm. “I knew you to be a hard man,” he stated. In truth, the servant had constructed a portrait of the Master organized entirely around one dimension of the Master’s character — the exacting, demanding dimension — and used that characteristic to erase the other one. And here’s what makes this so precise: Jesus doesn’t deny the portrait at all. In Matthew 25:26-27, He accepts it as a premise, but turns it against the servant, saying, “You knew that I reap where I have not sown? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers.” Notice that He doesn’t say the servant was wrong to see Him as exacting. He says the servant took that truth about Him and used it to suppress the equally true fact that the Master also rewards faithful investment — a condition the first two servants’ experience had already demonstrated. Well, the servant saw the exacting half of the Master and let it erase the generous half. Fear always does this. It takes something true about the Lord and strips away the part that would require a responsible response. Let me drill down on my point.

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The Greek word for “afraid” here is phobētheis. It’s the passive participle of the word phobeō, meaning “to seize with fear,” and it produced action. Specifically in this context, it produced burial. What he received was not invested, not risked, and not returned with an increase. It was placed in the ground and kept perfectly, safely, immovably preserved until the Master’s return. Was anything lost? Nope. But was anything gained, either? Sadly, no.

I want to be precise about the Master’s verdict, because the scripture is richer than a single word permits. Jesus called the servant both ponēros (meaning “wicked) and oknēros (meaning “slothful, idle, and the specific shrinking hesitation that never quite finds the moment to act”). Moreover, the word oknēros comes from oknos, meaning hesitation; it’s the reluctance of the soul that keeps drawing back from action until action becomes permanently deferred.

That’s why fear and slothfulness aren’t two separate indictments here; the phobētheis of verse 25 generated the oknēros of verse 26. In other words, the fear was the interior engine and the burial was its concrete fruit. Jesus names both the root and the fruit, because both deserve to be named.

In a way, fear always generates a theology (a belief or set of beliefs about God). What I mean is that the fearful soul doesn’t just feel afraid; it builds a doctrinal case for its paralysis, calls the case honesty, and offers the undepleted talent as evidence of faithfulness. The Lord sees the ground it came from.

What God Did Not Give You, and What He Gives to the Afraid

Before we go further, though, I need to point out the distinction this series requires in every single article; the holy counterpart to the malignant condition, of sorts. And I have to do this because getting it wrong here will cost you either false courage or false peace.

Let’s look at 2 Timothy 1:7 (NKJV). The Bible says, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”

The Greek word for “fear” here is deilia. It’s cowardice, timidity, and the shrinking back of the soul that has calculated the cost of full surrender and decided the exposure isn’t worth it. Paul names this explicitly as not given by God. The Holy Spirit produces dynamis (power), agapē (love), and sōphronismos (the properly ordered, self-disciplined mind) — He gives the soul exactly what deilia steals from it.

But the yirah of Proverbs 1:7 is not deilia. Let’s look at the text: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (ESV). This fear is the reverential awe that orients the entire soul toward God and produces worship, obedience, and action. It doesn’t run from the Lord; it runs toward Him with open hands and a bowed head. The distinction holds: yirah produces formation; deilia produces burial.

And here’s a third distinction I don’t want you to miss, because it changes the call to action at the end of this article. Deilia is not the same as the fear that coexists with faithful obedience. Moses told the Lord he wasn’t eloquent and begged to send someone else (and he went anyway). Gideon asked for signs three times and laid out fleeces in the dark (and he went anyway). Jeremiah said, “I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth” (Jeremiah 1:6, ESV). And guess what? He went anyway. And Paul enters the record explicitly, saying, “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling” (1 Corinthians 2:3, ESV), right in the middle of planting one of the most significant churches in the New Testament. Not one of these is an example of deilia being expelled before obedience. They are examples of fear coexisting with faithfulness, and of the Lord doing His formative work through the movement rather than before it.

Deilia is specifically the fear that produces permanent burial. It is not the fear that goes to Pharaoh despite the presence of internal opposition, that faces the Midianites, or that enters Corinth anyway. What we’re addressing here is the person whose fear has motivated them to “bury their talent in the ground,” or defer a definite calling or invitation from the Lord indefinitely.

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Grasshopper Theology

I love the case study presented to us in the book of Numbers. It doesn’t let anyone off the hook, including people who had just watched the Red Sea part and manna appear at their feet. Let’s go to the report the ten spies brought back from Canaan. And of note, I’m applying this typologically; the text’s primary referent is Israel’s specific historical failure, and the pastoral extension to the fearful believer’s assignment is an acknowledged move, not a direct proof. Here’s Numbers 13:33 (ESV): “And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Six words are doing all the theological heavy lifting: “we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.” The ten spies had the same information as Caleb and Joshua. They walked the same land, saw the same giants, and assessed the same fortified cities. The difference, though, wasn’t in the evidence; it was in the theological framework through which the evidence was processed. Caleb and Joshua saw the same giants and concluded that “the Lord is with us; do not fear them” (Numbers 14:9, ESV). And yet, the other spies saw the same giants and concluded that they were like grasshoppers. Two groups, identical evidence. But two entirely different theologies of what the Lord was capable of doing through inadequate people.

And here is what the grasshopper theology does to a community: it spreads like cancer. Numbers 14:2-3 tells us that the whole congregation wept that night and said, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness!” — which is, if you’ll notice, exactly what the wilderness would eventually grant them. The deilia of ten became the paralysis of a nation, and the cost was forty years of wandering — not just for the ten, but for an entire generation whose inheritance was forfeited because the collective soul decided the giants were too large and the Lord wasn’t reliable enough to justify the risk.

Of course, you’re here, reading this article, not counting Nephilim. But you are calculating the cost of a marriage, a ministry, a calling, or a conversation the Lord has been inviting you into for months or years. And the calculation keeps producing the same result. That’s why I want to name that calculation for what it is, which is deilia dressed in the language of wisdom. And it has already begun measuring the dimensions of the hole.

What Perfect Love Actually Does

That said, I want to look at a familiar verse, 1 John 4:18 (ESV). The apostle John wrote, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” The Greek phrase for “casts out” is exō ballei, which literally translates to “throws outside,” or a forceful expulsion.

The point is that perfect love doesn’t manage fear or diminish it gradually through careful attention. It expels it, the way a body drives out a foreign element, because the two cannot occupy the same interior space. And the mechanism John names is profoundly precise. He tells us that “fear has to do with punishment.” What that means is the fearful soul is operating under a paradigm of judgment. It expects the Lord to punish, to demand, and to reap where He did not sow. This is the third servant’s selectively incomplete theology again, taking the exacting dimension of the Master and using it to erase His generosity. And so, the soul that fears has not yet been completed in love; it hasn’t yet been brought to the mature, formed interior posture in which the Lord’s perfect love has replaced the punishment-framework with a receiving-framework.

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Now, I want to be careful about something here, because it changes what the closing asks of you. I’m connecting 1 John 4:18 to Matthew 25 as a pastoral synthesis. The two passages are distinct in context. But the pattern they point toward together is worth naming. 1 John 4:18 is a description of the trajectory of formation, not a precondition for action. You don’t wait for love to be perfected before you move. Moses didn’t. Nor did Gideon or Paul. In the biblical pattern, the movement itself is part of how love is perfected. The Holy Spirit does His expulsive work in the heart that is already moving toward the Lord, not in the one that has decided to remain stationary until the fear resolves. Perfect love casts out fear, and one of the primary ways by which is operates is through obedient action that is taken before the fear has been fully expelled.

That’s good, isn’t it? It’s not “wait until you feel braver” or “manufacture courage you don’t yet have.” It’s…move in despite the fear, and let the love do the work of expulsion through the very motion the fear has been resisting.

And so, as I close out this 6-part series on the malignancies of the soul, the synthesis I want to leave you with is this: every malignant condition in this series is a counterfeit of something genuinely holy. Bitterness masquerades as discernment. Cynicism as realism. Envy as justice. Offense as righteousness. Pride as conviction. And fear as prudence.

The malignant soul isn’t recognizable as malignant because it’s always wearing the outfit of something the Lord actually values. And what perfect love does through the patient, persistent, formative work of the Holy Spirit is strip the costume from every condition, one by one, and give the soul the genuine article it was always counterfeiting toward. That is, discernment without bitterness, realism without cynicism, justice without envy, righteousness without offense, conviction without pride, and prudence without fear.

My friend, that is wholeness.

The Talent Is Still in the Ground

And so, with that, what is the Lord inviting you into that you’ve been calling imprudent?

In other words, if the Lord has placed a calling in front of you and you’ve been circling it for months or years without committing, that’s not discernment; that’s deilia. And if the excuse has been some version of “I know what He’s like, and the risk doesn’t justify the exposure,” the third servant’s selectively incomplete theology has moved in. And if the theology has been there long enough, the talent is already in the ground; perfectly preserved, producing nothing, while you wait for a return you’ve made certain cannot come.

Here’s the assignment, both concrete and specific. Tonight, I’d like you to name the risk the Lord has been inviting you into that you’ve been calling wisdom to avoid. Not “I need to trust God more.” That’s not specific enough to act on. I’m after the actual thing — the conversation you haven’t had, the step you haven’t taken, the investment you haven’t made, or the surrender you keep deferring. Name it specifically, then take one step toward it before you sleep. Not after the fear is gone, of course, but before. The biblical pattern from Moses to Gideon to Paul is consistent. The Lord doesn’t require the fear to be expelled before the first step. He requires the first step. And in the first step, the love begins its expulsive work.

The Master is not a hard man. He is the One who runs down the road to meet the returning son before the son has finished his speech. And every risk made in faithfulness to Him is redeemed — not always with measurable increase in the investor’s lifetime, but with a return the kingdom’s economy guarantees, and no earthly calculation can fully anticipate. Moses never entered the Promised Land, but Hebrews 11 says God had prepared something better. Paul went to Corinth in fear and trembling. And the church he planted is still in the New Testament. The kingdom doesn’t waste a single step taken in faithfulness toward the Lord, even when the investor can’t yet see what the investment is producing.

Perfect love casts out fear. And the mechanism it most often uses is the obedience that didn’t wait. Will you join me in opening the ground and taking back what we buried?

I sure hope so.

I’ll talk to you next week.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” — 1 John 4:18 (ESV)

Five installments into this series, we’ve been naming conditions that wore the costumes of other virtues: bitterness dressed as discernment, cynicism as realism, envy as justice, offense as righteousness. And every one of those conditions had an external trigger: a wound received, a labor frustrated, a comparison made, and a violation logged into memory. This one is different in makeup, though, and it’s perhaps the most lethal of the soul-cancers we’ve explored thus far.

You see, pride requires no external trigger. It grows from within and from the accumulated experience of having processed all of life through the self’s theological grid long enough for that grid to become self-certifying; no longer open to revision, no longer genuinely capable of receiving correction, no longer able to distinguish between “I am convinced by Scripture” and “I am convinced by myself.”

Throughout my years of life and ministry, I’ve watched people arrive at this condition through some of the most sincere, most sustained, and most genuinely costly theological formation imaginable. It’s abundantly clear that they didn’t set out to be proud (not many people do). They set out to be faithful. And somewhere in the long process of becoming certain, they crossed a line they never saw coming.

That’s what we’re exploring in this article.

The Heart That Deceived Itself

Before I go anywhere else, however, I want to take you to one of the most understudied texts in the entire prophetic canon. It’s brief, it’s precise, and it names the anatomy of pride with a surgical accuracy I don’t think any other text in Scripture matches. Here’s the prophet Obadiah in verse 3: “The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rock, in your lofty dwelling, who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’”

In context, the nation of Edom had built its civilization in the high places; in the literal clefts of the rock, at an elevation that made military defeat seem inconceivable. And the theological corruption that matched their geographical position was that they had convinced themselves that no one could reach them. The Hebrew word for “pride” here is zĕdôn, from the root zûd, meaning insolence, presumptuousness, and the posture of the self-appointed authority who acts as though their position is unassailable.

But here’s the statement I don’t want you to move past too quickly: “The pride of your heart has deceived you.” Not “your pride is obvious to everyone watching” or “your pride has made you insufferable in public.” Rather, the pride of your heart has deceived you.

Said another way, a proud person is the last one in the room to know it. Why? Because the very faculty they would use to evaluate their spiritual condition (their theological and circumstantial certainty) is the thing that’s been compromised. The fact of the matter is that the proud person can’t see the ground anymore, not because they have closed their eyes, but because they have climbed so high into their tower of self-importance that the ground is genuinely below their field of vision.

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That’s why the most treacherous thing about pride as a soul-cancer is that it doesn’t feel like pride. It feels like theological precision; like faithfulness to the Word. It feels like the appropriate refusal to compromise on what Scripture clearly teaches. And while all of those things can be genuine virtues, the question isn’t whether conviction is present. The question is what that conviction does to the soul that holds it.

Inflation is Way Up

The case study Paul presents in 1 Corinthians deserves to be slowed down and studied because he’s not dealing in generalities; he’s addressing a concrete situation in a concrete church, and the precision of what he observes lands harder for it. Let me bring you to 1 Corinthians 8:1-2 (ESV). Scripture says, “Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ This ‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.”

The Corinthian locals—as immature as they were—had the right theology. They knew that idols were nothing, that there was one God, and that meat sacrificed to those idols was simply meat. Sure, they were correct. And Paul affirms that fact. The problem, though, wasn’t the content of their knowledge; it was what that knowledge had done to the interior posture of the people who held it. Let me drill down on this. The Greek word for “puffs up” is phusioō. It means “to inflate, to bloat, to fill with air.” And so, as it applies to the Corinthians, their theological accuracy had inflated them rather than built them, and the pressure of that inflation was producing contempt for the brother whose conscience was not yet as developed as theirs. And that’s pride.

Now watch this. Paul’s distillation isn’t “your theology is wrong.” Rather, it’s “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” What that means is that the measure of true theological knowledge is not its accuracy alone. It’s what the knowledge produces (the fruit). What I’m getting at is that knowledge that builds people up produces love; it produces patience with people who don’t yet see what you see and a genuine openness to the possibility that your own understanding, however carefully constructed, is not the final word on anything. Knowledge that puffs produces a closed system, an increasing difficulty receiving correction, and a subtle contempt for people whose theology is less developed than yours. Worse, that contempt rarely announces itself as contempt. It arrives on the scene as a concern or as the burden of someone who simply has to carry more theological weight than the people around them.

That’s the inflation nobody feels.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

The Prayer That Thanked God for the Wrong Thing

I love Luke’s gospel. He doesn’t just give us the parables; he tells us who Jesus told them to and why, which is often the sharpest part of the text (pretty predictable behavior for a physician, I’d say). Here’s what Luke records before the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, in chapter 18, verse 9 in the ESV: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.”

The Greek for “trusted in themselves that they were righteous” is the phrase pepoithotas eph’ heautois hoti eisin dikaioi — those who had placed their settled, reliant confidence on themselves as righteous.

Did you catch that? Their settled, reliant confidence was not placed upon the Lord, but on themselves. And the mark of that misplaced confidence wasn’t an obvious arrogance; it was the treatment of others with contempt. My point is that the proud in heart almost always has a category of contempt — a group of people who don’t see what it sees, who haven’t done the theological work it has done, who represent a lower order of spiritual seriousness. Of course, that’s not my best guess. That’s straight from the next couple of verses. Let’s look at the evidence for my assertion, found in Luke 18:11-12 (ESV): “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.”

What makes this picture muddier is that the Pharisee actually fasts twice a week and faithfully tithes everything he possesses. He has genuinely done the work, and he is grateful to God for it. And yet every clause of his prayer is self-referential; God is the grammatical object, but the Pharisee is the actual subject of every sentence. He has used God as a mirror that reflects himself to himself as righteous. That is the sophisticated, theologically serious form of pride. It includes God in every sentence while keeping itself at the center of every sentence.

You see, the Pharisee is not a hypocrite in the simple sense. I know this because I was one of them. I’ve been the one to pray, “Thank GOD I’m not like them.” The reason I mention that is that the Pharisee’s prayer is not fundamentally different in structure from a great deal of what passes as theological confidence in the contemporary church today.

The person (like me) who is certain they have the right hermeneutic, the correctly calibrated theology of the gifts, the properly ordered ecclesiology — and who has allowed that certainty to produce a corresponding certainty about the inadequacy of everyone who doesn’t share it — has prayed the Pharisee’s prayer with different vocabulary. The names of the categories they thank God they’re not like have changed, sure. But the structure of prayer has not.

What It Means to Have God Positioned Against You

Now, here’s the most sobering statement in this article, and I want to give it the space it deserves. Let’s look at James 4:6 (ESV). The Bible says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

The idea of the Lord opposing the proud is not subtle or soft by any means. It’s not that He has gently withdrawn His warmth from the proud soul, or grown distant, or even reduced a measure of blessing.

It’s much more severe.

When the Lord opposes the proud, it means that He has taken up a battle position against it; He has marshaled His forces in opposition to what is operating there. Worst of all, the proud soul — certain of its theological correctness, confident in its spiritual assessment of every situation — is conducting its formation in active opposition to the One from whom all grace flows. And frankly, that’s not a minor concern. That is the most consequential statement you might read this week.

Are you sobered up yet? I sure am.

But we’re not done yet.

The word for “proud” is the Koine Greek word hyperēphanois. It speaks of those who appear above and those who display themselves as higher than what they are. And the applied point is that pride is always, at some level, a performance of elevation. Even when it never expresses itself publicly, it is the soul exerting its own superiority to itself and arranging its convictions around that performance as theological justification.

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The verse does not end with opposition, of course. It ends with the alternative: grace to the humble—those who have measured themselves accurately before God and found no ground for self-elevation. The humble person isn’t someone who refuses to hold convictions; they’re someone who holds what they believe with open hands, submitted to the Lord Who gave it, and genuinely willing to be shown where they’ve gotten it wrong. The Holy Spirit produces this in us, not as a single moment of realization, but as the slow, ongoing work of formation in a heart that keeps returning to the Lord for correction rather than merely for confirmation and affirmation.

Isn’t that what we actually need? I’m exhausted by the syrupy motivational “live your best life because you’re amazing” teaching in the local church. I’m not saying we don’t need encouragement. But we’ve had enough of the cotton candy nonsense. It won’t grow us up. God wouldn’t be God if He ratified what we already think. That’s why I’m eager to serve a God Who is willing to position Himself against what needs to be broken in me so that what is true can remain standing.

The Assessment Is in the Reaction

Allow me to summarize what we’ve unpacked here today, and I’ll make it as crystal clear as possible. Pride is not destroyed by doubting your convictions. It’s not healed by theological uncertainty or the performance of intellectual humility that amounts to never holding a position with confidence. Those are counterfeits in the other direction, and this series has been naming counterfeits from the beginning. Pride is exposed by subjecting your convictions to the kind of scrutiny that genuine humility survives and pride cannot.

Moreover, the assessment is in the reaction. It’s like this: if you hold a conviction so tightly that no challenge can reach it, something in the soul has quietly placed that conviction above the Lord who gave it. And if the conviction is above the Lord, it’s above correction. And if it’s above correction, it’s above growth. And if it’s above growth, it has stopped being conviction and become a self-constructed fortress. What lives in a fortress long enough eventually forgets there’s a world outside.

Holy conviction, when challenged, engages the challenge; it goes back to Scripture, considers the objection seriously, and remains open to refinement even when it ultimately holds its ground. On the other hand, pride, when challenged, doesn’t engage the challenge; it dismisses the challenger. It finds reasons why the person objecting lacks the standing, the knowledge, or the spiritual maturity to be taken seriously. It reclassifies the correction as an attack and experiences the question as a threat rather than an invitation.

So here’s your assignment. Tonight, I’d like you to name one theological conviction you hold with the greatest certainty (the position you are most confident about and least willing to have disturbed). Then take it to the most spiritually mature, Scripture-grounded person you trust and ask them to tell you where your blind spots might be. Not to abandon the conviction, but to put it in the presence of another qualified mind and observe your own reaction to what they say. If the reaction is genuine engagement, what you hold is conviction. If the reaction is immediate dismissal and the categorization of the person as less qualified than you before they’ve finished their sentence, what you hold is zĕdôn. And antitassetai is already in position.

