Three. Out of 183.

Meanwhile, Jesus himself asks 307 questions. More than a hundred questions asked for every one he actually answers straight.

Jesus wasn’t running a Q&A booth. He was doing something else entirely, and it turns out that “something else” looks a lot like a skill I spent the past few years learning in a completely different world: sales.

I’ve spent a few years living in two worlds that don’t usually get mentioned in the same sentence: pastoring a church, and working in sales. For a long time I kept those two worlds in separate boxes. One vocabulary for closing a deal, another for talking about Jesus.

Then I started noticing something. A lot of what makes someone good at having an honest, low-pressure conversation in sales is the same thing that makes someone good at having an honest, low-pressure conversation about faith. Not the tactics. The posture underneath them. And it turns out Jesus was doing it long before anyone wrote a book about it.

Here’s what I mean.

Ask Before You Go Deep

Good salespeople don’t open with a pitch. They open with a question that earns the right to keep talking. Something like, “Would it be okay if I asked you a few questions about that?”

Most of us skip this step in faith conversations. We either stay completely silent, or we jump from small talk straight into a spiritual monologue nobody asked for. There’s a better middle path: “Would it be weird if I asked what you think happens after we die?” “Can I ask you something kind of personal?”

That one small move changes everything. Nobody feels ambushed by a question they agreed to answer.

Ask, Don’t Announce

The best salespeople rarely lecture. They ask good questions and let the other person get to their own conclusion.

That’s what Jesus was doing with all those questions. He wasn’t stalling, and he wasn’t dodging. He was letting people arrive somewhere themselves instead of just handing them a conclusion to accept or reject.

The same is true in a spiritual conversation. Instead of leading with answers nobody asked for, ask questions that let someone name their own ache. “What’s been weighing on you lately?” “Do you ever think about that stuff?” Then actually listen to the answer instead of waiting for your turn to talk.

Take the Pressure Off, On Purpose

This might be the most surprising thing I’ve learned, and it’s the biggest key to creating real curiosity instead of resistance.

Sometimes the most disarming thing you can say is something like, “It’s totally fine if this isn’t for you,” and actually mean it. It sounds backwards, but taking away the pressure to say yes usually makes people lean in, not pull away.

I think this is one of the most overlooked truths about evangelism. The moment someone senses you need them to respond a certain way, the conversation starts to feel like a pitch, and people can always feel a pitch coming. Robby Gallaty put it well: some gospel presentations sound a lot like a pyramid scheme business pitch, and people walk away feeling like they got sold something.

Be Upfront About What You’re Doing

Good salespeople set expectations before a conversation instead of steering it secretly. No hidden agenda, no engineering the discussion to land somewhere the other person didn’t sign up for.

The same honesty works in a faith conversation. Something as simple as, “Hey, I’ve got something on my mind I’d love to get your take on sometime,” is a lot more respectful, and a lot more effective, than quietly maneuvering a conversation toward a conclusion you picked in advance.

You’re Not the One Who Has to Close

Here’s the truth underneath all of it: the moment you feel like you need a certain outcome from a conversation, people can sense it, and it pushes them away.

This isn’t just good practice. It’s good theology. Paul wrote it to the church in Corinth long before anyone was studying sales psychology:

You were never the one who saves anyone. You never held that job, and you never will. Your part is smaller, and honestly, easier to carry: plant, or water, and trust God with everything that happens after you leave the conversation.

Letting go of the outcome isn’t just a good communication skill. It’s just good theology.

One Thing This Isn’t

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read all of this and walk away thinking faith is just a better sales pitch, softer, sneakier, more effective. That’s not what I’m saying, and it’s worth being direct about that.

Jesus doesn’t need a PR team. He’s not a product waiting on better marketing, and the gospel isn’t a message that succeeds or fails based on how skillfully we present it. He was fully alive, fully true, and fully worth following long before anyone studied a single sales technique, and he’ll still be exactly that long after every methodology in this article is forgotten.

What I’m actually talking about is something smaller and more personal: how we treat the people in front of us. Whether we’re honest or manipulative. Whether we’re patient or pushy. Whether we actually listen or just wait for our turn to talk. Those postures matter, not because they’ll help us sell Jesus better, but because they’re simply what it looks like to love someone well while you tell them the truth.

The Takeaway

I don’t think it’s an accident that honest, low-pressure conversation works the same way whether you’re talking about a purchase or about Jesus. Manipulation isn’t the only alternative to silence. There’s a better way to have these conversations, one that’s honest, curious, low-pressure, and trusts God with the outcome instead of you.

You don’t need a script. You just need permission, a real question, and the willingness to let someone else arrive at the truth instead of forcing them there.

You’re going to be fine. Not because you’ve got this figured out (you don’t), and not because the plan is going to work out the way you’ve drawn it up. You’re going to be fine because the God you’re chasing was never waiting for you to arrive somewhere before He showed up.

I know that’s not the sermon you want. You want the one where the hustle pays off, the faithfulness gets rewarded on a predictable schedule, and the exhaustion turns out to have been worth it. I don’t have that sermon. I never found one that held up. But here’s what I’d actually tell you, twenty-five years later, if you’d sit still long enough to listen.

If I’m honest about anything, it’s this: you’re a chaser. You always have been. You’ll chase the next platform, the next win, the next version of yourself that finally feels like enough. Some of that chasing will look like ambition. Some of it will look like calling. Most of the time you won’t be able to tell the difference, and neither will anyone watching you.

Ambition and calling aren’t the same thing

You’re going to spend a decade confusing the two. Bigger platform will feel like more faithfulness. It isn’t. Some of the most faithful things you’ll ever do will happen in rooms nobody’s watching, and some of the biggest stages you stand on will do nothing for your soul.

Here’s the part you won’t want to hear: the chasing doesn’t stop because you finally catch something. It stops when you stop needing to.

The burnout won’t look like collapse

You’re picturing burnout as some dramatic breaking point. It’s not. It’s quieter than that. It’s going numb to things that used to wreck you in the best way. It’s showing up Sunday and going through the motions of caring. And for a chaser like you, it sneaks up because you’ll mistake the exhaustion for evidence you’re finally doing something right.

There’s a scene in 1 Kings 19 you’ll come back to more than almost any other passage. Elijah’s just had the biggest spiritual win of his life on Mount Carmel, and one chapter later he’s under a broom tree asking God to let him die. God’s response isn’t a pep talk. It’s food, sleep, more food, and then, finally, a conversation. Before God asks Elijah a single question about his calling, He deals with his body.

You’ll wear tired like a badge for years before you figure out that’s backwards. Rest isn’t what you earn after the work is done. Michael Yaconelli says it better than I can:

“Rest is a decision we make. Rest is choosing to do nothing when we have too much to do, slowing down when we feel pressure to go faster, stopping instead of starting.”

Read that book (Messy Spirituality) sooner than you’re going to. It’ll save you some years.

You don’t owe anyone your certainty

You’re going to spend your twenties trying to have answers for everyone. Someone’s marriage is falling apart, someone’s kid walked away from faith, someone’s parent just died without knowing Jesus, and you’re going to reach for a verse or a phrase that makes it feel resolved. Stop. You’ll spend your thirties learning that “I don’t know” is sometimes the most honest sermon you preach.

The guy in Mark 9 who says “I believe; help my unbelief” isn’t rebuked for the doubt part. Jesus meets him right there, mid-sentence, holding both things at once. You’re allowed to do that too. The people in front of you aren’t looking for someone with no questions. They’re looking for someone honest enough to admit he has them.

Who you are isn’t up for a vote

You’re going to tie your worth to how Sunday went. The energy in the room, the compliments after service, the sense that it landed. That’s going to cost you more than you think, because it means your identity resets every seven days based on a crowd’s reaction.

Paul writes about a thorn he begged God to remove, and the answer wasn’t removal, it was “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). You’re not going to feel strong most weeks. That was never the qualification. Yaconelli again:

“Spirituality isn’t about being finished and perfect; spirituality is about trusting God in our unfinishedness.”

Let that be true of you before you’ve earned the right to believe it.

One more thing

You’re going to think the goal is to arrive somewhere: more settled, more sure, more finished. It’s not. You’re going to chase that feeling for a long time before you realize it doesn’t exist, and that the chasing itself was never the problem. It’s what you were chasing. Twenty-five years from now you’ll still be unfinished, and it’ll turn out that was the point the whole time.

You’ll spend your twenties trying to have answers for everyone. You’ll spend your thirties learning that “I don’t know” is sometimes the most honest sermon you preach.

Start there. It’ll save you a lot of time.

Not people who don’t believe. Not people who hate God.

People.

Somebody who loves God looked at the church and decided there wasn’t room for them there. We should not be okay with that.

Church was supposed to be a table. Somewhere along the way we turned it into a door, and we put ourselves in charge of who gets to walk through it. Come, but clean up first. Come, but agree with us on everything. Come, but don’t ask too many questions. Come, but only if you already look like the rest of us. That is not an invitation. That is an interview. And we did not get this from Jesus.

James stood in front of the whole Jerusalem council in Acts 15 and said something the church still has not fully learned: don’t make it difficult for people who are turning to God. Not “lower the bar.” Not “pretend sin isn’t real.” Just don’t make it difficult. We made it difficult. We made it so difficult that people who love God are opting out of the family of God, and we called it standards.

Here’s where the word gives us away. The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia. Two words fused together. Philos, meaning love or friend. Xenos, meaning stranger or foreigner. Love for the stranger. That word is the direct opposite of xenophobia, fear of the stranger.

Here’s how we actually do the keeping out. We give people labels. Backslidden. Liberal. Unrepentant. Not serious about their faith. Once the label sticks, we don’t have to wrestle with the person anymore. We already know where they stand, so we don’t have to sit with them and find out.

That’s not discernment. That’s a bouncer at a door, checking to see if you’re on the list.

We got so married to our theology and our traditions that we started treating them like the point instead of the path. Doctrine that was supposed to lead us to Jesus started functioning as a velvet rope instead. Get the categories right, use the right words, land on the right side of the right issues, and you’re in. Miss on any of it and we’ve got a label ready for you.

I used to think this fear was about who we don’t want sitting next to us. The wrong crowd. The wrong lifestyle. The wrong politics. Keep them at a distance and the room stays safe.

I don’t think that’s actually it anymore.

I think we’re afraid of what sitting beside them would make us face in ourselves. Because the second you let someone different into your life, close enough to actually know them, you can’t keep your categories as clean as they used to be. You start noticing your own contradictions. You start feeling things you’d rather not feel: guilt, doubt, the possibility that you might have been wrong about something you built your whole identity on.

That’s not comfortable. That’s not safe. So we don’t call it fear. We call it discernment. We call it protecting the church. We call it standing for truth. But underneath the language, it’s the same thing it’s always been. We would rather keep our distance and hand out labels than face what closeness would actually cost us.

Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners so often the religious leaders made it His reputation (Luke 15:1-2). They had labels for those people too. Jesus sat with them anyway. That wasn’t safe for Him. It cost Him His standing with the people who mattered most in that culture. He did it anyway, because the point was never His comfort. If the table was worth that to Jesus, it was never going to stay comfortable for us.

