By the second, the room grew louder as people turned toward each other.

And I didn’t. I didn’t know the people around me, so I didn’t trust them. I sat there praying by myself, asking God for the desire to pray.

I’ve been in a …

Read more

This weekend, just like any other weekend I’m home, I had College GameDay on. Near the end, during the picks segment, the camera settled on the panel, and behind them, above the crowd, four signs stood in a row.

Left to right, I copied them down word for word:

“Seek the living Jesus. Not ‘church,’ not religion, not politics”

“To all who suffer, don’t give up. Come to Jesus”

“Don’t give up. You are loved. Jesus says ‘come to me,’ not a ‘church’

“Forget religion. Get to Jesus”

My first reaction was a nod. The living Jesus over dead religion? Hope for people who are hurting? I believe every word of that. I’ve also seen where those signs come from.

I worked in church relations for an evangelistic ministry, which meant seeing a lot of churches from the back hallway, and I know how fast a mission turns into machinery. And I’ve been a pastor. I know the pull to care more about Sunday running smoothly than about who wasn’t in the room.

I’ve been the “church” on that sign.

Then I read the signs again.

Somebody had put the word church in quotation marks, on two different signs.

The segment moved on, and I couldn’t shake the question: what exactly were they telling people to skip?

What the signs get right

The people holding those signs deserve some credit first. They got up early, stood in a packed crowd, and spent their one shot at national television on Jesus. Most of us have never done that.

They’re also right about more than you might expect.

“Come to me” is a direct quote. Jesus said it in Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The weary he had in mind were, first of all, people worn out by religion. Twelve chapters later he describes the religious leaders of his day: “They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4). Jesus had very little patience for religion that crushes people. Neither should we.

The line about politics has good company too. In 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that nothing would be more destructive to the German church than letting party politics use it.1 He was right. Twelve years later, the Nazis hanged him.

And the second sign, the one for people who suffer? I have no notes. That sign is Matthew 11:28 on poster board.

So why couldn’t I shake the other three?

The “church” on the sign

Maybe because most of us know exactly which “church” those signs mean.

You’ve been let down by an institution. A school that cared more about its rankings than its students. A company that called itself a family right up until the layoffs.

Some of you were let down by a church. The pastor who fell. The leaders who protected the institution instead of the person it hurt. The small group that went quiet when your marriage came apart. If that’s you, I won’t argue you out of your scars.

Ready for one that may step on your toes a little bit more?

Some of us agree with those signs for reasons that have nothing to do with being hurt. Church is just inconvenient. Saturday is for football, and Sunday is for recovering from Saturday. A podcast on the drive to work feels like plenty of Jesus. Nobody burned us. We drifted, and a sign that says Jesus never wanted us there anyway sounds a lot like permission.

Underneath all four signs is a longing I share: people want Jesus without the damage. Underneath the longing sits an assumption, and the quotation marks give it away. On those signs, “church” stands in the same row as religion and politics. It’s a human system, built by people, that you can opt out of, like canceling a subscription.

If that’s what the church is, the signs are right. Skip it.

That leaves the question the signs never ask. What is the church, according to the Jesus they’re quoting? And can you have him without it?

I work through questions like this with a method I call Redemptive Correlation. You listen to the culture’s question on its own terms, distill the longing underneath it, reframe it through Scripture’s whole story (creation, fall, redemption, restoration), and respond with something you can actually live. We’ve listened. We’ve named the longing. Now let’s go to the one man in the New Testament who got exactly what those signs promise.

“Why are you persecuting me?”

Saul of Tarsus met the living Jesus with no church involved: no pastor, no building, no worship band. Jesus came to him directly, on a road, in the middle of the day. If anybody in history had grounds to hold up a “Jesus, not church” sign, it was Saul.

Luke tells us what Saul had been doing before the road: “Saul, however, was ravaging the church. He would enter house after house, drag off men and women, and put them in prison” (Acts 8:3). Then he asked the high priest for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, roughly 135 miles north, so that he could do the same thing there (9:1–2). Saul was traveling with arrest warrants.

Then the light. Saul hits the ground and hears a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?”

Except that’s the wrong quote. Read it again: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (9:4). Saul asks who’s speaking, and the answer comes back: “I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting” (9:5).

Saul had never laid a hand on Jesus. He had laid hands on Jesus’s people, house after house. Jesus took every one of those arrests personally.

Augustine, preaching four centuries later, explained it with a crowd: “It may happen that someone’s foot is trodden on in a crowd, and it hurts: the tongue cries out, ‘You’re treading on me!’ It does not say, ‘You are treading on my foot.’”2 Head and body speak as one. Anybody who has stood in a GameDay crowd knows exactly what he means.

That’s the first problem with the signs. They offer a Jesus you can have apart from his people. The living Jesus, the one the first sign tells us to seek, looks at his people and calls them “me.”

“Brother Saul”

If the story stopped at verse 5, the signs might still have a case. Saul met Jesus alone. Done.

Watch what Jesus does next: “But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do” (9:6).

Jesus had Saul’s full attention. He could have finished the conversation right there on the road. He sends him into town instead, blind, to sit for three days and wait for somebody else to tell him what to do.

That somebody is the last person Saul expected. Ananias is a disciple in Damascus, exactly the kind of person Saul came to arrest (9:14). His name might as well have been on the list. When the Lord tells him to find Saul, Ananias does what any of us would do. He objects: “Lord, I have heard from many people about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem” (9:13).

Translation: Lord, have you read this guy’s file?

He goes anyway. He walks into the house, puts his hands on the man who came to arrest him, and says two words that carry the whole story: “Brother Saul” (9:17).

The scales fall. Saul is baptized. Then, Luke says, “Saul was with the disciples in Damascus for some time” (9:19). Later, when he tries to join the disciples in Jerusalem, and they’re too afraid of him to believe he’s really a disciple, Barnabas puts his own name on the line and vouches for him (9:26–27).

Even Karl Barth, the theologian most famous for calling religion unbelief, saw it. On the road, Saul deals with Jesus alone. In the second act, the community enters through Ananias, and Jesus’s closing words on the road had already promised it a part in Saul’s future.3

One precision note for careful readers. Paul insists he received his gospel by revelation from Jesus, from no human teacher (Gal 1:11–12). Ananias didn’t hand Saul his message. Jesus handed Saul to his people.

So here’s the line I can’t get past:

“Without spot or wrinkle”

You may be thinking, “That’s a nice Bible story, Jacob. You haven’t met my church.”

Fair. Paul hadn’t either. But he knew what churches were like. He spent most of his letters correcting them. And he still wrote this: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless” (Eph 5:25–27).

Read that slowly. If Christ is still cleansing her, she still needs cleaning. Paul describes a groom who is still washing a bride who still has stains. He loves her too much to leave her that way, and he has already loved her enough to die for her.

That’s the whole story of Scripture in one marriage.

In creation, God looked at a man by himself and said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18).

In the fall, everything broke, religion included. The heavy loads of Matthew 23 are real, and so are the churches that tied them on people. The signs see this part clearly.

In redemption, “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her” (Eph 5:25). He died for a people.

In restoration, the story ends at a wedding: “the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has prepared herself” (Rev 19:7).

Here’s where the signs’ foundation cracks. They define the church by the fall, by its failures, and then reason correctly from a wrong definition. Scripture defines the church by what Christ has done for her and what he will make of her. The signs ask you to choose between the groom and the bride. The groom has already made his choice.

If you’re in a church

Those quotation marks are partly our fault. People put “church” in quotes because of what they’ve seen us do, and what they’ve watched us fail to do.

So here’s one thing to try this week. Be an Ananias.

Think of the person whose name you’d rather not see on the list. The one who left. The one who got hurt in your church, or by it. The one who is honestly a little scary to you, the way Saul was to Ananias. Text them. Buy the coffee. Sit with them. Say “brother” or “sister” and mean it.

And if you agreed with the signs because Sunday is inconvenient, I’ll say it as gently as I can: you don’t get to call that freedom. My own confession puts it plainly. All believers are “bound to join themselves to particular churches, when and where they have opportunity so to do” (Second London Baptist Confession 26.12). Jesus sent Saul into the city. He’s sending you too.

If the signs were written for you

If you’re suffering, if a church hurt you, if you’ve about given up on the whole thing, hear the second sign again. It was right. Don’t give up. Come to Jesus.

He’ll meet you. He met Saul on a road, and he can meet you on a couch on a Saturday morning.

Just know what he does with the people he meets alone. He hands them to his people. Probably someone you’re nervous about. Probably someone nervous about you.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the church at its worst. He watched most of the German church make its peace with Hitler. He stayed anyway, helped lead the church that resisted, and wrote this: “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”4

You don’t have to go back to the church that hurt you. You may need to go somewhere else. But when Jesus sends you an Ananias, let him in the house.

Jesus will meet you alone. He won’t leave you alone.

The crowd

Imagine if the next person who gave up on “church” walked into a living room and got called “brother” before anyone asked about his past.

Imagine a church known in its town for the people it sits with, the ones who suffer, the ones who left, the ones whose names used to be on somebody’s list.

Imagine if the folks watching GameDay at home on a Saturday morning, the ones the signs were written for, knew exactly where to find a Christian who would show up with coffee and stay.

The signs wouldn’t need quotation marks.

This morning the segment ended, the show cut to the first game of the day, and the four signs dropped out of frame. I haven’t stopped thinking about the people holding them. Whoever they are, they got up early and stood shoulder to shoulder with thousands of strangers to tell the rest of us to come to Jesus alone. I know now what they were telling people to skip. It’s the place Jesus sends everyone he meets.

Even the sign telling you to skip the crowd had to be held up in one.

About ten years ago, it stopped leaving. I was in a job situation I hated and more alone than I knew how to say. Most mornings felt like waking up underwater. Being a pastor while making ends meet in food service, I still showed up to both places. I still knew my theology. Neither lifted the weight.

What I remember most is what happened when I finally told people. They were kind. They said they’d pray for me. Then the conversation moved on, and I went home carrying the same weight I’d brought in.

They weren’t wrong to pray. They just didn’t know what else to do. That’s the problem.

We Know How to Pray. We Don’t Know What Comes Next.

Anxiety and depression aren’t rare. About one in five American adults say their mental health is only fair or poor.1 They’re in your small group. They’re in the pulpit. In a 2014 survey, nearly a quarter of pastors said they had struggled with mental illness themselves, yet about half rarely or never talked about it with their churches.2

That silence is hard to excuse, because people want to talk to us. In a 2024 Pew survey, about a third of Americans said they’d be very comfortable talking to a religious leader about their mental health. Among weekly churchgoers, that number nearly doubles. Evangelicals were the one group more comfortable going to a pastor than to a therapist.3

People are already bringing it to the church. The problem is what they find when they get here.

Usually it’s kindness, a promise to pray, and a quick change of subject. Underneath sits a quieter belief: if a Christian’s faith were strong enough, this wouldn’t happen. If that’s true, the depressed believer isn’t sick. He’s failing.

That belief is heavier than the depression. And it isn’t biblical.

Made Whole, Broken Whole

God made us as bodies and souls together. He formed Adam from dust and breathed life into him (Gen. 2:7). We aren’t spirits riding around in machines. Our minds live in our bodies, and our bodies shape our minds.

So when sin broke the world, it broke all of us: not just our choices, but our brains, our sleep, our grief. A body that can get cancer can get depression. Anxiety can be a symptom of a fallen world without being a symptom of weak faith.

The Bible doesn’t pretend otherwise. Psalm 88 is the prayer of a faithful man named Heman, and it never turns the corner. There’s no “but I will praise you.” It ends with “my companions have become darkness” (Ps. 88:18). God put that prayer in His book. He wants us to have words for the dark.

Not Every Dark Night Is a Lesson

In the 1500s, a Spanish friar named John of the Cross wrote about the “dark night of the soul,” seasons when God feels absent, and prayer goes dry. I don’t share all of John’s theology, but he saw something the church still needs.

John was careful. He said not every darkness is God’s purifying work. Sometimes the dryness comes from melancholy, something close to what we’d call depression, and has to be understood differently.4 A man who gave his whole life to prayer knew that some dark nights aren’t spiritual tests. They’re sickness.

Call every depression a spiritual lesson, and you tell sick people to pray their way out of an illness. Call every spiritual struggle a chemical problem, and you miss what God may be doing. Good care holds both.

What God Did for Elijah

Elijah had just watched fire fall from heaven. Then he runs for his life, collapses under a tree, and asks to die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4).

God doesn’t lecture him or hand him a verse. He lets him sleep. An angel touches him and gives him bread and water. Elijah sleeps again, and the angel returns with more food, “for the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7).

Sleep. Food. A touch. Only later does God speak. Elijah’s crisis was real and spiritual, but God started with his body.

That’s the order the church keeps reversing.

A Savior Who Knew Sorrow

The gospel doesn’t just say God sees our darkness. It says God entered it. In Gethsemane, Jesus said, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38). He asked His friends to stay awake with Him. They fell asleep.

Jesus knows what it is to be overwhelmed and left alone in it. He can “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). Your anxiety doesn’t put you out of His care. It puts you in the company of a Savior who has been there.

The story ends with God wiping away every tear (Rev. 21:4). Until then, He gives gifts to carry us, and some come through doctors, counselors, and medicine. John Calvin argued that whatever is true in medicine, even from unbelievers, comes from the Spirit of God and must not be despised.5 That’s common grace.

I’ve taken medication. It wasn’t a failure of faith. It was a gift, and I received it with gratitude.

If You’re in the Dark

If you’re struggling right now, hear this: you are not a bad Christian. You are a Christian who is hurting.

Tell someone, and don't make it a prayer request with the details filed off. Tell a friend, your small group, your pastor: “I’m not doing well, and here’s what that looks like.” Then let them help. See your doctor. Find a counselor. Take the medicine if you need it. Eat. Sleep. Let people bring you bread.

When the darkness doesn’t lift on your timeline, don’t take that as proof God has left. John Piper wrote a short book for people like us, about doing what we can while we wait for God.6 It helped me. And Psalm 88 is still in your Bible. You’re allowed to pray it.

Church, Do the Next Thing

Pastors and leaders: pray. But don’t let prayer be how you end the conversation.

Your people already trust you with this. Make it normal to talk about. Name it from the pulpit. Tell small group leaders it’s good when someone says they’re not okay. Know a few trusted counselors and doctors in town before anyone needs them.

When someone tells you they’re struggling, ask the Elijah question: what does this person need today? A meal? A ride to an appointment? Someone to sit with them?

Sympathy is where care starts. It can’t be where care ends.

Bread Before the Word

Picture a church where saying “I’m depressed” in small group doesn’t make the room go quiet. Where people know what to do next. Where we pray, and then we show up with soup.

That isn’t a softer church. It’s a more biblical one. It looks like the God who fed Elijah before He spoke to him, and the Savior who stayed awake in the dark when His friends couldn’t.

We’re still waiting for morning. Until it comes, let’s not make anyone wait alone.

Two findings made headlines. First, younger adults, especially those aged 18 to 29, scored lower in nearly all of those areas. Second, people who attend religious services regularly reported considerably higher flourishing, and the association held even in the most secular societies. Japan, with the lowest attendance of the 22 countries, also reported the lowest flourishing.

Christians read that second finding and exhale. Somebody screenshots it. Somebody preaches it. Science agrees: church is good for you.

The data deserves a fair hearing. The researchers are careful, and the correlation is real. Our reflex deserves a harder look.

We track sleep. We track steps. We track protein. We track screen time. Now we can track church attendance and watch our score climb. Somewhere in that list, God became the best supplement on the shelf.

I’m in this too. I wear my Apple Watch to bed every night along with my Oura ring. I track every walk, even if it’s a few blocks. I log every meal.

Even deeper, I often treat my Bible reading as a checkbox to tick off instead of a moment to meet with God. My Bible app even keeps a streak. Ticking the box buys me a clean conscience and a better day.

Under the tracking is a longing worth honoring. We want to be whole. The Hebrew Bible calls that wholeness shalom, and the study is reaching for something close to it. The trouble is the assumption riding along with it: that wholeness is something you build, one input at a time.

Jeremiah saw it coming 2,600 years ago.

This is what the LORD says: Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind. He makes human flesh his strength, and his heart turns from the LORD. He will be like a juniper in the Arabah; he cannot see when good comes but dwells in the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land where no one lives. The person who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence indeed is the LORD, is blessed. He will be like a tree planted by water: it sends its roots out toward a stream, it doesn’t fear when heat comes, and its foliage remains green. It will not worry in a year of drought or cease producing fruit. (Jer 17:5–8)

Jeremiah never promises the blessed man better weather. Heat comes for both plants, and so does the drought year. Same sun, same sky, same calendar.

The difference is underground.

Jeremiah’s “salt land” points toward the basin around the Dead Sea, the lowest dry ground on earth, about 1,400 feet below sea level. Nothing grows there by trying harder.

The juniper’s real problem is worse than scarcity: it “cannot see when good comes.” Self-reliance starves you twice: once in the drought, and again when the rain comes, with no roots to take it in.

Then comes the line I can’t get past. The blessed tree “will not worry in a year of drought or cease producing fruit.” Jeremiah measures flourishing in the worst year.

Run Jeremiah’s tree through the study’s six domains in a drought year, and it scores poorly. Health down. Finances down. Happiness, who knows? God calls it blessed.

Verse 9 explains why we miss it: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else.” The man who makes flesh his strength is trusting his own read on what he needs: the least reliable instrument he owns. Your heart is a bad dashboard.

Psalm 1 uses the same picture and adds a detail.

He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. (Ps 1:3)

The tree is planted. Somebody put it there. Some scholars hear “transplanted” in the Hebrew word (shatul); others think that pushes it too far. Either way, the tree didn’t pick its riverbank.

The phrase “in its season” is where the flourishing project breaks. We want fruit every quarter, measurable and trending up. Psalm 1 gives us a tree that bears when it’s time, and a God who decides when that is.

“Whatever he does prospers” sounds like a prosperity sermon until you read it beside Jeremiah. Prospering happens on God’s schedule, to a person rooted in the right place, and the schedule sometimes includes a drought year.

A tree doesn’t bear fruit to earn the river. It bears fruit because it’s been planted there.

The study asks what makes people thrive. Scripture answers with where we were planted, how we were uprooted, who replanted us, and what we’re growing toward.

“The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed” (Gen 2:8). God is the first gardener, and the first human is placed. Work comes next (2:15), good work done inside a location God chose. In Eden, flourishing was an address before it was an achievement.

The woman saw that the tree “was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom” (Gen 3:6). Read that as a survey: physical wellbeing, aesthetic delight, intellectual growth. The fall was a flourishing strategy, Jeremiah’s cursed man in the first garden: humanity reaching for a tree to secure life on its own terms. Every self-made flourishing project since has been a garden planted east of Eden.

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree” (Gal 3:13). Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 21:23, not Jeremiah, but the echo is hard to miss. The one man who trusted the Father completely was hung on a tree and took the curse of the shrub. He went to the salt land so we could be planted by the water.

“The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations” (Rev 22:2). Psalm 1’s tree bore fruit in its season. This one bears every month: no drought year, no off-season. Its leaves go to the nations, including the 22 nations the study surveyed. The survey can measure what’s broken. The tree heals it.

If you’re tired, it isn’t from lack of effort. You’ve got the reading plan, the streak, the gym membership, the budget app, and the podcast queue on how to live well. You’ve built a decent irrigation system.

Somewhere along the way, the whole thing started depending on you. Miss a day and the day goes worse. Break the streak, and you assume God is disappointed before breakfast. That’s the juniper’s logic, human flesh as strength, with a verse taped to it.

You may be thinking, “So I should quit reading my Bible?” No. Jeremiah’s tree “sends its roots out toward a stream” (17:8). Roots reach. Scripture, prayer, and the gathered church are where they reach.

What changes is what you think the reaching earns. Read because the river is there and you’re thirsty. A better day may come with it. Some days it won’t.

If you’re in a drought year, hear Jeremiah again. The dry year is where he sets his blessing, so it can’t be proof you’ve lost it. His tree is green in it.

Isaiah describes God’s restored people as “righteous trees, planted by the LORD to glorify him” (Isa 61:3). The word is plural. Isaiah pictures a grove, not one heroic tree hitting its numbers.

I suspect that’s what the researchers keep finding without a word for it. Read their data through Scripture, and the people who gather on Sunday are a planting: trees sharing a riverbank, holding each other up when the heat comes.

Who’s standing next to you in a drought year? What would your city notice about a grove that stays green when everything around it is tracking, striving, and drying out?