Will you join me in opening our hands to the One who opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble? What I’ve discovered is that the Father is more generous than our certainty deserves.

It’s a new day, and pride will hinder us from walking in it.

It’s that big of a deal.

I believe in you.

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” — James 4:6 (ESV)

Boy, was I wrong.

As a pastor, I’ve also watched this condition operate in some of the most sincerely devoted people I know; people truly who love the Lord, who serve faithfully, and who would be appalled to be told what has taken up residence in them. Why appalled? Well, it’s easy. The offended person doesn’t believe they’re wounded. They believe they’re awake and have something to say. But by the time you tell them otherwise, they’ve usually already decided that your inability to see what they see is itself the problem. That’s what makes offense the most culturally fortified condition in this series. And it’s where we begin this week. Welcome to the fourth installment in our Malignant Soul series.

The Trap Nobody Sees Coming

By now, you know I love the Word and studying it deeply. That’s why I want to start with the Greek word that organizes our entire theological case. Jesus uses it with surgical deliberateness. And yet, we’ve domesticated it into something far less dangerous than what He intended. Let me bring you to Matthew 18:7 (NKJV). Here’s Jesus: “Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!”

The word Jesus uses here is skandalon.1 And before we go further, I want to trace its roots carefully, because the English word “offense” has softened what skandalon actually describes. In its original context, the word is often traced to the trigger mechanism of an animal trap — the spring-loaded element that, when touched, snaps the snare shut around whatever made contact with it. Whether that precise etymology holds across all scholarly accounts, the metaphor in New Testament usage is consistently that of a snare or stumbling block. Simply put, it’s something designed to catch, to hold in place, or to entrap. It isn’t primarily a feeling or emotional state. It is a mechanism of captivity.

Luke records the same warning in Luke 17:1 (ESV). Scripture says, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!” The skandala are real, Jesus says, but the person who triggers the snare bears a woe, and so does the soul that steps into it. Now watch this: Jesus doesn’t call offense a virtue in either text. He doesn’t name it prophetic sensitivity or the evidence of a righteousness that takes sin seriously. He calls it a woe.

The mechanism’s primary function is to hold its host in place while everything else moves on around it. Of course, that’s exactly what the skandalon does, and what makes it so difficult to diagnose, because the soul caught in the trap believes it has found the high ground.

Before our investigation goes any further, though, I need to make a distinction that this series requires, because we’ve made it in every prior installment. Not everything that looks like offense to the naked eye is the malignant condition this article is naming, and theological integrity demands that I say so plainly. What do I mean? Well, for instance, the Lord doesn’t call His people to undifferentiated tolerance of sin.

Moreover, Paul is explicit in Ephesians 4:26 (ESV) [emphasis mine]. He says, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” The first clause matters enormously. The point is that righteous anger is permitted. It is not the skandalon. The holy form of the impulse that offense corrupts is a direct, specific, privately conducted confrontation. It’s what Jesus prescribes in Matthew 18:15, where going to the person privately, naming the fault specifically, and seeking restoration is the first and primary movement. That’s not passivity. Rather, it is the most demanding form of relational faithfulness available to us.

That said, some situations (those involving genuine abuse, exploitation of power, manipulation, or patterns of harm) require more than a private conversation. They require appropriate authority, the witness of the leadership, or the establishment of a protective distance from the relationship. This article is not addressed to those situations, and I want to state that plainly: the Lord is not honored by covering genuine harm with Christianese or the language of spiritual maturity. What I’m after here is the specific condition that develops when a legitimate hurt (whether real or perceived), instead of moving toward the Lord, toward the person, or toward appropriate accountability, parks itself in the interior life of the offended and becomes a courthouse the soul never leaves. Does that make sense? I hope so, because that’s what we’re here to explore.

The Most Faithful Man of His Generation Was Not Immune

Now, if you think you’re beyond temptation on this matter, please think again. Even the most faithful man of his generation was not immune, and I’m speaking of John the Baptist. Let’s look at Matthew 11:2-3 (ESV). The Bible says, “Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?’”

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So here’s John, in prison because of his faithfulness and awaiting an execution he didn’t deserve. He sends his disciples to ask Jesus a question.2 And for all intents and purposes, John is asking from a place of genuine personal tension. He’s basically saying, “Hey, Jesus, you’re not doing what I said you would. The axe at the root of the tree (Matthew 3:10) hasn’t fallen the way I preached it. My theology of what the Messiah was supposed to look like is in tension with what’s actually happening in front of me.”

And somewhere in that gap between expectation and reality, the skandalon was waiting.

Of course, Jesus doesn’t condemn him. But He does send the disciples back with a list of miracles, and then drops this rhetorical bomb, recorded in Matthew 11:6 (ESV): “And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

Stay with me, because the weight of that sentence lives in what it presupposes, which is that a blessing names a genuine danger. Jesus doesn’t pronounce blessings on conditions trivially easy to meet; He is naming a vulnerability so real and so consequential that even the greatest man born of woman was feeling its pull from inside a prison cell. The skandalizō (the snaring) was a live possibility for John. And if it was live for John, nobody reading this article is above it.

Even you.

I’ve watched this play out in life more times than I can count, and it’s like this: Genuinely faithful people step to the same edge John was feeling, not because they were careless, but because the Lord wasn’t performing on the timeline they expected, in the form they’d constructed their case for. And instead of bringing that tension directly to the Lord, the way John did by sending his question to the source, they filed it away and made a quiet internal determination that they would take matters into their own hands. And what was filed away into the recesses of the heart became a grievance. And what became a grievance became an identity. And what became an identity became the lens through which everything else was interpreted.

That is the skandalon closing, albeit quietly, around a soul that believed it was simply being honest.

The Courthouse You Built Without Knowing It

When offense settles into the interior life and isn’t addressed — either by the direct and personal confrontation Matthew 18:15 prescribes or by genuine release to the Lord — it doesn’t merely sit there. It builds something lethal. It installs a courthouse in the soul, fills every seat with the same person, and then opens the court for business.

Here’s how it plays out. The offended person becomes the prosecutor who identified the violation. They become the judge who determines its severity and the jury that delivers the verdict. And they become the warden who administers the sentence, which is usually some combination of distance, dismissal, silence, and the carefully calibrated withdrawal of goodwill that passes in Christian circles as wisdom about who gets access to you.

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This is what I’d call moral self-enthronement. It’s the assumption of a judicial seat that belongs only to the Lord, presiding over a case that was never yours to adjudicate. I want to look at Romans 14:4 (ESV) together. But first, some context. In Romans 14, Paul is addressing disputes between the strong and the weak in Rome over meat sacrificed to idols and the observance of certain days (disputable matters of conscience, not interpersonal harm). He isn’t writing a treatise on offense. But the principle his argument rests on carries direct weight for the courthouse we’ve been describing, and I want to hear it that way: “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls.”

Well, Paul wants an answer, and the only honest one is “nobody.” What I mean is that you have no standing in that court because the person who wronged you is not your servant; they are the Lord’s. And the Lord has not vacated the bench to make room for your grievance. The offense you’ve been prosecuting, no matter how legitimate the original violation was, has placed you in a seat that isn’t yours, administering verdicts you have no authority to render. And frankly, too few of us take this matter as seriously as it should be considered.

Now, I want you to hear what I’m not saying before I say what I am. I’m not saying the violation wasn’t real (whatever it was in your life). I’m not saying the hurt isn’t legitimate (not at all!). I’m saying that what you’ve built around it — the case, the courthouse, the sentence — is something the Lord never commissioned. And it’s costing you far more than any verdict could ever be worth.

There’s Glory in Overlooking Offense

I love the precision of the wisdom literature. Solomon doesn’t deal in generalities or poetic consolation; he makes surgical claims about the architecture of the human soul. Let’s look at Proverbs 19:11 (ESV). Solomon wrote, “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.”

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The Hebrew word for “glory” is kāvôd. It’s the weightiness, the honor, or the settled heavy presence of someone whose spiritual substance precedes them into a room. The Lord’s kāvôd fills the temple in 1 Kings 8. And Solomon says it is this kāvôd that characterizes the person who overlooks an offense rather than prosecuting it.

That said, I want to be crystal clear that this isn’t the description of a doormat (or a peacekeeper). It is not passive, nice Christianity masquerading as gentleness, or the inability to hold people accountable dressed up as spiritual virtue. It’s the description of the most formidable person in any room. This is the one who doesn’t need to respond to every slight, who doesn’t require the last word, and who can absorb what was done or said and release it without losing anything of themselves in the transaction.

That person has something the offended soul is spending itself trying to find. They have kāvôd. They possess the settled interior weight that doesn’t require external validation from the person who wronged them to feel whole.

Isn’t that what we actually want, too?

See, the offended soul is convinced it needs the other person to acknowledge the full scope of the harm before anything can be released. And yet Solomon says the person with good sense (with kāvôd already operating in them) can overlook it entirely, not because the wrong didn’t happen, but because they carry something inside them that the wrong couldn’t actually touch.

What we’re witnessing is a hard distinction between the person who grits their teeth and attempts to overlook an offense through sheer willpower in the moment of pressure, and the person who has undergone the kind of sustained spiritual training that makes the kāvôd response natural rather than forced.

This is the difference between trying…and training.

And thankfully, the Holy Spirit produces kāvôd in us, but not as an automatic result of a single act of surrender. It is the fruit of a soul that has submitted itself, over time, and when it feels hardest to do, to the specific disciplines that retrain the interior life. Those include sustained times of prayer, Scripture memorization, the practice of honest confession before the Lord and our confidants, and the habitual choice to release what belongs to the Lord before the courtroom door swings open. This is formation, not performance, my friend. The “try harder to overlook” posture produces the gritted-teeth version of patience, which is not kāvôd in the least bit. It produces suppressed resentment dressed up in a polite Christian personality.

The Assignment Due Before You Sleep Tonight

Can I give you some homework? First, here is the synthesis that the whole article has been building toward. The skandalon is real; it closes, and the soul caught in it cannot move forward, cannot receive what the Lord is building ahead of it, cannot steward kāvôd in a community that desperately needs people carrying weight rather than grievances, let alone a culture that is so desperate for the mature sons of God to arise in this new day of awakening.

The violation may have been real (and I’m so sorry for that). The hurt may have been legitimate. But the courthouse you built around your heart was never authorized. And every day you continue to sit on that bench rendering verdicts you have no standing to pronounce, and administering sentences you were never commissioned to give, is a day you’ve traded your kāvôd for a gavel that doesn’t belong to you.

Paul has already set the deadline, and I want you to hear the full text now. Let’s look at Ephesians 4:26-27 in the ESV. Paul wrote, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” The unresolved courthouse isn’t only a personal cost. More specifically, it is a strategic foothold.

And so, back to the homework assignment to which I alluded a moment ago.

Tonight, name the offense you’ve been prosecuting. You already know what it is; the courtroom door opened the moment you started reading this article. Then make the decision you’ve been deferring.

If the wrong requires confrontation (if it’s the kind of sin Matthew 18:15 is designed to address), take it to the person privately and specifically, with the goal of restoration rather than vindication. If the situation involves serious harm requiring appropriate authority or protective distance, move toward that accountability with the same urgency and seriousness. And if this is a wound the Lord is asking you to release directly to Him, then release it tonight, fully, without reservation, to the only Judge with actual standing in that case.3

Now, listen closely. What I’m not giving you is the option to keep carrying it. The trap was never a home, and it has had you long enough.

Join me in stepping out of it. Repent. And let’s move forward together.

I believe in you.

“Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” - Proverbs 19:11 (ESV)

But in truth, it’s envy.

And here’s what makes it so treacherous: an envious person, almost without exception, doesn’t believe they’re envious.

Over the years (and maybe last week, too), I’ve watched this condition operate in some of the most genuinely devoted people I know; people who love the Lord, who serve faithfully, and who would be appalled to be told what was growing in them. They were comparing themselves to someone whose flourishing occupied a space they believed (with theological scaffolding to support the claim) they deserved. And as honest and authentic as that may sound, it’s not justice. It’s a soul-cancer growing in the recesses of the heart.

How do I know this so well? I used to be one of them.

Let’s look at what Solomon says in Proverbs 14:30 (AMPC): “A calm and undisturbed mind and heart are the life and health of the body, but envy, jealousy, and wrath are like rottenness of the bones.”

The Bones Don’t Lie

Of all the descriptions of a soul condition in the wisdom literature of Scripture, this appears to be the most physiologically precise. In the verse we just read, Solomon doesn’t say envy wounds the spirit or dims the mind, though it does both. He says it rots the bones.

I want to drill down on this.

The Hebrew word for envy here is qin’ah, which translates to “the burning urgency of a desire that cannot tolerate another person’s advantage.” And the word for “rot” is raqab, which is the slow corruption of what was once structural. Think about it this way: Bones are the architecture of the body; they hold everything else in place. And so when they decay, the structure collapses from the inside (nearly imperceptibly) until the collapse is total.

You’d think Solomon is reaching for vivid imagery, but he isn’t. Instead, he’s naming what envy does at the deepest level of the interior life, silently, over time, and below the surface, which is precisely the pattern this series (accidental series, at that!) has been tracing from the beginning.

Before I build the case further, though, I want to offer a distinction that I believe theological integrity requires. Envy is not the same as lament over genuine injustice. Can we make that clear? The psalmist Asaph names this with a transparency that should embarrass those of us who dress our envy more carefully than he did. Here he is in Psalm 73:2-3 (ESV):

“But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

What Asaph describes flirts with the border between envy and legitimate grief. Watching the wicked flourish while the righteous suffer is a real emotional category named in Scripture. The Psalms are full of instances like this. And so, the diagnostic distinction I’m making is this: Asaph brings his stumble before the Lord, enters the temple, and receives a recalibrated vision (73:17). And that is lament moving toward the Lord.

This is the key I want you to pay attention to.

On the contrary, envy in its malignant form does not move toward God. It moves toward isolation, comparison, gossip, and toward the slow construction of a case against the person whose flourishing has become intolerable.

That’s the line we toe. And staying on the right side of it requires a level of self-examination most of us are not willing to do.

Not All Jealousy Is Sin, and That Complicates the Diagnosis

I want to be really careful here, because Scripture doesn’t treat all jealousy as malignant, and an article that implies otherwise would be theologically dishonest. That’s why I’m working hard to parse this apart thoughtfully and accurately.

Let me flip the script.

The Lord names Himself, Exodus 20:5 (ESV), “a jealous God”. And that root word, qana, comes from the same root family as the word qin’ah. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “I feel a divine jealousy for you” (2 Corinthians 11:2, ESV). Moreover, Phinehas’s zeal turns away the Lord’s wrath in Numbers 25:11 and is commended, not condemned.

So what’s the difference?

Godly jealousy is covenantal. It guards something precious that belongs rightly to the one feeling it, for the sake of the relationship, not for self-interest (I can’t tell you how many couples I’ve counseled on this exact issue). Let’s hold this up against the examples I shared a moment ago. The Lord’s jealousy guards His covenant people. Paul’s jealousy guards the Corinthians’ fidelity to Christ. Phinehas’s zeal guards the holiness of the camp.

And yet, envy is acquisitive. It doesn’t guard what is rightfully yours. Rather, it covets what belongs to someone else, and it does so for the self, not for the sake of any relationship worth protecting. We identified this same root in the bitterness article as pikros zēlos, bitter jealousy, in James 3:14. Envy is that same root grown in a different direction, aimed not at a wound received but at another person’s flourishing.

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That’s the test. And so, when you’re in a similar situation, ask whether the jealousy is guarding something that belongs to you for the sake of love, or coveting something that belongs to someone else for the sake of self. The first is holy. But the second is rotting your bones right now, possibly while you call it discernment.

Worse, this malignancy of the soul is as ancient as humanity.

The First Murder Was an Envy Problem (Almost)

I want to take you back to the beginning, in Genesis 4. It’s the account of the first murder in human history.

I need to be precise about something before I build this case, though, because Scripture itself is more restrained than the popular reading of it. Genesis 4:5 doesn’t use language that implies envy at all. Here’s the actual text, rendered by the ESV: “So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.” The Hebrew names anger, not qin’ah. And so, what I’m about to trace is a pastoral extension of the narrative’s logic, not a direct lexical claim the text makes about Cain’s interior state. I want to own that plainly before I make the case, because I believe the case is still worth making.

Cain brought an offering. So did Abel. The Lord regarded Abel’s sacrifice and did not regard Cain’s. And what followed was anger.

Now watch this.

Cain didn’t covet Abel’s livestock. He didn’t want Abel’s land or Abel’s possessions. What he wanted was what Abel had before the Lord: the regard and attention turned toward his offering. Now, whatever we call the emotion the text names as anger, its trajectory was vertical (toward the Lord) before it became horizontal (relational between the brothers). Cain wanted the Lord’s face turned toward him the way it was turned toward Abel, and when it wasn’t, the anger he carried toward heaven found a target he could actually reach.

If that’s clear as mud still, it’s like this: If you want what another person has with the Lord and you don’t receive it, something in the soul begins to construct a reason why (maybe even a reasonable one at that). And if it constructs a reason why, it begins to build a case against the person who has what it wants. And if the case is strong enough, that person becomes the obstacle between the soul and the regard it believes it deserves. And if the person is the obstacle, removal becomes the solution. That’s what the soul begins to calculate, consciously or not. And that’s the trajectory of Genesis 4, despite the name we give the emotion that started it.

But here’s where mercy interrupts the cascade, and I don’t want you to miss it. Before Cain lifted his hand against his brother, the Lord came to him first. In Genesis 4:6-7 (ESV), He said, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”

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Goodness, talk about mercy before the murder. The Lord doesn’t merely offer Cain an exit; He diagnoses the mechanism of Cain’s heart with surgical clarity (as the God of the Universe would). The case study is clear: Sin is crouching, desiring Cain the way a predator desires its prey, and Cain is told, rather explicitly, that he must rule over it. Integrity of heart would require that desire not dictate the outcome. We see that Cain retained agency over what was stalking him, right up until the moment he didn’t use it. And sadly, Cain didn’t take the exit. But you and I can.

The Day a Pagan Saw What Priests Couldn’t

I want to look at Matthew 27:18 (ESV). Here, Pilate is standing before the crowd, and the crowd is demanding Barabbas. The Bible tells us why, saying, “For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up.”

Read that again.

The “they” here matters greatly, and Matthew’s biography of Jesus opens the chapter, naming exactly who they are: “all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death” (27:1). This was not the whole religious establishment (figures like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea remained sympathetic to Jesus throughout). It was specifically the chief priests (the men with the most institutional standing to lose) who handed Him over. And a Roman governor, a pagan official with no investment in Israel’s theological disputes, identified their real motive instantly. They had dressed it in the language of doctrinal concern, covenantal loyalty, and protection of the people. And Pilate saw through the costume in a mere moment.

The Greek word Matthew uses here is phthonos, and its use in Scripture is only the corrosive kind. In other words, it’s envy that cannot tolerate another’s advantage and desires not merely what another has, but to see them deprived of it entirely. Well, the chief priests had nursed this phthonos into a comprehensive theological case that felt, to the men carrying it, like zeal for the Law of Moses. And it was rotting bones beneath robes of religious respectability.

I want to bring this down to the practical before we go further, because the lesson loses its force if it stays at the level of ancient biblical history. Most of us will never construct a theological case for killing anyone. Am I right? But most of us have, at some point, constructed a quieter case; a reason why a colleague’s promotion was undeserved, why a friend’s ministry platform reflects something other than the Lord’s favor, or why someone’s flourishing should trouble us more than it pleases us. Well, guess what? The mechanism Pilate saw in the chief priests is the same, scaled down, operating in church staff meetings, family gatherings, and the private commentary we run in our own minds about people the Lord has chosen to bless. Can I tell you plainly that phthonos doesn’t need a crucifixion to do its work? It only needs a comparison left unexamined long enough to do its dirty work and leave the crime scene pretty tidy.

The Question Jesus Refused to Answer

There’s a verse in John 21 that holds the mechanism of liberation for everything this diagnosis has named. Jesus has just reinstated Peter. Of course, Peter, freshly restored, turns and sees John following, and asks, in John 21:21-22 (ESV), “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!”