There’s a singer/songwriter named Justin McRoberts who wrote a song called “Safe.” In it, he pictures a version of peace that comes from staying far away from the noisy, needy crowd. Comfortable. Undisturbed. Earned by keeping your distance and calling it faithfulness. Then he asks the question that guts the whole thing: is grace even supposed to be safe? Because if it is, we’ve built something. If it isn’t, we’ve been playing it.

Most churches are not actually afraid of bad theology. We are afraid of what we’d have to see about ourselves if we let the wrong people get close enough to hold up a mirror. So we keep the table small, hand out labels at the door, and call it purity. Jesus called it something else. He called it the Pharisees.

If hospitality is love for the stranger, then the real question isn’t whether someone is ready for church. The real question is whether we’re willing to feel what it costs us to let them in. That means sitting with people whose lives make us uncomfortable, and staying in the discomfort instead of managing it with a label. That means letting someone’s presence expose something in you before you get to explain anything to them. That means admitting the wall was never about them. None of that waters down the gospel. It just gets the gospel out of our hands and back into the hands of the God who invented the table in the first place.

If someone who loves God still believes church isn’t for people like them, that’s not a them problem.

That’s us.

So what label are you handing out right now, and what are you really trying not to feel by handing it out?

Justin McRoberts-Safe

We thought it was beatable. That’s the cruel part. Not that cancer took him. That for a while we actually believed we’d win this one.

The last real conversation I had with him was leaving his hospital room. I told him I’d see him soon. He said, “I don’t know how much time I have.”

Then he looked right at me and said, “But you don’t know how much you have either.”

I’ve thought about that line almost every day since.

Twenty Five Plus Years of Carrying Something That Wasn’t His

For over 25 years, my dad lived out his calling as director of Camp Pinehill Baptist Retreat. If you know camp people, you know what that means. It’s not a job. It’s a life.

But here’s the thing about my dad and that camp: he didn’t own it, and he never acted like he did. He was carrying something other people started long before him. People who showed up on that land and introduced kids to Jesus before he ever walked through those gates himself.

He just picked it up where they left off. And he ran with it for over two decades.

Why I Went Back

It’s been two years since I came through those yellow gates of Pinehill. This time I was helping to lead a group of students from our church for summer camp.

But underneath that, I knew something else was true. I knew it was time for me to go back too. Not just to give students a week away from their normal life, but to let this place do what it does for me.

I didn’t tell most of the students why the trip meant something different for me this time. I just watched them drive-thru the same gates I did, toward the same lake I jumped in as a kid, and felt something settle in me that I hadn’t felt in years.

Four Kids of My Own

My wife and our kids came on this trip too. They’ve been to camp before, this wasn’t new for them.

But this time was different.

I watched them do the same things they always do: make friends, stay up too late laughing about nothing, glide the water on a paddle board, live in that easy, unguarded way kids do at camp. Except this time I was watching all of it through a different lens. I knew what that ground had cost our family, and I knew what it had given us.

My dad carried something forward that wasn’t his. Now my own kids are part of that same story too, even if they don’t fully understand that yet.

That’s not something I planned. It’s just what happens when you go back to a place that shaped you, grieving someone who shaped it, and bring your family along for the ride.

My dad’s fingerprints are everywhere, not because he built a monument to himself, but because he poured himself into something bigger than himself. Staff he trained. Campers he prayed over. Keith and Claire Darnell lead the staff now, still pointing kids to Jesus in the same cabins, on the same trails, under the same sky he loved.

My dad is not there. He never was the one holding it together anyway, and he knew that. The Lord was. The Lord still is.

The Days I Still Want to Call Him

Grief doesn’t move in a straight line.

Some days I’m fine. Some days I still reach for my phone to call him about something dumb: a ballgame, a decision, nothing important. Then I remember.

I still haven’t deleted his number. I don’t think I ever will.

Losing him has been the hardest and most complicated thing I’ve walked through. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or wrap it in a bow. It’s just been hard.

But standing on that camp ground again, something shifted. Not because the grief disappeared. It didn’t. But I could feel, in a way I can’t fully explain, that the Lord heals. Not on our timeline. Not in the way we’d script it.

From Middle Schooler to a Man Bringing Students of His Own

I first walked through those gates as a middle school kid looking for a summer of fun. I had no idea that decades later I’d walk back through them as a grown man, leading a group of teenagers, looking for something a lot deeper myself: healing, and maybe a little closure.

That’s the thing about the places that shape us. They don’t just hold memories. They hold us.

Going back wasn’t about escaping the present. It was about letting God meet me in a place that already knew my story, while it was busy writing new stories for a whole new group of kids, and my family.

My dad told me I didn’t know how much time I had. He was right. None of us do.

So I’m trying to live like it. Trying to carry forward things that aren’t about me, the way he did. Trying to let the Lord use whatever time I’ve got, the way he let camp use his, not to build his name, but to point people to Jesus’s. That’s why I brought those students, and my own kids. Not for me. For them.

Where Love Goes

I still miss him every single day.

The singer/songwriter Stephen Wilson Jr. has a lyric that captures something true:

Grief is just love that no longer has anywhere to go.

All that love I had for my dad didn't disappear when he did. It's still there. It just doesn't have anywhere to land anymore, not the way it used to.

Except that’s not entirely true.

Because I stood at those yellow gates with my family and a new group of kids finding what I found decades ago, and I realized the love didn’t run out of places to go after all. It just found new ones.

It shows up when I watch my own kids walking the nature trails or jumping into the pool. It shows up when I see a teenager from our church meet Jesus on ground that shaped me. It shows up every time someone walks through that gate looking for something they didn’t know they needed, the same way I did as a middle schooler, the same way my dad did for over two decades.

Grief didn’t get the final word. Love found somewhere to go.

Not just grief.

Peace, sitting right next to it.

You know the one. A man is beaten, left for dead on the road. A priest walks by. A Levite walks by. Then a Samaritan, the one nobody expected, stops and helps.

The students prepared their sermons. Then researchers told them to walk across campus to deliver them.

On the way, each student passed a man slumped in an alleyway, clearly in distress.

Here is what happened. The students who were told they had time to spare? Sixty-three percent stopped to help. The students who were told they were running late? Ten percent stopped.

Nine out of ten seminary students, on their way to preach about the Good Samaritan, walked past a suffering person without stopping.1

We Have a Bystander Problem

Psychologists call it the bystander effect. The basic idea is this: the more people present in an emergency, the less likely any single person is to help.

Two things happen in a crowd. First, you assume someone else will step in. Second, you look around, see that nobody else is acting, and conclude it probably is not that serious. If it were serious, somebody would be doing something. Right?

So everyone waits. And nobody moves.

This shows up in emergencies on the street. It shows up in offices and neighborhoods. And if we are honest, it shows up inside the church more than we want to admit.

What Is Actually Going On

Here is what the Princeton study exposed: knowing the right thing does not automatically produce the right action.

These were seminary students. They were studying to be pastors. They had just spent time in the Good Samaritan text. And still, being in a hurry overrode what they knew.

That should make every pastor and every church member uncomfortable. Because we do the same thing.

We study the parable. We say “love your neighbor” and mean it. And then the pace of life, the crowd around us, and the assumption that someone else is probably handling it, all quietly add up. And we walk past.

This is a structural problem in how many churches operate. When responsibility is shared by everyone, it is often owned by no one.

Think about it. How many times have you seen someone struggling in your church, assumed the pastor knew, assumed a small group leader was on it, assumed something was being done? And how many times was nothing being done, because everyone assumed the same thing?

That is the bystander effect..

What Jesus Was Actually Doing in That Parable

The original audience of the Good Samaritan parable would have fully expected the priest and the Levite to stop. They were the qualified ones. The religious ones.

They did not stop.

Then Jesus introduced the Samaritan, who would have been despised by the people listening. And the Samaritan stopped.

Jesus was not just telling a feel-good story about being kind. He was exposing something. He was saying that religious training, correct belief, and proximity to suffering are not enough. At some point, you have to actually stop.

The lawyer who prompted the story asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus flipped the question at the end. He did not answer, “Here is who counts as your neighbor.” He asked, “Which one acted like a neighbor?”

The question was never about who deserves your help. It was about who you are choosing to become.

What to Do With This

This is where most posts give you a list of vague encouragements. Love more. Care deeper. Be present.

That is not enough. The seminary students already believed in caring for others. Belief was not the problem. Busyness and diffusion were the problem.

So here is what is actually useful:

Name the person. Vague concern leads to collective inaction. When you see someone struggling, do not assume care is happening. Ask directly. Call them. Say, “I noticed. How are you?”

Do not wait for the right moment. The hurried seminary students were not callous. They had a conflict between two obligations and chose the scheduled one. That is a real tension. But if you always wait until you are not busy, you will almost never stop.

Say it out loud in the room. In group settings, when someone is clearly in need, someone has to break the silence first. The research shows that once one person acts, others follow. You can be that person. It is uncomfortable for about thirty seconds.

Check in on the ones nobody mentions. The loudest needs get the most attention. The quiet ones often get none. Think about who has not been talked about in a while. That is probably who needs someone to stop.

The Uncomfortable Takeaway

You already know what the right thing is. You probably knew it before you read this.

The question the Princeton study forces is not, “Do you care?” Most people care. The question is whether your actual life, your pace, your assumptions about who else is handling it, is quietly making a bystander out of you.

The Good Samaritan did not have a strategy. He did not form a committee. He saw a person, he stopped, and he helped.

At some point, the sermon has to end and somebody has to stop.

Will that be you?

That’s not a scripture problem. That’s a tradition problem.

We Mistook Inherited for Inspired

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us stopped asking “what does scripture actually say” and started asking “what have I always been told it says.”

Those aren’t the same question. They just feel the same when you’ve never separated them.

Tradition isn’t automatically bad. Some of it holds real wisdom. But tradition was never supposed to outrank scripture, it was supposed to serve it. When that order flips, you get people defending a position with total confidence and zero ability to tell you where in the Bible it actually comes from.

That’s how you end up with Christians using the name of Jesus while living nothing like Him. Not because they’re hypocrites on purpose, but because somewhere they swapped out “what Jesus said” for “what I was taught Jesus meant,” and nobody ever made them check the difference.

My friend Tony has a word for this: untangling

Not deconstruction. Untangling.

Deconstruction has become a loaded word, and honestly, sometimes for good reason. For some people it’s meant walking away from Jesus entirely. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Untangling is different. It’s not tearing the whole thing down. It’s going back through what you were taught and asking, “is this actually what scripture says, or is this just what I inherited?” It’s pulling apart the knot of tradition, culture, and personal interpretation until what’s left is just Jesus.

Even Peter Had to Untangle Something

If anyone had earned the right to be certain, it was Peter.

He walked with Jesus. He preached at Pentecost. He had seen the resurrected Christ with his own eyes. And he had spent his entire life believing certain foods were unclean, not as a preference, but as conviction. That belief was scripture to him. It was identity.

Then in Acts 10, God gives him a vision: a sheet full of animals he’d been taught his whole life to avoid, and a voice telling him to kill and eat. Peter’s response is almost funny. He argues with God. Three times (Seems to be a trend with Peter:) .

God had to repeat Himself three times before Peter would even consider that something he’d never questioned might need to be untangled.

And it wasn’t really about food. While Peter was still puzzling over the vision, men showed up at his door, Cornelius, a Gentile, someone Peter would have been taught his whole life to keep his distance from. The food was never the point. God was untangling something much bigger: who belonged at the table.

