Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:53:44 -0400

Watched: Lanterns S1E8, Dirt and Stars 🍿

This show was absolutely fantastic from start to finish. I hope we get many more like it.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:23:19 -0400

I miss the days where we were on blogger/blogspot and we were interacting with each other’s blog posts in the comments and had blogrolls and even did those blog arounds where everyone blogged about an idea and built off one another’s blog posts.

Those were good days.

Tilted Halos

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:13:34 -0400

LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Tilted Halos

What happens when we stop keeping our halos on too tight

Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 3 and 4

I still crack up at where Brennan Manning says the phrase “ragamuffin gospel” came from.

He overheard some valley girls talking, and one of them said something like, “Like, Jesus is totally intense — dying for ragamuffins and all.”

I can hear it in my head. Maybe I have watched Legally Blonde too many times, but I can hear it.

And yet, for all the comedy in that, Manning is getting at something deadly serious. We are rooted — absolutely rooted — in the necessity of grace.

Jesus hung out with rabble

Manning opens chapter 3, “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” with a list that ought to stop us in our tracks:

Jesus spent a disproportionate amount of time with people described in the Gospels as the poor, the blind, the lame, the lepers, the hungry, sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, the persecuted, the downtrodden, the captives, those possessed by unclean spirits, all who labor and are heavy burdened, the rabble who know nothing of the law, the crowds, the little ones, the least, the last, the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

In short, Jesus hung out with rabble.

With ragamuffins.

Someone in our room heard that list and said what I think most of us were thinking: sounds like all of us.

That is exactly right. He hung out with all of us.

But then Manning writes the sentence I very often skip over, and I think it might be the most important sentence in the chapter:

Obviously, his love for failures and nobodies was not an exclusive love.

That would merely substitute one class prejudice for another.

Here is what can happen when we get enraptured by this vision of the ragamuffin gospel: we can become Pharisees about being ragamuffins. We can look at the poor, the blind, the lame, the sinners, the lost — see ourselves in them, which is good — and then turn around and despise everybody outside that group.

Yes, Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes. He also ate, again and again, with Pharisees. He was at their tables constantly.

The love Manning is describing is not a love that lets us create a brand-new category — Jesus loves us ragamuffins, and by definition he despises those other people who are not ragamuffins.

That is not the deal.

This is an inclusive love. And that is beyond important.

Poor in spirit can have a pretty good life

Part of what Manning is trying to get us to see is that you can be poor in spirit even if you grew up with every privilege you could possibly have.

The one who is poor in spirit is the one who recognizes that everything she has, everything he has, comes from the hand of God.

I think about my kids. They grew up — and yes, I am tooting my own horn a little bit here — with a mom and dad who loved them well, who tried to demonstrate the love of God, who leaned into grace and mercy. There would be a danger for them not to be poor in spirit.

But I think they are. I think they know that all of that love was by grace. They did not deserve it. They were, by God’s sovereign goodness, just born into our family. And so they carry this great sense of gratitude with them.

That, to me, is poor in spirit. Not a performance of brokenness. A recognition: all I have comes from the hand of God.

Only now

Then Manning gives us what I think is the key line of the chapter.

He is talking about little children — and about little John Dyer, the boy who showed up at Brennan and Roslyn’s house with one thing on his mind: Where are the cookies? No past. No résumé. Just present-tense need and present-tense trust.

Manning writes:

When Jesus tells us to become like little children, he is inviting us to forget what lies behind. … Whatever we have done in the past, be it good or evil, great or small, is irrelevant to our stance before God today. It is only now that we are in the presence of God.

How does that strike you?

In our room, somebody named both sides of it honestly. First: relief. He’s not going to hold me accountable for the things I did that I wish I hadn’t done. And then, right behind it: But I did a lot of things right. I hope he recognizes that.

That is us, isn’t it?

We want grace for our failures. We want credit for our successes.

And so the conversation went where it always goes — to works. To the scorecard. Are we going to be judged by what we have done?

I have trouble with the scorecard version of God. I think most of us do.

Yes, James says, “I’ll show you my faith by my works, for faith without works is dead.” Yes, Paul says God has prepared good works beforehand for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Works are real. They are the signs of life. If you walk by a plant in your garden and it never blooms, never greens, stays gray and dry season after season, you are probably going to conclude it is dead. It might be out of season for a while. But if it never blooms?

Our lives — how we live, not just what we say — show whether something is alive in us.

And yes, Paul says some will be saved “as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15). That sounds ominous, and it should. Corinth was a mess — I called it NashVegas in our sermon series, Nashville and Las Vegas mashed together — and their lives were not reflecting the grace they had received.

But here is the tension we have to hold: God’s grace is so overwhelming, so beyond our comprehension, that we will never wrap our minds around it. And because it is that amazing, we respond by doing good. The doing is the response. It is never the payment.

The thief got there on somebody else’s word

Think about the thief on the cross. He had no time. No church attendance. No Bible study. No prayer life to speak of. No fruit of evangelism.

Scottish preacher Alistair Begg tells it like this: imagine that man standing at the pearly gates, and St. Peter starts asking questions.

Tell me about your theology. How often did you go to church? What about your Bible study? Your prayer life?

To every question, the man has the same answer: I didn’t. I never.

Finally Peter says, “Well then, sir, why do you think you should come into paradise?”

And the man says, “The man on the cross in the middle told me I could.”

Well, why didn’t you say that from the beginning? That’s all that matters.

He demonstrated his faith in that moment — he turned to Jesus — and yet it was purely, scandalously by grace.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8–9)

That is grace. That is the grace.

So what do we do with people who say they believe in Jesus but whose lives don’t seem to show it? Or people who claim faith and live beautifully? Jesus told a parable about wheat and weeds growing together, and the punch line is not flattering to our instincts: it is not up to us to sort them out. Drive past a wheat field and you cannot tell wheat from weeds until harvest. It is not our job to determine who is being honest and who is false. That is between them and God — and somehow we know God is perfectly just, perfectly loving, and gracious beyond our math.

That is the hard part. And it is also the freeing part.

What “works” actually looks like

Someone in the room asked whether we put too much focus on our definition of works — as if works mostly means physically doing things. Helping somebody dig up their yard. Mowing a lawn.

Isn’t it also how we live our lives in relationship to other people? Do I show you the same grace God shows me? Do I show you kindness, respect, courtesy, decency?

Yes. It is both.

We talked about a man one of us grew up knowing — ran a booming party store, later became president of the town’s only bank. Quietly, he was the person families in trouble could go to. As a banker, he helped people get into homes who had no other way to afford them. In retirement, he was the guy out visiting people with cancer, people who were dying in their homes. If you were making a list of acts, you could not think of anyone who had done more.