If I’m honest, I’ve always been irritated by that verse. Nothing more, nothing less. Just Jesus—the SEAL team 6 sniper that He is—dropping the line, “What is that to you? You follow me.”

That’s why I want to tell you that the cure for envy is not to suppress the comparison through sheer willpower. Instead, it’s to become so fixed on the specific assignment the Lord has placed in front of you that the lane next to yours becomes genuinely irrelevant. Not because you’ve managed the comparison, but because you’ve been given something far better to look at. And I want to give you something concrete to do with that redirected gaze, because a reoriented heart that still has nowhere to put its energy will drift right back to comparison.

“The concrete discipline,” you ask? Yeah, it’s blessing.

Not tolerating another person’s flourishing through gritted teeth and a smug, sweet tea-laced “bless your heart,” but actively asking the Lord to increase their lives; speaking well of them; thanking Him for them and their gift out loud, and in their hearing if you can manage it. Blessing is something the will can do in the exact moment comparison wants to take over, and frankly, it’s very hard to bless someone with your mouth while phthonos governs your heart.

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Here’s Pastor Paul, in Philippians 4:11 (AMPC), to drive home my point: “Not that I am implying that I was in any personal want, for I have learned how to be content (satisfied to the point where I am not disturbed or disquieted) in whatever state I am.”

I love that Paul doesn’t call this kind of contentment a gift he was simply born with. He calls it learned. The Greek word for “content” in this verse is important to highlight. It is the word autarkēs, which means self-sufficient, not in the sense of independence from the Lord, but in the sense of an interior sufficiency that doesn’t require comparison to feel whole. And the verb “I have learned” is emathon. It’s a decisive, completed acquisition Paul looks back on as a single settled fact, and the whole of a long formation viewed as one finished thing. He didn’t receive this at conversion. He learned it, and the learning is finished, even though, of course, the living of it continues daily.

Bless What You Used to Resent

“Bless what you used to resent.” I resent myself for writing what sounds like a lightweight, sugary Christian trope. There are very few things that annoy me more than platitudes. But hey, we’ll work with it.

Three thousand years removed from Cain, and two thousand removed from Pilate, the mechanism Solomon taught in Proverbs 14:30 hasn’t changed one bit. Comparison still rots what conviction once held up. And here’s the synthesis this whole article has been building: the wound was never that someone else had too much. The wound was that somewhere along the way, you stopped trusting the Giver enough to leave the distribution in His hands. Cain wanted the Lord’s face turned toward him the way it was turned toward his brother. The chief priests wanted the crowd’s allegiance the way it had turned toward Jesus.

And you? You want what someone else is holding before the Lord right now, and the wanting has convinced you it’s righteous. My friend, it isn’t. It’s qin’ah, doing underground work on your bones while you call it discernment.

So here’s the application, and I want to give it to you plainly, not as a suggestion but as an assignment due before you sleep tonight. Ready?

Name the person. You already know who they are; the name surfaced the moment you started reading this article. Go to them, or go to the Lord on their behalf, and bless out loud what He is building in their life. Not through gritted teeth. Out loud, in a way that costs you something to say.

Phthonos cannot survive in a mouth that is busy blessing. That’s not sentiment. That’s spiritual mechanics.

Join me in fixing our eyes forward.

I believe in you.

If this work is helping you heal what’s holding you back and walk in wholeness, you can invest in the mission here.

For more, I invite you to check out my book, Healing What You Can’t Erase, and listen to my weekly podcast, Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness.

There is a specific kind of cynicism that rarely gets named in conversations about the soul, because it wears the clothes of something noble. You see, it doesn’t take root in the person who gave up. It takes root in the person who keeps going. It nestles in the recesses of the heart of the person who showed up, again and again, to the work the Lord assigned, and who kept showing up even when the results were invisible and the encouragement was absent. Moreover, it settles into the soul not through carelessness but through sustained, costly faithfulness that eventually runs headlong into a wall of no visible return. And when it does, something in the interior life begins to ask a question it’s never had the nerve to ask before: What exactly is the point of this?

As a pastor, I know that question well. I’ve sat with people—young and old—who asked a version of that question draped in a cloak of exhaustion, and in the sentiment of quiet despair. I’ve heard it from wonderful folks who keep building what the Lord said to build, and keep watching it look—from every measurable angle—like it isn’t working.

And more recently, I’ve asked it myself.

This article is for us, because cynicism born of frustrated faithfulness is one of the most spiritually insidious conditions in the formation of God’s people. Not because it’s dramatic, of course, but because it’s almost entirely invisible until it becomes structural. On the surface, it doesn’t look like rebellion. Instead, it looks like realism. It doesn’t announce itself as a crisis of faith; it announces itself as a stoic assessment of how things actually work. And by the time you recognize what it’s doing to your soul (the erosion is so subtle that it’s nearly undetectable), it has already reorganized your interior life around a metric that has nothing to do with the kingdom.

The Productivity Gospel Nobody Interrogates

There is a popular axiom widely circulated in culture and almost universally misattributed to Albert Einstein (who almost certainly never said it) that defines insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different outcome. I’m certain that you’ve heard it. It has the ring of obvious wisdom, the kind of statement that decorates motivational literature without anyone stopping to ask whether it’s actually a kingdom principle.

Well, in the economy of the world, of course, it holds. If a strategy consistently fails, the move is to revise it. Seems obvious, right? The feedback loop is tight, and the corrective action is unambiguous. This is sound management thinking in a nutshell.

But the question I’m asking today is whether that is a tried-and-true kingdom principle. Spoiler alert: I don’t believe it is.

As far as I can tell, the kingdom of God doesn’t operate on productivity logic. It doesn’t run on visible metrics, quarterly returns, or outcomes calibrated to effort invested. And so, when we import the world’s economic framework into the kingdom (when we measure faithfulness by output, obedience by return, and calling by visible result), we haven’t become wise; we’ve become cynical. We’ve mistaken a management principle for a theological one and handed the economy of our soul’s formation over to a system that was never designed to hold it.

Quickly, I want to name two things carefully before we go further, because integrity requires both. First, this is not a defense of fruitlessness or undisciplined labor, and it isn’t an excuse for the kind of spiritual stubbornness that mistakes resistance to the Holy Spirit’s correction for faithfulness. There are seasons when the Lord genuinely redirects His people. Those seasons include times when the absence of fruit isn’t about timing but about assignment. And distinguishing those two conditions requires ongoing, intimate attentiveness to the Holy Spirit rather than a blanket principle of persistence. Does that make sense?

Second, not all sustained critique of broken systems is cynicism requiring repentance. The Old Testament prophets were not people who needed to surrender their timelines; they were people accurately naming what was genuinely corrupt, at enormous personal cost. Consider Jeremiah. His laments weren’t cynical. They were the honest grief of a faithful man watching covenant catastrophe unfold in real time. The point is that there is a difference between cynicism born of frustrated faithfulness in a genuine assignment and prophetic discernment that correctly identifies structural failure requiring confrontation or departure. And collapsing that distinction is how broken institutions silence the people who see them most clearly.

What I’m addressing, therefore, is something more specific, and that is the condition that develops when the soul has genuinely been faithful to its assignment and begins to conclude that faithfulness (read: doing the same thing over and over) in and of itself is futile. Well, that conclusion is a lie. And it’s the lie this article is built to dismantle.

You Were Not Called to the Harvest

I love the teaching of Paul. He doesn’t let us build monuments to our own labor (sorry, influencer culture), and he doesn’t let us despair over outcomes that were never ours to manage in the first place.

To demonstrate my point, we’re going to look at 1 Corinthians 3:6. But first, a brief hermeneutical note, because the context matters. In the text at hand, Paul is writing to a divided Corinthian church in which factions have formed around human leaders. Some are pledging allegiance to Paul, and others to Apollos. His primary argument in the text is against misplaced loyalty to spiritual personalities rather than to the Lord. The pastoral extension to sustained faithfulness without visible return is legitimate and available here, so I merely want to own it as an application point rather than a direct proof text. Here’s the verse in the ESV: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

Now watch this. Three verbs. Three players. And three entirely distinct domains of responsibility.

Paul planted. Apollos watered. God gave the growth.

The Greek word for “gave the growth” is auxanō, which is continuous divine action. In this case, God was all the while bringing the growth. The planting and the watering were human, historical, and bounded by available effort. But the growth was entirely God’s jurisdiction and His prerogative. And that means Paul’s assignment was never the harvest; it was faithful planting and the complete release of the outcome to the only One whose domain includes the increase.

Is that ringing your bell yet?

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I also want to be honest about what Paul says immediately after in verse 8: “Each will receive his wages according to his labor.” Therein is an accountability dimension that the article’s argument doesn’t eliminate.

Laborers will be evaluated—not by the size of the harvest—but by the quality of the labor itself. Now, that is both a warning and a liberation. It’s a warning because faithfulness isn’t an excuse for careless, undisciplined work. And it’s a liberation because the judgment of your labor doesn’t depend on outcomes you were never responsible for to begin with. You’ll be evaluated on what you planted and how you watered. The harvest was (and will always be) God’s to give.

And so, the cynicism that creeps into sustained faithfulness almost always emerges from a confusion of assignments (at least it does in my experience as a type-A, driven, strategic self-starter).

The one called to plant holds himself accountable for outcomes that were never in his portfolio (I’m notorious for doing this!). He keeps checking the soil for what isn’t there yet, and the absence of visible growth begins to mean something to him that God never intended it to mean: failure. But Paul is entirely clear in this portion of Scripture. Auxanō, the increase, was God’s work, continuous, below the surface, in the dark, and in the domain the planter was never invited to manage.

The Moment Weariness Becomes Cynicism

Whatever we misdiagnose, we will mistreat. In this case, that means that weariness and cynicism are not the same condition. Weariness is an energy condition by which the soul has given much and is running low. Most often, it can be addressed by rest, by community, by the kind of encouragement that refuels a depleted person for the next movement. Cynicism, on the other hand, is a belief condition whereby the soul hasn’t merely grown tired; it has drawn a wrong conclusion. It has crossed from “I’m exhausted” to “I’ve stopped trusting the process (and the Lord).” And that crossing is a spiritual threshold that rest alone cannot reverse.

Let’s zoom in on weariness for a moment. Paul addresses weariness directly in Galatians 6:9. Let’s look at the AMPC rendering, which gives us the full weight of the Greek:

“And let us not lose heart and grow weary and faint in acting nobly and doing right, for in due time and at the appointed season we shall reap, if we do not loosen and relax our courage and faint.”

The operative Greek word here is enkakeō, which means to lose courage from within, to become exhausted and faint in one’s purpose. Paul isn’t warning against laziness; he’s warning against a specific interior collapse that follows sustained effort with no visible return. And he describes it in three movements: lose heart, grow weary, and faint. All three describe not a person who abandoned their post early, but a person who kept going until the going cost them their conviction that it was worth going.

And that’s the crossing point. That’s where cynicism is born: not at the beginning of the race, but somewhere in the middle of it, when the faithful soul has been running long enough to start privately concluding that the finish line isn’t real.

And Paul’s answer isn’t “run harder” (read: hustle) or “find a more effective technique.” His answer is frustratingly simple: the timing isn’t yours. And that leads us to the next phrase in the text, “In due time and at the appointed season.” The Greek here is kairo idio, meaning “in its own appointed time.” I want to hold this with appropriate epistemic care and articulate that scholars have rightly noted that the sharp theological contrast between kairos and chronos popular in pastoral teaching overstates how distinctly the terms function across New Testament usage. The pastoral point, however, stands with full weight, and it sits at the core of the thesis of this article: there is a time that belongs to God’s reckoning rather than ours, and the soul trapped in cynicism has stopped trusting that time.

Maturity—the goal of our Christian experience and discipleship to Jesus as the sons of God—demands our faithful stewardship to this concept (not our perfection in achieving it, of course, but our submitted hearts unto the Lord with humble dependence and trust in His power, wisdom, and goodness).

And if that was a lot to assimilate, I’ll make it simple. If your faithfulness isn’t producing visible results on your timeline, something in the soul begins to conclude the method is wrong. And if the method is wrong, it begins to question the economy that the method is serving. And if the economy is questioned long enough, it begins to question the King who established it. And if the King can be questioned on the basis of delayed return, the whole architecture of obedience begins to rest on something other than trust. Why? Because cynicism doesn’t start with unbelief. It starts with a metric usually determined by our own insight and understanding.

The Seed Has to Die Before It Multiplies

I want to bring you to John 12:24. Before I do, though, let me own something hermeneutically: Jesus is speaking here of His own coming death as the mechanism of His own fruitfulness. This is Christological before it is applicatory. My pastoral extension to the laborer’s experience of apparently fruitless seasons carries a strong homiletical tradition, and I believe it’s available to us, but I’m naming it as an extension. Cool? Good. Now, here’s the text, John 12:24, from the ESV:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

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The Greek word for “dies” here is apothanē. It’s a complete and deliberate death. Not hibernation, nor a holding pattern. And in the kingdom economy, the death of the seed is the mechanism of multiplication, not a setback on the way to multiplication. Nor is it a delay before multiplication, but the actual means by which multiplication becomes possible.

You’re probably asking, “Chris, what in the world does that mean for the soul laboring in sustained faithfulness with no visible fruit? Like mine?” Well, it means there is a category of kingdom reality that looks, from the outside, exactly like failure.

Yep. You read that correctly. It looks like a failure to the untrained eye.

Think about it this way: The seed in the ground is indistinguishable from a seed that will never grow. There is no visible, measurable, externally verifiable difference between a seed dying toward multiplication and a seed that is simply dead. The difference is entirely hidden in the ground, in the dark, and in the domain of the One who brings the increase. Much like our lives.

Gosh, isn’t that a liberating thing to finally name? The truth at hand is that the absence of visible fruit is not necessarily evidence of unfaithfulness. On the contrary, it may be evidence of the precise stage of kingdom development that precedes the multiplication you’ve been believing for.

Of course, there’s a catch-22 in play. The seed that refuses to die remains alone. Faithfulness that insists on remaining visible, on producing results that can be confirmed and credited, is a seed that won’t go underground. And a seed that won’t go underground cannot multiply. That is the kingdom economy, and it isn’t cruel; it’s incredibly generous because the multiplication it produces is far beyond what the seed could have become by remaining intact above the soil.

Fruit You May Never See

Now here’s the hard part. Integrity demands that I say something that most teaching on perseverance quietly avoids (especially in the sugar-pop motivational Sunday morning sermons du jour): some faithfulness is designed to bear fruit the laborer never sees. If I’m honest, I don’t love that. And yet it changes the shape of the entire argument.

I’ll prove my point.

Moses was faithful for forty years and never entered the Promised Land. Jeremiah preached his entire ministry without witnessing national repentance; vindicated only after his death when his warnings proved catastrophically true. Isaiah spoke words that wouldn’t be fulfilled for centuries. John the Baptist died in a prison cell without seeing the full fruit of his forerunner ministry, and Jesus called him the greatest born of woman. And then there’s the list of heroes in Hebrews 11 who died before seeing their promise. These are not failure stories. They are the shape that certain faithfulness takes in the kingdom economy.

With that established, let me bring you to Habakkuk 2:3 (ESV). Scripture says, “For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end — it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

Let’s break this down.

“If it seems slow.” The Lord doesn’t deny that slowness is a real perception. He addresses it directly with an instruction: wait for it. But the confidence in that waiting belongs not to the word itself but to the promise attached to it from the Lord: “it will surely come; it will not delay.” The word provides the posture; the promise provides the ground.

But I need to hold both the promise and the category honestly. For some people, “it will surely come” means the breakthrough arrives within their lifetime and they reap what they planted. For others (like Moses, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist), it means that their faithfulness plants something that will bring forth a harvest in the age to come, and their reward is eschatological rather than historical. This is not a lesser outcome by any means. By the measure of the kingdom, it is a greater one. And so, as it applies to our theme, the cynicism-defeating word for that category isn’t “wait, it’ll come soon.” It’s this: your labor belongs to a story longer than your lifetime, and the Author of that story is not slow. He is, in fact, precise.

I want to be careful not to collapse what I've just said into a cute motivational message, because it's far more costly than that. I also hope you’re tracking with me, because this is the very thing that reorients our souls away from the wrong economy entirely. Faithfulness isn’t an investment expecting a return. It is an act of worship offered to the Lord, Whose ledger runs longer than ours and Whose arithmetic we can’t yet fully read. And that’s why the metric has to change.

Change the Metric, Not the Mission

The cynicism born of frustrated faithfulness is not healed by trying harder, by finding a more effective method, or by waiting until the fruit arrives and proves you right. It’s healed by repentance of the metric and re-consecration of the labor itself as worship unto the Lord rather than investment for personal benefit. Might this be a core theme of the work of sanctification in our lives? I do believe so.

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That fundamental distinction is the mechanism, and it needs to be as architecturally precise as the forgiveness framework in last week’s article on bitterness. Forgiveness opened the fist. What opens the fist in cynicism is the re-offering of the labor to the Lord without conditions attached to the outcome. Not “Lord, I’ll keep planting if You give the increase on my timeline,” but “Lord, this labor belongs to You in the first place. I offer it as worship. The outcome is Yours entirely, and I release my right to evaluate whether the kingdom is working based on what I can see from where I’m standing.” That’s not resignation or fatalism in a Calvinist sense. On the contrary, it’s the most demanding form of faithfulness the kingdom asks for. Why? Because it surrenders not just the outcome, but the right to judge whether the economy is working at all.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t honor a faithfulness that is secretly waiting for God to prove Himself on a chronos schedule. He calls for the kind that has released the outcome entirely; one that plants and waters because planting and watering is the assignment, and trusts that auxanō, the increase, belongs to the One who has always been its Author; working continuously, below the surface, on kairo idio—His time, not ours.

I know this is challenging, my friend, but truthfully, it’s not complicated. Solomon gave us a foundational principle. Here are his familiar words, from Proverbs 3:5-8 (AMPC):

“Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; reverently fear and worship the Lord and turn [entirely] away from evil. It shall be health to your nerves and sinews, and marrow and moistening to your bones.”

As we close, I invite you to pray the following with me.

Father, I confess that I’ve been measuring Your work with the wrong ruler. I’ve submitted my faithfulness to the economy of visible results, timely returns, and the kind of progress that can be documented and reported. And when Your economy didn’t perform on my schedule, something in me began to conclude that faithfulness was futile. I repent of the metric. I repent of the timeline I handed to You and then quietly expected You to honor on my terms. I repent of the cynicism I’ve dressed in the language of wisdom and hard-won experience. And today I re-consecrate my labor to You, not as an investment I’m holding You to return, but as an act of worship, offered freely, with open hands. Teach me to find my sufficiency in the planting itself, not in the harvest, not in the vindication, and not in the return. I trust that You are giving the increase even now, in the dark, below the soil, on the timeline that belongs to You. I will not faint. I will not loosen. I will wait for it. In Jesus’ mighty name. Amen.

Stay in the field and keep planting.

Our series on the various malignancies of the soul continues next week with an in-depth look at why envy is counterfeit justice. Stay with me. In the meantime, please share this article (and last week’s, too) with a friend or family member.

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I believe in you.

“Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.” - Psalm 126:5-6 (ESV)

The song is 30 years old this year, which probably makes me old(er). And, frankly, I couldn’t help but wonder why that particular song was living rent-free in my mind. It’s not like Lauryn Hill is talented or anything (read that with the extreme sarcasm with which it was written). It’s as if the soundtracks in the key of life (see what this elder-millennial did there?) somehow build themselves. Why? Because bitterness, it turns out, does exactly that. It kills you softly and strums your pain with such quiet precision that you eventually mistake the wound for wisdom.

Allow me to explain.

Lately, I’ve noticed seeds of cynicism (i.e., bitterness en vogue) in my soul, and I don’t like it one bit. Though the gnawing has been quiet, the associated discomfort has been unnerving and unrelenting. It has arrived as familiar heaviness in places of my heart I didn’t expect to find it. I don’t know if it’s the accumulated weight of a demanding season of life whose pressure relief valve is nowhere in sight, or if the root of the issue is something that requires more deliberate attention than I’ve given it.

