It’s the simple things in life that bring us the most joy. You may not have a lot of resources, but if you have family, you’re blessed. If you have your health, you’re blessed. If you can look up at the stars at night, you’re blessed.

— Joel Osteen (@JoelOsteen) June 27, 2024

It’s not an uncommon sentiment to hear from a pastor, but many online users pointed out that Osteen might not be the best spokesperson for that message. After all, Osteen’s estimated net worth is at least $50 million, and his two homes in Texas have a combined value of $13.4 million.

X users were quick to start their unofficial Osteen Roast, letting the megachurch pastor know he might need to think before he tweets.

If you can look up at those stars from the balcony of your mansion, you’re Joel Osteen. https://t.co/QOjUVqHq39

— Jessica Huseman (@JessicaHuseman) June 27, 2024

You donating your salary then ?

— Federico Chispas (@dfchispas) June 27, 2024

Yeah, Joel, your multimillion dollar mansions and $350,000 Maserati are the “simple things in life.”
Why don’t you try living like you preach as Jesus would have you do? Move into an average home, drive a Chevy, get your own clothes and groceries, cook, clean.
6 months. Deal?

— Farmers for Democracy (@FarmerinVA) June 27, 2024

Joel Osteen, worth $100 million, living in multiple mansions, and owning multiple yachts wants you to know that money won’t bring you joy — but he still wants you to send him all of the money you can. https://t.co/kPaf0uLlhV

— Melanie D’Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) June 27, 2024

Joel Osteen: “It’s the simple things in life”

Also Joel Osteen: pic.twitter.com/qBvAluTiyA

— ScottW (@jswtreeman) June 27, 2024

Saw Joel Osteen trending and thought he had locked his church doors during a hurricane again
pic.twitter.com/QI4arlm1zX

— P. Against The World (@chillin662) June 27, 2024

Joel Osteen coming in to tell you how much of a struggle life is on his $54,000,000 yearly salary. pic.twitter.com/8AVHXhda7V

— Meme Kingdom (@MemeKINGD0M) June 27, 2024

If I walk into a church service pretty much anywhere in America and ask people to raise their hand if they have been hurt by a church (specifically the leadership of a church), nearly everyone will raise their hand.

Now, this isn’t to say that friction or conflict in churches are a sign of a church totally blowing their mission. Jesus teaches us how to resolve conflict in a church community. Surely, he wouldn’t do that unless we were going to need it.

No church is going to be perfect, I get that. In fact, I love how Nadia Bolz-Weber, the founding pastor of The House For All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado puts it. She tells people who want to join the church: “We will let you down.”

In my opinion, that phrase should be on the marquee of every church in America.

But there’s a flip-side to the reality that the church is made up of imperfect people who are gonna miss the mark sometimes. Jesus also says this:

“But Jesus called [the 12 disciples] together and said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave.” (Matthew 20:25-27)

We can be open about the fact that the Church isn’t perfect. But when we use that as an excuse to refuse to obey Jesus in the areas he wants to transform us (or our community of believers), that’s what noted theological experts call “a bad idea.”

Jesus doesn’t say, “it should be different” in church leadership, he says “it will be different.” This is non-negotiable.

If we in the Church don’t commit to being transformed into the likeness of Christ, why should anybody listen to us when we talk about the amazing power of the Holy Spirit in our lives or in our church gatherings?

While we cannot get caught up looking for a perfect church, what are habits of a church that is healthy?

Healthy churches have open and honest conversations.

If you bring concerns to church leadership and you are met with dismissal, prepared statements or excuses as to why information cannot be given, you should ask why.

There may be legitimate regulations and concerns for the privacy of others in some cases, and church leaders should be accountable for their actions. Those who are given power by the church should be happy to explain to the church community why authority is being used in the manner that it is.

I have a friend who was deciding on a church to attend when she moved into a new area. My wife and I had just started attending a church so we invited her to join us. Our friend set up a phone meeting with the lead pastor and asked questions about the vision and mission of the church. He refused to answer.

We didn’t last long at the church, mostly because of some moral failings that occurred within leadership staff. Secrecy is not a great habit for church leaders to overindulge in and avoiding transparency can be a huge warning flag for deeper seeded issues.

Healthy churches readily admit mistakes.

In The Next Generation Leader, Andy Stanley says that people will forgive a leader for making a mistake, but will not forgive a leader for failing to communicate. I believe that a leader who refuses to admit mistakes puts him or herself in the difficult situation of always having to spin what happens into being something good.

Sometimes, we just blow it.

Instead of putting lipstick on a pig and telling everyone it’s a princess, we gain credibility and humility when we own up to our failure. A big buzz word in churches today is authenticity. We don’t arrive at authentic community without letting people see the warts.

It’s best to be up front from the start.

If you see a recurring defensiveness in the leadership of a church when asked about mistakes, it should certainly be on your radar. Likewise, if a church tries to hide mistakes or craft seasons of failure into a ready-made public relations campaign, it’s a big warning sign.

Healthy churches embrace encouragement.

If you encounter a church that uses shame to influence you, run for your life.

Seriously. Shame about giving more money, shame about missing a Sunday, shame about your actions—shaming in any area of your life is toxic. The Holy Spirit does not transform us using shame. In fact, Paul specifically writes that “there is no condemnation to those for those who belong to Christ Jesus.”

Since Jesus doesn’t come out of the tomb saying, “There. I did it since you jerks couldn’t,” no church should ever use the Gospel message to make people feel shamed. The Gospel is the most uplifting message in history.

Don’t let anyone—not even church members—say it’s something it’s not.

No church, no minister will sit in the place of judgement at the end of this age.

If someone acts as if they have the final say about you “getting to heaven,” remember first that “getting to heaven” isn’t even the point of Christian faith, and second, that anybody using a carrot on a stick to manipulate your behaviors doesn’t follow the God who gives grace with crazy generosity. They don’t follow the God who transforms though the love of Christ.

Healthy churches aren’t selective.

If you have to dress a certain way, have a certain color skin or adhere to a predetermined set of regulations to be welcome at a church, you may wanna watch out. Any time people draw superficial lines to keep others away, they separate themselves from the Messiah who welcomed lepers, kids, beggars, prostitutes and thieves.

I’m not saying discipleship is unimportant. I’m simply saying that if a church starts excluding certain groups of people, there’s no reason the leadership can’t find a reason to put you on the exclusion list any time they want.

I believe that belonging to a faith community and being the body of Christ is critically important. It’s why I strive to call out the places where we fall short so that we don’t add more scorn onto our family, but rather so that we can invite the Holy Spirit into those places in order to see transformation.

The best way to avoid manipulative churches is to have leaders who recognize they are in place to serve others, not the other way around. Because the only way we’re going to succeed in our mission is if we’re different. Which is exactly what Jesus was telling us.

There is no plan B.

Either we commit to being different from the rest of the world in the transformation that happens within us and through us, or we fail.

In August he’ll open for Phil Wickham and Brandon Lake on the “Summer Worship Nights Tour.” Later in the fall, he’ll release his new album — his first project in three years. But he’s most excited about his new baby boy on the way. It’s a lot of change for the 25-year-old artist, but as he shared with RELEVANT, he’s figured out the key to staying grounded while his career continues to skyrocket.

Hulvey sat down with RELEVANT to talk about the secret to a healthy work/life balance, how his life is completely different from three years ago, and what fans can expect from his upcoming album.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You’ve got a tour with Phil Wickham and Brandon Lake this summer, an album coming in the fall, and probably a few other fun surprises. What are you most looking forward to?

Goodness, I mean, for me, I think this new baby boy is what I’m most excited about. The other stuff is awesome, but me and my wife, we already have one son, and just the joy that we get from that. It’s just like, I can’t wait to have that multiple times too. So for me, I’m really looking forward to that. On the career side, I can’t wait to hit the road. Brandon and Phil, it’s going to be amazing. From the times I have got to connect with them, they’ve just been so genuine. I mean, I have an album coming out, and I think that’s also really something I just can’t wait to give people because I put so much into it.

As a young dad, how do you find the balance between your career and your family?

Recently, there’s been this concept my wife and I have been operating on: quality over quantity because of how much I’ve had going on career-wise. When I’m home, I gotta be home. I mean, sit down with my son and just throw the ball with him. If he wants to throw the ball or watch a show with him, whatever it’s gotta be, I wanna be there to do it. Even the other day I had a show and had to travel in a tight window, but he had dads and donuts that morning, so I chose to make it tight and still go to his dads and donuts because I want to be there for that. Fighting for the quality of my relationship with my son and my wife has been key for us because we are aware that the quantity is not as much there right now based on how busy things are. We’ve been really fighting for that.

Do you have any tips for how you remain focused on the things that really matter?

One thing you can do is really talk to your spouse about what’s going on in your world. My wife reminds me, “Hey, keep the main thing, the main thing.” Being willing to have that accountability with your spouse can keep you grounded because she’ll let me know if there’s pride or a lack of intentionality. That helps me level up as a husband and a dad. Mentorship is also important; my mentor was really heavy with me about how all this stuff is going to fade, but my family needs me. The world can get another artist, but my family can’t get another husband and dad. Having those voices in your life to remind you what’s important is crucial. Scheduling is something I’m still learning, but learning to say no is huge as well. Being willing to say, “I’m not going to do this because I need time with my family.” We’re still walking through that, but it’s been fun to learn.

Your new album, which drops this fall, is your first one since 2021. How has your life changed in the last three years?

I could go for years about this, but it’s been a lot of things. I can’t go in public without understanding that how I represent myself could be seen by a fan. That wasn’t the case three years ago, and now it is. If there’s a stressful day going on, the way I represent Christ could be seen by somebody. Just the everyday lifestyle of fighting for Him in the midst of stress is different from what I went through in 2021 because now people really are paying attention. If I go in the Chick-fil-A line, they’re going to see how I act. I wrote a song about it because I had a bad day one day, and they saw that. I had to be honest with myself and realize I need to represent my God and my family better.

The responsibility I have over more people in my world has also changed. There’s a far bigger team now, and I have to handle business relationships in a way that is honoring. I have a responsibility to the fans to provide music that they can connect with God on and that brings them hope. They may not always agree with everything I do, but I always want it to be pure-hearted. Since 2021, the responsibility has grown. Everything the team and I are doing is naturally bigger in the world’s eyes, and I strive to make it tailored to who God made me to be. When we do these big shows, I want people to see what God’s put in me, not a version of somebody else. So, everything is different right now, and that’s okay.

Speaking of things getting bigger, Christian hip-hop is huge now. Why do you think that’s happened?

It’s totally not where it was. What I attribute it to is the TikTok movement. A lot of Christian rappers put in a lot of work on TikTok, and many content creators started coming out as Christian. They started making music for God and putting it on TikTok, and that stuff started blowing up. It became a trend, and now people are making memes about it because of how big it is. You’ve never heard a Christian song like this before; that is literally a movement now. I really attribute it to the TikTok movement.

I also think the culture is really tired of the same message of murder and watching rappers constantly die. People are wanting a breath of fresh air. It’s not just hip hop; the whole music industry is looking for life. I’m noticing that brighter textures of music are starting to be what people love to listen to. In the 2010s, there was a balance of bright and darker tones, but now it seems like people really desire music full of hope. Christian hip hop started with guys like Caleb Gordon and Alex Jean, who started coming up and shocking people. People wanted music to be excellent and reflect God. It’s definitely taken a whole new turn.

What can fans expect from your new album?

Tons. I really get into it on this one. On one of the songs, I peel back layers regarding Christian culture and the so-called church, revealing some things I think we could fix. I talk about how Jesus invites everybody to the table. Jesus is not picking and choosing who’s invited. I think a lot of people love to invite people to the table but then get shocked when they actually show up. This album is like, “Hey, you really are invited for real.” I talk about what I went through as a teenager in church, how I felt, and how God gave me hope. He was like, “Nah, you’re invited, man. You have a seat here.”

The album is funny because it has a sad title, but it’s actually a new play on a word. It’s about re-imagining what it looks like to cry and being thankful for God and what He’s done. Not always dwelling in our pain, but dwelling on how He’s taken our pain. He literally lives in us. This album is a reflection on what He’s done for me and the thankfulness. It’s very bright but also really reflective. Everyone I’ve gotten to play it for early has been really blown away by the response. I was a little scared I couldn’t pull it off because all the singles had me on a heavy momentum, and I was scared I couldn’t continue that momentum. It felt like God was giving me something fresh. He put on my heart, “I’m going to tell the story.” As I listen back, I realize God really did tell the story.

I just addressed the things going on. You’re going to hear moments where I’m being pretty bold in what I’m saying. It’s going to challenge people for sure, but the point is to remind people who Jesus really is. It’s a reminder that we’re all human, but with God in the story, we can have thankfulness and live in that place. The music really communicates that. I’m really looking forward to it. For real.

“I’m angry & disgusted to hear of Robert Morris’ sexual abuse of a child & heartbroken for Cindy Clemishire,” Warren on X. “To sexually use a 12 yr old child, then continue it for yrs, is not merely an ‘inappropriate relationship.’ It’s a crime. Sexual child abuse is an evil punishable by law. One can’t just confess when caught & move on with no consequences.

“For the integrity of Christ’s Body, God insists ‘expel the wicked person out of your church!’” Warren continued. “Perpetrators are to be publicly fired, not allowed to resign. Child abuse STILL enrages Jesus… Until the Church realizes the soul-destroying trauma of sexual abuse, the pattern will continue.”

I’m angry & disgusted to hear of Robert Morris’ sexual abuse of a child & heartbroken for Cindy Clemishire. To sexually use a 12 yr old child, then continue it for yrs, is not merely an “inappropriate relationship.” It’s a crime. Sexual child abuse is an evil punishable by law.… pic.twitter.com/1WetIdYyRy

— Rick Warren (@RickWarren) June 21, 2024

Warren’s response comes after the Gateway Board of Elders announced they had accepted Morris’ resignation last week. In their statement, the board expressed regret over the newly revealed details, claiming they were previously unaware of the victim’s age and the extent of the multi-year abuse.

“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not the abuse of a 12-year-old child,” the statement read. “Even though it occurred many years before Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we regret that we did not have the information that we now have.”

The board also announced they were working with a third-party firm to conduct a thorough investigation into the entirety of the abuse.

When my lips cried these words in a public prayer service, it felt like I was exposing a wound. I had just been diagnosed with a lethal, incurable cancer. My expected lifespan had been chopped by decades. The cancer had already burned through the inside of my bones—like a furnace.

Praying this Psalm of lament felt a bit like speaking a foreign language. As a young Christian, I had been taught that prayer consisted of ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. I found that structure helpful, and I still do. But there’s something missing: lament. Lament is not confession, and it can’t be reduced to bringing our petitions and supplications before God. Lament is bringing our grief and our protest before the Almighty when life doesn’t make sense.

After my cancer diagnosis, I experienced a flood of emotions. Within a week, not just my emotional life but my body also was forced to adjust to changes through intensive chemotherapy treatment. People would ask, “how are you?” At any given moment, I was not sure. I was not the expert on how I was doing. Moreover, I didn’t always have the time to grieve, or the energy to bring anger before God.

But as I spent time praying through the Psalms, I noticed how many Psalms I had skipped over before: Psalms about enemies, about blaming God, about lamenting to God.

Though an army encamp against me,
 my heart shall not fear; 
though war rise up against me,
 yet I will be confident (Psalm 27:3).

He has broken my strength in midcourse;
 he has shortened my days.
 ‘O my God,’ I say, ‘do not take me away
 at the midpoint of my life,
 you whose years endure
 throughout all generations’ (Psalm 102:8, 23-24).

I felt trapped by an enemy, something I never experienced so viscerally before my “war” on cancer. And deep down, I felt alienated and abandoned; the Psalmist dares to bring these before the Lord. The Psalmist trusts God’s sovereignty enough to even blame Him when His promises don’t seem to be coming true. “He has broken my strength midcourse.”

As I learned this new language of lament, I realized that I should have learned it much earlier in my Christian life. Whether our burden is an illness, the loss of a relationship, the loss of a dream, or fear about the future, laments in Scripture give us a path for bringing our anxiety and confusion before the Almighty.

Over a third of the Psalms are laments. Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning and lamenting, and the Spirit intercedes in “wordless groans.” Jesus laments in protest—turning over the tables at the Temple—and in grief—sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane, praying for the cup of the cross to be taken away. Jesus even utters a cry that simultaneously expresses our feelings of abandonment, and heals them, in trust of the Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Lament is deeply personal, but not private. In the midst of crisis, I did not always have the emotional and physical energy to weep, to cry out in grief and protest. In those moments, I was grateful for my brothers and sisters in Christ who bore my burden, not just by praying for me to be healed, but by lamenting with me.

After I had started chemotherapy, I talked with a friend on the phone: giving an update, how my wife Rachel was coping, how it affected my children, ages 1 and 3. After the conversation, she sent me a note, bringing her own emotions before the presence of God. This is how it ended:

I hate this for you more than anything. I hate this for your family. I want you to beat the heck out of it. Forgive us all for the stupid things we say and don’t say. I am praying tonight for you and Rachel.

When I received this note, the treatment had left me too exhausted to even be angry. But I was grateful for my friend’s words. I was grateful that she trusted God enough to bring her anger before the Lord in prayer. I was grateful that she was helping to carry my anger. I was grateful that she wasn’t just expecting a “quick fix” with her prayers.

In moving beyond the ACTS approach to prayer, I also realized how self-centered my own prayer life had been. When I prayed for others in need, I tended to pray that they be “fixed”—for those who had lost a loved one, for the poor in my midst, for the persecuted Christians around the world, and so on. I was right to offer “supplications” on their behalf. I still do so. But these are bigger problems—and losses—than a “quick fix” can amend. We need to unite our supplications to lament, joining the cry of the suffering: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1)

As I learned the biblical language of lament, I also came to see how I had been praying as a person of privilege, as a white, middle-class American: I assumed that God owed me a long life with a career, retirement and a chance to see my kids grow to adults. But in praying with the Psalmists, I came to see how God does not owe us these things. God has promised us His steadfast, covenant love. But He can display His love in lifespans that are shorter as well as longer, in life-stories that seem to have senseless endings, as well as those that fit with our common expectations.

Precisely because we trust that God is the sovereign Lord, we can wrestle with Him in lament. This good world is in the hands of God—but the world is also not the way it is supposed to be. Its wounds are too deep for Band-Aids and quick fixes.

In addition to adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication, we need to join the Spirit in lament—joining our suffering brothers and sisters in lament, until the Kingdom of Christ has fully come. With the martyrs in Revelation we cry out to the “Sovereign Lord” and ask “how long?” And expectantly, we petition, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

Next to it, I wrote, “Is anyone happy?“

At the time, I thought my way was blameless. I was a student leader in Cru’s ministry. I read my Bible and prayed regularly. I evangelized, I served.

I was also terribly, terribly unhappy. My faith was a heavy yoke. At night, alone in my dorm room, I had panic attacks, and thinking of my future put a knot in my stomach.

But I didn’t think unhappiness was a big deal for Christians. Wasn’t I supposed to be content with any situation? My feelings were beside the point.

Christians I admired seemed to agree. “Do not depend upon feelings,” Bill Bright, the founder of my parachurch ministry, asserted. “We, as Christians, do not depend upon … emotions, but we place our faith (trust) in the trustworthiness of God and the promises of His Word.”

I decided if my life was Jesus-approved, my heart would get with the program eventually.

Thankfully, when Cru staff members learned about my struggles, they insisted I get counseling. When I faced my deep unhappiness for the first time, I collapsed; but acknowledging my feelings led me back to wholeness.

I wish I had taken my unhappiness seriously. I wish I had believed that joy really is a hallmark of Christian flourishing. And I wish I had believed better of the Almighty—that God was concerned about more than my perfect attendance.

Here are reasons why paying attention to your happiness—and unhappiness—is essential to having a mature Christian faith.

Honesty About Unhappiness Is the Gateway to Joy

I’m moved by an interview with Bruce Kramer about living with ALS, considered one of the worst terminal illnesses. He radiated deep peace and joy. He offered no platitudes about his condition. Instead, he shared about his struggles with anger, humiliation and grief.

Often times, we American Christians wave away our discomfort, our grief, our rage and pretend everything’s better because of Jesus.

But Kramer offered a deeper, more painful and more joy-filled approach: He felt and acknowledged his unhappiness, while asking, “How do [I] grow into the demands of what is beyond [me]?”

Only through honesty about his feelings could he choose and experience joy.

Minimizing our unhappiness robs us of wholeness. As Brené Brown puts it in her book The Gifts of Imperfection, “We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

Unhappiness Is an Important Call to Action

Kramer felt his unhappiness, but he did not dwell there. Both he and his wife fought hard to avoid falling into depression. It’s eye-opening that even while dealing with ALS, they considered persistent unhappiness to be a real battle.

Long-term unhappiness should bother us. As I’ve discovered, it can signal depression, poor boundaries or abuse. God doesn’t call us to be content with dysfunction but tells us to “seek peace and pursue it.”

Rather than viewing our unhappiness as a failure or a pesky annoyance, it’s actually a gift from God. If we are deeply unhappy and don’t know what to do, it’s a clear sign we need help. Seeing our unhappiness as a call to action can steer us toward new life.

Like Bright noted, our emotions can’t be our only source of wisdom—they’re great warnings but lousy maps. I found a good therapist to be an invaluable resource for making wise choices.

We Serve a God of Joy

Finding happiness in a world of suffering is only possible because we serve a God of fierce love.

Theologian Howard Thurman, whose teaching instructed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders, was the grandson of a former slave. Thurman wrote candidly about the suffering of the African-American community.

Yet God’s goodness undergirded his hope. Thurman said of Jesus, “‘In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.’ Wherever His spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for He announced the Good News that fear, hypocrisy and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.” Thurman knew that God’s goodness and wholeness was the source of his community’s freedom. He believed that a holy God did not play handmaiden to the system that oppressed them.

Knowing God is good matters. Believing that God desires our wholeness helps us take action. If we are not whole, if our unhappiness seems neverending and without purpose, then we know something’s wrong. A good God calls us to take radical, courageous steps to face a broken world.

Happiness is a Serious Matter

I wish more Christians thought of deep unhappiness as an emergency. Too often, I hear faithful people waving away their problems, affirming that “God works out everything for good” without asking hard questions about how. Jesus is not a magical eraser. He calls us to be loving, not better hype men.

Happiness isn’t the only metric for wholeness, but it should be one of our concerns. At the very least, if we feel unhappy, we should ask why. We should be willing to seek counsel, examine our theology and rush desperately after new life.  We should assume that God cares about our emotional health, that He provides a pathway to wholeness.

GOD: Go to Pharaoh so you can bring my people out of Egypt.

MOSES: What? Who, me?

GOD: I will be with you.

MOSES: What if they ask who sent me? GOD: I Am has sent you.

MOSES: What if they don’t believe me?

GOD: I’ll give you the power to perform signs and wonders in my name.

MOSES: But I’m not good with words.

This is where I can imagine God saying slowly and firmly, “Moses, who made your mouth? Go! I’ll help you speak, and I’ll tell you what to say.”

It’s easy to read about Moses’ doubt and think, This is God speaking to you! Don’t you trust him? Then I think of all the times I’ve determined God must have confused his plans for me with his plans for someone else. I’ve offered up plenty of I can’t do this! Just look at my mess! I wonder what God thinks as he listens to my fears of never-enough-ness.

God does the choosing and assigning, not us. Whew! He calls us, and he equips us. There’s no need to run from his calling, to deny it, or to wish it away because “the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep,” will also “equip [us] with everything good for doing his will.”2

God demonstrates his power through our frailty. In fact, this is the only thing we can boast in: His power is made perfect and on full display in our never-enough-ness. When we are weak, we are actually made strong in Christ Jesus.

Whoa. The secret to strength is weakness.

Grasping this has been a game changer for me. I used to think being ill-equipped disqualified me from serving God, but I’ve learned that when I admit my inadequacy, I invite his power in to strengthen me. This is fertile soil for surrender. Surrender says, The calling you’ve laid before me is too great. I cannot fathom it. Still, I will obey. I will trust that you go before me.

I believe God chose Moses because he was weak. God wanted Moses to know he was able to lead the people only because God was with him, giving him everything he needed to do the job.

When you feel weak—or anxious or fearful—the very admission of your weakness could be the moment you realize true strength. And in that moment, you’ll see that you are the one God wants to use. You’re it. God’s glory rests in you.

The first time I ever spoke in public was at a writing work- shop, six months before my first book was released. When I stepped up to the microphone, I said, verbatim, “This is the first and last time I’ll be speaking in public, so here goes.” (In hindsight, I don’t recommend this.) 

I proceeded to cry through my story, sniffling into tissues, ending my time with a rousing offer to pray. To my surprise, at the end of my session, about fifteen women formed a line to talk. My story had touched them, had offered them something they needed. I’d given language to anxiety and depression, something not often talked about in church. I left hoping to get the chance to speak again. 

The speaking invitations crept in. But speaking brought fear, so I’d write out my talks word for word, only to find myself speaking with my head down, following the script too closely. If I looked up to reference a slide, I’d lose my place in my notes. 

A few months into this new vocation, I found myself on an airplane headed to give three forty-five-minute talks at a conference. This time, due to weather, my flight was running behind. I had only thirty minutes to make my connection in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport—one of the busiest in the world. I ran from concourse to train to concourse and was the last to board for the final leg of the trip. As we reached ten thousand feet, I leaned down to get my laptop and put a few finishing touches on my upcoming talks. 