And we talked about a woman we knew in a nursing home who had no knees, who went from bed to wheelchair and back again. She could not get out and do much of anything. But whenever we visited her, she blessed us. She prayed. That was her work, and it was not small.

Works is not a category of religious busyness. Works is a life lived out of grace, in whatever body, in whatever season, you have been given.

The issue is trust

Here is where Manning is so helpful. When we talk about grace versus works, we almost always think of doing as the problem, as if grace and doing are opposites.

That way of thinking has been colored for most of us by the Protestant Reformation — faith versus works, grace versus works — and it is not wrong, exactly. But it can mislead us if we stop there.

Because the real issue underneath the debate is not doing. It is trust.

What am I trusting in to be forgiven? What am I trusting in to be brought into the presence of God? My good deeds? Or Christ’s righteousness?

If we trust ourselves, we are in trouble. We will never do enough. It is not a moral scale where we just need one more good deed to tip the balance against the bad. The problem is that one bad — one falling short against an infinite and eternal God — is a hole we, as finite and mortal creatures, can never dig ourselves out of.

And that is exactly where grace becomes even more radical. Even more scandalous. Even more beyond what we can imagine.

Manning puts it this way: there could be no bargaining with God in some petty poker-table atmosphere. Our puny works do not entitle us to barter with God. Everything depends on his good pleasure.

I love that. No poker table. No chips. No, Well, God, I did this, so you owe me that.

Grace comes. Then the doing comes — led, as best I can tell, by the Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth — as a response.

The scandal of the table

If chapter 3 is about who the gospel is for, the table is where you see it.

Manning writes that nowhere in the New Testament is the privileged position of nobodies and marginal people disclosed more dramatically than in Jesus’ ministry of meal sharing. In our time, it is scarcely possible to appreciate the scandal Jesus caused by his table fellowship with sinners.

He paints it with a picture from 1925: if a wealthy plantation owner in Atlanta had invited four Black cotton pickers to his mansion for Sunday dinner — cocktails beforehand, brandy and conversation afterward — the Georgia aristocracy would have been outraged, Alabama infuriated, and the Ku Klux Klan apoplectic. Sixty or seventy years ago in the Deep South, the caste system was inviolable. To break it was to lose your reputation.

In first-century Palestinian Judaism, the class system was enforced just as rigorously. It was forbidden to mingle with sinners outside the law. Table fellowship with beggars, with tax collectors — traitors collecting taxes for Rome from their own people and taking a kickback — and with prostitutes was a religious, social, and cultural taboo.

And Jesus did it. On purpose. Repeatedly.

Grace frees us to go be present with the people on the fringe.

You have to wonder what we would do if Jesus showed up today. If the Christ came now, arrived on the scene as an adult ready to teach, and started having dinner with women who have had abortions and were proud of it. With prostitutes — still looked down on today. Maybe with LGBTQ folks. Maybe with Democrats. Maybe with Republicans. Maybe — and this would be a stretch — even with a Buckeye fan.

How would good, solid Christians respond?

We would lose our minds. We would be apoplectic.

There is no way that could be the Christ, because he would never share a table with — fill in the blank.

And yet he did.

I get asked sometimes whether the Bible says we should not hang out with certain people. It does not. What is common is Christian authors telling us to be careful who we hang out with, because who you hang out with is who you become.

Maybe. But Jesus hung out with sinners, and how did that turn out for him? He got crucified.

Maybe some of those writers just want to keep us from being crucified.

God created no junk. That was something one of us said in the room, and it has stayed with me.

Manning ends the chapter by saying the beauty of the ragamuffin gospel lies in the insight it offers into Jesus — the essential tenderness of his heart, his way of looking at the world, his mode of relating to you and me.

“If you really want to understand a man, don’t just listen to what he says, but watch what he does.”

Watch Jesus at the table. That tells you the man.

Your halo is on too tight

Chapter 4, “Tilted Halos,” opens with a joke that is so perfect I wish I had written it.

A man walks into a doctor’s office. “Doctor, I have this awful headache that never leaves me. Could you give me something for it?”

“I will,” says the doctor, “but let me check a few things first. Do you drink a lot of liquor?”

“No, don’t touch the stuff.”

“How about smoking?”

“Disgusting. Never in my life.”

The doctor is a bit embarrassed to ask the next one. “You know the way some men are… any running around at night?”

“Of course not. Who do you take me for? I’m in bed by ten o’clock at the latest.”

“Tell me,” says the doctor, “this pain in your head — is it a sharp, shooting kind of pain?”

“Yes! That’s it. A sharp, shooting pain.”

“Simple, my dear fellow. Your trouble is you have your halo on too tight. All we need to do is loosen it a bit.”

The trouble with our ideals, Manning says, is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.

The tilted halo is what grace does to a person. It loosens the thing.

Manning gives us three marks of the disciple who lives by grace rather than law:

A decisive conversion from mistrust to trust.
Genuine gratitude.
Absolute, rigorous honesty.

That is the whole chapter, and, if I am honest, most of the Christian life.

Because when we look at the places where the fences and walls get built — where the message is mostly you can’t be with those people — what do we so often see? Mistrust. The opposite of gratitude, which might be privilege or disdain or thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought. And, if we are telling the truth, a fair amount of dishonesty.

One of my favorite jokes: if you ever go fishing with a Baptist, make sure there are two of them. Otherwise the one will drink all your beer.

It is funny because it is honest about dishonesty. In the holier-than-thou crowd, there is an abject dishonesty — as though they are perfect.

They are not. None of us are.

Once you grasp the necessity and centrality of grace, you can be honest. You can admit that you break just about every commandment before your first cup of coffee. You do not have to hold on to pretenses anymore.

There is great freedom in honesty.

Afraid of being found out

When we are not living in grace — when we are living by the law, trying to put on some sort of fake holiness — we go through life deathly afraid someone will find us out.

That we don’t really have it all together. That we aren’t all that holy. That we aren’t all that righteous. (Come to game night at my house sometime. You will see all the unrighteousness you need.)

I did not go to a seminary where people lived on campus, but one of my mentors did, and he said on Sunday mornings in married housing — early spring and early fall, windows open — you could hear all the fights. And then you would see those same people at church, because everybody pretty much went to the same church, and they were the perfect couple.

Some people say the most unholy hour of the week is the hour before church, getting there — yelling at the kids, yelling at each other — and then we show up and everyone is a happy, smiling family.

We all giggle uncomfortably because we all know it is true.

None of us want to get found out.

Grace is the end of that fear. Not because we become impressive, but because we no longer have to pretend.

And that honesty runs deeper than confession. It is about telling the truth when life is terrible.

Doug, in our room, talked about getting his heart diagnosis and wanting to be an example — upbeat, positive, a good witness. And then he would get to church on a Sunday when he was not feeling well, and Janet would come up and ask, “How you doing?” and it was so hard not to be truthful. It is really hard to say “I’m doing great” when somebody who cares about you actually wants to know.

