Author: herbertberkley

Comparison assigns value, establishes prices, and promises returns. We spend attention discovering where we stand. We spend effort improving that standing. Sometimes we spend obedience because the life we envy seems to offer a better return.

Noticing that someone has more skill is not the trouble; that can be honest, even useful. The trouble begins when the noticing turns to resentment, and another person’s circumstances become our measure of God’s goodness. Their ability and their role make ours look small. Their abundance becomes evidence that God has withheld something we must have to be content.

We establish the valuations, then ask God to honor them.

When I first started my career in technology, more than 35 years ago, I was surrounded by people who were much smarter and more skilled than I was. It pulled me towards that comparison economy through envy. This led to a competitive quest for superiority. It’s one of the things in the world that competed with my relationship with God.

That is how the world places people, by who stands above whom. Those in Christ have another place, and Paul describes it as a body.

When we think, “I wish I had their role,” Paul answers with who did the arranging: “But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” (1 Corinthians 12:18, ESV) Paul tells them, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27, ESV) Within that body, a difference between members is no reason to despise ourselves or to dismiss someone else.

Paul is writing to Corinth about spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1), given by the Spirit to that first-century church as He willed (1 Corinthians 12:11). Our abilities are a different thing, but what Paul goes on to say about the members still holds, because that body remains, and what we have we also received: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7, ESV)

Then he takes up the ranking itself, the thought that their ability is better than ours, and turns it over. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” (1 Corinthians 12:21, ESV) The parts we would rank lowest, the ones “that seem to be weaker,” Paul calls “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22, ESV), and “God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it” (1 Corinthians 12:24, ESV). The world’s way of placing people would never price the body that way.

God composed the body “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.” (1 Corinthians 12:25, ESV) When one member is honored we rejoice with it, and when one suffers we suffer with it (1 Corinthians 12:26). Comparison makes a rival of someone we have been joined to love.

Peter says what a received gift is for: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10, ESV). A steward holds what belongs to someone else, and Paul says the same of us in 1 Corinthians, while warning against sexual immorality: our bodies are members of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:15), and “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20, ESV) What we received was given for one another, and while we assess someone else’s usefulness, the service goes undone.

The thought “I would be content if I had what they have” has its own answer. Paul told the Philippians he had learned “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12, ESV), and that he could do all things “through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13, ESV). We can begin learning that dependence in the circumstances we have today.

Where has watching someone else’s life become a reason to withhold obedience in your own?

Where envy has already cost us obedience, we confess it, and He is faithful and just to forgive (1 John 1:9). Looking back on back in my life, I find the angst of it all shaped my closer walk with the Lord, when envy of others was replaced with identity and value from God. So we go back to what we were given, and to the member whose need we have overlooked.

The same care goes with us into the world. Jesus said it is by the love His disciples have for one another that “all people will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35, ESV), and Paul carries the good past the church: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” (Galatians 6:10, ESV) The neighbor we have been measuring ourselves against is someone we can do good to instead.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016.

Drafted with AI assistance from Herbert Berkley’s own words and reviewed by him.

After a hard day’s work of demanding effort there is a place that I long for that is only a moment. It’s just a moment to stop, to cease, to let go, to be still for the sake of being still, sometimes for sanity. And then the ask comes. Not from one place but from several places. Sometimes simultaneously. From my wife, from my daughters, even sometimes the cats. We let go of our moment and give more than we think we have. Sometimes our body language, our sighing, our short words tell a story that rises above that moment of quietness. It screams something deeper and honestly less holy than we often consider. There is a cost when we let go grudgingly of what we want to do in a moment, and it is often the people around us who pay it.

Mark records a day when rest was planned and did not arrive on schedule:

“The apostles returned to Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. And he said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.” (Mark 6:30–34, ESV)

Mark takes the need for rest seriously. The invitation came from Jesus Himself, and Mark gives the reason: the apostles had no leisure even to eat. Then the plan meets a crowd. Mark does not tell us whether they rested at all during the crossing. He records what Jesus saw when He went ashore, and why He had compassion: the people were like sheep without a shepherd. The Lord who had just called His apostles to rest answered the crowd’s need by teaching them many things. Both needs were real.

We are often tired. Scripture does not ask us to pretend otherwise. What matters is what we see when the voices calling our name reach us before our rest does. We can see interruptions, or people running up a debt against our patience. We can also see the people we love, each with a need of their own, whether or not the timing suits us.