My laptop was still in the seat pocket of my last flight. 

I arrived at my hotel in a puddle of exhaustion, fear, and frustration. Now what? No notes, no computer. Falling to my knees, I confessed right then: 

Never have I wanted my teaching to be about what I bring. I don’t want my words to be my own, my talks to be controlled or predictable. But I’m afraid not to plan every word. 

Will you please help me? Speak through me? Surprise us all with what you have? 

God gently responded: “Do you trust me? Do you trust I will give you my words?” 

God was looking for this little girl to simply be brave. I taught three sessions without notes that weekend. It was the most free I’d ever felt standing in front of a group of women. As it turns out, I love telling stories on the fly. 

It’s difficult to muster bravery in our everyday lives, isn’t it? So often, fear creeps in. What if I fail? What if others ridicule me? Our emotions are very real, and I do not wish to minimize them. But our bravest moments come from trusting, from falling into the plan of God. When we do, bravery becomes less about courage and more about faith. We trust God will never leave us or forsake us. We trust everything is possible for those who believe. We trust we can do all things through Christ, who gives us strength. He is faithful to accomplish what- ever he begins and will carry it to completion.

What joy to come before the throne, humbled and low. What freedom to be used, shortcomings and all. This is when we realize that we, the weak ones, have been a part of God’s plan all along. 

Reflect:

Have you found yourself believing that past mistakes or even current situations disqualify you from being used by God? How might those same things be part of the very reason God chooses to use you in His kingdom?

Taken from A Surrendered Yes by Rebekah Lyons. Copyright © 2021 by Rebekah Lyons. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com. 

They may even put up protest when their spiritual lives are our topic of conversation, fervently arguing that all the benefits of Christ are theirs. Instead they live in fear, desperation and often sin.

The question is, why are so many of us stuck in our development toward Christ-likeness? Why are we more known for our fear and hate than our peace and love?

Our struggle starts like this: All Christian disciplines are beautiful and beneficial in the life of a believer. For example, I have a personal burden and desire to read the Bible every day and to perpetuate a heart of worship, praise and thanksgiving both continually and, at times, intentionally when no one is watching.

I also practice constant contact with the Spirit throughout my day with times of focused engagement and intercession. But even in my own very disciplined life I can easily practice these spiritual exercises and not actively engage with God on a personal and intimate level.

For far too long, we have practiced our faith assuming that these valuable disciplines are the meeting place or the “point of communion” arranged for us to meet with Jesus every time we use them.

A point of communion is the practice, discipline or place in which the Spirit has created special access to the spiritual nourishment and manna needed for each season. It is a place of fulfillment and refreshing we need to remain sustained in Christ. In it, the Spirit provides the grace we need to overcome and remain united to Christ.

I believe reading the Bible every day is extremely valuable. But no one is able to eat upon His flesh and experience their daily bread while in the Word every time he or she opens it up. Yes, you can always learn more about His character, nature and ways when studying Scripture, but that doesn’t mean the words on the page will be the place you will meet Him face to face today.

If you have been a believer for long you have had these experiences: First, a day or season of reading the Bible where the verses jumped off the page and nourished your soul. (I absolutely love these times when the Bible comes to life.) Secondly, you’ve been told, and shamed into believing that if you are struggling with sin or stuck, not growing in the Lord, “What you need do is read the Bible more.”

The mistake we all make is trying to recreate any experience with the Lord without checking in to find out where supper will be served. We experienced communion or nourishment during worship or in Bible study one time and assumed we were benefitting from the practice rather than the presence. What could happen if we were to exchange our value for form with a love for encounter?

We have to remember that ours is a romance story, not a formula.

The spiritual disciplines are about tuning in to God’s heart and refining our focus so that our hearts match His already established will and nature. They were not designed to be used as a power play.

How often have we read the Bible because we thought laying our eyes on the pages would please God and make us more likely to earn His favor and provision? Or, do we read the Bible because we believe somehow this behavior or discipline makes us more worthy of His attention?

Of course, reading the Bible is a great idea, but it’s our heart and our intent in the practice that is vital. Read the Bible. Do it every day. But don’t do it as if you’re paying spiritual dues and building credibility in the eyes of God.

Similarly, how many of us have attempted to use fasting to impress God? I am convinced He is not impressed. How can He be any more impressed with us? He is already consumed with love and affection for every one of His children. Fasting is very important—exponentially so in any first-world culture. The issue is the heart and whether we are trying to force God’s hand out of our own determination.

Fasting, is mostly, if not entirely, for our benefit. Fasting is separating ourselves from different forms of distraction and replacing them with acute focus on our spirit man. Fasting helps us tune into God, not God into us. For example, from a place of fasting we might discover a clearer means of intercession.

Often, we pray like we fast, trying to manipulate God into action. If this formula—where religious abstinence yields spiritual progress—worked without fail, we would all be fasting a lot more often. Our perspective will dictate our interpretation of the events. We often misinterpret any positive result found in our practices as a byproduct of the “discipline” performed instead of the intimacy achieved through acute focus. God always longs for that level of intimacy and connectedness.

We learn in the Word that He desires and is moved by intimacy rather than our sacrifice. I have found that the Father will move on our behalf even when we have no idea why. His bountiful love is not held captive by our understanding. Yet our limited understanding can hold us back and keep us captive. Our perspectives keep us stuck, effectively dining alone at an empty table.

Lastly, let’s consider the practice of worship and thanksgiving. Whether through the vehicle of music or simply through the intentional act of giving God the attention, affection and acclaim He deserves, regular worship is appropriate and beneficial.

Yet, there are times when the Spirit invites us specifically into worship as the place to meet and encounter Jesus. In those times, worship has a new depth or a new excitement. In those times, we eat upon and nourish ourselves on His goodness through worship and thanksgiving. The Spirit-led invitation, made personally, often helps to increase our appreciation for His presence.

If we are going to move from sprinters to marathon runners, we must learn how to maintain nourishment and stamina at the table of Jesus. The purpose of our training is to follow the Spirit’s lead and direction to where He has made a meeting place for us and Jesus. Sometimes it’s worship, sometimes it’s studying the Bible and sometimes it’s as unspiritual as taking a moment to enjoy a great cup of coffee.

Following the Spirit in the disciplines is about learning to discern where your peace and romance with Christ is most full and nourishing in every season.

Learning to discern our Point of Communion is the life source of endurance. If you are not careful you will miss out on this fuel because you forgot to show up emotionally and relationally or because you were too busy doing the “right” Christian practices.

Christian disciplines are beneficial to practice regularly or every day, but understand two things: disciplines do not buy you value or credibility with God and, secondly, spiritual disciplines, no matter how often or intensely practiced, will not cause you to live a life overflowing with love. Only intimacy with God will. The Pharisees made this obvious. (see John 7:14-19, 8:1-11)

Practicing spiritual disciplines without intentional openness and intimacy with God is as successful at making a connection as taking your wife to dinner and being on a business call or watching to a football game the entire time. You might have made the disciplined effort of taking her out, but I promise you, she is not feeling the love. Grace and mercy and her bounty will not overflow.

And likewise, a wife can submit her body as a matter of sacrifice and honor to her husband, but if she doesn’t show up in genuine affection and intimacy beyond the physical, then whether he knows it or not, he will not be satisfied. He needs her fully present in spirit, soul, and body. He needs her invested. Authentic intimacy and connection cannot be fake. It is the same with our spouses and our God.

Seasons in the Lord can come and go as often as daily and can last for years. Knowing and providing what we need to remain in Christ is the work of the Great Counselor, the Holy Spirit. Learn to discern your Point of Communion, and learn to be sustained in the ever-abundant, ever-present goodness of God.

Start by first asking God for help. This is my most common encouragement to people. Then ask for an increased discernment and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and begin to practice. If you believe you can hear a specific leading, then try it out and see what happens. If you are not sure, then put one or two of the disciplines into practice and see if you are encouraged, filled or sustained.

The only way to grow spiritually is through trial and error. This is why grace has been afforded to you. You get to practice. In the art of seeking, genuinely and honestly, you cannot go wrong. And today’s a great day to start.

Lentz answers that question head-on in the latest episode of The RELEVANT Podcast.

“I did ministry most of my adult life,” Lentz said. “I don’t miss doing church. I can’t imagine us doing a church at all.”

Lentz was fired from his position at Hillsong NYC in November 2020, citing “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures” as reasons for his termination.

“I ran a church and it went bad at the last chapter,” Lentz admitted. “The whole picture of Hillsong, New York City [was] amazing. I’m proud of it. But I’m also really aware that there’s a part in there that’s painful that had to do with my leadership. I don’t take that lightly.

“I’m not going to rush some of the repair jobs that I need to take,” he continued. “I didn’t get there overnight, so it’s not going to get healed overnight. But I’m not starting any church.

“If God shows up and an angel drops on my doorstep and knocks with blueprints, I’m still going to say, bring another angel.”

Over the last four years, Lentz has stayed away from the pulpit — working regular desk jobs and consulting public speakers — jobs he said he’s really enjoyed.

“I don’t miss the ministry headaches at all,” he said. “My real answer to that question [if he’s eventually starting a church] is it’s not even in the conversation. And I know people are skeptical of that — cool. I don’t expect you to come back around. But I can tell you right now, if people are waiting for me to come back and do a church, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

You can hear our full, hour-long conversation with Lentz — which covers everything from what led to his downfall, to his approach to healing over the last four years, to his family and more — on the latest episode of The RELEVANT Podcast.

Episode 1174: Carl Lentz

“We are deeply grieved and saddened by the recent and very serious allegations against Pastor Robert Morris involving the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old minor,” the network wrote on X. “In light of these events and a recently released statement by Gateway’s Elders, Daystar’s leadership has made the decision to remove all of Pastor Robert Morris’ programming from our broadcasting schedule. Daystar unequivocally condemns the actions described in these allegations and remains committed to upholding biblical values as outlined in the Word of God. As we navigate through this challenging situation, we extend our heartfelt support and prayers to all those impacted.”

The decision comes less than a week after Cindy Clemishire, now 54, publicly accused Morris of sexually abusing her over a span of four years, starting when she was a child. On the Wartburg Watch blog, Clemishire detailed the abuse she endured starting on December 25, 1982, when she was just 12 years old and Morris was 21. She said the abuse continued for four-and-a-half years while Morris lived with her family.

On Friday, Gateway’s elders sent a statement to staff, stating Morris admitted that “in my early twenties, I was involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying.”

“It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong,” Morris, 62, said in a statement to local Dallas news station WFAA-TV on Sunday. “This behavior happened on several occasions over the next few years … Since that time, I have walked in purity and accountability in this area.”

Clemishire, however, told The Roys Report that Morris’ version of events was not the full story.

“He says there was no sexual intercourse, but he did touch every part of my body and inserted his fingers into me, which I understand now is considered a form of rape by instrumentation,” she said. “I was an innocent 12-year-old little girl who knew nothing about sexual behavior.”

On Tuesday, Gateway’s Board of Elders announced that Morris was resigning from his position at the 100,000-member church. The board expressed regret over the newly revealed details, claiming they were previously unaware of the victim’s age and the extent of the abuse.

“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not the abuse of a 12-year-old child,” the statement read. “Even though it occurred many years before Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we regret that we did not have the information that we now have.”

However, Clemishire shared that in 2005, she had confronted Morris about the abuse via email, with former Gateway elder Tom Lane responding and acknowledging the incidents.

“The leadership at Gateway received actual notice of this crime in 2005 when I sent an email directly to Robert Morris’ Gateway email address,” Clemishire said in a statement released Tuesday night by her attorney Boz Tchividjian. “Former Gateway elder, Tom Lane, received and responded to my email, acknowledging that the sexual abuse began on December 25, 1982, when I was 12 years old.

“Again in 2007, my then attorney Gentner Drummond (the current Attorney General of Oklahoma) sent a letter to Robert Morris with the hope that he would help reimburse me for the thousands of dollars I had expended in counseling as a result of this abuse,” she continued. “His attorney acknowledged the dates as well and then attempted to blame me for the abuse. At the very least, both the Gateway pastor and at least one elder had specific notice that I was sexually abused beginning when I was 12 years old. Gateway had the information but intentionally decided to embrace the false narrative Robert Morris wanted to believe.”

1. I thought I was a Christian, but….

2. God did [blank] in my life…

3. …And now I’m at this amazing place and I’m not struggling anymore at all!

Evangelical Christians have developed a rather confusing habit when it comes to sharing testimonies. We have a tendency to prefer telling dramatic stories about dark, reckless pasts turned around at a sudden moment to grab the attention of the crowd and stir their emotions rather than describe the ebb and flow of real-life faith stories. The more dramatic the conversion story, the better.

There seems to be an obsession with sensational testimonies and tangible moments of catharsis—you know, those brilliant “this-changes-everything” moments that make every story better.

But the problem is, often, the walk into faith is gradual. And the reality is that struggles are constantly coming and going. How does that work its way into our stories?

The Ups And The Downs

Many Christians discredit their actual earliest memories of conversion, highlighting later turning points as the moment when they truly “got it.” Especially in the case of prodigals, any falling out with God gets relabeled as a pre-conversion experience. This practice can seemingly justify delinquent behavior that occurs after the conversion experience, and eliminates the Christian sin factor.

Obviously, that’s problematic.

Christians are forever working to regain acceptance in a secular society after acquiring unfortunate labels like “hypocritical” and “close-minded.” Bending the truth about faith journeys only makes that worse.

The reality is that many normal Christians walk away from their faith for periods of time, for whatever reason. Challenges and temptation spin people around and bring them to their knees. Especially where hurt, shame, doubt, or lack of support is involved, it’s easy to walk or run away from the faith-based life.

When people come back, though, how should they treat those seasons? There are endless complicated theological arguments over whether once-saved-always-saved is a reality, but individuals know deep down if they were living in faith or not before their falling away periods.

The same goes for Christians who struggle with some kind of ongoing sin. While Hebrews 10:26 explains the tough truth about habitual sin and the lack of grace for it (“For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains sacrifice for sins”), habitual sin is a part of tons of Christians’ lives.

That’s the problem with the sensationalized, past tense testimony. There is no room for everything that isn’t OK now. There isn’t room for real failures. It’s hard to talk about our past brokenness. It’s nearly impossible to talk about current brokenness, especially because of the undeniable pressure to fit the mold in contemporary churches.

It’s Time to Get Real

The way we do testimonies needs to change. If we are still trying to make church, faith, and Christian living real, testimonies need to get real, too. We can’t act like our struggles magically disappeared when we accepted Christ.

Anything but the truth does a disservice to ourselves, to truth, and to each other.

How many times have you heard people question whether or not they are saved? One of the biggest reasons people question that is because they feel like they’re not allowed to struggle.

Struggle is a reality. Temptation is a reality. Failure is a reality. Yes, even for those who are actively walking with Christ.

We can and should work to change Christian culture so that struggle doesn’t have to be so embarrassing. The reality of Christ is that shame isn’t ours to bear (Isaiah 61:7). The reality of living in faith is that Christians need to support each other (Ephesians 4, 5).

Telling real testimonies is key for that.

Spurts and lulls are normal.

Maybe this obsession with dramatic testimonies full of drastic changes has gotten out of hand. They’re exciting and all, but, by acting as if early faith lives were not faith lives at all, an unrealistic precedent is being set for new Christians, especially.

That, and we are doing a harming to our representation of Christianity if we discount struggles, sins and lulls as non-faith periods—because we present the idea that real faith is without temptation, failure or dry spells.

It can be scary to get vulnerable, but when everyone gets vulnerable together, there are so many more opportunities to receive help and healing.

Real faith lives aren’t just rainbows and sunshine. Let’s stop acting as if they are.

That’s a question many of us have asked ourselves at some point. I’m talking about how we’re going to affect the situation, change the world, get our hands dirty, watch people go from despair to joy and actually see life-change occurring in front of you. We’re talking about palpable, measurable help. What can one person do to help like that?

I’ve struggled with (and sometimes still do) the enormity of the need and the smallness of me. Sometimes it seems like giving 25 bucks, signing some petition, or even praying just feels like throwing a cup of water into the ocean. And while I feel good doing those things, I often wondered, “Was this more for them—or for me?”

Then one day, a pastor took the stage at my church and shared a story I’d heard zillions of times, but was about to hear again as if for the first time. Maybe you’ve heard this story, it’s about Jesus feeding the 5,000, and it’s found in all four of the Gospels. By way of recap:

A bunch of folks — at least 5,000, but probably more like 15,000, because the original count didn’t include women and children —were clamoring to hear Jesus speak, heal and generally just be Jesus-y. It was an epic, big-tent-revival, emotionally and physically exhausting, amazing kind of day.

So, these thousands of people are at this impromptu Woodstock when they begin to run out of an oh-so-precious commodity: food. And as the original greek states, “The 5,000 started to get cranky because their little bellies were empty.”

Enter, The Apostles.

What did the ever-practical apostles do? They approached Jesus and said (again, in the Greek), “JC, your people are hangry (hungry+angry), what would you think about giving a quick benediction, sending them home for supper, and starting again tomorrow?”

Now the apostles must have known better, because there’s just no way they thought that Jesus, being as wonderfully contrary as He tended to be, would say, “Yep, solid point homies, send my people away from me.”

What then did He say?

Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat” (Matthew 14:16).

The apostles proceeded to go back a forth a few more times, reminding Jesus that it would take half a year’s salary to feed everyone, and even if they did have that kind of money, it’s not like there was a Costco down the street.

Finally, Andrew, maybe out of desperation, or possibly out of deep faith (or both?), says to Jesus, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” (John 6:9).

Now what I love about this is that:

1. Andrew offered this up this small bit of food as a legitimate solution. And while he probably thought it was unlikely to make a dent in the problem, he tried. He didn’t cower behind the problem, he did something!

2. There was a little boy who, when everyone got hungry, didn’t run away with his food and hide, but somehow made it available as a humble solution to the gigantic problem. Would I have hid? Would anyone blame me if I did? I mean, it’s my lunch, why be hungry if I know this tiny bit of food won’t really help.

Of course, Jesus does what only He and David Blaine can do: magic. And with the little bit that was offered, He miraculously fed everyone. Abracadabra: dinner!

So, what can we take from this story?

First, like the apostles, we are faced with a dilemma. There is a gigantic need in front of us, in fact there are multiple gigantic needs. There are 35 million people enslaved, right now, in this world. In 2022, 630,000 people died of HIV/AIDS. 21,000 people (most of them kids) die of starvation every. single. day. And if you’re like me, the enormity of the problem is crippling—unless we think like Andrew.

Andrew didn’t get how it would all work out, but he put his best solution forward, not because he actually thought it would solve everything, but because he knew that trusting Jesus means not having every answer, but rather being obedient with what you’ve got and trusting Him for the miracle.

And like the little boy, we’ve got a lunch box filled with what we feel is just enough to keep us satisfied. Yet God asks us to relinquish it so that He can work and do miracles with our very best offerings.

So what’s in your lunchbox?

I would contend that you have a lot in there. For starters, maybe you have a passion to help, resources at your disposal and the ability to pray. So, instead of seeing that 25 bucks as nothing, realize that it is something—it’s a fish! And what about the prayers you offer, the social media posts you share, and the internship you accept? All of those are loaves and fishes.

Those you care about need you to not crumble under the enormity of the problem, but rather rise up, bring forward your lunch, and trust that miracles will happen.

Or, if you’re Christine Caine, you got your motorcycle license. 

“I thought to myself, ‘I’m 55, I’ve got to do something new,’” Caine said, as if it’s the most obvious hobby for a full-time global ministry leader to pick up.

But in both her life and missions work, Caine always goes for the unexpected. She’s not interested in following the same path everyone else is taking. She’s on the lookout for the undiscovered path, the next step that lead to a new adventure.

It’s why, unlike most of the world, she has no desire for the world to “go back to normal.”

Moving Forward

“We are in a time that we all need reminding it’s time to move forward or we’re going to get stuck,” Caine said. “The one phrase I have heard more than any other phrase in the last three years is, ‘I just wish things would go back to normal.’ But I’m standing here thinking that we can’t do that. The world fundamentally has shifted in the way that we knew it. And not only that, but the Lord’s always doing a new thing.”

Caine has spent the last three years repeatedly hearing the message that God was doing a new thing in this season, which led her to write her latest book, Don’t Look Back.

She was reading Luke 17 one day when the message struck her. In verse 32, Jesus instructs the disciples to remember Lot’s wife. “It was like I had been hit in the head by a two by four,” Caine said. “I found out there are 170 women referenced in Scripture, either by name or in passing, but Jesus only told us to remember one woman: Lot’s wife. And he told us to remember her in the context of the world ending as we know it.”

Caine said she knew God was trying to show her a deeper message, which led her to Genesis 19: The world as Lot and his family knew it was burning down.

The Lord had rescued them out of Sodom and Gomorrah, and as it was all burning down, the angel of the Lord said, “Don’t look back.” But Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

Through her studies, Caine quickly discovered why Jesus wanted people to remember the story of Lot’s wife.

“In the original language, the ‘looking back’ is like a longing, a wanting to go back,” she explained. “I was thinking how everyone has been talking about how they just want to go back to normal. They wish they could go back to the good old days, whatever that might mean. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s so much longing on the earth right now, even among believers, to go back to something, some sort of fantasy land that we think is awesome.’

“But Lot’s wife got stuck as a pillar of salt,” she continued. “She basically became calcified in a place she was only meant to be passing through. She was more attached to what she was leaving than what God had for her in the future.”

Caine realized that if we’re not vigilant, many of us can become like Lot’s wife — calcified in a moment for the rest of our lives. In fact, many of us have already become calcified, stuck in the past three years waiting for life to start again.

“We’ve been in a pandemic in sweatpants for three years, and it’s time to get your jeans back on and start stretching a bit and moving forward,” Caine said. “We are in a dangerous moment because there comes a threshold that if you don’t start at some point, you really do get stuck. And I truly believe that the time to act is now.”

“I think we are in a time on the Earth that we all need reminding that it’s time to move forward or we’re going to get stuck.”

Of course, sometimes the hardest part with moving forward is knowing how to take the first step. The world has changed tremendously over the last several years, and stepping into a new world is never easy, especially when the world seems like it’s heading down a chaotic path. But Caine wants people to know that we have to start somewhere.

“If you don’t start moving forward, you end up just in a holding pattern rehearsing and regurgitating the same old thing,” she said. “Otherwise, 20 years happen and you’re still dealing with the same problems. But you get to decide whether you’re going to move forward with that or whether you’re going to still be stuck.”

Caine chose to move forward by developing skills to transform her life, ministry and relationships: resiliency, tenacity and flexibility. It’s what led her to learn how to ride a motorcycle.

Caine pulled up to  a Southern Californian DMV fully prepared to leave with a small piece of paper that would let her drive a bike on the open road. Additionally, she left with a valuable lesson about looking forward to the future.

“The instructor would remind us, ‘Remember, where you look you go,’” Caine said. “And it was like something went off in my head. It’s so simple, but so true. If you keep looking back, you’re going to go backwards. And if you start looking forward, you can move forward.”

That simple bit of advice has become a mantra for Caine. She’s looking forward to what God has lying ahead for her, not focusing on what’s in the rearview mirror.

It is tempting to look back, she admits, but Caine is trying her hardest to keep her gaze on where she knows God wants her. Some days are easier than others, as some paths are easier to say yes to than others. She knows the future will have hardships and difficulties and unforeseen obstacles along the way. But she knows that ultimately, the difficult paths are always worth it.

“I’ve learned over the years that the pain of regret is greater than the pain of obedience,” she said. “I have to trust what I know about the character of God more than what I do not know about the future. That’s the only way I’m able to move forward.”

A Time for Reflection

As much as we may want change to happen overnight, we can’t wake up one day and no longer have a fear of the future. The problems we might be facing today don’t go away because we’ve got our sights set on what’s next. There is still a current reality that we have to learn to live in.

“If you keep looking back, you’re going to go backwards. And if you start looking forward, you can move forward.”

But, Caine warns, the key is learning how to navigate our challenges while still moving forward, not getting stuck in place trying to solve a solution.

“I don’t want people to think that they can dismiss or even bypass their pain and suffering by looking to the future,” Caine clarified. “But there is a difference between looking back on our circumstances to heal from them, like in a therapy session, and looking back to stay there, for good or bad reasons. There is a proper time to process it, and a proper time to move on from it.”

Caine points to Scripture for examples of Biblical heroes like Moses, Joshua and Saul aptly mourning their circumstances and then moving forward.

And that’s where Caine feels our world is now. We’ve spent three years lamenting a world that has passed away.

“Now, it’s time for us to start looking forward instead of backwards,” she said. “It’s almost like, OK, we need some permission now to say it’s OK to start looking forward towards the promise of God, the purpose of God. He’s still got a future. Our history doesn’t have to define our destiny. You can acknowledge what has happened, but not be defined by it.”

But what exactly does the first step toward the future look like? Caine has some advice for those brave enough to start a new journey. “The first step is always in your mind,” she said. “You have to decide for yourself because nothing changes until you change your mind.”

Think of your thoughts as if they’re a train, Caine explains. They take us from one place to a new destination, but you don’t get there if you don’t get on the train. By making the conscious decision to step on a thought train, you’re metaphorically stepping off the stationary platform.

“And then, be willing to go through the process,” she said. “You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get unstuck, whatever hard work is required.”