Peter wasn’t a hypocrite. He was sincere and convinced, and still wrong about something he’d never thought to examine. It took a vision, a repeated word from God, and a knock at the door before he could see it.

That’s what untangling looks like. Not always a crisis. Sometimes just God patiently knocking on a door you didn’t know needed opening.

Untangling Is Just Dying to Yourself Again

Here’s the part I didn’t see at first: untangling isn’t really an intellectual exercise. It’s a self denial exercise.

It feels like research. It feels like asking good questions. But underneath it, you’re being asked to let go of a version of yourself that was attached to being right.

Jesus said if you want to follow Him, you deny yourself (Luke 9:23). Most of us picture that as giving up a habit or a comfort. We rarely picture it as giving up a belief we built part of our identity on.

But that’s exactly where pride hides.

Some people aren’t actually protecting scripture when they refuse to untangle anything. They’re protecting their own credibility.

James says God opposes the proud (James 4:6). Not corrects. Opposes. That should tell you something about how seriously God takes it when we’d rather defend ourselves than follow Him.

Pride doesn’t always look like arrogance. Sometimes it looks like certainty that refuses to be questioned. Peter had that kind of certainty, sincere and well earned, and God still had to dismantle it.

I’m Writing This From Inside It

I’m a pastor. I’m supposed to have this figured out, right?.

I don’t.

I’m in a season right now where the Holy Spirit is stretching things I assumed were settled. Not the gospel or Jesus. Just the parts I inherited and never actually held up to scripture myself.

It’s humbling. Some days it’s uncomfortable. But I’d rather be stretched by the Spirit than comfortable in something that was never His to begin with.

I think that’s the posture this requires: not me leading the untangling, but following His lead through it. Letting Him set the pace instead of rushing to resolve every tension just so I can feel settled again.

How do you know if it’s healthy

This is the test that matters.

• Is this pulling you closer to Jesus, or further from Him?

• Is this making you more honest, or more cynical?

• Is this leading you to scripture, or away from it?

• Is this producing humility, or just permission?

• Are you willing to be wrong, or just willing to be heard?

Untangling that draws you nearer to Jesus is growth. Deconstruction that ends with you bitter, isolated, and done with Him is something else entirely.

The Challenge

Peter needed a vision, a repeated word, and a knock at the door before he’d let go of something he’d never questioned.

What’s God been repeating to you that you keep arguing with?

Here’s the story.

June 18, 1865

The day before Juneteenth, a man woke up in Texas and went to work.

He didn’t know he was free. He had no reason to think today was any different than yesterday, or the day before that, or the two and a half years before that.

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. By law, by executive order, slavery was finished in the Confederate states. But Texas was remote. Union troops were thin. Some enslavers had relocated to Texas after the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, thinking that relocating might allow them to ignore the abolition decree. And in some cases, enslavers withheld the information until after harvest season.

So life continued as it had. Men, women, and children woke up, worked, and went to sleep in bondage. Not because the law hadn’t changed. Because the news hadn’t arrived. And because the people who stood to lose something made sure it traveled slowly.

It was two years and six months later, on June 19, 1865, that Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered General Order No. 3 announcing the end of legalized slavery in Texas.

The order read: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

Two and a half years after they already were.

Sit With That for a Moment

Freedom had been declared. The law had changed. The war was over.

And people were still living as though none of that was true.

Not because it wasn’t. Because no one had told them.

That is the Juneteenth story. Not a political story. A human one. A story about the gap between what is declared true and what people actually get to experience.

And if you have any familiarity with the Bible at all, that gap should feel familiar.

The Gospel Has the Same Shape

Paul writes in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Declared. Done. By authority higher than any executive order.

And yet people spend their entire lives living as though the news never arrived. Carrying shame that has already been lifted. Performing for an approval that has already been given. Striving for a freedom they already possess.

The problem is not the declaration. The problem is the gap between what is true and what we are living.

Juneteenth is a reminder that the gap is real, that it costs people something, and that someone has to be willing to ride into town and say out loud what should have already been known.

Why the Date Matters

Before you dismiss the date, sit with the story.

More than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865. Already free. Still living as slaves. Because the news was withheld.

It can make you ask what news you might be withholding from someone. What truth you know that someone near you is still waiting to hear. What freedom has already been declared over a person that they haven’t been told about yet.

Juneteenth Is an American Story

It’s the story of what happens when freedom is declared but not delivered. When truth exists but is suppressed. When people are kept in bondage not because the law allows it, but because the people in power prefer it that way.

And it’s the story of what happens when someone finally shows up and tells the truth.

The news was already true. It just needed a voice.

That’s still the job.

Quick question: when’s the last time you read 1 Timothy 2 in context, instead of as a stand-alone proof text?

I did that recently, and it’s changed things for me. I’ve been wrestling with this for a while, and I figure it’s worth saying out loud.

For years I held a pretty standard view on women in ministry: men lead, women support. That’s just what “biblical” meant. But the longer I’ve studied, preached, and actually paid attention to the text, the more that view has started to crack for me.

I’m not writing this to settle anything. Faithful, Bible-loving people land in different places on this, and I’m not interested in calling anyone unfaithful for landing where they have. But I do think the questions deserve more than “that’s just what it says.” So here’s where I’m at, and here’s how I’d respond to the pushback I usually get.

Paul Tells You When He Means Business

Paul has a pattern. When he wants something to carry full, non-negotiable, this-is-from-God weight, he tells you. “Not I, but the Lord.” “This is a trustworthy saying.” “I command you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

He’s not shy about telling you when he’s speaking for God versus just giving his own opinion. He does both, back to back, in the same chapter. In 1 Corinthians 7 he writes, “To the married I give this command, not I, but the Lord” (v.10), then a few verses later, “To the rest I say this, I, not the Lord” (v.12), and later still, “I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment” (v.25).

So when I get to “I do not permit a woman to teach” in 1 Timothy 2, and none of that “this is from God” language is there, I have to ask: is this a rule for every church, everywhere, forever? Or is Paul addressing a specific mess in a specific church?

Then There’s What Paul Actually Does

If “I do not permit” was meant as a rule for every church everywhere, Paul has some explaining to do.

He calls Phoebe a deacon, a real leadership title, not a nice compliment. He says Priscilla helped teach Apollos, and her name comes first, which wasn’t nothing in that culture. He calls Junia “outstanding among the apostles”. He doesn’t flag any of this as an exception or apologize for it. He just says it, like it’s normal.

That’s Paul’s own ministry sitting in tension with how a lot of us have been told to read his words.

“Isn’t This Just Going Along With Culture?”

This is a fair question. Nobody wants to bend Scripture to fit the moment.

But here’s the thing worth sitting with: the traditional reading also has to deal with culture. Paul’s lists of qualifications for church leaders, mature, sober, hospitable, self-controlled, sound a lot like the leadership lists already common in his world. He’s not inventing brand-new categories out of nowhere. He’s using language his readers already knew.

So the real question isn’t “is this shaped by the culture it was written into?” Everything in the Bible was written into a culture. The real question is: what is Paul saying should never change, and what is he just assuming because of the world he lived in?

That’s a harder question than “what does culture say today”, and it’s the one I think actually matters.

What About “Husband of One Wife”?

This is the verse people lean on hardest: a church leader must be the “husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:6). Doesn’t that settle it?

Here’s the thing, almost nobody, even people who hold the traditional view, reads this super literally. Nobody thinks you have to be married to lead (Paul himself wasn’t married). The real meaning is “if you’re married, you’re faithful to your spouse.” It’s basically the ancient version of saying someone is “a one-woman man.” It’s about faithfulness, not about gender.

And if this phrase alone meant only men can lead, it creates a problem just a few verses later, where the same list for deacons clearly includes women too.

This verse is doing real work, it’s about integrity and faithfulness. But it’s probably not a secret code about gender.

“Women Should Remain Silent” — What’s Actually Going On Here

This is probably the verse people are waiting for. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must remain silent... it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church.”

That sounds about as clear-cut as it gets. So let’s slow down and look at it.

First problem: just three chapters earlier, in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul gives instructions for how women should pray and speak out loud in church gatherings. He assumes they’re already doing it, he’s just telling them how to do it well. So it would be strange for him to spend a chapter telling women how to speak in church, and then three chapters later tell them not to speak at all. Either Paul contradicted himself in the same letter, or “be silent” in chapter 14 means something more specific than “never say a word.”

Second thing worth knowing: in some of the oldest copies of this letter we have, these two verses show up in different places, sometimes right where we’d expect, sometimes moved to the very end of the chapter. That’s unusual, and it’s made respected Bible scholars wonder if these verses might have been added later by someone else, not originally written by Paul. N.T. Wright talks about this in his paper Women’s Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis, he points to a well-known textual scholar named Gordon Fee who’s made this case. This isn’t some fringe internet theory, it’s actually mentioned in the footnotes of a lot of study Bibles.

Third: even if Paul did write these words, most scholars don’t think it means “women can never speak in church, period.” The whole chapter is Paul trying to calm down a chaotic worship service, people talking over each other, everyone trying to speak in tongues at once, nobody interpreting. Wright also mentions an idea from another scholar, Ken Bailey, who studied Middle Eastern culture: back then, men and women sat on separate sides during worship. So this might be about women calling out questions across the room to their husbands, which would’ve been disruptive, rather than a total ban on women ever speaking. That reading also doesn’t contradict chapter 11, which the “total ban” reading does.

So where does that leave you? About where the rest of this post has left you. Some careful, faithful readers take 14:34-35 as a permanent rule. Some think it’s addressing one specific problem in one specific church. And some serious scholars think these verses might not have been part of Paul’s original letter at all. What doesn’t really hold up, though, is the simple version, “the Bible just says women can’t talk in church”, when Paul’s own letter, just three chapters earlier, assumes they already are.

“Jesus Chose 12 Male Apostles”

True, and it matters. But let’s think about what that actually proves.

The twelve apostles had a one-time, can’t-be-repeated job. They were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and they represented the twelve tribes of Israel being restored. That’s a unique role in history, not a job description for “pastor” that gets handed down forever.

If the fact that they were all men sets a permanent rule, we’d also have to ask why they were all Jewish and all from the same region, and nobody thinks those are permanent rules.

Meanwhile, look at who Jesus picks to deliver the resurrection news, the most important news in the whole Bible. Women. In a culture where a woman’s word wasn’t even considered valid enough to use in court. That’s not a small detail. If Jesus were just going along with his culture’s view of women, that scene makes no sense.

The twelve apostles tell us something important. They’re just not enough, by themselves, to build a permanent rule about who can lead.

“But This Is How It’s Always Been”

For most of church history, almost all pastors and leaders have been men. Doesn’t that long track record mean something?

Maybe, but maybe not what it looks like at first. A long track record often shows what a culture allowed, not what the Bible actually requires. For most of history, women, like most regular people, had no access to education, no legal rights, and no platform, no matter how gifted or called they were.

But when women did get the chance, Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia in the New Testament, and plenty of women throughout the history of missions and revivals since, they show up doing exactly this kind of ministry.

“This is how it’s always been done” has been true about a lot of things the church has rethought over time. A long tradition deserves to be heard. But it’s not the same thing as a command from God.