If you walked away from church because someone promised you’d thrive and you didn’t, God never made that promise. He made one about where you could be planted, and it’s still open.

A tree doesn’t bear fruit to earn the river. It bears fruit because it’s been planted there.

My streak will break someday. Trees don’t keep streaks.

If your streak broke tomorrow, would you still believe you were planted?

Is Christianity beautiful?

Is Christianity true?

If you’ve ever stood halfway out the church door, you’ve asked some version of those three. They’re fair questions, and old ones. The first person to weigh them was standing in a garden, looking at a tree.

“The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” (Genesis 3:6)

Good for food. Delightful to look at. Desirable for wisdom. Good, beautiful, and true, in that order, in one verse. The third phrase doesn’t say true, but it names the same hunger: to know what’s real, and to know it yourself.

Genesis 3 says plenty about those questions. Most of it is about the one asking.

For a long time, the church answered these questions from the bottom up. Is it true? Here’s the evidence for the resurrection. Settle the truth, and goodness and beauty will follow.

More people now come at it from the top. They want to know whether this faith is good, and whether it’s lovely. The arguments can wait.

The dechurched especially. If your church protected an abuser, you don’t want a lecture on the empty tomb. Question one is answered. If faith felt like a rulebook and a fog machine, question two is answered. Question three never gets a hearing.

I won’t wave those answers off. A faith that wounds people should have to answer for it.

Ready for one that may step on your toes a little bit more?

Every one of us asks these questions from somewhere, usually from the judge’s bench, with Christianity as the defendant. That posture feels like the only honest one. The alternative is getting fooled twice.

Genesis 3 is the story of the first time someone took that seat.

Before the serpent says a word, Genesis 2 has already answered two of the three questions.

“The LORD God caused to grow out of the ground every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food . . .” (Genesis 2:9)

Pleasing in appearance. Good for food. Every tree. When 3:6 calls the forbidden tree good and lovely, it tells us what was true of the whole orchard. That tree had nothing on the others for flavor or looks.

It offered one thing the rest didn’t. The Hebrew makes the point quietly: “desirable” in 3:6 (nechmad) is the same word 2:9 uses for trees “pleasing” to the eye. The word for the beauty God gave now describes a wisdom she plans to take.

Good: who gets to say it

Six times in Genesis 1, God saw that it was good. The seventh is the verdict: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed” (1:31). Genesis 3:6 opens the same way: the woman saw that the tree was good. Same verb, same verdict, different one doing the seeing.

The serpent set that up. God’s first word to Adam was generosity: “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden” (2:16). The serpent’s opening line flips the ratio: “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” (3:1). Then he supplies the motive: “God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God” (3:5). God isn’t generous. He’s guarding His turf.

Once God looks like a withholder, someone else has to decide what’s good. Before she took the fruit, she took the verdict.

Beautiful: what the eyes were for

The tree was delightful to look at because God made it so. Beauty isn’t the villain here. But her eyes now work under someone else’s promise: “your eyes will be opened.”

And they were. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (3:7). The serpent technically kept his promise. The first thing they saw was themselves, and they couldn’t stand it.

They reached for something lovely and ended up hiding in the bushes.

True: wisdom you can take

The serpent never mentions how the fruit tastes or looks. His whole pitch is about what God said. He misquotes God (3:1). Then he repeats God’s warning, “you will certainly die” (2:17), almost exactly, and adds one word: not (3:4).

That order matters. Once she believes his account of what’s real, the good and the beautiful rearrange themselves around it. The fruit didn’t change. Her story about God did, and her eyes followed.

Interpreters disagree about exactly what “knowing good and evil” means. In context, the most natural reading is that it means claiming the right to decide good and evil for yourself. That’s why the wisdom is taken. Scripture’s wisdom starts elsewhere: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). She wanted wisdom without Him, and got the knowledge of shame.

In Eden, we reached for a tree to become like God. On Calvary, Christ hung on a tree to make us like Him.

Redemptive Correlation reads the culture’s questions through Scripture, carrying them across the whole story: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. Genesis 3 is only the second act.

Creation: given. Good, beautiful, and true arrived as gifts before they were ever questions. Even the truth about the forbidden tree came freely. God told Adam plainly, ahead of time, what it would cost (2:17). Nobody had to pry it out of Him.

Fall: grasped. Taken on our terms, all three curdled. Good became a verdict we issue. Beauty became something we hide from. Wisdom became the knowledge of our own nakedness. Then, in the same chapter, the gift returns: “The LORD God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them” (3:21). God covers what fig leaves couldn’t.

Redemption: received. Where Adam reached, Christ refused to. He “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited” (Philippians 2:6). Then He went to a tree as the one being given: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).

He calls Himself “the good shepherd” (John 10:11), and the Greek kalos means both “good” and “beautiful.” He calls Himself “the truth” (John 14:6). The three things Eden grabbed for turn out to be a person, and He offers Himself.

Restoration: given back. The Bible ends at a tree: “The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month” (Revelation 22:2). Good for food again. The eyes get what they were made for: “They will see his face” (22:4). And the mind gets its wisdom: “I will know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). All three come back the way they first came, as gifts.

Some of us have spent years proving Christianity is true. But the people around us are asking two other questions first, and they’re answering them by watching us.

If your theology is airtight and your life isn’t good, you’ve told your neighbor something false about God. Paul aimed this at false teachers in Crete, and it stings because it can describe us: “They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:16).

Ouch.

That’s orthodoxy without orthopraxy, and Jesus expected the opposite: “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The world isn’t wrong to ask whether we’re good. Jesus told them to look.

If someone watched your home, your church, and your feed for a month, would they find anything good or beautiful enough to make them wonder whether it’s true?

You may be right about the church you left. Some of what you saw wasn’t good or beautiful, and the people responsible will answer for it.

But notice what you’ve kept. You still believe some things are good and some evil. You still know beauty when you see it. You still want the truth, or you wouldn’t have left because of a lie. Genesis says all three came from the same Giver. You can’t keep the gifts and put Him on trial.

So bring your questions to Jesus Himself, not His worst representatives. When Nathanael doubted anything good could come from Nazareth, Philip didn’t argue. He said, “Come and see” (John 1:46).

That’s still the invitation. Come and see whether He’s good, beautiful, and true. Just come to receive, because Eden showed us what happens when we come to take.

Back to the tree

What would it look like for a church to answer all three questions at once?

What if your congregation was known in town as the people who show up when a marriage falls apart, or a diagnosis comes back bad? What if your Sunday gathering had something a stranger would call lovely, and mean it? What if the truth we preach were the most obvious explanation for how we live?

The watching world would start asking a new question: “Where does this come from?” The answer is a person, and He’s been giving Himself away since Genesis 3:21.

In Eden, we reached for a tree to become like God. On Calvary, Christ hung on a tree to make us like Him. At the end of the story, a tree stands on both banks of the river, heavy with fruit every month.

No one will ever have to reach for it again.

For me, it was hunting. Long story short, I didn’t grow up in a culture or environment that included this kind of sportsmanship. We fished, we went to the mountains occasionally, and we for sure ate meat, but it wasn't until I moved across the country that I found myself holding a weapon in the mountains for the express purpose of finding an animal, harvesting it, and eating the fruits of my labor for the foreseeable future.

As an adult learner in this space, I felt behind. I put pressure on myself to quickly reach the experience level of the guys who graciously helped us our first season and had spent their entire lives learning the craft. Suffice it to say, it was a frustrating first fall for me, even after finally having a successful hunt.

As I was learning, my thought was that these people were my age. We had the same gear, the same amount of time to get out, and were going (together) to the same spots. The only difference? They had the experience. And I mistakenly couldn’t understand why I wasn’t achieving the same results they were when I saw the posts about their big bucks.

You may not be learning how to hunt, or do anything quite as complex, but how often do we all play the comparison game? We’re afforded the same opportunities as others, but the difference between them and us is the journey that got us there.

We most often see this in job interview processes. You applied for a job, interviewed well, but the rejection email said they offered the position to someone “more qualified” or “more experienced.”

Maybe you picked up a sport in high school and played with other athletes who had been kicking, throwing, or hitting since before they could read or were out of diapers. It was an ego hit when you were named the backup behind them, and you blamed your effort in tryouts and conditioning instead of realizing they have more reps over time.

To take this a step deeper, we play this comparison game with other Christians. You see someone who uses a lot of big spiritual words they actually understand, hear about the amazing prayer time they had this morning, and notice how many verses they can quote from memory. It can make you feel less-than, even though your faith walk may be younger or shorter than that person’s.

In all of these scenarios, what do the results make us do?

Speed up. Run before we can walk. Take on more than we can handle.

Like diving into the deep end of a pool on the second day of swimming lessons, when we try to accelerate our progress beyond what’s healthy, scalable, and manageable.

You raise your hand for a project at work that’s outside your depth of field because you want the experience that could’ve gotten you the other job.

You push too hard at practice, to the point of injuring yourself, because you think that that’s what will be the difference maker between you and the starter.

You increase your volume of Bible reading, church involvement, and spiritual growth resources to the point where you’re just checking a box rather than getting something out of it, purely because you see that other person doing the same thing and they’re closer to God.

I wish I could say the third example, of playing the comparison game with other Christians, in this section was hypothetical. I watched it in real time this past week with someone who, being new in their faith and hungry for the Lord, found themselves in deep-end topics and concepts before their faith had found any foundation.

This is why I want to camp on this main point:

I’m all for getting deep. I do this research, read the sources I quote, and engage non-orthodox ideas because it’s a necessary part of the growth process to better understand and affirm what we believe. I’ve written extensively on the topics that are absolutely considered “fringe,” like this post. After all, a faith that goes unchallenged is a faith that can’t be questioned, and God invites us to ask questions and bring our uncertainties to him.

But there is a time and a place for evaluating ideas like these. Only after we’ve found our footing and are convinced of what we believe can we take the next steps.

So, if you’re younger in your faith, or even drawn to concepts on the edge because you think “we aren’t being told the whole truth,” I offer these three ideas as caution, admonition, and encouragement.

Foundation - Start where the apostles did.

Nothing we build, both literally and metaphorically, can survive without a solid base. Even Jesus talks about this in Matthew 7:24-27 (and Luke 6:46-49) when he compares the man who built his house on a rock versus the one who built his on sand (or no foundation). So when we read Paul’s words to the Corinthians, as he seeks to correct their starting points and basics on many different topics, we must heed this statement in particular:

¹¹ For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 3:11 CSB)

To take it even further, Paul spends the first part of 1 Corinthians 15 rehashing and restating the foundation as “the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand and by which you are being saved, if you hold to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain” (1 Cor. 15:1b-2 CSB).

Most of us would say that Christ is our foundation, no question. But look where your study hours go. If what you read in the Bible, listen to from podcasts, and spend late nights arguing about keeps circling the topics you think the church is “too scared” to preach, then that tells you what you’re really building on. What we spend the most time thinking about says more about what we believe than what we put in our Instagram bios.

Paul summed up this thought in one sentence: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Everything else, both in the letter and in our lives, hangs from that.

Filter - the center interprets the edges.

Jude shows how this works. He sat down to write about “our common salvation” (Jude 3), but went in a different direction. False teachers turned grace into an excuse and license to sin (Jude 4), which in turn gives us the letter we have now.

It gets strange real fast. In a short 25-verse book, we get angels who “abandoned their proper dwelling” (Jude 6), Michael the archangel arguing over Moses’ body with the devil (Jude 9), and a prophecy from Enoch (Jude 14-15). Genesis tells us that Enoch walked with God, but the words Jude quotes come from 1 Enoch, a non-canonical book so well known in those days that fragments of it were found at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls. This suggests Jude was reaching for stories his audience already knew.

Where he brings them up in the letter matters. Every strange story is in the middle of his message. On one side, Jude calls his readers to contend for “the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3), and on the other, he tells them to keep themselves in God’s love, “waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life” (Jude 21). The edges live inside the center, and Jude makes it clear that each has its own place.

We need this same order. The Bible no doubt has weird things in it, and they’re there for a reason. But we can only read them the right way when we read them through the person and work of Christ. Read Genesis 6 through Colossians 2:15, where Paul says Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly,” and the sons of God become one more chapter in a story where God wins. Read the cross through Genesis 6, and Jesus becomes a side character in a cosmic thriller.

Jude knew his readers loved and held the Enoch stories closely, but he made extra sure they finished the letter looking at Jesus.

Fruit - speculation vs. stewardship.

Paul knew Timothy had this same problem in Ephesus. The apostle left his protégé there with one job: stop certain people from teaching strange things, which he names as “myths and endless genealogies.” The reason is that these “promote empty speculations rather than God’s plan, which operates by faith” (1 Tim. 1:4).

While we don’t know exactly what the “myths” were, the most likely candidates are the same kind of material the filled writings like 1 Enoch. Whatever they were fixating on, the Ephesian church found them more interesting and exciting than the Gospel. Sounds familiar, right?

Paul doesn’t refute the myths or even identify them. He goes to what fruit they bear. “Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5). Some, he says, had wandered off into “fruitless discussion” (1:6). They wanted to teach people the Bible, but they actually couldn’t tell anyone what the Bible was for.

You may be thinking I’m saying, “Don’t study Genesis 6.” That’s not my point, because Jude did, and so did Peter in both his letters (1 Pet. 3:19-20 [likely], 2 Pet. 2:4-6). The question is what that study produces in you.

A healthy test is to ask yourself, “Do I love God more after studying X? Am I more patient with the people in my life? Do I want to share Jesus more after my research?”

If the real answer is no, then you’ve only become more interesting at parties. I know this firsthand because I’ve found myself down that Nephilim rabbit hole more than once.

Speculation feeds curiosity. Stewardship feeds people. Knowledge that never turns to love is just trivia with a Bible verse attached.

If you’re newer to this thing called faith, start with the center and stay there longer than feels exciting. Read one of the Gospels, finish it, then start it again. Read books like John Stott’s Basic Christianity to learn who Jesus is, why you need him, what he did, and how to respond. Ask someone who’s walked with Jesus longer than you to help you out. The weirder, secondary topics will still be there later. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

If you’ve been a believer for most of your life, this one’s for you too. New believers show up hungry as can be. They’ve finally beheld Jesus and his glory, and they’ll use their resources to search. If all they hear about these fringe topics is prohibition or warning, their algorithm will happily feed them the edges, Reel after Reel. You have a responsibility to be the person who reaches these younger Christians, in your church, with the center.

Even if you’re not a Christian, but have stuck it out this far, and think the stranger things about faith are interesting and something you want to research, follow the scent. Every one of them ends in the same place: a God who wins, and a cross where he did it. Start with Jesus, and see if the rest makes sense.

That first fall, I thought the difference between the guys who took me hunting and me was talent. But after a few seasons, I realized it was actually time at the range. Behind every successful harvest was someone who took their rifles, sat on a bench 100 yards away from a target, and shot until the rifle held zero. I learned this the expensive way, with a rifle that wouldn’t hold zero no matter which scope I mounted on it.

You can’t make a 300-yard shot with a rifle that can’t hold 100.

Get zeroed first, and the distance will come.

But that's not at all what God’s Word was meant to do. It's not a comprehensive history book. It's no math textbook. It isn't a science, geography, art, or English guide either. What the Bible is is a history of God’s plan to be in relationship with his creation, and the lengths he went to prove it, despite what those who came before us did in rebellion against God.

What Paul tells his protégé, Timothy, about Scripture is just as important to us as it was when the apostle first wrote it.

14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed. You know those who taught you, 15 and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.  (2 Timothy 3:14–17, CSB)

As Paul tells Timothy, in his final letter before his execution, how to live his life, structure the church, and lead the congregation, this small piece of advice is massively important. We tend to focus on the final two verses of the passage, citing them as the reason why we believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. Yet, without the first two verses, there isn't much of a reason to state the inspired purpose.

If God’s Word isn't what it is, what we learn in 3:16-17, then there is no reason to hold fast to it as long as Timothy had. Therefore, in clinging to the truth since he was a kid, using it properly and for its intended purpose, and persisting in it no matter what (4:1-2), Timothy has the foundation on which everything else he does laid: the Word of God used and believed in its right and proper context.

Here are three simple, yet important, takeaways you should keep in mind as a result of these four verses. You don't have to be a pastor, scholar, or expert to start doing these things right here and now.

Don't give up.

When Paul tells Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and firmly believed,” we read elsewhere in the two letters that, in the midst of the cultural occasion for writing Timothy, it became increasingly attractive to go after new ideas and abandon the older things that people grew up with (4:3-4). Thus, it would be ignorant to think that Timothy also didn’t face some sort of pressure himself.

We see this today just as frequently and prevalently. Because some new trend, thought leader, or way of life seems more appealing and often easier to follow, people who grew up in church leave to chase after these things. They want safer, simpler, and calmer lives while also maximizing the reward, something that often proves too good to be true.

So, when you’re confronted with temptation to jump ship because things get hard as a Christian, or your faith grows stagnant, or whatever may pull you towards something different, stay the course. Use what you’ve learned from God’s Word to educate, empower, and encourage you through the moments of difficulty. Persist in these things.

Don't miss the point.

What Paul tells Timothy in verse 15 is not that Scripture gives us all of the answers to all of our questions, but that Scripture gives us “wisdom for salvation.” We learn about who God is, what he did, and what he offers us in Christ Jesus. We grow in our relationship with him through the words on each page, from Genesis to Revelation.

I heard a theologian once say, when talking about trying to find answers about how angels live, what happened before “In the beginning” in Genesis 1:1, or how Satan came to be, that we won’t find those in the Bible because the Bible isn’t concerned with that. It’s an odd thing to consider, since we’ve been raised to turn to Scripture when we need answers. Yet God was concerned with one central idea when he inspired the authors of the Bible to write, and that was to teach us about himself and his plan for humanity.

When we’re tempted to give up, we’re also tempted to ignore the point of the message we have from God. No, you won’t know what happened to the dinosaurs. No, you won’t know everything the angels do, or what type of fruit Adam and Eve ate from.

You may read this and think, “Is Jacob saying the Bible is inadequate, incomplete, and missing things?” By no means am I saying that! What I’m arguing for is that you use God’s Word as it was intended to be used, not for your purposes or desires. What you will know from Scripture is who God says you are, who he says he is, and how you’re supposed to live in light of both.

Don't waste it.

Because we’re not supposed to give up on our faith or miss the point of Scripture, Paul tells Timothy what Scripture was intended to do, in the most popular verses from either of the letters he wrote to his son in the faith. Paul gives four key purposes that God’s Word serves, with implications beyond the surface:

• Teaching: add that which is found in God’s Word to the knowledge and wisdom of the hearers

• Rebuking: call out the things which believers shouldn’t be doing

• Correcting: point them in the right direction to grow in their faith

• Training in righteousness: support the sanctification at work and promote ways to make righteousness the automatic choice

We’ve become accustomed to the positive notions Paul lists, because teaching and training are comparatively more comfortable than being rebuked or corrected. But, when we ignore the refining power of God’s Word, we miss out on its fullness and its encompassing work.

And these purposes aren’t for nothing. They have one express purpose: making the believer complete and equipped. A Christian without the Word and its effects is found lacking and wanting. They aren’t effective, nor are they growing in their faith. But by sitting under the Word, being taught and trained, called out and corrected, a believer is honed, sharpened, and made ready for the work God has in store.

Therefore, God’s Word is vital, powerful, and literally life-changing. It may not tell us every answer, but it gives us the answers we need. It invites us to sit in a sort of mystery that reminds us he is God and we are not. When we approach the Bible on its own terms, we’re left in awe that God would include us in his plan.

As you can imagine, this has come back to bite me on more occasions than I’d like to admit. I’ve given a response to a support question I was 90% sure was correct, only to find out that I was 100% wrong and should’ve asked for help.

With the advent of LLMs and more widely available artificial intelligence, I feel even more like I have no excuse to be found without something to add to a conversation. “Hmmm, let me ask Claude.” “Oh, I’ll ask Siri.” “Hey Chat, what’s….?”

You feel it too. You use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok like it’s your personal researcher, and you used Google before that. You want to get a full brief with interesting tidbits, or a link to share with your friends to prove your point, or just a grasp on a topic you haven’t looked up before that moment.

To take it one step further: maybe you do all of this not to contribute to a conversation, but to dominate, win, and make yourself look good. You’re not there to be part of the situation; you’re there to control it and be the conductor, dictating what everyone talks about.

But what if we were never meant to have all of the answers? What if the goal of our faith isn’t to know everything and be theological experts, but to know the right things really well and do something about it?

I’ve been reading 1 Corinthians the week prior to writing this, and couldn’t shake what I read towards the end of chapter 1:

¹⁷ For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its effect.