Here is the beautiful thing about grace: you don’t have to lie.

My friend John — one-legged John, the best — never lied about his cancer. If he was having a terrible day, he would say it. “This is terrible. I’ve got phantom pain. I hurt. I’m on this chemo, it’s making me puke and poop at the same time, my hair’s falling out, I look like Uncle Fester.”

And then he would always say, “And yet… I have one more day. One more day to be with Kristen. One more day to demonstrate God’s love to people. And because I’m laid out in this bed and I cannot do anything — I’m just a smeared piece of nothing — I’ve laid here with my index cards and I’ve prayed. I prayed for all of them. I prayed for you.”

My first conversation with him after they took his leg, he was about as low as I ever remember him being. He said, “Yeah, this is the worst. But on the upside, they didn’t take the wrong leg.”

That was all he had in that moment. And it was enough.

You never have to be untruthful. You get to say, “This is terrible, and yet…” And the and yet is where you begin to see grace, even in the darkest moments, because John held on to his joy with a dogged determination to keep looking for grace there.

Gratitude is the only possible response

The second mark — gratitude — grows right out of that.

One of us said she has been thankful to God lately just for letting her get old. For looking back over a life, thanking him for letting her live long enough to realize some things, to see what she did back then and what he has allowed her to learn, and to become a different person.

Someone else put it simply: if you don’t have gratitude, you just take it for granted. You don’t appreciate God. You start to think all of this is your due.

Put a sign over the kitchen sink that says Thank you, as one family in our room has, and you start to see it.

When we really come to grips with the fact that we cannot earn it — that God has to, by his grace, give us this forgiveness — gratitude becomes the only possible response.

We talked last week about the forgiven debtor who went straight out and throttled the man who owed him a little. He had no gratitude, because somehow he believed he deserved the forgiveness he’d been given. So he turned right back to judgmentalism. That is what a graceless heart does.

And gratitude is hard. Someone said it plainly: it is hard to show gratitude and be gracious when you’re having a tough day. It is. It’s a test. That’s where it gets brutal.

One person in our room, on a tough day, goes outside, looks up at the sky, and thanks God for the sky that day. Blue sky. Clouds. Trees. Squirrels. Something, anything, to be thankful for.

Our week-one practice fits here: sit in silence for five minutes. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t confess anything. Just sit and feel his presence. That was hard for more than one of us, because we immediately want to start thanking him for this and this and this, and then we start asking for things. It is hard simply to be quiet and let his Spirit be present.

But gratitude is not a mood we wait for. It is a way of seeing. Even in the depths of despair — a terrible cold, a death, a diagnosis — the question becomes: Can I see Jesus when I’m in that?

If I can, everything changes.

From mistrust to trust

Which brings us back to the first mark, because mistrust is where legalism starts.

Under a legalistic picture of God, there is a level you have to reach — do this, and this, and this — and if you don’t, you fall short. We learn to expect shortfall from ourselves, and then we expect it from other people too. We don’t know what God is going to do. We don’t know what his judgment will be. Just because I think I’ve met the standard doesn’t mean he believes I have.

Someone remembered a Christian teacher in a Flint high school who threw open the door of the smoke-filled teachers’ lounge and announced, “You’re all going to hell.”

Well. That wasn’t good.

Kind of like when we do it on Facebook. Super, super helpful.

That is mistrust doing evangelism.

Trust is different. Trust says God is in power, God is good, and I do not have to manage outcomes I was never given to manage. Trust turns a person outward — to the table, to the fringe, to the neighbor — instead of turning us inward to protect an image.

Nothing can separate you

Manning closes the chapter with words I want to sit with for a while:

To be alive is to be broken. To be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ.

The saved sinner with the tilted halo has been converted from mistrust to trust, has arrived at an inner poverty of spirit, and lives as best he or she can in rigorous honesty with self, others, and God.

And then he asks the question the gospel of grace puts to every one of us: Who shall separate you from the love of Christ? What are you afraid of?

Are you afraid your weakness could separate you from the love of Christ? It can’t.

Your inadequacies? They can’t.

Your inner poverty? It can’t.

A difficult marriage, loneliness, anxiety over your children’s future? They can’t.

Negative self-image? It can’t.

Economic hardship, racial hatred, street crime? They can’t.

Rejection by loved ones, or the suffering of loved ones? They can’t.

Persecution by authorities, going to jail? They can’t.

Nuclear war? It can’t.

Mistakes, fears, uncertainties? They can’t.

And someone in our room, bless him, added one more to the list: being a Detroit Lions fan.

It can’t.

The gospel of grace calls out: Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So loosen the halo a bit.

Live tilted — trusting instead of mistrusting, grateful instead of grasping, honest instead of hiding — and go sit at whatever table Jesus is sitting at.

You will fit right in. It’s full of ragamuffins.

Believing is Seeing

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:06:01 -0400

How we miss the presence of Christ in our grief — and how He meets us there anyway

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Believing is Seeing

Happy Easter.

Yes, I know it’s October. But here we are, in John chapter 20, on Easter morning — which is as good a reminder as any that you don’t need the church calendar to tell you to celebrate the risen Christ. Really, we should probably reorient ourselves to think of every Sunday as Easter Sunday. As Resurrection Sunday.

John 20 is, in many ways, the pinnacle of John’s Gospel. It’s where he declares to us what happened that first Easter morning.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:1–18)

In the dark

Notice the detail John gives us right at the start: while it was still dark.

In John’s Gospel — really, in all of John’s writings — light and darkness matter. Darkness is the time of chaos and heartbreak and sadness and fear. And that is when Mary Magdalene shows up to the tomb.

Jesus had died. Everybody knew he was dead. There was no question about this. This would-be Messiah was in a hole, in a cave, behind a stone, and he was dead.

Can you imagine what that must have felt like for them? This man whom they had declared to be the Lord, the Son of God, the Messiah — they had a very clear picture of who Jesus was, and now he had died.

So Mary shows up in the dark, before the sun rises, expecting a stone. Probably expecting to simply mourn.

But the stone was moved. And she looks in, and there’s no body. And she takes off running.

John and Peter run to the tomb — and can we just pause there? John, “the disciple Jesus loved,” makes sure we know he outran Peter. Not once. Three times. He reached the tomb first. He was faster.

Just tell me that’s not the most guy thing ever. I find it hilarious that John made sure nobody would wonder: he won the race. Guys have been guys from history to this very day.

They look in. They go away bewildered. And Mary is left standing outside the tomb, weeping.

The angels who didn’t get to say their line

We can read past this part so quickly, and miss how deep Mary’s grief really is. And we catch it in a very small detail — a detail that isn’t even there. And that’s what makes it so important.

When an angel shows up in Scripture, what are the first words, just about every time?