Where I Land

So here’s where I’ve landed, plainly: I stand with women in ministry.

Not as a concession to culture. Not because I think people who disagree are unfaithful, I don’t, and I’ve tried to show that throughout this post. But because when I follow Paul’s own words, Paul’s own ministry partnerships, and where the whole story of Scripture seems to be heading, this is where it leads me. Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia weren’t exceptions the early church awkwardly tolerated. I believe they’re a picture of what God intended all along.

This matters to me because it isn’t just an academic question. There are women in our church, and women I love, with real gifts for teaching, leading, and shepherding, and I don’t want a tradition standing between those gifts and the body of Christ, if Scripture itself doesn’t put it there.

But I’ve stopped being satisfied with “that’s just what it says” when the text itself seems to be doing something more complicated than that. When I look at what Paul actually says, what Paul actually does, and where the whole story of the Bible seems to be heading, I find myself asking a harder question: are we defending what the Bible says, or a tradition that got built on top of it?

If you want to go deeper, here are a couple of places to start.

For the traditional view, made by people who hold it carefully and seriously: Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (free PDF) has chapters specifically on the passages I covered here.

For the case I’m leaning toward, told as one pastor’s honest journey through the whole Bible on this topic: From Genesis to Junia by Preston Sprinkle. He started where a lot of us did, took years to work through it, and changed his mind — and he’s fair to both sides along the way.

Neither of these will tell you what to think. But they’ll show you this is a conversation worth having, not a question that was already closed.

Crash tests revealed the fuel system’s vulnerabilities at speeds as low as 20 mph. In some tests, the fuel tank ruptured and spilled dangerous amounts of fuel. A simple fix existed: an $11-per-car improvement that would prevent fiery deaths in rear-end collisions. Factual AmericaAutosafety

Ford ran the numbers and passed on the fix.

Internal memos showed Ford used a cost-benefit analysis to justify this decision, valuing potential lawsuits and settlements as less costly than redesigning the fuel system. Because the $137 million cost of the safety improvement outweighed the $49.5 million benefit of the redesign, Ford decided to push ahead with the original design. Factual AmericaStudocu

People died.

But here’s the thing most people miss about this story. It wasn’t just greed. It was a bias problem. Ford was a respected, successful, iconic American company. They had built decades of credibility, and that credibility made it easier to trust their internal math without asking harder questions. The halo was bright. Nobody looked past it.

That is the Halo Effect. And it is not just a corporate problem.

What the Halo Effect Actually Is

The Halo Effect is when one positive thing about a person, or an institution, causes us to assume everything else about them is good too. One strong impression bleeds into how we evaluate everything.

The flip side is the Horn Effect. One negative thing, and suddenly the whole person is suspect. The label attaches, and we stop looking.

Both of them feel like discernment. Neither of them is.

They are shortcuts. And shortcuts, especially with people, are dangerous.

The Pharisees Had the Brightest Halo in the Room

If you want to see the Halo Effect operating at full strength, read the Gospels.

The religious leaders had real credentials. They fasted twice a week, tithed everything down to their garden herbs, and knew the law better than anyone in the room. That track record was not nothing. It was genuinely impressive public behavior.

And the crowd responded exactly the way the Halo Effect predicts. Visible religious performance got read as internal spiritual health. The halo was bright, so people stopped looking past it.

Jesus didn’t stop looking.

In Matthew 23, He calls them whitewashed tombs. Clean on the outside, full of death on the inside. He says they shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces. He says they travel to make a single convert and make that person worse off than before.

That is a devastating critique of people who had everyone else fooled.

And here is the uncomfortable part: they were not faking the religious activity. They really did all of it. The fasting. The tithing. The teaching. But in John 5:39-40, Jesus said they studied Scripture constantly and still missed the point entirely. They had the practice without the Person.

The halo was real. The fruit was not.

The Horn Effect Has Its Own Body Count

The woman caught in adultery got dragged into the center of a crowd (John 8:1-11). She didn’t need an introduction. The label arrived before she did. And everyone in that crowd was certain about who she was, what she deserved, and what should happen next.

Jesus drew in the dirt and said, “The one without sin, throw the first stone.”

They all left.

Then He looked at her and said, “I don’t condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

He did not ignore the sin. He also refused to let one moment become her permanent sentence.

The disciples did the same thing with Paul. When word spread that he had converted, they didn’t believe it (Acts 9:26). The man had been hunting Christians. He had watched Stephen get stoned. The horn was attached, and honestly, it made sense. But Barnabas took a risk. He said, here is what actually happened. Give him a hearing.

The rest is history.

Why This Is a Church Problem

Because the church is full of people, and people do this constantly.

We give platforms to people with polished images and compelling stories, and we never look past the halo. We quietly write off people with complicated pasts, and we never look past the horn.

In both cases, we are making judgments based on incomplete information. Which means we are not practicing discernment. We are practicing bias with a spiritual vocabulary layered on top.

Proverbs 18:17 says the first person to state his case always seems right, until someone comes and cross-examines him. That is a warning about how fast we lock into a story and stop asking questions.

Jesus said you will know them by their fruit (Matthew 7:16). Not their reputation. Not their platform. Not one great moment or one terrible one. Fruit takes time to observe. It requires patience, honest attention, and a willingness to stay curious when the easy label is already available.

Some Honest Checkpoints

• When someone is praised: Ask what you actually know about their character, not just their performance. Visible faithfulness is worth something. It is not worth everything.

• When someone has failed: Ask what has happened since. Growth is real. Repentance is real. One moment is not the whole story.

• When you feel certain about a person: That certainty is worth questioning. Certainty that stops asking questions is not wisdom. It is a shortcut.

• When you are about to repeat something about someone: Ask if you have the full picture, or just the version that confirms what you already believe.

None of this means you ignore real patterns. A track record matters. Consistent fruit matters. Character over time matters.

But a track record is not the same as a snapshot. And a snapshot is not the same as a verdict.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Who have you written off based on one thing? And who have you given a permanent pass to based on one thing?

Because both of those people deserve more than a halo or a horn. They deserve what you would want someone to give you: honest attention, patient observation, and enough grace to be seen as more than your worst moment or your best one.

That is harder than a quick read.

It is also a lot closer to how Jesus actually engaged people.

He saw through the halo. He looked past the horn. And He still managed to love people clearly, without being naive about them.

That is the standard. It is a high one. But it is the one He set.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)

Solomon was one of the wisest people who ever lived. And one of the things he was clearest about was this: you were not built to do life alone. Not marriage. Not hard seasons. Not the ordinary weight of being a human being trying to follow Jesus in a complicated world.

You need people.

But not just any people. The right people.

And that distinction matters more than most of us want to admit.

Filled or Drained

Here is something most people already know but rarely say out loud.

Some relationships fill you up. You walk away from them feeling refocused, refueled, and more like yourself than when you arrived. You can say the hard thing. You can be honest about where you actually are. And the person across from you does not flinch.

Other relationships drain you. You leave feeling guarded, depleted, and vaguely like you just performed a version of yourself rather than actually showed up. Nothing was technically wrong. But something was definitely off.

You already know which relationships are which. You feel it every time.

What you may not have considered is how much that difference is shaping your mental and emotional health over time.

This Is a Mental Health Issue

Most people think of mental health in clinical terms. Anxiety. Depression. Burnout. Those things are real and they deserve to be taken seriously.

But a lot of what quietly erodes mental and emotional health is relational. It is the slow drain of being around people who take more than they give. It is the exhaustion of never being fully known. It is carrying weight that was never meant to be carried alone because you have never built relationships where you can actually set it down.

Proverbs 12:25 says, “Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up.”

The right words from the right people at the right moment carry real weight. They do not solve everything. But they change something.

The right people in your life are not a luxury. They are part of how God designed you to stay healthy.

What the Right People Actually Look Like

My wife Allison and I have a handful of people in our lives who have been with us through the highs and the lows. Mark and Heather are two of them. Long tenured. Seen the good versions of us and the harder ones. Never cared about my role or my title. Just showed up and stayed. They have celebrated alongside our kids and we have done the same. We have lived a lot of life together.

When I walk away from time with those people I feel two things consistently: refocused and refueled.

I feel brought back to myself.

That is what the right people do.

And here is what that actually looks like in practice for me, because I think most people overcomplicate it.

With my friends…We text. We grab lunch. We meet for coffee. We use the Marco Polo app to send voice and video messages when life does not allow for sitting across a table. We find ways to stay in contact regularly because intentionality is the only thing that keeps relationships from drifting.

Nothing is off the table. We encourage each other. We challenge each other. We laugh, a lot, and that matters more than people realize. Proverbs 17:22 says a cheerful heart is good medicine. Joy is not a distraction from the serious work of friendship. It is part of it.

No formal agenda. Just people who keep showing up for each other consistently.

The format is not the point. The consistency is.

Not Everyone Who Calls You Friend Is One

This needs to be said honestly.

Some people are present in your life because of what they can get from being close to you. And when you are no longer useful, they drift. You know who these people are. You feel it after every interaction. Drained. Slightly less yourself than before.

The wrong people do not just fail to fill you. They actively deplete you. And if you are surrounded by enough of them for long enough, that depletion starts to look like depression, burnout, or anxiety when really it is the cost of chronic relational poverty.

This is not a reason to become cynical about people. It is a reason to become intentional about who you let close.

Not everyone gets the same level of access to your life.

How to Start Building the Right Relationships

The best friendships in my life developed over time, around shared experience and genuine interest in each other. You cannot manufacture that. But you can create conditions for it.

A few honest starting points:

• Show up without an agenda. The right friendships form when you are genuinely interested in another person, not in what they can do for you. Be that kind of person first.

• Give it time. Real friendship is not built in a season. It is built over years of showing up, being honest, and staying when things get inconvenient.

• Find people who know you, not just your role. If everyone in your inner circle knows you primarily by your job title, your family situation, or your social media version of yourself, that is a gap worth addressing. You need people who know your name before they know your resume.

• Be honest first. The fastest way to build real friendship is to be real first. Not performatively vulnerable, just honest. The right people will meet you there.

• Stay in contact consistently. Use whatever works. Text, coffee, lunch, Marco Polo. The method does not matter. The consistency does.

• Let Ecclesiastes be your standard. Find people who will lift you up when you fall. And be that person for someone else.

The Closing Thought

Jesus did not do life with everyone equally.

He had the crowds. He had the seventy. He had the twelve. And within the twelve He had three, Peter, James, and John, who were closest when the moments mattered most.

Even Jesus had an inner circle.

You are not meant to be equally available to everyone. You are meant to have a few people who actually know you. People who leave you refocused and refueled. People who will sit with you in the hard moments and laugh with you in the good ones. People who show up and stay.

Solomon said it plainly. Two are better than one.

Not because one is not enough spiritually. But because God built you for real connection. The kind that costs something and gives back more.

If you have those people, protect those relationships. Do not let busyness erode them. Keep nothing off the table.

If you do not have those people yet, start moving toward them. Be the kind of friend you are looking for. Give it time. And trust that God, who said it is not good for man to be alone, is not indifferent to your loneliness.

The right people change everything.

Go find them.

It almost never works at the professional level. It is bold, it is rare, and when it does work, nobody forgets it.

Yogi Berra was the Yankees catcher that day. He was certain he had Robinson tagged out. The umpire disagreed. Yogi argued.