¹⁸ For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved. ¹⁹ For it is written,

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and I will set aside the intelligence of the intelligent.

²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish? ²¹ For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached. ²² For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. ²⁴ Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, ²⁵ because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor. 17-25 CSB)

Because I care so much about getting it right when I write, teach, and converse, when Paul writes to the Corinthian church about how they use what they know, often to the detriment of their relationships, I feel deep conviction about how I wield the facts I’ve collected and ideas I’ve crafted. Instead of using it to spread the Gospel, I often weaponize it to build my ego and reputation (however futile it ends up being).

I love how Taylor frames this section: “The ensuing argument presumes that the message of the cross is antithetical to the status-seeking cultural expectations associated with wise speech.”1 In this vein, as Paul tackles one of the besetting issues in the church in Corinth, I see the section saying three clear things we should heed and internalize.

You can get it right, but still lose the plot. (vv. 17-19)

Your Bible most likely has a heading/pericope break between verse 17 and verse 18. It’s important to call this out because verse 17 serves as a transitional statement between Paul’s first point of the section and his second, providing a bridge that acts as both a closer and an opener.

Paul knew his purpose: preach the Gospel. He didn’t even want to get caught up in the insane divisions the Corinthians put in place. The voices in the congregation that stoked this problematic fire went wrong by putting more stock in how the message came to them than in the message itself. Akin summarizes both Paul’s intent in writing this sentence the way he does, as well as the idea he was trying to refute:

Paul knew it was better to speak truth poorly than to say nothing with flair. Paul certainly cared nothing about the delivery of the gospel. Paul would agree that what you say and how you say it are important, yet the point is the medium must not get in the way of the message. The power is in the message! The power is in the preaching of the cross! If an impressive delivery overshadows the preaching of the good news, then the cross will be emptied of its power. The power of salvation is never in the messenger. The power of salvation is always in the message, the gospel, the cross of Christ.2

For us, this is all too applicable. We strive for a polished version of whatever we say, making sure each paragraph and statement lands with the most impact. We stockpile facts from our chosen sources, package them for the biggest bang, and send them off without considering whether our words even mean anything.

When it comes to the Gospel, we care way more about getting the wording right than just trying. And in that internal decision, where we talk ourselves out of sharing our faith with someone we feel the pull to talk to, we elevate the “flair” that Akin mentions over simply being honest and making the attempt.

Thus, as Paul transitions to the next portion and then quotes Isaiah 29:14, he makes his point clear. What God does, in order to emphasize the message over the messenger, is invert the way of worldly wisdom and reason to demonstrate that what we think is logical isn’t always so. Fee comments, “[T]he message of the cross is not something to which one may add human wisdom, in any form, and thereby make it superior; rather, the cross stands in absolute, uncompromising contradiction to merely human wisdom.”3 The fact that Christ came, lived, died, and rose again, all in the place of black-hearted sinners like you and me who don’t deserve it, isn’t something that we could cook or scheme up ourselves. Humanly speaking, this just doesn’t make sense, and that’s exactly the point.

We weren’t meant to think our way to God. (vv. 20-23)

One thing we must understand about 1 Corinthians is that it’s a very literary book. Paul uses irony, sarcasm, rhetorical questions, alliteration, and other wordplay to meet his readers where they were culturally; in these verses, that approach is clearly driven by a dependence on, and emphasis on, mental fortitude.

After a series of aforementioned rhetorical questions, Paul drops the hammer on the very things those who are skeptical of God appeal to in order to see if He exists, all with the point that God found it “pleasing” to save people who believed despite the absence of logic, reason, and signs. After all, as Fee notes, “A God discovered by human wisdom will be both a projection of human fallenness and a source of human pride, and this constitutes the worship of the creature, not the Creator.”4

It stands to reason that, if this is the case, then we can’t just connect the dots mentally and come to the conclusion that there is a God and He’s done what we read about in Scripture. The Corinthians viewed wisdom as their salvation; God is the only Savior. Akin brings context to the moment: “The Jews rejected the message because they asked for signs—the miraculous… the Greeks lifted sophists (traveling teachers of wisdom), popular rhetoricians, and debaters as the celebrities of the day.”5 So we too view knowledge and proof as a life raft to cling to when life gets tough and feels out of control. We turn to the things we can look up, uncover, and digest by our own might, and it will always leave us high and dry.

This doesn’t work in God’s economy. Paul even calls the way God works “a stumbling block” and “foolishness.” It’s only through the things that don’t make sense that we can find, or rather be found by, God.

Even at your best, you already lost to God’s worst day. (vv. 24-25)

At first glance, that claim is discouraging. We read it and these verses with human eyes, forgetting that God doesn’t play by our rules. Comparing our highs and lows with someone else’s is daunting and exhausting; how much more when we use our finite minds to compare ourselves to God!

But this is where we have to remember what Paul’s pointing at. “God’s foolishness” and “God’s weakness” are more than just figures of speech. They point back to that fateful day, with a cross outside of Jerusalem on a Friday that held God’s son.

That truly is the worst day. The moment every human standard of wisdom and strength would mark as a total failure. But, subverting this notion, Paul says that this is wiser and stronger than anything we have at our disposal. It’s not a knock on us, and it’s not a comparison. God didn’t keep His distance and leave us to our own devices. Instead, He came down, went lower than the lowest low we could think of, and He won the battle against sin and death.

It’s a fitting way to close this section. The playing field is leveled, all means of pride are destroyed, and we’re left with one final piece of wisdom: the only power that can do anything of value is Christ’s power. Fee writes, “In the cross God ‘outsmarted’ his human creatures and thereby nullified their wisdom. In the same cross God also ‘overpowered’ his enemies, with lavish grace and forgiveness, and thereby divested them of their strength.”6

With all of this in mind, what can we do about the fact that what we bring to the table in our means, minds, and moments aren’t enough? Paul provides the answer in the next section:

²⁶ Brothers and sisters, consider your calling: Not many were wise from a human perspective, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. ²⁷ Instead, God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. ²⁸ God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world—what is viewed as nothing—to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, ²⁹ so that no one may boast in his presence. ³⁰ It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom from God for us—our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption ³¹ —in order that, as it is written: Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. (1 Cor. 1:26-31)

Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Across major translations and commentaries, there’s consensus that Paul means bragging, glorying, or reveling in what God has done in Christ’s work on the cross.

This is the part where it's easy to rail against learning, knowledge, or studying. That’s not what Paul had in mind at all. We’re meant to grow in our learning, study the deeper things of Scripture, and be equipped to disciple others. But we must recognize that we are not the source or originator of what we know. It’s a gift from God that we can have wisdom!

Thus, we must use it appropriately.

So what does it look like to use our wisdom in the right way, when we’re in a conversation we didn’t see coming?

Most of the time, it looks like being okay with saying, “I don’t know.”

This is just as much for me as I hope it is for you, because that sentence scares me. I’ve positioned most of my life to avoid saying that, but it seems that Paul is writing to people like me (and you) in this closing section: “Not many of you were wise from a human perspective, not many of noble birth.” The qualification, not what’s missing, is what he’s hitting on.

The one thing that scares me most is where God prefers to work.

So keep reading. Keep digging. Care about getting things right. But lay down the need to arrive at every conversation armed to the teeth with something to share. The role of conductor you and I try to play has already been taken by someone who knows how to keep time better than we have, since He’s been doing it since before time began.

So use Logos. Use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to help you. But hold what you find loosely. Hold it with an open hand so that when you do get the question you can’t answer, you still have the one thing that you actually walked in with:

Christ crucified.

But during weeks like this past one, when a customer goes nuclear, the hope of de-escalation dwindles with each email.

I was in a conference room with a colleague, trying to put out the fire. Usually, just getting someone on a Zoom takes the temperature down; we’re all bolder behind a keyboard. Not this time. He came out of the gate hot as can be. Rolling his eyes. Throwing his hands up with every sentence. Cussing at us for not doing things his way.

That shut me down. I was lost. My jaw clenched, my hands started shaking, and all I could eke out was, "I understand the frustration here, but our policy stands. There are certain things we can do, can't do, and choose not to do."

What I wanted to say was, “Slow your roll. You’re overreacting for absolutely zero reason. If you’d read my email and not blown up, we wouldn’t be here.”

We talked past each other for another twenty minutes. I thanked the customer for his time and said we’d follow up on any product ideas we’d pass to the team, and ended the call.

I looked at my colleague and said, “Well, that just happened. I didn’t expect that.”

The problem still isn’t resolved. And every time I think about him, no matter where I am, I’m back in that room.

This brought up the quintessential customer service conundrum:

I tried to find that answer in my 1-on-1 meeting with my leader, in peer conversations with the success manager on the call, and by googling as much as I could to tackle it from an operational standpoint.

That’s when God, in His loving ways, caught me by the collar.

When we look at other people as the problem, like how that question frames the customer I dealt with, it gives us a way out. I’m not the problem here; they are. We end up forgetting that we, too, are just as messy as they are and aren’t totally innocent in the equation. Yes, they’re difficult, but so am I. My temper flared. My selfishness and desire for safety reared its head in my heart.

So, the real question, when we distill the self-preservation, emotions, and offense out of the equation, is quite different:

I found my answer to this question in an unlikely place.

First Peter 2:18–23 reads:

¹⁸ Household slaves, submit to your masters with all reverence not only to the good and gentle ones but also to the cruel. ¹⁹ For it brings favor if, because of a consciousness of God, someone endures grief from suffering unjustly. ²⁰ For what credit is there if when you do wrong and are beaten, you endure it? But when you do what is good and suffer, if you endure it, this brings favor with God.

²¹ For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ²² He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; ²³ when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.

I asked myself the same question you’re thinking now: how does a passage directed to slaves apply at all to someone getting under your skin?

Schreiner addresses this objection: “The exhortation is addressed to slaves, but slaves function as examples for all Petrine Christians [those going through situations where they have little control], and so the principle enunciated applies to all believers.”1 You can’t control how other people act; you can only maintain your own witness and composure. Schreiner continues this train of thought in saying that the “New Testament writers concentrate on the godly response of believers to mistreatment.”2

Let me pause here and add this contextual delineation. Peter’s whole aim in this first letter to the “dispersed exiles” (1 Pet. 1:1) is to bolster the faith and resolve of those who were hated and persecuted for their belief in Jesus, all right before a period of even deeper and harsher oppression.3 You’re probably not being oppressed, persecuted, or denied opportunity because you’re a Christian in 2026. You’re probably just getting your feelings hurt because someone disagreed with you or you didn’t really have the qualifications you needed to move up at work.

The world of today is nowhere near as hostile for believers as the world of 1 Peter. My week was not a case of persecution or oppression; it was merely a bad call with a customer who probably won’t think about me after his problem is solved.

At the heart of this passage, in vv. 21-23, Peter invokes Isaiah 53’s Suffering Servant motif to demonstrate the example that we’re supposed to follow. Davids unpacks this idea and shows us this isn’t just a copy/paste keystroke: “The theme of following Christ or imitating Christ is common in the NT and (shifting to the theme of imitating an appropriate teacher) in the Hellenistic world, but the vocabulary used here is unique. The term for ‘example’ is not simply that of a good example that one is exhorted to copy, but the pattern letters that a school child must carefully trace if he or she will ever learn to write.”4

And if Christ is the pattern after which we should follow, then it stands to reason that if he could put up with the most intense form of persecution, we can exercise patience in the times when it would be easier to stand up for ourselves and our own rights. After all, as Charles Spurgeon, the “prince of preachers,” notes, “The giving up of what is our right, the giving up of what we may fairly claim as our own, is the very mark of Christ’s sheep.”5

This is where Redemptive Correlation comes into play. The customer support question here doesn’t get answered the way other areas of my job can: better canned replies or workflows, firmer boundaries, or clearer policies. Not as a believer, because those tools don’t reach. I have to pull it under Scripture’s authority, culture read through Scripture and never the other way around, and let it come back as a different question.

The first recorded human words in Scripture are recognition of another image bearer: “This one, at last, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam saw a someone.

And that’s how God designed all of this to work. He made us so that we’re to be face-to-face, not taken advantage of or used as a means.

Which is why that call really got under my skin. I was treated as a mechanism, and that structural violation of who God designed us to be went beyond just a workplace annoyance.

Not even two chapters later, the one who recognized became the one who used. He offloaded what should’ve been his responsibility to bear, saying, “The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12). One sentence, and Adam handed the blame for his sin to his wife and billed God for giving him a helper.

That’s where a particular type of entitlement was born. It screamed, “This is yours to carry, not mine.” It’s the type of entitlement we don’t recognize right away, because we’re so used to the type that demands more than it deserves.

Cain finishes what his dad started and adds further definition to this type of entitlement. He says to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9) when Abel is nowhere to be found, because Cain murdered him. In modern language, he said, “That’s not my job.” He refused the burden.

In my world, my customer was running Adam’s play: “Fix it, and fix it now.” But what I was running was Cain’s. I quietly calculated how much of him I was actually obligated to carry.

Verse 23 has one verb that undoes the whole question we’ve been looking at.

²³ when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.

Entrusted. Peter tells us that Christ handed the whole account over to his Father and let him handle things. He didn’t just suck it up and wait for the payout.

That’s a different thing than patience. We often view patience as a deferred collection of what’s owed to us. We hold our tongues, keep score, and tell ourselves we’re being gracious all while tallying up the slights in the back of our minds.

Jesus didn’t do that before Pilate, and we need to understand that’s not what he’s asking of me or you on a support call.

So: what is my patience for, when it buys nothing?

That’s still the wrong question. Patience isn’t for anything. When it’s for something, whether it’s favor, formation, or the guy backing down on the other end of the call, you’re back in the transaction mindset without any progress.

Peter does say enduring unjust suffering brings favor with God (v. 20), but the phrase really is closer to, “This is commendable in God’s sight,” rather than, “This earns you credit.” It’s a Father’s assessment of what he’s looking at, not a balance accruing in your bank account.

Ask what your patience bought, and you’ve already misread the transaction. The receipt was never yours to hold.

When Peter talks about “the one who judges justly,” he’s not giving us a consolation prize. It’s actually a promise. He’s saying that the ledgers get balanced by the only one who can actually make sense of the accounting and do something about it.

You don’t have to be your own lawyer when you’re mistreated. You aren’t a neutral party to your own case, and neither am I.

What we’re working towards is a world where there’s nothing left to pay back. No outstanding balances, no IOUs, and not even an eye-for-an-eye waiting. Forbearance will be obsolete because no one takes anything from anyone. No more calculating how much you can take before pushing back is allowed.

When you hand over the ledger now, you’re running a dress rehearsal for that world.

You may not be on the other end of escalated calls like I was this week. But you have someone.

It might be a friend who calls to complain to you about their life, but never cares about yours. Or a coworker who lingers too long at your desk after a conversation you didn’t have time for in the first place. Or someone in your small group who treats it like their personal weekly therapy or vent sessions.

You do what I did. You stay calm, but you keep score.

I’m not going to tell you to just be more patient. That’s the easy route here. What you and I both need to actually do is stop counting.

Your receipt-keeping may be accurate. It’s also a refusal to believe anyone is going to settle the account.

It’s okay to name what happened as wrong, because Peter does in v. 19 when he calls it suffering unjustly. Jesus denying his right to speak up in front of those accusing him wasn’t him claiming nothing was happening to him.

You can name it, but you have to hand it over and let go. Tell the truth about the wrongdoing, then put down the notebook and the pen.

Try to do this in the smallest form possible. No reliving the conversation over and over in your head in the shower, or building a case, or typing out the reply to that text message in your Notes app. Hand it over and go do something else.

It’s okay if you don’t do it perfectly the first, second, or tenth time. I’ll admit, every time I thought about the phone call and prayed for the customer who was rude to me, it didn’t take me long before I was back to litigating my own case.

Here’s what I have to relearn, almost daily.

The church is full of people who know everything there is to know about forgiveness, but they still hold accounts open on someone who did them dirty back in 2013. We know all the verses, stories, commands, and promises about forgiving others as Christ forgave us, but we still carry that ledger around in our back pockets, ready to use it, no matter if there’s one little line or pages full.

This is orthodoxy without orthopraxy. Again.

We’re supposed to look like a man who was insulted, but didn’t clap back. The truth is that we mostly don’t when we look in the mirror. Sure, we believe it, but we don’t practice it in the mundane, ordinary areas of our lives. But those small places are the only places where practice happens. The mad boss. The terse email. The customer who will never think about you again.

We’re rehearsing for a world where none of this will be necessary. Every account we close early is a small, stubborn advertisement for heaven.

So, whose ledger are you still keeping?

This post is an example of the original theological method I've developed called Redemptive Correlation: reading the world through Scripture, not being the Bible to fit our culture. If this struck a note with you, I'd appreciate you subscribing (which is completely free) and supporting my writing.

Subscribe now

If you really liked it, I'd love for you to share it, whether via Restack or simply copying/pasting the link and posting on social media.

Share

But that’s not the piece you’re reading this week.

I don’t know if that piece will ever go out in its current form.

You see, the whole essay centered around the idea of control. It’s something I deeply struggle with, and I have even been diagnosed with acute OCD. Needing everything in its place and in the right slot of the routine is really important to me, so I wanted to address the subject of control in a way that showed how we mistake it for faithfulness.

However, the way I wrote it was a means of controlling the narrative around my failings and shortcomings. I hedged too much. Quite frankly, I made it too safe.

It’s easy to confront the Jesus jukes and the God-speak that we use when things aren’t going right. The “God’s got a plan” and false humility cards we play to puff our chests through the breakups, losses, and times when things just don’t go right are often our default, and I know the God-speak responses as well as anyone.

But what if the real control in the depths of my soul isn’t my desire to control others, but really my desire to control how God moves?

That’s not as easy to address. It’s not as easy to admit. I cringe at the thought that this is what I actually struggle with, since I know all too well that I would make a terrible god. And yet, I use my prayers to convince God to do things my way, preferring the easy route with the least pain to what God’s already planned.

So, as I approached this idea of controlling God, I’m taken immediately to the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42:

While they were traveling, he entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who also sat at the Lord’s feet and was listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, and she came up and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to serve alone? So tell her to give me a hand.” The Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Now, the main way you and I have heard this explained (maybe even explained it this way ourselves when talking to a youth group) is somewhere along the lines of ordering your right priorities in the right way. That’s all well and good, because there’s something to learn from these verses about how we stack up our lives, but that’s not the point at all. One commentary says “the interests of this brief narrative unit lie elsewhere. Luke’s narration is manifestly concerned with the motif of hospitality.”1

Hospitality. We can show it in many different ways, from welcoming people into our homes and cooking for them to showing kindness to those who may not deserve it. To embody hospitality requires someone to relinquish some sort of right or privilege in favor of another person’s comfort or preference.

Put another way, it means giving up total control so that others may have a say in the matter. You don’t run the show, and even more so when Jesus shows up at your front door.

We see the difference in the two women almost immediately. The same commentary says, “Mary is depicted as one who has begun the journey of discipleship by acknowledging through her posture her submissiveness to Jesus and by ‘listening’ to his word. Martha’s ‘doing,’ on the other hand, is censured, rooted as it is in her anxiety as a host rather than in dispositions transformed by an encounter with the word.”2

So when the two butt heads, or rather, when Martha boldly and bluntly makes her opinion known about her sister, you can easily feel the tension between approaches. Martha feels like Mary is lazy; Mary feels like Martha is high-strung, or at least can surmise that from the way Jesus responds.

And oh how he responds. You can almost feel the disarming tone as you read his words, as he comforts Martha’s anxiety while correcting her at the same time. He doesn’t say serving is wrong, or the wrong thing to do in this moment; he confronts her anxiety and fretting.

So serving isn’t wrong; it’s serving with the wrong heart posture. Making things happen isn’t wrong; it’s doing so with the wrong motivation. Colloquially speaking, driving a car with the wrong fuel in the tank will always lead you to disaster.

Schreiner makes an important observation: “Serving is good and necessary, but Martha has lost the truth that all service must flow out of one’s relationship with the Lord, that all service must be rooted in the joy of knowing God as one’s treasure and one’s pleasure.”3

When we “listen” and submit, we say with our hearts, minds, and lives that we don’t have the full picture. That there’s something we’re missing that’s necessary for us to comprehend what God is doing and how we fit into His plan.

When we “do” and try to strong-arm others, including God, into making things happen according to our plan, we say with our hearts, minds, and lives that others don’t have the full picture as we do. That our page is the right page, and our idea of how things operate is the only way.

Do you see how terrible a mode of operation it is to try and take the reins from God, especially when we see it in light of this passage?