Do not be afraid.

What do these angels say?

“Woman, why are you crying?”

They’re on their back foot. You have to think these angels were sitting there ready to deliver their line — Do not be afraid, we know we’re awesome — and Mary isn’t wowed by them at all. She is in such grief, such heartbreak, such a state of unmet expectation, that the presence of not one angel, but two angels, does not awe her.

Mary is crushed. She is gut-wrenched. She is so broken that two of the most awesome beings in the universe, sitting right in front of her, leave her not dumbstruck, not awestruck — just weeping.

And their hearts break for her. They have to meet her in her grief.

“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

She hears the voice behind her — the gardener, she thinks — asking her the same question. And again she is so overwhelmed that she doesn’t even recognize who is standing in front of her.

“They took him. Don’t you get it? They took our Lord away. Tell me where he is. I’ll go get him. You don’t have to do it. I’ll get him.”

She cannot see what is right in front of her.

Until she hears her name.

“Mary.”

And all of a sudden, it all becomes clear. There is Jesus. There is her teacher. There is her Lord. He is not dead. Not only is he not dead — he’s alive. He’s standing right here, in her presence.

It goes from grief to unmitigated joy in a single word.

But don’t miss this: in her grief, in the midst of her unmet expectations, she could not see him. She could not see him.

Three ways of seeing

There’s something happening under the surface here that we get in the Greek and miss in the English, because John gives us a whole trajectory of sight.

When Mary first sees the stone removed, John uses the word blepei — a surface-level seeing. Just noticing. I see that it’s sunny outside. I see my shoes are dirty. She sees the empty tomb, and she runs to tell the disciples.

John gets to the tomb first and he, too, blepei. He bends over, looks in, notices the strips of linen. It’s real. It’s there. But it’s still surface-level.

Then Peter runs straight in — Peter being Peter — and John uses a different word: theorei. This is a deeper, more thoughtful seeing. Almost scientific. Peter is right down by the stone slab, looking at the clothes, really taking it in, evaluating it. Cognitive. Careful.

And then John himself goes inside, and we get a third word: eiden. He saw and believed. Eiden carries the idea of perception — seeing and knowing. It’s that moment of, Oh. Oh, there’s something happening here. He has risen.

From noticing, to evaluating, to perceiving.

But notice how that section ends: “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” They were perceiving that something was going on, and they still didn’t really get it. It was a process. Belief gave them sight, one step at a time.

The question for us

Which brings us to the question we have to ask ourselves:

How do we miss the presence of Christ in the midst of our own griefs and unmet expectations?

Because this world is hard. Our lives are not always easy. We think, I’m doing all the right things. I’m following Jesus. I go to church. I read my Bible. I pray. And yet pain happens. People get sick. People die. We walk through difficulty, and all of a sudden we are faced with unmet expectations about what God will or won’t do.

Mixed with grief, it becomes very, very easy to miss the presence of Christ.

We are so much like Mary. In the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, Jesus can be standing right in front of us — and we will not see him. We can notice (blepei). We can evaluate (theorei). We might even begin to perceive (eiden). And still not fully get it.

So the second question follows the first: Will we hear our name when he speaks it?

When Jesus said “Mary,” she knew. Because as Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “My sheep know my voice. When I speak to them, they will know my voice, and they will follow me.”

In the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, we need to be listening for his voice. Will we hear it? Will we pay attention? Will we be listening for our names?

Behind locked doors

The story continues that same evening — Easter night. It’s getting dark again, and the disciples are together with the doors locked, for fear of the Jewish leaders. And Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

He showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Peace be with you. Have shalom. Have fullness of life. Be at peace.

Do you see it? He shows up in the midst of their fear and their unmet expectations, shows them who he is, breathes the Spirit on them, and sends them out — just as the Father sent him.

“I will not believe”

But Thomas wasn’t there.

The other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” And you can just picture them running up to him: Bro, you’re not going to believe it. We were behind locked doors, in the room at night, and he just showed up. He showed us his hands and his side. He breathed on us. We got the Spirit. He sent us. It was awesome.

And Thomas, still in that place of grief and unmet expectation, says, basically: You’re right. I’m not.

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

A week later, the disciples are in the house again, Thomas with them. Though the doors are locked, Jesus comes and stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.”

And then he turns to Thomas. He does not say, “You faithless fool.”

He says, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

We do what Thomas did, don’t we? In the midst of our pain and grief, we make declarations.

Because that’s really what Thomas was doing. It’s not so much doubt as it is a declaration: God absolutely cannot be real. If God were real, why would this happen? If Jesus were what everybody says he is, why would that be happening? Or maybe our version is softer: Well, the Jesus I believe in would never…

Pick your thing — the thing you slot in there. We make these declarations all the time, and almost all of them come out of the same place: grief, or unmet expectation.

And Jesus meets Thomas — and meets us — not with heavy-handed tactics. Not with “you fool, don’t go to hell.”

He meets us with a gracious, loving, merciful invitation: Come to me. What do you need? You need to touch my hands? Touch my hands. You need to put your hand in my side? Put your hand in my side. Come. Turn your doubting into belief.

And here’s the beautiful thing: Thomas doesn’t actually need to touch anything. The invitation itself is enough. Through that gracious invitation, he makes the greatest confession in the Gospel:

“My Lord and my God.”

We do not come to faith and trust in Christ because somebody shames us into it. We come because he looks at us with love and grace and mercy and says, I will meet you wherever you are. He meets us in the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, and he reframes our declarations.

The final beatitude

Then Jesus gives us what John has saved for the very end.

John doesn’t give us Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. He doesn’t give us the Beatitudes — all the “blessed are the…” statements — until right here, at the end, as his own addendum:

“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Blessed are you who believe without seeing.

Look around. We are the ones blessed to believe without seeing. We have never seen the risen Christ with our own eyes. We’ve never seen an empty tomb. We’ve never watched him die on a cross or physically perform a miracle in front of us. We’ve seen none of it the way John describes it.

And yet here we are. We believe. And therefore we are blessed, because we have life in the risen Christ.

John tells us why he wrote it all down: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

When we believe, we begin to see the work of Christ all over the place.

I know this because when I said “we haven’t seen signs and wonders,” I saw the look on some of your faces. You were thinking, Um, I’ve seen Jesus do things. I’ve seen the Spirit of God do things. I’ve seen signs and wonders in my life.

And that is because you believe.

Things other people call coincidence, we can name as the hand of God. A number of years ago, in our missional community in Ypsilanti, one of the folks there asked us to pray for her niece, who needed a job. She’d applied for a particular position that really fit who she was — her skills, her training, her passions. One of those jobs where everything lines up. So we prayed for her that night, together.

The following week, that same woman was standing around my kitchen after communion, in our time of sharing stories and prayer requests, and she was glowing. “You are not going to believe this,” she said. “My niece got the job!”