But in either case, what I do know is that the subject is worth examining and not explaining away. The condition of the heart is not a secondary matter in the formation of God’s people; it is the primary one. And because I believe that this is a new day and a serious time in the calendar of the Lord, it’s an occasion that demands mature men and women (the sons of God) who carry pure hearts, not merely self-managed and immature ones.

Maybe that’s why, if I’m being honest, I’m a little embarrassed to share this teaching with you today, because I’ve never thought of myself as being “that guy.” Suffice it to say, as much as I offer this diagnosis to you, I’m sitting under it myself and submitting it to the Lord as we speak.

Let’s dive in.

For starters, nobody in the grip of bitterness thinks they’re bitter.

Do you? [long pause] Right. I didn’t think so.

That’s what makes it so spiritually precise as a weapon. From the inside, bitterness doesn’t feel like poison; it feels like clarity. It doesn’t present itself as a wound that has infected the soul; it presents itself as the moment the soul finally started seeing things as they actually are. And cynicism is what happens when that deception has been running long enough to become a personality. Cynicism is bitterness with a portfolio. It calls itself experience, realism, and “finally being honest about people.” It has refined its wound into an aesthetic, and it wears that poisonous veneer like ill-fitted armor.

And it’s for that reason that this article isn’t about a feeling to manage. It’s about a theology that has to be dismantled truss by truss…by truss.

The Counterfeit Theology of Bitterness

I want to make something hermeneutically precise before we go further, though, because the framing of what James says matters enormously (also because I’m wittingly turned off by proof-texting and eisegesis). Let’s look at James 3:14-15 (AMPC) together:

“But if you have bitter jealousy (envy) and contention (rivalry, selfish ambition) in your hearts, do not pride yourselves on it and thus be in defiance of and false to the Truth. This [superficial] wisdom [emphasis mine] is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual (animal), even devilish (demoniacal).”

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Now watch this: James uses the phrase “this [superficial] wisdom,” thus acknowledging that bitter jealousy presents itself as wisdom, while simultaneously unmasking that presentation as a spiritual fraud.

Hello.

The Greek word for “bitter jealousy” used in the text is pikros zēlos. Pikros means sharp, pointed, and cutting. It’s like a blade that enters cleanly without announcing itself as a wound. And one thing’s for sure, and that’s that bitterness doesn’t blunt perception. More specifically, like a knife, it sharpens itself in the wrong direction. It becomes precise in cataloguing injustice, precise in identifying threat, and precise in constructing its case against everyone who has ever failed it. Heck, it feels like finally seeing what’s true.

But the apostle James calls it earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. Yep, demonic. Not because the pain behind it isn’t real, of course, but because what the pain has constructed in the soul is a rival truth; a theology of the wound that now governs our perception in place of the Word of God.

And that, my friend, is a self-inflicted death by a thousand cuts.

I want to be careful, though, because pastoral and homiletical integrity in this case requires naming two distinct conditions rather than one. As I stated earlier, most people trapped in bitterness don’t know they’re bitter; the deception is genuine, and the blindness is real.

But some bitter people know exactly what they’re carrying and have chosen to hold it, because it feels like the only remaining form of power or justice available to them. That isn’t perceptual blindness; that’s volitional hardness. And James 4 indeed makes room for both: bitterness as deception, and bitterness as willful refusal to submit to the Lord. Now, this article is primarily addressed to the first category. But if the second is where you find yourself, the medicine is the same. It’s just that the journey to it is simply longer and more costly.

Does that make sense? I hope so, because what most conversations about bitterness miss is this: we treat it like a normal feeling that simply needs resolution. But Scripture treats it like a theology that needs to be dismantled.

The Root That Grows in the Dark

There’s a text in Hebrews that gives us the diagnostic category we need at this juncture. Here’s what the writer says in Hebrews 12:15 (ESV):

“See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”

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This phrase, “root of bitterness,” carries a widely recognized hat-tip to Deuteronomy 29:18, where Moses warns Israel about a concealed idolatrous root growing unseen until it contaminates the entire covenant community. Granted, the writer of Hebrews doesn’t import every layer of that original context, but the structural warning is the same: this is something hidden, subterranean, and communally destructive. And that’s a root.

We all know that a root does its most significant work underground, in the dark, where no one observes it. It draws nourishment from whatever the soil around it contains (in my book, I spent two chapters teaching about why the quality of the soil determines the fruitfulness of the seed). And this is precisely the architecture of a bitter soul: bitterness doesn’t announce itself. It settles in the ground of the heart. It begins as an unprocessed offense (a wound that was never brought before the Lord or a grievance that was filed away rather than surrendered). And in the quiet of the interior life, where no one is watching, it sets its root. Then, of course, it draws nourishment.

What does it feed on, you ask?

Every subsequent disappointment that tastes like the original injury.

That’s what it feeds on.

It leeches on every new piece of evidence that confirms the old narrative—the private rehearsal of a story the soul keeps telling itself in the dark. And it feeds on community (in other words, the alliances we form around shared grievances and the relationships that quietly organize themselves around who failed us and why). It’s worth noting that bitterness is rarely a solo condition; it finds company rather quickly, and in that company its root system widens underground, drawing from a network of confirmed resentment.

Over time, it becomes structural, and then it defiles. The Greek word, miainō, meaning to stain and to render ceremonially unclean, doesn’t describe private contamination; it describes communal contamination.

What I’m getting at is that a bitter root in a soul is a bitter root in a body. You can feel its effect in a church, a marriage, a company, or a team, without being able to name its source: the unexplained tension, the alliances forming around unspoken grievances, the conversations that never quite land, and the spiritual ceiling that never lifts. Of course, the exacerbation of these conflicts arises because we’re neglecting to guard our hearts as the primary pursuit in life.

The Heart Keeps What It Has Not Released

Let’s look at what Solomon writes in Proverbs 4:23 (ESV). It’s a familiar verse to most of us:

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

The Hebrew word for “keep” is natzar, meaning to guard or to station a sentinel at the gate. And the word for “springs”—totzaot—literally means outgoings, exits, the source from which everything flows outward from a life. Here, Solomon isn’t offering a wellness insight; he’s making a claim about the architecture of the human person. The heart is the origin point of everything that pours out of your life: your relationships, your prayers, your perception of others, and your capacity to receive what the Lord is building in this season.

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Now, before I continue, I want to make a distinction that matters greatly: I’m not describing lament here. Biblical lament (the kind that cries out honestly to the Lord and carries the wound into His presence and weeps there) is a holy thing. The psalms are full of it, and the Lord vindicates it. What I’m describing is what happens when lament stops moving toward the Lord and starts calcifying against people. That’s the turn. That’s where the bitter root finds its first soil. And its landing spot is in fact…you guessed it…the heart.

See, the bitter heart doesn’t just remember the person who wounded it; it begins to process all of life through the wound’s interpretive lens (been there!). Every disappointment becomes evidence. Every imperfect relationship confirms the old conclusion. And every invitation to trust begins to feel like a potential ambush. The heart was designed to be a spring of life, but when bitterness has settled into it, what flows from it isn’t life. It’s a slow contamination that the person carrying it almost always attributes to the quality of the water around them rather than to what has settled deep in the source.

This is exactly what Proverbs 4:23 is guarding against: Not a season of hard feelings, but more accurately, a defiled source.

Homicide in the Heart

I love the teaching of James. He doesn’t let us stay at the surface of behavior, and he certainly doesn’t preach cute, sugary “better not bitter” sermons. Instead, he goes straight to the anatomy of the issue. And nowhere is he more surgically precise than in chapter 4, verses 1 through 2. Let’s sit with this, using the Amplified Classic translation:

“WHAT LEADS to strife (discord and feuds) and how do conflicts (quarrels and fightings) originate among you? Do they not arise from your sensual desires that are ever warring in your bodily members? You are jealous and covet [what others have] and your desires go unfulfilled; [so] you become murderers. [To hate is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.]”

The word for “sensual desires” is hēdonōn, meaning pleasures. And the word for “warring” is strateuomenōn, which is a military term. Translation: your thwarted desires aren’t passive; they’re conducting a military campaign inside you. My friend, the bitter soul isn’t simply wounded; it’s at war. And you might not even know it.

You see, this progression from desire to hatred isn’t automatic. At every stage—in the wanting, in the covetousness, in the rage—there was an exit available, whether it was prayer, surrender to the discipline (read: training) of the Lord, or even rightly-motivated question-asking. The cascade James describes is what happens when those exits are consistently refused; it’s a description of accumulated refusals, not an inevitable psychic process. And naming that condition matters because it means there is always a door back.

That said, in the reading I’m persuaded by—and which the AMPC renders clearly in its parenthetical—James connects the terminus of that cascade to what 1 John 3:15 makes explicit. Here’s John, the apostle: “To hate,” he says, “is to murder as far as your hearts are concerned.” What that means is that when resentment hardens into hatred (even the quiet, managed, socially acceptable kind we carry without naming it), we’ve committed something in the interior life that carries the spiritual weight of murder.

And that’s not good prose, gang.

What’s really happened here is that we’ve tried the person in the court of our own hearts, convicted them, sentenced them, and buried them. And then we wonder why prayer feels hollow, why the Lord feels distant, and why our spiritual life has the texture of going through motions we no longer believe in.

Sounds hyperbolic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. It’s a precise read on a critical spiritual matter to which few people attend.

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James continues, writing, “You do not have, because you do not ask.” And even when we do ask, we ask with the wrong purpose and selfish motives. What James is getting at is that bitterness eventually infects the prayer life (I’ve seen it affect mine). The bitter, cynical person does pray, sure. But they pray through their bitter theology rather than from a surrendered soul, asking the Lord to confirm their grievance rather than heal the source of it. And they receive, of course, nothing from that kind of asking, because a clenched fist cannot be filled.

Resentment is a Thief That You Invited to Dinner

To the best of my study and pastoral observation (and I want to name this as observation more than direct exegesis), resentment is a thief of the future.

The bitter person isn’t living in now; they’re living in then; the then of the injury (the moment everything went wrong). And because they’re living in then, they can’t receive the new thing the Lord is building now.

Did you catch that? If not, read it again.

The writer of Hebrews, immediately after addressing the consequences of a bitter root in one’s heart, recalls the story of Esau. Quickly, though, I want to be careful about how far this pastoral connection is pressed, because Hebrews doesn’t explicitly call Esau bitter, and the text’s primary application concerns the foreclosure of repentance through accumulated hardness of heart.

But…the structural warning carries weight that I want to use in teaching you. Esau sold his birthright for a single meal (Hebrews 12:16, ESV). What that means is that he traded a living, generative future for immediate relief. And he found no place of repentance afterward, though he sought it with tears. And bitterness makes a similar trade, exchanging the future the Lord is building for the cold comfort of a grievance we’ve called our right and our reason.

Gosh, that is a sobering thing, isn’t it? The Lord has something to give you right now, this side of the wound. And the only thing standing between you and it is what you’ve refused to release to Him.

But here is where I have to name something the diagnosis alone cannot complete: the mechanism that opens the fist is forgiveness. Not forgiveness as a feeling to be manufactured, and not forgiveness as the erasure of what actually happened. Forgiveness as an act of the will, offered in obedience to the Lord, on the ground of what He has forgiven you.

Jesus is unsparing about this in Matthew 18, in which the servant whose enormous debt was cancelled, who then seized his fellow servant by the throat over a fraction of that amount, was handed over to the tormentors. The torment isn’t punitive symbolism; it’s the spiritual architecture of what unforgiveness actually produces in the soul. And Matthew 6:15 (ESV) details the consequences most unambiguously. Jesus said, “If you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

The point? The hand that will not open cannot be filled. Full-stop.

Now, I also want to say something that gets lost in the call to forgiveness: releasing your grievance is not the same as letting the wrong go unanswered. I think that principle gets lost in our Christian teaching. The ground for releasing it is that the Lord has it. Romans 12:19 (ESV) is clear. Paul writes, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” And Hebrews 10:30 confirms the same, saying, “The Lord will judge his people.” And that’s why you can release it. Why? Because He hasn’t. His hands are more capable of settling what yours never could.

As for the Holy Spirit, He grieves alongside an unrepentant, bitter root. Ephesians 4:30 (ESV) teaches us not to “...grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” And though His indwelling doesn’t waver, His grief is real, and it is the kindest form of confrontation available to us. The Holy Spirit doesn’t negotiate with a theology of the wound. He confronts it patiently and persistently until the posture of the soul changes.

Break Up Your Fallow Ground

There’s so much more I could (read: should) write on this subject, and I will. Trust me. But for now, I can’t think of a better way to land this plane than to invite you to pray this prayer with me (‘cause the Lord knows I’m praying it right alongside you). Ready?

Father, I’ve called this feeling discernment. I’ve called it wisdom. I’ve even called it finally seeing people clearly. But today I hear You calling it what it is: sin. It’s a root drawing nourishment from every wound I’ve refused to surrender. Therefore, I repent, not just of the feeling, but of the theology upon which I’ve built my case. I ask forgiveness for the bitter worldview I’ve built around my pain, which has placed my grievance at the center, and everyone who has wounded me on trial. David prayed in Psalm 51:6 (NKJV), “Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts.” That’s my prayer, too. Make what’s inside me match what I confess with my mouth. Forgive me for the homicide I’ve both plotted and acted upon in my heart. Forgive me for the future I’ve spent rehearsing a past You already died to redeem. I open my hands to you today. In Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.

Let’s move forward, my friend.

“Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.” - Hosea 10:12 (ESV)

This compulsive pattern isn’t random, nor is it a quirk of personality. And to be honest, I don’t think it’s simply a failure of social awareness, either. What I’m referring to is oversharing.

To the best of my study and observation, oversharing is a soul-symptom that’s trying to do something urgent; something it believes is necessary for survival. But before I name what that something is, I want to draw a line, because not every torrent of words is the same thing. The person who pours out their grief before a trusted friend is not doing the same thing as the person who carpet-bombs every room they walk into with unsolicited confession. I hope you understand that. Lament is a deeply profound (and necessary) human experience. The psalmists wept openly, cried out at length, and called heaven to account. Just look at Psalm 22 and Psalm 88. Moreover, Scripture does not diagnose that as a character flaw in the least bit. Remember Job? He spoke at length from the depths of his suffering. And though the Lord corrected his theology, He did not rebuke Job’s monologue itself. What I’m trying to get at is that genuine verbal processing, honest lament, and the legitimate human hunger to be witnessed within community are not disorders. God made us for them.

What I am after, however, is something different: the compulsive, insecurity-driven, anxiety-fueled pattern of over-disclosure that most of us recognize not by its content but by the feeling it leaves behind, both in us and in the room. You know what I’m talking about:

The conversation that went forty-five minutes longer than it needed to.

The email with seventeen paragraphs when three would have done the work.

The explanation that kept extending itself even as the other person’s eyes glazed over.

That is what I want to talk about today.

Out of the Abundance of the Heart, the Mouth Speaks

Scripture goes after the tongue with a precision that should make us uncomfortable. James 3 calls it a restless evil and full of deadly poison, not because words are inherently dangerous, but because the mouth is the most honest external register of what is happening in the interior life. In fact, in Luke 6:45 (ESV), Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” Said another way, whatever fills the interior will eventually find its way into the atmosphere.

This means that before we ever address the pattern of “too much” speech, we have to ask what the heart is reaching for when it pours out. What need is being served? What fear is being managed? Because if Jesus is right—and He is—then the volume of a person’s words is not a communication problem. Rather, it is a diagnostic. Proverbs 10:19 puts it with surgical economy. Let’s look at the text: “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.” And Proverbs 17:27 presses further, saying, “Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding.”

You see, the inverse of restraint in both verses is not simply foolishness in a social sense. More specifically, it’s a soul that has not yet found its footing and has not yet anchored in something deeper than the conversation in front of it. It is pulling at that conversation because it does not yet know where else to go.

The Wound Beneath the Words

What I have observed across years of conversations in both casual and counseling settings, and what I believe Scripture confirms, is that compulsive oversharing rarely comes from arrogance or narcissism. It comes from insecurity and fear. Specifically, it tends to come from a recognizable triad that coexists in the same interior space: the fear of being misunderstood, the fear of being unseen, and the fear of rejection before the full story is told. And the result? It’s a kind of verbal preemptive strike. It’s like this: if I give you just enough context (enough explanation, enough backstory, enough of my internal landscape), then you cannot misread me. And if you can’t misread me, you can’t reject a version of me that is not yet complete. And if you can’t reject me, you can’t leave our conversation with the wrong impression of who I am. Why not? Because I will not let you leave before I have managed every impression.

Now, I do want to be careful here, because this is a pastoral observation, not direct exegesis, and I do not want to attribute to it more authority than it carries. What I am describing here is a recognizable pattern of the unformed soul under relational pressure, and Scripture illuminates it rather than systematizes it. But here is what the biblical text clearly establishes: the soul that speaks compulsively is a soul in motion; a soul that has not yet come to rest.

Ecclesiastes 5:2-3 (ESV) addresses this, though with a precision I do not want to flatten. Qoheleth’s (the teacher) immediate context is the worshipper approaching God in the temple. Here’s the verse: “Be not rash with your mouth, and let not your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.” Basically, he is warning against rash vows made in worship; the unreality of the person who makes grand promises before God that their interior life cannot sustain. That’s his direct address. But the principle beneath it reaches further than the temple court, and the rest of Proverbs (and the words of Jesus) confirm that it does. Put simply, the soul that does not know who it is standing before will never stop talking. It is trying, by volume, to locate itself.

That’s the extension I am making, and I want you to know I am making it. The fool’s many words are not, at their root, a verbal problem. They are a proximity problem. They are the noise of a soul that has not yet found its place. Allow me to extrapolate (I hope this is resonating with you).

The Idol Hidden in the Overshare

This is where the diagnosis gets a bit sharper. Stay with me, because I want to be precise here and not overreach.

Insecurity, in its disordered form, is not primarily a self-esteem problem (though it will often present as one). Biblically, the disordered version (the version that compels a soul to demand that other people carry what only God can carry) is fundamentally a worship problem. It’s what happens when the need to be understood, validated, and received is loaded onto other people with the full weight of a need that no human being was designed to bear. Now, I want to be careful not to pathologize the God-given desire for community here, because Scripture is clear that we are made to be known within the body of Christ, that it is not good for the man to be alone, and that love in 1 Corinthians 13 moves in both directions. The desire to be understood by others is not a disorder. It is part of the design.

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But the disorder (read: dysfunction) is the demand, and that distinction matters enormously. The disordered version says, “I must be fully understood by you, or I am not safe,” and “I must control the narrative of how you receive me, or the outcome of this conversation will undo me.” And when that demand enters the room, the tongue becomes its instrument, and the oversharing that follows is not simply communication run amok. It is a form of control. I say this carefully because I want to distinguish between two different people who can end up in the same behavioral pattern.

There is the genuinely wounded person who overshares out of real emotional and relational poverty, who learned in childhood or in pain that they had to fight to be heard, and who never quite stopped fighting. That person is not primarily strategic. They’re primarily desperate. Of course, there is the more sophisticated version, which is the person whose verbal output is a performance of vulnerability designed, often below the level of consciousness, to manage how they are perceived and preempt any version of themselves that might invite rejection. Both people overshare in nearly every conversation. But the pastoral approach to each person must be different, because the wound beneath each is different. What they share, however, is that both have assigned to other human beings a weight that belongs only to the Lord.

I love the teaching of James. In 1:19 (NKJV), he says to be “swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” I want to note that James’s immediate context is about receiving the word of God with meekness, not correcting it, not reacting to it from anger or pride. That is his direct context. But the principle clearly generalizes, as Proverbs 29:20 (ESV) confirms, saying, “Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” That’s why the soul trained in insecurity reverses James’s sequence. It speaks first because it is afraid of what might happen in the silence, because silence feels like exposure, and exposure feels like risk. And risk, to the insecure soul, feels indistinguishable from danger.