For some people, getting unstuck may be beginning therapy. Or it might be blocking, muting or unfollowing certain people. It could be changing friend groups, careers, or leaving a draining relationship.

“Truthfully, there isn’t always one tangible next thing you can do,” Caine said. “But whether it’s mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, relational or financial, whichever area you feel stuck in, that’s the area that you have to begin to do the next right thing.”

Everyone’s first steps look different, as do their second, third and fourth steps. Sometimes they’re big, like moving across the country, and sometimes it can be as small as setting an early morning alarm. Whatever the step, the important thing is to keep moving.

“Nothing changes until you change your mind.”

“I think most of us have a hope of where we want to end up,” Caine said. “But we don’t know how to get there. We end up minimizing the value of the right next step because we think it’s too small and it won’t make a difference. And the truth is, the difference probably won’t show up right away. But it will a year from now.

“Unfortunately, because of the world that we live in, no one’s got any patience,” she said. “Everyone wants instant gratification. We all want change, but it’s not going to happen. This is not a self-help thing that with three steps and two weeks will magically unstick you. I wish I could say there’s no pain. But there is pain, so choose your pain wisely.”

Caine chose to step into the pain of obedience three years ago. And while it led her to newfound experiences — more travels, more friendships, and of course, a motorcycle license to accompany her cream-colored Vespa — it also led her to a deeper intimacy with Jesus. And of all the things she’s embraced over the years, she continually admits that’s her favorite step she’s ever taken. 

“I’ve been given the opportunity — well, we all have — to become more intimate with Jesus,” she said. “And it didn’t take me long to realize that’s about the only guarantee we have in this life. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He will never leave us nor forsake us. And I think coming out of the last few years, that’s about all I do know. He’s good; He won’t leave me; He is going to enable me to get through whatever it is, and in Him, all the promises of God are yes and amen.

“So despite what the past looks like, I can have hope, I can have faith, I can still have a glint in my eye, a spring in my step and look to the future with joy and peace and confidence,” she concluded. “Not because I know anything about the future, but because I know the One who holds the future in His hands.”

Historically, differences on teaching have caused major divisions within the Church. Few things annoyed Jesus or the apostles more than incorrect teaching. Martin Luther even started the Protestant Reformation because of his annoyance with the Church’s incorrect doctrine.

But before you go and nail a list of complaints to the door of your pastor’s office, take the time to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What Does the Bible Say About it?

Christianity is unique among religions in that its adherents are encouraged to test the teaching they receive and not accept it just because it comes from a preacher or person in authority. John encourages us in 1 John 4 to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

So take the teachings from your church, community or pastor and test them against what Scripture states. Can you find that they are consistent? Or do these teachings in your church disagree with what the Bible actually says?

This will help you discern whether you have biblical grounds to confront your teachers. If you do end up confronting the pastor or teacher, you will want to bring more of an argument than, “Your teaching annoys me.” You would be well served to have biblical grounds to challenge their (or anyone’s) teaching.

2. Is it Me?

Of course, you may find that your pastor or teacher lines up with Scripture. If so, then you probably need to search yourself and ask why you’re feeling annoyed.

Many times, we may walk away from a church not feeling right about what we heard taught. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the teaching was unbiblical or incorrect. Sometimes that feeling we feel is the Spirit of God using His Word to convict us of sin or in our own lives or errors in our thinking. Perhaps we feel annoyed because we didn’t get enough sleep the night before, or perhaps we failed to approach our time of worship in prayer and humility.

It’s wise, before you jump the gun and confront others, first to pray like the Psalmist, “Search me O God and know my heart, test me and see if there be any grievous way in me.” This kind of submission requires humility. So remember, be humble and ask, “Is there anything in my life that could be contributing to the discord I feel in my faith community?” “Am I annoyed because the teaching is unbiblical or am I annoyed because the teaching is striking too close to home?”

Often, I find the latter to be true.

3. Can I Confront False Teaching in a Spirit of Love and Peace?

Unity and peace within the Church are the foremost characteristics of a Spirit-filled community. We never want to do anything actively to bring discord to what God has joined together. Our motivation should always be love and never pride. Remember that love bears all things, endures all things and never fails (1 Corinthians 13).

However, if some teaching in your church runs contrary to the Scriptures or to the Gospel, then you should bring your concern to the authorities in your church.

But remember, Jesus-like confrontation is for the benefit of the Church, not your own reputation. So confront in the name of truth, but speak the truth in love. If you find can’t do this without getting angry, or if you’re just looking to prove you’re right, then take a step back and pray for wisdom as to how to proceed. Your victory will be hollow if you succeed in correcting your pastors’ or teachers’ doctrine, but fail to display the love and humility that doctrine teaches.

I should have seen it coming. I had packed my life with jobs and positions and commitments out of my deep-seated need to be needed. I was too busy, and the gentle, calm woman I’d married five years prior had decided she would rather be single than be married and do life all alone.

“Pam,” I said, my voice low and my words slow, “if you will stay here tonight—if you will agree not to leave tonight—I will walk in tomorrow and resign.” The red rims around her eyes told me she’d been crying all afternoon. “No, you won’t,” she challenged. “You won’t.” I asked for 24 hours, to prove that I’d make good on my plan. And by that time the following day, I had resigned every last role.

That was one of the first times I realized I have a problem: I’m addicted to being busy.

And it’s not just me. Every problem I see, in every person I know, ultimately is a problem of moving too fast for too long in too many aspects of life. Every problem. And I’m a pastor, so I see a lot of problems.

We think if we can keep going, keep busy, keep plowing ahead, our conscience won’t have time to catch us because—ha, ha!—we’ll already be long gone. And the reality is this approach actually works. But only for a time. “Life is like the breath,” writes Brother David Steindl-Rast. “We must be able to live in an easy rhythm between give and take. If we cannot learn to live and breathe in this rhythm, we will place ourselves in grave danger.” Maybe even the literal grave.

Because it’s easy for me to chase after the tempting buzz of busy living, I’ve learned to recognize the signs that my addiction has kicked in again. If you lean toward over-scheduled and under-rested, consider these danger signs of a busyness addiction:

You Feel Like You’re in Your Glory When You’re Busiest.

This really should be the first clue that something is amiss. You see, I like how success feels. I don’t want to unplug. I don’t want to relax. The last thing I crave is rest. I’m a recovering speed-and-wild-success junkie who never wants to come down, and to allow any semblance of white space is to cause the undesirable effects of withdrawal.

You’re More Fascinated With Gadgets Than With God.

I got to work a few days ago and realized I’d left my phone at home. The all-out search that proved futile and the ensuing overwhelming angst I experienced were significant. I think I was more distraught than if I’d misplaced one of my children. How am I going to get through this day without my phone? I thought.

A different kind of call was coming in, even as I searched for the device. It was a call from God: “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” Of course I didn’t pick up.

God tried again: “Lay your burdens down, child. Walk with me, and your walk will be burden-free.” To which I didn’t respond. Again.

God stays the course: “I want you to be fascinated not with trinkets, but with me.” Still, no response.

Ever-patient, ever-persistent, God went for it a fourth time: “Slow down. Look up. Linger here with me.”

It was then I thought I heard something. Wait. Was that the voice of God?

But then, I hear a subtle ding from my phone, which had been in my laptop bag the entire time. The ding was alerting me to a text message that had just arrived. My thumb couldn’t help itself—it was itching to swipe. As I reached for my phone, all attention focused on that new text, I simultaneously scored one for the enemy of my soul.

Technology is not a bad thing in itself, but when we’re more tuned into our iPhone alerts than to our Creator, it’s a problem.

Your Favorite Compliment Has Become, “Wow. You’re Always so Busy.”

Behind the” I’m-so-busy-it-would-blow-your-mind” conversations is the motivation for all my busyness. I have a theory on this, which is that busyness is our means to impress. If I’m busy, then I’m important, and if I’m important, then you’ll be impressed. That’s the reason I spend so much time being busy: to impress you, so perhaps I’ll feel like I matter. Impression management becomes a full-time job, and it’s exhausting.

You Don’t Have Time for the Ones You Love.

These days, years after that day of packed bags at the door, I don’t let things get that far. But still there are times when I can see in my wife’s weary gaze that I’ve been pushing and driving too hard. It’s the worst warning sign of all, I think, the one that says, “You’re hurting the ones you most love.”

For some people, it takes a world-rocking tragedy or the loss of everything they hold dear in order to finally learn how to slow down, to tend to their souls, to rest—it takes some sort of death. I hope that won’t be true for you. I’m determined it won’t be true for me. I’m resolving instead to go down a different path, a path paved with rest and peace.

Consider this: God is not merely a peaceful person; God, in fact, is peace. When you and I sit in God’s presence, we’re sitting in the presence of peace. And when we sit there—actually stay there, quiet, still—we come away breathing differently. We come away with steadied souls. From there, astoundingly, we can become people of peace. We can become more like God.

This is why God’s invitation is so profound, the invitation to come to Him to find our rest: He can actually deliver on what He promises, something the world never will be able to do.

I want this type of restfulness. I want to say yes to this.

We slow down—to rest, to contemplate, to lollygag with God—because slow can pay serious dividends, for our bodies, for our minds, for our souls.

I’m learning that it’s actually neither.

“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” James 3:17 (NIV)

If ever I catch myself pretending or proving, I know I’m processing my hurt the wrong way.

The godly way is approaching this situation with soul integrity — responding in a way that’s honest but also peacemaking. James 3:17 says, “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure [honest]; then peace-loving …” Yes, I want this kind of wisdom — this soul integrity. I want to be honest and peacemaking at the same time. But how?

Just realizing this can help me make progress. After all, hurt feelings don’t often want to cooperate with holy instructions.

Real Honesty

Not all honest expressions of my feelings can be categorized as “healthy.” You see, my honest feelings may not be truthful assessments of the situation. I can be honest with how I feel and still exaggerate or misinterpret what is factually true. I can feel justified in being blatant about my feelings and not holding anything back by thinking, “I’m just being true to myself.” But if I’m not being true to my most healed self, then I could compound everyone’s hurt.

Honesty that isn’t surrendered to truth isn’t honesty at all. It could just be emotional spewing. That’s why we need peacemaking honesty — honesty reined in by the Holy Spirit — if we’re going to have authentic soul integrity.

So, if I want real honesty, I have to ask the Holy Spirit to show me real truth. I need to see things from the other person’s perspective. I need to ask questions with the desire to better understand instead of throwing out statements of accusation. Ultimately, my goal should be to add peacemaking to my honesty.

Real Peacemaking

It must grieve God to see plastic versions of peacemaking that aren’t reined in by honesty. That’s what we do when we stuff our emotions and pretend everything is okay. The upside to stuffing is that we have the semblance of peacemakers. But when we do this at the expense of honesty, we harbor a corrosive bitterness that will eventually emerge. Either it will erode our health and later present itself in a host of emotional and physical anxiety-induced illnesses, or it will accumulate over time and surprise everyone when the peacemaker eventually erupts. Saying “I’m fine” to keep the peace when we’re really not fine builds walls and shuts down intimacy.

Sometimes, dishonesty comes in the form of saying things that aren’t true. But it’s also dishonest when we pretend to be okay but secretly simmer with resentment.

It may seem godly in the moment, but it’s false godliness. Truth and godliness always walk hand-in-hand. The minute we divorce one from the other, we stray from soul integrity and give a foothold to the instability that inevitably leads to coming unglued.

Yes, we’re after soul integrity — honesty that is also peacemaking that leads to godliness. This soul integrity brings balance to unglued reactions. It makes us true peacemakers — people who aren’t proving or pretending but rather, honestly demonstrating what they experience in a godly manner.

None of this is easy. None of this is tidy. But I’m convinced better reactions can lead to better relationships.

Dear Lord, it is only through You that I’m able to bring all my exploding and stuffing under Your authority and Truth. Thank You for Your Holy Spirit who gives me wisdom and helps me have better reactions. Help me lean on You. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Yet, fatherlessness is as an American epidemic. The National Fatherhood Initiative cites a 2022 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, showing 18.4 million children, or 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. Fatherlessness happens for many reasons—many of which may be out of a family’s control. Still, the impact is clear as numerous studies link fatherlessness to a variety of social issues including depression, incarceration and poor academic performance.

Beyond just having a father present, a recent study in Psychology Today explores the need for a father’s approval, even at the stages of life where we have matured and reached levels of success. In her article, “Daughters and Dad’s Approval,” Dr. Peggy Drexler writes:

In my research into the lives of some 75 high-achieving, clearly independent women, I knew that I would find powerful connection between them and the first men in their lives. What surprised me was how deep (and surprisingly traditional) the bond is, how powerful it remains throughout their lives, and how resilient it can be— even when a father has caused it grievous harm. No matter how successful their careers, how happy their marriages, or how fulfilling their lives, women told me that their happiness passed through a filter of their fathers’ reactions. Many told me that they tried to remove the filter and— much to their surprise—  failed. We know that fathers play a key role in the development and choices of their daughters. But even for women whose fathers had been neglectful or abusive, I found a hunger for approval. They wanted a warm relationship with men who did not deserve any relationship at all.

Dr. Frank Pittman, author of “Man Enough,” writes, “Life for most boys and for many grown men is a frustrating search for the lost father who has not yet offered protection, provision, nurturing, modeling, or, especially, anointment.”

That word anointment refers to being chosen, blessed . . . approved. We are all desperate for our fathers’ approval. But it’s not always there.

Without this approval, we can feel given up on, abandoned, deserted, or disowned. We can feel ignored or isolated or jilted or judged. There’s some kind of thirst we can’t quench on our own, a hole we cannot fill no matter how hard we try. This void, this lack of a father’s presence and approval, can feel like a shadow that is always there, an intangible missing piece we don’t even know how to find. In the words of Dr. Drexler, our happiness or satisfaction or contentment or peace still passes through “a filter of [our] father’s reactions.”

While your life story to date may be a tangled mess of betrayal, disappointment, and defeat, history records that the God of heaven is for you. He made you. He sees you. And He wants you to know the joy of being a child of God and of having the most excellent father possible.

God is far better than any earthly father, especially the one who left a broken relationship and a broken heart in his wake. It’s not the same as having your dad back or having him become a different kind of father than he was or is. But the blessing God wants to give you is not to be discounted. In fact, the blessing of Father God is actually way beyond any human relationship.

Our mental image of what a father is like is mostly learned from our earthly fathers. I know this, and I get this, and I want to be sensitive to you and what you’ve been through and are going through with your dad. I don’t want to minimize in any way what’s happening right now when I say “father.”

Please know if that word pushes on a nerve, or exposes a hurt, I’m not doing that without a lot of grace and care. I want to give you room to cry, to be mad, to set the book down and think for a while— to wonder and ponder and journal and take your time processing what God is saying to you. Yet, I also want to resolutely and lovingly and biblically point you to this amazing truth: that the knowledge of our identity as sons and daughters of God unlocks prison doors, heals wounds, and propels us into greater purpose in our lives.

The best possible earthly father giving the most excellent blessing can’t compare to the smile of your heavenly Father. His love is supernatural and powerful, unending and unassailable. And His love means this for us:

No one who knows Him as Father will be left behind.

No one will be orphaned.

No one will go unwanted.

No one’s story will end with abuse and betrayal.

No one will have to live without a father’s love.

No one, ever.

There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding women lately. From Hollywood and #MeToo to Christians and #ChurchToo, women are demanding their voices be heard … and many are listening. Women everywhere are echoing Oprah’s famous line—“A new day is on the horizon!”—from her empowerment speech during Golden Globes.

But naturally, just like everything else in culture, not everyone agrees—particularly when it comes to women’s role in the Church. After John Piper came out with a response stating women should not pastor (or teach), Twitter users took it as an opportunity to promote, encourage and affirm the women who have impacted them in their faith and in their theology. Names of women rolled in for hours and with reason. Historically, women have been crucial aspects of the Church’s growth and spiritual formation. It’s apparent women belong in leadership.

Here are five reasons why:

1) Women were foundational to the spreading of Jesus’ message.

Not only was “the woman at the well” the first evangelist to Samaria, and the women at the tomb the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’s resurrection, but Mary of Bethany was affirmed by Jesus as “doing the right thing” in “sitting at Jesus’ feet.” In antiquity, “sitting at the feet” literally meant “being a disciple.” Even Paul, during his ministry made mention of several leading women in his salutation to the Roman Church (Romans 16). Among these were Junia the apostle and Phoebe, Paul’s emissary and the translator of the letter. We also know of several house-church leaders like Chloe and Nympha (1 Corinthians 1:11, Colossians 4:15), and Priscilla, who also taught Apollos “the more accurate way” about Jesus.

If women were crucial in leading Jesus’s movement in the very beginning, why wouldn’t they be as crucial in doing so now?

2) Women are gifted for ministry in the Church.

Nowhere in the New Testament are the Spirit’s gifts gender-specific. In fact, Joel the Prophet spoke concerning Pentecost, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy … Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” Since we are living post-Pentecost, we can be sure God has poured out His Spirit on all flesh—both men and women. This also includes young, old and people in every ethnic group. The Holy Spirit has gifted the Church with the ministries and offices that it needs for its mission, as well as for the purpose of building one another up.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses both “brothers and sisters” when speaking of the gifts, claiming some will perform miracles, some will prophesy, some will be teachers, others evangelists and even others pastors. These are gifts distributed by the Spirit to both men and women, as God sees fit.

Shouldn’t women use the gifts given to them by God to lead the Church, for its uplifting and edification?

3) Women bear God’s image, too.

In the creation narrative, men and women were both given an equal responsibility to bear God’s image, have dominion/”rule” over creation, and be fruitful. In both genders being “made in the image of God,” we understand that the fullness of God’s personhood is expressed in not only in masculinity, but also in femininity. We were created to be reflections of God—to speak and act for Him in our distinctions.

God affirms this when He uses female-specific imagery when relating to His people—like a bear to her cubs (Hosea 13:8), an eagle hovering over her young (Deuteronomy 32:11), a mother comforting and weaning her child (Isaiah 66:13, Psalm 131:2), a nursing woman (Isaiah 49:15) and a woman in labor (Psalm 131:2). Even Jesus compares Himself to a mother hen (Matthew 23:37).

If God is reflected in both masculine and feminine terms when nurturing His people, shouldn’t both genders be reflected in leadership—when nurturing members of the Church?  

This leads to the next point:

4) Women need women advocates.

It’s no surprise that men and women are different—each having different experiences and different needs. Because of this, we need a diversity of voices in leadership who can guide and pastor men and women and speak to their particular situations. Diversity in leadership is tantamount to authentic discipleship and foundational for healthy relationships and growth within a community of people.

When making important decisions in the Church, female perspectives are necessary to speak into issues that men cannot relate to and don’t have firsthand experience in. No one knows the needs of women better than women. Shouldn’t leadership in the Church reflect the diversity of its members?

Particularly in our current culture, with sexual abuse stories being exposed within the Church, it’s more important than ever for women to be represented when it comes to making decisions in leadership on behalf of the community.

5) When women are empowered, society as a whole flourishes.

We know that on a global scale, women are among the most oppressed people. In certain countries, many women have no rights in society, are sold like cattle for a bride price, forced into sex slavery and in some places, not even allowed to show their face in public. However, organizations like UN Women and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among others, have reported on studies that show how much of a vital contribution—and even complete shift in society—women make when they are educated and empowered.

UN Women found that increased educational attainment for women and girls accounts for about 50 percent of the economic growth in OECD countries over the past 50 years. Over half of this is due to girls having had access to higher levels of education and achieving greater equality in the number of years spent in education between men and women.

Similarly, a study using data from 219 countries found that, for every additional year of education for women, the child mortality rate decreased by 9.5 percent.

These are only a couple statistics among hundreds that prove that women’s equality is necessary for human flourishing. When women are empowered, everyone wins.

If this is true on a grand and global scale, wouldn’t it be true for the overall health and growth of the Church? If women are celebrated, empowered and given freedom to exercise their gifts in leadership as God intends, imagine what it could do for the global Church—God’s kingdom on Earth as He intended—a glorious, united and beautifully vibrant people.

Eventually I got an email from a professional résumé-writing service. Having somehow gotten a hold of my résumé, they provided a detailed report explaining that the document wasn’t worth the bytes that stored it, and that the algorithms companies use to filter out irrelevant résumés were most certainly filtering out mine. It needed a redesign to reduce visual clutter. It needed to focus on my accomplishments rather than just my duties. It needed exciting verbs like “innovate,” “transform,” and “slash [costs],” instead of boring ones like “implement” and “develop.”

After a couple more weeks of futile job applications, I finally caved and coughed up the money to have my résumé professionally rewritten. A few days later it appeared, sleekly redesigned and chock-full of accomplishments and dynamic verbs. I began sending it out to prospective employers almost immediately.

The following week I received an email from a different résumé-writing service. It included a link to a lengthy report detailing the numerous ways my (new) résumé didn’t have a prayer of getting through the algorithms. It was in bad need of a visual redesign, etc. There was, however, no need for despair: they would be more than happy to rewrite my résumé for a very reasonable sum.

—

The very fact that these professional résumé services exist speaks to the document’s key role in our increasingly competitive economy. People (such as myself) are willing to pay through the nose to have experts present their accomplishments, qualifications and skills in the most flattering light possible.

Although these services are a relatively recent phenomenon, résumés themselves have been around for a long time: the renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci is believed to have written the first one. But the practice of highlighting skills and accomplishments in order to gain employment (or power, or prestige) is probably as old as the human race itself.

Take for instance that 2,000-year-old letter we call 2 Corinthians. Starting in the 10th chapter, the Apostle Paul finds himself locked in combat with a rival group he sarcastically dubs the “super-apostles.” We don’t know a lot about this group, but we do know that they were trying to take Paul’s job, so to speak, by undermining his authority and installing themselves as the spiritual leadership of the Corinthian church.

The super-apostles were quite fond of trumpeting their achievements and profound spiritual experiences. These, they claimed, were proof-positive of their apostolic calling and authority.

In response, Paul first complains that bragging on yourself is just an incredibly stupid thing to do (10:17-18; 11:17). Eventually, though, he reluctantly agrees to play the super-apostles’ game by setting forth his own credentials. You could say that he’s presenting his apostolic résumé to the Corinthians—except that it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what you’d expect. It’s really more like an “un-résumé.”

The super-apostles imagine themselves servants of Christ. Paul boldly claims to be a better one (11:23). But instead of presenting the typical list of qualifications, skills and achievements, Paul gives us a long litany of his sufferings: stonings, beatings, shipwrecks, swollen rivers, exposure to the elements, hunger, thirst, cold, and threats from Romans, Jews and counterfeit believers alike.

And the suffering is not only physical. Paul admits to “daily” anxiety over the spiritual health of the churches he has founded, lest they slip into some heresy or other (11:28).

Is Paul trying to underscore his inner strength in the face of hardship? Quite the opposite: “If I must boast, I will boast of things that show my weakness” (11:30). You can imagine what professional résumé writers would say to that. Paul is going out of his way to present himself as exhausted, beat up and stressed out.

To counter the super-apostles’ claims of great spiritual experiences, Paul mentions one of his own. But he does this all wrong: recounting almost no details from the experience (he’s in fact forbidden from doing so), he instead focuses on the painful aftermath, the infamous “thorn in the flesh” sent by Satan to keep him humble (12:8). Rather than using his experience as a selling point, Paul only brings it up in order to highlight, once again, how weak he is.

It’s also worth mentioning that Paul has already admitted to not being a polished public speaker (11:6), a fact that his opponents have gleefully used against him (10:10).

The point of Paul’s strange un-résumé is this: the super-apostles–strong, wise and skilled—leave no room for Jesus Christ to work. On the other hand, it’s precisely because Paul is weak that Jesus can exercise His strength through him (12:9). The super-apostles don’t need Jesus—and, consequently, they don’t experience His power and presence. Paul does, and has, and it’s so sweet that he actively brags about the weaknesses that invite Jesus to work in and through him.  

—

Paul has flipped our assumptions of how God works on their head (he has a tendency to do that). As Christians, we’re familiar with the idea that God gifts or equips us for kingdom work. What we don’t often recognize is that our weaknesses are part of that package–and maybe even the most important part.

I’ve dealt with depression on and off since my freshman year in college. It’s not something I’d wish on my very worst enemy. It strains my relationships and interferes with what I want out of life. At worst, it’s practically debilitating.

When it’s bad I can’t even pray coherently or concentrate on a passage of scripture. But I can still feel Jesus sustaining me when nothing else is. Insofar as I have done anything good, kind or loving during these bouts of depression, it has been from His working through me and not from my own strength. My weakness is the “opening” He uses to work his will in my life.

I am no Paul. I can’t say I boast in my depression. In fact, I’d get rid of it permanently if I could. We tend to resent our weaknesses because we feel that they hold us back from getting what we want out of life. And it’s true. They do. But even more than our strengths, our weaknesses allow us to experience the power and presence of Jesus Christ. In the end, we find ourselves held back from transient things that don’t and can’t satisfy, by the arms of the One who knows and loves us beyond our imagining.

Sadly, there’s no shortage of documentaries about the Church. Many highlight absurd instances, but there are a few that represent the truth of the modern church in a difficult light. It can be easy to ignore these documentaries, but it might actually be important for believers to engage with these documentaries to understand what those outside of the Church think of God’s kingdom.

Here are six documentaries that will leave you frustrated, upset, maybe even angry — but they’re all still worth the watch.