And we all celebrated.

“That’s not the part you’re not going to believe,” she said. “As she and I were talking, it turns out she got the email that she got the job at basically the exact time we were praying for her to get the job.”

Some people would say that’s just a coincidence.

We believe, and so we can see the hand of God at work. That was not a coincidence. That was the sovereign and good God doing his thing.

Believing is seeing

And so, as we walk through a world that brings us much grief, that gives us so many opportunities for unmet expectations, the way forward is this:

Seek to embrace belief. Trust that we have a Savior who is standing there, looking at us, saying, Come to me. I will meet you in your grief. I will meet you in your unmet expectations. Come to me, my child. Come to me, my brother. Come to me, my sister. Come to me.

We believe, and then we are able to see.

Resurrection faith gives us sight.

Believing is indeed seeing.

Heavenly Father, we know we live in the midst of a world that brings great grief, a world that causes so many unmet expectations. We desperately want to be a people who hear our Shepherd’s voice in the midst of it all — who believe that you are indeed our Lord and our God, who can see Christ in the places where we are grieving. Make us a people who believe, so that we can see. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:15:52 -0400

Currently reading: The Ragamuffin Gospel Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out by Brennan Manning 📚

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ.

That’s good news.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:07:12 -0400

"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." ~ Henry Miller, novelist

This really resonates with me. Being intentionally present is rooted in this perspective. As Ted Lasso said, “Be curious.”

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:45:05 -0400

Finished reading: How to Talk about Jesus by Sam Chan 📚

Read through this little book today at the recommendation of a colleague. It’s not earth shattering.

It provides some nice suggestions for folks trying to be a bit more open about their faith.

I still struggle with the transactional tenor of the text.

Grace, Drunk Straight

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:36:38 -0400

LIsten to the unabridged audio here: Grace, Drunk Straight

This week in Beyond Sunday School we dove into the first two chapters of Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel: chapter one, “Something Is Radically Wrong,” and chapter two, “The Magnificent Monotony.” I have to say, I deeply appreciate a preacher who can nail the alliteration. Magnificent monotony. That’s good work.

I opened the session with a question, and I’ll ask it of you too: When you hear the word grace, what do you know is true — and what is still hard to trust?

The room answered fast. It’s free. You don’t have to do anything to gain it. And that, frankly, is the part that’s hardest to accept. Someone else added: grace is for everybody. Which drew an honest nod, because if we’re telling the truth, most of us would prefer it weren’t.

Before we get to Manning, we need Ephesians 2 fresh in our minds. Our state before God was not that we were underperformers. Not that we were struggling and trying our best. We were dead. Spiritually dead. And the hinge of the whole passage — the hinge of the whole Christian life, really — is those two words: but God.

Grace is received through faith. It is not earned, not chased down, not won. A few weeks ago I used the image of drowning: if someone pulls you out of the water, even if you wanted to stay under, your body is going to force you to breathe. That’s what receiving grace looks like. You can say “I don’t want grace” all you want, but when grace is given to you, you’re going to receive it, because that’s what you were made for.

And good works? They matter. Ephesians 2:10 says God prepared work beforehand for us to do. But works are not the price of admission. They are the fruit of grace, the response to having received it.

Which brings us to chapter one, and Manning’s diagnosis of the American church: “The Christian community resembles a Wall Street exchange of works, wherein the elite are honored and the ordinary ignored. Love is stifled, freedom shackled, self-righteousness fastened. The institutional church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded.” Too many Christians, he writes, are living in the house of fear and not in the house of love.

The house of fear. That phrase landed in our room like a dropped hymnal.

Our culture has made grace impossible to understand, Manning says. We resonate with slogans like “there’s no free lunch” and “you get what you deserve.” It shapes us more than we admit. Think about the last time you drove past someone asking for money. What was your first thought? Mine, if I’m honest, runs straight to: I don’t know if they’ll spend it on the right things. And if we struggle that much to extend grace, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine the God of the universe extending grace to us. We’ve taken the slogans into ourselves.

And the church, someone in the room said quietly, has to answer for a lot of that. She’s right. Lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, Manning writes, while “many Christians live as if it is only personal discipline and self-denial that will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than what God is doing.” The fear of God got put into us when we were kids, and grace became something we talked about while living some other way entirely.

I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my ministry someone has told me I need to preach more on the Ten Commandments. We get all the Jesus stuff, they say — we really need the accountability. But the whole point of Jesus coming was to free us from the fear of the commandments, because when we actually read them, we fall short on all of them. Probably before I finish breakfast I break most of them.

Isn’t it fascinating that Christians want the Ten Commandments hung in classrooms, but no Christians are clamoring for the Beatitudes to be hung in classrooms? Nobody’s lobbying to post Ephesians 2:8–9 on the wall. The commandments are Scripture, and they’re important. But the beauty of Christ’s coming is the coming of grace — a radical reorientation in which we finally know we can’t live up to the commandments, so grace frees us up to love. As John says, perfect love drives out fear. When we insist on the tablets instead of the sermon, what we’re communicating is that we’re afraid — afraid that those people, whoever “those people” are for us, might get the idea that grace is for them too.

Which raises the question one of our folks asked out loud: why are we so stingy with grace? What are we afraid of?

Jesus already answered us with two parables. In one, the workers hired at the last hour get the same wage as the ones who labored all day, and everybody who worked the whole day is furious. In the other, a man who owes the king more than he could ever repay begs for mercy and gets his whole slate wiped clean — then goes out and throws a fellow servant in jail over the equivalent of a day’s pay. That’s how too many of us handle grace. We get millions forgiven and go beat up people who owe us pennies.

Someone asked the honest follow-up: but what if you commit the same sin over and over? Does that mean you’re taking advantage of grace? No. It means you’re in process. The debtor who keeps sinning isn’t gaming the system. He’s a glorious mess being loved.

Manning reminds us the book was originally published in 1990 — keep that in mind when he writes that the word grace has become “trite and debased through misuse and overuse.” Ecclesiastical officials are still called “your grace.” Sportswriters praised Michael Jordan’s easy grace. A perfume is named Grace. A bad report card is a disgrace. We’ve lost our sense of awe. (Someone in the room added that we’ve done the same thing to “awesome.” It used to describe the beauty of God; now my pizza is awesome. We’ve even got a song about it.)

Then Manning quotes Robert Farrar Capon, and it’s worth reading slowly: “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered in the dusty basement of late medievalism a whole cellar full of 1500-year-old, 200-proof grace — of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly… The word of the gospel, after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps, suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale.”

