Author: herbertberkley

I do not always use my freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but somehow the flesh finds me anyway. It is not that I lack love for the Lord. It is that I live inside a frame, and the struggle with it comes back every day. I have had moments when two minds differed on a matter of judgment. In those moments the shift from being led by the Spirit toward the flesh tipped the difference into disagreement, the kind that, if not addressed quickly, could lead to something more serious. That is walking by the flesh and not by the Spirit.

Against that frame, Paul sets a single command: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). It asks something of us on every ordinary day we spend in Christ. Paul’s word means to walk in line, and that image helps us see what he asks: a line of walkers moves together only when each one sets the next foot where the line is going. The “if” is not a doubt. It assumes we already live by the Spirit, and it asks that our steps agree with the life we have been given. The pronoun is worth a second look. Paul does not say “you.” He says “us.” The apostle who wrote the command puts himself in the line with the people who first read it. He had already told those same people how they came to be in Christ: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:26–27).

Paul’s route to this command matters. He reaches it by way of freedom rather than struggle. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he writes, and he tells the Galatians to stand firm and not submit again to a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1). For most of the letter he has been guarding that freedom against those who would hand it back to the law. Then he turns and guards it from the other side, reminding them that they were called to freedom: “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (5:13). Freedom can be lost in two directions. It can be surrendered to a yoke of slavery, or it can be spent on the flesh. Paul allows neither, because the freedom Christ gives is meant to be spent in love that serves.

He is honest about what stands in the way, and he is honest about where it stands. “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (5:17). That was written to Christians. The opposition is not something we leave behind by belonging to Christ, because Paul describes it in people who belong to him.

Before he describes the conflict, Paul gives the promise: “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (5:16). The word “gratify” keeps catching me, because at times it sounds to me like “satisfy.” Paul’s word is plainer than that. It means to carry a thing through to its end, which is why some translations read “carry out” or “fulfill.” The promise is not that the desire will never be felt, because the next verse says it will be. The promise is that the one who walks by the Spirit will not carry it through.

Then Paul names the works of the flesh, and the list is not the one most of us would have written. “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (5:19–21). We expect the sins of the body to be on the list, and they are. What we may not expect is that eight of the fifteen are sins against one another. Enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, and envy need no dark street or hidden room. They can take root in a congregation that never misses an assembly. Most of the works on Paul’s list are not sins of the body, and he will not let any of us blame the body for the flesh. When I read Paul’s list, I do not see fifteen separate temptations so much as a congregation of influences that aim to take us away from the freedom to be led by the Spirit.

Paul has bracketed the whole passage with that danger. On one side stands the warning, “if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (5:15). On the other stands the chapter’s last word, “Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another” (5:26). Between them, Paul places the verdict: “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (5:21).

From that list Paul turns to another. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (5:22–23). The fruit belongs to the Spirit. No law stands against a life like that, and it is hard to imagine a statute that ever needed to forbid patience.

Then Paul sets the ground beneath the command: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (5:24). Earlier in the letter he told them that if they are Christ’s, they are Abraham’s offspring and heirs of the promise (3:29). The order matters. Paul describes those who belong to Christ before he tells them to keep in step, so the command rests on what is already true of them. Belonging to Christ has meant a death, and the flesh with its passions has been crucified. That lies behind those who are his.

What lies ahead is the daily work, and in Romans Paul holds both agencies in one sentence: “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13). We do the putting to death, and we do it by the Spirit.

When one of us falls out of step, Paul does not leave him behind: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). That is a command to the church, and it shapes how the warning of 5:21 is heard inside the family. The warning stands at full strength. The one caught is to be restored, and the one restoring him is to watch his own feet.

Paul tells the church what to do with a brother who is caught. John tells each of us what to do with the sin itself, and he writes from inside the “we.” He warns first that to claim fellowship with God while walking in darkness is a lie, and he does not make that warning light. Then he says that when we walk in the light, as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:6–7). Paul tells us to walk by the Spirit, and John writes of those who walk in the light. Then John gives the promise: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1:8–9).

John is writing to believers, people he calls his little children, and he does not pretend they will never sin. To deny our sin is self-deception, and to confess it is to find God faithful. He names the one who stands with us when we do sin: “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins” (2:1–2). John writes so that we may not sin, and he still provides for the day we do. Forgiveness is not God looking away from what we have done. It comes through Jesus Christ the righteous, who is our advocate with the Father. So when a disagreement tips and we lose the step, the way back begins with confession. The Father is faithful to forgive, and the Son speaks for us before him.

Being led is what the Spirit does in us: “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Galatians 5:18). Keeping step is what Paul asks us to do, and it asks something of our feet. To follow, we have to keep up, and keeping up takes diligence. Paul never pictures that diligence alone. After the restoring of the one who is caught, he gives a charge to all of us: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). He is just as clear that no one else can walk for us: “For each will have to bear his own load” (6:5). The others do not take our steps for us; walking with them is part of how we keep up. Togetherness is underrated.