Dancing With the Devil

What it’s about: Netflix’s latest documentary, Dancing For the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult, is a three-part docuseries examining Los Angeles-based Shekinah Church and the charismatic pastor that many say abused his spiritual authority and led it like a religious cult. At the center of the story is a group of very influential TikTok dancers that joined the church and ultimately signed with the pastor’s talent management company, 7M, which ultimately was used to control every aspect of their lives.

Why you should watch it: As former members point out, the Shekinah Church of today is not what it’s always been. Many spoke of how it was a place for community, for refuge, for growth. But along the way, spiritual manipulation from its leader Robert Shinn twisted the church up and lead it down a different path. It’s not a completely uncommon story, and it’s one that believers everywhere should be on the look out for in their own leaders.

God Forbid

What it’s about: This Hulu documentary is not just a salacious story about a sex scandal. It is also a film about the power of religion and the dangers of hypocrisy. The film shows how Jerry Falwell Jr. used his position as a religious leader to justify his own behavior, and how his actions lead to major consequences for Liberty University. It also shows how the Falwell family’s fall from grace had a ripple effect on the evangelical community.

Why you should watch it: The Falwell family has had a massive impact on modern evangelicalism, and to a larger extent on American politics. The documentary explores how things came to be, and how it all imploded with Falwell’s scandal.

The Way Down

What it’s about: The HBO Max documentary looks into Remnant Fellowship Church, a Tennessee-based church led by charismatic leader Gwen  . In the 90s, Shamblin gained popularity for her diet lifestyle book, The Weigh Down. Her success “naturally” led her to starting her own church where she preached “the gospel” of self-control and losing weight. The documentary dives into the consequences of the false gospel, how well-intentioned believers can be misled by a false teachers, the secrets and abuse hidden in a church and so much more.

Why you should watch it: Many former members of the church share their experience with Shamblin and Remnant Fellowship. Through their stories, they warn others how staying connected to The Truth is the best way to steer clear of lies.

The Secrets of Hillsong

What it’s about: This Hulu documentary explores the rise and fall of Hillsong Church, one of the most popular and influential churches in the world. Over four episodes, the story chronicles the church’s meteoric growth, its celebrity following and its hidden secrets, including allegations of sexual abuse and leadership abuse. The documentary also examines the role of Hillsong founder Brian Houston, who has been accused of covering up his father’s sexual abuse.

Why you should watch it: Hillsong Church has been one of the most influential churches of the 21st century. From worship to preaching, their leaders have impacted the global church in more ways than one. If you want to understand how and why things are the way they are today, you need to check out this doc.

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

What it’s about: The Catholic Church sexual abuse is, at this point, a well-documented story. There have been numerous documentaries and films about the abuse, but one of the most important is Mea Maxima Culpa, which translates to “my great fault.” This documentary explores the abuse of power in the Catholic Church through the story of four courageous deaf men, who in the first known case of public protest, set out to expose the priest who abused them.

Why it’s important: The story of uncovering Catholic Church abuse is one of the most difficult ones for the Church to face. But it’s an important part of Church history that cannot be overlooked. Additionally, this HBO documentary challenges Christians to be on the look out for those with disabilities in the Church, ensuring they are being cared for just as much as anyone else.

Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey

What it’s about: This gripping Netflix documentary delves into the world of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Through firsthand accounts and unseen footage, it exposes the chilling control and abuse wielded by its leaders, particularly Warren Jeffs. This eye-opening series unravels the deep-seated corruption within the FLDS, shedding light on the resilience of those who escaped.

Why you should watch it: At the crux of this docuseries is a profound understanding of the dangers of unchecked power and the impact of religious extremism. The documentary offers compelling, firsthand testimonies that highlight the resilience and courage of those who escaped. Additionally, it serves as a critical reminder of the importance of vigilance and advocacy for human rights and justice.

Shiny Happy People

What it’s about: Amazon Prime’s limited docuseries explores the hidden truths beneath the wholesome Americana surface of the reality TV mega-family and the organization they’re members of: The Institute in Basic Life Principles. Through the lives of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting family, the Duggars, secrets begin to unravel about the family America watched and the religious organization they helped grow.

Why you should watch it: The bombshell documentary unveiled that the persona held by the Duggars on screen did not match up to the children’s actually lives. Several daughters spoke candidly about their upbringing, alongside formed IBLP members who expressed the harm they received at the hands of the organization’s leaders.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

What it’s about: Long before Jessica Chastain put on the hair and makeup, the story of real-life televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker was told in this bombshell 2000 documentary. The film follows the “Queen of the Eyelashes” journey from her love-at-first-sight encounter with Jim, through the glory days of PTL, to the scandal that brought both their empire and their family tumbling down.

I was in my first year of graduate school and was living off campus in my own apartment. I was no longer surrounded by the hustle and bustle of college life. Though I had three roommates, we were each wrapped up in doing our own things, and our lives crossed paths only every now and then.

Many mornings, I would wake up to an empty house, hearing only the quiet tick-tocking of my clock hanging on the wall and the chirping of the birds outside my window.
Who knew I was awake? Who even cared? There was no one to reflect with, no one to connect to. No one to witness my life and remind me that it mattered.

And in that loneliness, sometimes I felt as though maybe my life didn’t matter.

Sometimes, it’s really hard to be alone. I would venture to say that the loneliness is the absolute hardest part of being single.

When it comes to longing for marriage, there are so many things it wasn’t about for me. It wasn’t about the sex. I had held off on that for years—what was just a few more?
It wasn’t about having someone to take care of me. In fact, I was working and in graduate school, paying my bills and managing my money—I would say I was doing a pretty good job of taking care of myself. It wasn’t about wanting a family. I was surrounded by children who called me their “mom” while immersed in my inner city ministry.

It was about feeling alone.

There is an underlying, unspoken idea in our Western culture that somehow, being alone makes you less of a person. That somehow, it takes away your value. Try going to a movie by yourself or getting a bite to eat alone. Deep down, there is this fear of what people will think. Deep down, being alone makes us feel less.

No, my desire for marriage had nothing to do with sex, money or family, but everything to do with not wanting to be alone. I longed for that person to connect with in the early moments of my morning when I opened my eyes (those seemed to be the hardest for me). I wanted someone to share with about my day, my struggles, my plans. I was longing for connection, for companionship, for camaraderie.

Looking back, that time period was one of the hardest seasons in my life. But through the struggles, I also learned two major things:

1. We struggle to be alone because we were not made to be alone

I remember feeling so disappointed in myself for struggling with loneliness. I wanted to be a woman who was independent and strong. I wanted to resist the urge to “need a man” and have the ability to stand alone.

Looking back, I judged myself needlessly and harshly. The truth is we struggle when we are alone because we were never meant to be alone. God made us with a strong desire for relationship and a need to connect with others. We were made in His image, after all—the image of a God who longs for relationship, connection and intimacy.

One benefit of that difficult season is I learned how to rely on God in the most relational way I’ve ever experienced. He went from being “theoretically” part of my life to legitimately and practically part of my life. I learned to talk to Him, hang out with Him and connect with Him like never before. I needed to connect, and some days, He was the only one I had to connect with.

I learned that He was always up for hanging out, and He always proved to be good company.

I also learned I needed community far more than I ever realized. We need people in our lives! I wasn’t lonely because I “needed a man,” I was lonely because I needed people!

By the end of that year, I was challenged to realize community doesn’t just come to you, you have to seek it out. I got so much better at connecting with the people around me, being deliberate to make plans and reaching out to get together.

2. Our search for validation has to start with us

Why did I feel so uncomfortable being alone? I think part of it came down to the fact that I wasn’t really comfortable in my own skin. It’s as though I needed someone to tell me I was fun, smart, beautiful and worthy.

But there is so much danger in basing your self-worth on the people in your life, because it can never be maintained in a healthy way. There will always be someone who thinks less of you than you think they should. But even more common, many times, there will be no one there to tell you what you need to hear when you need to hear it.

True value, worth, identity and affirmation must come from within. There is a God who witnesses our lives when no one else does. There is a God who is intensely aware of our every move because He is so darn in love with us that He just wants to know. He is keenly aware of us, because we matter. Because we are valuable. Because we are worthy in His eyes.

I had to dig deep to recognize my value had nothing to do with my relationship status and everything to do with the value I had been given by a God who was head-over-heels in love with me.

That was a valuable lesson, and one I am so glad I learned as a single woman. It prevented me from so many mishaps and relationship catastrophes, because I stopped seeking a man to add value to my life and instead began to see the value my life had to add to the world around me.

It was transformational and still is to this day. My value was not rooted in my relationships from that point on. And though there were (and are) days I still fight off the urge to validate my life by my relationships, I see even more clearly now that I am married how unfulfilling and unrealistic that actually is.

Relationships can’t make you valuable, because they were never intended to; they don’t have the power to.

Ultimately, relationships are “the act of connecting with another flawed human being.” It doesn’t sound so amazing when you put it that way, but that’s the ultimate truth. They will always, at some point, let you down. And those who find their value in relationships will find that their identity and worth come crashing down.

Being alone is difficult and trying. But it is an opportunity for so much healing, identity-shaping and self-awareness. Because sometimes the only time we are forced to look inward is when there is nothing distracting us outwardly.

Seek to master the art of being alone. It may very well change your life.

Ouch. The pastor did not articulate that word, but you could see it on his face. Here was a young couple who to this point, had been faithful in attendance, serving, and presumably, giving. Now they were leaving. From their vantage point, the local church was no longer necessary.

This conversation was not an aberration. It’s taking place more frequently. And, consequently, it is at least one of the reasons church attendance in America is waning.

Does the couple have a legitimate point? Is the local church no longer necessary? Is church membership a vestige of a culture that is no longer relevant or needed?

I respectfully disagree with this couple. Indeed, I would argue that minimizing the importance of the local church and membership in it is vitally important. Let’s look at several reasons why church membership is important.

The Bible Is Cogently Clear on the Importance of Church Membership

Think about it. From Acts 2:42, where the community of believers formed the first church, through the first three chapters of Revelation, the New Testament is written to the church, or it is written in the context of a local church. The local church is God’s plan A, and he didn’t leave us a plan B.

1 Corinthians 12 strongly communicates the idea of membership. Each person in a church is a part of that local body. The body does not function well unless all its members are functioning well. “Membership” in a local church is not only thoroughly biblical, the Bible clearly expects Christians to be healthy and functioning members in the church.

Yes, there are many types of different memberships today. You can be a member of a civic club, a credit union, or a country club. But membership in a local church preceded all these modern examples. And, as we note in the next paragraphs, membership in a church is based on selflessness while most secular organizations typically have perks as a privilege of membership.

Membership in a Local Church is Other-focused

Biblical church membership always focuses on God and others. Its membership is just the opposite of country club membership. The latter is all about perks. Members pays a price (or dues or fees), and they get benefits in return: nice dining and meeting areas, swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, and more. Country club membership is all about meeting the desires of the members.

On the contrary, church membership carries the expectation of serving God, serving others, and giving sacrificially. Country club membership is self-indulging. Church membership is self-sacrificing.

So why would anyone be attracted to church membership? As noted earlier, it is a biblical mandate: “And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25, NLT). But the vital role of church membership goes beyond the biblical mandate. Church members have the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They have the opportunity to make a difference that has eternal impact.

Other-focused membership is more than altruistic; it is making a difference of the Kingdom. It is to be a part of a ministry that will change the world.

Church Membership Engenders Accountability

Not too long ago, I did not attend my weekly small group at my church. Even more, I neglected to let anyone know ahead of time. A pressing business issue took me out of town.

Within a couple of hours after the group concluded that week, I received three texts checking on me. None of my fellow church members were tossing guilt trips on me. They were genuinely concerned. I am a part of a church and community where people really care. And when you care for someone, accountability is natural and positive.

I need accountability in my small group. I need accountability in my worship attendance. I need accountability in Bible reading. I need accountability in sharing the gospel. Because I am in a community of believers who are concerned for my spiritual wellbeing, I am subject to accountability that makes me a better husband, dad, granddad, church member, and follower of Christ.

The Local Church Is a Place Where I Worship with Other Believers Every Week

Our worship on earth is preparation for worshipping together with others in heaven. I don’t fully grasp what heaven will be like, but what I do read in the Bible is magnificent. Look at this scene of heavenly worship in Revelation 7:9-10: “After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a great roar; ‘Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb.’”

I am a member of local church where, like most churches, we worship the living God every week. We come together demonstrating our adoration of God and our desire to show our love to God in worship. The local church at its best is a heavenly preview that should not be missed.

As a Church Member, I Get to Serve My Community

I recently heard from a couple who had moved to the Nashville area, and they were looking for a church home. The wife sensed God’s leadership to a particular church, but the husband had great doubts about her choice. “That church does nothing to serve its community,” he protested. “Let’s find a church where they are making a difference.”

His wife calmly replied, “Don’t you see it, dear? We have the opportunity not only to serve and minister to the community through this church, but we can also start those ministries from scratch. Isn’t that exciting?”

She got it. God gave every church its address for a reason. This lady was not deterred by a seemingly moribund congregation. She knew God had placed that church in that particular community for a reason. She wanted to be part of God’s plan not only to revive the church, but also to be a Kingdom force in the community.

As a church member, you can change the community in which you live. As a church member, you should change the community in which you live.

We Must Change the Narrative

Church membership often gets a bad rap. I get it, especially if church membership means joining something to meet my preferences and desires.

But it is incredibly exciting to belong to something greater than ourselves, something where we get to give instead of receiving. We need to change the narrative.

Church membership is important. It is vitally important. It is God’s plan A to reach and minister to the world. And he did not give us a plan B.

If I’ve learned anything about myself over the years, it’s that I love control. One of the ways I gain this is through setting goals —and while this is a good thing in and of itself, I’ve also found that I tend to over-romanticize and idealize the reality of those goals.

If I’ve learned anything in the short time I learned about living at home for the summer, it’s that stillness exposes things.

Our lives are a never-ending cycle of intake and outtake, input and output. The word “bored” has become obsolete in our culture; entertainment is always within the click of a button or a swipe of a screen. The squares on our calendars struggle for breathing room, and in the hurry, we hardly recognize that the air’s become thin for us too.

Sometimes, it gets to the point where we do recognize the “bareness of our busy lives,” which Socrates so wisely warned us to beware of. Busyness is another conversation in and of itself, but what happens once we actually take the leap and hit the pause button?

At least for me, there is a certain undercurrent of electricity that accompanies my self-diagnosed busyness — and I love it. Having somewhere to be, something to do, or someone to help or talk to gives me a sense of accomplishment and purpose that — for the most part — I genuinely enjoy.

What happens when the semester ends, your people aren’t available, you’re transitioning between jobs, or even when the WiFi goes out?

We’re left alone. And we freak out. We’re strangers to space, and we’re unsure how to process “nothingness.” We turn to our to-do lists for comfort, and their emptiness — which we once longed for — fills us with a rising surge of discontent and discomfort.

I think that sometimes, we are so quick to fill the space and launch ourselves back into comfort that we forget to question why the presence of space bothered us in the first place.

Personally, what caught me off guard was how anxious and empty I felt the moment my “to-dos” and “to-sees” were removed. I thought rest was supposed to be rejuvenating and life-giving, not clouded by a sense of purposelessness. Was I doing rest wrong? Was I wasting my time?

The ugliness of my own heart began to reveal itself as I continued to process these things, and I was suddenly confronted with sin and struggle I hadn’t really taken the time to address in my hurry. So naturally, I took time to process and pray and all was well in the world again — right? Not quite. Instead of facing my fears and addressing what was being exposed, I tried to numb out the negative feelings I had by switching on the TV, scrolling through social media, and running around to coffee shops. If I just kept busy and filled my time with “stuff,” I’d feel better — and maybe then I would be able to finally achieve the rest I craved.

As I began to see my life with no filter, I struggled to regain the control I felt like I’d lost. I was becoming increasingly aware of the ways I wasn’t showing the love of Christ to others — especially to my own family. I was keeping count of all the ways I’d already failed this summer, and of all the ways I felt “stuck.” I wasn’t doubting God, but I wasn’t feeling his presence either — and this frustrated me, because I know from Scripture that “in His presence, there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16). My soul was thirsting to feel that presence and joy, like David in Psalm 42.

I was listening to a sermon by John Mark Comer on “The Dark Night of the Soul.” He talks about how when we are in a “dark night,” we are in a time of “refining and stripping down” – the end goal being “a heart posture of trust in God himself — not in our feelings or ideas about who God is.”

Whoa. What if my ideas and feelings about God were being confused with who God is? What if the Lord, in His sovereignty, was stripping away my ideology and my hurry to create space for knowing him more honestly and intimately? What if God, because of His mercy, was exposing my sin — not so I could count the ways I’ve failed, but so I could see my true emptiness apart from Him? What if God was trying to set me free from my “attachments and anxieties to live in joy and peace”?

I immediately started brainstorming all of the ways I could pass this season with flying colors, only to be stopped dead in my tracks when John Mark Comer noted that “the dark night isn’t something you do. It’s something God does TO you… rest is God’s work in your soul.”

Oh. I finally began to see that rest isn’t about what you do (or don’t do) while you’re “resting.” True rest is a posture of the heart, and sometimes, the Lord takes away so we can realize how empty we’ve become apart from Him.

In the stillness and the spaces — when everything in us wants to run—the Lord invites us in. He invites us to allow him to refine and re-work the desires of our hearts by showing us how desperately in need we are.

It makes sense that we struggle when faced with our emptiness and ugliness, because seeing those things proves our utter inability to save ourselves. Enter, the Gospel.

We have a Savior who died to set us free from the penalty of death and the weight of sin, and who delights in our hearts becoming more connected to His with the passing of each day. There is a future coming where sin is no longer a threat — but for now, we are purposed to live “worthy of the callings we’ve received” (Ephesians 4:1). “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

I don’t know about you, but I want to become more like the righteousness of God — and the only way to do that is to let go of the illusion of control and allow God to tend to the spaces in my heart that are not like Him.

Comer reflects that “there’s something about losing control that does a great work of freedom in us.” Maybe rest is not discovered through feeling “in control” of the stillness and spaces I find myself in. My focus for this summer is no longer on what I need to “do” to reach rest.

My prayer for myself (and for you) is that we would be graced with the humility and courage to accept the merciful invitations of the Lord in every season, even if doing so means letting go of the things we hold too tightly.

Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in 2019. 

John Mark Comer knows all about that. As an author and pastor, he’s spent years leading Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, through a global pandemic, economic collapse, nation-wide uprisings for racial justice and rising political tension. He says he’s not inherently an optimist, but that’s OK. Comer is hopeful. To him, being hopeful is very different than being optimistic. It’s not a personality trait or even a way of looking at the world so much as it is a daily discipline that unites mind and heart. 

Comer sat down with RELEVANT to give his perspective on where the Church is heading and how to discipline yourself to become a hopeful person. 

Things are changing quickly out there, and there are a lot of studies that say religion is on the decline in the U.S. Does that concern you? 

I’m concerned in the sense that I’m sad. I’m sad over it. I grieve it. And remember, I’m in Portland, so I just long ago resigned myself to it. 

Think of it this way: I was reading this book on Victorian England a couple weeks ago, and it was about London as the first really major urban industrial city. This is the height of Christendom and they were talking about this bank and they had a daily schedule of the bank in there, and I was shocked that the bank started every morning at 8:30 a.m. with prayer for a half an hour. Everybody from the bank CEO down to the tellers all had to be there for prayer. I just can’t even fathom a world where Wells Fargo employees or Bank of America employees all had to be at work at 8:30, a half an hour before doors opened, to pray the Lord’s Prayer or whatever. 

Now, the upside to that is, man, it would be incredible to raise my children in a cultural ecosystem where the basic moral tenets were in line with Jesus’ vision of the human flourishing! If I could pick that, I would do it in a heartbeat. 

But the downside is, it’s just rife with compromise and complicity because the line is so fuzzy between what the New Testament calls the World and the Church, and so then you have imperialism and colonization and slavery and economic inequality all co-existing with this vaguely Christian moral ecosphere and social order. That turns off a lot of intellectuals to the faith, and then — in the case of Victorian England — comes the Enlightenment. 

So all that to say, I’m not concerned about it. I’m sad over it, but I’m resigned to it with the exception that nobody knows what’s going to happen. 

So you don’t think the fact that America seems to be going through a period of secularization right now necessarily means that’s here to stay?

I remember reading Rodney Stark’s The Churching of America. Blew my mind. In my mind, I think America 300 years ago or 250 years ago was super Christian, then every year it’s just gone down a little bit, and now it’s almost over. That is not what the data points say at all. Stark makes the case that the most post-Christian America ever was was during the Revolutionary war, and that it actually reached its zenith of cultural Christianity in the ’50s. And he just sees more of an ebb and flow and you have Great Awakenings and these different movements, and you have the ’60s counterculture. 

So who knows? With globalization, the Church of Jesus is exploding all around Asia right now, and with the internet, we have no idea what could happen. We could be on the verge of a massive third Great Awakening. It could be this huge influx of Christian Asian culture that is imported. We don’t know. In the near future, I think my city is crazy secular and will continue to go even more secular. But that will just, I think, make the Gospel more and more attractive for people. 

Is it hard to maintain an optimistic position for you or is that your natural disposition?

Oh, no. I am cynical and pessimistic by nature. The weird thing about being a leader is that you don’t get the luxury of optimism. I have to plan for the worst case scenario. 

For example, up through the election, I had to have a plan in case President Trump got re-elected. That’s not a political statement. That’s just a fact. I live in one of the most liberal cities in America. And so if he had been re-elected, my city likely would have been on fire. So I just have to plan pastorally for how to navigate through that.

Again, let’s say there was no vaccine til 2022. I was optimistic that we’d have a vaccine early on, but I couldn’t plan on that. I can hope for that as an American citizen, but I couldn’t plan on that as a leader. I had to imagine: “All right, what if this pandemic is two years long and social unrest doesn’t go away, and I have to live in that space so I can respond instead of react?” 

So no, I am not optimistic by nature at all. But with the 24/7, attention-based, anxiety-based for-profit news cycle, it’s almost impossible not to get sucked into this super anxious doomsday view of the world. I think the discipline for me is curating my digital news input, because I can walk around the city and it can be a beautiful day and I can feel good in my spirit and get a cup of takeout, to-go coffee or whatever and feel like, all right, there’s hope for Western civilization and the Church yet (and those are two separate things). 

And then I can go online for five minutes and just feel like, “It’s over. I’m going to immigrate to New Zealand or become Amish out in the country and bake bread or something.”

So how do we stay optimistic in these times of a lot of cynicism and uncertainty?

Well, I think optimism and hope start with acceptance of reality. Optimism and hope are not the same thing. Optimism is a self-help trick where you tell yourself things are going to get better. Hope is that God is with us and all will be made well.

The problem is, reality does not always align to optimism. You’ve got all the sociological and psychological surveys that basically say pessimists are more likely to be right about the future, and optimists are more likely to be wrong but they live happier, healthier lives. So pessimists actually have a closer view of reality, but optimists’ illusion of reality actually enables them to be literally — in their body and in their mind — healthier people.

Interesting.

That is interesting. It captures the complexity and the contradiction of the human condition and our need to hold things in tension and in paradox, hold reality in our body and hope for the future. 

That’s where hope is such a different concept. Hope is interesting. It’s about the future, but it’s energy for the present. In biblical theology, hope asks the question: What is our energy source in the present? It’s just belief in what my therapist calls “the gospel of upward mobility.” It’s not the linear view we have that things are always going to get better and better. Hope is that God is with us through whatever suffering we face, and good will come through it and in the end. But the end isn’t 2021 or 2022 or any sort of calendar date. End is the return of Jesus. It’s a very different metric system.

So hope is less focused on tomorrow than it is on the here and now.

So I think hope starts with accepting the pain of life. We’re mortal, we’re fragile, we’re living through a global pandemic, we could die, life is hard, we’re living through a political polarization that might get better but I would be shocked if it goes away. And the future of Western civilization itself is a little bit up in the air right now. Not like it’s going to devolve into the Dark Ages, but lots of people are saying this is what it felt like at the end of the Roman Empire. That’s over my pay grade. I don’t know. And what will come after this? I don’t know! And part of me is more and more excited to see, but only after I’ve done the work of grieving.

So where does discipline come into this? 

I think the discipline is curating your digital inputs, where your mind is. So I’m not a big fan of mental Ninja trick optimism. Optimism will make you a happier person, but it won’t necessarily make you a better person. 

Replace your optimism with biblical concepts of Jesus being with us, Jesus bringing good out of who we become through our suffering and Jesus’ return to make all things new.

God chose you.

You did nothing to earn His favor, but He has set His affections on you. God has reached down and grabbed His enemies and made them His friends. John Piper writes, “Deeper than knowing God is being known by God. What defines us as Christians is not most profoundly that we have come to know Him but that He took note of us and made us His own.” Can you handle this truth? Believer in Christ Jesus, God has known and loved you before the foundation of the world. This is a doctrine to be enjoyed and to comfort us in our heartache.

God’s choosing us for salvation is a doctrine that shoots a dart of grace into our hearts when we apply it to our lives.

J.I. Packer writes in Knowing God:

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.

Is there a greater love story than this? Brian Rosner calls being known by God the “Cinderella of Theology.” We bring nothing to the table with God. We have no pedigree that would attract Him to us. We have no earthly reason He should look at us, but He does.

Being known by God gives us comfort in the dark nights of the soul. One Puritan called being known by God “the full and final comfort of a believer.” Here are some truths about God knowing you:

But you, O Lord, know me; you see me, and test my heart toward you (Jeremiah 12:3).