Paul comes at the same moment from another direction. Writing to a church that prized its spiritual gifts, he insisted that even the most impressive activity without love amounts to nothing, and then he described what love looks like in practice:

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7, ESV)

“Not irritable or resentful” speaks to the short words. We can complete exactly what was asked and still answer in a way that makes someone reluctant to ask again. It would be easier to be judged by what we did, since we did give more than we thought we had. Paul never mentions sighing, and a sigh can mean nothing worse than exhaustion. But when the sigh or the short word carries resentment, his description of love reaches it. Then the tone reveals the source.

If we are honest, what the sighing and the short words are screaming is leave me alone right now. Needing a few minutes alone is not the problem; Mark has already shown us that. But we can need those minutes and still be wrong in how we ask for them, and when the asking comes out as resentment, the people we love are the ones who feel it. Paul explains what controls his own life, and he roots it in Christ’s love, death, and resurrection:

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” (2 Corinthians 5:14–15, ESV)

Christ died for all so that those who live would no longer live for themselves but for Him, and that purpose reaches us even at the end of a day of giving, when all we wanted was a moment. The resentment that sometimes rides along with our need insists on its own way, and Paul has already told us that love does not. Each person calling our name is someone for whom He died.

None of this means every request must be met the instant it is made. The same Lord who had compassion on the crowd had first called His apostles away to rest. Scripture does not give us a set of steps here, but love might look something like this. We can ask someone to wait without making them feel guilty for asking, by saying honestly that we need a few minutes and asking whether it’s urgent. If it isn’t, we come back when we said we would. When our answer has already come out sharp, we can own it plainly without offering our tiredness as the excuse, rather than leaving the people around us to carry the hurt.

I’ve gone back to the person — my wife, my children — when I am short, when I am impatient, when I am frustrated, and asked them to forgive me. I ask God to forgive me too and pray for more of what’s needed in the heart to not get lost in these moments.

The Shepherd stepped off the boat, saw the crowd that had beaten Him to the shore, and had compassion on them. He is the same Lord who died so that we would no longer live for ourselves. Going back to the people we hurt, and to God, is part of learning to live for Him.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016.

Drafted with AI assistance from Herbert Berkley’s own words and reviewed by him.

Do you like to study words?

Transform appears in only three verses of the ESV. The first is about the mind: “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2, ESV). The second is about the image: beholding the glory of the Lord, we “are being transformed into the same image” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV). The third is about the body: Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body.” (Philippians 3:21, ESV) In all three the change runs God’s way: toward His will and the Lord’s image, and at last into a body like His Son’s. When Scripture warns about the other direction, it reaches for a different word: “Do not be conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2, ESV).

So the word is narrow, but change is happening to all of us. There are no days where I am not transformed. Much of what shapes us is not something we decided on; it happens to a body living under the sun, where “time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, ESV) Either way, something is being made of us, and Philippians 3 gives only two ends.

Philippians 3 walks the whole road, and it starts where all of us start. Before we choose anything, we are formed, as the psalmist says: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13, ESV) Paul’s own list begins with something done to him as an infant: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Philippians 3:5, ESV). Nobody eight days old chooses a tribe. Then the list turns to what he made of it: “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church” (Philippians 3:5–6, ESV). Received formation becomes, through repeated choices, a way of living, and Paul’s way of living was aimed squarely at Christ’s people. Paul calls all of it “reason for confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:4, ESV). It is physical life, real and partly received, but it is not the life Paul is pressing toward.

Then he met the One he was persecuting (Acts 9:5), and soon after he rose and was baptized (Acts 9:18). Everything he had counted as gain changed columns. “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Philippians 3:8, ESV) Everything. That is the response the encounter asks for. Some desires took me away from God, but God gave those desires back in a different form. It was being creative — being a producer. That production was worldly. Now I am a product of what is eternal and eclipses that worldly production. It costs me everything because to embrace it I must die to myself. Paul has a phrase for it: “becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10, ESV). Before the body is ever made like Christ’s glory, the self is made like Christ’s death. Romans names where that death begins. Spiritual life, as distinct from the physical life we were formed with, begins at the waters of baptism, where we are baptized into His death and raised through faith (Romans 6:3; Colossians 2:12) so that “we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4, ESV)

And it does not finish in a day. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on” (Philippians 3:12, ESV). This is where character is built, slowly, and where we are tempted to turn it into a list we can check off. Transformation is not a checklist. It is a change and shift in the direction of every impulse we are given to own inside of the body. Paul expects God Himself to keep correcting the way we think: “if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you” (Philippians 3:15, ESV). That is close kin to the renewal of the mind Romans 12:2 calls for, and it goes on as long as we do.