And then for the next sixty years, every time he walked past a photo of the play at his museum, he would mutter, “You’re out.” When Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s wife and lifelong keeper of his legacy, would see Yogi at events, they had the same exchange every single time.

“Safe,” she would say.

“Out,” he would say.

Warmly. Every time. For sixty years.

Yogi was there. He was the catcher. He had a real angle and real skin in the game.

Most of us, when we form strong opinions about other people’s conflicts, are not Yogi.

We are forty rows back, just as certain.

Here Is How It Actually Happens

Someone you trust tells you their version of a conflict. You feel the weight of their hurt. They seem credible. You care about them. And before you have talked to anyone else, before you have asked a single question of anyone on the other side, you have already made the call.

Out.

And you were not even at the plate.

This is how gossip works. Not always through malice. Usually through proximity. Someone who is hurting tells their story to someone they trust. That person carries it to someone else. By the time it reaches you, it is a highlight reel with no context, no other perspective, and no invitation to find out more.

You just received someone’s edited version of a play you were not there for.

And here is what makes it spiritually dangerous: a half-truth does not feel like a half-truth. It feels exactly like the truth. It lands with full weight. It sounds completely reasonable. That is what makes it so damaging.

What the Bible Actually Says About This

This is not a new problem. The Bible addresses it directly.

Proverbs 18:17 says the first to state his case seems right until the other side is heard. That is not a criticism. It is just an honest observation about human nature. Of course the first version sounds convincing. You have not heard anything else yet.

Jesus was practical about this in Matthew 18. He did not say talk to everyone except the person involved. He said go to the person. Directly. First. Not after you have already told three other people what you think happened. First.

Proverbs 26:20 puts it plainly: without wood, a fire goes out. Without gossip, conflict dies down.

Every time we pass along an incomplete story, we are adding wood to a fire we may not fully understand. And fires do not stay where you put them.

The Damage Is Real

When half-truths circulate unchallenged, real people get hurt.

Not just the people the story is about. The people hearing it get hurt too. They are asked to carry a weight, form a judgment, and pick a side based on information that is incomplete at best and distorted at worst.

It creates confusion in communities where trust is supposed to be the foundation. It makes people question things they do not have enough information to actually evaluate. And it is incredibly hard to undo. You can correct a rumor, but you cannot un-plant the seed of doubt it left behind.

That is not neutral. That is not just people processing their hurt. That is damage.

So What Do You Actually Do?

This is not complicated. It is just uncomfortable.

• When someone brings you a story about a conflict, ask who they have talked to directly. Not to shut them down, but because you actually want to understand what happened before you form an opinion.

• Before you land on a strong verdict, go to the source. If the story involves a leader, a friend, or a community you are part of, the people closest to the situation deserve to be heard before you decide what you think.

• When you hear something that does not add up, say so. You do not have to debate anyone. You can simply say, “I do not think I have the full picture. Have you talked to them directly?”

• Ask yourself what you are getting out of the certainty. Sometimes a strong opinion feels good because it gives us something solid to hold. But if it is built on one side of a story, it is not solid ground. It is just comfortable.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Yogi Berra and Rachel Robinson greeted each other the same way for sixty years. “Safe.” “Out.” And they did it warmly. Neither of them made being right the whole point of the relationship.

Most of us cannot say the same. We receive one version of a play we were not there for, and we hold it, defend it, and sometimes build a whole narrative around it without ever going to the source.

Before you call it: Were you at the plate? Have you heard from everyone involved? Have you actually gone to the people closest to the situation and asked what happened?

Because you might be right. But you also might be forty rows back, holding a verdict on a play you never actually saw.

Five words that can mean almost anything.

They can mean someone wrestled with God for weeks, surrendered what they wanted, and came out the other side with an answer that cost them something. That is real prayer. That is the kind that shows up in the Psalms and the Garden of Gethsemane and the life of every person who has ever genuinely sought God.

But if we are being honest, those five words can also mean something else entirely.

Sometimes “I prayed about it” means: I wanted something, I asked God to agree with me, I felt okay about it eventually, and now I have spiritual cover for whatever I was going to do anyway.

That is not prayer. That is using God as a notary.

Let Me Be Honest About My Own History First

Before I say anything else, I need to put my own story on the table.

Growing up, prayer for me was mostly a list. Things I needed. Things I was supposed to pray for. Bless my family. Help me with this. Be with the missionaries. Amen. It was structured and sincere enough, but if I am being straight about it, it was more routine than relationship. I was talking at God, not with Him. He was on the receiving end of a transaction, not a conversation.

Then came the other version, which is harder to admit.

There were moments in my life where I had already decided what I wanted to do. An opportunity I wanted to pursue, a direction I had already leaned into privately. And instead of actually praying about it, I wrapped the words “I prayed about it” around whatever I had already decided. Not to deceive God. He already knew. But to keep people from asking questions. To close the conversation before it started. To make it clear that God had signed off, so there was nothing left to discuss.

That is not prayer. That is using the language of prayer as a tool to avoid accountability.

And I do not think I am alone in that.

What Is Actually Happening

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Most of us learned to pray in a way that is more about information management than actual conversation with God.

We bring Him the decision we have mostly already made. We present our case. We wait until we feel a sense of peace, which often just means our anxiety settled down enough that the thing feels doable. And then we move forward and call it Spirit-led. Dallas Willard described prayer this way:

“Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.”

Together. Not you presenting a proposal and waiting for the stamp of approval.

The problem is that real prayer, the kind Willard describes, requires you to walk in genuinely open to an answer you did not script. And that is harder than it sounds. Because most of the time, by the time we “pray about it,” we already know what we want. The prayer becomes less of a conversation and more of a formality.

The Test That Cuts Through the Noise

C.S. Lewis nails the problem in Letters to Malcolm. He writes:

“It is no use to ask God with earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

That is sharp. Lewis is not saying do not bring your desires to God. He is saying do not dress them up. Do not perform surrender while quietly clutching the wheel.

James 4:3 says it even more directly: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.”

James is being honest about a pattern that is very human and very common. We bring our agenda into the room and call it prayer.

So here is the honest test: did the prayer change anything?

Not the outcome. You.

Did it change your mind, your timeline, your posture, your willingness to hear no? Did you walk out of it different than you walked in? Did it cost you anything at all?

If prayer never surprises you, never challenges you, and never asks anything of you, it might be worth asking what you are actually doing when you do it.

What Real Prayer Actually Looks Like

This is not a call to make prayer more complicated or more religious. It is a call to make it more honest.

A few things worth sitting with:

• Bring what is actually in you. Not the polished version of your request. If you want the job, the relationship, the outcome, say so. God is not impressed by spiritual framing. He already knows what is in you.

• Stay in it long enough to be changed. Real prayer is not always fast. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, they were not asking for a formula. They were asking to be inducted into a practice. That takes time and it takes showing up even when nothing feels like it is happening.

• Watch for resistance. If a direction in prayer makes you uncomfortable, that is worth paying attention to. Discomfort in prayer is often where the actual work is being done.

• Let trusted people in. If you are making a major decision and only your own private prayer is informing it, that is a gap worth examining. Proverbs 15:22 says plans fail without counsel. God often speaks through community, not just in quiet moments alone. And if you find yourself using “I prayed about it” to shut down the people closest to you, that is a sign, not a green light.

• Ask whether you are actually willing to hear no. If the honest answer is no, that tells you something important about who is really running the decision.

The Closing Thought

Jesus modeled what real prayer looks like the night before the cross.

He did not walk into Gethsemane with peace already in his pocket. He sweat blood. He asked for another way. And then He said: “Not my will, but yours.”

That is the posture. Not passive, but genuinely open to an answer that might not be what you came in wanting. That prayer changed nothing about the cross. But it changed everything about how He walked toward it.

Prayer is not a tool for getting God to bless what you have already decided. It is the place where you find out what He actually thinks, and where you become the kind of person who can handle the answer.

So yes, pray about it.

Just make sure you actually do.

That assumption is wrong, and it might be one of the most dangerous things sitting quietly inside the American church right now.

The Problem

You can win a theological argument and lose your soul in the same conversation.

You can quote the right verses, hold the right positions, and defend the right doctrine while being cold, proud, and completely unavailable to the people around you.

That is not a hypothetical. That is a pattern. And if you have spent any time in church circles, you have probably seen it up close.

Maybe you have even been it.

What Is Actually Going On

Let’s be clear about something before we go any further.

Studying Scripture is not optional. It is not a nice add-on for people who really want to go deep. It is vital. Non-negotiable. You cannot follow someone you do not know, and you cannot know Jesus apart from the Word. Paul tells Timothy that Scripture is “God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16) Jesus himself pushed back on the enemy with Scripture. The early church was built on it. Your theology matters. What you believe about God shapes everything, how you treat people, how you handle suffering, how you make decisions, how you live.

So this is not a case against studying. This is a case against stopping there.

Because knowledge about God and actually knowing God are not the same thing.

Paul makes this personal in Philippians 3:10. He says, “I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings.”

Think about who is writing that. This is not a new believer feeling inspired at a conference. This is a man who studied under Gamaliel, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of his era. A man who had already planted churches across the Roman world, been beaten with rods, shipwrecked three times, and spent years in prison for his faith. If anyone had earned the right to say “I’ve arrived,” it was Paul.

And he is still leaning forward.

That word “know” in Greek is “ginōskō.” It is not academic knowledge. It is relational, lived-in, experiential knowledge. The kind you do not get from a commentary alone. The kind you only get by actually being with someone over time, through hard things, through real life.

Paul is not saying he wants to understand more facts about Jesus. He is saying he wants to go deeper into a person.

That is a completely different posture.

The Pharisees are the uncomfortable mirror here. They were not theologically sloppy. They had memorized entire books of Scripture. They could debate the law at a level most of us will never reach. And Jesus looked at them and said, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” (John 5:39-40)

They had the map. They refused to take the trip.

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.”
A.W. Tozer

What Paul describes in Philippians 3 is exactly that. Not arriving. Pursuing. The goal of studying Scripture was always to lead you into something, not just inform you about it.

James 2:19 adds the final edge. “You believe that God is one. Good. Even the demons believe, and they shudder.”

Demons have clean theology. They know exactly who Jesus is. It does not change them at all.

That should make us uncomfortable.

Information informs. Formation is something else entirely.

Here is the honest question: are you studying God, or are you actually spending time with Him?

Because those two things can look identical from the outside and feel completely different on the inside.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Theological correctness without spiritual depth tends to produce a few specific things:

• Confidence without compassion. You know you are right, but you have stopped caring about the person you are talking to.

• Criticism without fruit. You can spot what is wrong with every church, every sermon, every Christian, but the people closest to you are not becoming more loved.

• Busyness without presence. You are doing things for God while quietly drifting from God.

• Correctness as identity. Being right has become more important than being formed. You protect your positions more than you examine your heart.

None of this means theology is unimportant. Doctrine matters. Truth matters. But truth was never meant to be a trophy. It was meant to be a doorway.

What To Actually Do About It

This is not a call to study less. It is a call to let what you study do what it is supposed to do.

A few honest checkpoints:

• Ask yourself what your theology is producing. Not in your arguments, in your life. Are you becoming more patient, more honest, more loving, more like Jesus? If the answer is mostly no, something is off.