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me (John 10:27).

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

God knows you and what you are going through in your darkest trial. This is a truth I must come back to every day. God knows every time I bump my tender elbows on the side of a door and cry out in agony. He sees every accident. He knows when my leg pain is so bad that I lie awake in bed for hours. He is keenly aware of my feelings of depression and the hopelessness that often rage within my heart. He knows you and your trials. He knows each of your chemotherapy appointments. He was there weeping with you when you lost a loved one. He knows your every injury and irritation. He sees your despair. He knows how you feel.

Rosner points out that during the three lowest points in the history of Israel (slavery in Egypt, the wilderness wandering and the exile), God reassured His people that He knew them. During Israel’s greatest trials, God’s way of encouraging them was to let them know He hadn’t forgotten them. He knew what they were going through. Their trials did not escape his divine gaze.

He Really Does Know Every Hair on Our Heads

In the incarnation, Jesus relates to our earthly trials. He faced physical, emotional and spiritual agony during His life and death on the Earth. The one who went through the pain is also the one who knows about our pain. Jesus, when preaching to thousands, told the crowd not to fear:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear Him who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows (Luke 12:4–7).

Jesus really knows every hair on your head. I have what looks like thousands of strands of hair on my head. And Jesus knows them all. Every single one. He knows about every ache, every wound, every thought and emotion. Every bad day is a day Jesus is aware of. No trial surprises Him or escapes His eye. Jesus encourages those who are facing persecution to not fear those who can kill the body but do nothing else. Instead we can trust the God who knows us and is keenly aware of all our circumstances.

Jesus is not unaware of the waves that are crashing down on you today. Don’t look to find your comfort in anyone else. That aimless pursuit would be like Cinderella at the ball being pursued by the prince, but leaving the party to try and make herself known to someone else. It would be ridiculous. But this is what we do when we spend our time searching for significance in the things of this world. We have the King of kings who has set His affection on us. He knows us and cares for us, and yet we go looking for solace in other places.

Hurting friend, don’t look for your ultimate comfort in the things in this world. Some of these things are good things, and they are often a help to us, but one day even the good things will fail you. Don’t look for comfort in your social media activity or your hobbies. Don’t search for it among friends from work or in your boss’s applause.

You are known by the King. He knows your name and everything about you. He sees all of your pain. In the words of the apostle Paul, “If anyone loves God, he is known by God” (1 Corinthians 8:3). The Church, the unlovable chosen by God, is the true Cinderella story.

Content taken from Kiss the Wave: Embracing God in Your Trials by David Furman, ©2018. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.

But there’s a facet of God’s love that author and speaker Lisa Bevere wants believers to take a closer look at: the fierce love of God. In her book Fiercely Loved, Bevere dives into God’s thoughts about His children. She explores how God is not passive in His love, but is rather wholly present and pursuing.

We sat down with her to chat about God’s fierce love and why sometimes it feels too good to be true.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

RELEVANT: There’s a lot of different ways we can describe God’s love, so why do you see it as fierce?

LISA BEVERE: I think most people feel fiercely judged. I also think that it’s become white noise. People think, “Oh yeah, I know God loves me,” but they haven’t experienced it and they don’t have an understanding that God is love. I have love for my grandkids and if anybody tried to hurt them, they would see the fierce Sicilian side of me. But God is so much more engaged, involved, aware. I just feel like we’ve become sterile and tame with the love of God.

There seems to be two things going on: either people are afraid to receive His love and they live in this shame and guilt and think, “I’m going to earn that love” — but you can’t earn what was given. You have this detachment from it. Then you’ve got the other thing where “God loves me, I can do whatever the heck I want. I can live however I want. I can speak however I want.” It feels like we need to have a connection with this God who is love, but He’s also a consuming fire.

You bring up a great point that a lot of times people can miss out on God’s love because they think it’s supposed to look a certain way. How can we be sure that we have a correct view of what God’s love is supposed to look like?

I think our first interaction with it is very different from our interaction with our parents. I grew up with a 100% Sicilian mother, so that probably can tell you a whole lot without even having to describe it. I remember right before John and I got married, I was having a really hard time opening up my heart. I remember somebody saying to me, “God’s love is unconditional,” and it broke me at such a deep level. I actually had no idea how much I had constantly experienced conditional love. In the Church, there’s so many ways that we’re doing things right. But if we don’t get the love of God right, it undermines everything. So when we have a revelation that God loves us, basically in spite of us, then that changes everything.

Most people think that God is thinking thoughts of disappointment. Thoughts of you’re going to just mess up again today. Thoughts of if you do this again, you’re under a rock pile. And yet David had such a revelation of a God whose thoughts towards us were thoughts of good, thoughts of hope, thoughts of plans, thoughts of future. Then he went on to say, “How good and treasured and precious are your thoughts about me, oh God.” He said, “If I could number them.”

I was recently at the beach. I’m expecting my sixth grandchild and I’ve got one granddaughter that is, I mean, she’s a piece of work. I’m just going to say it. It’s so fun that I’m not raising her. I get to enjoy it. She’s sweet, but she’s naughty and she’s super fierce, super engaged with everything that she’s doing. She was trying to build a sand castle, and when you’re building a sand castle, I forgot how important it is to have the right ratio of sand to water. She kept flipping it over and it was heavy, she was having a hard time flipping it. I watched her and I began to think about just the amount of sand in that bucket. If God was actually thinking about me that much, I couldn’t even number those grains of sand and yet it wasn’t that bucket full of sand, it was all the sand on that beach as far as I could see. God’s thoughts towards us, they’re good, they’re enumerable. Then David said, “And when I wake, you are still there with me,” so they’re constant.

But yet we are constantly thinking that he is thinking harm, that he is thinking judgment. I think God loves us into a place of wholeness. He doesn’t shame us into a place of wholeness. He doesn’t judge us into a place of wholeness. Now that doesn’t mean there’s not consequences. When my kids were little, I loved them as their parent, which meant there were consequences, not judgment, consequences. They know there’s cause and effect. 

I think sometimes because we had parents maybe that didn’t raise us with discipline, they raised us with punishment, that we’ve gotten really confused that if there’s a consequence, we think we’re not loved. For me, fierce love is about consuming the things that would unmake me and making me into the image of who God created me to be. He’s going to go after those fears of my life. He’s going to go after the labels. He’s going to go after the limitations.

How do you think comparison affects our understanding of God’s love for us?

Well, first and foremost, Paul’s the one that said “I do not dare to compare.” Comparison will either make you feel proud like “I’m so much better. We’re going to be Pharisees, oh, I’m so glad. I’m not like him. I’m not like her. I’m doing better than them.” Or it’s going to isolate us with insecurity. What I have found with comparison is it will always push us on the outside looking in.

When I travel and speak, I use this silly example. I talk about going on a date with your husband and on the date, you’re happy, you’re so excited. You’re finally escaping the kids, you’re going to a movie. Then somewhere along the movie storyline, you watch it as the fake husband kisses the fake wife and you think, “When was the last time my husband kissed me like that? He never kisses me like that anymore.” And you start pulling away during the movie, you’re angry. You’re leaving the movie theater and you’re a little bit cold shouldering your husband. He’s like, “What’s going on?” You’re like, “You know what’s going on, you know.” He’s like, “No, I have no idea that you were comparing me to that actor. I had no idea that you were thinking, ‘Why doesn’t my husband act like that?'”

Theodore Roosevelt said it the best: “Comparison is a thief of joy.” So when I see something that someone else has, and I imagine that it has been deducted for me, I’m never going to be happy for them. But if I see, “hey, I love the way that couple is loving each other,” or “I love the way that person is being promoted,” or “I love the way that woman has found who she really is,” if I celebrate that, then I get to be part of it. If I demean it, compare it, get angry about it, God’s like, “Baby girl, I’m going to have to bench you for a while until you figure this out.” What we have done is we have looked to other people to define us and really only our creator has the right to define us.

It’s funny, but it’s true, I’m 62 and I still get invited to do youth conferences. I think they’re like, “We just need to throw a grandmother in here.” Occasionally I just get to be the token grandmother. I love that Gen Zs and Millennials actually know that God has his hand on their life for something significant. They’ll come up and say that to me and I’ll say, “I totally, 100% believe that.” But then they’ll say, “I have no idea what it is.” I would say that you will never discover what you are called to do looking at everybody else. You discover your calling when you lean in to your creator. I have found that the more I pursue God, the more he reveals me. He doesn’t call me by the names of who I’ve been, He calls me by the names of who I am becoming. The enemy will attack us by who we’ve been, but God will draw us by who we are becoming.

I think the reason why Gen Zs and Millennials don’t know what they’re called to do is because they’re called to do something that has never been done before. When you’re called to do something — something we don’t even have adjectives or adverbs or a noun for yet — when you’re called to do something that has never been done before, you better not waste your time looking at what is being done. You need to lean in. I think it’s just such a beautiful declaration that every single day when I’m laying in my bed and I wake up and I pray to our Father and I say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” What am I doing? I am declaring something. A kingdom invasion into my world. Something I’ve never seen before, something beyond compare.

Here are the top 10 weirdest stories from the Bible that will have you doing a double take:

10. Lot’s Wife Turns into a Pillar of Salt (Genesis 19:24-26)

When escaping the doomed city of Sodom, Lot’s wife made the mistake of looking back. Instantly, she turned into a pillar of salt. The lesson? Always follow instructions, especially if it involves not glancing at impending divine destruction. But we guess that’s not always easy to follow.

9. Jacob’s Wrestling Match (Genesis 32:24-32)

Jacob, the patriarch, found himself in a midnight wrestling match with what turned out to be God. They grappled until dawn, and Jacob wouldn’t let go until he got a blessing. He walked away with a new name, Israel, and a limp. Who knew God was into WWE?

8. The Sun Stands Still (Joshua 10:12-14)

Joshua was in a fierce battle and needed more daylight to secure victory. So he prayed, and God made the sun stand still for about a day. It’s like asking your boss for an extension on your deadline and getting it – times a thousand.

7. The Prophet Who Ate a Scroll (Ezekiel 3:1-3)

When God tells you to eat something, you do it – even if it’s a scroll. Ezekiel was instructed to eat a holy document, which he said tasted as sweet as honey. We’ll have to take his word for it.

6. Elijah’s Fiery Chariot (2 Kings 2:11-12)

When it was time for Elijah to leave the earth, he didn’t just die peacefully in his sleep. Oh no, he got a dramatic exit via a chariot of fire that whisked him away to heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha is left gobsmacked and probably wondered if he would ever get to witness such an unbelievable moment again (spoiler: scroll down to No. 2 for the answer).

5. Jesus and the Temple Tax Fish (Matthew 17:24-27)

When it came time to pay the temple tax, Jesus had a, um, unique solution. He told Peter to catch a fish, and inside its mouth, Peter found a coin to cover the tax for both of them. If we knew that happened more often, we’d all be fishermen.

4. Jonah and the Big Fish (Jonah 1:17)

Jonah tried to run from God’s mission, but after a stormy sea adventure, he ended up in the belly of a whale/giant fish (debate amongst yourselves, theologians) for three days and nights. Once Jonah repented, the fish spat him out, giving him a second chance – and quite the story to tell.

3. The Plagues of Egypt (Exodus 7-12)

From rivers of blood to frogs, gnats, and locusts, the plagues that God sent upon Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let the Israelites go are both terrifying and bizarre. The grand finale? The death of the firstborns, prompting the institution of Passover. Talk about a memorable moment.

2. Elisha and the Bald-Headed Bears (2 Kings 2:23-25)

Prophets can be sensitive about their hair. When a group of boys mocked Elisha, calling him “Baldy,” he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the kids. Moral of the story: Respect your elders, especially if they’re follicly challenged.

1. Balaam’s Talking Donkey (Numbers 22:21-39)

Imagine heading down the road, minding your own business, when your donkey suddenly turns to you and says, “Hey, why are you hitting me?” That’s basically what happened to Balaam. His donkey saw an angel blocking the path, and when Balaam couldn’t see it, he started beating the poor animal. The donkey had enough and started a conversation that Balaam probably never forgot.

But then I find myself saying things like, “What are you trying to teach me through this, God?” Trying. Through this. The implication is subtle, but it’s there. The implication that my hope has shifted from healing or a miracle and into the land of manipulation and accusation. That if I can figure out what the intended lesson is, I can fast track this along and my body will be fixed. That I actually do believe He is doing this TO me, in order to teach me something. It’s a different kind of victimhood that I wasn’t aware I was slipping into.

The normal approach to victimhood is a “woe is me” mindset, right? We’ve all been that person at least once, and for me, it’s been multiple times. But the type of victimhood I’m talking about is the opposite of wallowing, I think. It’s a determined, bulldozer approach to finding the root issue and fixing the problem. It’s the assumption that God would never let anything bad happen to me without there being a reason, so if I find the reason and correct the behavior or thinking pattern, I can right the ship. I am a victim, but I have the power to learn the lesson and regain control of the situation. It’s bossy victimhood, and it’s bad theology.

There’s a huge difference between knowing that God will use all things for the good of those who love Him, and believing that every hardship in life is intended and a lesson from God. The prior is a healthy understanding that while we live in a broken world, God will use our pain and our hurt for His glory. The latter is an unhealthy belief that any hardships I face are an intentional challenge to clear as I pursue Him. If I can clear this hurdle, I’ll get what I want and move on to the next. And suddenly, my life has become about performance over obedience. Performance over belief. Performance over trust. Performance over faith. Performance over everything.

When I type it out like that the difference is clear and obvious, but life is much more subtle than that. The lies that tempt me to make everything lesson-based are so easy for me to believe because lessons come with an answer. Lessons come to an end. Lessons, like a mathematical formula, serve a purpose and can be neatly written out with a step-by-step process to find a solution, and I find that to be soothing and assuring. I find comfort in thinking God works that way, but it’s a lie.

My pastor loves to talk about how easy it is to get off course in life, and how it starts with just a minor adjustment. Just three degrees here can put you hundreds of degrees off course down the road, but it happened so slowly that when you look back you won’t know where it went wrong. I think that’s the case here. Our words hold great power in enforcing what we believe about God, and just the slightest adjustment can quickly lead us into believing lies such as this. God can (and is and will continue to) teach me lessons through infertility, but that isn’t the reason we’re walking this road. Broken bodies are part of a broken world, not a hurdle to clear as I desire to touch and see the face of God.

Instead, learning to pray “what WILL you teach me through this” can change the position of my heart from manipulative and accusatory to trusting and obedient. A subtle shift back on the course of understanding that my God is a good, good Father who will use every opportunity to teach me of His love and goodness. That He weeps with me and walks with me, but never creates an obstacle course requiring me to prove my devotion.

These are all questions we’ve once asked ourselves, and I believe the topic of God’s will to be one of the most discussed topics among evangelical Christians as it pertains one’s spiritual journey.

What if God’s will isn’t as complicated as we make it out to be? What if there isn’t a right or wrong school to go to, or job to take, or person to marry? What if we’re making more of a mess by asking questions than we are finding clarity? What if we’re making this whole thing a lot harder to understand than it’s supposed to be?

What if God’s will isn’t as complicated as we make it out to be?

While trying to discover my own purpose in this world, I asked myself a lot of the same questions. I guess just like everyone else, I wanted to make sure I was making the right decisions, staying true to God’s plan for my life and weighing all my options to make sure I was choosing the correct path in life.

I wasn’t asking so many questions because I was unsure of God’s will, but because I wanted to make sure the decisions I was making had me in the center of his will.

I wonder how many of us are spending so much time worrying about making the right decisions in life that it’s actually interfering with our relationship with God. Could we be stressing so much about God’s perfect will for our lives that we’re actually missing out on the bigger picture?

I understand that God has a specific plan and purpose for each of us in this life, but I’ve always wondered how truly specific that plan really is. Is there any wiggle room? Is there space to breathe? While some people hear audible callings upon their life—which I believe are in fact from God—what about those who haven’t heard exactly which road to take?

What about those people who are at a crossroads in life, one where both roads lead to something good and righteous? What then?

For the glory of God

When discussing God’s will and our purpose here on earth as Christians, one passage of the Bible that has always stood out to me is 1 Corinthians 10:31 which says, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

To me, this passage is the essence of God’s will for each of our lives. No matter what we end up doing in life, just do it for the glory of God.

If you sing, do it for the glory of God. If you’re a stay-at-home parent, do it for the glory of God. If you’re a writer, do it for the glory of God. If you feel called to be a teacher, do it for the glory of God.

No matter what season of life you’re currently in, just do it all for the glory of God. That’s God’s will for you. Because when you glorify Him, you align yourself with Christ.

So instead of stressing whether or not you’re making the right decisions, ask yourself whether or not your decisions are glorifying God. If they aren’t, then I don’t believe them to be part of God’s will. But if they are, then you may just be right where God wants you to be.

God’s will for your life is simple; glorify Him in all that you do.

“God, this isn’t fair…”

“God, only if you would change this little thing…”

“God, I’m tired, aren’t you tired of me whining? If so, please grant me this…”

“God, is it ok to cuss in prayer?” (And usually I’d end up doing so)

A part of me thought I had come to some new breakthroughs in how honest I was with God in my prayers. Surely He is pleased with how “authentic” and “real” my prayers must be! (Don’t we all have those words posted in our room somewhere? So it must be good) And I thought that was how I should pray in this season of suffering, by complaining and venting as much as I could to God. Sometimes it felt good, and other times it made me feel worse.

In reading the Psalms, I came to some clarity on what was missing in my prayers. This, not to say, any prayer need be formulaic or somehow it is “incomplete.” (Nor would He somehow answer a prayer that is better written, etc…) But what did help me was in recognizing that I did not have the full picture of how the Psalmists cried out to God. I thought that many of the Psalms were about these godly people lamenting and complaining and begging God, and in turn, showing honesty and passion. They would show a real struggle of their being, questioning their situations and getting mad at injustices and feeling like God had somehow forgotten about them. And I think I imitated that part well; I really let God know how I felt about this and that and was vulnerable and just let Him have it. But what I failed to do was the other half of what most of these “venting” Psalms showed.

Psalm 77 begins with: “In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord, in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints” and closes with: “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old…you led your people like a flock…”

Psalm 102 begins with: “Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress! … Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my flesh.” It closes with: “You are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall dwell secure…”

Psalm 42 begins with, “Why are you cast down O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” and closes with: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God”. 

Psalm 55 begins with, “My heart is in anguish within me…fear and trembling comes upon me, and horror overwhelms me,” and closes with: “Cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never permit the righteous to be moved”.

Psalm 13 begins with, “How long O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” and closes with “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me.”

What’s seen is this: Remembrance of God’s character and gratitude that flows to worship. For every “How Long O Lord” There seemed to be at the end “But you are faithful”, and for every “Must the wicked prosper?” There was “I will remember your deeds”. 

For every seeming complaint and rant, the Psalms would focus back onto God, His character and His goodness. And in doing so, many of these Psalms (not all of them! Some end on a solemn note) would end by the people blessing the Lord or singing His praises. 

Usually that didn’t happen to me once I started ranting, I ended the prayer with a “come on God, hurry up” or “It’s not fair” kind of statement. But, after seeing how many of these Psalms that start on such a downer end up as praises, it did get me questioning my approach of being “vulnerable/authentic” in prayer. 

The ranting and complaining part is so easy for any of us to do. I like to wallow in self pity, and it feels good to vent and be mad. But to forget what God has already done, both from personal experience as well as revealed in His Word, is not what I should strive for. And being authentic in prayer doesn’t mean I have to forget the reality that God is still King. And even if I vent, why do I need to ignore the fact that He has shown great things? 

The next time I pray to God one of these angry long drawn out prayers, I would hope to eventually put my eyes back on Him, and remember that even though it doesn’t make sense, even though I might still be angry, that I can remember who He is: A loving Father, a gracious Redeemer, a Holy God who has already given me the miracle of new life and who will continue to make me more like Him. 

I don’t think that will come naturally or easy to any of us, and even for this reminder we need His divine help. But hopefully remembering His faithful character and being grateful for His presence in our lives would help selfish people like me get my eyes off myself and onto a generous and loving Father, who loves me despite my rants and doubts and all.

Now listen, prayer is powerful and important. But as I got older, I realized I was misguided in my prayers. You see, when I “took everything to God in prayer,” what I really meant was I had something I wanted God to do, and I was asking Him to do it with the expectation that He would say yes. But, thankfully, that’s not how God operates. He doesn’t say yes to everything, even the things we really want from Him. Sometimes the door we’re begging Him to open is supposed to stay closed.

Coming to that realization was quite the journey. Learning that God sometimes (let’s be honest, oftentimes) says no to the things I was asking for was not an easy pill to swallow. It left me hurt, confused and angry most times. There was even a period when I was mad at God for denying my most desperate prayers. I wasn’t sure what to do with that anger, until a trusted mentor showed me that the best way to get past a hangup or negative feeling about God is to take off the gloves and get into it with Him.

Now listen, before someone gets called a Pharisee, I have come to my conclusion that we can battle with God because of the following two verses:

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18)

“About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ (which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’)” (Matthew 27:46).

Here’s what I take from those, and about the zillion other Google-searchable verses on having less than positive feelings toward God:

1. God gets you.

2. He can handle your doubt.

Yes, He can. Yet, when we think about being that kind of honest with God, we often shy away. Some set of inherited values kicks in and it feels improper, impolite or disobedient. And to an extreme, it can be. But don’t let that value system override the larger truth: God wants to know you, all of you—the good, the bad, the shameful, the frustrated, the joyful, the sorrowful.

We may view God as some patriarchal boss, which is just not the character of God. He’s endlessly dimensional and wants you, where you’re at, right now. My pastor used to say, “We cannot meet God where we wish we were. We either cry out to Him from the place we find ourselves or we will not cry out at all.”

That’s it — be where you are and cry out to God from a real place of vulnerability and honesty. It helps, I know.

There was a moment in my life when I was in the middle of praying for the zillionth time that a difficult situation would be different and that God would just show up. And then, one day, I kind of snapped internally and said, “screw this.” I fell silent for a long time because I just couldn’t take the non-answer anymore. I couldn’t take the lack of bigger picture, and I couldn’t take the option of “no.” Like you, I just lost the steam to keep praying.

Enter, God.

Surprisingly, during my time of giving full vent to my anger and lashing out at God, my heart started to heal and soften. Things weren’t OK, but I calmed down, and eventually, I had enough energy to start praying, reading the Bible, talking to friends and hoping again. This was because God knew I had a broken heart and was out of my mind. What’s more, God cared for me even as I rejected Him.

Now listen, our situations are likely not a perfect parallel. I can’t imagine the sadness/stress/worry you feel. But I do get the idea of being so afraid that God will give another “no,” or another bout of silence, that you just stop asking.

I would fight against that as hard as you can, and I’d bring that before God. Seriously, give it to Him: “Where are you, God?” “Am I not asking the right thing?” “I am so mad at you!” “Why have you forsaken me?” God has heard these things before, and He’s able to hear them from you.

The dangerous part is, of course, that our anger and honesty can — when unchecked — turn into desertion. To guard against that, I’d make sure that even if your head and heart is in the wrong place, your body is doing the right things. Things like reading, community, mentorship, etc. Then, once you’ve fortified your life and are ready to do it, I’d give full vent to your anger and not treat God as though He can’t handle your disappointment in Him.

Like any relationship, the darkest and most honest times often lead to deeper levels of love and trust—because someone was willing to go there and be real when it wasn’t easy.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

Trial comes first. It has to. But the difficulty will produce deeper levels of trust and intimacy if you keep holding on and continue to let God into the pain.

Todd Deatherage, the co-founder of the Telos Group who has spent decades working in public policy positions educating officials on the Israel-Palestine conflict, is advocating for peace in a variety of practical ways — including prayer. As Deatherage continues to educate others on what’s really happening in Gaza, he’s also using prayer as a tool to achieve what God wants for all His people.

“The world as God intended it, and the world that God is redeeming and will one day make whole, is marked by justice and peace and is one in which neighbors flourish,” Deatherage said. “We’ve too often bought the lie that the peace, justice and security we all want can be achieved through violence. But living as countercultural agents of God’s kingdom in the now-but-not-yet reality of our lives calls us to push back against these zero-sum, ‘me and mine,’ ‘eye for an eye’ approaches, and work for not just our own flourishing but that of our neighbors, even our enemies.”

Like Deatherage, I believe prayer gives us a way to reset and renew the mind, a way toward repentance, listening and transformation. Prayer might sometimes seem like a passive, inert process — the antithesis of action — but I would argue that it in fact provides a powerful pathway to action and advocacy.

Prayer is an act of listening.

Karl Barth, the great Swiss Reformed theologian, argues that when you pray, you don’t ask God for things; you pray to listen. As you “clasp the hands in prayer” in this act of listening, he says, you mark “the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

For those of us who yearn for justice in the world, we begin here: counting our breaths. Meditating on faith, hope and love. Listening to the voice of God. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh talks about contemplative prayer or meditation as entering the kingdom of God. I interpret that in terms of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

“God speaks to us,” says Eugene Peterson, author of The Message. “Our answers are our prayers.” Peterson understands prayer as an offering of our soul. He translates the famous verse in Matthew 22 as a command to “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence” and “Love others as well as you love yourself.”

For global health issues, considering the other is of utmost importance, and we do this first through listening prayer.

Prayer is an act of transformation and empathy.