Being Known Without Being Consumed

Where am I going with this, you might wonder. Well, the theological adjustment II want to offer is not simply “talk less.” If fewer words were the prescription, Proverbs would be a productivity guide, and we could close the Bible at chapter seventeen. But the correction is deeper and more costly. And as such, it does not ask the disordered soul to suppress its need for connection. Instead, it asks the soul to reorder that need toward its true source.

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In Psalm 139, David writes that God has searched him and known him; his sitting down and his rising. The Lord has understood his thought from afar, discerned his path and his lying down, and is acquainted with all his ways (vv. 1-3, ESV). Scripture goes on to teach that before a word is on David’s tongue, God knows it altogether (v. 4). This is not a verse about omniscience as a theological category. This is a pastoral verse. It is David orienting himself before an audience that never misunderstands, never projects, never leaves the room with the wrong impression, and never conditions its reception on the quality of what is brought. That audience is always present, always prior, and always more complete in its knowing than any human being in any conversation can be.

And so, here’s what I want to say carefully, my friend: this does not make human community unnecessary. It makes it possible. The soul that has received the experiential knowledge of God as sufficient is paradoxically the soul that can be most genuinely present with other people, because it is no longer using those people to fill a void they were never designed to fill. It is no longer performing or managing optics, and it has nothing to protect, because it is already known by the One Whose verdict is final. And that freedom? Gosh, it’s so good. That kind of freedom is what produces speech that is measured, weighty, and actually heard, because it comes from a soul that is not desperate.

The Formation of the Restrained Tongue

As I’ve sought the Lord on this issue for my own maturity, I have discovered that there is a spiritual discipline here that most of us have not named as such. The practice of fewer words is, at its root, the practice of trust. And it is not a practice that willpower can sustain for long. Every time the anxious soul resists the urge to over-explain, over-justify, or over-disclose, it is making a small act of surrender, essentially realizing that it does not need the room to carry what only God carries in one’s life. And like all small acts of surrender, it accumulates. Over time, under the patient work of the Holy Spirit, the soul learns that the silence it once experienced as exposure is actually the space where it is most held.

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Zephaniah 3:17 (NKJV) announces what this holding looks like. Listen to the prophet: “The Lord your God in your midst, the Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.” Here, Zephaniah is addressing Jerusalem in an eschatological register. It’s a promise to the remnant after judgment and a future word to the covenant people. I want to name that, because the hermeneutical move I am making requires it. What Zephaniah announced as a future promise to Israel, the Holy Spirit now administers personally and presently to those who have been indwelt. Isn’t that good?!

The quieting is not only a future event for a future people. It is the Holy Spirit’s active, present-tense work in the interior life of every believer who brings their unrest before the Lord. He quiets and does not demand that we manufacture stillness through discipline alone. He quiets the restless, word-flooded soul with the weight of His own love, which is a love that does not require explanation, does not need backstory, and does not condition its reception on the quality of what we bring. The soul that has sat long enough in that love stops needing to fill the room. It has already received what the room was supposed to give.

A Final Word for the Loud-Souled

Let’s land this, shall we? Our goal here is not to become a person of few words as a matter of social virtue. The goal is to become a person whose words carry weight because they come from a soul that is no longer in survival mode; a soul that has stopped using conversation as the primary means by which it establishes that it exists, that it matters, and that it is existentially safe.

Sure, that formation is slow, and it does not come by way of a simple decision. Rather, it is a discipline, and it is the work of a lifetime under the care of the Holy Spirit. But it begins with an honest question, and I want to leave you with it. Ready?

Whose verdict are you still waiting on?

Because the soul that is still waiting for the room to deliver what only God can give will always have more to say. And the soul that has received the Lord’s verdict in Christ (beloved, known, held, not because of how well it articulates itself but because of what He has done) can finally rest and speak humbly and honestly in any given situation. Not because it has nothing to say, of course, but because it is no longer afraid of what happens when it stops speaking.

Does that make sense?

Join me in repenting of the demand to be understood on our terms. Release the audience you have made sovereign and in control of perceptions and outcomes. And then bring the wound beneath the words to the One Who is your Healer and Redemmer. He calls you by name.

Be still and know—with experience—that He is God. Let Him be enough. Of course, He is. Your soul knows the way home. It’s in His presence.

Keep going, my friend. I believe in you.

I want to press on that assumption this week, because I think the already-defeated-enemy’s most effective work in the lives of believers is not the obvious attack, not the dramatic temptation, and not even the overt crisis of faith. It is something far more precise. It’s the quiet occupation of the frequency you trust most. And if you don’t learn to discern it, you will spend years agreeing with a verdict that the blood of Jesus already overturned.

The Accuser Has a Title

Revelation 12:10 names the accuser plainly: ho katēgoros. It’s a Greek term drawn directly from the legal vocabulary of the ancient world. Katēgoros is the prosecutor in the courtroom; the one whose entire function is to bring charges, to compile the case against you, and to press the list of your failures before the court and demand a full and decisive verdict. And the text does not leave the nature of his work ambiguous: he accuses the brethren before God day and night. More specifically, he is not selective or lazy. He is prosecutorial by nature, and his work does not take a day off because you had a good week.

What is worth noting is that the same passage also names him diabolos (the slanderer) and Satanas (the adversary). It’s important to understand that these are not competing descriptions; they are cumulative ones. In other words, he is the adversary who slanders by prosecution and the one who takes whatever is real in your record and arranges it for maximum condemnation rather than redemption. A prosecutor does not need to fabricate every fact. He needs to select which facts he presents, sequence them toward the darkest possible verdict, and press the charge before you can appeal. Now, I want to be clear that this “selective prosecutor” framing is a pastoral application of the text, not a direct exegetical claim. Scripture is more interested in his defeat than in the precise mechanics of his method. But the pastoral picture here is consistent with what Revelation 12, John 8:44, and 1 Peter 5:8 together describe: a being who is both deceptive and strategically adversarial, who works against you with something that passes for truth. And as I heard my pastor say for years as a young adult, “The devil isn’t trying to get you on his side. He’s trying to get you on your own side.”1

Perhaps that’s why the critical distinction for your interior life is that there is a stark difference between the work of the Holy Spirit, who convicts so that you can return your heart to the Lord, and the work of the accuser, who condemns so that you stay stuck. What I mean is that conviction has a direction. It moves you toward repentance, toward the Father, toward the specific change the Spirit is producing. But condemnation loops. It returns to the same indictment without offering a door. As such, if the voice in your head is leading you toward Christ and toward change, give it proper attention. If it is simply rehearsing your failures with no exit, that is worth questioning at the level of its origin.

He Does Not Announce Himself

That said, I want to be pastorally careful, because what I’m about to say carries a real risk of being misused. Scripture does not explicitly teach that the enemy mimics your internal voice. I have to name that plainly, because theological precision matters more here than any compelling framework I might present. What Scripture does teach, however, is that Satan “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), that he is the father of lies whose native language is a lie (John 8:44), and that his schemes have a recognizable architecture (2 Corinthians 2:11). And so, the application that accusation often arrives without a detectable foreign signature (that it surfaces in the first person, in your own vocabulary, carrying your specific memory of failure) is a pastoral inference from those texts, not a direct exegetical claim. I hold it as a working observation, not a dogmatic category. As such, I ask you to do the same.

But here is why it matters pastorally, if it is even partially true: if an accusation can arrive in a register that feels self-generated, you will not likely interrogate its origin. Instead, you will treat it as accurate internal data. Heck, you might even agree with it. And the moment you agree with it (the moment you say, in your interior, yes, that is true of me, I am what this says I am), you have moved from being a recipient of an accusation to being a participant in your own condemnation. And that is precisely where the enemy traps you. Not in overt rebellion, but in the posture of a person who has accepted a verdict that the blood of Jesus already dismissed.

I hope you’re tracking with me, my friend, because the pastoral risk I mentioned cuts in both directions. On one side, a believer unaware of spiritual accusation will receive condemnation as self-generated truth and never question it. On the other side, a believer too eager to externalize can begin attributing to the enemy what is actually the legitimate convicting work of the Holy Spirit (or simply the voice of a conscience shaped by genuine, unaddressed sin). And so, the discernment required here is not a technique. It is a developed capacity of the interior life, built over time through Scripture, prayer, and the kind of honest self-examination that the late philosopher Dallas Willard called the necessary precondition for any genuine spiritual formation. That’s why you do not start by deciding that a thought came from the enemy. You start by bringing it to God and asking whether it leads toward repentance or toward a loop with no exit.

The Thought Is Not the Sin

There is a distinction in Scripture that is easy to blur but critical to hold. The arrival of a thought is not the same as agreement with it, and agreement is not yet action. James 1:14-15 describes a progression: desire conceives, then gives birth to sin, then sin, when full-grown, brings forth death. And so, the moment of conception is already a moral movement. But the arrival of a thought before any of that has begun is not transgression. What you are responsible for is what you do with the thought once it lands. Do you hold it up against the truth of what the Word says about who you are, or do you simply receive it as accurate internal data?

I want to be careful not to draw the line between arrival and agreement too cleanly, because the will is not a switch you flip. It is a disposition shaped over time by what you habitually attend to. A believer who has spent years feeding a particular category of self-contempt has, over time, moved the line of “agreement” much closer to the moment of arrival, not because the thought is more true, but because the interior life has been trained to receive it without resistance. This is why the work of spiritual formation is not primarily about thought management, but about the renovation of the interior life so that the deepest part of “you” is increasingly oriented toward what is true, what is of Christ, and what the Spirit is actually producing, until the accuser’s framing begins to feel foreign precisely because it contradicts what you have been rehearsing in the presence of God.

The Neural Vulnerability He Exploits

You know I love neuroscience and faith. Neither competes with the other. What fascinates me is that research on intrusive thought is broadly consistent with what Scripture implies about the vulnerability of a burdened mind: the mind in a state of fatigue, grief, or sustained pressure does not hold its defenses with equal strength at all hours. The brain’s capacity for discernment and re-appraisal is genuinely reduced under conditions of exhaustion.

And so, what I am willing to say (albeit pastorally and not dogmatically) is that the enemy described in 1 Peter 5:8 as “prowling like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” implies predatory calculation. Lions do not attack prey at full strength if they can wait for a better moment. Now, whether that patience extends to neurological vulnerability windows in the human brain, I cannot say with certainty, and I won’t claim to (talk to my good friend Dr. Lee Warren2 about that one). What I can say, though, is that Scripture calls you to sobriety and watchfulness precisely in the context of his activity, which suggests that your own interior attentiveness is part of the defense, not a passive posture waiting for God to handle it. The accuser, whatever the specific mechanics of his strategy, is not looking for a fair fight.

You Are Living Downstream of Egypt

The image that will not leave me is this: the enemy wants you living as though you never crossed the sea, so to speak. Israel crossed the Red Sea, and the water came down. Pharaoh’s army drowned, and the chapter of slavery ended with an act of God so decisive that the surrounding nations heard about it and trembled (Joshua 2:10). And within three days, the people were grumbling (Exodus 15:22-24). Not, I want to be precise here, simply because they had a “slave mentality” that needed interior renovation, though that is part of the story. Scripture presents their grumbling primarily as a failure of trust in God’s present provision. They had seen what He could do and still could not trust what He would do next. That is a different diagnosis than psychological self-image, and it is the heavier one.

The application for your interior life is exactly this: you may be standing on the far side of something God has already done (the cross, the resurrection, the blood that Revelation 12:11 calls the instrument of the accuser’s defeat) and still waking up as though Pharaoh has a claim on you—not because the cross was insufficient—but because you have not yet learned to align your interior life with what has already been legally and cosmically settled. That is not a self-help project. It is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in a life that keeps showing up in Scripture, in prayer, in community, and in honest confession, and keeps surrendering the old verdict in favor of the one that was declared at the empty tomb.

The Blood Already Spoke

Revelation 12:11 does not say they overcame him by mental clarity or by correctly attributing the origin of their thoughts. It says, “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” Note the three instruments. The blood—the legal, irreversible declaration of the cross. The word of their testimony—the active, costly act of speaking what God has done, out loud, into the face of accusation. And a willingness to hold their lives loosely enough that the accuser had nothing left to leverage. This is not passive. It is not simply knowing the right doctrine. It requires a life genuinely offered, genuinely spoken, genuinely anchored in what the blood of Christ accomplished.

Romans 8:1 reminds us that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That verdict is ontological. It does not fluctuate with your feelings of condemnation. But Paul does not stop there, because he knows that the legal reality and the experiential reality are not automatically the same thing. The rest of Romans 8 is an extended account of the Holy Spirit’s active work in the believer’s interior life that, over a period of time (read: a lifetime of sanctification and transformation), produces a mind that is set on the Spirit rather than the flesh, groaning toward a future that is already secured, and interceding in the thin places where language runs out. My friend, the verdict has been declared, and the formation is ongoing. Both are true, and you need both to actually walk free.

I’m sure that’s at least a bit irritating to read, because we want the verdict to automatically produce the experience. I get it. But the truth is that it does not always. Knowing you are not condemned and living as a person who is not condemned are different things, and the distance between them is where spiritual formation happens. It’s where the Holy Spirit, given room and time and surrender, does the slow renovation of the interior life that produces a person who can actually inhabit Romans 8:1 rather than merely citing it.

You Are Not the Sum of His Accusations

Before you close this and move on with your day, I want to ask you something, and I need you to sit with it honestly: how long have you been agreeing with his accusations? Not with temptation, not with outright rebellion, of course, but with the voice that rehearses your failures in your own cadence, that returns to the same indictment every morning before you've had a chance to remember who you actually are? Because here is what I know from sitting with people in the hardest seasons of their lives: agreement with the accuser does not feel like a spiritual defeat. It feels like self-awareness or humility. It feels, if you're honest, like the most truthful thing in the room. And that is precisely what makes it so dangerous, and precisely why the blood of Jesus had to speak a word more final than anything you have ever said about yourself.

You are not the sum of the worst things said about you by the voice that sounds like you. The accuser has already been defeated by blood you did not shed and a resurrection you did not produce. The verdict is in, and your part now is to stop agreeing with the case he keeps reopening.

Bring your interior life into the presence of the Lord in Scripture, in prayer, in honest confession to people who will speak truth over you. Let the Holy Spirit do what only He can do. Let the word of your testimony be spoken out loud, because silence is where the accusation gets to run unopposed.

The prosecution rests. And so should you.

I believe in you.

Maybe you’re in this place right now. If so, please stay with me.

I get it. The season is long, and the progress seems invisible. And so, almost without deciding to, you stop abiding and start strategizing (okay, just me?). You swap surrender for a plan. You trade the Vine for a spreadsheet. And then you wonder, months or years later, why everything tastes hollow.

This is real talk, my friend. And that’s why I want to introduce you to a man few people know anything about. His name is Epaphras.

Located in the fourth chapter of Colossians, Paul’s nod to Epaphras pulls back the curtain on a striking personal quality. Scripture says that Epaphras is “always striving earnestly in his prayers, pleading that you may stand firm and mature in spiritual growth, convinced and fully assured in everything willed by God” (Colossians 4:12, AMPC). The word translated “mature” there is the Greek word teleios, which connotes being complete, full-grown, and brought to its intended end. The Amplified Classic (one of my favorite formal equivalence translations) renders it with the image of “ripe character.” And while that amplification is the translators’ own expansion of teleios, rather than the Greek word’s native agricultural content, it is not wrong as a pastoral application in the least bit. Ripeness is a legitimate picture of teleios. It’s something brought fully to its intended end, on a timeline that cannot be compressed. And so, if we take that image seriously, it immediately confronts one of the deepest failures of the Western church: we want teleios without the season that produces it.

There Is No Miracle-Gro in the Kingdom

We live in a culture that has learned to grow tomatoes in January in a greenhouse in Nebraska, and we have unconsciously imported that same framework into our theology of formation. In other words, we want the fruit without the season and the harvest without the winter. And the market has been more than happy to accommodate us with conferences promising “breakthrough in a weekend,” devotional plans guaranteeing transformation in thirty days, and ministries built on the implicit premise that your stuck-ness is primarily a knowledge problem. Of course, I am not dismissing the means of grace. Reading the Word, gathered worship, prayer, and community are not optional accessories. But neither are they Miracle-Gro. They are the conditions of abiding on the Vine, and abiding is not a technique; it’s a sustained, costly, unhurried orientation of the self-directed will toward the Lord, through which the Holy Spirit does what only He can do.

Solomon’s words in Proverbs 14:12 (ESV) apply by honest extension here, even if we name it as such. Look at the verse: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” The point is not that self-directed formation leads to literal death in every case. The point is that the capacity for self-deception about the rightness of our own way is total, and the consequences compound quietly over time. We say “I’m going my own way” as though that were evidence of courage. “You do you” is the slogan of our postmodern culture. But Solomon called it a path to ruin. Why? Because the timing of ripeness (read: maturity and readiness) is not ours to determine. It belongs to the Vine.

The Gospel of Good Soil

Now, here’s some genuinely good news, even though your flesh will register it as anything but.

Mature fruit is not only a product of time. It’s a product of the quality of the soil.1 And good soil does not come from nothing. It is cultivated, broken up, turned over, and enriched by what the earth produces when things decompose. There is a reason the most fertile ground smells the way it does. I won’t costume the image, because what I am pointing at is real: the material your flesh wants to run from is often the very thing the Holy Spirit uses to prepare the ground for what He intends to grow.

Luke 13:8 presents the case of a gardener who refuses to give up on a fruitless tree, who digs around it and applies fertilizer (read: manure), and then asks for one more year. Of course, he knows what the tree does not: that which looks like waste is indeed preparation.

And this is the reframe I am asking you to sit with today. Adversity, in and of itself, is not the enemy of your development. Unprocessed, unsubmitted adversity is. And I want to be careful here, because the Psalms of lament are Scripture, and they earn lament a permanent seat at the table. Psalm 22 opens with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and does not resolve easily. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no neat resolution at all. The feeling of divine absence is not automatically a sign of immaturity. Rather, what I am naming is not the feeling. It is the response to the feeling; the moment you begin to construct an alternate plan because God seems absent, rather than bringing the ache to the Vine and asking what He is doing in it. That is where the ground is lost.

James puts the stakes plainly, saying, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its complete work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4, ESV). Now watch this: that phrase, “complete work” (ergon teleion in the Greek). carries the same root as Colossians 4:12’s teleios. Here, James is not saying suffering is inherently good. He is saying that what suffering produces, when it is received rather than fled from, is completion. It’s ripeness, the exact quality of character Epaphras was on his face, praying that the Colossians would carry. And sure, that might sting. But I would rather say it plainly now than watch you trade a formative season for a comfortable one.

You Have to Stay on the Vine to Get Ripe

I’ve never known Jesus to be subtle. Have you? Here He is in John 15:4-5 (ESV): “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me... apart from me you can do nothing.” The primary weight of John 15 is on fruitfulness in the outward sense (things like discipleship, mission, and the gospel spreading). But the abiding posture that produces that outward fruitfulness is inseparable from the interior work of the Holy Spirit forming us into people capable of bearing it. You cannot separate the two. The branch that detaches from the Vine does not grow on its own schedule. It dries up.

As is the case, what follows is where the diagnosis becomes surgical. The most common form of spiritual drought is not apostasy. It is a quiet disconnection; the subtle, incremental drift from abiding into self-sufficiency; from surrender into self-reliance. Of course, there is a failure mode on the other end that must be named just as plainly, which is that patient abiding is not the same thing as passive waiting. Dallas Willard was precise about this. Though training is not the same as trying, it is still very costly. The disciplines of the spiritual life (prayer, fasting, Scripture, silence, community) are not Miracle-Gro, but they are the soil conditions without which the Vine’s work cannot take root in you. Stay with me here. The point is not to strive harder. The point is to remain engaged in the conditions of abiding so that the Holy Spirit has genuine access to your interior life, not just your public calendar.

What the Season Is Asking of You

The Lord is not withholding blessings because He is uncaring or apathetic. Rather, He is cultivating capacity because He is wise. What He has prepared for you requires a version of you that does not yet exist. Said another way, God is preparing you for what He has prepared for you.2 That means that the training, the adversity, and the long season of formation are in fact the processes by which that version of you is being brought, by the Holy Spirit, into being. Hebrews 12:11 (ESV) says, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” The word “trained” in the Greek—gegymnasmenos—is the root of our English word gymnasium. And so, the reframe we need in this moment is that the painful times are indeed training times, if we have a pliable heart to cooperate with the Lord.