Paul’s call to the church is plain: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.” (Philippians 3:17, ESV) And he will not let us read the chapter as if only one road runs through it. “For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.” (Philippians 3:18–19, ESV) Whatever repeatedly holds attention eventually shapes worship. They are being changed too, only in the other direction. Their appetite has become their god, and the text names where that road ends. Paul says this with tears, not with a pointed finger. He tells it to the church as a warning, and none of us is past needing it. Is the direction of my impulses toward the cross, or away from it?

Then one small word turns the chapter.

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” (Philippians 3:20–21, ESV)

Here the one doing the transforming is Christ. In Romans we are told to be transformed by the renewal of the mind; here the body is changed by Christ, with a power that subjects all things to Himself. We cannot raise ourselves. We await Him, and we wait as people pressing on. And what He changes is the body itself. The body whose appetites the enemies of the cross serve, and that we are tempted either to indulge or to despise, is the very body He has promised to transform.

He can be trusted with our bodies, because He took a body Himself. Christ was “in the form of God” (Philippians 2:6, ESV), and He took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7, ESV). That was not a transformation. He did not stop being who He is: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8, ESV) What is transformed is us, into His image, and the reason is love. God, “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,” made us alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–5, ESV). The One who took the form of a servant is the One who will change our lowly body.

The chapter holds both ends of a life. On the other road the end is destruction. On this one it is a glorious body like His. We are all being changed into something. The question the text leaves us is into whose image.

The Same Person Inside the Storm

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4, ESV).

Then Paul tells the Corinthians about the affliction behind it:

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself” (2 Corinthians 1:8, ESV).

Paul describes the weight of the affliction in Asia without identifying it. We all want to carry the confidence that everything is going to be ok during moments of absolute uncertainty. I’ve had those seasons in my family, and in my experiences. I’ve always tried to portray this image that it’s all going to be ok. It’s not always ok. In the most recent season, health concerns were ever present. In many ways there seemed to be no real clarity on what the issue was. It impacted our daily lives, our jobs, and our walk as well. I think about what I’ve been through, and I read this passage. Even so, I do not think they are the same thing. But the power of the text gives us a chance to be connected to those, without specificity, who have suffered as is being described here. The beauty of this is that it is not clear what it was. We only have what it was like, and that’s a blessing from God. We can fill our names into that description.

Later in the same letter he does it again. He says “a thorn was given me in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7, ESV). He doesn’t disclose the thorn, or the details of the despair, only what they did to him. We do not need to identify Paul’s affliction to learn from his dependence on God.

“Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9, ESV).

God is named by what He does. He raises the dead. Paul says plainly where that hope rests: “he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:14, ESV). The resurrection is still ahead of us, but the hope it gives can comfort us now. We can depend on God without knowing how this particular affliction will end.

Part of what we miss is this. To handle these circumstances in a godly manner, we must not be so concerned for ourselves that we forget who was concerned for all. I feel this strongly. Paul says it more sharply: Christ died for all, “that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15, ESV). Suffering does not suspend that. But also, we need to be careful not to assume God has placed us in harm’s way because of something we have done. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Physical safety and recovery are not always promised. Where Paul went is exactly where we should go.

“He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (2 Corinthians 1:10–11, ESV). In our most challenging moments in life the tendency is to fix it on our own. Who can we trust in these moments? Who is the one leading us where we are going? We often need to set down our self-willed assessment and do what Paul did. Paul set his hope on God and asked the saints to help him by prayer. My family needed to do the same. We all need to do the same.

We had prayers from the Church that came to us and God healed us according to His will. We followed Paul’s example. Not every season ends that way, and the text does not promise that it will. The hope set on God holds either way.

“For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you” (2 Corinthians 1:12, ESV). Paul is defending how he had dealt with them. Some read his changed travel plans as the mark of a man who says yes and no at once (1:15–17). His answer is a clear conscience. By the grace of God, his conduct toward them had been sincere, even under pressure.

Notice how the circumstances were handled. The two ways a life can run. Earthly wisdom or the grace of God. We must look beyond the human outcome and focus on the spiritual outcome. In chapter 12 Paul asks three times for the thorn to be taken away. I carry pain from my past. I asked God to remove it, and He hasn’t. Paul heard this answer: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, ESV).

Grace does not mean looking unaffected. Paul told the Corinthians he despaired. His grace sustains us in weakness. We are called to remain faithful while we carry what has not been removed. We need to be the same person inside the storm as we are outside of it. That’s living inside the grace He gives. The grace He gives demands faithful obedience for us to be called living.

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: 2016. 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.

HEB

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.

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