So we end where Paul does. We are to “keep in step with the Spirit,” and we are not to “become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another” (5:25–26). In that picture, the line is already moving, and Paul has taken his place in it. We take the next step beside him, in step with the Spirit.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2025. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Developed with the assistance of AI writing tools, under the author’s full theological review and final editorial control.

I was led to Jesus by my father, my mother, and a church family in a small farm town in Kansas called Mulvane. I could still give you their names.

My father preached. I sat under him for years, and I could not give you one of those sermons back now. What stayed was the invitation. Every time, at the end: the problem, the solution, the steps. I can still see it on the overhead, the fan running under the light. That is nearly all I kept from those years. It may be the only part that was built to be carried out the door.

My mother never stood behind a pulpit, and what she handed me was harder to point at and went in deeper. She was calm when things went wrong. She believed God held what she could not hold, and she lived that way in front of her children, which is a different thing than hearing it from your mother when you’re an anxious child. Whatever peace I have in following Jesus, I first saw it on her face before I could have explained a word of it.

Discipleship came after the water. I was baptized first. Then somebody put me on the list to lead a prayer, and I stood up and prayed out loud in front of people I had only just met. We were new to Texas. They barely knew my name and they put me up front anyway. That was one congregation, and it was years behind me by the time I signed up to teach a class of teenagers. I wanted to shape them the way I had been shaped. Three churches, counting Mulvane. Different states, different decades, nobody comparing notes. Neither of them was recruiting me. I already belonged to God when they started handing me things, and what they were doing was building up somebody who was already leading.

None of them were building anything for themselves. It’s rare to see someone build a following out of a Wednesday night Bible class.

Every one of them I really listened to shaped me. I can tell you now which ones stayed with me, and it was never the ones I admired most. It was the ones where I forgot who was talking. Nothing he gave me came from him. What reached me was Scripture, and God speaking in it.

They led and I followed, and sometimes I followed in the wrong direction — never because a man taught me something false, but because I had my eyes on the brilliance of how he was speaking so powerfully. That is the whole danger, and I was inside it before I could name it.

On his way to Jerusalem, Paul stopped at a coastal town called Miletus and sent for the elders of the church at Ephesus. It is the only sermon in Acts to Christians that Luke gives us any of, and he knew it was the last time he would stand in front of them. He told them plainly they would not see his face again. Then he gave them their charge.

“Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” (Acts 20:28, ESV)

Look at what he does to those men in one sentence. He hands them the flock and tells them in the same breath that it is not theirs. The Spirit set them there; they did not set themselves there. The church belongs to God, and the price of it was blood, and it was not their blood. Everything else he says that day rests on it. A man who believes that is already out of the middle, and he never had to work at humility to get there. He was simply told whose the church was, and he took it.

Paul said that to elders. He did not say it to me. But a man does not have to hold that office to be standing in the middle of something, whether it is a class, a song service, or a house. The charge belongs to elders. The danger in it reaches anybody people look at.

Then the warning.

“I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.” (Acts 20:29–30, ESV)

After them.

Notice where they come from. The wolves come in among you. These men arise from among your own selves. That is the harder thing, because he is already in the room and he is one of theirs.

And notice what the twisting is for. Not the error by itself. The pull, men drawing disciples after themselves. The teaching is the road and the men are where it ends, because a man who wants to be followed will eventually find something to teach that requires him. Often the error exists to justify the pull.

Not sparing the flock. That is who pays for it. A man can want to be followed and never think of it as costing anybody anything. Paul says the sheep are what it costs.

So Paul does the opposite in front of them.

“And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” (Acts 20:32, ESV)

Able. Paul is not the one who can do that, and he says so out loud while they are still looking at him. He hands them to God and to the word, and he names the two things they will need once he is out of reach: something that can build them up, and something that can give them the inheritance when he is not there to hand it over. He had given those men three years. He taught them in public and from house to house. He called for elders, plural, and there were elders there to call.

He had already worked this out somewhere else, with a church that was coming apart over which preacher belonged to whom.

“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:5–7, ESV)

He does not rank himself above Apollos or beneath him. He takes both names off the table. Neither man is anything, and both of them knew it.

I want to slow down here, because this argument runs off the road easily and I have seen it run off.

In (Acts 20:29–30, ESV), Paul says flock. He did not invent that word for the occasion, and it runs back through the whole Old Testament. Moses used it at the end of his own life, when he asked God for one last thing.

“Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, that the congregation of the LORD may not be as sheep that have no shepherd.” (Numbers 27:16–17, ESV)

Forty years he carried those people, and his request is not that they remember him. It is that they not be left standing there without somebody to go out in front of them. He asked God to replace him. God did, and Israel crossed a river Moses never crossed.

God gave elders. God gave teachers. He said so through Paul, and he meant it to be a gift. Sheep are not independent animals, and the New Testament does not treat them as if they were. The question was never whether people would depend on somebody. They will. The question is what they are depending on, and whether the man standing in the middle of it is content to be a hand passing something along, or has started to enjoy being what people come for. Most men do not decide to make that turn. They notice it late, if at all. A man can make it while doing everything right on the outside, and the first sign is usually not false doctrine. It is quieter than that. Ask what the room does when he is not in it.