Having said all of that, perhaps what’s required of you right now may be the thing you least want to hear, and that is to remain. Remain on the Vine. Let the Holy Spirit work the soil. And let the adversity do what adversity, when surrendered, was designed to do. Ripe character is not given to those who found a shortcut. It is given to those who remain.

Pray this with me: “Father, this is what the season is doing in me. This is where I have confused impatience with initiative. This is where I have pulled back from the disciplines because the fruit wasn’t coming fast enough. This is where I have misread Your cultivation as Your silence. Search me here. Correct me here. Train me in the thing I have been resisting. I want to be one of those mature sons that can walk in purity and power in this great day of visitation.”

It is time to go up the mountain of the Lord as those who are still becoming, with clean hands, pure hearts, and roots that go down deeper than this season.

Stay on the Vine, my friend. Trust His timing, for that which He started, He will bring to pass for your purpose and His glory.

I believe in you.

As we dive in together, I’d like to share a personal example.

As a pastor, I’ve counseled many people over the last decade. In doing so, I observed that there often came a point in one’s “hidden season” when the pain of the experience could have stopped being honest and instead, become poisoned by bitterness and unbelief.

What I mean is that at first, the newfound ache of obscurity is easy enough to name for most people. You feel the unusual quiet. You feel the lack of forward progress in life. You feel the disorientation of remaining unseen while other lives gather speed and visible fruit. And sure, that kind of pain is real, nor should it be buried beneath cheap hyper-spiritual language.

But here is what must be identified in the same breath, and I want you to stay with me as I build this case: the greatest challenge of a “hidden season” is not that it hurts. The greatest challenge is that it reveals. And if what it reveals is not brought honestly under the searching light of the Holy Spirit (Psalm 139:23-24), the very place that could have become formative can slowly begin to deform the soul instead, steering it toward, as I said, bitterness and unbelief.

What I’m getting at is that hiddenness does not automatically sanctify us in our maturity to the Lord. As much as a person can remain hidden for a long time and emerge quieter, freer, more surrendered, more whole, one can also remain hidden for a long time and emerge embittered, more self-protective and insecure, more inwardly theatrical, and more attached to false stories than when the season began. The point is that the hidden place reveals, but what it reveals must still be surrendered if it is to become holy ground upon which the seeds of the Word fall and bring forth abundant, mature fruit.

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Hiddenness Is Not the Holy Spirit

The first illusion that has to die is the assumption that because a season is difficult and unseen, it must therefore be sanctifying you in some deep way. Of course, it may be. But it may also be exposing how much of you still resists truth. Again, hiddenness is not the Holy Spirit. A person may be living in obscurity and still be governed by pride; unseen yet consumed by a competitive spirit of comparison. A person may be withheld from public opportunity and yet become more inwardly dramatic than ever, narrating oneself as the unrecognized remnant, the faithful sufferer, the deep one among shallow people, or the misunderstood vessel whom others simply do not have the categories to understand.

That kind of narrative is poisonous, even when it borrows theological vocabulary. It can make a person feel serious while leaving him entirely untouched by the humility that would actually make him holy. And frankly, that type of person is exhausting to be around.

This is perhaps why Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV) boldly says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Translation: the heart can misread itself while sounding utterly sincere. It means the flesh can corrupt almost anything, even the language of surrender. You see, in visible life, certain illusions are interrupted by relationships, outcomes, and correction. Moreover, in hidden life, a person can construct elaborate interpretations of himself and of God with very little resistance. He can begin mistaking private intensity for spiritual maturity, loneliness for chosenness, passivity for trust, and fear for wisdom. And so, if anything, hiddenness increases the need for vigilance, not diminishes it.

When Waiting Becomes a Cloak for Passivity

As I’ve stated before, one of the most common ways hidden seasons begin to deform a person is when waiting slowly turns into passivity and then gets baptized with the syrupy hyper-spiritual colloquialisms of cultural Christianity. There are indeed seasons where restraint is obedience, where silence is wisdom, and where waiting on the Lord is the most active form of trust the soul can offer. But the flesh has a way of taking a true category and turning it into a refuge for fear. Over time, waiting can become a cover for avoidance, restraint can become an excuse for not risking obedience, and prayer can become a way of postponing courage.

I hope you’re tracking with me. But just to galvanize my thesis, here is the sharper word: not every delay is imposed by the Lord. Sometimes delay is prolonged by fear, indecision, and the refusal to take the next plain step because the heart is still hoping for one that feels more significant, more flattering, or less costly. Sometimes what a person calls “waiting on God” is simply the refusal to move until he can do so without vulnerability. That is not trust. That is control with Scripture duct-taped to it.

James 2:17 (ESV) says, “So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Here, James is not commending frantic striving. He is confronting the fantasy that faith can remain inert without becoming false. The issue is not whether you feel seen. The issue is whether you are obeying what God has already made clear. Understand that hiddenness becomes deforming when a person uses uncertainty in one area as permission to neglect obedience in another, when he does not reconcile, does not repent, does not tell the truth, does not serve, and does not steward what is already in front of him. That is not the quiet strength of Psalm 27:14. That is—if I can be so bold—stagnation wearing angel wings.

When Disappointment Hardens Into Resentment

That said, another way hidden seasons go wrong is when disappointment remains unsurrendered long enough to become resentment. At first, the ache is often clean. Why? Because it’s new and innocent. The soul hurts. Prayers seem unanswered. Other lives appear to be moving while yours remains in a kind of prolonged interior winter.

But pain that is not brought honestly to the face of the Lord rarely remains pain in a clean form. It starts asking accusatory questions such as Why them and not me? Why does their obedience seem to open doors while mine leads deeper into silence? And because the heart is so skilled at self-justification, resentment does not usually announce itself as resentment. It arrives dressed as fatigue, realism, or even discernment. But underneath, it has begun accusing God of mishandling your life. And as much as we need to be honest before the Lord, approaching Him with a spirit of pride and accusation is wholly unwise.

Once resentment takes root, the soul interprets everything through a victim narrative. Other people’s fruit starts to feel threatening. Their joy becomes irritating. Their visibility becomes offensive. And slowly, the hidden life that could have become a greenhouse for freedom becomes instead an underground chamber where comparison, offense, and grievance grow in the dark.

Proverbs 14:10 (NKJV) says, “The heart knows its own bitterness, and a stranger does not share its joy.” That bitterness remains largely invisible to others for a long time. It hides beneath theological correctness, Christian tropes, and a well-composed exterior, but it always reshapes the inner life, making the soul less teachable, less generous, less childlike before the Lord. Thankfully, the Psalms teach us a better way. In Psalm 13, for example, David carried his disappointment before God until it stopped deforming his soul in the dark. And that is what many believers refuse to do. They would rather interpret their pain than surrender it. But hidden seasons remain safe only when grief stays soft before the Lord. Once grief hardens into grievance, the soul begins to change shape in ways that are subtle, serious, and deeply destructive.

When the Hidden Life Starts Feeding Spiritual Vanity

This one’s gonna sting, my friend. And it may be the most deceptive corruption of all, because it hides beneath the carefully curated language of humility. In this soul-state, a person begins thinking of himself as deep because he is hidden, mature because he is restrained, and substantial because he is unseen. He starts quietly contrasting himself with more visible people.

They are loud; I am quiet. They are flashy; I am rooted. They are simpletons; I am experienced. They are platformed; I am consecrated.

None of this may ever be said aloud, but it lives in the imagination. And once it does, the hidden life stops producing humility and starts feeding a more sophisticated form of vanity.

My friend, please pay attention. Your ego does not mind becoming “the humble one” if that identity can still be used to feel superior. It will feed on prominence, and if prominence is not available, it will feed on obscurity.

And that is still pride. It is simply pride with cleaner language.

Jesus cuts through that illusion in Luke 18:9–14, where the Pharisee stands apart and thanks God that he is not like other men, while the tax collector stands far off and asks for mercy. The text tells us plainly that Jesus spoke this parable to those who “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.” The lesson here is that obscurity can leave pride with fewer external checks, and a person can become inwardly grandiose while remaining outwardly quiet. But the true hidden life does not make a person grand. It makes him honest, humble, and less impressed with himself, not more.

The Real Diagnostic

What matters, therefore, is not how intense the season feels or how long it has lasted. Not how much has been stripped away, either. The real question is whether the hidden life is making you more like Jesus. Is it making you more obedient, more humble, more loving, more surrendered, more free from the need to be seen, more tender under correction? Because if the answer is no, then the hidden season is not functioning productively in your life, no matter how spiritual your language about it may sound. Galatians 5:22–23 (ESV) gives us the clearest test: the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” Hidden seasons are not holy because they are hidden. They are holy only insofar as the Holy Spirit is actually producing His fruit there.

So if this resonates with you today, please let the hidden place evoke the truth.

Don’t call passivity trust. Don’t call resentment sorrow. Don’t call vanity depth. Don’t call fear discernment.

Bring all of it into the light of the presence of the Lord without theatrics, without self-hatred, and without the need to make yourself either more noble or more broken than you really are. Just tell the truth before your Father. The psalmist wrote, “You desire truth in the inner being; make me therefore to know wisdom in my inmost heart.” That’s the posture. As such, perhaps your prayer is something like this:

Lord, this is what the hidden season is doing in me. This is where I have grown passive. This is where I have started resenting others. This is where I have made an identity out of being overlooked. This is where I have turned inward and forgotten love. Search me here. Correct me here. Heal me here.

Granted, it is costly because it refuses the romance of hiddenness while still receiving the mercy of it. It brings the soul back to the place where formation actually happens, under the Word, under the Holy Spirit, under the hand of a Father who loves too well to let us remain flattering versions of ourselves. Why? Well, because the greatest danger of a hidden season is not that no one sees you. It is that you might begin to believe hiddenness itself is saving you, while all the while the deeper work God was after—humility, obedience, tenderness, truth, and love—is being quietly resisted beneath the surface.

Surrender again (and again after that) until the hidden place stops being where your illusions live and becomes, by grace, the place where they die.

It’s time to ascend the mountain of the Lord as mature sons—those who have clean hands, pure hearts, and have not lifted their souls to that which is false.

Look up. Open your heart.

And let’s get moving.

It’s functional atheism at best. How do I know this? Well, I’ve lived it.

As I’ve sought the Lord to understand the underpinnings, I’ve come to realize that this is not a peripheral problem. It is the central one. And the reason most people never resolve it is not a lack of desire, not a lack of sincerity, and not even a lack of theological knowledge.

The reason is something older and more stubborn than all of those: the prevailing presence of fear and distrust, the absence of wisdom, the absence of discernment, and the absence of a heart trained to understand what it is actually looking at when it looks at itself. But there is a second reason. You see, some resistance stems from spiritual blindness rooted in fear and self-protection. At other times, the resistance is indeed a deliberate refusal. And because Scripture does not treat these as the same condition, neither should we. Allow me to explain.

Proverbs 14:12 (ESV) frames the first condition with disarming simplicity: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” The word translated “seems” carries the Hebrew sense of something appearing straight, even, and correct, which means the person walking this road is not confused about their direction. They are convinced. They have assessed the terrain, concluded they are on the right path, and proceeded with confidence. And that confidence, unexamined and unsubmitted, is precisely the problem.

The Flesh Has a Theology

One of the most disorienting discoveries in the spiritual life is that the unsubmitted parts of your personality are not chaotic or irrational in the least bit. Instead, they are often meticulously organized. They have a logic, a set of values, and a surprisingly coherent worldview, and that worldview is almost always dressed in the language of virtue. Here’s what I mean:

The person who refuses to forgive does not call it bitterness. They call it justice, or self-protection, or the reasonable refusal to be naive again. The person who controls every relationship and every outcome? They don’t call it fear. They call it responsibility, or leadership, or wisdom earned through hard experience.

The person (read: ME) who performs for approval and struggles to tolerate failure does not call it shame. They call it excellence, or good stewardship, or even the simple commitment to doing things well.

In every case, the flesh has constructed a theology that sounds entirely reasonable and is entirely self-serving. And because it sounds reasonable, it never gets examined, and because it never gets examined, it never gets submitted to the leadership and lordship of Christ.

The Apostle Paul understood this with unnerving clarity. In Romans 8:6–7 (ESV), he writes: “For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” The phrase “it cannot” is not a description of willpower failure. It is a description of heart-orientation. The carnal mind is not merely reluctant to submit; it is incapable of it, because submission is not what it was built for. It was built to survive, to manage, to protect, and to negotiate, and it will do all of those things with extraordinary skill while looking, from the outside, like a functioning Christian life.

Now, this is not moralistic determinism, and it must not be heard as an excuse. Paul does not say the person is helpless; he says the flesh is fundamentally incapable. And the crucial distinction is that every believer has been given the Holy Spirit, and it is in response to His persistent, patient work that the will either opens or resists. The incapacity belongs to the flesh. But the responsibility belongs to the person. And the power to change belongs entirely to God, which is the only framework in which genuine accountability makes any sense at all.

What We Will Not Name

There is a specific category of interior resistance that is rarely addressed in contemporary Christian culture: the resistance of the high-functioning, self-aware, spiritually serious person. We talk often about obvious sin, about addiction and moral failure and outward rebellion, and those things deserve the attention they receive. But there is another kind of resistance—albeit quieter and therefore more dangerous—that lives in the parts of the personality we are most proud of. As you read, take note of which attributes show up in your life most often.

Pride

Pride rarely presents as arrogance in people who know their Bible. Rather, it presents as discernment and as a prophetic eye for what is wrong with the room, with the church, with the leadership, with the theology of whoever just said something slightly imprecise. It presents as the reasonable unwillingness to be led by someone less gifted, less studied, or less spiritually mature. And because it wears the clothing of discernment, it is seldom identified as the thing Scripture calls it, which is, in fact, pride. Look at Proverbs 16:18 (ESV): “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Self-Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency presents as faithfulness. The person who never asks for help, never admits weakness, or never allows another human past the careful perimeter they have constructed around their interior life does not experience themselves as sinfully self-sufficient. They experience themselves as diligent, as not wanting to be a burden, as someone who has simply learned to handle things. And yet Proverbs 3:5–7 (NKJV) places this person in a serious category. Have a look at Solomon’s familiar words: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and depart from evil.” The phrase “do not be wise in your own eyes” is directed not at the fool but at the capable person who has confused competence with wisdom and self-management with surrender. What’s interesting to me is that the capable person is the one most at risk here, precisely because they have the most evidence to justify their self-reliance in the first place!

Addiction to Comfort

Comfort-seeking presents as rest. We are, as a generation, almost constitutionally resistant to the kind of suffering that produces character, and we have developed a sophisticated spiritual vocabulary for avoiding it. We confuse the peace of God with the absence of tension. We interpret discomfort as a sign that something is wrong rather than a sign that something is being formed. James 1:2–4 (ESV) insists otherwise, saying, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” The word “perfect” here is the Greek word teleios, meaning mature, complete, and fully formed. And the path to that fullness runs directly through the trials we are most eager to escape. Because we have no framework for sanctified suffering, we exit every hard season before it has finished its work, and then wonder why we keep arriving at the same place. In the words of the writer Michael Easter, we are indeed in a comfort crisis.

We Cannot See What We Will Not Name

Here is where the diagnosis sharpens. The reason these unsubmitted areas of personality persist is not primarily a problem of will. It is, in many cases, a problem of perception. What I mean is that we cannot submit what we cannot see, and we cannot see what we have spent years explaining, justifying, and reframing into something acceptable. This is not hypocrisy in the conscious, deliberate sense. But it is the honest blindness of a person who has mistaken their coping mechanisms for their innate character.

Let’s go to the Word to fortify our point. Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV) renders the diagnosis without softening it: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” The Hebrew word translated “deceitful” is aqob, a word that carries the sense of something tortuous, crooked, and inscrutable, drawn from the same root as the name Jacob, who took his brother by the heel and spent the first half of his life maneuvering around the truth about himself.

The point of the verse is not that the heart schemes with calculating deliberateness, though it may. The deeper and more frightening point is that the heart conceals its own condition from its owner, persistently and without our awareness, in ways we are structurally unable to detect from the inside. And the question at the end of the verse, “who can understand it?”, is not rhetorical despair. It is a diagnostic pointer toward the only One who actually can. “I the Lord search the heart,” the very next verse answers. The examination we cannot perform on ourselves, the Lord performs with perfect accuracy. And this is not a threat. It is the only hope available to the person who has run out of explanations.

This is why Proverbs returns, again and again, to wisdom as something received through humility and the fear of the Lord rather than acquired through intelligence or experience. Proverbs 9:10 (ESV) says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” The Hebrew word reshith carries the sense of first in rank or preeminence, not merely first in time, which means that the fear of the Lord is not the starting line that wisdom eventually crosses. It is the foundation on which wisdom stands permanently. To pursue wisdom without that foundation is not wisdom at all. It is, in practice, sophisticated self-management, the crooked heart explaining itself to itself in increasingly convincing terms, and calling the result maturity.

When Blindness Becomes a Deliberate Refusal

Even so, the diagnostic must go deeper, because Scripture presents not one category of resistance, but two. And collapsing them into each other is a pastoral mistake with real consequences.

The first category is blindness: the person who genuinely cannot see what the Holy Spirit has been pointing at, whose coping mechanisms have become so familiar they are invisible, whose greatest need is wisdom, discernment, and the willingness to allow the Word of God to do what Hebrews 4:12 (ESV) says it does, “piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” For this person, the invitation is to stop explaining and start asking, and to receive the wisdom God gives generously and without reproach to those who ask in faith (See James 1:5).

The second category, however, is refusal. This is the person who has heard the Voice of the Lord clearly and chosen not to respond. Hebrews 3:15 (ESV) names this without diplomatic softening. Check the text: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” In other words, the hardened heart is not confused. It has heard, it has understood, and it has made a choice. Let’s be clear. This is not a failure of perception. It is an act of the will, and Scripture treats it as such.

The remedy for blindness is wisdom and revelation. But the remedy for hardness of heart is not more information. It is repentance; the turning of the whole self, the full orientation of the will, back toward the Lord.

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While these are different conditions and require different pastoral responses, they do share one diagnostic feature: both are forms of unsubmission, and both are far more common in “spiritually serious people” than we are comfortable acknowledging.

The person who has hardened their heart rarely experiences themselves as someone in rebellion. They experience themselves as someone who has wrestled with this, prayed about it, and arrived at peace. But the peace that comes from settling into unsubmission is not the peace of God. It is the quiet that follows a decision, and only the fear of the Lord—the honest willingness to let Scripture have the final word rather than our own resolved conclusions—can tell the difference.

Faithful in the Little Things, or Lost in the Large Ones

Jesus identified this dynamic with the kind of precision that only the One Who made the human heart could possess. In Luke 16:10 (ESV), speaking directly about money and material faithfulness, He says, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.” The obvious immediate context is stewardship of material things, and that must not be bypassed, because the way we handle money is one of the most reliable windows into the interior life we possess. But the principle Jesus establishes reaches beyond finances into the whole architecture of character, which is that readiness for great things is determined by faithfulness in the small ones. And the small ones are almost always the places we have quietly decided are beneath the level of spiritual examination.

So, what are the small things? Let’s zoom in on this.

The small things are the moments of irritation you never bring before the Lord because it seems too minor to bother with. They are the habitual pattern of thought you have carried for so long that it no longer registers as something that needs examination. They are the way you relate to inconvenience, to the person in your life who most consistently exposes the parts of your personality you would prefer to keep hidden, or to the recurring conflict you keep avoiding because you have already explained to yourself why you are right. They are the tiny, daily, invisible negotiations you make with the areas of your interior life that you have quietly decided are simply part of who you are and therefore beyond the reach of transformation.

But thankfully, they are not beyond the reach of transformation. They are precisely where transformation works.