According to C.S. Lewis, “Prayer doesn’t change God; it changes me.” While we may have known that intuitively across the centuries, we now have science to back it up. Recent research suggests that meditation increases activity in the brain regions used for paying attention and making decisions. Part of that “paying attention” helps us to see others rather than ourselves.

The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut believes that we manifest a mature form of loving self when we exhibit empathy for others. Kohut defines empathy in part as “vicarious introspection,” which is simply the ability to step inside someone else’s perspective to try and see life from an alternative angle.

As believers, we practice this when we pray intercessory prayers on behalf of others. Prayer helps us to empathetically direct ourselves outward toward the needs of others—whether they live in Nashville or Namibia—and toward a sovereign God who can meet those needs.

Prayer is an act of advocacy.

One of my heroes, Congressman John Lewis, once quoted an African proverb that says, “When you pray, move your feet.” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the renowned philosopher, theologian and civil rights activist, also talked about marching in the South with Martin Luther King Jr. and others as “praying with my feet.”

As Christians, we believe the Church is the Body of Christ. We are its hands and feet. We are also the eyes and mouth. Prayer is a way of living out the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.” It inclines our minds and our communities toward peace, and it also answers the call of Scripture to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the refugee.

As faith communities that care (or ought to care) about what is happening in the world, prayer is a bold and central part of our pursuit of justice. As we “pray with our feet,” with empathy and wisdom, we advance hope, healing and peacemaking for ourselves and the Church, and we also advance the health and well-being of millions of people around the world.

With God’s help, may it be so.

A version of this article originally appeared in 2017.

Zoe Church Pastor Chad Veach knows that struggle well. In order to pastor his church in L.A., be present for his wife and child, run from meeting to meeting each day and host a weekly podcast, Veach has had to learn how to stay focused on the things that truly matter without getting overwhelmed.

To find out how to live a less distracted life, we sat down with Veach to get some practical tips on focused living and hear more about why Christians should fight to be present.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you think Christians need to recent their attention on God these days?

I was just reading Matthew 6 this morning. We had a prayer meeting today, and someone had transcribed it, written it out for me, and taped it into my Bible so I could read it on the opening night of the Zoe Conference. And I saw that again today. I love the thought in Matthew 6. We’ve always grown up with the NIV or the New King James Version translation, but in the Message translation of Matthew 6, towards the end, Jesus says to “give your full attention to what I’m doing right now.”

When I read it in the Message, it really jumped out at me. We always hear, “Seek first the kingdom of God; tomorrow will take care of itself.” But I like that new iteration of it: give your full attention. I felt that for us as a city, as a church, and just for people in general, it’s so easy to look at the glory days of the past, what God did back then, before COVID, and so on.

It’s about the contrast and the decision you have to make to go from the glory of the rearview mirror to the windshield of faith, looking forward.

Many of us think we have to get back to how things were before COVID. And I always laugh at that, because we could also enter into a new season and do that. We don’t have to go back. My whole joke is, I remember who you used to be. You were just as upset, just as frustrated, just as lonely. It’s like the fish gets bigger every year. It was so great. No, no, we were there. You were not that happy. It’s a trick in life. The tension is not to romanticize the past and not to villainize it. It wasn’t the worst. They weren’t the worst. I hated being there. Gosh, it was just so hard. I don’t think I was around you when you were that mad. We had a couple of bad days. We need to stay in a good tension there.

Do you have any tips on how we can hold that tension well?

Well, I think the verse is the key. The verse is the answer. And what is the antidote in culture? People want to say you need to be present in the moment. The gift of being present. I think Jesus is alluding to that, right? Pay attention to right now. If I can’t do that, I’m going to walk by Zacchaeus in a tree and I won’t even be able to help him because I’m in the past or I’m so fixated on the future. Someone’s got to pull my jacket because they need healing, and I won’t stop to realize virtue went out of me. I won’t be able to do it because my mind is somewhere else. I think the key to life is being present. Today I am receiving forgiveness and have the strength to give forgiveness. That’s the challenge of today.

One of my favorite preachers, Jensen Franklin, was at our conference. He calls them weapons of mass distraction. That’s the bottom line: we’re so distracted with so many other things than the present and what’s in front of us today.

What do you do personally to keep your focus on God?

Yeah, I mean, I’m probably the most boring person. I have to apologize. My wife gets so mad at me. She’s like, you want to eat at the same place, the same meal, at the same time, every single day. I just kind of live a little bit robotic, probably. Some of that’s really healthy. It allows me to get up every morning, make my coffee, sit down and read my Bible. I did it this morning. I did it the day before. I did it the day before and I’ll do it again tomorrow. And that allows me to set my intention for the day, dedicate my day and start off with gratitude, start off with awareness.

I always say, “Okay, God, today is your day. I’m very thankful. If you would like to put me into a divine appointment moment, I’m going to have eyes and ears to see that. Whatever you want to do.” I think it starts with that. It starts with the intentionality of setting that in life. I think you’re going to get whatever you go for. I just believe that. So setting that intention to be used by God and I think the rest starts to take care of itself.

It really is something as simple as being intentional. It doesn’t have to be hard, and I think that most of us just forget that so quickly. If I don’t do that, I can forget my commitments, my convictions. I could start to erode and leave who I really want to be. So I need some things in my life that keep those guardrails there.

Other theologians and historians would call this “spiritual disciplines.” I call it boring stuff.

What does it do to us spiritually when we remain present?

The greatest ability is availability. And so I think it’s always about trying to get your ego out of the way, get your pride, your disappointment, your rejection, all the issues you’re dealing with, to wash that, heal that, cleanse that, to allow the love of Jesus to be poured into us. Because if it’s poured in, it will naturally flow out.

So I think it becomes very important. Paul goes to Timothy, hey, there’s a lot of vessels in a house. Only a few are really useful. And see, you’ll set yourself apart to be useful for the master. So what good am I if I’m distracted, discouraged, defeated, disobedient, all those things that could so easily entangle? The sin that so easily entangles, I can get caught up in that fast. So I’ve got to spend these times dying to myself. God, please today, you increase and let this joker decrease. Because if I increase, I’m going to steer us into a bad path probably. But I trust you to lead me and to guide my life. And so I call you my Lord, you are in control.

I think that stuff like that is very important. I think that’s where these daily confessions, these daily affirmations are important. I think we can never underestimate the power of identity, knowing who you are, knowing what you’re about, your vision, values, and standards, the mission of your life. Jesus is sneaking away, slipping away to the wilderness to pray. He comes back with purpose.

And you see him model that for us. I heard someone say a long time ago, don’t give the best part of your day to people. Give the best part of your day to yourself and to God, and that time that’s so valuable, so overlooked. It is not rocket science. And Jesus says to us in Revelation, hey guys, I wish you were either hot or cold. That would be even easier to work with. But you get stuck in this lukewarm, I’m kind of in, I’m kind of out, I’m wishy-washy, I wanna, and it’s like, he’s like, I spew you out of my mouth. So if he wants me to be hot or cold, I’m definitely not gonna live my life cold. I’m gonna do my best to live hot. So how do I throw logs on the fire? What are the things that keep me on fire, motivated, inspired, and excited? Convicted, well, all of that comes from God’s presence. So I better get there.

But—like in all relationships—our encounters with God are meant to be progressive, not repetitive. That’s why I think I was so excited about the movement of a fresh approach to worship that was coming out of people like Martin Smith and Matt Redman in England in the early ’90s and things like the Passion Movement here in the U.S. It wasn’t simply a stylistic change. It was something fresh in the expectation of the movement of God.

But now, 15 years and thousands of songs later, there seems to be a new homogeny throughout our churches and our worship gatherings. We’ve gotten to the point where we have made what was fresh into a formula once again.

A familiar formula

Tell me if this sounds familiar for a worship song as played by the band at your church:

Loud intro

Come down for verse one

Hit it hard for the chorus

Keep it going hard up til the bridge

Drop out for the bridge

Build back into a loud bridge section

Come down for an ending chorus

Vamp low on the end (with some occasional builds)

This type of song formula takes people dynamically up for two minutes, down for one minute, back up, back down. It’s a constant roller coaster for the duration of the set.

There’s nothing wrong with this song structure, but it might point to a greater issue: Perhaps we’re relying on musical dynamics to elicit an emotional response more than we are pleading for the Holy Spirit to engage us in the spiritual realm.

Obviously, the solution to what seems to be our new habitual formula is not another formula. But we should be aware of how songs really do affect us emotionally and how we can engage with God in different ways through a range of dynamics. It might help to think through what we think of as a time of “worship.” Are there times of celebration with the Lord as well as times of rest? Do we dwell on the joy of celebration and the peace of rest, or are those moments fleeting?

Who is worship for?

Ultimately, worship leaders are there to help foster moments where individuals can connect with God. And our goal as worshipers is to use that time to connect with God.

Sometimes, I think we get into the mindset that the worship is for the band—that we are present to allow the band to do what it wants or to help us hit an emotional high. There’s a time for high notes and guitar prowess, but it’s a matter of the chicken and the egg. Because those moments aren’t all the time. It’s a continual balance of asking, “What is this moment calling for, and what will take us deeper?”

Music seems to be this strange thing that serves as a bridge between the natural and the supernatural. Because of that, our conversations about how to do what we do best involves both the earthly and the spiritual. It means not getting stale in what we think of as “worship.” But it also means fighting the temptation to judge whether or not the worship was “good” by criteria like, “They sang well” or, “That band was awesome.”

But the most important thing about worship is that it allows us to engage with God. It matters a lot less if everyone hits the right note, or if the band hits the right solo at exactly the right time or even if the particular song is the one you want to sing. What matters is if worship is providing you a space to connect with God—it’s not a formula or a series of easy answers. It’s letting God work through each of us to connect with Him both as individuals and as the Church.

Cole NeSmith is the pastor and creative director of City Beautiful Church in Orlando, Florida. This article is adapted from an article that originally appeared on his blog.

Though quiet spots are essential for spiritual strengthening and formation, they aren’t always attainable. As a musician, worship leader, father and New Yorker, I am always surrounded by noise. With everything going on in our nation, I am also easily sucked into media when I am not catching up on my Netflix. Because of this, I know I must make an effort for silence, reflection and meditation with the Lord to compensate the difference for the health of my soul. Solitude fuels us so we can be engaged and loving to the world. Solitude is our confidence when we are alone with Christ. 

Silence can simply be quieting your thoughts, listening to your heart and feeling your breath. It can be listening to the air and the sounds of nature. It can be acknowledging yourself as a living being, and can be reminding yourself that the universe is much bigger than you. Henry Nouwen wrote, “Silence is the home of our words. Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to our words. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of silence from which they come.”

Reflection looks like getting to a place—both physically and mentally—where we can contemplate our life, our worldview, and our faith. Reflecting on the Bible is critical to develop a rich spiritual life that is in flow with the word of God. This can make us more effective communicators and listeners because we are connected to the Divine presence. James 1:19 tells us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. In our seeking of the presence in us and around us, truth and love are found and enjoyed. 

Meditation zooms in on a specific element in the Bible or on a specific attribute of God and turns it over in our hearts. Meditation can also be a combination of silence and reflection with a specific intention. 

As someone who has been entrusted to lead music for worship gatherings, I have said my fair share of dumb things from the microphone over the years. Ever since I have made these practices a critical part of my day, I now find myself communicating and articulating my thoughts more clearly from the microphone. Christ always found time to break away from the noise to be alone with the Father. Christ was an excellent communicator. We must do the same in order to have equipped minds and hearts. To become more and more like Christ, we must be formed in His nature and follow His example.

Ever since my family moved to New York City, I have realized more and more why the Lord has led me on a journey to study these practices. There is always a siren in the distance, horns honking and shouting in the streets. Looking for opportunities to find silence can be quite difficult.

What I am discovering is that I need to find silence in the midst of chaos. In the middle of a crowded subway or walking 10 blocks to my destination, I can find opportunities for reflection and silence. I can be with the Lord when I decide to show up. I can create my own moments of solitude in my everyday routine. 

If we can choose to leave the headphones out and not always jump to entertain our boredom, we can learn to be fully present in the moment. And in that moment, we can close our eyes, and dwell on the peace and faithfulness of our Creator. When we consider the mercy and love dancing around us, we can find beauty in the absolute present. 

Trinity is in us and all around us. Trinity is waiting for us to show up and enjoy its presence. We must train ourselves to be present no matter where we are. And this can be our solitude.

The Church has done a great job of encouraging young people to raise support for their missions trips, but what is the “right” way to view raising support? For those not familiar with Christianese, “raising support” is our code for asking people to pay the salary of our Christiany job. Which, if you cringed a bit at that definition, is how many of us feel when faced with the prospect of hitting up our loved ones to pay our rent. That is, unless we reframe our thinking…

Raising Support Can Be Community Building

Here’s the thing, I know it feels weird to ask someone for something because, if you’re like me, we’ve been taught to not be “takers.” I distinctly remember being sent to a sleepover when I was little and told to not ask for things and only humbly accept that which was offered. In a broader context, we’re taught in America that anyone can make it if they just lace up their boots and make it happen. In short, independence is valued and dependence is scorned.

This is not the case with God. Over and over again, God asks us to lean not on our own understanding but to trust Him with the outcomes. Clearly, you’ve experienced this, because somehow your best idea (being an architect) was not God’s highest and best use for your career. Even though I’m sure, you struggled with the idea of making a drastic shift in vocation, eventually, you just jumped off the ledge and trusted that God knew what He was doing.

Such is the case with raising support. It is a joy, for the people who love you, to watch you trust—and obey—God’s plan for your life. And while you may feel like a taker, think of it from the other perspective. Would you, for a second, be offended if a really kind friend reached out and shared with you what God was doing in their life and asked you to financially give to that work?

Of course you wouldn’t! Because you and I both know that everything we have is just stuff that’s been entrusted to us. And our job is to do all we can to leverage our lives, our time and our money to support those things God deems important.

Believe me, it feels awkward as heck to ask. I’ve done it both as an individual and as a pastor talking about the tithe. But to not ask is to deny people one kind of opportunity to leverage their life in support of what God is doing (through you). The asking isn’t about you, it’s about something larger than you—and people love being challenged to be a part of that. Unless…

Raising Support Can Become Destructive

There is another side to raising support that, if not paid attention to, can be counterproductive. And for this, we turn to some bullet point warnings:

1. You’ve got to be very sure that God is calling you to this work. Of course, I have no doubt that you are being moved into this position. But also, many have come before you that have taken their own aspirations and pinned them on being “called”—when in fact they weren’t. Raising financial support is, at its core, completely dependent on God being in it. If He is, awesome. If not, well you may have a difficult road.

2. Not all of your friends will understand what you’re doing. Even those who identify themselves as Christ-followers may not yet fully understand the point of tithing, giving to charity or supporting you in your work. When you encounter those folks, be gracious. Them saying no isn’t between you and them, it’s between them and God.

3. Even when people understand the importance of generosity, they still may just say no (or not reply at all)—and you won’t know why. These are going to be the tough pills to swallow as it might feel like they’re rejecting you along with rejecting supporting you. Don’t go there, especially if there’s no historical evidence of them having any issue with you.

Sometimes, people just aren’t ready to give. Either because they don’t have the money and are embarrassed to acknowledge it, or simply because they’re just not feeling like this is the right thing at the right time. Whatever the case may be, this isn’t you. Remember, you’re offering the option to engage in a broader story, they’re making the decision to take it or not. You just worry about your job and keep plugging away.

At the end of the day, raising support and being funded as a missionary is nothing new. Paul gave multiple encouragements to support the work of those in vocational ministry. However, Paul also had a vocation (tent making) that helped him pay the rent while being supported as a missionary, which is what I think the model for every pastor and missionary should be—but that’s a different soapbox for a different day.

The bottom line is: It’s biblical to ask for support, it’s biblical to give financially to the work of the Kingdom, and I think you’ll be surprised by the number of people who are delighted to be on this journey with you.

I’ve studied biology and photosynthesis, and I know that plants live on light and water that soaks through the soil. It makes them independent. They’re producers. We’re consumers. If all the plants died, almost every other thing alive would starve. If we died, the plants would go on living off the sun, unfazed.

Fasting is like photosynthesis. You live on sun and rain. You drink water, and if it’s not warm outside, you’re drawn to every source of heat. But unlike photosynthesis, fasting will never make you independent; it’s not meant to. The point is not to prove how little we need, but how much—and how deeply.

The first time I fasted regularly was my sophomore year in college. I’d been reading about fasting, and the pastor of a church in town encouraged us to try it. So I did, one day a week. Nothing terrible happened. I didn’t faint or flunk any tests from lack of concentration. Nothing terribly wonderful happened either, but from the books I had been reading, I knew that was fairly normal. Fasting lets God change you, and change doesn’t always happen in fireworks with trumpet fanfares. Also, fasting is a way of connecting yourself to the spiritual world. The things that happen in the part of our world that’s not made up of flesh and bone aren’t always immediately visible.

The Process

My one-day-a-week fast happened on Mondays. Sunday I went to bed with an impending sense of doom. I don’t know what I dreaded, but it seemed to come back every week nonetheless. So I was surprised that when I decided to fast for a week or maybe more, I actually starting looking forward to it. It felt like an adventure; I couldn’t wait to start.

The books all said the first three days are the hardest. It was a Monday, and it felt a lot like normal Mondays—with a little extra adrenaline from knowing I probably wouldn’t eat for at least six days more. On Tuesday, I wasn’t hungry exactly; there was more of a dull ache in my stomach, and I felt a little weak. My heart seemed to beat faster from less exertion than it normally would. On Thursday, I had the same weak feeling and light flu symptoms, as the books had promised (author Richard Foster said the flu symptoms were my body getting rid of toxins). In the afternoon, I had a burst of energy. Friday was a lot like Thursday, but in the evening I had enough energy to go sledding. Climbing the hills took a while longer than normal, and in spite of my six layers, I only held out for an hour or so.

Things came into very sharp focus. Every step took concentration. When I climbed the stairs in the library with a backpack of books, I had no mental energy to waste on anything other than lifting the next foot. Putting it down. Sitting down was a gift, so was the pointed lace of winter trees. The smell of food, strangely, was not torture at all. Instead, I began to savor each aroma for its own sake. It was as though my very existence had been altered, and I was now some see-through creature, living on whiffs of goodness.

But at the same time, I was very aware that I was not a plant or some fairytale creature, independent of physical food. When I tried to read, I got sleepy more quickly. My tongue felt dry all the time, and I was constantly running (that is, walking slowly) to the bathroom from drinking water, even though water had taken a nasty taste. Every part of life seemed to weigh more. By the end of each day I crawled into my bed totally exhausted and used up. I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I had made it through the day and that now I could lie still for an entire night.

The books said that after the ninth and 10th days, fasting starts to feel like soaring. Hunger, flu and aches are gone, and you feel as though you could go on without food forever. Sometime after the 10th day, Foster said, real hunger will return; this is the time to stop fasting.

I have a German friend whose mother fasts once a year, not for spiritual reasons, but because she likes what it does to her body; she enjoys the experience. And in the instant you break your fast, it will certainly seem that your first sip of something other than water was worth the whole experience. Once I broke a fast drinking watered-down white grape juice from a tall, narrow blue glass with white spirals. I started out with more water than grape juice; still it tasted like a stronger drink than anything I’d ever had before, like something divine, not meant for mortals.

Fasting and prayer are often mentioned together in the Bible. Prayer takes on new meaning when you’re weak enough that you sometimes feel the wind might blow you over. It is a physical manifestation of a spiritual reality: We are husks of nothingness without God.

While I was fasting, the lines between spiritual and physical realities blurred. The Hebrew word that’s translated “soul” in the Old Testament actually means “breath.” The ancient Israelites didn’t have the distinction between mind and matter (or spirit and body) that we do today. We got that from Greek philosophy.

We run into problems when we make the soul all-important and the body totally insignificant. When we forget that our bodies matter, we live lopsided lives. We forget to rest. We forget that our very cells are holy and that the clearest word God’s ever spoken came to us as a body with red blood and breakable bones. The spiritual intersects profoundly with the physical.

Our souls are all tangled up in our bodies, and when I fast, I know this. I become more aware of each small physical thing and each small spiritual thing, and that they are not so separate as I once believed.

Usually when we think of this word it’s followed by a slight eye roll, a palm to the face, and a deep sigh of anguish. I know ya’ll, we’ve all been there!

We teach and raise our kids with obedience. We reward our pets when they act in obedience, but how do we as Christian adults use this form of action in OUR daily lives? It’s easier said than done. However, if there is something I’ve learned in 2019 it is that obedience is better than sacrifice.

As we build our personal relationships with God, He gives us instructions that are necessary for our growth, healing, and personal development. However, the truth is when God instructs us to do something it oftentimes is the complete opposite of what we had in mind.

“Don’t go to that event, stay home and get some work done.”

“Don’t start that project yet, wait until I give you the green light.”

“Go introduce yourself, ask how their day is going.”

God has personally given me all of the above instructions in the midst of me planning to do the exact opposite. I usually respond with something like this:

“But God I really want to go and I already paid for my ticket!”

“Why would you give me the idea if I can’t start it yet?!”

“I’m not really in a chatty mood right now…”

Imagine the level of audacity you must have to tell God Almighty, “I’m not in a chatty mood right now.”

The word obedience means “compliance with an order, request, law, or submission to another’s authority.” It’s weird to think that I have completely dedicated every single aspect of my life to a being that I can’t even see. The truth is though, once you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are making the conscious choice of letting your flesh die and living as an open vessel for God. When God gives us instructions, it is for a reason. Our obedience could end up saving your life, or someone else’s. God sees eternity but our only concern is how we are feeling in a single moment.

The Bible instructs us that we must not rely on our feelings but we should lean on God’s infinite wisdom and knowledge. “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths,” Proverbs 3:5-6 says. So what exactly does that look like ? This means those feelings of confusion, laziness, and stubbornness have to fly out of the door once God drops something on our lap. Being obedient not only makes God happy, but it saves us a lot of energy in the long run. 

When God tells you to introduce yourself to someone, they might have the solution to a problem that has been worrying you.They could even be a major resource in your life later on. You won’t know until you obey. When we ignore this guidance and try to figure things out on our own we end up sacrificing time, money, energy, relationships, and mental stamina. After all of this is done we end up in the same place we started. Doing things our way will take much longer and induce more frustration. I can’t count how many times I have found myself frustrated by the situations that I walked myself into.

To successfully comply with obedience we need another important strength working in us, and that’s discipline. Discipline and obedience go hand and hand, you simply can’t have one without the other. You have to constantly train yourself to let go of your own feelings and move off the words of God. I would suggest starting small. When you feel a nudge in your spirit saying to spark a conversation with someone (even when you don’t want to) move past your emotions and just say hello.

These small practices will create the foundation of your obedience and trust towards God, so when big instructions come you are more likely to obey in faith. Plus, what is the worst thing that could happen? We should view everything in this lifestyle as an adventure, after all we do have the Most High as our personal tour guide!

Pro Tip: A sure way to stay aligned in God’s purpose for you, ASK HIM before you make a decision, big or small . Before you plan for something check in with God and make sure you both are on the same page. This will save us in the long run!

Step one: Pick a time and a place to meet with God.

Before my wife, Taryn, and I moved to Washington D.C. to plant Metro Church, I felt drawn to this influential area for many years believing that if you can influence this area for Christ, you can influence the world. But the people here tend to have an obsession with schedules and appointments. On more than one occasion, I have heard someone say something to the effect of, “I have an opening three weeks from now for thirty minutes. Sorry, everything else is booked solid.”

I have heard these same people confess that they struggle to find time to meet with God. My thought in pastoring them has been simple, How is it that we prioritize meetings with people we don’t even like and neglect to meet with the God we love?

I don’t say this in a critical way, but rather as a wake-up call and a reminder that we prioritize what we value. I challenge you to pull out your smartphone out right now and schedule daily time with God.

This sounds simple, but it is so easy to let the appointment slip if you do not guard it. In my earlier years, I was more sporadic in my devotional times, but I found that missed appointments with God led to disappointments in life.

How can I expect to find the abundant life He offers if I am not seeking Him each day to guide me into His fullness?

The time:

I recommend that you choose the time when you are at your very best. I believe that God always gives us His very best, so I want to respond by spending time with Him when I am most alert and ready to receive. Some people like getting up early, like five a.m.—that’s great for them, but I am not at my best that early. I have found that God does not speak to me at that hour because, well, I am asleep (He can speak to me in my dreams if He wants to say anything to me before the sun rises). God is happy to meet with you any time of day, so what time works for you?

The place:

Next, find a place for you and God to meet. I recommend going somewhere that you love. When I take Taryn out on a date, I do not go to Burger King because I want it to be a place that we both love and enjoy going to together. My organic, gluten-free-loving wife’s love language is most certainly not super-sizing some greasy french fries or being in an environment with screaming kids and dirty booths. Instead, I try to choose a healthy restaurant that has an atmosphere where we are able to connect with each other. In a similar way, I recommend choosing a place for your time with God that you are excited to go to and a place that is conducive to connecting with Him.

There is a classic ‘80s flick called Field of Dreams. The movie is about an Iowa farmer that hears a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” Although in the movie it is referring to building a baseball field for the Chicago Black Sox, I have found this same principle to be true in my relationship with God. If you prepare a place for Him and build in time to be with Him, He will show up. If you build it, He will come! Once you have picked a time and a place, what do you do next?

Step two: Be still and worship.

In Psalm 46:10, God instructs to “be still and know that I am God.”