Where my control manifests most is in the way my personality employs service. I am naturally inclined to hop in to help people, to stop what I’m doing and give up my preferences. I raise my hand and volunteer to do anything and everything I can.

But not always in a noble, humble way.

I end up inadvertently keeping a ledger. “I did this for you, so you owe me.” I want people to do things for me in response, so I have to get the first word in by making the first move.

Schreiner’s concluding words in response to the passage perfectly sum up where the idol of control takes me:

Ironically, serving others can become a means by which we exercise our selfish will. We can validate our existence and feel better about ourselves because of how much we do for the sake of others. In other words, our service can cease to be nurtured by a relationship with God, who is the “fountain of living waters” (Jer. 2:13). We can become so distracted with what we do that we forget who we are and neglect our relationship with the living God!4

Wherever this lands for you, I hope you ask yourself the question: am I trying in any way to control others? Or maybe even God?

I hope this also serves as a reminder that people aren’t pawns in a chess game. You don’t have to force people to do things for you; you can just ask them and be honest if you need help.

I’m a work in progress when it comes to giving up control. I know that much of how sin rears its ugly head in my life is through my need and desire to manipulate circumstances and situations.

And it’s in that acknowledgment that I’m able to examine my thoughts and actions and engage in surrender. I’m able to take it to God and say, “I want to make things happen my way, but I know that’s not right and I don’t know how to not do this. So God, this is yours.”

The only thing you can truly control is how you respond: to God, to others, to what’s going on right in front of you. And how much better is it to respond the way Mary did, with submission, receiving, and focus, than the way Martha did, with anxiety, manipulation, and worry.

I hope this hit home for you as much as it did for me while I wrote it. If you found any wisdom, insight, or comfort here, please consider subscribing to get more Bible-centered content that touches on real things sent to your email inbox each Monday.

Subscribe now

A few Sundays ago, our pastor closed out a summer series on Hebrews 11 with Hebrews 12:1-2. As part of an illustration, he went for a run before church and hated it. But he didn’t stop because he was physically tired.

He explained that running (and exercise in general) is a mental game. It turns from “I can do this” to “Can I do this?” to “I can’t do this,” often within minutes and over and over again. I felt way too seen in that moment because I go through this roller coaster every day when I’m at the end of a set of reps during MTNTough. Ten seconds into a marching wall sit, 80 to go. I can. Can I? I can’t.

The coach on the screen starts the timer, and my desire for comfort kicks in. I don’t want to shake. I don’t want my quads to burn. I don’t want to sing the alphabet backward to get through it. I just want to be done.

All this to say, the race Hebrews 12:1-2 talks about, metaphorically speaking, is a mental challenge. Two verses give you a finish line and something to fix your eyes on. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you what to do when your eyes are fine and you still want to stop.

The next verse, Hebrews 12:3, speaks directly to this analogy, but in a much deeper way. It names the danger in that the fear is not that we’ll slow down:

³ For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won’t grow weary and give up.

A literal rendering of the Greek reads, “in order that you might not become weary in your souls giving up.” The phrase “in your souls” sits between the two verbs, and Cockerill argues that it qualifies both the exhaustion and quitting alike: “The race is not lost in the legs, but in the runner’s inmost being.”1 Read that quote again. English can’t hold both at once. A translator has to pick a side of the phrase at the expense of the other. But the preacher put it in the middle on purpose.

It’s worth sitting with this idea, because calling this a letter is a misnomer. Its author calls it a “word of exhortation” (13:22), and most scholars read it as a sermon intended to be read aloud rather than as a letter to be sent.2 You’re overhearing a man trying to keep people from walking away.

So the better question is what is he doing to people who are about to quit?

Two verses later, the pastor quotes Proverbs 3:11:

⁵ And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons:

My son, do not take the Lord’s discipline lightly or lose heart when you are reproved by him, ⁶ for the Lord disciplines the one he loves and punishes every son he receives.

The quotation reads like a proof text for the point he’s building to. It’s doing more than that. The Greek word behind “lose heart” in verse 5 is the same word behind “give up” in verse 3. Two different English renderings, one word, two verses apart.

And the borrowing runs backward. Cockerill argues that the preacher chose the word in verse 3 in anticipation of the Proverbs text he was about to quote.3 He set the echo up like a softball pitch. The word was already waiting in verse 3 for a verse that hadn’t arrived yet.

Two verses apart is close enough to here. This preacher works that way throughout his sermon. He alliterates, plays on phonetically similar words, repeats key terms like a drumbeat, and marks his sections by echoing a word at the start and the end.4 He wrote for the ear, to be heard with all the same devices you employ during a presentation or a speech.

This seam is invisible in English; that’s why nobody typically preaches it.

And it means he didn’t change the subject at verse 4.

Verse 3 already told you what to do about the weariness: consider him.

The verb is stronger than it looks. Cockerill calls it a command that asks for arrival rather than effort.5 Arrival, meaning to come to the full realization of who he is. Mohler puts it plainly: hold Christ up as the model and keep looking.6

That’s the first answer, and it’s the one that gets preached.

Here’s the second. The hostility that verse 3 attributes to sinners, verse 5 calls the Lord’s discipline. Same pressure, two descriptions, two verses apart.

Be careful with the word. The Greek paideía covers training, instruction, guidance, reproof, correction, and punishment, all in one term.7 Talk about semantic range! Croy argues the discipline here is entirely non-punitive. Schreiner thinks that goes too far and washes out any reference to discipline for sin.8 This means we should read it as primarily formative without making it exclusively so.

What the preacher does with it is the part worth slowing down for. He tells them what the hostility is doing to them. God is dealing with you as sons (v. 7). Cockerill reads this as God’s use of opposition to strengthen his sons and daughters in obedience, and he’s careful to distinguish it from punishment for sin Christ has already cleansed.9 Lane presses further into this, though: sharing God’s holiness isn’t available apart from that correction.10

Then verse 4, which keeps the whole passage honest: you haven’t yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. Oof. It’s a rebuke, and an oddly gentle one. Their persecution was real, but it hadn’t turned lethal like the ones at the end of Hebrews 11.11 He tells them their suffering is smaller than it feels and more meaningful than they know, all in one sentence.

Some of you aren’t worn down by your sin or what’s happening to you. You’re worn down by obedience, by the honest effort of trying to do all the right things, and that’s even harder to say out loud.

You keep showing up in a friendship that takes more than it gives. You keep your integrity intact, sometimes by telling the truth when lying would be easier, sometimes by choosing to be alone and avoiding places of temptation rather than giving in, showing up, and getting yourself in trouble. You pay your bills, taxes, and debts, even when people who don’t do so get the same results.

And you’ve done the math. The math won’t leave you alone. Obedience costs; it keeps costing, and the receipts don’t ever come.

Mohler names the connection Hebrews is already making. The pull to avoid the cost of following Jesus and the pull to give in to sin are the same pull.12 That’s how the preacher moves from hostility to discipline without skipping a beat. He’s describing one exhaustion from two angles.

This means that your tiredness is evidence of something. Verse 8 is blunt about it. The absence of discipline is what’s truly alarming. If nothing about following Jesus has cost you anything, that’s the sentence to sit with, since it likely means you’re not really following him.

So what would change if you read the thing you’re most tired of as the place where you’re being treated like a son?

The preacher ends on a strange note.

The weariness he named in verse 3 was in the soul. The remedy he gives in verse 12 is physical.

¹² Therefore, strengthen your tired hands and weakened knees…

Cockerill hears a boxer in it, hands dropped, knees buckling, and the instruction is to get the hands back up.13

Then he quotes Proverbs one last time:

¹³ [A]nd make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed instead.

And he changes it. In Proverbs, it’s a father talking to one son, but here the preacher makes it plural.14

He’d left the first Proverbs quotation alone. Verse 5 is still my son, singular, speaking to the one exhausted person about why it hurts. But the walking he hands to the room.

The preacher makes it the responsibility of the congregation, and that’s the picture of grace a church living on mission for the gospel should paint. You may deal with the exhaustion and weariness that come with your obedience, but in God’s economy, we all support one another in doing the right thing and urge each other to do so (Heb. 10:24-25).

Your legs were never the problem. They’re just the part everyone else can see.

Theologetics is free and stays free. If you want to support the work, founding membership is $5 a month or $50 a year. Members get The Monthly, a longer piece that doesn’t go out to the main list, plus the archive of this year’s best writing sorted by topic instead of by date.

Subscribe now

I’d like to hear from you in the comments. What’s the obedience you’re most tired of right now? Not the hardship. The obedience.

Because it’s so difficult, when I think about vulnerability, I have trouble pinpointing one pivotal moment that stands out among the rest as the pinnacle of avoiding being truly known. Yet, among the catalog of moments, I keep circling around the time when I thought I had tricked a therapist into thinking I was okay.

When my dad died, I wasn’t really sure how or if I was going to recover. I was in 6th grade, and talking about real things like grief and loss at that age is almost unheard of, and even something that most middle schoolers don’t know how to do in the first place. My mom made me go to counseling to try and talk it out and work through the pain, but I had other plans once I stepped into those sessions.

I remember it got to the point where I even had to switch therapists, because what the first one was telling my mom about how I was doing obviously didn’t match up to what she was seeing. I was so closed off to telling anyone about the hurt that I let it lock the door to getting over it.

I told them what I wanted them to know, and that’s it. No recounting what the last conversation I had with my dad was. No processing the downright torturous words that someone told me a few weeks after it happened, that he wished I had gone with him. None of that. I instead talked about going to a baseball game, or going to church, or something so inconsequential that I don’t even remember it.

And you’ve done the same thing too, even if it wasn’t sitting on a couch in a therapist’s office.

Think about the last time you actually answered honestly when someone asked, “How are you doing?” and they genuinely wanted to know.

Maybe your friends only know so much about you because you’re afraid that they won’t be okay with the real “you,” with all of the baggage.

What about in your church small group, when you chose to tell the sanitized version of the deep struggles you’re facing to a community that’s designed to help you get through all parts of life?

If we’re to understand why we feel this way, why we make hedging decisions to protect ourselves, we have to go back to the very beginning, to territory that feels so familiar yet rushed through. The Garden of Eden holds so many keys to unlocking and explaining the way things are, all packed into 3 rather short chapters. Where we want to see the moment everything changed is what we skip over to get to the exciting part. At the end of chapter 2, we read this phrase:

²⁵ Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.

The state Adam and Eve find themselves in is incredibly important; “naked and unashamed” aren’t merely descriptors to pass over but a deliberate setup for what breaks in the following passage. This is anticipatory of the shame found a little bit later in 3:71, and it “[links] the foregoing narrative of creation to the subsequent narrative of human sin.”2

In only a few words, we get the ideal state that we’re about to lose right before it gets snatched from us. We feel relief as we think about what it means to be known, without having to go through the process of opening up, only for us to learn a few sentences later that it’s about to be lost.

As the next chapter opens, the intentional use of “cunning” or “crafty” (depending on what version you read) is there to juxtapose and undercut the first couple’s “naked” state.

^1a Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made…

In our English translations, we don’t get the full weight of how the Hebrew structures the contrasting ideas; the words for naked (ʿărûmmîm) and crafty (ʿārûm) share the same consonant and paint a picture of just how inverted the two are. To put it plainly: the serpent’s craftiness is the narrative’s exact inversion of the couple’s transparency — hiding intent versus having nothing to hide.3 Crafty, cunning ways like the serpent’s operate with an ulterior motive, for the sole purpose of controlling the narrative we want to portray. We now have the reflex to conceal ourselves rather than live with the capacity to be exposed.

Just how deceitful the serpent is shows up in the first sentence he speaks to Eve:

^1c …“Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. ³ But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’

He introduces a moment of doubt, making the woman rethink whether what he asked really was, in fact, what she heard God say. It leads to deception:

⁴ “No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The same deception here is what we experience when we’re faced with the choice to open up or shut down. And, when we close ourselves off in a way that turns us away from God’s original plan, it leads to disobedience in the same way Eve chose, as the story continues:

⁶ The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

We so wish that when we turn away from what God intended, things will be okay. That no one will experience any negative consequence, or that we’ll just feel better about ourselves as a result. But, how often do we instead turn from a healthy way of being known to an unhealthy outcome that leaves us disgusted, making the choice to

^7a Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked

The sin they committed brought “shame and conflict rather than status and power,”4 where the shame they experienced brought “disgust over having disobeyed.”5

^7b [S]o they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

And so this section ends in a destruction of God’s original design. They covered themselves as an attempt at control, managing the results instead of dealing with the cause.6 They felt exposed and like they needed to make a “desperate attempt to regain the safety”7 that they lost, the feeling they had before shame showed up.

As if feeling shame for the first time wasn’t enough, the One they disobeyed comes into view. God does something so unimaginable by human standards, knowing that the pair had sinned already: He asked a question.

⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

¹⁰ And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”

Notice that what God does isn’t asking for Adam to tell Him where they were because God didn’t know. God, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present Person He is, already knew that Adam and Eve disobeyed Him. Like when your parents already knew you broke the lamp, but still asked, “Who did this?”

If we knew that someone had transgressed against us, how we would confront that person would be very different from what we read here. We’d approach in anger, bust down a door, and seek immediate vengeance. Take action first, ask questions later. Yet God’s appearance here is presence-seeking rather than punitive.8 He “gently invites the man to reveal himself”,9 showing how much more relationship means in this exact moment than justice; yet justice and punishment do come a few verses later.

The relationship between God and man, as we know from the following scene, was broken. Yet, that wasn’t the only relationship broken. We see here that the horizontal, spouse-to-spouse relationship was severed too. The eye-opening the pair experienced was all-encompassing, leaving nothing to hide from anyone at all and a need to conceal from everyone and everything.

We don’t talk about this enough. Adam and Eve didn’t just hide from God—they started hiding from each other too. When you hold back and share only a safe version of yourself, you’re protecting something you learned to hide long ago.

Ask yourself what you’re really protecting. Be specific, and don’t hold back. Think about the answer you’ve practiced so you never have to say the real thing. The version of your struggle that’s just true enough, but still controlled. It’s time to stop telling yourself that’s humility. What you’re actually doing is sewing together your own version of fig leaves.

Think about your Wednesday night group, a place meant for people to know and be known. Maybe it feels hard to be open there, not because of the room, but because you’re testing if it’s safe—just like Adam wondered if God’s question was a threat. He assumed the worst and hid. You might be doing the same with people who haven’t given you a reason to doubt them.

Here’s where the text keeps going. John, thousands of years later, picks up the same vocabulary the author of Genesis used when he wrote about the garden and gives it back to us as an answer rather than a diagnosis:

⁷ But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say, “We have no sin,” we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Look at that phrase again: fellowship with one another. It’s not just about you and God—a faith that’s only about “Jesus and me” is weak. Both our relationship with God and with others are restored in the same verse. Confession and vulnerability, our modern version of being “naked,” are the only real coverings that work. Fig leaves never could.

You can’t get back to being naked and unashamed by pretending everything is fine. You get there by doing what Adam and Eve should have done—staying in the garden and facing the questions, not running away.

There’s a sixth grader in a therapist’s office in all of us somewhere, still giving the practiced answer instead of the real one. Still choosing what others are allowed to know about the day everything changed.

We weren’t made to be that lonely. We were created to be naked and unashamed, and we’re being remade into people who can be truly known again. Not just by a therapist or a small group we filter ourselves for, but by each other, fully, like it was before there was anything to hide.

That’s what the church looks like at its best—a place where the question is asked, and finally, someone tells the truth.

This is part of The Whole Story — walking Scripture’s arc one text at a time. Last week: “Betrayed on Purpose” (Mark 14–16, Acts 4). This week continues the thread from rupture into hiding, the instinct underneath the betrayal.

If this is the kind of theology you want in your inbox every Monday, you subscribe for free below. You’ll get one essay/piece a week, at the beginning of the week, for you to digest and apply throughout the rest of week.

Subscribe now

Do you know someone who’d rather manage what people see of them than risk being known? Send them this article, and simply ask them, “What do you think about this?” Curiosity, not judgment.

Share

If you’ve been impacted by my writing, one deeper way to support me is by becoming a Founding Member. For $5/mo or $50/yr, you get one extra article per month, plus access to the Founding Archive that helps you see the scarlet thread in my writing better.

You can click the button below to manage/upgrade your current subscription:

Upgrade my subscription

In seminary, I got the assignment (or opportunity, depending how you look at it) to trace a theme verse-by-verse through the Gospel of Mark. I walked away with more than a grade.

Mark 14–16 can feel like old hat if you’re not careful. We know this story cold: the anointing, the betrayal, the denial, the arrest, the crucifixion, the resurrection. The temptation is to spend your energy comparing how the other three gospels tell it, instead of asking why Mark tells it the way he does. I gave into that temptation more than I’d like to admit, even in this paper.

Then something caught me off guard in the final research pass. Everyone in these chapters acts entirely on their own, and Mark keeps insisting, in the same breath, that none of it could have gone any other way, especially with guys like Judas and Peter. The tension is easy to miss unless you slow down.

Both, All the Way

Mark doesn’t offer us a softened version of Judas.

Judas goes to the chief priests. He looks for the right opportunity. He accepts money for a man he’s shared a hundred meals with. When the moment comes, he uses a kiss to mark the target for the men holding swords. Every verb in that sequence belongs to Judas.

Mark doesn’t soften what Jesus says about it either: “The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him” (Mark 14:21, CSB). The betrayal isn’t a wrench thrown into the plan; it’s already inside the plan. William Lane notices something easy to miss here, saying there’s “no vindictiveness” in the woe Jesus pronounces over Judas, because setting the betrayal inside God’s design and holding Judas fully responsible for it are the same move for Mark. Hans Bayer reaches the identical place from an entirely different commentary set: Judas is caught up in a plan he didn’t write, and he’s still fully guilty for what he chose to do inside it.

Take the sovereignty side, and Judas starts to look like a tool, a man who couldn’t have done otherwise, and the woe loses its force. It becomes determinism with a flat story arc. Take the responsibility side, and “as it is written” turns into a pious flourish sitting on top of one man’s greed, and the necessity of the cross fades out of view. Mark hands you both pieces in one breath and moves to the next scene like it isn’t a problem to be managed.

It would be, if Judas were the only one. Peter, the Sanhedrin, and Pilate all know the same tension, even if none of them would call it that.

Peter denies three times, the third with a curse, to a servant girl who never raises her voice. Nobody made him.

The Sanhedrin hunts for testimony, can’t find two witnesses who agree, and convicts anyway. Nobody made them either.

Pilate knows Jesus is innocent and hands him over to keep a crowd quiet. Nobody made him either.

Every one of these people does exactly the kind of thing that makes a person guilty, and every one of them, in the same two chapters, is walking a road Mark keeps telling you was already written before any of them set foot on it.

The Prayer That Got There First

A few weeks later, in the same city, part of it happens again: an arrest, a hearing in front of some of the same men, this time ending in a threat instead of a cross. The religious elite let Peter and John go, and the two find their own people and pray. What they pray is the earliest recorded reading of what had just happened to Jesus, and it doesn’t hold anything back.

They quote Psalm 2, then name names: “in this city both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, assembled together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your will had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27–28, CSB).

Herod. Pilate. The soldiers. The Sanhedrin. Everyone who touched Jesus’s death across the last two chapters of Mark gets folded into one sentence, and the sentence doesn’t let a single one of them off. It calls what they did assembling together against him. It calls the same thing the fulfillment of what God’s hand and will had already determined.

Watch where Luke puts “whom you anointed.” It isn’t tacked on afterward to reassure you it all worked out fine. It’s wedged into the middle of the conspiracy clause, in the same breath as the plotting. Patrick Schreiner names the irony directly: “he was anointed through opposition.” Not despite it. It’s the same reversal Joseph names to his brothers generations earlier: what you meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20).

Then the prayer stacks language on top of itself. Hand. Will. Plan. Three separate words for the same reality, because the church wasn’t satisfied saying it once. This isn’t a theologian centuries later smoothing over a hard text. This is the eyewitnesses, weeks out, reading the arrest and the trial and the cross exactly the way Mark had already narrated them: freely chosen, fully guilty, fully inside the plan.

Every Hand a Real Hand

Now, go back through Mark 14 and 15 with that prayer fresh in your mind, and the whole account reads differently.

The Sanhedrin can't find two witnesses who agree and convicts anyway. That's on them. It's also the same council Acts 4 names as gathered against God's anointed.

Pilate finds no basis for a charge and hands Jesus over regardless, choosing a crowd's approval over what he already knows to be true. That's on him. He's also "Pontius Pilate," named in that prayer as an instrument of a plan drawn up before he was born.