That is the test, and it is hard because it does not measure your gifts at all. Men who are good at this fail it. Gather people, teach well, solve what needs solving, carry what nobody else will carry, do every bit of it, and still leave behind a room that cannot move without you.

Ask it plainly. If you were gone this month, what would be standing.

Paul said something close to this to a different church, and it belongs next to the other.

“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” (Philippians 2:12, ESV)

He is not saying he would rather be gone. He is saying their obedience never ran on his supervision, and he did not want them finding that out the first time he was not there.

My father is still living. He still preaches. He is still giving that same invitation. Whatever preacher there is in me came from watching him do it plainly, out of the word, with nothing added to make it land. A man who preaches that way has already decided the sermon is not going to be about him. He is not at the center of anything, and I have watched him long enough to know that was on purpose. My mother’s steadiness never needed an audience either. Those congregations have scattered or died or grown old, and what they built is still standing, and I am standing in it. It never required any of them to stay.

Which leaves the question where I would rather not leave it. Not with them. With me, and with any man reading this who has a room he is responsible for. If the honest answer is that things would come apart, that is not a verdict on you. It is a place to start, and the work in it can start this week.

The flock was bought with blood that was not yours. Commend them to God and to the word of his grace, and get out from in front of Jesus.

HEB

This devotional was developed using AI-assisted writing tools. The theological direction, governing observations, personal territory, text selections, and editorial judgments are the author’s. AI contributed structural framing, connective prose, and iterative refinement under the author’s direction. The final piece reflects the author’s voice, convictions, and relationship to the text.

The meal delivery arrived at six. The flowers had come that morning, already arranged, already paid for. Her phone kept lighting up on the table beside her. Sweet things like these: praying for you, thinking of you, let me know what you need. None of it was false. None of it was wasted. When the house went quiet again, the food was still warm and the flowers were still standing, and the person who had always been in the chair across from her was still gone.

Sending has less friction these days.

That’s not really an argument against the sending. Paul wrote letters when he could not travel. John was no stranger to a pen either: a Gospel, three letters, a vision no one has fully unpacked since. But near the end of one of those short letters, John admits something almost embarrassing for someone who wrote that much: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12, ESV). He is not confessing that the letter failed. He is naming its ceiling. Something in a friendship will not travel through paper, however well the paper is written.

Paul gives us the fuller picture. Writing to the church at Thessalonica, he says: “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8, ESV). Notice its two objects. The gospel of God. And our own selves. Paul did not choose between truth and presence, sending one and keeping back the other. He handed over both, and the second gift is the one no courier can carry for him.

We tend to automate some of the effort of caring because technology has made it extremely easy, and that’s not usually about hiding from guilt when we let an app stand in for a visit. Most days it’s simpler than that: we’re tired, or unsure what to say, or genuinely stretched past what one person can give in a week. That much is honest, and it deserves to be treated honestly. But underneath the fatigue there is often a quieter arithmetic running: if the message went out, the debt is paid, and the evening is ours again.

Jesus told a story about that arithmetic once, though the man in it never touches a phone. A priest had somewhere to be. A Levite had somewhere to be. Then: “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him” (Luke 10:33–34, ESV). Every verb in that sentence has a body attached to it.

This is what a phone was never built to carry: the presence of a hand that closes firmly around another hand. Arms that actually surround someone, not a message that only says they are surrounded. Eyes meeting eyes long enough for something true to pass between them. A voice, not a notification, saying soft, comforting words a screen can display but never speak.

Calling for help now might be wiser than personally lifting a stranger onto a donkey. Wisdom was never all that opposed to a faster tool. The question the parable actually asks is narrower than that, and harder to answer: did the need reach far enough to bend your schedule, or only far enough to reach your contacts list?

Some days the honest answer is that it didn’t reach far enough. Sometimes that’s just a limit — a person only has so much reach in a day. And sometimes, if we’re honest, love actually fails. Christ carried what no one else could, including the times our love falls short of what we meant it to be.

That’s what the Incarnation actually is: not merely a message about God’s presence, but God’s presence itself. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, ESV). God did not send flowers ahead of himself. He came and stayed.

So is the answer to put the phone down and show up for every hurting person who crosses your path? It is not, and calling it obedience would only be a different kind of exhaustion that has learned to dress for church. Paul could give himself away because he was never the source of what he was giving: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, ESV). Grace does not excuse us from carrying one another’s burdens. It frees us from believing we must carry what only Christ can. We are servants at the empty chair, not the Savior who can fill it.

Somewhere tonight a phone is lighting up on a table. The message on it is true. The flowers are real. The meal is warm.

None of that can answer the one question that matters tonight: is there a chair, in a house you could actually reach, still waiting on the gift Paul once called our own selves.