• Get honest about the gap between what you believe and how you live. Most of us have a bigger gap than we want to admit. That gap is where the real work is.

• Read the Bible to be changed, not just informed. Speed-reading for content is different from sitting with what the text is asking of you. Slow down. Let it land.

• Stay in real relationships. Spiritual depth does not happen in isolation. It happens in friction, forgiveness, and showing up for people over time. If your theology is not being tested by real relationships, it is probably still just theory.

• Pray like you actually need God. Not as a box to check, but as someone who is genuinely dependent. If your prayer life is thin, that is usually a sign that you are running on your own understanding and calling it faith.

The Honest Takeaway

Correct theology is a good foundation. It is not a finished house.

You can build the right foundation and never actually live in the building. You can know every fact about a person and still be a stranger to them.

“We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.” AW Tozer

Study the Word. Know it deeply. Let it shape how you think. And then let it do what it was always designed to do: lead you into an actual, living, ongoing relationship with the God it points to.

The goal was never just to be right about God.

It was always to actually know Him.

And those two things, close as they look, are not the same.

Not in an obvious, angry way. It was subtler than that. It showed up as criticism that felt justified. Comments that felt insightful. A posture that felt mature, like I had finally seen behind the curtain and was just calling it what it was.

It was only a few weeks ago that I actually saw it for what it was. My cynicism wasn’t clarity. It was a bandage over a wound I hadn’t let heal.

It gave me a way to feel smart about my pain without actually dealing with it. And honestly, it worked for a while. Until I started noticing what it was slowly doing to me.

That’s what cynicism does. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly moves in, rearranges the furniture, and convinces you it was always supposed to look this way.

Cynicism rarely starts as rebellion

Most cynical people didn’t wake up wanting to be cold. They got hurt, got tired, and stopped staying tender.

Think about Peter. After the resurrection, he went back to fishing (John 21:3). Not because he loved fishing. Because he didn’t know what to do with his own failure. Disappointment has a way of pulling you backward, toward the familiar and away from the hopeful. Before long, doubt starts masquerading as experience and distance starts looking like wisdom.

Elijah did the same thing. Right after one of the greatest miracles in the Old Testament, he ran into the wilderness, collapsed under a tree, and told God, “I’ve had enough” (1 Kings 19:4). Burnout and disillusionment can drop even the most faithful people.

Cynicism is usually disappointment that never got dealt with.

It feels wise. It usually isn’t.

There’s a line I keep coming back to: cynicism feels like wisdom, but it usually grows from wounds.

Cynicism tells you that you’re no longer gullible. That you’re too experienced to be fooled again. That you’re finally seeing people for who they really are. But here’s the problem: cynicism doesn’t just protect your heart. It can poison it.

Proverbs 14:10 says, “The heart knows its own bitterness.” Bitterness and cynicism are close cousins. Both feel justified. Both do damage quietly. And Hebrews 12:15 warns that bitterness, left unchecked, defiles not just you but the people around you: “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”

A cynical heart spreads.

“The human heart is the most important real estate in the universe. Whatever sits on the throne of your heart runs your life.” — Louie Giglio

A guarded heart is not the same as a hard heart

Solomon nailed it in Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Notice what he said. He didn’t say shut down your heart. He didn’t say protect yourself from everybody. He said guard it, because your heart is the source of everything: your relationships, your decisions, your capacity to love and be loved.

Guarding your heart means protecting what’s holy in you without losing tenderness, wisdom, or the ability to actually love people. There’s a real difference between a guarded heart and a hard heart. One is wisdom. The other is damage.

Think of your heart like a city with a wall. A guarded city has gates. It lets the right things in, keeps the wrong things out, and functions well because of that. A hard city doesn’t have gates. It has no walls at all, just rubble from every hit it ever took, with nothing protecting what matters most.

God never asked us to live behind rubble. He asked us to steward what He gave us.

If you don’t deal with pain, pain will disciple you

This is the part that should concern us most.

Unhealed disappointment shapes your outlook in ways you don’t always notice right away. You start reading motives into everything. You assume people are fake. You roll your eyes more. You celebrate less. You trust less. And one day you wake up and realize you’ve become someone smaller than who you were.

Paul warned about this in Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That word “conformed” carries the idea of being pressed into a mold. Pain and cynicism are one of the world’s most effective molds. If you don’t actively resist it, it will shape you.

That’s not maturity. That’s a wound that’s been running the show.

Jesus wasn’t naive, but He wasn’t cynical either

Jesus saw people clearly. He knew what was in the heart of man (John 2:24-25). He wasn’t surprised by betrayal, denial, or abandonment. He saw it coming.

And yet He kept loving. He kept healing. He kept calling people by their potential instead of their failures. He looked at Peter, the guy who would deny him three times, and called him “the rock” (Matthew 16:18).

That’s the model. You can be discerning without being harsh. Wise and tender are not opposites.

Pay attention to what’s shaping your heart

What are you feeding on all day? Outrage? Drama? Constant criticism? Petty comment sections are basically a fast track to soul rot.

Philippians 4:8 is almost annoyingly practical here: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.”

That is not naive positivity. That is intentional stewardship of your mind. What you keep feeding will keep forming you. Your heart doesn’t stay soft by accident. It takes effort and intention.

Here’s a simple gut check: What are the last five things you consumed today, news, social media, conversations, content? What posture did they leave you in? If the answer is angrier, more suspicious, or more hopeless, that’s not clarity. That’s contamination.

Soft hearts are strong hearts

Tender doesn’t mean weak.

David is one of the most celebrated warriors in the entire Bible. He defeated giants, led armies, and conquered kingdoms. And he was also the man who wept openly, wrote raw and honest poetry, danced in the streets, and called God his shepherd (Psalm 23). That combination, strength and tenderness together, is what made him a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22).

A soft heart can forgive. A soft heart can repent. A soft heart can still feel, still respond, still love. That kind of heart takes real strength. Hardness isn’t toughness. It’s damage.

The goal isn’t to become gullible

The goal isn’t to pretend pain isn’t real. The goal is to stay open to God, soft toward people, and grounded in truth without letting disappointment turn you into someone hard, bitter, and joyless.

James 1:2-4 reminds us that trials are not meant to harden us but to complete us: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

Trials are supposed to produce perseverance, not poison. But that only happens when we bring them to God instead of letting them pile up and quietly shape us.

A few weeks ago I had to do exactly that. I had to stop, name what I was actually carrying, and let God into the wound instead of covering it up with commentary.

It wasn’t comfortable. But it was the only thing that actually helped.

You don’t have to let pain write the final version of you.

Guard your heart. Not with walls that keep everybody out, but with wisdom that keeps cynicism from taking over. Because a soft heart in a hard world isn’t weakness. It’s one of the rarest and most powerful things you can offer.

“Smile with your teeth
Your bruises make a lovely accessory
Have some guts kid, this is ministry.”

A friend of mine sent me those lyrics this week, and they carried a weight I had not felt before.

Over the years, I have seen the highs and the lows in ministry. I have had moments where I thought, I could do this for the rest of my life. I have also had moments where, without the right people around me, I might have walked away. Welcome to ministry.

If you have been there, Galatians 6:9 stops sounding like a nice Christian slogan and starts sounding like oxygen: “Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.” Some weeks, that is not a verse you underline. It is a verse you hang onto.

Ministry will mark you

I love ministry.

There is nothing like preaching the gospel, walking with people through pain, watching someone take a real step toward Jesus, or seeing life change up close. It is a privilege to do this work.

It is also costly.

Ministry will stretch you, expose you, and wear on parts of you that people never see. It will hand you joy and heartbreak, sometimes in the same week. If you care deeply, this work will leave a mark.

I have preached with a full heart and I have preached while carrying weight I could not talk about from the stage.

That is why those Gable Price and Friends lyrics landed.

Smile with your teeth

“Smile with your teeth…”

Sometimes the smile is just you deciding not to quit.

That is ministry too. Not just the sermons that connect, the wins you celebrate, or the stories you tell later. Sometimes ministry is simply showing up when your heart is tired and trusting God to meet you there.

Your bruises make a lovely accessory

“Your bruises make a lovely accessory…”

Bruises are not lovely. They are bruises.

I remember deciding to drop in on a four-foot skate ramp once, despite the tiny detail that I had never skateboarded in my life. It looked easy until it very much was not. I hit the hardwood, bruised up my whole side, and could not sleep on my right side for a week.

Bruises have a way of reminding you what happened.

Ministry does too. Not always physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The bruises show up in disappointment, criticism, misunderstanding, betrayal, and the slow weight of carrying people while trying to stay healthy yourself.

They come from disappointment, pressure, criticism, misunderstanding, betrayal, and the slow wear of carrying people while trying to stay healthy yourself.

Theologian Charles Spurgeon put it this way: “Who can bear the weight of souls without sometimes sinking to the dust?”

If you stay in ministry long enough, you will get bruised. Not because you are failing, but because this work is real. People are real. And loving people always costs something.

The bruises are not the goal. They are not a badge of honor. But they are often part of the cost of staying in it long enough to love people well.

Have some guts kid

“Have some guts kid…”

That part made me laugh a little, mostly because some days blunt is exactly what you need.

Because ministry takes guts.

It takes guts to tell the truth when it would be easier to stay vague.
It takes guts to stay tender when cynicism would be easier.
It takes guts to keep showing up when your heart is tired.
It takes guts to apologize when you get it wrong.
It takes guts to keep loving people without letting pain turn you cold.

It looks like prayer, faithfulness, and doing the next right thing when nobody sees the internal battle.

The right people matter

One thing I know after more than two decades in ministry, nobody makes it on calling alone.

You need the right people around you. People who can tell when you are tired. People who care about your soul more than your role. People who help hold you steady when ministry starts messing with your head.

I know that because I have needed those people.

There have been moments where the presence of the right people kept me from making a decision in exhaustion that I would have regretted later. That matters more than most leaders want to admit.

Calling matters. No question. But the right people around you can make the difference between pushing through a hard season and walking away from something God never told you to leave.

This is ministry

“…this is ministry.”

Not the polished version. The real one.

Ministry is joy and heartbreak, purpose and pressure, laughter and heaviness. It is beautiful work, but it is not light work.

Maybe that is why those lyrics landed on me this week. Because ministry has a way of reminding you that you are not the Savior, and that is good news.

You were never meant to carry everything. You were never meant to be unshakable.

Ministry is one of the quickest ways to learn how much you need Jesus. Not just His help for the work, but His presence in the middle of it.

So what do we do with the bruises?

We tell the truth about them.

We do not pretend everything is fine when it is not.

We bring the bruises to Jesus. We let trusted people in. We rest. We get honest. We stay close to God, not just busy for God.

And then we keep going.

So yes, smile with your teeth.

Not because nothing hurts, but because hurt does not get the final word.

This is ministry. Beautiful, heavy, costly work. So have some guts, stay close to Jesus, and do not lose your soul trying to help everybody else with theirs.

Jesus does not invite you to add Him to your life like a productivity hack. He calls you to follow Him, and following Him requires the death of something in you.

Your ego.

Jesus Was Not Vague About This

In Luke 9:23, Jesus says, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

That is not “try harder.” That is “die daily.”

In Matthew 10:39, He says the one who tries to hold onto life will lose it, but the one who loses life because of Him will find it.