Even Barabbas fits tighter than it first looks. A guilty man walks. An innocent man is condemned in his place. Nobody in that crowd is coerced into choosing it. And Mark has already told you what Jesus said as the arresting party closed in around him in the garden: "the Scriptures must be fulfilled" (Mark 14:49, CSB). Not "let's see what happens." He names it before it happens, the way the psalmists had already named it centuries before either of them opened their mouths.

That's the shape of the whole account once you're looking for it. Every hand in this story is a real hand, doing exactly what it wants to do. Judas still has to walk to the chief priests. Peter still has to open his mouth and lie. The soldiers still have to reach for the purple cloak and the crown of thorns on their own initiative, mocking a king they have no reason yet to believe in.

And every one of those hands is also doing, in the same act, what "[God’s] hand and will had predestined to take place."

The early church didn't resolve that by picking a side. They prayed it, three weeks out, with their own arrest still fresh, looking straight at the same men who'd just done it to Jesus. Anointed through opposition. Betrayed on purpose.

Now Point It at Yourself

But we’re not the early church. We live in the 21st century. And I’m sure at this point you’re thinking something along the lines of, “Yeah, that’s all well and good for those who knew Jesus personally and in the flesh. But what about my situation, where I got so terribly hurt?”

And that’s totally fair, because I have that thought too.

You don’t have to look much further than the modern church and the headlines around it: sex scandals, power trips, abusive tendencies, control issues, cover-ups. People hurt people deeply, and we can get so lost in the aftermath of the pain that we lose sight of God.

So the real question to investigate here is: Can you believe God was sovereign over what happened to you without believing it was somehow okay?

Both are true, and neither one cancels the other out. That’s the same grammar Acts 4 already gave you: “whom you anointed” sitting inside “assembled together against him,” guilt and sovereignty side by side, nothing softened out of either one. Now point it at yourself instead of at Pilate.

You weren’t built to be a robot. You weren’t built to run the universe either. What happened to you sits somewhere between those two, and it’s not a comfortable place to stand still in. The choice someone made against you was real. Free. Fully theirs to answer for. And none of it ever sat outside what God’s hand and will had already set in motion. Both. At the same time. Not half of each.

How you answer that shapes what you do with the pain next. Not “what is God trying to teach me.” That question can wait, and it isn’t the one underneath this. The question underneath it is simpler and harder to sit with: was God even there?

Judas didn’t get a pass because it was written. Peter didn’t get one either. Neither does whoever hurt you. What you do with that, whether you can hold both halves without letting go of either one, isn’t something I can answer for you.

It Kept Going

Chapters 14 and 15 alone would leave the failures with the last word. Judas dead by his own hand. Peter weeping in a courtyard. Eleven men scattered into the dark before Friday’s over. If Mark had stopped there, the whole account would be a story about what people do to each other and what it costs.

He didn’t stop there. The same hand that gets named in Acts 4, the one that held Herod and Pilate and the Sanhedrin without releasing any of them from what they’d done, rolls a stone away three days later. Sin doesn’t get the last word. Neither does the kiss, or the curse, or the running.

And when the church has a few weeks to sit with all of it, watch what they don’t pray. They don’t ask God to undo what was done to Jesus. Standing in the same room where they’ve just been threatened, they don’t ask him to undo what’s about to be done to them either. Luke records the prayer, and there’s no request in it to reverse anything. They ask for boldness instead: to keep saying the same true things, louder, in the same city, in front of the same men who’d have them silent.

That’s the whole shape of it, cross to commission. Whatever hand and will and plan held Judas fully guilty while working through him anyway didn’t stop at the tomb. It kept going. Into a locked room. Into two ordinary men who should have been afraid and asked for nerve instead.

Going from Montana to Georgia for a concert might sound like a lot, especially since the tour also stops in Denver and Salt Lake. But we wanted to skip the Ticketmaster headaches, and Atlanta is special to both of us. We each lived there years ago, before we met. I also grew up as a Braves fan, watching games for 30 years and sticking with them through everything. I’d been to Turner Field, but never to Truist Park.

We also got lucky because a Braves staff member we know gave us floor wristbands.

When Noah started the first song, we stood in right field, on the same grass where Acuña plays. You could feel the excitement in the air. I’ll admit, I sang along to almost every word.

Then he played “The View Between Villages.”

That song meant something new to me on my birthday in 2025. I was back in Virginia, the town I left what feels like ages ago. I had just lost my father-in-law, and my in-laws’ house was about 45 minutes from my mom’s, where I spent 20 years growing up. Driving back from lunch on the interstate, the lyrics hit me:

“A minute from home, but I’m so far from it.”

And

“The things that I lost here, the people I knew

They got me surrounded for a mile or two”

Nothing in Hampton Roads would ever be the same again. Not the roads, not those two houses.

During “All My Love,” I noticed something.

This was a worship service. I was part of it, singing the chorus back to the man on stage in a sold-out stadium.

When I stopped singing for a moment and listened to the crowd, I felt grieved that I was complicit, knowing I was part of it. Still, I kept singing, and I loved every second.

The Man Who Keeps Telling Us He’s Ordinary

You’ve probably been somewhere like that, even if you’ve never been to a stadium show. Maybe it was in a gym at a youth conference, a bar at last call when the right song played, or a funeral where the singing took over. There’s a moment when a crowd stops consuming something and starts submitting to it, and you can feel the change before you can explain it.

What makes last week’s concert hard to describe is that the man on stage has spent three years trying to avoid this exact thing.

Kahan started The Busyhead Project in 2023, named after his first album, and it has raised more than $6.6 million for roughly 170 community mental health organizations. In April, he released a documentary on Netflix called Out of Body, and it is not a victory lap — Brian Tallerico’s review at RogerEbert.com called it “not a typical hagiographic music doc.”1 He talks about depression, body dysmorphia, and about a mirror that reports back a man nobody else can see. You can see the guilt as he talks about mining his own family’s worst years for material.

He isn’t trying to make himself a hero. Instead, he’s been honest about how hard it is to be put on a pedestal.

So I can’t write the easy version of this essay. I can’t claim a famous person was exposed as a false prophet, because for three years he’s told us he’s just a guy from Strafford, Vermont, with his own struggles and a good band. He’s said it in interviews, liner notes, and a 95-minute film. He’s been as clear as anyone could be.

We just kept singing.

What stood out even more was that Gigi Perez opened for him that night. Before her set ended, she talked about how Noah’s music helped her through a tough time when she needed something to hold onto. She said his songs got her through dark days and helped her keep going. Now, opening for him felt surreal, and her words touched the audience.

I learned something later that I’m not sure the rest of the crowd knew. Perez grew up in church. Her older sister Celene died in 2020 at age twenty-two, and Perez has said her grief, her faith, and her religion are all mixed together in a way she can’t separate. Her breakout song is about that struggle. It includes a line that made some conservative Christians online ask her to change it, but she refused, saying songwriting isn’t a democracy.

I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior

Read it again and notice what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t get rid of the position of a savior. It fills it.

That’s the part I keep thinking about. Everyone at Truist Park would have said they came for a concert. But forty thousand of us stood in the humid air for two hours, arms raised, singing about being unwell to a man who wrote those words because he was unwell. It felt like all that energy was going somewhere.

There’s a scene in Acts where this exact thing happens, and the two men at the center of it tear their clothes trying to stop it.

Two Men Who Tore Their Clothes

Sometime in the late 40s A.D., in a hill town in what’s now south-central Turkey, Paul healed a man who had never walked. The crowd erupted. And because they erupted in Lycaonian, Paul and Barnabas had no idea what was happening.

Luke mentions the language for a reason; if a group was freaking out on you in a foreign language, it’d be a pretty important detail to you. The two men at the center of this religious event couldn’t understand what was happening around them. Because of the local language, plans to honor them as gods went much further before either apostle realized it.2 By the time they figured out what was going on, the priest of Zeus was already at the gates with oxen and garlands.

The Lystrans weren’t being stupid, which is an easy conclusion to reach. Their region carried a story: Zeus and Hermes had passed through once before, disguised, looking for a bed, and the one couple who took them in got a temple out of it while the neighbors who turned them away got a flood.3 Lystra had a cultural memory of a divine visitation that almost everybody missed, and of what happened to the ones who missed it. When archaeologists dug near Lystra in 1926, they found a stone altar dedicated jointly to Zeus and to Hermes.4 The infrastructure was already poured. The crowd wasn’t inventing a category that day, but instead living in one they had already that hadn’t been filled with anything in a long time.

I keep coming back to one way of reading this scene. The Lystrans didn’t lack information. God was revealing himself right in front of them. But they filtered that experience through a way of thinking that couldn’t accept it. Johnson calls this a functional theology.5 Theirs worked perfectly, but it just wasn’t based on anything true.

Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes. In Scripture, that gesture either signals grief, or it signals that you’ve just heard blasphemy. Here, it does both at once. Then they do something stranger than protesting. They run into the crowd, toward the people trying to worship them. “We are people also, just like you,” Paul says (Acts 14:15, CSB).

What Paul and Barnabas say next changes how we see the whole scene. They don’t just refuse the worship; they redirect it. They point to rain from heaven, fruitful seasons, food, and joyful hearts (14:17). God had been showing himself in their weather and meals all along. Paul never says their longing was false. He says it was aimed at the wrong place.

Then, a handful of verses later, the same crowd stones him. Huh?

Luke says outsiders, men from Antioch and Iconium, came and turned the crowd against Paul (14:19). That’s part of the story. But some believe there’s more to it. The Lystrans felt embarrassed, and people who feel foolish often turn angry.6 That’s just a guess, but I think it fits.

Either way, the sequence stands as written. The men who refused to be gods were dragged out of town and left for dead by the same people who had wanted to sacrifice to them, and Paul carried the scars for the rest of his life (2 Cor 11:25; Gal 6:17). Garlands, then stones.

The Other Man

Two chapters earlier, Luke shows us the alternative.

Herod Agrippa puts on his robes, takes his seat, and gives a speech. The crowd shouts that this is the voice of a god and not of a man (Acts 12:22). The historian Josephus supplies the detail that the robes were silver and caught the morning sun.7 Herod says nothing. And then he is struck down, because, Luke tells us, he did not give the glory to God (12:23).

The worms have turned this into a Sunday school horror story, which is a shame, because the Greek may be saying something quieter and even more unsettling. In commenting on this passage, Jame Hamilton notes the phrase can be read as saying Herod died and became food for worms, just like every mortal does, and that the ESV’s connective is a defensible interpretive addition rather than a certainty.8 Either reading works for us. The man a crowd called a god turned out to be just as mortal as everyone else.

Hamilton also flags that the contrast with Lystra is impossible to miss, and he’s right.9 Two men handed divinity, and two answers. Herod accepted it, and it killed him. Paul and Barnabas refused it, and the crowd tried to kill them. Nobody in this story survives being worshipped.

Reading Truist Park Through Lystra

This is where Redemptive Correlation comes in, and the direction matters more than anything else in this essay. I’m not asking what a sold-out stadium can teach us about worship. I’m asking what Scripture says a sold-out stadium is. Bonhoeffer put it in one sentence: theological thought moves from God to reality, not from reality to God.10 Lystra isn’t just an example I used to explain Monday night. Lystra is the diagnosis. Monday night is the case.

Creation. The capacity that filled Truist Park isn’t a mistake. Humans are made to aim at something. The Lystran instinct to fall down in front of something that healed a man was the right instinct, just running on the wrong information. Worship is built into every person and culture. It’s standard equipment, and it doesn’t turn off when belief does.

Fall. Paul says we traded the truth of God for a lie and worshipped what was made instead of the one who made it (Rom 1:25). The action never changes, but the object does. Last week I wrote about a nation making that swap with a flag. On Monday I did it with a setlist. The Fall gave us a world where people worship each other, which is how a guy from Strafford, Vermont, who made a documentary about his own body dysmorphia, ends up carrying 40,000 people’s need to be saved without ever asking for it.

Redemption. Every rumor in Lystra was really about one thing: gods coming down looking like people. They had the shape and hints of the gospel, but none of its content. Then someone actually came down, and the details matter. Jesus accepts worship because he is God, and he never tore his clothes when someone fell at his feet. What he refused was the crowd’s version of the crown. When they tried to make him king by force, he left (John 6:15). When they finally crowned him, they used thorns. He is the only one who can take in what that stadium was doing and not be crushed by it.

Restoration. At the very end of the Bible, John falls down at an angel’s feet and is told to get up and worship God instead (Rev 22:8–9). John. In the last chapter. Still getting it wrong. Still being corrected. The sorting isn’t finished, and it was never ours to finish. The end of the story is a room louder than any stadium, focused on the one voice that can hold it, and not one person in that room is being overwhelmed by the singing.

Name Your Room

You weren’t in right field on Monday. But you can name your room.

Not the obvious one. You already know to be wary of stadiums. I’m asking about the voice you’ve quietly given the final word: the podcast that got you through your hardest year, the author whose books you’d defend faster than your own pastor, the counselor who said the one thing that changed you, the man on the platform in your own church on Sunday morning.

The test isn’t whether you worship them, because nobody would say yes to that. The real test is what you feel when someone criticizes them. If the critique hits you before you even think about what you believe, you’ve found the altar. You built it. You know exactly where it is.

And you’re on the receiving end of this too. Someone has quietly put more on you than you can handle: a kid, a younger believer, someone in your small group who thinks you have it all figured out. You know they’ve done it, but you’ve never corrected them. Herod didn’t correct anyone either.

Read the charge against him again. He didn’t claim to be divine. He just accepted it in silence, and Luke says he didn’t give God the glory. His sin wasn’t what he said. It was the silence where he should have spoken up.

The correction, when it comes, isn’t about looking down on the venue. Paul never told the Lystrans their hunger was embarrassing. Instead, he told them it was aimed in the wrong direction, and then he pointed to rain, harvests, and full stomachs—the evidence that had been in front of them all along. You can do that. It’s slower than just giving an opinion, and it costs a lot more.

And it will make you look like Paul did: a grown man tearing his own clothes in public while everyone else is just having a good time.

That’s what made me pause in right field. I didn’t want to ruin the night. I’d waited months for that show, and I wasn’t going to be the guy who turned to his wife in the middle of “All My Love” and said, do you hear what this is.

So I sang. I loved it. And I didn’t say a word.

You’ll find yourself in a moment like that before the month is over. You’ll feel it. The only question is whether you’ll say something out loud, or do what I did.

What We’re Practicing On

Nothing was wrong with Truist Park.

Forty thousand people stood in the heat on a Monday night and gave something their full attention. They sang about depression, divorce, and small towns without hesitation, and they did it next to strangers. They knew every word. They wept in front of people they’d never met. That’s not a culture that forgot how to worship, but one that never stopped, doing it beautifully, for a man who has been saying for three years that he can’t carry it.

The Lystrans were half right. Something worth falling down for really had shown up. They just couldn’t tell the messenger from the message, and Paul cared enough to tear his clothes over it.

So the church’s job in a moment like this isn’t to look down on stadiums. We’d only be looking down on ourselves; I have the ticket stub. Our job is to be the room where all of that energy is aimed in the right direction, and where the aiming doesn’t harm anyone in it.

That’s what the singing was for. Not performance, not preference, not the thing we argue about at members’ meetings. A congregation with its whole self lifted up, focused on the only one who can take it all in and not be crushed. We have what every stadium is reaching for. We’re often bored by it.

John got it wrong in the last chapter of the Bible, and he’d seen everything. He fell at the angel’s feet and was told to get up. Even at the end, the aim needs correcting. It always will, until it finally doesn’t.

There’s a room coming that will be louder than Truist Park. Nobody in it will be sold anything. Nobody on the receiving end will buckle.11 And everyone there will have spent a lifetime practicing on smaller stages—some not so well, some in right field with their arms up and their aim off by just the width of a man.

What are you practicing on?

This is the fifth entry in Functional Gospels, a series on the salvation stories our culture actually runs on—the ones people live by, whether or not they’d ever call them that. Previous entries: The Da Vinci Code, Brené Brown, Matthew McConaughey, A God Who Asks Nothing.

This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what’s here. It works in four steps: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, find the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture’s story from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. If you reverse that, you get a stadium.

If this one connected with you, the most helpful thing you can do is send it to one person. Not share it widely. Send it to the specific person you thought of while reading.

Theologetics is free and will stay free. Founding members get The Monthly—one extra piece each month, longer and more in-depth than what’s here—plus the Phase 2 archive sorted by topic instead of by date. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year, and the rate stays the same as long as you’re a member.

Manage your subscription

My favorite teacher, who was also the baseball coach, led the club and had done so for years. He knew I was a Christian and that I had gone off to college for ministry, and he was one of my biggest cheerleaders. So whenever I came home, I’d give him a shout and see if he had space on the calendar. More often than not, he’d bump the teacher who was supposed to speak so that I could instead. He trusted me and trusted in me. That trust is why this story matters.

One week, as I was prepping, he told me the athletes needed a timely message. Work ethic and hustle were slipping across the spring programs, and he thought the best place to spark some change was with the believers on the teams. He even picked the passage: Colossians 3:23–24. The words had stayed with him: whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. When I asked why this verse, he believed it was stronger than 1 Corinthians 10:31 and wanted these students to think more seriously about how they competed.

If I’m honest, I had some doubts. I was still new to studying the Bible in depth, but I at least knew enough of the context to feel some pause. Paul wrote those words to slaves whose work brought them no reward on earth.1 He was telling them their real Master was not the person they served each day. What I knew was that the main point of the passage is that your value does not depend on whether people notice your effort, because your inheritance is grace, not wages. It’s about resting from the need for human approval and letting that fuel your work.

I understood that, but I still bent and molded the message.

I shaped my talk around integrity: always doing the right thing and working hard because it’s the right thing to do. That sounds good, and it’s even true. But it’s not what the passage actually says. I made it say that because it fit the occasion.

Like any school club meeting, it was 7 A.M. on a Friday, and the room was still asleep. The students probably didn’t hear much since they were thinking about the weekend, or just wanting to go back to bed. But if I put myself in their shoes, I think they felt like they were being lectured instead of encouraged.

I didn’t think twice about it until years later, when I read more and studied more, realizing I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. If I could talk to younger me, I’d say this: the Bible already teaches ethics. Integrity runs through all of it. There was a better and more winsome way to say what needed to be said. I didn’t need to contort the text into something it shouldn’t have been. I just needed to trust that Scripture already had what I was looking for.

I didn’t trust it, so I changed its meaning.

The Water We Swim In

This was my small mistake. But here’s the harder truth: it wasn’t just a one-time slip. It’s part of the environment we live in.

All of us come to the Bible hoping it will say what we want. We show up with our minds already made up: maybe about a belief, a complaint, a political issue, or a fear. Then we search for a verse to back it up. This, at its basest level, is what we’d call eisegesis: reading meaning into the text.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem dishonest. It feels like we’re just finding support. Our efforts can even feel like faithfulness or interpretation, especially since we’re usually aiming for something good. Work ethic is good. Life is good. Country is good. That’s why it’s so hard to notice when we do this: we’re rarely twisting Scripture toward something bad. We’re just aiming for something true, but not the truth the text was actually saying.

This goes far beyond a 7 A.M. meeting. Consider the biggest twist in American life, one so old we hardly notice it anymore: the belief that the United States is, in some important way, God’s nation. Our pastors quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 and make it mean that we’re the “people” God was telling Solomon about. We like the sound of it, so we own it and claim it.

Jon Meacham calls this idea the American gospel.2 He sees it as a good thing—a faith that, in his words, “shapes the life of the nation without strangling it,” a balanced middle ground between extremes.3 He means it as a compliment. And in some ways, he’s describing something real, even beautiful: a country where belief is part of public life, but no single church controls the state. But notice what this god is expected to do. He blesses, founds, watches over, and supports the nation. All positive, all joy, and all sunshine & rainbows. What he never does—in civil religion, at July 4th services, or with the flag by the pulpit—is judge the nation, call it to repent, or ask it to give up its own interests. This is a god with no cross, but really just Providence wrapped in Old Glory.

If this were a game of cards, then that’s the poker face breaking. It’s not just that people talk about God in public life. That in and of itself can be good. The real sign is when the god being talked about never asks for anything the group doesn’t already want.

Russell Moore, who frankly lost his denominational career for declining to bend the knee to the political powerhouse taking over his and my spiritual homeland, names the mechanism plainly: civil religions are “a kind of Great Commission in reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity.4 The Great Commission runs one direction. This civil one runs the other.