No water, no ice, no ginger ale. I think we’re living in a time very much like the one Capon describes. Church after church teaches that we need to add something. In the early 2000s we got books like The Purpose Driven Life and the whole radical-Christianity wave, and the message underneath was: you can’t just be an ordinary Christian. You have to be a Christian with purpose, a Christian who’s radical, a Christian who does X, Y, and Z. No. We get to just be ordinary Christians who have received a radical grace, a radical mercy. And we’re saved for exactly one reason: because God loves us and gave us grace we don’t deserve — by definition.

Instead, too many sermons sound like a to-do list: we need you at this ministry opportunity, we need you on this mission trip, we need X percent of your dollars, and actually we need more of your dollars, and we need you at the Bible study and the small group and the soup kitchen. I once sat in a leadership meeting at a large church where I asked, “How would you define a successful member?” The answers: attends worship every week, in a small group, attends midweek classes, goes to Sunday school, pays their tithes. All of it was external activity. All of it was measurable works. There was nothing about growing in love, joy, peace, patience — nothing that looks like the fruit of the Spirit.

Chapter two opens with creation’s awe — Manning writes that “creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God’s power. We stutter and stammer about God’s holiness. We tremble before God’s majesty. And yet we grow squeamish and skittish before God’s love.” I am flabbergasted, he says, “by the widespread refusal across this land to think big about a loving God.”

Whenever I write about the love of God, I get emails and messages that start with “yeah, but…” My granddad would have said, “Yeah, but doesn’t live here.” We love the God who speaks creation into existence. We love the God so holy you take your sandals off near a bush he’s burning without burning up. But the God who is supremely loving? We immediately start making a list in our minds of all the people that love can’t possibly apply to.

We don’t want to share him. And as someone in the room said, the deeper truth is we don’t want to love them either. We need the whole picture of God — love without justice is just sentimentality — but it’s remarkable how easily we set aside the love. Folks a little to the right tend to distrust the love of God and cling to his justice; folks a little to the left tend to distrust his justice and cling to his love. Both get a little goofy. All of us need to re-embrace the bigness of his love.

We really do like having enemies. During the protests of 2018 and 2019, a lot of signs read “Love Trumps Hate,” and sociologists noted the slogan cuts two ways: love overcomes hate — or we just rally around hating somebody new. There’s a fallen instinct in us to need a bad guy, someone we can point to and say, “Well, at least I’m not like them.” Grace refuses to play that game.

Near the end of the chapter Manning draws the contrast between two gods. The God of the gospel of grace “out of love for us sent the only son he ever had wrapped in our skin. He learned how to walk, stumble and fall, cried for his milk, sweated blood in the night, was lashed with a whip and showered with spit… fixed on a cross and died whispering forgiveness on us.” The God of the legalistic Christian, on the other hand, “is often unpredictable, erratic, incapable of all manner of prejudices… Sunday worship becomes a superstitious insurance policy against his whims.”

That’s the difference between running from punishment and running into relationship. Are you following Jesus because you’re afraid of hell, or because you’re safe? Believing out of fear isn’t sin — you’re just missing out on what’s actually on offer. It’s like the difference between two kinds of kids. Some tell their parents the truth because they don’t want to get in trouble for lying — and the minute they realize their parents won’t find out, they keep them in the dark. Others tell their parents everything because they know they’re loved no matter what. I knew with my mom I could tell her anything. She might look at me with white-hot rage that said “I don’t like you right now,” but I never doubted she loved me. I never had to hide.

A friend in the room who does counseling put a name to it: unconditional positive regard — dealing honestly with a person’s behavior while holding their worth as a human being. That’s how God looks at us. And Manning insists this doesn’t lead to spiritual laziness. “Love is a far better stimulus than threat or pressure.” I know I want to be a better person for Amy, not to earn her love — I can’t earn it, she gives it freely — but as a response to it. That’s exactly how it works with God. Chasing a fear-based God is exhausting. You wear yourself out, and eventually you walk away — from a God who doesn’t actually exist. That capricious, erratic God is an idol, one we’ve mostly made in our own image.

The room got honest about where that fear comes from. One of our folks was raised Catholic and laughed through Manning’s confession stories because they were hers: counting mortal sins and venial sins all day, every day. When her grandmother died, her mother told her and her sister to pray Grammy out of purgatory, and she thought: how do we know she’s there? How do I know when she gets out? How does she get out? She left church countless Sundays thinking, “I am never going to be good enough. No matter what I do, no matter what I say.”

Manning’s line for her — for all of us — is this: “Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are.” God’s going to love you whether you’re sinning right now or not. There’s a myth that once you accept Christ you’ll be sinless from then on. No. It’s okay. He loves you no matter what.

Manning knows, because he lived it. He writes about becoming an alcoholic after his conversion: “It is possible because I got battered and bruised by loneliness and failure and took my eyes off Jesus… because justification by grace through faith means I have been set in relationship with God and not made the equivalent of a patient etherized on a table.” I love this man. We are a glorious mess. He calls himself a saint with a high capacity for beer; we’re Presbyterians, so I’ll say I’m a saint with a high capacity for scotch. And Manning is honest enough to admit that before grace got hold of him, he preached some of the very same stuff he’s now dismantling.

So what does God actually ask of us? Manning says there’s only one thing: “that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything, and for whom God is enough.” That’s the root of peace. The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners — for the weak who know they don’t have it all together and aren’t too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.

I’ll close the way Manning closes, with a little story: a sinner was forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. “They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.” And God said, “What are you complaining about? They won’t let me in either.”

When we chase legalism and set aside grace, we’re not letting God in either.

The King We Need

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:06:12 -0400

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Believing is Seeing and Believing is Life - The King We Need

Have you ever listened to a song or hymn that ends on an unresolved note? Unlike many traditional hymns that finish on a bright, major chord leaving you with a sense of simple happiness, certain songs refuse to resolve so easily. There is something profoundly honest about that. While the sacrifice of Christ is finished—once and for all—our daily walk in response to that salvation is ongoing, calling us into something deeper.

That unresolved tension is precisely what we encounter in John 18 and 19. As we trace the events of Jesus’ final night—from his betrayal in the garden to his trial and eventual execution—we come face-to-face with a stark reality: the King we need is rarely the King we want.

Jesus reigns not by conquering his enemies, but by dying for them. Throughout the entire narrative of his passion, Jesus never relinquishes his ultimate authority; rather, the cross becomes the very site of his enthronement and glory.

1. The King Who Commands His Arrest

The narrative opens in the dark of night in a garden across the Kidron Valley. Overlooking the valley, one can see the massive walls of Jerusalem. In the pitch-black night, Jesus would have looked out across that valley and watched a line of torches and lanterns descending from the city walls.

Judas arrived with a detachment of Roman soldiers and temple guards. The Greek term used for “detachment” (speira) refers to a cohort—potentially up to 600 Roman soldiers.