Honestly, I am not always good at being still. I would definitely rather be moving, preferably at a very high speed. Fortunately, the Hebrew word is not necessarily reflective of a literal stillness but more of a stillness of the soul. Psalm 46:10 can be translated as, “Stop striving and know that I am God.”

The context of this passage was at a time when Israel was being threatened by other nations. In the midst of these threats, they could trust in the covenant that God made with them and know that He would be their very present help, refuge, and strength (see Psalm 46:1). There is something about being still before God that reminds us we are not in charge—He is.

Once we are still before Him, we can enter into true worship. I have found that when I worship, everything shifts. If my perspective was off, I see rightly once again. I am reminded of the bigness of God and of how much He loves me and how much I love Him. I am also reminded again of how much I need Him and how trustworthy He is.

I have not always begun my time with God in worship, but I highly recommend taking some time to worship before you jump into reading the Bible. Worship helps you release burdens you are carrying and shifts your perspective so you see rightly again. Sometimes I will put a song on repeat, so that the words wash over me again and again. Our hearts are tenderized in His presence.

Step three: Read and pray.

God has written down His opinions and wisdom regarding the most common problems we face, so I recommend spending time looking at what He says in His Word. There is an integral partnership between the Word and the Spirit when it comes to God speaking. As you open your Bible and read, you are hearing what God has already spoken and asking the Holy Spirit to make it come alive so you can discern what God is speaking to you.

I recommend you start by spending 10 to 15 minutes in study after you worship. As you get into the Word, that time will likely increase. Sometimes I study for hours looking up Greek and Hebrew words and cross-referencing passages in the Bible. Sometimes I default to a topical study, or even a character study. Other times I spend just a few minutes reading a few verses.

Sometimes I feel as though God is speaking directly to me through His Word, and I understand exactly what He is asking me to do next through something I read. Other times when I read, God feels abstract and I struggle to understand how the passage has any correlation to my life whatsoever. This is very normal. Keep reading. As you continue to read with your ears and heart open, He will speak to you.

After you finish reading, take a few minutes to respond in prayer to what you read. Pray about whatever is on your heart. This brings us to the next step in how we can practically position ourselves to hear the supernatural voice of God.

Step four: Listen and write.

I recently heard that the above average listener only listens for approximately 17 seconds without diverting the conversation back to themselves. It seems that we are just naturally egocentric unless we intentionally guard against it. To illustrate this point, when you see one of your group pictures, who is the person you look at first? Is it your friends?

I didn’t think so.

In our relationship with God and with others, most of us struggle with being good listeners, but we will miss many important promptings from God if we do not take the time to listen for “the still, small voice of God”1 (1 Kings 19:12). Do you pause to listen to God or do you spend most of your time rattling off prayer requests? Don’t worry I have problems with it, too.

The single most revolutionary step I have taken in the past several years to dramatically increase both the amount of time I spend listening and the frequency I hear from God is something I call two-way journaling.

This is where you get out a journal or notepad and write a letter to God by just telling Him how you feel, asking questions, etc. After pausing for a few moments and asking Him to speak to you, simply write back what you feel like God is saying to you through listening to His still small voice.

If this is a new exercise for you, as it was for me when I started, I believe you will enjoy this focused way of processing with the Lord and hearing what He says as you write! Just like anything else you download from God any other way, it is important to test the message and take it through the same filters of seeing if it lines up with Scripture, testing it through asking the godly counsel in your life if it resonates with them.

Step five: Share and obey.

Who can you share with what God spoke to you? If it is direction you received, it is wise to share this with the right people in your life. I am committed to always having these kinds of people in my life and have given them permission to speak into my life and hold me accountable. The people that hold this place in our lives should also have a role of accountability. As we agree to be authentic with them and give them permission to speak into our lives, they bring great affirmation for the road ahead. Those who play this role in my life are the ones I can openly share with when I am walking through a challenge.

Although sometimes a bit humbling and even embarrassing, I have found it to also be one of the most freeing disciplines in life and it gives me the confidence to move forward feeling affirmed in what God is saying to me. Colossians 3:15 reminds us to let God’s peace lead us when we feel challenged to obey or step out because His peace is a tangible reminder of Him being with us.

Just remember God wants to speak to you and these five steps are simply helping to position you to hear His Voice in your daily life.

David I. Stine is lead pastor of DC Metro Church in Washington. This article was adapted from Stine’s book, Hearing From God, Five Steps To Knowing His Will For Your Life (2017 Howard Books). 

Winner is a speaker, historian, author of books such as Still and Girl Meets God and an assistant professor at Duke Divinity school.

In Wearing God, Winner broke down a few of the scriptural metaphors for God that Christians don’t tend to talk about—and explores what each of them might mean for our faith.

We talked to her about what the metaphors reveal about God’s character and how we can see Him in fresh ways.

In the book, you break down several metaphors for God. Which ones were most surprising to you?

I think the image that was most surprising, and in some ways most disturbing, to me was the image of God as one who laughs.

I went searching through the Scriptures hoping to find some Psalm in which the psalmist split a bottle of champagne with God over dinner, and they laughed with each other. And the psalmist might say something like, “Now I know that I am the laughter in God’s heart.” I wanted laughing with God to be the way I laugh with my friends, and that’s not what I found.

It turns out that the primary way we encounter God laughing in the Scriptures is God laughing at someone quite acerbically. It’s in some ways a really disturbing image. It shows up most centrally in three of the Psalms. I don’t really like to think of God that way—laughing at people. That seems mean and caustic.

But they’re not only disturbing images, they are actually intimately related with God’s sense of justice. God can laugh at God’s enemies and the people who are trying to interfere with justice. Because God knows that those people will not ultimately triumph.

As I was beginning to try to live with the psalmists that depict God that way, I did some study and research about the ways laughter and humor figure in political protest, which was always interesting to me. Marginalized people who are protesting injustice also laugh. They laugh at their oppressors, and they laugh at the people they’re protesting.

That seems to me to be part of what it means to laugh with God. So somehow, to say, “I want to laugh with God” must mean, “I want to go work for God’s justice and be hanging out with the oppressed people who are laughing at people who are trying to interfere with God’s justice.”

You talk about how the Western Church, especially, has focused on just a few metaphors for God—like God is a shepherd and provider. How do you think that’s influenced the Church?

In my church community, we use a lot of “Father” language. We use a lot of “Great Physician” language, because we have a lot of sick people. When we’re really feeling brave and bold and going out on a limb, we use that mother hen imagery from Matthew and Luke.

On the one hand, I think when a person or a church does this—when they just focus on a handful of images—those images become richer and [have] deeper association.

I have now prayed for 10 years with this Great Physician language with members of my church community who are really sick and really need God to be a great physician. And frankly, before doing that, the image of God as a Great Physician didn’t really mean all that much to me.

But by the same token, I think when we focus on just a few of these images, we’re limiting our imagination about who God might be. It’s wonderful to speak of God as the Good Shepherd. We could think all afternoon or all week about what a shepherd is and how sheep are and so forth and so on. But that’s just one basket of characteristics.

I think one of the reasons the Bible gives us so many different metaphors for God is to remind us that no single one of these images—and no 33 of these images—is going to capture who God is. We constantly are being invited by the Scriptures to have our own assumptions checked and our own imaginations expanded around who God actually is and what God is like.

What would you suggest to Christian leaders, writers and speakers who want to start introducing some of these metaphors into the way they talk about God?

For me, the most vital place of engagement has been prayer.

I have found it unsettling and really fruitful to pray with these images. I think for me, one of the most unsettling pieces of living with this topic of these biblical images of God has been about this image of God as clothing.

I had done a good bit of different praying with that image, and praying with the scene from Genesis 3 where God clothes Adam and Eve. And then praying again with Paul’s language about our being clothed in Jesus.

As I had prayed that language—really for some years now—I feel like I’m beginning to understand that this is actually a statement about intimacy with God—that God is close to us.

Clothing is really close to us. It is right pressed up against us. So it’s very startling for me still to sort of prayerfully put myself in the space of trying to believe, trying to experience God as being nestled up against me as intimately as clothing is.

When I think about clothing, clothing is pressed up close to the parts of me that I love, the parts of me that I find beautiful and delightful. But clothing is also pressed up close to myself to the parts that I am ashamed up. Like the 10 pounds I wish I could lose—clothing is right up against that too.

In prayer, I’ve begun to receive something about God wanting to be close to both my beautiful and lovely parts, but also the parts of me that I’m ashamed of.

I was praying with the images as much as traditional Scripture study and so forth. But really I think prayer is probably at least for me, where the rubber hits the road.

Obviously, prayer through some of these metaphors is one way, but what do you suggest as some other steps for people who want to see God in new ways and be refreshed in their faith?

I am attracted to the images of God that are connected to our everyday lives. Clothing is very much a part of our everyday lives. Laughter. I have a chapter in the book about smell—God is the one who perceives scent and admits an aroma.

I became convinced in working on this book that this is actually Jesus’ method. What Jesus seemed to do in His teaching was go through life, go through an ordinary Tuesday and kinda grab on to something He saw: A sparrow, a woman holding her coins, men lining up to get their paycheck.

Jesus would see these very ordinary everyday things, and He would draw them into His teaching and would say to people, “You can look around your everyday life and all these ordinary things you’re seeing are actually invitations to learn something about God, and to draw near to God.”

It seems to me that part of what the Bible is suggesting to us is that we can look around our everyday lives and say, “Here I am looking out my window at this magnolia tree. That’s not just a beautiful tree, and it’s not just something that was created by God. It actually is telling me something about who God is, because God describes God’s self as a tree in Hosea.”

We have this powerful invitation from Scripture that the good things God created and put in our world—that please us and delight us—those things don’t just please and delight us: They actually contain hints about who God is and what our relationship with God can be like.

Knowing God is going to look different from any other relationship in our lives. We can’t see God. We can’t look across the table at our favorite coffee shop and talk with Jesus in bodily form. I used to get so frustrated with this dynamic. So, in a world where I cannot text God or send Him an email, what does it look like to be in a relationship—to be in a friendship—with the one who created all things (Colossians 1:16)?

Intentionality

No deep relationship happens apart from intentional cultivation. Even the relationships that seem to happen “organically” in my life—those friendships where we clicked immediately—needed to be nurtured to one degree or another. We reach out to the people we care about, and we have to seek to be intentional in order to get to know one another. Determining that we actually do want to grow in our friendship with God—and then setting aside intentional time to spend with Him—is an important first step toward getting to know Him better.

But while we may be intentional about growing in a relationship with God, it may seem challenging because we may not feel God’s intentionality toward us. Still, His intentionality in loving and knowing us is always, always there. The One who created us—the One who “knit [us] together” (Psalm 139:13)—has never wavered in His intentionality toward us. He made each of us specifically and with great love. We are worth a great deal to Him (Luke 12:6-7).

We don’t have to ask God to pencil us in to His calendar—He always has time for us. Whether it is 15 minutes in the morning where we read the Bible and pray, an hour-long jog while appreciating His creation, or a weekend retreat spent worshiping Him, consistent, intentional time spent getting to know God is one of the foundations of a deep relationship with Him.

Communication: Talking

But what do we do during the time that we’ve set aside to connect with God? As with earthly relationships, the hope is that we will communicate. Communication with God looks both similar and different from communication with earthly friends, but it includes what all healthy relationships include—sharing, confessing and praising.

We share our hearts with God through prayer and tell Him what we’re excited about, what we’re worried about, and what we are thinking about. We open up about the places we have fallen short and confess our sin to Him. And we praise Him for who He is and what we love about Him. We thank Him. We worship Him. Just as we tell our earthly friends how much we appreciate them and are thankful for them, we do the same with God—to the highest degree.

Communication: Listening

But our communication with God can feel difficult at times. Perhaps we think we are the one doing all of the talking; while we can talk to God through prayer, we don’t (usually) expect an audible voice to respond to us. So we must learn to listen to God in other ways if we are going to have a relationship with Him that runs deep. What does that look like?

Listening to God includes reading the Bible—one of the clearest ways we have to hear God’s voice speaking to us. If we read Scripture with a mind and a heart that is listening for His personality, His presence and His encouragement on the page, we will hear Him. We will get to know who He is as we read about how Jesus responded to the disciples; we will encounter His passion as we read about how He cared for the sick and hurting.

We can also listen to God by asking Him to speak to us. While it may not be through a lightning bolt or an angelic encounter, God does communicate with His children. He has given us His Holy Spirit to live inside of us, and Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit’s role in our lives:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13-15)

Acts of Love and Sacrifice

Earthly relationships that are rooted in trust are the ones built over time, through honest communication and with acts of love and service. This is why spouses make promises at the altar to stay faithful “in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer”—because it is a choice to stay and serve and sacrifice when the going gets tough. The same is true in our relationship with God—but not in the way we might think.

Unlike earthly relationships, where mutual sacrifice and acts of love are needed to keep a relationship healthy, our relationship with God is built solely on His love and His sacrifice. When Christ allowed the nails to be pummeled into His hands and feet—when He endured the horror of death on a cross—His was the ultimate and only act of love and sacrifice that was needed. He did all that is necessary for us to “have a relationship” with God by becoming the sacrifice for sin, and now the way to a relationship with God is open and available for any who desires it.

We don’t have to sacrifice for God in order for Him to love us. We don’t have to do a certain number of good works in order to know God. We cannot earn our way into a relationship with Him. But, as in any healthy relationship, when we truly love someone, we desire to pour our affection out on that person. How do we do this with God? There are many ways. We can love God outwardly by serving others, by giving generously, and through the daily choice to love Him and obey His commands.

Although a relationship with God will look different from every other relationship in our lives, there is no other relationship that matters as deeply or shapes us as fully. As we seek to build a relationship with him through intentional time together, meaningful communication, and acts of service, we will find that he is already reaching out to us in love (1 John 4:19).

To be completely transparent, I myseld am what would be considered an egalitarian. That is, I am of the belief that a women is fully equal in every way to a man. I believe that a woman can hold any position in ministry including, but not limited to: apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher (list found in Ephesians 4:11). In my interpretation of the Bible and after prayerful consideration, I believe that both the qualifying and excluding factors for work in ministry are blind in regards to gender. Here’s why:

There is a pretty interesting conversation happening around an idea called the Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic. This fancy seminary term was coined by William Webb in his not-at-all-funny, quite boring, but phenomenal book titled Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. And before I go any further, I need to warn you that I’m about to try and sum up the main idea of that book in a few paragraphs. Doing this is like playing Beethoven’s ninth on my daughter’s Playskool piano—I admit that much will be lost. You should read the book.

That being said, the main idea Webb proposes is that as we read the Bible, we see movement on an issue either toward a more broad worldview, or toward a more narrow worldview. By way of example, the issue of slavery: In the Old Testament of the Bible, there is clear direction for the proper treatment of slaves (Leviticus 25:44-46, and others).

Now you could read that and, as many do, say, “God’s OK with slavery? That’s messed up.” However, what we fail to see is that while God’s view of justice is perfect, He is keenly aware that ours isn’t. A pastor friend of mine used to put it this way, “God knows A to Z, but is wise enough to not freak us out. So He takes us from A to B, then to C, and so on.” This progression in thought is not God’s character changing, but our character changing and giving us the ability to see more of what He sees.

That’s what is happening in the Bible in regard to slavery. In the Old Testament, God’s giving humans the first step toward what we now know, ultimately, will be Christians unanimously declaring that slavery is wrong. God’s saying (in so many words), “First, just don’t treat them ruthlessly” (that’s A). And later, as we read in the New Testament, God continues to broaden the scope of our understanding. In a letter to Philemon, Paul says of the slave Onesimus, “He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord” (Philemon 1:16). That’s the next step, B. See what’s happening? There’s a progression in thought. A: Just don’t beat them all the time. B: Love them as a brother or sister in Christ. And on and on to Z: Slavery is unjust.

That’s the broadening of our worldview in regard to the Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic. And it’s this broadening that, in this egalitarian’s opinion, explains why we’re having this conversation now. Because as I read the full canon of Scripture, I see progression. I see God giving more and more instruction to a people who started as misogynist.

In the time that the Bible was written women were, at best, second-class citizens. But slowly, God revealed the narrative, and we see that women are held in high esteem. From Jesus to Paul, women are not only valued as people, but as laborers in the Church. Laborers who are called to spread the Gospel to the four corners of the world.

Who were the first people that saw the resurrected Christ and were given the lofty task of changing humanity? Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women who came to the tomb. Who was called by Paul, “A fellow worker in Christ” and held up as great teacher? Priscilla. Who was given the responsibility to answer to angels, take scorn and shame, bear the Son of God and encourage Him to greatness? Mary. Women aren’t footnotes in Scripture, they’re some of the most vital players in all of Christianity.

All right, I’m fully on the soapbox now, let’s settle down a bit…

Clearly, I’m of the view that God has given us clarity and continues to broaden our worldview. But, with very little effort, holes can be poked in everything I just said. In fact, I’ll do it for you:

1. This article pretty much destroys the Redemptive Movement Hermeneutic by Webb. If you read it, and you should, you’ll see other really brilliant people are saying that progression in thought is counter-scriptural and wrong.

2. I have daughters and am hugely biased because it’s impossible for me to think that there’s anything in the planet God couldn’t call them to.

3. Tim Keller, John Piper, Wayne Grudem and likely C.S. Lewis would all disagree with me. They respect and value women as God’s creation, but wouldn’t allow the same roles in ministry as I would. Those people are smart and they shouldn’t be discounted.

This brings us to an important question many women have asked themselves: “I feel called to leadership at my church, but there aren’t any women on staff so how do I bring this up?”

What I would do is study, pray, consider and then engage in the conversation. Your male leaders aren’t bad guys for not being 100 percent certain that women should be allowed into all facets of ministry—really, they’re not. So have patience with them. We don’t know everything that there is to know yet, and the conversation is still being had. Someday, we’ll be at “Z” and all be on the same page (whatever that page may be). But until that point, we need to be patient and kind with each other have a civil discourse on those things that have yet to fully reveal themselves.

The Church of the Holy Spirit, a historic church located in Heimlichm, Germany, recently hosted a worship service that focused on Taylor Swift’s music. According to Deutsche Welle, an estimated 1,200 people — mostly young women (duh) — crammed into the historic church on Sunday, May 10, for the service, titled “Anti-Hero,” a reference to one of Swift’s songs.

“The Church of the Holy Spirit has always been a place of encounter and exchange,” Pastor Christof Ellsiepen told the outlet. “That’s why a pop-music religious service fits so perfectly. With it, we are giving space to the questions and issues that occupy the younger generation.”

According to parish pastor Vincenzo Petracca, the service focused on the strong Christian themes in Swift’s music that address topics such as women’s rights, racism and gender equality.

“Theologically speaking, she points to the justness of God,” Petracca said. “For her, faith and action are inseparable.”

Petracca acknowledged that Swift has taken flak from some Christian leaders for her recent album, especially in the United States. But he made it clear that the sermon highlighted that Swift’s “faith knows doubt and inner conflict.”

During the service, the congregation sang along to live performances of six Swift songs, led by Tine Weichmann, a singer from Hamburg and professor of popular church music in Heidelberg.

Petracca recalled to DW that one of the most emotionally stirring moments occurred when Weichmann and her band performed “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a song Swift wrote for her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. In the song, Swift sings of the healing powers of medicine and prayer: “Holy orange bottles, each night I pray to you / Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus, too.”

During the performance, Petracca was moved by what he saw from the congregation.

“I stared into beaming faces — and during the song that Taylor wrote for her cancer-stricken mother, many had tears in their eyes,” he said.

The church said they plan to continue the “City Church Rock ‘n’ Pop” series with Billie Eilish and Beyoncé-themed services later this year.

Keller spoke with RELEVANT about his final book in November 2022 on The RELEVANT Podcast. He spoke about the importance of seeking forgiveness and justice simultaneously, how to address church hurts, and how to reconcile with people we’ve wronged. 

Here’s a small portion of that conversation. You can hear more of our final conversation on today’s episode:

(Note: The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited.)

People argue it’s better to pursue justice over forgiveness, or vice versa, but you write in your book that we should pursue both. Why is that?

If you’re going to put this in a nutshell, I’ll say it this way and then we can unpack it: Forgiveness is not the opposite of doing justice. Forgiveness is not only not a contradiction of pursuing justice; it’s actually a precondition for pursuing justice. Because if you don’t forgive before you start to pursue justice, you’ll actually be pursuing vengeance.

You know, the Bible has a statement called Lex talionis, which is “a tooth for a tooth.” You’ve heard that? Well, the reason why that was a legal rule—a tooth for a tooth—is that if somebody knocks your tooth out, you don’t want to just knock out their one tooth. You want to knock all their teeth out because vengeance almost always goes beyond justice. You want the person to suffer, you want the person to hurt. In fact, you usually want them to hurt a little more than you were hurt because they started it.

So, two things about vengeance: vengeance always goes beyond justice. Well, I’ll say three things about it. It tends to go beyond what justice requires. Number two, it very seldom really is successful because vengeance is easy to see. So if you’re going after a perpetrator and you’re trying to just make that person suffer, that person is not going to respond well to you. They’re not going to repent. They’re not going to admit they’re wrong. They’re going to see that it’s a vendetta and they’re just going to get their backup or even retaliate. And last of all, vengeance eats you up with anger. I mean, it just consumes you. What you ought to do is get control of that anger by forgiving and then pursue justice. And then you will do it well. You will do it in a just way. A big part of the difference between vengeance and justice is motivation.

Here’s the last thing I’ll tell you about this. Why do I want justice? Why do I want that person to admit they are wrong and maybe have some consequences? I could be doing this for God’s sake because God is a just God. I could be doing it for even the perpetrator’s sake because it’d be great to see that person change so that they don’t do this again. I could be doing it for the sake of other victims so that nobody else gets hurt. So I could be doing it for God’s sake, for justice’s sake, the victim’s sake, or the perpetrator’s sake. But in vengeance, you’re doing it for your sake. It’s really all about you. It’s very self-absorbed. You hide behind the idea of justice, but what you’re really after is wanting this person to suffer at least as much as they made you suffer. Therefore, forgiveness is changing your motives, getting control of it, and making it possible for you to actually pursue justice. It’s not the opposite. It’s not like if I forgive, I can’t pursue justice. Who says that? Why? That’s not in the Bible. It doesn’t say you can’t pursue justice.

What’s the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation? 

This is a great question because here’s a second issue. If I forgive somebody who’s wronged me, that doesn’t mean I automatically trust them. See, if you forget—so, for example, if I forgive, let’s say, a kind of abusive parent—I mean by abusive, I’m talking really more about verbally abusive. So let’s just say I’ve got a verbally abusive parent who tends to just haul off, and you decide, I’m going to forgive my mother for verbally being abusive. On the other hand, I also know that even though I’ve forgiven her, she’s still the same person probably. She may have even asked, “I’m sorry,” and she said, “Please forgive me.” What if she says, “Please forgive me?” And I say, “Okay, I will forgive you.” But what if she even repented? And yet I know that that’s her habit, her whole habit. So I need to say to her, “I will forgive you, but I really don’t want you to keep doing it. It’s wrong. It’s absolutely wrong.”

I knew an adult who once did this, a woman, by the way, who did this with her father. He would get verbally abusive, and what she would say is—and this is an adult woman with an older father—”Dad, I’m going to call you every week on Tuesday night because you’re my father and I’m your daughter. But I want you to know that if you start getting verbally abusive to me, I’m not going to warn you. I’m not going to talk to you, I’m not going to give you warnings or get into arguments. I’m just going to hang up. I’m just going to say, Dad, you’re doing it, I’m going to hang up. But I’m going to call you back the next Tuesday night. And if you start doing it, I may end up hanging up. But the point is, I forgive you, I want a relationship with you, but I’m not going to let you send it to me. Now, it’s not good for you or me or anybody else.” Now, that was, I thought, a tremendous example of someone who was saying, look, I’ve forgiven you and I’m opening the door for a relationship, but you have got to earn my trust. And the only way to do that is to stop verbally abusing me. And so every single Tuesday night, she was giving her dad another chance. It’s amazing. So there’s got to be a way to, on the one hand, say, “Look, you have to earn the trust. You have to do something if we’re going to be reconciled. This is not something that I can pull off. You’ve got to do something.” But at the same time, keep the door open for it. To let people know, “You know, I’m always open if you’re ready to make the changes you need to make.” So the answer is yes. There is definitely another step. It has to be done in reconciliation. There has to be an offer where you show the—and you have to explain the offer that you make, and you have to show what the conditions are, and then the other person has got to meet those conditions.

So many people talk about the church hurt they’ve experienced over the years. How do we encourage someone to forgive the church without causing further damage?

Well, I mean there’s forgiving a group, or you might say corporate forgiveness for forgiving a group. You mentioned the church, and I’ll get to that in one second. Miroslav Volf wrote a book some years ago called *Exclusion and Embrace*. Miroslav Volf is a theologian at Yale, but he’s Croatian. And back in the early ’90s, he wrote that book about forgiveness, but he was thinking about what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, where in Bosnia and Croatia, the Serbians were coming and they were just wiping people out—ethnic cleansing. And the real question is, how do I, as a Croatian, not hate every Serbian?

And so let me just say that book is a kind of academic book. It’s nowhere near as easy to read as my forgiveness book. I’m a pastor and he’s a theologian, and it was much more challenging. And yet, in there, he does a really good work. The term “exclusion and embrace”—what he’s saying is an embrace is a way of opening your arms to somebody, but then at the same time being open to them, even though they may not change, they may not embrace you back. But there’s a way of extending your arms. So he was trying to talk about how, as a Croatian, he had to forgive the Serbians or at least give them an opportunity to change, to give them an opportunity to reach out to him.