And this doesn’t just happen in public life. It shows up in how we interpret the Bible. A passage about a mother’s faith turns into a case for a political cause. A psalm about God’s people becomes a slogan about America. A verse meant to comfort the powerless is used to push teenagers to work harder. The way I twisted Scripture in that classroom and the way a nation twists its founding story are really the same mistake, just on different levels: reading the Bible through what we already want, instead of letting the Bible shape what we want.

And if that feels like a familiar line that comes up in what you read from me, good. What I’ve done with Redemptive Correlation, the spine that keeps my words and thoughts upright, fights this urge. It’s the opposite of what Scripture is meant to do.

Here’s what should make all of us uncomfortable, no matter our politics (because both sides do this). The right uses Scripture to bless the nation. The left uses it to try to cleanse the nation. One side wants a God who supports the country; the other wants a country without God. But underneath it all, both want the same thing: the authority of something higher, without the Lord who actually gives commands. Both want a god who agrees with their views. Neither wants the God who says you shall have no other gods before me—and that includes the nation.

So before we talk about what the Bible really says, we need to admit what we hoped to find in it. You can’t read Scripture honestly until you recognize the prejudice you brought with you.

I brought my own agenda into that baseball coach’s classroom. But are you willing to ask yourself: what did you bring with you to church last Sunday?

Reading the Nation Through Scripture

So let’s do what eisegesis, the act of making the Bible say something we want it to, never does. Let’s look at our nation through the lens of Scripture, instead of trying to fit Scripture into our nation’s story.

We must begin where the Bible begins, or else we’ll get ourselves confused. People are made in God’s image—not to create meaning, but to reflect it. We are meant to be mirrors, catching God’s light and sharing it with the world. Image-bearers don’t create glory; they carry it. So from the start, worship has a direction: it goes from God, through us, into the world. If you get that direction right, everything else falls into place. If you reverse it, things fall apart.

But what happens in the Fall messes that up profoundly. Fast forward to Moses when he’s receiving the Ten Commandments, and this is exactly what happens at the foot of the mountain when the leader is gone.

The people get anxious. God seems far away, the future feels uncertain, and they want a god they can see—one that goes where they want and does what they need, matching their fears. So they make one. Here’s the detail many miss: they don’t call it a new god. Aaron makes the calf and says, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD”—using God’s own name. The people look at the gold they shaped and say, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” They give credit for the real rescue—the actual exodus, done by the real God—to an idol they made themselves.5

That isn’t atheism. It’s something worse. It’s taking the true God and reshaping him into something the group prefers. Not a rival to Yahweh, but Yahweh changed to fit their wishes—a god who simply follows where they already wanted to go.

Scripture is clear about what happens when people do this. You become what you worship. If you bow to a god you made, you slowly become like it—stubborn, hard-hearted, unable to see or hear.6 A god that never challenges you creates people who can’t change. The golden calf doesn’t just break the first commandment; it reverses the deepest part of creation. Instead of reflecting God into the world, people start getting their identity from something they made. That’s how every civil religion works: a god made from the group’s own resources, credited with their own story, worshiped until they can’t tell the difference between God and themselves.

Now put that false god next to the real God, and see how quickly it falls apart.

Paul writes to the people in Philippi—a Roman colony where citizens believed Caesar was lord—and gives them a different message.7 He says the true God, “being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant … and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8).

Compare that to the golden calf, and the difference is clear. The idol is a god people grab, shape, control, and use to serve themselves. The living God does the opposite: he never stops being God, but he chooses not to grasp power and instead gives himself away.8 Civil religion is about taking. The gospel is about giving.

And here’s what the American gospel cannot digest: the true God did not bless the empire. In fact, the empire killed him — executed as a state criminal, by the death no Roman citizen could suffer. A civil religion can salute a god who founds nations. It has no idea what to do with a God the nation executed. The cross doesn’t underwrite the empire. It judges it — and then, unbelievably, offers it grace.

That’s the god with no cross, revealed. He was never the God of the Bible. He was just the golden calf, painted in red, white, and blue.

If this is what the idols say, and force us to believe when we worship them instead of the true God, what then is the case when we move forward in the true God’s kingdom, one that’s upside down and inverted away and against this earthly one?

This kingdom is not a Christian nation. It’s something bigger and stranger than any country. John describes the end of the story as a crowd “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” standing before the throne (Rev. 7:9). No flags to use to claim any ground, no party lines to draw, and every earthly loyalty gone in the light of the Lamb. This is the blessed nation the psalmist meant: not a piece of land, but a people—the covenant people, now gathered from every country, a chosen race and a holy nation with no border except the throne.9 The coming kingdom doesn’t baptize America and rubber stamp its advances. It puts all nations of all persuasions in perspective and gathers what it saves from each one.

Look at what happens to these people. Those who worshiped the calf became like it—stubborn, blind, and deaf as the metal they bowed to. Those who are redeemed also become like the one they worship: their robes are washed in the blood of the Lamb, they are led to living water, and God wipes away every tear. You become what you worship, but grace can reverse the process. If you worship a god shaped like your nation, your faith will match your nation’s desires. If you worship the Lamb who was slain, you are slowly and steadily changed into something no nation can explain—a people who can truly repent, who hold their country loosely, and whose hope was never tied to an election.

This means a Christian’s deepest identity is not with any birth certificate, passport, voting card, or bumper sticker. We are strangers and travelers here just passing through. We’re people who love their country like you love a good Airbnb on a long trip: thankful for the shelter, but we know it’s not home. That kind of citizenship is what finally separates a believer from the tribe. You can’t belong completely to a nation and completely to the Lamb. One of them has to be just a rest area for a bathroom break along the way.

So the story of the golden calf leaves us with one important question: what are you becoming?

The Tell

So here’s the real test. It’s not “are you a Christian nationalist?” We can dodge that question all day long and kick that powder keg down the road. Don’t believe me? Go find Joel Webbon and Doug Wilson.

The real test is quieter and more personal, one that exposes our real state only after we answer.

When you hear a sermon that matches your politics, and it feels like worship, that feeling is the sign.

When a sermon just confirms what you already believed, and you leave feeling comfortable instead of challenged, pay attention to that comfort. Scripture, when read honestly, does bring comfort—but it also pushes back. It tells you things you didn’t expect. If God’s word never challenges you, never costs you anything, never says what your group would reject, you might not be hearing God. You might be listening to a familiar voice and calling it the Lord.

I wish I could say I’ve moved past this, but I haven’t. I still find myself reading the news with my Bible open, looking for a verse to support the point I already want to make. That tendency never fully goes away. But you can learn to notice it—that small feeling of discomfort, the warning before you go too far—and stop. You can choose not to shape the gold before it becomes an idol.

The real question isn’t which group is right. It’s whether you would still follow Scripture if it led you away from your group. Because if you read honestly, it will do that at some point.

That’s the invitation, and it’s actually better news than it might seem.

Because the God who cannot be twisted is also the God who never lets go. He judges the nation, but not to leave it behind. He judges it like he judged the golden calf: destroying what’s fake so we can worship the real thing again. The same word that calls you out of your group is the word that gives you a better home: a people with no borders, gathered from every nation, so that no nation can claim them.

That’s the kingdom worth belonging to. Not America made holy, and not America rejected. If we’re honest, that would just be lame. Lacking. Boring. The best kingdom is a countless crowd from every nation and language, standing before the throne, worshiping the one Lord no empire could control, and no cross could defeat.

So we hold our country loosely. We’re thankful for the shelter, but always moving toward our true home. We read the Bible as people who would rather be corrected and admonished by God than comforted by something we invented.

That in and of itself is the real practice. Come to Scripture ready to be changed. Pre-decide that you need to be corrected by the God-breathed words on the page. Let it shape you before you try to use it for your own moment. And when it leads you away from the group you started with, follow it.

It’s leading somewhere bigger and better, and it always was.

This piece was written using Redemptive Correlation, the method behind most of what runs here. It works in four movements: listen to the cultural question on its own terms, distill the longing underneath it, reframe it under Scripture's arc from creation to restoration, and respond with something you can actually live. The order matters. Culture asks; Scripture answers. Reverse that, and you get what this article is about.

You’ve been reading Theologetics for free, and I’d rather you keep reading free than not read at all. That stands.

But if this piece was worth your Monday, consider becoming a founding member. It’s $5 a month, or $50 a year at a rate that stays locked as long as you keep it. You get The Monthly, one extra piece every month that runs longer and digs deeper than what I can do on a weekly cadence. This month’s is on the exile texts and what they actually ask of us. You also get the founding member archive, the best of the last six months organized by topic instead of by date, so you can read a thread instead of a feed.

Founding members are the reason I can spend eleven footnotes and five commentaries on a single article instead of writing something faster and thinner. If that’s the work you want more of, back it.

To upgrade, click the button to change your subscription level and enter your payment details.

Manage your subscription

I also remember not saying a word about the thing I was actually fighting. Not in that room. Not in any room. I was too scared to admit failure and be thought of as one.

So I built a system instead. I memorized verses, prayed harder, and would even stand up and leave the room when I felt temptation coming. When my system worked, I felt like a Christian. When it didn’t, which was most weeks, I was left with one question. I asked it alone, in the dark, again and again:

If I struggle this much, am I even saved?

It took me another decade to understand this. The book was right. Jerry Bridges wasn’t pushing willpower; he was writing about grace, about the Spirit doing what I couldn’t. But at fifteen, I was ashamed, and when you’re that age and ashamed, you don’t want grace. You want a technique. So I read a book about grace and turned it into a method, because the method was something I could control.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after seeing it happen to others: this is how orthodox theology can create kids who think it’s all about earning their way. It doesn’t happen because they’re taught the wrong things. It happens because they’re taught the right things at an age when shame drowns out every word about grace and only lets them hear the parts about striving.

Bridges wrote a book insisting that the Spirit does what we cannot. I read a manual. Same pages. Different book entirely.

Nobody in that living room did anything wrong. That’s what makes it hard to talk about. No bad doctrine to point at, no false teacher, no obvious failure. Just a room full of teenagers reading a good book about grace while at least one of us silently converted it into a performance review.

I was in my living room in Nashville, mid-twenties, still failing, when I read Matt Chandler on recovering redemption. What finally cracked it open wasn’t a better technique. It was the idea that what I was fighting had roots — that the behavior was fruit of something older and deeper than my Tuesday-night resolve, and no amount of walking out of the room was ever going to reach it.

You had a room too.

Maybe it wasn’t a student pastor’s living room. Maybe it was a small group, a men’s retreat, a Bible study where everyone shared prayer requests for someone else and nobody said the true thing. But you know the room. You know what it costs to sit in it holding something you can’t put down and won’t put out loud.

And you know what we do in those rooms. We ask for a method. Give me the plan, the accountability app, the reading schedule, the thing I can do on Tuesday that will make Wednesday different. Because a method is dignified. A method means I’m working on it. Confession means I’m losing.

The church didn’t invent this. We just baptized it.

I thought I’d left this behind in high school, that it was something high school kids do. Then I watched a man win an Academy Award and preach it to forty million people.

They took it as gospel. So did I.

McConaughey’s speech is beautiful, and that’s what makes it risky. He thanks God first and truly means it. He talks about gratitude as if he knows it saved him. Then he shares who he’s chasing: himself, ten years in the future. He says that at thirty-five, he realized he’ll never catch up to that man, and that’s the point. The hero always stays ahead, so you keep running.

Forty million people heard that and felt encouraged.

I heard my fifteen-year-old self building a system.

We were made to become

Start with what’s true in the chase, because something is.

God did not make us finished. Adam was placed in a garden with work to do — cultivate it, keep it, name what was in it. The first man was given a trajectory, not a terminus. There was somewhere to go.

So the instinct McConaughey describes isn’t a lie. The restlessness, the feeling that you’re not yet who you should be, the urge to become someone further along than the person doing the dishes right now—that’s part of how we’re made. It’s not a flaw. It’s part of our design.

That’s exactly why the counterfeit is convincing. Counterfeits aren’t made from nothing. They start with something true, just twisted.

Then the destination moved

Here’s what Genesis 3 does to the chase. The serpent’s offer was not become nothing. It was become like God — on your own terms, by your own reach, on your own timeline. The temptation was never to stop becoming. It was to become without reference to the One who made becoming possible.

Kenneth Mathews puts his finger on the sales technique: the serpent spoke only about what she would gain and said nothing about what she would lose.1 That’s the whole pitch. Not a lie exactly — her eyes really were opened, she really did come to know good and evil, exactly as promised. He just never mentioned the invoice.

And what she got was not what the brochure said. Mathews again: they became like God in one way, and what they achieved was isolation and fear.

Isolation.

Read that word and then go back to a fifteen-year-old on a living room floor, holding something he will not say out loud in any room, for years.

The serpent’s offer always delivers. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with. You do become someone. You just become someone alone.

What changed after the fall wasn’t our desire to grow, but what we aim for. The self becomes both the runner and the finish line. And if the finish line moves at your pace, it isn’t really a finish line. It’s just a treadmill that looks appealing.

McConaughey said it himself, more honestly than most preachers: his hero is always ten years away, and he’ll never catch him. He called this freedom. Think about that. A man stands on the world’s biggest stage, holding the highest honor in his field, and says the thing he’s chasing can’t be caught—and that this is good news.

That isn’t freedom. It’s like Sisyphus, just with a Texas accent.

And it is precisely what I built at fifteen, with a verse list and a plan. The system was designed so that arrival was structurally impossible. Every failure proved I needed more system. Every success proved the system worked and had to be maintained. There was no exit. If I struggle this much, am I even saved? is the only question that framework can generate, and it has no answer inside the framework.

The hero already came, and he came from behind

Romans 8:29 says God predestined those he knew ahead of time to be shaped into the image of his Son. Look at the grammar. God is the subject of every verb in the list: foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified. You aren’t the one doing the shaping. You’re the one being shaped.

And notice what you’re being conformed to. The language reaches back to Genesis 1:27, humanity made in the image of God. We fall short of that glory, so we only arrive at what we were made to be when we’re conformed to the One who is himself the true image.2

Which means McConaughey is not wrong to chase. He’s chasing the right thing at the wrong image. The self ten years out is not the image you were made for. It never was. It’s just the only one visible from inside the treadmill.

This is what Chandler showed me in a Nashville living room, and it’s why a better method was never going to save me. The gospel isn’t about keeping on until things get better. The gospel is that the light was red for good, and Someone else stopped for me.

And the question I asked in the dark for years—if I struggle this much, am I even saved?—turns out to be about belonging, not performance. John says the Father poured out his love on us and called us his children. Gary Burge points out that this is an act of legitimation: a father names a child and makes a permanent claim on that child’s identity. That claim isn’t in the child’s hands.3

Which is the whole point. If my sonship depended on my Tuesday, I’d have lost it a thousand times by Wednesday.

The chase ends in a face

McConaughey’s arc has no ending, and he knows it. Ten years out, forever. The story can’t resolve, because the hero is the one telling it.

Scripture ends differently. When he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. Not because we caught him. Because he showed up. And the seeing is what does the work — we are changed by the sight of him the way a mirror doesn’t strain to reflect.

That’s the difference between a treadmill and a road. A road has a destination, and the destination has a face.

So here’s what I want to ask you, and I want you to answer it before you close this tab.

What’s your system?

Not your theology. Your system. The thing you actually reach for at 11 P.M. when the old pull comes back. The app, the streak, the reading plan, the rule you made for yourself in January that you’ve broken and remade four times since. Name it.

I’m not going to tell you to stop. Some of those are wise. Get the app. Leave the room. Bridges was right about the disciplines, and so is anyone who tells you to build guardrails.

But notice what happens in your chest when the system breaks. That’s the tell. If the failure sends you looking for a better system, you’re still chasing. If the failure sends you to a Father who already named you, you’ve been rescued from something that was never going to save you anyway.

The difference isn’t in the effort. Both people are trying. The difference is what the effort is for — whether you’re working to secure a verdict or working because the verdict came in.

And if you’re the one who left — who sat in a room like mine, did the plan, kept failing, and finally decided the whole thing was a con — I understand why. I’d only ask you to consider that you might not have walked away from Christianity. You might have walked away from a technique with Christian vocabulary stapled to it. Those aren’t the same, and only one of them ever claimed it could hold you.

We are not going to catch him.

Not the hero ten years out, and not the version of ourselves we keep promising the people who love us. That race was rigged from the start, and the mercy of the gospel is that it tells us so out loud instead of letting us run until our knees give.

What we get instead is both stranger and better. We have a Father who names us before we do anything, a Brother who already finished the race, and a Spirit who works in us in ways no reading plan ever could. We get to stop striving and start becoming, not because we finally found the right method, but because the outcome was decided before we ever sat down on that living room floor.

Keep livin’ is a decent slogan for a man who hasn’t been caught yet.

We have.

If this named something for you, share it. Somebody in your small group built the same system I did and hasn't said so out loud yet.

Share

The Chase We Called Sanctification is part of Functional Gospels, a series on the counterfeit gospels we’ve handed the culture and the culture has handed back. Brené Brown and The Da Vinci Code are already up. Next week: Jon Meacham, public religion, and the Christian nation debate.

Subscribe and get every piece in the series.

Founding members get The Monthly — one long-form piece a month that doesn’t run on the main feed — plus the curated archive of the best of Phase 2, sorted by topic. $5/month or $50/year, locked for as long as you stay.

Click the button below to get started.

Subscribe now

I keep seeing the same post.

It’s a Bible-believing Christian I know and respect. Sound doctrine. Real faith. And there, in their feed, is a graphic — soft background, clean font — with some version of the same message. You are enough. You were made for this. You have everything you need inside you. Sometimes there’s a verse underneath. Usually it’s Philippians 4:13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

And I want to be generous about it. I do. I think they mean because I have Christ, I am enough. That’s the Christian version, right? The baptized one.

Except that’s not what Philippians 4:13 says. Paul wrote that line from a prison cell, in a paragraph about learning to be content whether he’s full or hungry, whether he has plenty or nothing at all (Phil 4:11–13). The “all things” he can do through Christ include surviving with nothing. It’s a verse about being emptied and held anyway. We turned it into a verse about being full.1 We took a text about sufficiency in Christ when you have nothing and made it a slogan about the sufficiency you already carry.

I noticed it in other people first. That’s always how it goes.

Then I caught it in myself.

For a while now I’ve been trying to step into more at my church — to use what I think I’m actually good at, to offer it, to be trusted with it. Good desire. But watch what I did with it. I turned the ask into a campaign. I built the case. I “Jesus-ed up” the conversation — laced it with the right language, the right posture — and underneath the language was a pitch. Here’s what I bring. Here’s what I can do. Look at the gifts.

And one day it landed on me with a weight I didn’t expect: I was advocating for what I do. I had quietly made my usefulness the argument for my acceptance. I wanted to be wanted for the goods. And the whole time I’d have told you — I’d have believed — that my worth was in Christ.

That’s the thing about this particular lie. You can hold it with a straight doctrinal face. You can believe the gospel on paper and still be running on you are enough underneath. I was. That’s why I can spot it. I’m not writing this from above it. I’m writing it from inside it.

We Hired a Therapist to Pastor Our Shame

Here’s what I want to say carefully, because it’s the actual argument of this piece: Brené Brown didn’t do this to the church. The church did this to itself, and hired her to make it feel holy.

Let me be fair to her first, because the method demands it and because it’s true. Brené Brown is one of the most perceptive diagnosticians of shame writing in English. Her research named something real — that shame operates in secret, that it tells you you are unworthy of connection and then makes you hide the very thing that needs to be brought into the light. She’s right that performance cultures are crushing people. She’s right that vulnerability is not weakness. She’s right that we were made to belong. A lot of pastors could stand to read her on the mechanics of shame, because she pays attention where we’ve often waved our hands.

And she’s right about something the church has been terrible at naming: some shame isn’t yours to carry. There is a shame that gets heaped on people — by parents, by systems, by churches — that they had no hand in earning.2 That shame is real, it’s crushing, and telling people to repent of it is pastoral malpractice. Brené sees those people. She goes to them. Credit where it’s due.

I’m not here to relitigate her scholarship. I want to be honest about my own limits: I’m not engaging with her full corpus end-to-end. I’m engaging the version of her that the church absorbed — the framework as it now functions in our Bible studies, small groups, graphics, and feeds. That’s a fair target, because that version is doing real theological work in real Christian lives, and most of the people running on it never chose it on purpose. They inherited it. So did I.

And here’s how it got in.

The church had a shame problem it wasn’t pastoring. We’re good at guilt — we have whole vocabularies for guilt, whole altar calls for guilt. But shame, the deep conviction that you specifically are unacceptable, the thing that keeps people out of the pew and out of the light? We mostly left that on the floor. We told people to try harder, serve more, get their quiet times in order. We ran a quiet performance religion and called it discipleship. So when someone finally spoke to the wound — spoke to it with warmth, with research, with permission to stop performing — of course it landed. Of course it spread. It spread because it was answering a question we refused to answer.