Picture the scene:

An armed battalion of hundreds of men with weapons, lanterns, and torches.
Eleven terrified, sleep-deprived disciples standing in the shadows.
One unarmed man stepping forward into the light.

Jesus steps out and asks, “Who is it you want?” When they answer, “Jesus of Nazareth,” he replies with two simple words in Greek: Ego Eimi—“I am He”.

At those words, the entire contingent of armed soldiers draws back and falls to the ground.

When Jesus said, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground. — John 18:6

This is not a picture of a victim caught off guard. It is the embodiment of the divine word. The same God who spoke creation into existence in Genesis speaks two words, and an army falls to its knees.

Even in his arrest, Jesus commands the situation. He secures the safety of his disciples, telling the soldiers, “If you are looking for me, then let these men go”. He steps into the gap to protect his followers, ensuring not one is lost.

2. The Trap of Earthly Power

While Jesus stands in supreme divine authority, the surrounding characters demonstrate humanity’s tragic obsession with earthly power.

Peter’s Misguided Weapon

When the soldiers step forward, Peter draws a sword and strikes the high priest’s servant, cutting off his ear. Peter wants a king who fights according to human standards—a king who swings a sword and flexes physical might. But Jesus commands him to put it away: “Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”

The Fear-Driven Denial

Later, standing in the cold courtyard of the high priest, Peter is questioned by a servant girl. Overcome by fear of Rome and the religious authorities, the same disciple who promised loyalty declares, “I am not”.

Where Jesus boldly declares “I AM,” Peter timidly responds “I AM NOT”. Peter wanted a king who would overpower Rome; when faced with a King who allowed himself to be bound, Peter’s courage failed.

3. “We Have No King But Caesar”

When Jesus is brought before Pontius Pilate, a fascinating dialogue occurs regarding authority and truth. Pilate attempts to find a way to release Jesus, realizing the charges against him are baseless. But the crowd and religious leaders insist on his execution.

When Pilate brings Jesus out, beaten and wearing a crown of thorns, he presents him to the crowd: “Here is your king”.

The religious leaders respond with a heartbreaking declaration:

“We have no king but Caesar.” — John 19:15

To understand the weight of this statement, we must look back at 1 Samuel 8, where the Israelites demanded a human king so they could be “like all the other nations”. God told Samuel that in demanding an earthly monarch, the people were not rejecting Samuel—they were rejecting God as their King.

In John 19, the people of God look into the physical face of God incarnate and take the ultimate step: they abandon their heritage entirely and declare allegiance to the pagan ruler of Rome. They preferred the coercive power of Caesar over the self-sacrificial love of God.

Whenever we subject our faith to worldly power, political dominance, or coercive tactics to get ahead, we fall into the exact same trap. We sacrifice integrity on the altar of power, choosing the kingdom of Caesar over the Kingdom of the Cross.

4. Enthroned on Calvary

Jesus’ throne was not a gold seat in a palace; it was a wooden cross on Golgotha.

Even his title was proclaimed to the entire world. Pilate wrote a sign and fastened it to the cross in three languages—Aramaic, Latin, and Greek: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Unknowingly, Pilate made the first global declaration of the true King of the universe.

As Jesus hung on the cross, he remained in absolute control of his mission:

He cared for those he loved: He ensured his mother was taken care of by entrusting her to John.
He fulfilled Scripture: He declared his thirst so that prophecy would be completed.
He completed the work: He uttered the word Tetelestai—“It is finished”.

Finally, John notes a critical detail: Jesus bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Rome did not murder Jesus. The religious leaders did not end his life. Jesus yielded his own spirit. He retained authority over life and death from beginning to end.

Examining Our Hearts

When Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus came to prepare Jesus’ body for burial, they brought seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes. This was an extraordinary amount—an extraordinary gift reserved specifically for the burial of a king. Through eyes of faith, they saw who he truly was.

The question left for us is simple yet deeply challenging: Where in your life are you rejecting the King you need because he isn’t acting like the King you want?

When God doesn’t fix your circumstances on your timeline…
When he calls you to lay down your rights…
When he commands you to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…

Do you dethrone him in your heart?

We must stop demanding a savior who merely serves our personal agendas. Instead, we are called to bow to the King who reigned from a cross, who conquered sin and death through love, and whose finished work offers us grace without end.

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:29:45 -0400

This morning we get to hear from Pastor Joyce Weekly reminding us of the necessity to hold on to our first love through grace, truth, and time. I needed this, this morning.

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:12:25 -0400

I’m so grateful that the Midwest Presbytery is taking on pastoral burnout head on. Sean Nemecek of Anchor Ministries is here providing important insight into how to protect against burnout and identify it.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:08:38 -0400

Currently reading: The Ragamuffin Gospel Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out by Brennan Manning 📚

Our resistance to the furious love of God may be traced to the church, our parents and pastors, and life itself. They have hidden the face of a compassionate God, we protest, and favored a God of holiness, justice, and wrath.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:59:10 -0400

There they are. There we are-the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to the faith.
My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace. - Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:50:36 -0400

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

bell hooks, essayist / critic

This really hits.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:42:18 -0400

As I prepare to preach John 18 & 19 this Sunday, I am blown away by how timely it is for our moment. Particularly, the parallel of the religious leaders in the first century and the religious leaders of today.

“We have no king but Caesar!”

Whew.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:29:08 -0400

Finished reading: The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman 📚

I cannot wait for the next installment to hit my Libby. The story is starting to really get good beyond the humor and action.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:31:21 -0400

Coffee and a laptop at Black Iron Coffee, what kind of trouble can I get up to? Probably more than I should.

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 19:00:36 -0400

I think one of the easiest things to do is critique. It’s a low bar. In what I write, preach, and record I endeavor to state what I am for. When critique is required in that context, I don’t shy away.

I got weary of many who simply complain.

Chart the path forward. Give us a vision of what it looks like for all things to be made new.

2.6 A Faith to Carry Forward

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:04:13 -0400

What does faith look like on the other side of deconstruction? In the season finale of The Pastor Next Door, we explore the characteristics of a mature, resilient faith—one defined not by rigid certainty or heroic arrogance, but by humility, deep love, and a steady hope that holds room for mystery and doubt.

When we let go of the need for easy answers, we discover that what truly survives deconstruction is Christ at the center.

Key Takeaways & Reflections

Humility Over Certainty: A mature faith isn’t afraid of the gray areas. It is quick to listen, slow to speak, and comfortable living with mystery rather than demanding absolute clarity.
Holding the Tension: Resilient faith can hold doubt without panicking and hold hope without living in denial of the world’s real pain and suffering.
Love as the True Measure: Theology is meant to lead us toward deeper love. If our theology grows sharper while our love grows smaller, something has gone wrong.
Hope Is Chosen: A mature hope isn’t naive to failing institutions or wounded theology; it consciously chooses trust because it believes in the reality of resurrection and that love wins.
Participation in Christ: At its core, faith isn’t about intellectual mastery of dogma—it’s about showing up, practicing presence, and participating in the quiet, loving life of God.