So it was a great book and pretty difficult to read in many ways. I think a lot of African Americans or nonwhite people in general can feel the same way about white people. Now, you brought up the other issue, which is I know these people have been hurt by the church, and I’ve seen them respond negatively to me because they don’t even know me, but I’m a pastor and I represent the church. So I think you’re right in saying I don’t think we can force people to simply—you can never force somebody to forgive. What you ought to do is you ought to try to explain that what we’ve already talked about, in fact, you’ve gotten some great stuff out of me here, is that you need to forgive the people who have wronged you so that you don’t let them control you the rest of your life.

Some years ago, I remember trying to get a guy who lived right down the street from our church in Virginia to let his kids come to a vacation Bible school. So we went there, we knocked on the door, and we said, “Hey, you know, we’re having vacation Bible school. We’re very happy to come by and pick up the kids and take them to vacation Bible school every morning at nine and bring them back at twelve.” It was right down the block. And he said no. He said, “My father made me go to church, forced me to go to church, and it was a terrible church, and I’m never going to let any of my children go to church.” And I’m thinking, okay, okay, I didn’t say this to him, but I was thinking, you know what, because you haven’t forgiven your father or that church, here you are 30 years later being completely controlled by them. In other words, you’re not letting your children do this or that because of what happened to you. You’re under their control. And I think the thing to say is you do need to forgive the people who have wronged you.

What I’ve seen now, and this is in the book, is I’ve seen women who are abused in the church, sometimes sexually but very often more spiritually abused in the church. And then when the abuser says, “Oh, I’m sorry,” everybody says, “Oh, you have to forgive him.” And what that does is it silences her, and he stays right in power. And that is not biblical forgiveness, as I’ve tried to show you. Forgiveness and seeking justice go together. But what a lot of people have done in the church is they’ve used forgiveness to silence victims. They’ve used the idea of forgiveness to silence victims. And if you felt like that, then you leave the church and you feel like, “I just can never trust the church again.” The only thing I would want to say to them is you do still have to forgive internally so that you don’t get controlled by them for the rest of your life. And then secondly, remember that all churches will not do that. So try to find a church that is not going to abuse you.

If you’ve had a bad experience with doctors, that doesn’t mean that you should never go see a doctor again, because you probably need a doctor. So the same thing is if you had a bad experience with a church, I think you still need to find a church somewhere and not let it just push you away completely.

What is the first step in forgiveness? 

So, well, here’s the funny thing. The first step in forgiveness is to name the wrong as a real evil. That sounds weird, but the difference between forgiveness and excusing is a very big difference. See, a lot of people, especially me, frankly, I used to do this a lot. I used to say, when somebody said, “Oh, I’m really sorry for what I did,” and I’ll say, “Oh, forget it, don’t worry, no problem.” I used to think of that as forgiveness. But what I was really doing was excusing it, like no big deal. It’s very typical of a lot of guys to do that, no big deal. But actually, the first step in forgiveness is to say, “Yes, what you did was wrong.” You can’t forgive something unless you admit that it was an evil. So you first have to name it.

Second thing, and this is from Miroslav Volf, by the way, is I need to remind myself that I’m a sinner who actually also needs forgiveness from God and other people. The first step is this person did wrong. This is an evil. Name it. The second step is to remember, however, that you also live by forgiveness, and that sort of softens you a bit. Then the third thing is, and here’s what I say, I’ve said this to so many people as a pastor, forgiveness is granted before it’s felt.

See, if you try to feel the forgiveness before it’s granted, that usually means, “I can’t forgive because I’m angry.” Well, see, what you’re doing is trying to feel forgiven before you grant it. That’ll never happen. I’d say grant it before you feel it. They said, “Well, how can I grant it?” I said, “Well, make a commitment, and that commitment is not to try to get revenge. Whatever else you’re gonna do, you’re not gonna try to get revenge because Jesus didn’t take revenge on you for everything you’ve done.” And here’s the way you cannot take revenge. One is, when you see the person, you don’t throw the thing up in their face. Secondly, when you’re talking to other people, you don’t try to ruin their reputation by talking about it. And thirdly, don’t keep bringing it up to yourself. I would say to grant forgiveness is a promise—not to keep bringing it up to the person, to others, or to yourself.

Like, for example, if my wife one day says, “I can’t believe you big blue turnip, you did that,” and then after she says, “I’m very sorry for calling you a blue turnip,” and I’ll say, “I forgive you.” But what if a month later, I’m unhappy with her, and I say, “I remember when you told me that I was a blue turnip,” and she said, “I forgive you, big blue turnip.” And the answer is, see, what have I done? I haven’t forgiven her. I’m using it now on her. So forgiveness is granted first. I promise not to bring it up to you, to others, or to myself. And if you keep with that discipline, eventually you start to feel it. And never call me a blue turnip. Never. Because it just never ends well.

I didn’t have a strong theology around my body and its significance to my faith; for most of my life, I’ve treated thought and feeling as the means by which God makes himself known. My postpartum state forced me to reckon with my beliefs around the purpose of my physical form, and around the Bible’s pronouncement that as a part of God’s creation, my body is profoundly good.

God Spoke to Me Through Giving Birth

Months before my daughter arrived, a friend had prayed for me to have a deep and transformative encounter with the Lord during my labor and the time that would follow. I received her words eagerly and prepared in the ways I knew how: I kept a prayer journal, meditated on Scriptures that held special meaning for me during pregnancy, packed my hospital bag with art prints that spoke to me of the creative nature of God, created a playlist of sacred music for the birthing room.

I’m accustomed to meeting God through practices that carry intellectual and emotional weight; I hoped that by steeping myself in these things, I could prepare for a birth that would be like the spiritual practices I was used to, full of the intellectual and emotional revelation I associate with a fruitful walk with the Lord.

When the time came to deliver our daughter, my labor seemed void of the kind of revelation I anticipated. My contractions began with such intensity that they wiped my mind clean of the spiritual focus I was determined to maintain. I could hardly form a coherent thought. The Scriptures I had meditated upon receded; the art prints and playlist went unused. As labor progressed I felt increasingly submerged in my body. I had enough presence of mind to wonder if the Lord was trying to convey something in these moments but finding me too lost in physical sensation to hear. When I did sense Him near, I felt Him encouraging me to abide in my body, for He would speak without words through everything I felt and experienced and make Himself known through the form he had given me.

Seeing the Body Through the Eyes of The Maker

In the aftermath of my daughter’s arrival, I wondered if I had heard correctly. I had never felt so physically ravaged, nor so dead to the ways in which I was accustomed to communing with God. I was overcome with love for our child, yet I wept and trembled daily with pain, still bleeding, nursing my stitches and inflamed with a fever that had swept over me after we left the hospital. I asked God why this suffering was necessary when labor had already been such a struggle, and couldn’t hear His answer in any way I recognized. The discomfort radiating from my body was like static that interrupted all the ways I knew to train myself on His voice.

I felt contempt for my body. I was surmounting one of the greatest challenges of my life in learning to care for a newborn daughter, and not only was my body weak and faltering, it was disrupting the conversation with God I had cultivated for years.

Here, I believe the Holy Spirit brought me to remember the Genesis narrative. “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” It was a brief moment of clarity, but it halted me when I looked down at my body with disgust. It was as if God, knowing the accusations I was leveling against myself, came and shielded me from condemnation like He did on the cross, even when I acted as my own accuser. I believe the Holy Spirit then lent me a shift in perspective and brought me to see my body through the eyes of my Maker.

In the same way, I had marveled and given thanks, many times with tears, at my daughter’s body taking form within mine, the Lord had rejoiced as I grew in my mother’s womb. With knowledge of the path He set before me, He knit together a vessel that would carry me through the days He ordained and gave it to me as a gift, singular, unique and laden with His intention for my life. Indeed, it had shown His intentions—by gestating and birthing my child, being broken for her, nursing her with love both generous and sacrificial, my body had enabled the most visceral identification with Christ that I have ever experienced. If the days He ordained for me were meant for loving and laying down my life as He did, then truly, my body had faithfully carried me according to His purpose.

I know our bodies and our experiences of them are varied, but the principle I want to convey is this: In Genesis, God looks at His creation and sees that it is good, for it is the work of His hands and thus a reflection of His nature. However temporal or frail, bodies are not detritus to be shed in pursuit of a cerebral or emotional knowledge of God. They speak with their own eloquence about the Maker who formed them.

Whether we are being held in our mother’s wombs or embracing our children, we see in our bodies the story of how completely the Lord contains us, of how within Him, we live and move and have our being. Whether we are birthed or doing the birthing, we bear witness to the value God places on a human life, for each body arrives in a torrent of blood and water, echoing the sacrifice Christ made for us on the cross. Whether we are nourished in infancy or administering the nourishment, we glimpse the generous love of God, which bears forth life from a broken body, and invites us to eat and drink of him without cost. Bodies are not peripheral to our faith.

A year after giving birth I think about the opening verses of Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (verses 1-4).

On the many days I find myself immersed in the physical, repetitive tasks of new motherhood, I resist the pull to feel frustrated when I cannot return to the things I used to do. One day I will journal again, read with frequency or worship at length, but right now my communion with God consists of abiding in one body while caring for another. The psalmist says creation reveals knowledge; my current spiritual practice is an exercise in listening to the declarations spoken forth by my own body and by my daughter’s. I am learning a new language for speaking and hearing from the Lord, and it is different, but it is surely good.

Mitchell, who got his start on Kenan and Kel, opened up to Sharpe about his journey from childhood actor to adulthood and the trials he faced along the way. After experiencing some dark years, Mitchell’s friend invited him and a few others over to meet his mom, who was very spiritual. When his mom began praying, Mitchell recalls everyone having a physical reaction to what she was praying. 

“Everybody just started spitting up and throwing up,” Mitchell said. “It was really like an exorcist type of moment.”

Mitchell then asked his friend’s mom why this was happening. She explained that he was going through things because his ex-wife had “put a hex on him.” She and Mitchell began talking about the spiritual realm and the power of Jesus, and they began exorcising demonic spirits from Mitchell for nearly an hour. The experience left Mitchell exhausted, but lighter. 

“It was like I just had the craziest workout and at that moment no one could tell me that there’s not a God because I understood that this is spiritual warfare that we’re dealing with,” Mitchell said. “I also understood that throughout every process — between work and also through relationships and toxic relationships and everything — that there’s a real enemy that is warring for us.”

You can watch Mitchell tell the full story here.

Over the last few years, several notable figures have opened up on podcasts about their faith. Here are five of our favorite conversations:

Kathryn Hahn Shared That Her Acting Career Began With a Church Production of Psalty the Singing Songbook

In a lengthy and very fun conversation with Conan O’Brien on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, WandaVision‘s Kathryn Hahn revealed the very first bullet point on her acting resume was a gig with a certain beloved(?) anthropomorphic hymnbook familiar to Christian kids of a certain age. Psalty and his family (also talking hymnbooks) would gather kids around and sing all sorts of songs about God in a manner that was either sweet or terrifying, depending on the costume. Hahn played the big blue book in her first ever “acting gig.”

The conversation begins around the 51:45 mark.

Oscar Isaac Shared His Experience at Cornerstone in the 90s

Back in 2015, Oscar Isaac told Nerdist podcast host Chris Hardwick that he had attended Cornerstone festival as a teen. Isaac described it as a “Christian Woodstock” or a “Christian Coachella” where her listened to different Christian metal and hardcore bands. It was probably a big inspiration for him to start his own ska band, The Blinking Underdogs.

Mark Ruffalo Told His Wild Church Experience at a Jimmy Swaggert Revival Service

On NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, actor Mark Ruffalo talked about attending a (pre-scandal) televangelist Jimmy Swaggart revival services at his local church Kenosha, Wisconsin. During the service, Swaggart held an altar call for the kids and Ruffalo’s grandmother urged him to go to the front, and that’s where things take an interesting turn. You can hear him tell the full story starting around the 24:30 mark.

Kat Von D Doesn’t Hold Back Talking About Her Newfound Faith and Church Community

Tattoo artist and reality TV star Kat Von D has gone through a major spiritual transformation over the last two years. In 2023, she began to speak out more about her journey, inviting her fans in on her thoughts on faith, the Church and God. On the Relatable Podcast with Allie Beth Stuckey, the reality TV star also shared her surprising choice to attend a more tradition church.

“I want to worship,” she said. “I don’t want to go to a concert.”

Von D opened up further about the community she’s found and how the people in her life have lead her closer to God.

You can watch the full conversation here.

Rob Reiner Pushes Back Against Christian Nationalism on NPR

Rob Reiner is known for his acting career and film career, which includes classics like The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and This is Spinal Tap. But as of this year, Reiner is stepping into new territory, tackling a new subject: Christian nationalism. Reiner served as the executive producer on a new documentary, God and Country, which follows the rise of Christian nationalism. Reiner sat down with NPR Here and Now host Robin Young to talk about why it’s important for America to understand Christian nationalism, and why he believes this movement isn’t what Jesus wants for the Church.

While we can all think of some ridiculous things our own youth pastors did over the years, we combed the Internet to find some of the wildest, most cringe stories. You’re welcome/we’re sorry in advance of what you’re about to read:

15.

Dress up as Marty McFly (wig included) for a special "Illustrated Sermon" based on Back to the Future. We even had a Delorean in the parking lot which was actually pretty cool!

— Jeremy Macias (@jermacias) October 18, 2022

Can’t think of a single Bible story that requires a Delorean for a prop.

14.

You just have to cancel the whole trip at that point.

13.

On a mission trip to Mexico we were in a mall when Bon Jovis 'Living on a Prayer' came on. He jumped up on a table in the food court and started singing along at the top of his lungs until one of the other adults yelled at him to quit.

— Tim is top of the table (@abyssalmirror) October 19, 2022

He was a man on a mission!

12.

"Kidnapped" a replica of the Energizer Bunny from his (paying) job, and used a couple of us youth to help create a ransome video as an ongoing prank on his coworker. (We actually 'murdered' the fake bunny!)
It was awesome!

— Jewel Weissmann (@Jeweliebird) October 19, 2022

M-murder?

11.

Death by Tootsie Roll during a youth group game seems like a horrible way to go.

10.

Take kids across the country in a van for two weeks and wouldn’t tell anyone even the parents where they were going

— Ike Gordon (@thecinco_5) October 18, 2022

Youth pastors, let’s maybe not commit federal crimes? Can we make that a new goal?

9.

We are once again asking youth groups to stop making food challenges. 

8.

2/2 He never did get the girls to come back with us. That's about as exciting as rural Vermont gets. Also, he genuinely believed that Paul McCartney was dead & replaced by a lookalike, and that Christian rock was satanic.

— John B. (@hopchic) October 18, 2022

Hate to say it but your youth pastor sounds pretty hardcore.

7.

Well, at least their hearts were in the right place…

6.

Pretended to shoot a girl (he didn’t know) with a BB gun at summer camp, then actually did, then they had to call my dad (the pastor) to tell him they were sending him home.

He also painted the floor of the gym and painted himself into a corner.

— Becky Bergh (@LuckyUglyDucky) October 19, 2022

Seems like this youth pastor isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

5.

One night during s’mores and a campfire, one of the youth pastors told the kids the story of “old man Lochridge.” The next night, he dressed up as a monster (AKA old man Lochridge) and emerged from the lake into our group after a holy God-time outside, and chased us around.

— Andrew Eiler (@Andrew_Eiler) October 19, 2022

He’s committed to the bit, we’ll give him that!

4.

We need to speak to this youth pastor immediately to understand exactly what the vision was here.

3.

I don't advocate using scripture as punishment but they still remember it 10 years later .

— Stuck in the middle (@jmgreenhill) October 18, 2022

Don’t think that how God intended for His Word to be used…

2.

I was in college helping at a 5th-6th grade week of church camp in KY. The youth pastor threw a fake rapture & told us volunteers to play along. At 12a, power turned off, we corralled kids outside, & a cosplay Gabriel read off the names of the campers who were “already saved.”

— Sam Waldron (@SamWaldron22) October 18, 2022

Hope every person involved in this story is in deep, deep therapy.

1.

We did a youth event that was zombie themed! We choreographed the Thriller dance during a dinner. Some parents took their kids and left. We grew up in Church of Christ. Dancing in church was definitely not allowed

— Casey McMillon (@MrMcCasey15) October 19, 2022

Bold move bringing Michael Jackson moves into a Church of Christ.

Love us.

We all feel when someone genuinely loves us versus when we’re a part of someone’s agenda. There is a huge difference. I feel when someone truly cares for me and I also feel when I’m someone’s job. Peter said not to do things out of obligation.

Our obligation or agenda might be to share the Gospel. But if we care to share the Gospel with people, and do not care about the actual people, we’ve got it all wrong! We’re nothing like Jesus. We ought to share the Gospel with people because we love them, not the other way around.

Our motivation to share Jesus should always be love. So love us, cause we do sense when you don’t; when we’re just a number in your statistics of “people I shared the Gospel with.”

Learn from us.

Chances are that you’ve been taught many things differently than us your entire life. But that doesn’t mean we were taught wrong. In most cases it simply means we were taught differently.

I love Americans (I’m married to one), I admire many qualities I see in you like generosity, great work ethics and inventing football—which isn’t a quality, but still.

I have learned much from Americans. However, I stop being teachable the moment I feel treated like I’m a lesser person just because I’m not an American. You wouldn’t believe how many times this happened. Paul said there’s no Jew nor Greek anymore. There’s only Jesus. We might have a different mindset than yours, but we do have the Holy Spirit just like you. So please do teach us, by all means! But don’t forget to learn from us.

See us through OUR eyes.

You should have seen my face the first time I was introduced to customer service in America. “Wait, what? I can return this in a month if I don’t like it anymore? And get a full refund?” Most of the world doesn’t work this way! Customer service in my country is light-years away from being “customer service.”

Cashiers are grumpy, baristas make lukewarm coffee, bank tellers are everything but helpful, hotel staff frown upon any request you make. These things are easy to spot. But what’s not easy to spot is the conditions people in my country work in.

I know people who didn’t get paid for six months but kept working in hopes that they will. Most of the people I know work overtime for free. Suing your boss won’t get you anywhere due to corruption. The statistics say that every third woman in my country is a victim of domestic violence. So the next time the cashier lady doesn’t smile at you but shoves your groceries in a bag making your chips into a mush, think of that.

Suddenly your lukewarm macchiato isn’t the worst thing in the world, is it? Don’t let these things frustrate you, but let them break your heart for us. See us through our eyes. Like Jesus overlooking Jerusalem, let your hearts be moved with compassion.

Give us Jesus.

Don’t get distracted. My country needs Jesus desperately. I feel like sometimes it’s easy to lose focus of our main goal. There’s a time and a place for humanitarian work, after all James says we ought to show our Christianity by taking care of the less fortunate. But our end goal is to tell people about Jesus.

Don’t get distracted with helping us only. Giving us money in a time of need is an honorable thing. Fixing our roof is something we will never be able to repay you for. But giving us Jesus is what’s gonna change our life. So use all those things to tell us about Jesus. Otherwise, we’ll just think you’re a really good person raised by amazing parents, and move on with our life. We need Jesus, even if we don’t recognize it.

Be all in.

Facebook is great! It helps us keep in touch with our family and friends. It also puts our life on a very visible, vulnerable, public place. And if your Facebook is packed with statuses like ”I miss my family” or ”I miss Starbucks” or ”I wish I was there,” then I’ll be the first one to feel sorry for you because you’re telling everyone you’re suffering here.

It’s not wrong to miss your family. It’s not wrong to miss the amenities of your homeland. But if it’s all you write or talk about, or if furlough is the only thing in life that excites you, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude you’re miserable.

Are you all in? Did you count the cost? Seeing a homesick missionary is the pits for me. It tells everyone that you don’t like it here, and that hurts us because even though this country isn’t your home, it is ours. We feel like we’re not good enough for you, that our country isn’t good enough.

Be a Roman to Romans, be a Jew to Jews. Be all in!

This isn’t necessarily a new idea — Christians are humans, which means many public mistakes have been made for thousands of years — but with the age of social media and rapidly spreading news, the public scandals of Christian leaders have the ability to make the front page news. This is tough news for the Church, as 58 percent of nonreligious Americans say that “misconduct by Christian leaders” is the reason why Christianity’s influence is declining in the country.

But it’s not just powerful Christian leaders giving faith a bad name. In many ways, any Christian can slip into a bad habit of twisting Christianity for our personal benefit. Fortunately, there’s still time to this all around. The first step is identifying and owning up to the times we are misusing Christianity in order to get back to the truth of the Gospel.

Here are a few ways people misuse Christianity:

1. As a Form of Escapism

Some see Christianity as a way to escape from reality, to hide from their problems, ignore conflict and flee from the harsh realities of the world around them. But Christianity was never meant to be a carefree way to avoid stress, pain and suffering. Instead, it’s about embracing truth—no matter how ugly it may be.

Christianity isn’t a make-believe fantasy land full of perpetual happiness, tranquility and joy. Sure, those things do exist, but in the end, Christians are called to fight injustice, poverty, inequality and to help the weak and poor—this demands embracing reality instead of pretending everything is OK.

2. To Get Money

Christianity is filled with opportunities to tithe, donate, fundraise, support missionaries and give to various causes and ministries. Unfortunately, instead of feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless and helping those less fortunate, many take advantage of these platforms in order to increase their own personal wealth—selfishly getting rich off of the generosity of others.

3. To Gain Popularity

Contrary to promoting the Gospel, some use Christianity to promote themselves. It’s easy to use the venues of teaching, preaching and leading to create a culture of celebrity instead of one of humble servanthood.

In a society obsessed with fame, celebrity and viral sensations, Christians sometimes idolize these same distractions—often at the expense of glorifying God.

4. To Avoid Risk and Sacrifice

It’s easy for Christians to be constantly active—but what are we actually doing?

A litany of services, classes, sermons, retreats, bible studies, prayer groups and conferences provide a comfortable way to feel productive and meaningful—even if we’re not. Many use Christianity to rationalize that they’re making a difference in the world when in reality they’re just safely—and comfortably—immersing themselves within their own religious activities without taking any real risks or making any real sacrifices.

Christianity is wonderful, but it’s also demanding, counter-cultural, dangerous and scary. It requires real sacrifice and risk. It’s not for the faint of heart.

5. To Control Others

Some use Christianity as a tool for manipulation, using fear, shame and guilt to control and influence others. Whether it’s to promote a political agenda, rally around a particular cause, support a certain belief or to simply gain power—it’s a tempting trap. But Christianity is about freedom, redemption, grace and empowerment instead of domineering fear.

Instead of domineering over others and seeking worldly power, Jesus humbly and selflessly served, resulting in His own death—if only we could do the same.

6. As a Promotional Tool

Rather than seeing Jesus as a God, many view Him as a promotional gimmick—a sales opportunity. Whether it’s to endorse a political campaign, a particular law change, an organization, institution or form of entertainment, many exploit Christianity as a lucrative way to gain support for their own causes.

Instead of a spiritual journey, Christianity is regarded as a lucrative business opportunity. When this happens, our faith devolves into a business, where believers are seeing as customers, and Jesus is marketed as a product instead of worshipped as divine.

7. To Rationalize Bad Behavior

Christianity has often been used as an excuse to do many horrific things. It’s used to rationalize religious violence, abuse, corruption, ignorance, bigotry, racism, injustice, inequality, sexism, hypocrisy and a litany of other evils—all under the guise of “God told me to do this” or “The Bible says this.”

8. To Explain the Unexplainable, or to Reject “Secular” Truth

Christianity isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about a relationship with Jesus. But Christianity can be turned into a list of right and wrongs and “facts,” and it can mistakenly become a zealous attempt to answer all of the world’s questions—even when it can’t.

When we limit our knowledge strictly to the Bible and refuse to listen to—or dialogue with—others, we’re rejecting the truth of science, logic, experience and the wonderful wisdom of others. All truth is God’s truth, and Christians shouldn’t be afraid to engage with thoughts, ideas and resources beyond just the Bible.

9. To Judge Others

Jesus repeatedly warned against judging others—and yet Christians continue to be known for their accusatory behavior instead of their grace and forgiveness.

We shouldn’t turn Christianity into a religion of hatred, where the worth of others is categorized based on their sins and failures. Additionally, Christians shouldn’t consider themselves morally superior, self-righteous and worth more than others—this is sinful.

Christianity is about loving God and loving others—above all else, try to simply follow Jesus’s example.

10. To Change Cultures

Christianity isn’t meant to erase or change a cultural identity. Christianity is amazingly complex and diverse, and it was never intended to be a uniform religion of ethnocentric beliefs.

Many mistakenly perceive that a “correct” Christianity will exactly mirror all their own traditions, beliefs and lifestyles. Thus, instead of introducing people to Jesus, they attempt to change and conform people to their own cultural preferences. When people inevitably don’t conform, they’re often unfairly accused of being sinners—condemned to hell.

To be a Christian is to be transparent and truthful and vulnerable and brutally honest—it’s not pretending to be someone you aren’t.

Overall, there are many ways we can mistreat Christianity and commit horrible acts in the name of God. It’s easy to manipulate our faith in order to satisfy our own agendas.

But we also need to remember that throughout our faith journey we’ll make mistakes and our experiences will be filled with both highs and lows. Through it all, we need to rely on the grace and forgiveness of God—and hopefully, of each other.