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Scripture references: 2 John 12 · 1 Thessalonians 2:8 · Luke 10:33–34 · John 1:14 · 1 John 4:19 (all ESV)

Some mornings you say the true thing without meaning to. My wife and I were walking out the door—snack bags, the life-size doll, forgetting the juice boxes, diaper logistics—and she said it plainly: everything feels like a struggle right now. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary weight of getting a family fed, dressed, and moving, five days a week, for years.

There’s a feeling that goes with that kind of morning, even when nothing has actually gone wrong. Call it wilderness. Not sand and manna. A lengthy pickup line, a grocery budget, a body that’s tired before the day has started.

Paul had a name for it too, and he wasn’t reaching for a metaphor. The warning part of the passage is sharp—”take heed lest he fall”—and we need that caution. But the passage’s strength is what comes next. Writing to a church far removed from Sinai, he pointed back at Israel’s forty years and told the Corinthians plainly what that history was for:

“Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:11–13, ESV)

Paul doesn’t call the wilderness a punishment. He calls it an example, recorded on purpose so a Corinthian church, and a kitchen table somewhere else entirely, would recognize their own temptation inside someone else’s forty years. The struggle at the door isn’t proof God has stepped back. It’s the territory every believer has always walked, and Paul stitches two promises into one sentence about it: God is faithful, and He provides the way out. Not around it. Through a door that opens while you’re still standing in the pressure.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, because the temptation Paul names isn’t just exhaustion. Exhaustion only opens a door. What walks through it is the real question.

I’ll be honest about mine. On the tired mornings, behind schedule, I catch myself looking at people who seem to have it figured out: the recognition, the resolved-looking life, the ease. And something in me asks why I don’t have that. Not out loud. Not admitted, most days, even to myself. But it’s there, and it’s older than this particular morning.

That question has a history longer than mine. Satan asked a version of it to Jesus, on a mountain, after forty days without food—a depletion far more severe than mine at the end of a hard week:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.'” (Matthew 4:8–9, ESV)

He didn’t invent comparison for the tired and the ordinary. He used it on the Son of God at His most depleted. Which means the version that visits a parent at pickup line, measuring somebody else’s apparent ease against your own struggle, carries an echo of the same offer, sized down to fit an ordinary morning’s errand list. See what they have. Wonder why you don’t. That wondering isn’t the sin yet. It’s the door.

So the question this morning isn’t whether you get tired. Paul already told you that part is common to man. What are you tempted to bow toward, when you are?

Jesus answered the mountain with a refusal, not a negotiation:

“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.”‘” (Matthew 4:10, ESV)

That’s the way of escape Paul promised—and that’s what it looks like when you take it. Worship rightly placed. Jesus didn’t negotiate with the offer. He turned it down by pointing upward. Scripture says He was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8, ESV). The obedience that started on a mountain with bread and kingdoms held all the way to a cross. Ours is only asked to hold through considerably smaller mountains: a hard morning, a comparison, a wondering that wants to grow into a grievance.

I prayed something true about this before I ever thought to write it down, that I’m horizontally placed in this life: errands, deadlines, a family that needs me, a local congregation that depends on me. Ground level. But that my heart would stay vertical, oriented up instead of sideways at what somebody else seems to have. The struggle at the door doesn’t disappear because the heart turns. The wondering does start to lose its grip, though. One honest look upward at a time.

HEB

At some level, we could all confess that much of what we think we understand about life has already been bent into a lie. Not just a lie. A sophisticated lie.

Pride becomes self-respect. Greed becomes ambition. Lust becomes authenticity. Cowardice becomes caution. Compromise becomes maturity. Self-rule becomes freedom. Unbelief becomes intellectual honesty.

Notice which one made the list last, and notice why it feels different from the other six. We already suspect we’re lying to ourselves about pride, greed, lust. We caught those on the way down. But the seventh one wears a lab coat. It sounds like a mind still weighing evidence rather than a heart that reached its verdict long ago and has been stalling on the paperwork ever since.

Is unbelief really the one item on this list that isn’t a rename? Or is it just the one we’ve agreed not to check?

The heavens have been running the same argument on repeat since before there was a language to write it down. “Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19:2-4, ESV). That’s not evidence waiting to be discovered. What is left to argue when the witness never stops testifying?

And the Psalms don’t treat the denial of it as an intellectual position in the first place. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1, ESV). The verb matters. He doesn’t conclude it or reason his way there. He says it, from the heart, because this was never primarily a matter of the head.

Paul makes the same case, and he makes it as an indictment, not an offer:

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:18-21, ESV).

Read that again and notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the evidence was ambiguous. It doesn’t say a better argument might have tipped the scale. It says the testimony was plain, clearly perceived, and that the response to plain testimony wasn’t doubt. It was suppression. Suppression is not merely something that happens to the mind. It’s something the will enlists the mind to do, on purpose, because the alternative costs too much.

“Without excuse” is a courtroom word before it’s anything else. It describes a defendant who has already read the file. Picture him asking the court for one more continuance to review evidence he was handed months ago, evidence he’s already quoted back to the prosecution correctly, evidence he privately admits is airtight. It means more than that he lacks a convincing explanation. It means the explanations have run out. The evidence has already answered him, and now he has no answer for it. He isn’t confused. He’s just stalling. What do we call a defendant who keeps requesting more time to study a file he’s already memorized?