The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to develop a dramatic spiritual crisis before He does His deepest work. He is at work right now, in the recurring conflict you are avoiding, in the pattern you keep excusing, in the preference you have never once placed on the altar, in the small daily refusal you have renamed as a personality trait. He is working, and He is patient, and He is extraordinarily thorough, and the question pressing against every self-aware, spiritually serious person reading these words is simply this: are you paying attention to what He is pointing at, or are you explaining it away?

The Way Through Is Not a Method

There is no technique for this. There is no framework, no spiritual practice, no step-by-step process that can substitute for the foundational posture Scripture calls wisdom. And wisdom is not a skill. It is a gift, received through the fear of the Lord, cultivated through humility, and confirmed by the willingness to allow Scripture, rather than self-assessment, to be the final word on the condition of the interior life.

James 1:5 (ESV) says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” The phrase “without reproach” is the pastoral mercy buried inside a demanding invitation. God does not scold you for not seeing what your own heart has worked so hard to conceal from you. He knows why you could not see it. He knows the full history of every defense, every reframe, every explanation the crooked heart has constructed over the years. And He gives wisdom anyway, generously, to the person who is willing to stop defending themselves and start asking with humility.

For those in the first category, the ones whose resistance is blindness, this is the invitation. Ask, receive, and let the light in, even into the places where you have been most comfortable in the dark. For those in the second category, the ones whose resistance is refusal, the invitation is older and sharper and more urgent than wisdom. Ready for it? Repent. Turn. Stop negotiating with the Lord about the parts of your personality you have already decided are off the table, because the table belongs to Him, and everything on it was always subject to His authority, whether or not you have acknowledged that.

Now for some good news.

The unsubmitted parts of your personality are not too complex for the Holy Spirit, and they are not too well-hidden for the Word of God, which does exactly what Hebrews says it does, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, reaching into the precise geography of what you have protected and explained and kept carefully out of the light.

And what emerges from that examination is not condemnation. It is the only kind of wholeness worth having, not the false wholeness of a life that has successfully managed its unsubmitted places. It is the deep and durable wholeness of a life that has finally, at high cost, handed them over to the Lord.

So, the question is not whether those places exist in you and me. They do. The question is whether you have the wisdom to see them, the discernment to name them accurately, the fear of the Lord sufficient to stop defending them, and, if necessary, the willingness to repent of the ones you have been managing rather than surrendering.

Everything else follows from the answer.

Seek the Lord. It’s a new day. Rain is coming. Prepare your heart to receive.

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I’m talking about the pain of remaining hidden longer than you expected, longer than you prayed for, or longer than seemed necessary to whatever version of wisdom you were carrying when the season first began. At first, a hidden season can feel noble. There is a certain purity to obeying God when the road is narrow, and the room is quiet, and the only thing before you is the next faithful yes. But the longer the hidden place stretches, the more it stops feeling special and starts feeling like our omniscient God has had a slip of mind.

Herein, the issue is no longer whether you are willing to wait in principle. The issue is whether you can still love God when the timeline He has chosen begins to offend the timeline you were quietly hoping He would honor. And right there is where the soul is brought into a much deeper confrontation than most of us anticipate. Because it’s one thing to say that God’s timing is perfect, but another thing entirely to keep saying yes when His timing begins to press against your appetite for movement, clarity, visible fruit, and the emotional reassurance that comes from being able to point to something and say, “There, at least now I know this is working.” Anybody else? Just me? Okay, let’s continue.

That’s precisely why extended hiddenness must not be romanticized. Sure, it can indeed become a sacred place, but only because the Lord is present there, and because in that place, He refuses to let us remain strangers to what is actually governing us. You see, in and of itself, hiddenness sanctifies no one.

A person can be obscure and still be vain. He or she can feel unseen and still be deeply resentful. A person can be delayed and yet become more controlling, more self-protective, more inwardly accusatory, and more addicted to comparison than they were when the season began.

Again, the hidden life is not holy because it is hidden. Rather, it becomes holy when it becomes the place where the Spirit of God is permitted to search what visibility often compels us to conceal. And that’s precisely why a prolonged hidden season can feel so severe. It is not merely withholding outcomes or slowing things down. More specifically, it’s exposing attachments and revealing the truth about the bargains we were making with God while calling it surrender.

When Delay Exposes More Than Your Patience

Most believers assume the primary test of a hard season will be whether or not they remain externally obedient. Will I compromise? Will I quit? Will I sin in some obvious and catastrophic way? Those are real questions, and they matter. But often, the deeper test is not whether we will explode outwardly. It is whether we will allow the Lord to confront what the delay is revealing inwardly. Why? Because long hidden seasons do not merely test patience. They expose the architecture of desire and reveal how much of our peace depended on movement. They reveal how much of our confidence was quietly tied to measurable progress and how much of our idea of faithfulness still expected some form of visible reinforcement in return.

And when that reinforcement or self-validation does not come, the heart is forced to answer a question it would rather keep buried beneath our Christianese platitudes and disciplined routines. Ready for it? If God never gives me the version of fruitfulness I had pictured, will He still be enough for me?

Honestly, that question should not be answered too quickly, because most of us are far more mixed in our motives than we imagine. We do not simply want to be faithful; we also want to know that our faithfulness is leading somewhere legible. We do not simply want to obey; we also want some evidence that obedience is producing a future we can emotionally live with. We do not simply want God; we often want Him plus a timeline that protects us from having to feel too much uncertainty for too long.

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Now, that does not mean every longing is corrupt. Desire is not the enemy. Hope is not the enemy. Holy ambition is not the enemy. The issue at hand is whether those desires remain under the lordship of Christ or have begun to define the terms on which we imagine God’s goodness should be proved. This is one reason James 4:3 (ESV) cuts so forcefully when he says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” In context, James is not condemning desire as such; he is exposing desire that has curved in on itself. He is uncovering the human tendency to seek even good things on terms that keep the self enthroned. And extended hiddenness has a way of bringing that self-protective curvature into the light.

Now, we have to be careful here, because not every delay is a verdict on mixed motives, and not every hidden season exists because God is exposing some secret compromise in the soul. Scripture does not permit us to read providence with that level of certainty. Sometimes the Lord is testing and training us. Sometimes He is restraining. Sometimes He is protecting. And sometimes, He is simply asking for endurance without giving us an immediate explanation that satisfies the mind’s need for neat categories. But it is still true that delay reveals things, and one of the marks of maturity is that a believer stops using unanswered questions as a reason to harden oneself against what the Holy Spirit may be uncovering in the process. A holy heart does not insist on total interpretive clarity before it submits. It yields first, then listens.

The Violence Hiddenness Does to Demand

One of the most painful things a long hidden season does is confront demand at the level where demand feels most justified. And by demand, I do not mean longing. I mean the inward insistence that God’s goodness must arrive in forms that feel manageable to us, and within timelines that do not strain us beyond what we have already deemed reasonable. Hiddenness, when it lingers, begins to tear at that insistence. It strips the soul of its ability to use movement as emotional oxygen and exposes how often we were calling something faith when what we really meant was that circumstances were still cooperating enough to keep our anxiety from rising to the surface. It reveals how much of our inner life was being stabilized not by the presence of God, but by signs that things were progressing according to a plan we could endorse.

This is why the hidden season often feels less like a simple inconvenience and more like a death process. More often than not, the Lord is not merely asking whether you can survive without certain outcomes. He is pressing deeper. He is asking whether your love and steadfastness can survive when immediacy is denied. He is asking whether trust can remain standing when visible reassurance is removed from the room. Check this out: Isaiah 30:15 (ESV) says, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” In its context, that word came as a rebuke to a people who preferred human alliances to dependent trust in God. But precisely there lies its force for us.

Quietness is offensive to the flesh because the flesh would rather secure itself through movement than through surrender. Trust is offensive to the self-willed soul because trust does not allow us to keep managing reality from the center. Rest is offensive to the anxious mind because rest feels like the loss of control before it feels like peace. And yet the Lord says, “Hey! Strength is found here, not because quietness is an end in itself, but because quietness becomes the place where false dependencies are exposed before Me, and your disordered loves begin to lose their authority.”

I’d like to propose that right here is where many believers become vulnerable to a subtle but deadly error: they begin to interpret every restless impulse as wisdom. They call urgency discernment. They call fear stewardship. They call the refusal to be still responsibility. But, my friend, listen. Not all movement is faith, and not all urgency is holy. Much of what we call “trying to be faithful” is little more than the ego attempting to avoid the humiliation of not being in control. Oof. Been there.

Extended hiddenness confronts that illusion with merciless kindness. It tells us what we have not wanted to hear, namely, that much of our instability has been fed by the false belief that if we can just keep things moving, then we can keep ourselves from having to feel how deeply we do not trust God when we cannot see what He is doing.

The Weaned Soul and the Death of Immediate Reinforcement

This is one reason Psalm 131 is so precious and so searching.1 David says in Psalm 131:2 (ESV), “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” That image is hardly sentimental. It’s costly. You see, a weaned child has undergone disruption. A transition has taken place. Immediate gratification no longer governs the relationship in the same way it once did. And there has been protest, loss, recalibration, and, eventually, a new kind of settledness. The child is still near, still held, still safe, but no longer ruled by the same demand to be gratified on command.

That is why the image is so powerful for the hidden life. Much of what God is doing in prolonged obscurity is not merely teaching patience in the abstract; He is weaning the soul from its addiction to visible reinforcement; from the belief that His nearness must always be proved by movement. In this place, He’s weaning us from the instinct to measure spiritual health by how quickly things are resolving and from the immature insistence that what is good must also be immediate.

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That kind of weaning does not feel tender while it is happening. It feels like deprivation and like something is being withheld. And sometimes…it is. But whatever is being withheld is not being withheld by a careless Father. Psalm 84:11 (NKJV) says, “No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” That does not mean He satisfies every craving at the moment it becomes intense. It means His wisdom, not our urgency, governs what is truly good and when it may safely be received. This is an essential distinction, here, because many believers quietly interpret delayed fulfillment as though the Lord were being reluctant with good things, when in reality He may be withholding not out of indifference, but out of Fatherly intelligence. He knows what would nourish us, and He knows what would merely indulge what still needs to die.

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In my experience—especially in the last five months—this is where a long hidden season becomes one of the deepest schooling grounds of the spiritual life. Not because hiddenness is holier than every other kind of season, and not because the Lord does His only important work there, but because extended obscurity often forces the issue of whether God Himself is the reward, or whether we still require His gifts to arrive in emotionally convenient forms before our love can remain quiet before Him.

In Genesis 15:1 (NKJV) we find one of the most searching declarations in Scripture when the Lord says to Abram, “I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” However one works through the translation nuances that scholars discuss around the final phrase, the theological center of the text is unmistakable: God does not merely distribute benefits; He gives Himself. This is what the hidden life presses on with frightening clarity. Said another way, have we actually built our lives around God as our reward, or have we been using the language of devotion to conceal a subtler demand that He eventually validate us with outcomes we can point to?

Why Hiddenness Must Not Be Made Transactional

This is where another assumption has to die.

Many believers make peace with obscurity by imagining that it is obviously preparing them for some future public assignment. Again…just me?

Sometimes that is true. The Lord does test and prepare people for visible stewardship.

Scripture gives us multiple case studies for that. David was anointed before he was enthroned. Moses spent years in Midian before leading Israel. Paul did not emerge into apostolic ministry without prior formation. We don’t need to deny preparation to avoid triumphalism.

But in equal fashion, we do need to be ruthless with the transactions the flesh tries to build around it. They sound like this:

If I endure the hidden place well enough, surely it will eventually cash out in a form of usefulness I recognize. If I stay faithful long enough, surely God will make the meaning of this visible. And if I accept obscurity now, surely I can count on a kind of public vindication later.

That line of thinking sounds patient, but frankly, it is still one’s shortsighted attempt to remain on the throne while using surrender as a strategy for self-promotion. Does that sound harsh? Let’s go to the Scripture.

Mark 4:26–27 (ESV) throws a Molotov cocktail at that entire way of thinking. In the text, Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.” Notice how unromantic the picture is. The man is faithful to scatter, and then he waits. And waits. And…waits.

Life is taking place beneath the surface, and he is not in control of its timing, its speed, or its hidden mechanics. In equal fashion, the kingdom grows in ways that are real without being immediately legible. That should humble us deeply. It means faithfulness does not need to be constantly translated into visible explanation in order to be real. It means the Lord is not obligated to narrate the subterranean work of grace on a schedule that satisfies our craving to understand and proves that hiddenness is not a technique. It’s not a spiritual investment strategy by which we purchase future visibility, but rather, one of the places where faithful obedience may be required while the Lord does work that remains, for a time, below the level of sight.

And right here is where many people become disillusioned, because they discover that they were willing to remain hidden so long as hiddenness eventually made sense on their terms. But the Lord may keep a person in a quiet place for reasons that do not culminate in anything the world would call impressive. He may do it because freedom from self-importance is the point. He may do it because deep communion is the point. He may do it because loyalty of heart is the point. He may do it because conformity to Christ, not visibility, is the point. Yet, none of that makes life small. It only makes it offensive to the categories by which our age measures value and size.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves in the Long Middle

One of the greatest dangers in an extended hidden season is not the absence of clarity itself, but the stories the mind begins to tell to fill the silence. We human beings are interpretive creatures. We do not live on events alone; we live on the meanings we assign to them.

And when a season stretches beyond what we can comfortably explain, the mind starts reaching for narrative. Sometimes it becomes self-condemnation. We think things like I must have failed or I must have missed God.

Sometimes it becomes bitterness dressed as discernment, and we reason The Lord uses other people, not me. Nothing is changing. This has all been wasted.

Sometimes it becomes comparison baptized in spiritual language: They seem to be moving. They are being seen. Their obedience appears to be yielding fruit, while mine disappears into silence.

But every one of those stories is dangerous, not merely because it is painful, but because it attempts to interpret providence apart from the character of our faithful Father.

That is why 2 Corinthians 10:5 (ESV) matters so much in hidden seasons. Paul says we are to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.” That is not only for moments of overt temptation. It is for the slow, grinding seasons where delay begins to generate false narratives about who God is, who we are, and what our lives mean.

A hidden season is not simply an external condition; it is a pressure field that reveals what kind of stories govern the soul when visible proof is in short supply. It exposes whether we can wait without manufacturing fear-driven meaning and whether our minds have been renewed enough to remain under the truth when the flesh is demanding explanation. And perhaps most of all, it exposes whether we have learned to submit our private interpretations to the Lord rather than enthroning them as though they were reality itself.

This is why warfare in hiddenness is often quieter than people imagine. It is not always dramatic. It is not always a matter of loud declarations and visible confrontation. Often it is the sober daily discipline of refusing the lie that says silence means abandonment and refusing to narrate the season as punishment when in fact, the Lord has not called it that. Moreover, it is the patient work of bringing thoughts back under the authority of Christ again and again until the mind loses its right to define the season by fear.

What the Father Is After in the Hidden Place

At the center of all this is a question that must govern the article if it is to remain theologically clean: what exactly is God after in a prolonged hidden season?

For starters, He is after truth in the inward being. He is after loyalty of heart. He is after a people who do not require constant visible reinforcement in order to remain faithful. He is after mature sons whose love is no longer governed by bargains. And He is after the death of self-rule, the purification of desire, the renewal of the mind, and the formation of a soul that can remain restful under His hand without demanding that He explain Himself on our timeline.

But what He is not after is mere passivity. Can I be blunt? Hiddenness is not an excuse for disengagement, laziness, or self-protective withdrawal from exacting responsibility in life. Nor is He after morbid introspection, as though the point of obscurity were to make us endlessly decode our motives until we collapse inward on ourselves.

The Christian life is not sustained by self-analysis, but by abiding trust and obedient love. And yet obedient love does require honesty before the Lord. It requires that we ask whether our desire to be useful has remained submitted to Him, or whether usefulness has quietly become the thing we need to feel legitimate.

Perhaps this is why Matthew 6:6 (ESV) remains so vital. In the verse, Jesus says, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

The hidden place is not an empty vacuum. It is inhabited by the gaze of the Father.

He sees. He knows. He is not indifferent to the ache of delayed fruit. He is not dismissive of the cost of quiet obedience. But…His reward cannot be reduced to the forms of validation our age most easily recognizes. At minimum, it includes deeper communion with Him, further freedom from the tyranny of the self, and a heart increasingly capable of loving Him without the constant mediation of visible success. That is not a small reward. It is the foundation of every life that will have real weight, whether that weight is carried publicly or almost entirely out of sight.

Stay Under the Hand of God Long Enough to Become True

So what do you do when the hidden season lasts longer than you thought it would?

You refuse both fantasies that we have unpacked together: the fantasy that hiddenness automatically makes you holy, and the fantasy that hiddenness is meaningless unless it leads to visible influence.

And then, you let the hidden place do what it was always meant to do, not by glorifying obscurity for its own sake, but by yielding yourself fully to God in that place without demanding that He justify the process on terms your flesh finds satisfying.

You bring your disappointment into the light. You tell the truth about your mixed motives where they exist. You refuse the stories fear wants to write in the silence. You allow the Holy Spirit to expose what the delay is revealing without presuming that you can decode every detail of providence with perfect clarity. You keep scattering seed. You keep returning to prayer. You keep obeying the next thing He has said. And you remain under His hand long enough for what is false to begin losing its authority.

That is the great mercy of these hidden seasons of life. Not that they make life easy, of course, but that they make the soul honest.

Psalm 131 does not end with David congratulating himself for mastering his emotions. It ends with hope in the Lord. And that’s where every hidden season must land if it is to become formative rather than deforming. Hope in the Lord. Not in your reading of the season. Not in your projections about what it must eventually produce, nor your ability to make sense of the delay. Hope in the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore.

So pray the prayer again, but pray it more deeply now.

Lord, find me faithful in the unseen, and keep me faithful when the unseen lasts longer than I wanted. Find me faithful where no one is watching, and keep me faithful where no visible return is arriving. Find me faithful where my motives are mixed, and purify what still needs to die. Find me faithful where my mind wants to write false stories in the silence. Find me faithful where demand still tries to govern my discipleship. Find me faithful until my soul is quiet enough to rest in You without requiring that You explain Yourself first.

A life hidden with Christ is not a wasted life. It may remain illegible to the systems that taught us to crave notice, sure, but it is never illegible to the Father. And when He keeps a person hidden long enough for desires to become pure, for trust to become sturdy, for the mind to become at peace, and for the soul to become more whole beneath His hand, what emerges is not simply a person who has learned how to wait.

What emerges is a person who has become mature.

Keep going. He is your exceedingly great reward. And I believe in you.

If this work is helping you heal what’s holding you back and walk in wholeness, you can invest in the mission here.

For more, I invite you to check out my book, Healing What You Can’t Erase, and listen to my weekly podcast, Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness.

We live in an age that has trained us to equate visibility with significance, scale with fruitfulness, and public affirmation with legitimacy. You know it as well as I do. And that formation runs deeper in us than most of us are willing to admit. It reaches into the hidden motivations of the heart, into the quiet places where desire and insecurity shake hands, and it teaches us, almost imperceptibly, to believe that if a thing is not seen, celebrated, shared, or affirmed, then it must not matter very much. But the kingdom of God has never operated by those terms.

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The Lord does not define value the way the world does, and because He does not, some of His most consequential work in a human life happens in places where applause cannot reach, where outcomes cannot yet be tracked, and where the soul is left with a question it cannot evade: if no one ever knew what God was asking of me here, would I still say yes? That’s not a small question, my friend, but rather, one that exposes just how much of our obedience has become entangled with recognition.

Last year, a close friend of mine wrote a song with a line that has stayed with me ever since: “Find me faithful in the unseen.” I have not been able to shake it, perhaps because it is not the sort of prayer a flesh-driven life naturally wants to pray. The human heart, left unattended and unyielded to the Spirit of God, does not drift toward hidden faithfulness, but rather, toward self-preservation, toward affirmation, or toward the subtle intoxication of being noticed. It wants assurance that its sacrifice will be acknowledged, that its effort will amount to something visible, and that its surrender will produce a return it can point to. But to ask the Lord to find you faithful in the unseen is to place yourself before Him without those conditions and to ask for a life that remains true when the ego is not being fed, when the timeline is not moving, and when the only witness to your obedience is the Father who sees in secret.