We didn’t get colonized by a foreign gospel. We created a vacuum, and something true-enough rushed in to fill it. That’s the conspiracy we wanted to be true: that the cure for our exhaustion was permission to stop trying, and that permission was the same thing as grace.

It isn’t. And the difference is the whole ballgame.

You Weren’t Made to Be Enough

Start where the Bible starts, because the sequence is the entire argument.

You were not made to be enough. You were made for glory — made in the image of God, made to reflect and enjoy a weight of worth that was never generated from inside you in the first place (Gen 1:26–27). This matters more than it looks. “You are enough” locates your sufficiency in you. Genesis locates it in the God whose image you bear. The first is a closed loop. The second is a gift. From the very first page, the biblical human is not self-sufficient by design — she is derivative by design, glorious because she is held. Being told “you already have everything you need inside you” is not encouraging. It’s a demotion. It hands you back to yourself and calls it good news.

The Guilt Came First

Then read Genesis 3 slowly, because everyone rushes it. They eat. Their eyes open. And the first thing they feel is exactly what Brené’s framework is built to treat: they’re naked, they’re exposed, they hide (Gen 3:7–8). Shame. Right there. So far the frameworks agree.

But watch the sequence, because this is where the two gospels split and never rejoin. The shame is second. The guilt is first. They didn’t feel unworthy and then hide — they disobeyed, and the hiding came after. Before the disobedience there was no shame at all; it was the sin that changed how they saw themselves.3 The exposure they felt was not a false message about their worth. It was a true response to an actual rupture — not false guilt imposed from outside, but true guilt arising from a violated conscience.4 The shame was a symptom. The guilt was the disease.

And here’s the distinction the absorbed framework can’t make. There are two kinds of shame, not one. There’s shame we ought not to feel — the shame heaped on us for things that were never dishonoring to God, or never ours to carry. And there’s shame we ought to feel — the shame that comes from having actually had a hand in dishonoring God.5 Brené is a master of the first kind. She has almost nothing to say about the second, because her framework has no category for a wrong you actually committed against a holy God. Which means it can comfort the falsely ashamed and completely miss the truly guilty — and most of us are both.

This is the thing the church stopped saying: sometimes the bad feeling is telling the truth. Sometimes you feel exposed because you are exposed. And if you treat all shame as misplaced — if you tell every guilty person “you are enough, you’ve just believed a lie about yourself” — you will comfort them without ever curing them. You’ll talk them out of the symptom, leaving the disease running.

That’s the comfort we mistook for the cure. We took the ache of real guilt and reclassified it as a self-esteem problem, because a self-esteem problem is one we can fix with encouragement, and guilt is a problem only a cross can touch.

The Thing You’re Actually Hiding From

Here’s what the cross does that no amount of vulnerability can. Vulnerability brings you into the open in front of other people — and that’s good, that’s a genuine creational good. But the thing you’re most hiding from was never other people. It was God. Adam didn’t sew fig leaves for Eve. They both hid from the LORD among the trees (Gen 3:8). The primal exposure is vertical.

And the gospel meets you exactly there. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). Sit in the offense of that sentence, because the whole difference lives in it. It does not say you were enough. It says the opposite: you were still a sinner — not misunderstood, not merely wounded, not sitting on untapped inner sufficiency — a sinner, and loved anyway, and covered at a cost you could not pay.

This is the hinge on which the whole Reformation turned, and it’s worth being precise. The gospel doesn’t declare you were fine all along. It declares that God, without any merit of yours, of pure grace, credits to you the perfect righteousness of Christ — as if you had never sinned, as if you had yourself accomplished all the obedience Christ accomplished for you.6 Not a righteousness you generate. A righteousness imputed — reckoned to your account from outside, belonging properly to someone else.7 Justification is not God making you righteous by degrees; it is God declaring you righteous on the basis of Christ, a verdict handed down over people who are still, in themselves, ungodly.8

That is why it’s the more durable comfort by an infinite margin. “You are enough” works right up until the moment you fail in a way you can’t reframe — until the grief lands, or the sin is real, or the diagnosis comes, or you stand at the graveside and self-acceptance has precisely nothing to say. An alien righteousness — one that doesn’t depend on your performance because it was never yours to perform — is the only thing that still stands there when you have run completely out of enough.9 It doesn’t need you to be sufficient. It needs Christ to be, and he is.

Wholehearted Living Ends Where You End

And then the piece the absorbed framework structurally cannot offer, because it has no eschatology: this all goes somewhere. Brené can offer you wholehearted living — a better way to be present, right now, this side of the grave. It’s not nothing. But it ends where you end. The gospel offers resurrection — a day when death itself is swallowed up, when the last enemy is destroyed, when what was sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Cor 15:54–57). A day when shame is not managed but abolished, when the exposed are clothed for good, when the hiding is over because there is nothing left to hide from and no one left to hide from. Wholehearted living is a coping strategy for the exile. Resurrection is the road home.

“I Am Enough” or “I Am Covered”?

So let me ask you what I had to ask myself.

What are you actually running on? Not what you’d write on the doctrinal statement. Underneath. When you reach for reassurance, is it “I am enough” — or is it “I am covered”? Those are not the same sentence, and the difference will find you on the day the enough runs out.

Maybe you’ve been living on the graphic version because your church handed you performance religion and Brené handed you rest, and rest felt more like Jesus than anything you got from us. I understand that. That grief is legitimate, and part of it is on people like me. But hear it plainly: the permission to stop performing is not the gospel. It’s a good thing the gospel produces — and if you take the fruit without the root, it will not hold you when you need it most.

And if you’re like me — if you’ve been quietly building the case for yourself, campaigning to be wanted for what you bring, “Jesus-ing up” a pitch for your own usefulness — then you already know how tiring it is to be your own argument. Lay the pitch down. You were accepted before you were useful. You’ll still be accepted when you’re not.

Take the shame to the cross. Not to the mirror. The mirror can only tell you you’re fine. The cross tells you you’re not — and that you’re His.

The Counterfeit That Almost Works

The church has a better word than you are enough. We’ve just been too tired, or too ashamed of our own performance religion, to say it out loud. So we outsourced the pastoring of shame to someone kinder than we’d been, and we baptized her framework, and we told ourselves it was the same thing as grace.

It was close. That’s what made it dangerous. The counterfeit that works is never the one that looks nothing like the real thing — it’s the one that looks almost exactly like it, that gives you most of the comfort while quietly removing the cross.

Here’s the better word. You are not enough. You were never going to be. And the God who knows the full weight of that — every hidden thing, every real guilt, every place you’ve been sure you were unacceptable — looked at you there and did not offer you a slogan. He offered you a Son. He covered what you were actually hiding. He is bringing you to a day when the hiding ends for good.

That’s not the comfort we wanted. It’s better. It’s the one that’s actually a cure.

Functional Gospels is a series on the counterfeit gospels operating in the cultural water — the ones we absorb without noticing, dressed in language close enough to the real thing that we never stop to check. This is #2. If you missed it, #1 was The Conspiracy We Want To Be True.

Next in the series: the gospel according to a man who professes Christ and preaches contemplative virtue without ever naming sin.

Subscribe now

A few years ago, I was visiting my grandmother and the rest of my dad’s family when my uncle started in with the “did you know” questions.

He’d been watching the History Channel. Ancient Aliens. The Bible. How we’ve been told something that isn’t exactly true. He wasn’t asking me — he was announcing. A man who’d spent his whole life in the orbit of church, repeating a cable documentary like it was a deposition.

So I pushed back. Asked him if he’d fact-checked any of it. After all, this is my lane.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t defend it, didn’t argue. He just moved on to the next thing, like the question hadn’t happened.

And that’s when it landed on me: the morsels of doubt — the “new” information — mattered more to him than where he came from.

It still happens every Christmas and Easter. The same faded documentaries, the same rotation of scholars, arriving on schedule in the exact weeks the church tells its story — a counter-liturgy on basic cable, explaining what we supposedly weren’t told.

Maybe you don’t have that uncle. But you grew up in the same living room.

If you were raised anywhere near church in the last twenty-five years, the counter-story was part of the furniture. The specials about lost gospels. The experts explaining what Constantine “really” did. The endless whisper that the version you got in Sunday school was the edited-for-television cut.

Then, in 2003, somebody bottled the whisper. The Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies not because Dan Brown discovered anything, but because he gave the appetite a plot. You probably had forgotten about that book and its accompanying movie, but it was recently on TV, and I ended up tuning it to see how it had aged. A murdered curator, a suppressed bloodline, and a fictional historian named Sir Leigh Teabing delivering the speech that would outlive the book: the church chose your Bible for you, and hid the rest. Spoiler alert: it aged like milk.

I’ve stood in that crossfire myself. Back when I recorded YouTube videos, I couldn’t post anything without the comments turning into a sparring match — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant voices relitigating the canon under videos that weren’t about the canon. Brothers in Christ, sowing more confusion about the Bible’s origins than any book of fiction ever managed.

Here’s what should stop you: the book faded. The speech didn’t. Scroll long enough today, and you’ll find Teabing’s monologue running everywhere with the serial numbers filed off — canon-debate threads, “what Nicaea really decided” videos, whole conversion journeys built on the promise of a suppressed, older, realer Christianity. Even serious scholarship can feed it, every time a non-canonical book gets more spotlight than the sixty-six.

Nobody’s quoting the novel. They’re quoting the hunger it fed. A whole generation didn’t argue its way out of faith — it got offered a better story, one with a secret in it.

And underneath every version of it, the same aching question: what if the real thing has been kept from me?

The Hunger Came First

Before the diagnosis, a concession: the hunger The Da Vinci Code fed is real, and it is not stupid.

Ecclesiastes says God “has put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end” (Eccl. 3:11 CSB). The Hebrew word is ha’olam — built on a root that means “hidden.” What God set in the human heart is, quite literally, an appetite for the concealed. Read that slowly. We were built hungry for what’s behind the curtain — and built without the capacity to satisfy that hunger on our own. The gap isn’t a design flaw. It’s a homing signal.

This is where Redemptive Correlation goes to work. The method doesn’t start by correcting the cultural moment; it starts by taking the moment’s question seriously, then walking it back through Scripture’s own story — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — until we can see what the hunger was for before it got hijacked. Culture doesn’t get to diagnose itself. But it does get a real hearing.

So hear it: eighty million people bought a novel because it whispered the official story isn’t the whole story. They weren’t wrong to want the whole story. Wanting the whole story is the most human thing about them.

The Serpent’s Bestseller

Here’s what should unsettle us: the conspiracy thriller wasn’t invented in 2003. It was invented in Genesis 3, and the serpent wrote it.

Look at the structure of his pitch. First, seed doubt about the official account: “Did God really say...?” (Gen. 3:1). Then, name the cover-up: “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). An institution guarding secret knowledge. An authority that benefits from your ignorance. A forbidden act that promises enlightenment on the other side.

Every element is there. The suppressed truth. The self-interested gatekeeper. The initiation that separates the awakened from the sheep. Dan Brown didn’t invent this plot. He inherited it — and so did every documentary, subreddit, and late-night rabbit hole promising to show you what they don’t want you to see.

And here’s the tell. Within a year of publication, the book’s central claims were rubble. The Priory of Sion was a documented 1950s hoax — its inventor had confessed decades before Brown wrote. And the historical case was dismantled by, of all people, Bart Ehrman — the agnostic scholar who has spent his career arguing against orthodox Christianity.1 When your debunker is the man least motivated to defend the church, the debunking sticks. It stuck. And it didn’t matter. The claims collapsed and the appeal didn’t, because the appeal was never resting on the claims. It was resting on the hunger. You cannot fact-check an appetite.

That’s the disorder underneath the phenomenon. Conspiracy thinking isn’t primarily an information problem. It’s a trust wound. It’s what eternity-in-the-heart looks like after it has decided the Father is hiding something.

The Mystery That Went Public

Now the turn — and it’s sharper than we usually preach it.

Paul does not respond to the hunger for hidden truth by denying there’s a mystery. He doubles down on the word. The gospel, he says, is “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints” (Col. 1:26 CSB). There was a secret. There was something the ages didn’t know. Every instinct that told you there’s more going on than meets the eye — Paul says that instinct was right.

Then he says the thing no conspiracy can survive. Catch the verb: God wanted to make it known (Col. 1:27). The Greek says God willed the disclosure — nobody pried this secret loose, nobody leaked it, nobody decoded it against His wishes. Every conspiracy imagines a god who hoards. The actual God was the one pushing for disclosure. Grammar tells the same story: ages of hiddenness described in one long-standing state, ended by a single, decisive unveiling.

His task, Paul says elsewhere, was to shed light on this mystery hidden for ages (Eph. 3:9) — light being the operative image, because light is the one thing you cannot ration to an inner circle. And the disclosure matched the image. Christ was crucified in a public square during a governor’s term you can date. When Paul stood trial, he reached for the stock Greek insult aimed at secret-society philosophy — teaching whispered to initiates in a corner, away from public life — and threw it out on purpose: “this was not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). No hidden bloodline. No suppressed gospel in a vault. The most audacious claim in history was published on a hill, in daylight, with witnesses.

And the content of the declassified mystery? Not a technique. Not a code. A person: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). The secret at the center of everything turns out not to be information you master but a presence that masters you.

When the Withholding Ends

But Paul is honest about where we still stand. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12 CSB). His word for that dim seeing is ainigma — we see, literally, “in a riddle.” Paul concedes the enigma. He just refuses to let it end there.

That’s the admission the conspiracy mindset can’t make and the promise it can’t offer. Yes, you see dimly. Yes, there is more you don’t know. The Christian story never pretends otherwise. But the trajectory is not toward a bigger file of secrets. It’s toward a face.

That’s what every rabbit hole is actually digging for. Not one more document. Not the final decrypted layer. The end of the withholding — a reality where nothing is hidden because nothing needs to be, where you are fully known and finally shown. Restoration isn’t the ultimate reveal. It’s the ultimate presence.

The conspiracy we want true is the one where someone powerful has been keeping the real story from us. The gospel says something stranger: Someone powerful has been telling us the real story since a garden, and we’ve been the ones hiding.

Where Are You Scratching the Itch?

So here’s my question for you — and unlike my uncle, I’d love an answer.

Where are you scratching the itch?

Because you have it. You were built with it. And if you’re not feeding it on the open mystery, you’re feeding it somewhere. Maybe it’s the algorithm serving you “what the church doesn’t want you to know.” Maybe it’s the quiet suspicion that the Christians who seem most alive are the ones with something extra — a hidden book, an older liturgy, a secret key. Maybe it’s just the low hum that Sunday’s version is the beginner’s version, and the real thing is behind another door.

Next time the whisper comes — the documentary, the thread, the “did you know” — don’t fact-check it first. Ask a better question: what appetite is this feeding? Then take that appetite where it was always meant to go. Open the text you already own. Read it like it’s what Paul says it is: the mystery of the ages, declassified, addressed to you. The strangest truth in this whole story is that the deepest thing God ever hid, He hid in plain sight — and most of us walk past it looking for a locked door.

You don’t need clearance. You need an open Bible and the nerve to believe you’re holding the secret.

The People Telling the Story

And this is where we get to be different — not smarter than the conspiracy-hungry world, just better fed.

The church was never meant to be a vault. Paul says the mystery goes public through us — ordinary people in ordinary rooms, handling the open secret out loud. Every time we teach the text plainly, answer the hard question without flinching, and refuse to gatekeep what God declassified, we starve the counter-liturgy of its power.

We are not the people guarding the real story. We’re the people telling it.

And one day the riddle ends. Not with a final document, but with a face. Until then, we hold the secret the way it was given to us — wide open.

This is the first piece in Functional Gospels, a series about the stories that replaced the gospel for a generation — not arguments that defeated it, but narratives that displaced it. Next up: Brené Brown, and the gospel of self-acceptance.

Subscribe now

If Theologetics has been feeding you, founding-member spots are open — $5/mo or $50/yr, locked in for as long as you stay. You get The Monthly (one extra long-form piece every month) and the curated founding member archive.

That’s the honest version. I had a stack of work from seminary — the major papers, the exegetical pieces, the stuff I’d poured months into — and a Substack seemed like the place to put them where someone other than a professor might read them. So that’s what it was at first. A repository. I published finished things.

Somewhere in a seminary class, I’d gotten this idea about blending head and heart — that the doctrine I was learning wasn’t supposed to just sit in my notes, that it was supposed to land somewhere in a life. I didn’t realize I would enjoy apologetics as much as I enjoyed theology, yet there I was devouring works that made me want to shape the message of our faith into something more than a pastoral message or a good blog article. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t do it well at first. The conviction was there. The execution wasn’t.

Then I ran out of papers.

I’d shared all the major work, and suddenly I was writing without a finished thing to lean on. Winging it. I started recording videos on YouTube alongside the writing, and it began to feel more like the beginnings of a money grab and brand building maneuver than really putting something together that would benefit everyone involved. Looking back, I can see what was happening that I couldn’t see then: I was reaching for something I didn’t have the language for yet. The head-and-heart idea was still pulling at me. I just couldn’t deliver on it.

The click came at my last job.

I travelled almost every other week to talk with pastors and cast vision for a unified effort to share the gospel with their city, and to equip their people to participate in that work. I talked about Jesus’ high priestly prayer and the well-worn stump speech points our organization had used for over 60 years. These pastors were on board, and they knew they couldn’t do it without their congregations getting on board too. However, the same language I used with them couldn’t be the same language we used when we talked to the school teachers, plumbers, bankers, and business owners in their churches.

And somewhere in watching that, it landed on me: there had to be a way I could do the same thing with what I was doing. Those pastors were taking the deep things and putting them in the hands of people in the pew. That was the whole point. That was what I’d been circling since that seminary classroom.

Those everyday believers the pastors were equipping are the same people who long for more than just existing in their faith. I saw myself in them. We were asking the same two questions: so what? now what?

So what? Now what?

If you’ve spent any time in church, you know those questions. Maybe you’ve never said them out loud. Maybe you’ve felt them in the pause after a sermon you agreed with completely and walked out of unchanged. You believe the right things. You could pass the doctrine test. And still, somewhere underneath, there’s a question you’re almost embarrassed to ask: is this it?

But that question isn’t a sign your faith is weak. It’s a sign your faith is looking for something the church hasn’t always known how to give it.

We have no shortage of doctrine. Walk into most churches, and you’ll find people who can tell you what they believe about Scripture, about the cross, about the Trinity — and they’re not wrong. We’ve gotten good at orthodoxy. What we haven’t gotten good at is the bridge: the practice of taking what we believe and bringing it to bear on the questions an actual life actually asks. The teacher’s question. The plumber’s question. The banker’s question. Yours.

That’s the gap. Not a gap in what we believe — a gap in the discipline of living inside it, out loud, in front of a watching world that’s asking us harder questions than our stump speeches were built to answer.

And the strange thing is, most of us have been working in that gap for years without a name for it. Reaching for it. Circling it. Doing the work before we had a word for it.

Walk into Athens with Paul and watch what he doesn’t do.

He doesn’t torch the place. He’s provoked — Luke says his spirit was being provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols (Acts 17:16) — but provocation doesn’t become a tirade. Neither does he go quiet and accommodating, soft-pedaling the offense of the gospel to win a hearing. He does something harder than either. He looks. He walks the city, reads its altars, and finds the one inscribed To an Unknown God (17:23). Then he stands up in the Areopagus and says: that One you’ve been groping after in the dark — let me tell you his name.

That’s the whole posture in a single scene. Paul listens to Athens on Athens’s terms. He distills the longing underneath the idols — a city so hungry for the divine it builds altars to gods it can’t even name. And he reframes that longing under the true God, quoting their own poets back to them, not to flatter but to redirect. In him we live and move and have our being(17:28). He takes what Athens reached for and shows them Who was standing behind the reaching the whole time.

This is Redemptive Correlation before it had a name. Listen, distill, reframe, respond — read the culture through Scripture, not Scripture through the culture. I’m not the first to notice Paul doing this. A whole stream of thinkers has been circling the Areopagus lately, and they’ll tell you plainly that the practice is old even where the label is new — that what looks like a recent move “finds precedent,” as one recent volume on the subject puts it, “in significant apologists within the Christian tradition.”1 The instinct has always been there. What it’s lacked is a name and a discipline to hold it.