That’s what verse 21 catches in the act. Not, they did not know him. They knew him. The problem was never a missing fact. It was honor. It was thanks. It was the debt already owed on evidence already delivered, and it got renamed instead of paid.

I’ll own the version of this closest to home before saying another word about anyone else’s. I’ve lived inside the inversion, at a time in my life when I was not on the right side of the Gospel. I’ve hidden pride under the name of self-respect. I’ve called greed ambition, and lust authenticity, the way the world defines it. I lived the cowardly life, accepted just about anything, and called it maturity. I called self-rule freedom, and reveled in it. I called the whole arrangement honesty. It was all a lie. It was the same suppression we are exposing now, together.

As a Christian who now walks by faith, I can only feel the way Paul did. I count it all rubbish (echoing Philippians 3:8).

Real intellectual honesty was never going to stay quarantined at “there might be a Creator.” It has a name to reckon with, and that name gives the same diagnosis Paul already gave. Now let’s read what John wrote.

“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” (John 3:19-20, ESV).

That’s the same file Paul opened, signed by a second witness. The light that had been shining through creation the whole time finally had a face, and the response to it was the one Romans 1 already diagnosed. Not because the light was dim. Because it was, if anything, too bright for what people were protecting.

But the same chapter that names the judgment also names the exit from it: “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, ESV). Real honesty was never going to stop at “there’s probably a Creator” and call the inquiry finished, because the light it was avoiding turned out to be a person who could actually be believed, not just a fact to be conceded.

Unbelief renamed can hold the door shut for a while. It cannot hold it shut forever. The light has come into the world anyway.

Pride becomes self-respect. Greed becomes ambition. Lust becomes authenticity. Cowardice becomes caution. Compromise becomes maturity. Self-rule becomes freedom. Unbelief becomes intellectual honesty.

We are masters of futility. We rename the darkness, defend the new name, and call our refusal honesty. Still, the light has come.

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Scripture chain: Romans 1:18-21 (ESV) · Psalm 19:2-4 (ESV) · Psalm 14:1 (ESV) · John 3:16, 19-20 (ESV)

HEB

I had been moving in the same water for a some time, and somewhere along the way I started calling it a walk.

The strokes looked like progress. You get tired the way you would get tired on a real journey, so the fatigue feels earned. But the shoreline never changes. And if you are honest about it, you know the difference between swimming toward something and treading water to keep your head up.

For a while I thought the dullness was a gap in what I knew. I needed a better study, a newer book, one more framework laid over the last one. So I went looking for richer food. And the richer food tasted like cardboard.

Hebrews has a name for what was actually wrong with me, and it is not flattering. “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:12–14, ESV).

Read that again slowly. The problem was never the food. The food was solid. The problem was the palate.

A palate is built by what it eats. Feed it sugar long enough and a ripe tomato can taste like nothing at all. The very instrument you use to judge the meal has been shaped by every meal that came before it. So when the dense, demanding word of God arrives and a person sets it down and says it tastes like cardboard, the honest reading is not that the bread went stale. It is that the mouth was raised on something thinner. And underneath all of it ran an invitation I had stopped hearing years ago, the one about tasting and seeing.

Here is the part that finally loosened something in me. There is a law written into the matter of the world, and it runs in only one direction. Leave a garden alone and you do not come back to find it more orderly. Leave the garage, the body, the old friendship alone, and the same thing happens. Things come apart on their own. Things never come together on their own. Heat spreads out and never gathers; the iron rusts; the sandcastle slumps back into sand; the room you cleaned a week ago is somehow a mess again and nobody can say exactly when. Physicists have a cold phrase for it. The rest of us just call it the way of things.

The Father set that law into creation long before anyone had the equations for it. And what is true of the garden is just as true of the soul. A palate does not drift upward toward solid food. Left to itself, it reverts. It goes back to milk. The dullness I kept treating as some private failure was, in part, the world running its one direction through me, the way it runs through anything left untended.

I am making that sound like a lecture. Let me say it plainer. Nobody grows up by accident.

Which makes the rebuke in Hebrews harder, not softer. “By this time you ought to be teachers.” Time had passed. The years had stacked up. And the years, by themselves, had taught the palate nothing, because a calendar cannot train a mouth; only the daily, unglamorous practice can. A person can sit under good teaching for decades and still arrive carrying a child’s discernment, because the years had quietly been mistaken for the work.

If that were the whole letter, it would crush you. It is not. The same writer who calls them children turns a few lines later and says, “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation” (Hebrews 6:9, ESV). The honesty about how far behind they are never curdles into a sentence against them. He believes better of these people than his own rebuke would suggest, and he stops to tell them so.

And then there is the question the whole thing turns on. What is the solid food? What is the dense thing the trained palate is finally able to taste? It is not even a more complicated doctrine. It is a power. Paul prays that his readers would come to know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19–20, ESV).