That is the gospel paradox. The tighter you grip, the more you lose. The more you surrender, the more you receive.

Paul puts it in plain language in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

Paul is not saying he became more religious.

He is saying his old boss got fired.

Self Denial Is Not Self Hate

Self Denial Is Not Self Hate

Self denial is not you waking up and trying to feel worthless. It is you stepping down from being ultimate.

John Stott says it like this: “Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries… it is actually denying or disowning ourselves.”

In other words, self denial is not about hating yourself, it’s about firing yourself from the role of savior.

It means you quit trying to save yourself through effort, image, or control. It means your preferences stop being treated like a commandment.

That is death to your ego.

Your ego…
Is never satisfied.
It always needs credit.
It always needs control.

And it will work you to death trying to keep you “safe.”

The Cross Was Never Decorative

…So when Jesus calls you to take up your cross, He is not calling you to mild inconvenience. He is calling you to the death of self rule. Not the death of your personality. The death of your throne.

John Mark Comer says it simply: “Self-denial is the entry point to the life of Jesus.”

In other words, you do not get the life of Jesus while keeping yourself on the throne. The cross is not decoration. It is the doorway.

When Jesus said “take up your cross,” nobody pictured jewelry. They pictured Rome. They pictured execution. They pictured the end of a person’s rights, reputation, and control.

Why Ego Death Is Actually Good News

This is where people push back.

“Does God want me to have no desires? No dreams? No voice?”

No.

He wants you to stop acting like you are the center of the universe.

Because the ego centered life is small and exhausting. Everything becomes about protecting yourself, proving yourself, defending yourself, and controlling outcomes.

The gospel offers something better.

You do not have to be your own savior.
You do not have to keep your image intact.
You do not have to carry the weight of being right, being admired, and being in control.

Following Jesus is not self destruction.

It is self surrender.

And surrender is where freedom starts.

What This Looks Like This Week

Ego death rarely shows up as a dramatic moment. It shows up in ordinary decisions.

It looks like obeying Jesus when it costs you comfort. It looks like telling the truth when a lie would protect your image. It looks like apologizing without adding excuses. It looks like choosing faithfulness over control.

Self denial is not the add on.

It is the baseline.

How to tell the difference between warfare and consequences

After 20+ years of pastoral ministry, here’s a pattern I see on repeat:

When life gets painful, people reach for a label.Sometimes the label is accurate and sometimes it is convenient.

It is easier to blame the devil than to take responsibility. And when we mislabel consequences as spiritual warfare, we stay stuck. We fight the wrong battle and ignore the real repair work God is inviting us into.

So let’s sharpen the difference.

First, yes, spiritual attack is real

Scripture is not shy about this.

• We have a real enemy
  8 Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour. 1 Peter 5:8, CSB
  

• We have a real fight that is not merely “people problems”
  12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens. Ephesians 6:12, CSB
  

• We are called to resist and stand firm

  7 Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. James 4:7, CSB

13 For this reason take up the full armor of God, so that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having prepared everything, to take your stand. Ephesians 6:13, CSB

Spiritual warfare is part of life in a broken world. But not everything difficult has a demonic explanation.

Second, consequences are also real

Some pain is not an attack. It is harvest.

R.C. Sproul called sin “cosmic treason.” That’s why consequences are not God being petty, they’re God being honest about reality.

“Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself.” R.C. Sproul

Galatians 6:7 says we reap what we sow. Sometimes the enemy isn’t attacking, we’re just harvesting what we planted, and we blame the devil for it.

The book of Proverbs talks this way constantly. Wisdom has outcomes. Folly has outcomes. Choices grow legs and walk into your future.

Consequences often sound like:

“I ignored warnings and now things are breaking.”
“I kept feeding that habit and now it’s stronger than I am.”
“I kept lying and now nobody trusts me.”
“I kept avoiding that conversation and now it’s a mess.”

That is not always Satan. Sometimes it is simply life responding to what we planted.

The main difference in one sentence

A spiritual attack tries to pull you away from trust and obedience.

Consequences reveal where you have already drifted away from trust and obedience.

Different problem, different response.

What spiritual attack tends to target

In Scripture, the enemy regularly aims at things like:

• Truth (Genesis 3, “Did God really say…?”)

• Identity (Matthew 4, “If you are the Son of God…”)

• Unity (Ephesians 4:26–27 warns about giving the devil a foothold through unresolved anger)

• Endurance (1 Peter 5:8–9, resist and stand firm)

• Confidence in God’s character (John 8:44, the enemy’s native language is lies)

Spiritual attack often feels like pressure toward distortion: twisting God’s Word, twisting your story, twisting the motives of others, twisting your view of yourself.

What consequences tend to look like

Consequences are usually more traceable. You can connect dots.

There is often a pattern behind the pain, and the pattern didn’t start yesterday.

Scripture calls this out too:

• Sin has a real wage (Romans 6:23).

• Desire can lure you and drag you (James 1:14–15).

• Hard hearts don’t happen instantly (Hebrews 3:12–13).

Consequences are not the end of your story. They are an alarm that says, “This path is not life.”

A pastoral diagnostic that actually helps

This is what I walk people through when they say, “I think I’m under attack.”

1) “What happened right before this?”

Did this start after a step of obedience?

Sometimes resistance increases when obedience gets real (Ephesians 6:13).

If the pressure rose right after obedience, pay attention.

2) “Can we trace a pattern?”

Are there repeat choices leading to repeat outcomes?

If the same movie keeps playing, it’s usually not an ambush, it’s a script. Galatians 6:7 matters here.

3) “Is there clear disobedience I’m defending?”

Not “do I have flaws.” Everybody does.

I mean: is there something Scripture clearly calls sin that I keep explaining away?

If so, start with repentance. James 4:7 begins with submitting to God, then resisting the devil.

4) “What is happening in my mind lately?”

A lot of what people call “spiritual attack” is a mind that’s been living on fumes.

Proverbs 4:23 says guard your heart because it’s the source of life. Romans 12:2 says renewal happens through a transformed mind.

Christian author and speaker Caroline Leaf, known for her work on thought patterns and mental habits, says: “The more you rehearse disaster scenarios, the stronger those neural networks become.” In other words, what you rehearse gets reinforced.

So if you keep rehearsing fear, suspicion, lust, grievance, or doom, you will feel “under attack” because your inner world is constantly inflamed.

That’s discipleship of the mind, for better or worse.

5) “What would obedience look like in the next 24 hours?”

This is the simplest test.

If you can name a clear next step of obedience, take it. Light exposes what’s real

20 For everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it,[a] so that his deeds may not be exposed. 21 But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.” John 3:20–21, CSB

The two big dangers

Calling consequences “attack”

You keep your pride. You keep your patterns. You stay stuck.

Calling attack “consequences”

You carry shame you were never meant to carry. You stop resisting. As Christian Psychologist, Ed Welch puts it, “Shame… leaves you powerless, unable to put up the least resistance.”

You isolate. You accept lies as “just how life is.”

Both errors are costly.

The hope in both categories

Here’s what I love about Scripture. It gives you a path forward either way.

If it’s spiritual attack:
Stand firm, resist, put on the armor, stay close to truth (Ephesians 6:10–18, James 4:7).

If it’s consequences:
Repent, repair what you can, plant different seeds, walk in the light (1 John 1:9, Galatians 6:7–9).

And in both cases:
God is not looking for you to panic. He’s calling you to clarity.

Not everything is a spiritual attack.

Sometimes life is simply cashing the check your choices wrote.

And the best news is this: Jesus is strong enough for both warfare and consequences. He doesn’t just forgive, He rebuilds.

In a single sentence, normal life can disappear. One minute you’re planning dinner and stressing about regular stuff. The next minute you’re learning a new vocabulary, chemo, custody schedules, hospice, rehab, court dates, unemployment, grief.

Some sentences don’t just inform you, they relocate you.

My family has one of those sentences too. I still remember the day the doctor told us my dad’s cancer had spread to his spine, and there was nothing they could do about it. That moment changed the map. You don’t go back to normal, you learn how to live in the middle.

That middle is what I call the Land Between, the space between what was and what will be. You can’t go back, and you can’t see forward. You’re still trying to love God, still trying to do the next right thing, but everything feels unsteady.

Lately, this has felt close

Lately it feels like every conversation ends with someone exhaling and saying, “I don’t know what to do next.” I’ve sat with people in the middle of hard transitions and I’ve been reminded how much weight people carry quietly, health, family, finances.

If I’m honest, there have been Sunday mornings where I’ve prayed in the car before walking into the church because I didn’t feel like I had anything left.

And I’ve caught myself longing for “Egypt” too, not because it was good, but because it was familiar. In Scripture, Egypt was slavery and suffering, the place God rescued His people from. The wilderness was the stretch after the rescue and before the promised land, when life felt uncertain and unstable. That’s why the Land Between is both dangerous and important, it exposes what we’re really trusting.

I don’t have a neat bow for this season, but I do have a steady conviction: God does not waste wilderness. And that’s exactly why the Bible’s wilderness stories matter, because they show us what God does in the middle, and what the middle does in us.

Out of Egypt, not yet home

God promised to bring His people out of slavery and into a good land (Exodus 3:8). The destination was clear. The timeline was not.

Between Egypt and the promised land was a wilderness, and that wilderness became a formation place. It was where God taught them trust, and it was where their hearts got exposed.

That’s the part of the story most of us can relate to.

Manna: when the gift becomes the complaint

In Numbers 11, the people start craving other food and they start talking about Egypt like it was a five-star resort:

“If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost... But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:4-6)

Manna was God’s daily provision in the wilderness. It was free and it was enough for today.

And over time, the miracle became the complaint.

That’s one of the sneakiest dangers of the Land Between. It doesn’t just test your patience, it tests your memory. It can make you forget the rescue and romanticize the past. It can make slavery look like stability, simply because it was familiar.

It’s easy to read that and think, “I would never do that.”

Famous last words.

If this story is going to work in us, we have to see ourselves in it. We are prone to the same weaknesses, capable of the same failings, tempted by the same sins.

So here’s the question: what is wearing you out right now? What’s draining your energy and robbing your joy? As you grow weary, where might frustration be turning into complaint and taking up residence in your heart?

We may think nothing grows in the desert, but make no mistake, the Land Between is fertile soil. It will grow something. The question is what.

Trust looks like jumping

The Land Between is a trust test.

Think about taking your kids to a pool. You stand in the water, arms out, and you tell them, “Jump. I’ll catch you. You can trust me.”

When they leap, even with fear in their eyes, they make you look strong and safe. But when they refuse, it communicates something else: “You can’t catch me,” or “You won’t catch me,” or “It’s not worth trusting you.”

Fear keeps us from jumping. It keeps us stuck in what-ifs, trying to control outcomes. The Land Between is often the moment where God is saying, “Trust me,” and we’re saying, “I would love to, after you show me the landing.”

But trust doesn’t work like that.

Trust is a decision that shows up in action.

How to get better (not bitter) in the Land Between

The Land Between forces a choice: get better or get bitter. Here are a few practices that help you choose better, even when you’re tired.

1. Name the grief (don’t baptize denial).
   God can handle honesty.
   Pray it plainly: “God, this is not what I wanted, but I’m bringing it to you.”