Tillich developed a method that ran in the opposite direction, letting the culture set the questions Scripture had to answer on the culture’s terms. Paul reverses the vector. He lets Athens ask, but he doesn’t let Athens decide. The altar names the hunger; only the gospel names the God.

But here’s what Acts 17 gives you and doesn’t give you. It gives you the posture — a way of standing before a culture without either burning it down or bowing to it. What it doesn’t give you is a way to keep standing there. The Areopagus is a moment. A discipline is a life.

For that, go to Paul's older writing to a younger man, he’s handing something to.

Pay close attention to your life and your teaching; persevere in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers (1 Timothy 4:16).

Read that slowly, because it refuses the split we keep trying to make. Life and teaching. Orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Paul doesn’t let Timothy choose. He doesn’t say guard the doctrine and the living will sort itself out, and he doesn’t say live well and the doctrine is negotiable. He fuses them and tells Timothy to persevere in the fusion — present tense, ongoing, a practice you stay in, not a position you take once.

Kevin Vanhoozer spent a whole book refusing that same split, arguing that doctrine — far from the dusty thing we’ve made it — is “the stuff of life” itself, the script we’re meant to live and not just shelve.2 He’s right. And it’s worth saying that a systematician of his weight needed four hundred pages to land what Paul hands Timothy in a single verse: the teaching and the life were never two things.

That’s the word the church keeps losing. Not doctrine — we have doctrine. Not technique — we have apologetic technique, debate scripts, a hundred ways to win an argument with an atheist. What we keep losing is the discipline: the sustained, named practice of holding life and teaching together and bringing both to bear on the questions the culture is actually asking.

Run it through the arc and watch it hold. In creation, life and doctrine were never two things — to know God truly was to live rightly before him; the knowing and the living were one motion. The fall split them, and we’ve been paying for the split ever since: orthodoxy that doesn’t touch the ground, orthopraxy unmoored from truth. Redemption is God refusing to leave the two apart — the Word made flesh, doctrine that walked and ate and bled, truth you could touch. And restoration is where Paul’s “save both yourself and your hearers” is pointing: a day when knowing and living are seamless again, when no one has to be reminded to watch their life and their teaching because the two will finally be one thing.

A method gets you through the Areopagus. A discipline gets you through the Christian life. Redemptive Correlation is the method.

And here I want to be careful, because what I’m describing has cousins. There’s a rich conversation happening right now under the banner of “cultural apologetics” — making the faith plausible, beautiful, and desirable to a watching world — and I’ve learned from it. But that work aims mostly outward, at the skeptic at the city gate. What I’m after runs the other direction too: inward, at the believer in the pew who already affirms the creed and still can’t feel the floor under it. Not just commending the faith to outsiders. Forming it in insiders.

The discipline I’m describing — theological apologetics, the practice of holding doctrine and life together and reading the culture through the gospel — needs a name too.

I’ve been calling it Theologetics for two years. I’m only now telling you it was a discipline the whole time.

So let me talk to you — the one still sitting with so what, now what.

I want you to hear that your question is not a problem to be solved. It’s a calling to be answered. The ache you feel when the doctrine doesn’t reach the ground isn’t your faith failing. It’s your faith refusing to settle for less than what it was made for. You were never meant to just hold the truth. You were meant to live inside it — to bring it to the desk, the job site, the dinner table, the friend deconstructing everything you still hold.

That’s not a job for pastors and scholars. The plumber doing this in his shop is doing theology. The teacher doing it in her classroom is doing theology. You, doing it wherever you actually are, are doing the thing this whole discipline exists to name and train and sharpen.

So stop waiting to be qualified. You already have the doctrine. What you’ve been missing is the discipline — and the discipline can be learned. That’s what this is. That’s what it’s always been.

Here’s what I’m building, and here’s how you can be part of it.

Theologetics is becoming more than a place I post. It’s becoming the work itself — the sustained practice of holding life and teaching together and reading the culture through the gospel, done out loud, every week, where you can watch it and learn it and do it yourself. The founding member tier is how that work gets resourced and how you get the most of it: an additional long-form piece every month, the full Phase 2 archive organized so you can actually use it, and a permanent seat at $5 a month or $50 a year, locked for as long as you stay.

Subscribe now

When you click the button above, you’ll have the option to still subscribe for free, or select the paid option.

I’m not asking you to support a brand. I spent a season tempted to build one of those, and I walked away from it on purpose. I’m asking you to join a discipline — to put your money where your so what is, and help build the thing you’ve been circling all along.

Picture the city Paul walked around in.

Altars everywhere, to gods with no names — a whole culture aching toward something it couldn’t quite say. That city is still here. It’s the one outside your window, the one your coworkers live in, the one you and I were aching in not long ago. Full of people building altars to unnamed things, asking so what and now what into a silence they assume is all there is.

We have the Name. That’s the thing. We’re not standing in the Areopagus empty-handed, hoping to win an argument. We’re standing there knowing the One the altars were always reaching for — and the only question left is whether we’ll learn to say so, in a language the teacher and the plumber and the deconstructing friend can actually hear.

That’s the discipline. That’s the work. And it’s not finished in any of us — Paul told Timothy to persevere, present tense, because the day it’s fully formed in us isn’t a day we reach by ourselves or arrive at this side of restoration. We’re being made into people whose lives and teaching are finally one and the same. We’re not there. We’re on the way.

So come build it with me. Not because I’ve got it figured out — you’ve read far enough to know I don’t. But because the gap is real, and the work is good, and the city is still full of altars.

Let’s go learn to name the God behind them.

If this named something you’ve been circling too — the gap between what you believe and how you live it — then subscribe and stay. This is the work, every week.

Subscribe now

And if someone came to mind while you read — the believer who can pass the doctrine test and still feels the floor missing — send this to them. That’s how this grows: not by going viral, but by going to the right person.

Share

He was my accountability partner — a churchy way of saying the friend I’d asked to ask me the hard questions, the structure I’d built specifically to fight what I was doing. He asked. And I looked at him and lied. I told him I was fine. I’d done the one thing I’d asked him to help guard me against the week before, and I said nothing, and I let him pray for me, and three days later I stood up and preached on wisdom from Proverbs.

I want you to sit in that with me, because I’ve spent a lot of years not sitting in it.

I was leading a ministry. Building it, actually — pouring real hours into discipling people in the Christian life. And by every visible measure, it was working. There was fruit. People were growing. From the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, I looked like a young man on fire for God.

I was living contrary to Scripture in multiple streams and feeding a private habit I hid from everyone. Two lives, running at the same time, inches apart. I’d prepare a lesson on holiness with the previous night still on me. I’d teach people to walk in step with the Spirit and mean it, genuinely mean it, and then go kill nothing in myself the moment the lights went down.

Here’s the part I understand now that I couldn’t see then. I wasn’t a man with no spiritual life. That would almost be easier to explain. I had an enormous spiritual life. I felt real conviction when I sinned — sharp, hot, sincere. I sought God’s forgiveness, and I genuinely gloried in it; the relief was real, the gratitude was real. And then I soared in the pleasure of the sin again the next weekend, and felt the conviction again, and sought the forgiveness again, and round it went.

I called that repentance. It wasn’t. It was rehearsed repentance — the full liturgy of being sorry, performed on a loop, with one thing missing from the middle of it. I never actually killed anything. I confessed the sin, thanked God for covering it, and left it exactly where it was, alive and waiting for me to pick it back up again. I had a functional spiritual amnesia — except it wasn’t that I forgot. It’s that I’d built a cycle where forgetting was the point. Feel it, confess it, move on, repeat.

It ended the way those things end. I was found out. I resigned, and I dressed the resignation in a respectable reason, and the respectable reason was a lie too — the last lie on top of all the others.

You can see the sins well enough, but the sins aren’t the confession. This is the confession: I was doing more Christianity in that season than I have in almost any season since. I just wasn’t putting anything to death. And it turns out you can do an astonishing amount of the first while doing none of the second — and call the whole thing a calling.

I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are people reading this who haven’t actually killed anything in years, and who would never know it, because the activity is so loud you can’t hear the silence underneath it.

My version of this was loud and obvious. Yours is probably quieter. That’s what makes it more dangerous.

Because most of us aren’t living a double life with a dramatic secret. Most of us are just busy. Busy being Christians, even. We go to church. We serve. We read the plan, we know the words, we’d pass any doctrine quiz you put in front of us. By every visible measure, the faith is working.

And underneath all that motion, a question almost no one asks: when is the last time I actually put something to death?

Not “when did I last feel bad about a sin?” We do that constantly. I mean: when did I last take a specific corruption in myself — name it, drag it into the light, and go to war with it until it died? When did I last lose something I wanted to keep? For a lot of us, the honest answer is a number of years we’d rather not say out loud, if ever. We’ve just treated Jesus as fire insurance instead of life-changing. We’ve been active the whole time. We just haven’t been killing.

And it’s not because we’re sinless. It’s because our sins got respectable. The sharp tongue we call honesty and even embrace as our God-given personality. The ability to be offended we hold onto because we tell ourselves that without it, we’d be a doormat. The self-pity we’ve nursed so long that it feels like personality. The envy we’ve rebranded as ambition. We’ve made a quiet peace with all of it and say, “Oh well.” We’re not at war with these things. We’re cohabiting with them and making them our pet sins.

What we do instead of killing is feel. We feel convicted — genuinely, sometimes intensely. We confess. We feel the relief of grace. And we mistake that whole emotional circuit for repentance, when it’s really just the feeling of repentance running on a loop with nothing dying at the center of it. We’ve been sorry a thousand times. We’ve changed almost none of it.

And we are being told, from every direction, that this is fine. That the things we should be killing are actually the truest parts of us. That peace with ourselves is the goal, and war with ourselves is the sickness. The whole spirit of the age is built to talk us out of the one verb the Christian life can’t live without.

This is where all of it has been heading. Not a new question — the same one, asked for the last time, with nowhere left to hide from it.

It’s easy to nod at all this as a description of the lukewarm church out there somewhere.

It’s harder to ask the question straight: what have I actually put to death lately? And to sit in the silence if the answer is nothing.

There’s a sentence in Paul that the modern church has quietly stopped being able to hear. Not because it’s obscure — because it’s violent.

“If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom 8:13).

Put to death. That’s the verb. Not manage, not balance, not integrate, not make peace with. Kill. And Paul stakes everything on it: the clause before says that if you live according to the flesh, “you will die” — and he doesn’t mean you’ll feel distant from God. He means death in its fullest, most final sense.1 The commentators who handle this verse carefully refuse to soften it, because Paul refuses to. This isn’t advanced discipleship for the especially serious. It’s the difference between life and death, stated as a command.2

The Puritan John Owen built an entire book on this one verse, and gave us the line that has never been improved on: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”3 There’s no neutral third option, no holding pattern, no maintenance mode. Sin is not a static thing you contain; it’s a living thing that is either dying at your hand or growing at your expense. The Christian life, on this account, has a verb at its center, and that verb is kill.

A verb needs an object

Here’s the thing about a command to put something to death: it only makes sense if there’s something there to die.

“Put to death the deeds of the body.” Mortify what is earthly in you (Col 3:5). The grammar requires an object — a real corruption, a genuine self-in-rebellion that has to be dragged out and executed. The whole vocabulary of the New Testament Christian life assumes it. Put off the old self. Crucify the flesh. Deny yourself. Every one of those verbs reaches for an object, and the object is always the same: a version of you that has to die so a truer one can live.

And this — slowly, over years, without anyone deciding it on purpose — is exactly what we have lost.

Walk back through what this series has watched come apart. We started with judgment — the conviction that sin earns condemnation — and we watched the church quietly retire it, until sin carries no weight and there’s nothing to be saved from. Then we watched the authority of Scripture get relativized, until the texts that name sin no longer bind, and there’s no fixed word left to call anything sin at all. Then we watched the self get sacralized — you are your desires, express them, honor them — until the inner life isn’t a battlefield but a sanctuary, every want a piece of the authentic you.

Now stand back and see what all three have done together, because this is where they were always heading. Remove judgment, and there’s no penalty that makes sin worth killing. Remove Scripture’s authority, and there’s no standard by which to know what to kill. Sacralize the self, and there’s nothing you would dare to kill, because the thing the New Testament calls “the flesh” has been renamed “who I really am.” Strip out all three, and you haven’t made the Christian life gentler. You’ve removed its object. You’ve left the verb — put to death — with nothing left to put to death.

That’s the quiet catastrophe underneath the whole project, and it’s why this series has been one argument and not four. It was never really about any single doctrine. It was about sanctification all along — because when you relativize judgment and Scripture and the self, the thing that actually dies is mortification itself. You’re left with a Christianity that has every feature except the one verb that made it transformative. Activity without killing. Worship without dying. A faith you can practice with enormous energy, as I did, while putting nothing to death — because there’s nothing left you’re willing to call dead.

Killing is only half

But here’s where Scripture refuses to let mortification curdle into something grim, and it’s the half that even the church that still preaches “put sin to death” most often forgets.

You are not only killing. You are being made alive.

The old tradition had two words for the one motion: mortification and vivification. The putting to death and the making alive. They aren’t two separate projects — a season of killing followed by a season of living — but two faces of a single turn, the way exhaling and inhaling are one breath. Paul’s own language insists on it. The same passage that says “put to death” also says “put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10).4 You strip off the grave-clothes, and you put on the clean garment. The killing is never the point. It’s the clearing of ground so something can grow.

This is why Paul can hold together two things that look contradictory — that you have already died with Christ, and that you must still, daily, put sin to death. The commentators call it the indicative and the imperative: be what you are.5 You are already, by God’s act, a new creation. Now — by the Spirit, never by raw willpower, never by gritted teeth — become in practice what you already are by grace.6 Mortification without that grace is just moralism, the exhausting religion of self-improvement. But grace without mortification isn’t grace at all; it’s the verb-less Christianity we’ve been tracing all month — the one I lived — the one that lets sin sit alive and unbothered while you call yourself forgiven.

What you’re killing toward

And here is the thing that makes the killing bearable — that makes it, finally, hope and not horror.

You are not putting sin to death so you can be a slightly better person. You are putting it to death because of where this is all going. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not improvement — likeness. You will see Christ, and the seeing will finish the work, and you will be like Him.7

And John adds the line that turns the whole grim arithmetic of mortification into something with light in it: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). The killing is driven by the hope.8 You don’t put sin to death out of fear or duty or self-hatred. You put it to death because you’ve seen where you’re headed — a face you will one day look full in — and you cannot carry the old corruption into that presence, and more than that, you don’t want to. The hope does the purifying. Without it, John says, life is empty. With it, every act of mortification is one more thing you set down because your hands are getting ready to hold something better.

So here is the whole method of this newsletter, landed on its final question. The culture says: become who you are. Find the self inside you and express it without apology. Scripture says something stranger and harder and infinitely more hopeful: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self you’re chasing isn’t behind you, waiting to be excavated and honored. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed — and the only road there runs through a daily death.

Name what you’re killing

So I’m going to ask you the question the whole series has been walking toward, and I want you to actually answer it, not let it slide past.

What are you killing right now?

Not what do you feel bad about. Not what would you confess if pressed. What sin, specifically, are you at war with this week — named, hunted, actively dying at your hand? If you can answer that cleanly, then thank God and keep your blade sharp. But if you went quiet just now — if you scrolled back through the last month, the last year, and couldn’t find a single thing you’ve genuinely put to death — then I’m not writing this to shame you. I’m writing it because I lived in that silence for years and called it a ministry, and someone should have grabbed me by the collar.

So let me grab yours. Here’s what to do, and it’s painfully simple.

Pick one. Not all of them — you’ll do nothing if you try to do everything. One. The pet sin from a few paragraphs ago that you felt the heat on when I named it. The tongue, the offense you nurse, the self-pity, the envy, the thing you’ve been calling your personality. Pick the one you’d least like to give up, because that’s the one with its hooks deepest in you. That reluctance you feel — not that one — is the sin defending its own life. Listen to it. It’s telling you where to aim.

Then go to war with it. Specifically, concretely, this week. Name it out loud to one person who’ll ask you about it again — a real accountability you don’t lie to, which I know something about. Cut off whatever feeds it. When it rises, refuse it, and when you fail, get up the same hour and refuse it again. This isn’t a feeling. Feelings you already have in abundance; feelings are the loop you’ve been mistaking for repentance. This is an act, repeated, against something that wants to stay alive.

But hear the one thing that keeps this from being a self-improvement project — because if you miss it, you’ll just exhaust yourself building a better you and call it sanctification. You do not kill sin by raw willpower. Paul is explicit: it’s “by the Spirit“ you put the deeds of the body to death. The power isn’t yours, but the act is still required of you. Not “let go and let God,” as though you were a passenger. Not “grit your teeth and fix yourself,” as though you were alone. Both are counterfeits. The truth is stranger: you fight with everything you have, and the strength you fight with isn’t yours. You say a daily yes to a killing that God is doing in you and through you and will not do without you.

So stop waiting to feel sanctified. Stop running the loop — the conviction, the relief, the nothing-changes. Pick the sin you’re most fond of, and by the Spirit, start killing it today. Not because God will love you more when it’s dead. Because He already loves you, and He refuses to leave you cohabiting with the thing that’s killing you.

I told you at the start that my version of this was loud and obvious. I didn’t tell you how it ends.

It ends here — with me writing this. Restored. Years past the resignation and the lies and the cycle I couldn’t break on my own. I am not the man who lied to his accountability partner on a Thursday. That man, by the grace of God and a great deal of slow, unglamorous killing, is dead. I had to put him to death, over and over, for longer than I wanted to — and I didn’t do it alone, and I didn’t do it by feeling sorry. I did it by the Spirit, the same Spirit who would not let me stay in the grave I’d dug.

That’s the part the loop could never give me. The loop kept me feeling forgiven while leaving me exactly where I was. What actually saved me wasn’t softer than mortification. It was mortification — the real thing, the daily death — and on the other side of it, a life I could not have manufactured and did not deserve. The killing was never the end. It was the door.

Because here is what we are killing toward, and it’s the only thing that makes any of this bearable. “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not a tidier version of yourself. Not a respectable Christian who finally got the pet sins under control. Likeness to Christ — the actual face of God, seen at last, and the seeing finishing the work that every small death began. And the hope of that face is not passive: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself” (1 John 3:3). The hope does the killing. You put the old self to death because you’ve glimpsed where you’re going, and you will not carry the corpse into that light.

This is where the whole series has been heading, all four weeks of it. We watched the church lay down judgment, and Scripture’s authority, and the very idea of a self that needs saving — and I told you those losses would converge somewhere. They converge here. Strip out everything that makes sin worth killing, and you don’t get a lighter, kinder faith. You get a faith with no verb, no war, no death — and therefore no resurrection, because resurrection is only ever on the far side of a grave. A Christianity that has nothing left to put to death has nothing left to be raised.

So this is the question the whole month was always going to end on. Not what do you believe — you believe plenty. Not how do you feel — you feel constantly. The question is: what are you putting to death, and who are you becoming as it dies?

The culture says become who you are. Scripture says something better, and harder, and truer than anything the age is selling: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self worth having was never behind you, waiting to be expressed. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed.

Be killing sin. It was always the way home.

And I’ll see you there — both of us unrecognizable, both of us finally ourselves.

This closes the June series — four weeks on what the church loses, one doctrine at a time, when it trades hard truth for an easier peace: judgment, the authority of Scripture, the self that needs saving, and now the daily death that was supposed to change us. Thank you for walking the whole arc. If you came in partway, the four read best in order.

A note, because I told you a hard story, and I don’t want you to mishear the ending. I’m restored, not finished. The man who lied on a Thursday is dead, but staying dead is daily work — I still put things to death now, and some of them have my own name on them, as the last few weeks here have made plain. If you saw yourself anywhere in this series, you’re not too far gone, and you’re not behind. You’re just being invited, like I was, into the one work that actually changes anything. It’s slower than you’d like. It’s also the only thing that’s real.

→ If this series meant something to you, send the whole arc to one person. Not the timeline — one person you’ve watched get quieter in their faith, or louder in their activity with less and less underneath it. These four pieces were written for exactly that person, and they were written to be handed over, not broadcast.

Share

→ If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

Subscribe now

→ And one more thing, because the timing matters. Next Monday I’m writing something different — not an essay, a letter. About what this newsletter has become over the last year, who it turned out to be for, and something new I’m opening on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly piece can. If these four weeks were worth your time, that letter is the one to read. I’ll see you there.

“Nothing Left to Raise” is the fourth and final piece of the June arc.

The series in order: [1 — judgment] · [2 — Scripture] · [3 — the self] · [4 — this one].

A fifth question — where all of this is finally going — comes after the launch.