That claim is larger than it looks. Everything in this world runs down; the direction is always toward the grave. And then one morning the direction reversed. One tomb where the decay ran backward. And that reversal was not powered from inside the system; nothing in here had the strength for it. It came from outside. Paul says the very power that raised Jesus up out of death, against the whole grain of the world, is turned toward the person you actually are, not the better one you keep waiting to become. “Toward us who believe.”

That invitation had been open the whole time, long before Hebrews put words to the problem. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8, ESV). The command assumes a mouth, and a mouth is a thing that can be taught.

So I am learning to stop waiting until I feel mature before I act like it. That feeling arrives last, if it arrives at all. Before it, there is only the bite. You take the dense thing while it still tastes like cardboard, and you take it again the next day, and the body that has been fed thin food for years begins, slowly, to remember what it was made for. The change is not yours to manufacture. The strength to digest what you are swallowing was never your own. It is the risen Christ’s, lent to you every day, the same strength that carried Him up out of the grave.

I am still in the water some mornings. But I have stopped calling it a walk. And I have been reaching for the food I cannot yet taste, the same food set in front of all of us, on the word of the One who promised the palate can be retrained.

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Texts: Psalm 34:8; Hebrews 5:12–14; Hebrews 6:9; Ephesians 1:19–20 (ESV).

The Name We Cannot Build

I invited someone to services a few weeks back. They came. I honestly was not expecting it. They sat through everything: the singing, the teaching, the breaking of bread. They bowed their head during the prayer. They did not sing the songs. Polite about all of it. Seemingly engaged. After services ended they left. Promptly. They have not come back. I have not asked them why yet. Time, on their part, to process is more important than a hasty set of questions. Lord willing that time may come and maybe some of what is being written now will change in some material way. We’ve seen this time and time again. Someone comes to worship. They participate in some obvious way. We ask them the we questions. The ones where we would like to get to know them better. Sometimes there are connections. Sometimes people just never return.

When this occurs we go through this process of thinking what I think most of us do. I ran the inventory. Was it the singing, the plain slightly flat voices with no band behind them? Was it the three and one half part harmony a cappella? Was it the teaching, which stayed direct, avoided modern therapy language, and close to the text? Was it that we had nothing to hand them on the way in, no worship program, no spectacle of lights, nothing built to impress a person used to being entertained by everything else? I kept going down the list.

Here is what I skipped, at least at first. I didn’t ask whether the standard they were measuring us by was the right standard to begin with. We often have no awareness of where they come from spiritually. We can see interest, partially, but only what’s externally obvious. Those things are never good indicators of what’s really going on inside the person. And when they leave, with little to comment about, the not-knowing is what we are left with.

People just leaving, without commentary, is an old grief. John knew it. He wrote to a fellowship that had watched some of its own walk away:

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2:19, ESV)

I have to be careful with what I’m saying here. John is describing people who had been counted among the believers and then abandoned the faith, and he says their leaving showed where their anchor had been the whole time. He is not naming a guest who slipped out a side door. The grief can feel identical. The care for the soul walking away also identical.

We should never give up on those who came in the moment, whatever brought them in. Even when the position of the heart becomes clear and we hear with our own ears, “This was not what I wanted or expected,” we keep the door open. I’ve seen people who give chase to this outcome by asking what could we have done to change their heart? Jesus did not chase the crowd that turned back. He asked the twelve, and let the others go. There is another chase still that can lead to doctrinal drift. We might try and accommodate to win the soul, but the outcome is often not a soul won if we must compromise what is commanded to reach that soul.

A crowd once heard the hardest words Jesus ever spoke. The response stings like this:

“After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” (John 6:66, ESV)

No longer walked with Him. These were not strangers. They had followed Him. They had eaten the bread He multiplied with His own hands. And when His word turned out to be harder than the experience they had come for, they turned around and went home. Jesus let them go. Then He asked the twelve whether they meant to leave too, and I have never gotten over Peter’s answer: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68, ESV)

That is the part that should frighten us. The visitor with a different taste in how the New Testament defines worship music is of the same mind of people who stand in front of Christ Himself, hear His word, and walk the other way.

Let me take us somewhere older still. Before there was a church, before there was an Israel, a people gathered on a plain and said to one another,

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4, ESV)

Read that again. We learned the Babel story early. We colored the page of the tower. The people scattered. They wanted a name, and they meant to build it themselves. For their own glory. With their own bricks. To their own height. I am not pointing at anyone’s worship and calling it Babel. Wanting to be moved when we gather is a human thing, and a full room can be a good one when aligned with God’s authority. What is as old as that plain is the motivation underneath the building. It is the moment we start measuring the church by the name it can raise instead of the Lord it abides in. This impulse is, in our case, a human interest mostly.

The place I keep reaching to understand is that abiding means the shape Paul draws of Christ Himself. He was the one “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”(Philippians 2:6–7, ESV)

He veiled the open display of His splendor and went down.

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8, ESV)

All the way down. And only on the far side of all that descent, this: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” (Philippians 2:9, ESV)

Notice the difference between the Shinar plain and the cross. At Babel the name was seized. At the cross the name was given. The glory had been His from the beginning. He prayed for it on His last night:

“And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” (John 17:5, ESV)

He still waited on the Father to hand it back.