The Long Silence Before Public Life

One of the most sobering realities in the Gospels is how much of Jesus’ earthly life unfolded outside the public eye. Luke 3:23 (ESV) tells us that Jesus was “about thirty years of age” when He began His public ministry. The Gospels do not give us a detailed account of those prior years, and that silence should make us careful. In fact, we should not claim more than the text claims. And yet the silence itself is not insignificant. The One through Whom all things were made did not appear on the stage of redemptive history in the way our age would expect. He was not in a hurry. He did not force recognition. He did not emerge with a strategy for accelerated influence. He lived before the Father long before He ministered before the crowds.

Now, that matters, not because narrative silence allows us to romanticize obscurity, but because it confronts our addiction to immediacy. We want fruit without formation. We want to be entrusted with weight before our inner life has been made capable of carrying it. But in the life of Jesus, public ministry does not begin with self-assertion, but with consecration and surrender. And even then, when He does step into the open, the Father’s affirmation comes before the wilderness, not after it. In Luke 3:22 (ESV), at His baptism, the voice from heaven declares, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” Then, in Luke 4:1 (ESV), Jesus, “full of the Holy Spirit,” was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. My friend, that order is essential. He did not enter the wilderness to earn sonship. He entered it as the Son. Said another way, the testing did not produce His identity. Testing revealed the unshakable reality of it.

Honestly, that’s where this article must become more than inspirational, because the question is not simply whether you are in an intense season of testing and training. The question is what that season is exposing and building in you. It’s one thing to say that God works in obscurity. It is another thing entirely to ask whether the hidden place is revealing how much of your sense of self still depends on being seen. And the wilderness has a way of bringing that to the surface. It strips away borrowed reinforcement, removes the props, silences the echo chamber, and exposes whether your life with God has actually become a life with God, or whether it has quietly become a life of managing appearances in His name.

What Is Formed in Secret Eventually Gets Revealed

We have been conditioned to think of public life as the truest measure of who someone is. Scripture does not treat it that way. Public life reveals; it does not create. What is seen in the open is often the unveiling of what has been cultivated in secret over a long period of time. That is why integrity cannot be manufactured in a crisis. Integrity is revealed there. Stability cannot be improvised under pressure. Stability is exposed there. Character is not built by visibility. Character is tested by visibility. And if there is little beneath the surface, public opportunity will not solve that problem. It will magnify it.

This is precisely why giftedness and charisma are not enough to sustain one’s life for the long haul. Gifts matter. Grace is real. Callings are real. Open doors can indeed be given by the Lord. But charisma is not equivalent to character, and gifting must never be conflated with maturity.

We know this, and yet we keep acting as though the possession of visible ability is sufficient evidence of inward readiness. It is not. A person may have vocabulary, platform, brilliance, presence, even a genuine measure of spiritual power, and still be deeply under-formed in the hidden life. When that happens, what appears fruitful for a moment becomes fragile over time, not because influence is wrong, but because influence has a way of applying pressure to every unrepaired fracture in the soul.

Let’s go to the Word to unpack this idea more thoroughly. Jesus got right to the heart of this in Matthew 6:6 (ESV) when He said, “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Notice where the Lord locates the real transaction. It is not in public perception, but in secret communion; not in what can be broadcast, but in what can only be offered. The hidden place is not where we perform devotion. It is where devotion is purified and where the soul is disentangled from the need to be watched while obeying. It’s where obedience stops being a strategy for recognition and becomes an expression of love to the Father.

That said, we need to be careful here, theologically. Hiddenness and obscurity are not automatically and inherently holy experiences. A person can be obscure and still be proud, resentful, self-protective, or passive. Obscurity by itself sanctifies no one. The issue is not hiddenness as an abstract virtue. The issue is the surrender of our hearts to the Lord in hiddenness. The issue is what kind of person is being formed when no one is affirming you, promoting you, or validating you. That is where the hidden life becomes sacred, not because it is unseen, but because it becomes the place where the Lord deals with what public life often allows us to conceal.

Why This Feels So Hard in the Modern Age

Part of what makes hidden faithfulness so difficult is that we are not fighting only sin in the abstract. We are also contending with deeply habituated patterns of desire. The modern world has discipled us to crave immediacy, to seek measurable reinforcement, and to interpret silence as failure. That does not merely affect our habits. It affects our loves. It trains expectation. It forms the nervous system to reach instinctively toward that which offers quick validation. And though we must be careful never to force modern neuroscience into biblical texts as though Paul were secretly writing about dopamine and seratonin, it is still true that repeated external affirmation conditions desire. Human beings become attached to what rewards them, and in an age of constant social feedback, many people have been trained to experience attention as significance and visibility as worth.

That is one reason Romans 12:2 (ESV) is so necessary in this cultural moment. Paul said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” The Greek word for “transformed,” metamorphoō, speaks of real change, not cosmetic adjustment (read: behavior modification). Here, Paul is not describing a shallow behavioral upgrade. Instead, he is describing a deep reordering of the inner life such that perception, desire, judgment, and allegiance begin to come under the authority of God rather than the pressure of the age. The world says value must be seen to be real. The renewed mind learns to call that lie what it is. The world says quick affirmation is proof of fruitfulness. The renewed mind learns to resist that seduction. The world says if no one is noticing, then nothing important is happening. The renewed mind learns to tremble before the Father who sees in secret.

That kind of renewal is not instant. It is slow, inconvenient, and often painful. It takes place through repeated obedience, through the re-training of desire, through the costly refusal to let the age define what matters. It takes place when a person keeps praying when no breakthrough is visible, keeps forgiving when no one applauds it, keeps serving when there is no platform attached, and keeps repenting when no one would have known otherwise. In that sense, hidden faithfulness is deeply counter-formational to the world and deeply formative in the kingdom. It confronts the self that wants immediate proof and teaches the soul to live before the face of God.

The Wilderness Does Not Always Mean What You Think It Means

If there is one error many believers make when they enter a hidden season, it is this: they interpret delay as neglect. They assume that because life feels stripped down, God must have pulled away. Because prayers feel unanswered, He must be withholding, and because nothing outwardly impressive appears to be happening, the season must be wasted. But Scripture will not let us draw those conclusions so quickly. Not every wilderness is the same, and we should be careful not to flatten the category. In the Bible, wilderness can be a place of testing, revelation, dependence, purification, chastening, exposure, or even judgment. The point is not that every wilderness means the same thing. The point is that wilderness never means God is unable to work there.

For the new covenant believer, the hidden and painful places of life are never finally interpreted through shame. They are interpreted through sonship. Hebrews 12 makes clear that the Lord disciplines those He loves, not as a judge condemning criminals, but as a Father training sons1 for maturity. That is why the mature Christian does not ask merely, “How do I get out of this season?” but also, “Lord, what are You exposing in me here? What false dependencies are being uncovered? What loves are being disordered? What attachments are being brought into the light?”

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This is where the hidden life becomes so disruptive to the flesh. In the wilderness, the need for public reinforcement is exposed. The idol of approval starts to lose its camouflage. The fantasy of control begins to crack. The self we curated for acceptance begins to weaken under the searching kindness of the Holy Spirit. And if we will let Him do His work, what dies there is not personality, not calling, not even holy desire, but self-rule. The old man’s demand to be seen, secured, and validated on his own terms begins to collapse. What emerges in its place is not a polished religious persona, but a truer person, one whose inner life is becoming integrated under the lordship of Christ.

The world has no category for that kind of slowness. It wants acceleration. It wants proof. It wants scalable outcomes. But the Lord is after maturity. And maturity cannot be microwaved. It is formed through surrender, repetition, endurance, and truth-driven obedience over time. It is formed through the thousand hidden yeses that no one ever documents. It is formed through the quiet death of vanity. And it is formed in the long middle, where a person keeps showing up before God without demanding that He validate the process on the world’s timeline.

The Reward Must Be Defined by God, Not by the Flesh

One of the reasons hidden faithfulness can feel so difficult—at least in my estimation—is that many people have quietly reduced obedience to a strategy. They may never say it that way, but under the surface, the logic is often transactional: if I obey, God will eventually give me what I really want. If I stay faithful, surely this will lead to the platform, the promotion, the fruit, the recognition, the visible outcome that will prove it was all worth it.

But that way of thinking misunderstands the nature of life with God at a very deep level. Obedience does lead to reward, yes. When we walk in the ways of the Lord, we are indeed positioned for blessing. Scripture is not embarrassed by that. But the reward must be defined by God, not by the cravings of the unsurrendered self.

In Genesis 15:1 (NKJV), the Lord said to Abram, “I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” However one handles the translation nuances around that phrase, the theological center is unmistakable: God does not merely distribute gifts; He gives Himself. Communion with Him is not incidental to the Christian life. It is the Christian life. This is where Matthew 6 must be read carefully. In the text, Jesus does not invite us into secret prayer as a technique for extracting favorable outcomes. He invites us into the Father’s presence. He teaches us to live before the One who sees, the One who knows, the One who is not manipulated by performance. Whatever else reward includes in the purposes of God, it can never be less than a deeper communion with Him and further conformity to His image.

That is where much modern ambition gets quietly judged. Because if what you really want from obedience is a bigger version of yourself, then even your spirituality can become a mask for self-exaltation. Read that again.

But if what you want is the Lord, then the hidden place stops feeling like a waiting room and starts becoming the real place of life. You begin to understand that the deepest reward of faithfulness is not merely what God may eventually entrust to you in public, but what He is doing to you in secret. He is making you the kind of person who can love Him for who He is, not merely for what He can do.

Let Him Find You Faithful Here

Psalm 139:3 (ESV) says, “You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.” There is enormous comfort in that, but there is also holy pressure. The Lord is not unfamiliar with the hidden person. He sees the motives beneath the behavior, the ambition beneath the language of service, the fear beneath the striving, the loneliness beneath the need to be noticed. And His knowledge of us is not cold observation. It is the kind of love that refuses to leave us fragmented. It is the kind of love that will bring us into hidden places precisely because those are often the only places where we can no longer hide from ourselves.

So perhaps the prayer is simpler than we have made it, though not easier:

Lord, find me faithful in the unseen. Find me faithful where there is no audience. Find me faithful where no visible reward is attached. Find me faithful in my thought life, in my private decisions, in my stewardship of time, in my motives, in my repentance, in my restraint, in my secret history with You. Find me faithful when obedience feels costly and unnoticed. Find me faithful when my flesh wants proof that this matters. Find me faithful when delay tempts me to question Your goodness. Find me faithful not because I am strong in myself, but because Your Spirit can sustain what my ego never could.

Because in the end, my friend, the issue is not whether your life becomes visible. The issue is whether it becomes true. The issue is whether what is public is being upheld by something real beneath it. Second Chronicles 16:9 (NKJV) says, “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him.” That is the target. Not prominence. Not brand. Not expansion for its own sake. Loyalty. A heart that belongs wholly to the Lord. A life that has been consecrated in secret before it is ever trusted in public.

So close the door to self-promotion and the performance trap. Return to the place where your soul is no longer performing. Let the silence tell the truth about you. Let the Holy Spirit expose what still wants to be admired. Let Him confront the bargains you have made with visibility. Let Him uproot the lie that being unseen means being unused. Let Him train you in the slow, hidden, beautiful violence of ordinary obedience. And stay there long enough for the false structures to fall apart. Stay there long enough for your loves to be reordered. Stay there long enough for the roots to go down where no one can see them.

Then, whether the Lord keeps you hidden for another season or entrusts you with something others can see, your life will have weight to it. Not the weight of image, of course, but the weight of reality. Not the thin energy of performance, but the grounded strength of a person who has learned to live before God. And that kind of life, though the algorithm cannot see it and the age cannot reward it, is never wasted. It is often the very life through which the kingdom of God advances most powerfully, because it has first been surrendered where only the Father could see.

Selah.

If this work is helping you heal what’s holding you back and walk in wholeness, you can invest in the mission here.

For more, I invite you to check out my book, Healing What You Can’t Erase, and listen to my weekly podcast, Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness.

If so, allow me to offer some advice. If your understanding of the nature of the Lord is thin, abstract, or built more on assumption than revelation, you will misinterpret His ways when they do not align with your expectations. In fact, you will not merely struggle in the wilderness; you will misdiagnose it.

But we must be really careful here, because not every hardship is a divinely scripted “wilderness season” in the narrow sense. Scripture distinguishes between Spirit-led testing, the consequences of sin, the ordinary groaning of a fallen world, spiritual warfare, and the mysterious providence of God that governs all of it without being morally identical to all of it. When Matthew writes, “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Matthew 4:1, ESV), he is describing a specific, redemptive-historical moment in the life of the Son. In it, we are not permitted to flatten every form of suffering into that category. Yet we are equally not permitted to imagine that any hardship in the life of a believer exists outside the sovereign oversight of a Father who is forming sons into maturity.

That’s why if you do not have a settled, biblically anchored understanding of the nature of the Lord, you will interpret His providence and oversight through the lens of fear. And fear, when left unchecked, constructs narratives that protect the self at the expense of trust. That’s why we need to talk about temptation.

The Battle Over God’s Character

The first arena of temptation is rarely behavior; it is interpretation. Immediately after the Father declared over Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17, ESV), the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness. And the timing here is not incidental by any means. Jesus’ identity was established before testing began. And in the wilderness, the enemy did not begin with blatant rebellion; he began with insinuation. “If you are the Son of God…” The assault was aimed at trust in the Father’s word.

And today, that pattern has not changed.

The adversary does not need to persuade you that God does not exist. Even the demons know God exists. He needs only to distort your perception of Who God is. And so, if hardship can be reframed as neglect, if delay can be reframed as indifference, or if discipline can be reframed as rejection, then your heart will quietly withdraw while your behavior remains outwardly religious. Suspicion will replace surrender. Control will replace dependence. And you? You will call it wisdom.

Of course, this is not merely a theological issue. More specifically, it is anthropological. The human person is wired to seek coherence. When circumstances feel uncertain, the body’s threat-detection systems heighten vigilance, and the mind attempts to reduce ambiguity by constructing explanatory narratives. That does not make you faithless; it makes you human. But if those narratives are not governed by the Self-revealed character of the Lord in Scripture, they will be governed by fear. And fear is a poor theologian.

Yet we must not reduce unbelief to neurology. Scripture never treats distrust as a purely biological reflex. It is both relational and covenantal. Israel did not fail in the wilderness because their amygdala misfired; they failed because they hardened their hearts when they forgot Who had delivered them in the first place. The issue was not merely cognitive distortion, but instead, covenantal amnesia. And the same is true for us.

The Non-Negotiable Nature of the Lord

If we are to interpret the ways of God rightly, we must anchor ourselves in what He has revealed about His nature.

Have a look at Psalm 103:8–14 (ESV). Scripture says, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”

This is covenantal revelation, and it is good news. The Lord’s mercy, you see, is not mood-based. His steadfast love is not reactive. His compassion is not fragile. He remembers that we are dust. He does not forget our frailty, nor does He despise it. But neither does this psalm imply that His dealings will always feel gentle. The same Scriptures that reveal His compassion also speak of His holiness, His discipline, and His refining fire. The Father who remembers we are dust is the same Father who refuses to leave His children immature.

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Therefore, we must hold two truths together without collapsing either. God’s nature is merciful and steadfast. God’s ways may include testing, pruning, and painful discipline. The wilderness does not contradict His character; yet neither are we authorized to assume that every painful season is a direct, simplistic expression of a tidy training program. His providence is wiser than our categories.

Misdiagnosis and the Soul

A misdiagnosis in medicine leads to mistreatment. That should be obvious. And in equal fashion, a misdiagnosis of God’s character leads to spiritual distortion. In other words, if you believe, even subtly, that the Lord is fundamentally disappointed in you, you will read His correction as condemnation. If you believe He is indifferent, you will read silence as absence. And if you believe He is transactional, you will read hardship as repayment.

Yet right here, we must be ruthless with our own assumptions because not all misdiagnoses are the result of ignorance. Sometimes it is the result of resistance, meaning that we prefer a God we can predict and control. We prefer a system we can master. We prefer outcomes that align with our timelines. And so, when the Lord refuses to conform to those expectations, we are tempted to revise His character rather than surrender our control.

If I can be frank, much of what masquerades as spiritual maturity is anxiety baptized in Christian lingo. We call it discernment when it is in fact self-protection. We call it prudence when it is the fear of surrender. Now, to be clear, Scripture commends wisdom and boundaries. Prudence is not sin. Stewardship of your life is not rebellion. The issue is not whether you exercise caution; the issue is whether caution is governed by trust in the Father or by the illusion that you must secure your own outcomes. That’s perhaps why self-preservation, in the sinful sense, is not the same as wisdom. It is the refusal to die.

Discipline: Love With Teeth

Hebrews 12:6 (NKJV) says, “For whom the Lord loves He chastens, And scourges every son whom He receives.” The language is uncomfortably direct. The term translated “chastens” carries the sense of formative training, instruction, the shaping of a child into maturity. Yet the same verse uses language that includes severe correction. Scripture does not sanitize discipline, my friend. I know. That one stings. It does not reduce it to coaching tips. The Father’s love is not always sentimental, but it is sanctifying.

Even so, discipline is not retributive wrath for those who are in Christ. The New Testament is clear that there is no condemnation for those who belong to the Lord Jesus. The discipline of Hebrews 12 is relational, not judicial. It is the action of a Father forming mature sons, not a judge exacting payment. Still, formation can hurt, pruning is not painless, and refinement requires fire.

Let’s drill down on this. If you equate all discomfort with divine displeasure, you will resist the very process that is shaping you. If you equate all suffering with discipline, you will burden your conscience unnecessarily and perhaps accuse God falsely. Maturity requires discernment. Not every storm is chastening. Not every trial is punishment. But every trial, whatever its source, can be governed by a Father who refuses to waste it.

The Death We Resist

Jesus said in Luke 9:23 (ESV), “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Daily. The cross is not a metaphor for inconvenience. It is an instrument of death. The call to follow Christ is a call to relinquish ultimate control.

And here is where the wilderness often exposes us. In times of chastening, we discover how attached we are to being right, to being recognized, to being secure, and to being vindicated. And when those attachments are threatened, we call it injustice.

In the same breath, we must not romanticize suffering. The New Testament does not command us to seek pain for its own sake, but it does insist that the path to resurrection life runs through surrender. John 12:24 (NKJV) says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” The point Jesus is making is that death precedes fruitfulness. That’s why the question is not whether you will experience loss. The question is whether that loss will drive you into deeper trust or deeper control.

Establishing Your Rubric Before the Crisis

Can I offer some more advice? You cannot construct your theology of God’s character in the middle of panic and expect it to be stable. The time to anchor your heart in the nature of the Lord is before the storm intensifies. In fact, once you’re in a storm, it’s too late to prepare. Now, this does not mean you must feel a particular emotional experience. Faith is not measured by the intensity of your sensations. It is measured by your allegiance to what God has revealed in Scripture.

Your rubric must be Word-built, Spirit-illumined, and tested in community. Scripture reveals His mercy. The cross demonstrates His love. The resurrection secures your hope. The Spirit bears witness within you. And the people of God remind you of truth when your own mind is tempted to revise it.

When the wilderness comes, you will still feel the tension. You will still wrestle. But you will not be free to reinterpret God’s character every time circumstances tighten. You will return to what has already been revealed. He is merciful and gracious. He remembers that you are dust. He disciplines those He loves. He is not arbitrary. He is not cruel. He is not indifferent. And because His nature is steady, you can endure seasons when His ways feel hidden.

The goal is not mere survival. It is maturity. Not a hardened stoicism, but a surrendered strength. Not a self-protected spirituality, but a resilient trust that has passed through fire and discovered that the Father’s heart was not against you.

If your understanding of God remains intact in the wilderness, the wilderness will not define you. It will refine you. And when you emerge, it will not be because you mastered the process, but because you entrusted yourself to the One whose nature does not change, even when His ways stretch you beyond what you would have chosen.

If this work is helping you heal what’s holding you back and walk in wholeness, you can invest in the mission here.

For more, I invite you to check out my book, Healing What You Can’t Erase, and listen to my weekly podcast, Win Today: Your Roadmap to Wholeness.