2. Take today’s manna (small obedience).
   Don’t try to live on tomorrow’s strength. Ask, “What is today’s step?” Then take it.
   Daily provision usually comes in daily portions.

3. Build a remembrance loop.
   The Land Between messes with your memory, so fight to remember on purpose.
   Write down how God has carried you before. Reread it when you’re tempted to romanticize Egypt.

4. Watch your words before they become your world.
   Complaining spreads. It becomes the talk of the camp, and eventually it becomes the soundtrack of your heart.

You don’t need to pretend everything is fine. But you do need to be honest about what kind of person you’re becoming in the middle.

Jesus meets us in the middle

This can’t stay in Exodus and Numbers like it’s just an ancient case study.

Jesus doesn’t meet us after we’ve cleaned ourselves up and figured it out. He meets us in the middle. In the Land Between, the question isn’t whether God is faithful, it’s whether we’ll let this season train our trust or feed our complaint.

So take today’s manna. Name what hurts. Do the next right thing. Keep a record of God’s provision, even if it feels small.

You may not be in the promised land yet, but you are not abandoned. God does not waste wilderness. Not yours. Not mine. Not this season.

It’s a human one.

Because Christianity is not, at its core, a voting block or a cultural power play. It’s about the same humanity God loved enough to send His Son for. God’s love was never small, selective, or tribal. It was for the world (John 3:16).

That’s the baseline.

And it’s why my heart is heavy, because I think we’ve missed the mark. In too many places, we’ve replaced our identity in Christ with an identity in tribes, power, and man-made values. We’ve made God into our own image while erecting golden idols that are not of God. Then we’ve done it all “in Jesus’ name,” like Jesus is a mascot for our endeavors instead of the King who confronts and reshapes us.

The Bible says the world will hate Christians (John 15:18). But let’s be honest, why are “Christians” giving the world reasons to hate us?

This is a stark reminder that we have to do better.

Before I point fingers, I need to be honest

I’m not writing this from some clean, finished place. I plead Philippians 3:12–14, “Not that I have already reached the goal… but I make every effort…”

I’m working through it too.

I’ve had moments where I cared more about being right than being loving. I’ve had moments where I was quicker to react than to listen. I’ve even had moments where my tone got shaped more by the moment than by Jesus. I’m not exempt from the pressures I’m talking about.

That’s why this can’t just be a rant. It has to be repentance.

And I also need people to see this clearly: none of this changes by willpower alone. The kind of change we’re talking about is spiritual. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit, not just better behavior, better messaging, or better arguments.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t just inform us. He transforms us. He convicts, heals, strengthens, and produces real fruit in real people (2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 12:2; Galatians 5:22–23; John 15:4–5). That’s what we need, not a better brand of Christianity, but a deeper work of God in us.

The disconnect is bigger than we want to admit

Part of the problem is discipleship. The church has failed to equip people and introduce them to real transformation. I used to think today’s Christians were more informational than transformational. Now I question both of those things, because there seems to be a massive disconnect between the Jesus of the Scriptures and the Jesus being proclaimed today.

We keep saying “truth,” but we seem strangely comfortable with contempt. We keep saying “biblical,” but the fruit looks nothing like Jesus. And we keep giving platforms to people who mention the name of Jesus when they have no fruit, and then we justify it because they say the things we like to hear (2 Timothy 4:3–4). We’ve confused popularity for credibility.

Just because you say the “right” Christian lingo doesn’t make you a Christian. Jesus says in Matthew 7:21–23 that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of the Father.

Jesus didn’t say you’ll know them by their vocabulary. He said you’ll know them by their fruit (Matthew 7:16–20).

Just because someone knows the right Christian lingo does not mean they’re walking in the way of Jesus.

One example among many: racism

I grew up in a small town with a racial divide that wasn’t subtle. It was literally split by a railroad track, the old “other side of the tracks” line people said like it was normal. So when I talk about racism, I’m not doing it as a headline-chaser. I’ve watched what it does up close, on more levels than I can count.

I’m a white dad with a Haitian American son, and I’ve seen it up close, the comments, the looks, the way people treat him differently because of the color of his skin. If the church can explain that away, then we’re not defending truth, we’re defending distance. So I’m not interested in excuses, downplaying, or “it’s not that bad.”

History already showed us where that leads. Those Civil Rights photos are proof that you can claim Jesus and still end up on the wrong side. I want better than that, for my kid, for my community and for the church.

And it’s not just the photos.

I have seen the letters that were sent to churches during the 60s urging them to stand firm against Civil Rights. And the truth is, we’re not that far removed. It wasn’t ancient history. It was our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetime. Some of the people who wrote those letters, endorsed those ideas, or stayed silent were active in churches not that long ago.

That’s what makes it such a warning. Not just that it happened, but that it happened with Bible language, religious certainty, and people who were convinced they were defending something “godly.”

It’s a reminder that the church can be sincerely religious and still be deeply wrong.

Another example: immigrants, missions, and distance

My son is also an immigrant, who is proud of his Haitian roots.

And I have still heard and have read where Christians say that ALL immigrants should go back to their country, and in his case, to his “shit-hole” country, as it’s been called.

Think about that disconnect. The very places some people talk about with contempt are the same places Jesus pointed us toward when He told His followers to go into all the world and make disciples (Matthew 28). We talk about “the nations” like a sermon point, then talk about actual people from those nations like they’re a problem to be removed.

It’s hard to care about people from a distance, so we reduce them to slogans. It’s easy to love “humanity.” It’s harder to love humans.

And here’s the gut-check. If you read that quote about Haiti being a “shit-hole” country and your first reaction was, “A pastor shouldn’t use language like that,” but you don’t feel the same urgency about Christians speaking that way about image-bearers, then I might be proving the point. We are sometimes more concerned about protecting our position than living out the teachings of Jesus.

Now, to be clear, I do believe in immigration laws. I believe a nation should have a system. Even in Jesus’ time, the Roman world had structures around who “belonged” and who didn’t, citizenship status, legal residence, and even expulsions when leaders wanted to clamp down. So yes, I believe people should have a clear and direct process to be part of the United States and gain legal status. That’s not controversial, it’s practical.

But here’s what should be controversial: when Christians talk about human beings with contempt, when we flatten people into problems, when we use distance as an excuse to stop caring.

In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott said it well: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out He hates all the same people you do.”

That line should haunt us, because it’s not theoretical. It shows up every time we justify cruelty, dismiss suffering, or call something “biblical” that looks nothing like Jesus.

How the church lost the plot

In a lot of places, churches tried so hard to be seeker-friendly that we became gospel-light.

We built services that felt safe, familiar, and easy to consume, but didn’t actually call people to die to self, pick up a cross, and follow Jesus. We were afraid that clear truth would make people leave, so we traded depth for a waterdowned gospel. We turned the blood of Jesus into kool-aid. I am guilty as charged.

And that’s how you end up with a crowd that knows the language but not the life.

A culture that can quote a phrase but can’t practice forgiveness.
A room full of opinions, with very little transformation.

And it’s fair to say this part out loud too: some pastors have stayed silent. Not always because they don’t care, but because they’re afraid. Afraid of losing people, losing giving, losing influence, losing the “numbers.”

And sometimes we stay quiet because we worry we’ll be labeled “too political.”

But let’s be clear: this isn’t politics. It’s humanity. It’s the kind of humanity God loved enough to send His Son for (John 3:16). Calling people to dignity, truth, repentance, and love is not partisan, it’s basic obedience.

If saying what Jesus said gets you labeled political, then the label is broken, not the gospel.

When fear of backlash becomes the driver, you don’t lead anymore, you manage. And the gospel doesn’t need managers. It needs shepherds.

This is where the Holy Spirit matters

The Holy Spirit doesn’t just inform us. He transforms us. He convicts without crushing, He heals what’s wounded, He exposes what’s hidden, and He produces real fruit in real people.

If the goal is only “be nicer,” we’ll fail the moment we feel threatened.
If the goal is only “say it better,” we’ll keep drifting back into performance.

But if the Holy Spirit is actually forming us, something deeper happens. Not perfection, but real change. Truth without arrogance and a love that doesn’t depend on agreement.

We need the Spirit to do what we cannot do on our own, soften what’s hardened, remove what’s fake, and produce the kind of fruit Jesus actually talked about.

So here’s the challenge

Love people more than your position.
Stay curious.
Remain humble.
Sit at bigger tables.

Because if God so loved the world, then the table should be one of the most subversive, surprising, and sacred places of all.

Not a place to win, but a place to witness. Not a place to perform, but a place to practice the way of Jesus.

And if we’re going to carry the name of Christ, then we cannot keep giving the world a version of Him that looks like us at our worst instead of Him at His best.

The goal isn’t to sound Christian, it’s to look like Christ.

And the only way that happens is if the Holy Spirit does what only the Holy Spirit can do, starting with me.

¹⁴ How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? Romans 10:14, CSB

Paul wrote that in a world with no internet, no livestream, no podcast feed. If people were going to hear about Jesus, somebody had to walk into town and say it out loud.

And “preacher” here is less “stage and microphone” and more “messenger with news.” This is an announcement.

Here’s the message
Jesus came.
Jesus died.
Jesus rose from the dead.

That’s the Gospel.

This takes pressure off, because it’s not your message

When I share the Gospel, I’m passing along what God has said, not trying to win a debate. This takes pressure off, because it’s not your message.

I don’t get to edit the Gospel, and I also don’t get to control how someone receives it. That’s freeing.

Jesus said: “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me.” (Luke 10:16, CSB)

So when someone pushes back, I don’t have to spiral into insecurity or swing into defensiveness. I can listen, stay kind, and trust God to do what only God can do.

People can’t believe what they’ve never heard

Paul keeps going: “How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher?” Romans 10:14, CSB

That’s not complicated. Hearing the Gospel is the doorway to believing in Jesus.

And this is where we can drift. Good systems help, and I’m thankful for anything that removes distractions, but none of that is the engine. People don’t come to Christ because we nailed slides, music, lights, sound, or a podcast. They come because they hear about Jesus. God has always used the simple, stubborn method of the Word being preached, spoken, announced, and through it, He saves.

In order for a person to respond to the Gospel, the Gospel has to be preached.

“How do I preach the Gospel to my friends?”

When I don’t know what to say, I stop trying to be clever and just share a verse. God’s Word carries weight my opinions never will. Sometimes all I say is, “I read this and thought of you,” then I send it. After that, I trust God to do what I can’t.

The promise is clear, not fuzzy

Here’s Paul’s promise: “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13, CSB

Everyone means everyone. Not “everyone who has their life together,” not “everyone who has the right personality type.”

So Paul is showing a chain reaction that’s almost annoyingly straightforward:

God sends people→People preach→Others hear→Some believe→Believers call on Christ→And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

God does the sending. God does the saving. Our role is the sharing.

“If God is sovereign, why do I need to share?”

Because God’s sovereignty is not an excuse to go silent, it’s the reason we can speak with confidence.

God has sovereignly planned to call lost sinners to Himself through the preaching of the Gospel. He could do it a thousand ways, He chose this one: people telling people.

So take a breath. You’re not responsible for outcomes, you’re responsible for faithfulness.

A practical next step

Spend some time intentionally praying.

g for an open door this week to share one clear piece of the Gospel, with Scripture, in normal language.

The Gospel still needs a mouth, and God still uses ordinary voices to do extraordinary work.