This is what the visitor never knew to come asking for. I keep having to learn it over again, too. Christ gave up his glory and was given it back; we keep trying to manufacture our own glory and calling it worship. We ponder what draws a crowd, decide the crowd has found the weight that matters, and start raising a name for the church the way the people on that plain raised their tower. God did not ask us to build His glory for Him. He asked us to abide in the One who already carries it.

Which takes us where John takes his own readers, in the same letter where he had watched people go: “And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.” (1 John 2:28, ESV)

Confidence or shame, at the end of that one sentence. He writes that to church people, not outsiders.

So here is the question the preacher part of me will not let us walk past. On the day He appears, the question will be heavier than the room we filled: did we abide in Him? If we have spent our years raising a name of our own, our own draw, our own version of what the visitor came hoping to feel, we will stand there with a lot to show and nothing underneath it. Shrinking back from the very One we built it for.

I think about that seat of the invited visitor. I never learned what happened. The room thins out. It aches when it does. People come once, or twice, and do not come back. Some of that we cannot help. I have stopped running the inventory the way I used to. The inventory was the wrong question. The question is whether what we have is Him. It should always be this question. We have Jesus Christ to offer, nothing more, nothing less.

The mark He looks for at that appearing is the one John names in the next breath: “If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.” (1 John 2:29, ESV)

A family likeness. The Father’s righteousness showing up in people who did not chase their own glory and stayed.

Scripture chain: 1 John 2:19; John 6:66; John 6:68; Genesis 11:4; Philippians 2:6–7; Philippians 2:8; Philippians 2:9; John 17:5; 1 John 2:28; 1 John 2:29 (all ESV)

Romans 6:3–4

When I started walking with Christ, I thought growth would feel like climbing a mountain. Step by step, up. Mostly it has felt like walking around the same mountain a different way.

If you’ve ever hiked a steep trail, you know how this works. The trail can’t go straight up. Too steep. So it switches back and forth. You walk sideways for ten minutes one direction. You hit a bend and walk sideways the other way. The summit is somewhere up there, but you almost never feel like you’re going toward it. You’re just going sideways. The boot prints in the dirt tell you everyone before you walked it the same way.

Paul wrote his letters from inside that kind of walking.

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

Romans 6:3–4, ESV

Notice the verb. It’s walk. Not arrive. Not sprint. Walk. Step by step, day by day, sometimes forward and sometimes sideways. The “in order that” tells you why you’re walking. The walking itself is what it looks like to be a baptized believer over time.

Solomon had said something similar centuries before Paul ever wrote a letter.

“Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.”

Ecclesiastes 7:13–14, ESV

Some paths are crooked because God put a bend in them. You don’t get to straighten them out. The new life you’re walking in happens on the path that’s actually under your feet. Not on some other path you wish you had.

There’s a loneliness that comes in the middle of all this. The old self has been pulled apart enough that you don’t recognize yourself in the old patterns anymore. The new self hasn’t come together enough that you recognize yourself there either. You’re somewhere in between, what I’d call the comma between buried-with-Christ on one side and walking-in-newness on the other. You know where you’re going. You can quote the verse that says it. But day after day it doesn’t feel like you’re going anywhere. The verses were supposed to make this clearer.

Then you read Paul.

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”

Romans 7:15–20, ESV

Paul wrote that. The apostle. Inspired by the Spirit. And what he confessed there is what most of us have felt at one time or another. Wanting to do right. Doing the opposite. Not understanding ourselves. The Holy Spirit didn’t edit that out of Paul’s letter to make him look like he had it all together. The Spirit let him say it. That confession is in the Bible because God put it there.

The book we’re trying to walk by was written, in part, by a man who didn’t always know which direction his next step was going.

So here’s the question. When the walking feels like it isn’t going anywhere, what are you actually walking toward?

I can’t always tell, honestly. Some days the slow climb up a switchback feels exactly the same as treading water and calling it walking with God. The next step on the trail feels just like the next step on level ground until you get to a bend and look back and see you’ve actually climbed. The difference isn’t in how the step feels. The difference is whether the path you’re on is going somewhere.

Romans 6:4 says the path does go somewhere. The verb in the verse is walk. Walking just keeps going, even on days when the going feels sideways. And the verse names where the walking ends up. Newness of life.

Paul says something like this again in a different letter, this one to the Christians at Galatia.

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”

Galatians 5:16–17, ESV

To keep you from doing the things you want to do.

That’s the sideways feeling again, named by the same hand that wrote Romans 7. It’s in the verses themselves. You’re not failing when you feel that way. You’re walking where Paul was walking when he wrote the words.

So keep walking. Take the same step you took yesterday. The summit is up there. The path goes there. The Bible says so.

Walk in newness of life. Just keep walking.

HEB

You take your usual seat one morning and look across the auditorium. Three rows up sits a brother whose faith you have watched for a year. A year ago he was unsteady. Quiet in class, hesitant in prayer, carrying a weight you could see from across the room. This morning he is leading the singing. His voice is not better. The weight has not left. But something has shifted, and you cannot quite name when.

Then comes the question that decides what kind of believer you are about to be.

Where does the credit go?

The instinct is to congratulate him. To find him after services and tell him how much he has grown. There is nothing wrong with the words. But notice what the instinct assumes. It assumes that growth is a thing he produced, an achievement to be honored, a project he can finally check off. The instinct treats him as the agent and you as the admiring witness.

Paul will not let us stay there.

“We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.”

(2 Thessalonians 1:3, ESV)

Read it carefully. Paul does not write to congratulate the Thessalonians. He writes to give thanks to God for them. The faith is growing, present continuous, an ongoing work. The love is increasing. And the response Paul models is worship, not applause. We ought always to give thanks to God for you, as is right. The rightness is structural. The credit belongs to the one whose work is producing the fruit, and the fruit appears in a brother three rows up.

This is the small revolution thanksgiving performs. It re-locates the agent.

Being thankful means we understand something is being given. The gratitude is not a feeling we manufacture. It’s the recognition that comes when we’re seeing rightly. And when the seeing is right, attention turns away from what we think we lack toward what God is multiplying. Not in our own life only. In the auditorium. In the brother three rows up. In the family across town that prayed differently this year than last.

The work of thankfulness, then, has more to do with where we look than with what we feel.

Mark tells of a man who could not walk. Four friends carried him on his bed, dug through a roof, and lowered him into the room where Jesus was teaching.

“And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’ . . . ‘I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.’ And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God.”

(Mark 2:5, 11–12, ESV)

This is what spiritual growth often looks like. A man who could not walk, walking. Not because he became strong, but because the One who heals spoke. The bed he carries out is the bed that carried him in. The evidence of his weakness becomes the evidence of God’s work.

When you watch a brother grow, you are watching a version of that scene. He was lame in some place, fearful or distracted or distant, and he is walking now. The walking is not his accomplishment. It is the testimony of who got to him.

So why is the temptation to congratulate so strong?

Because gratitude that bends outward costs us something. It requires the relinquishment of a quiet pride that wants to think it had a hand in the rising. It requires us to admit that God’s manuscript is taking the story away from us and giving it to someone else, and that this is good. That the displacement is not loss. That seeing the growth in another believer and thanking God for it, by name, in prayer, is itself the evidence that God is doing the same work in us.

This is the part that is harder to say plainly. Thankfulness is harder when you are focused on yourself. The inward gaze cannot bend the gratitude outward. The man who is busy curating his own development cannot rejoice cleanly when the development shows up next to him.

I know this because I have caught myself doing it. The brother three rows up grew, and the first thing in me was not gratitude. It was an inventory of where I was. That inventory is what I’m trying to learn to set down.

But when the focus shifts, when we begin to receive our own growth as something God has produced rather than something we have managed, the auditorium can begin to change shape. The brother three rows up is no longer competition; he becomes evidence. The sister whose marriage held when it should have broken is no longer a mystery; she becomes testimony to the One whose mercy held it. We ought always to give thanks to God for them, as is right.

There is a season in the Christian life when this becomes the dominant note.

Earlier, the prayers are mostly about ourselves, our struggles, our fears, our stalled places. Then God begins doing the slow work of bending the gaze outward. The prayers shift. Names of others appear in them. They are no longer items being checked off; they are places where God is moving, and we have been allowed to watch. The thanksgiving thickens. Sometimes it brings tears.

“Jesus wept.”

(John 11:35, ESV)

The reasons were His own. Lazarus, Jerusalem, the weight of what He came to bear. But there is something instructive in that two-word verse for the believer who finds himself weeping in prayer over the growth in others. The grief and the gratitude are not opposites. Sometimes they arrive in the same breath. Thankfulness in weakness, where God’s strength abounds and grace trains obedient longsuffering, that prayer rarely stays composed.

Paul did not congratulate the Thessalonians. He gave thanks to God for them, from a Roman city, under his own pressure, watching a church grow under theirs. The thanksgiving was not the conclusion of his pastoral work but the form his pastoral work took.

Consider what your assembly looks like the next time you walk in.

Name the brother whose faith has grown over the past year. Name the sister whose love for the family has thickened in spite of what tried to shrink it. Name the young couple who started showing up differently. Name the older saint whose prayers have changed register.

Then thank God for them. By name. This week. More than once. They are living places where God has let you watch Him work; treat them that way in prayer.

And tell at least one of them what you have noticed. This is witness, not flattery — say it that way. I have watched God do something in you this year, and I have given thanks for it. The naming is part of the work. It returns the credit to its rightful place. It tells the other person what you have seen and what you have not been the source of.

Faith that grows under pressure is the work of God. The right response of those who watch it grow is thanksgiving. And the thanksgiving, when it bends outward, is the evidence that we are becoming like the One whose work it is.

Scripture chain: 2 Thessalonians 1:3 · Mark 2:1–12 · John 11:35

HEB