“A faith that can carry you forward is not louder, it is steadier. It may still have questions. It will still carry scars. But it stays.”

Season Core Reminders

Deconstruction is not the enemy—it’s an invitation to grow deeper.
When faith stops working, it’s not a failure, but a recognition of what cannot hold weight.
Reconstruct honestly without slipping into a new form of fundamentalism.
Community is still possible on the other side.
Mature faith is humble, loving, and hopeful.

Connect & Walk Together

If you are still sorting things out, take your time—nothing here requires urgency. You don’t have to get back to where you used to be; you are becoming someone deeper.

Transcript

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:19:31 -0400

I know it’s officially fall when I’m in the gym instead of the golf course first thing in the morning. 😂

Unveiled Glory

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:34:50 -0400

For the full unabridged audio listen here: Believing is Seeing and Believing is Life - Unveiled Glory

The world has a pretty fixed idea of what glory looks like. Glory is wealth. Glory is crowns. Glory is military power and self-promotion. We glorify ourselves.

But when Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven in John 17, he pulls back the curtain on the true heart of God. He unveils a glory revealed not in a palace but on a cross — not in self-preservation but in self-giving love, not in worldly dominance but in a united, protected church that reflects the eternal love of the Father and the Son.

Glory, from the perspective of Jesus, is so different from how we think of glory in the world. So let me try to give you a snapshot of what it actually looks like.

There’s a scene at the end of The Return of the King — the third film in The Lord of the Rings — that gets it. Aragorn (who I prefer to call Strider, because Strider is a cooler name than Aragorn) has been crowned the true king. The crowds are gathered, everyone cheering and celebrating. And who comes walking up? The four hobbits — the most diminutive of the peoples of Middle-earth. These brave little hobbits were so fundamental in the defeat of ultimate evil.

They come walking up, and they go to kneel. And Aragorn says, “No, no, no — my friends. You kneel to nobody.” And the king drops to a knee and bows his head to them. And as he does, so does everybody else.

It’s a powerful, powerful moment. The least of these are glorified because of their sacrifice, because of their bravery, because they went all the way to the end. It is upside down — because the world does not typically give glory to hobbits. They’re just some people who like good drink, good ale, and a nice pipe. And yet here, in this moment, they receive glory from the King.

Upside down and beautiful.

That’s the picture John 17 gives us. In this prayer, Jesus unveils God’s glory: revealed through Christ’s exalted sacrifice, protected mission, and missional unity.

The Prayer (John 17)

Set the scene: night has fallen. Judas is gone. Jesus stands on the precipice of arrest, beating, and death — they haven’t yet headed to Gethsemane, but they’re about to. This is one of those moments in John where we get the inside scoop. In the darkest of places, Jesus turns to his Father in prayer:

Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them.

I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.

I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.

Three movements run through this prayer. First, the glory of the sacrificial life (verses 1–5). Then the glory of protected mission (6–19). And finally the glory of missional unity (20–26).

The Glory of the Sacrificial Life

“The hour has come.” We’ve been walking through John together these past weeks, so we know this is a turning point. Every other time Jesus says “the hour,” it’s “my hour has not yet come.” Here in the upper room, the hour has come. His time. His moment. This is why he came — so he could glorify the Father.

How is Jesus glorified? Through the crucifixion. Through self-sacrifice — the giving of himself.

I know that offends modern ears. You’ll hear people say the cross is “cosmic child abuse” — how could you believe in a God who would kill his own Son? But here’s the thing: it’s not God killing his own Son. It’s God giving himself. This is where the Trinity comes to play. John has been teaching us from chapter 1 that Jesus was pre-existent — Jesus is indeed God. So here we have God the Son saying, “It’s time for you to glorify me so that I can glorify you.” And the way he does that is by giving himself for the world, on the cross.

We’re offended by that because glory to us is not dying a sinner’s death. Glory to us is not hanging on a cross naked, spit on and beaten and mocked. That, to us, is the very opposite of glory. And Jesus says: no. Nothing else is going on. This is what true glory looks like — giving yourself for someone else.

And this glory opens something up. Verse 3: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

We Westerners get caught up in the timeline — “eternal life, wow, that’s a long time.” It is. But don’t miss what Jesus is coupling here: eternal life with knowing God. “This is eternal life, that they know you.” This is less about a chronological timeline and more about a depth of knowledge — a quality of relationship. God is eternal, so to truly know God is to experience eternal life.

Which means we’re already tasting and living in eternal life right here, right now. It’s not something we’re waiting for, something we get someday in the future. As we know God through Christ, this is indeed eternal life. We’ve already begun the journey. Will it get better? Yes — there’s coming a day when he’ll wipe away every tear, no more mourning, no more weeping. But the journey has already begun, because Christ has revealed the glory of God through self-sacrifice on the cross.

The Glory of Protected Mission

Now Jesus prays for the guys in the upper room — that crew around him, probably the wider group we’d later see at the beginning of Acts. Think about where they were: night has fallen. They’re in the darkness, minutes or hours from watching Jesus arrested, mocked, beaten, crucified. They’re about to lose their rabbi. The fear must have been palpable — you probably could have cut it with a knife.

So Jesus intentionally prays for them. And the core of his prayer is that the Father would protect them. “I haven’t lost any that you’ve given me” — John always makes sure we remember about Judas — “They’re all here. They’re all safe. Now I have to go. So Father, you need to protect them.”

Could you imagine what it would be like to hear Jesus praying to the Father to watch over you, to protect you, to care for you? These guys are true believers — they really do believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, worthy of worship. And here he is, praying that they would be protected.

Now maybe if you’re like me, you think: Jesus, appreciate the prayers for protection, but wouldn’t it be great if you just took me with you? Scoop me up to the Father’s house where there are many rooms? Why do I need to stay here? Wouldn’t it be easier for the Father to protect me if I were already there?

That would be the easy way. We don’t get the easy way in following Jesus. Because he says, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”

We are a people on mission. From the very beginning, Jesus’s people were never meant to sit around and hide out and just read books. He’s sending them as the Father sent him. His people have a mission and a purpose — not to hide out in holy huddles, not to cower inside church doors, not to create private little groups of just Christians. We are to be a people on mission out in the world.

“My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” We are to be in the world but not of the world. And we need the Father’s protection as we move about, because until the second coming, we’re going out into a world of darkness, pain, suffering, evil. We need the protection of the Father through the Spirit. Jesus prayed for it — so we can trust it. We can go out into a dark world with boldness, without fear, to live sacrificial lives and love well.

And that will cost us. Love without sacrifice is not love. That’s hard for us to understand, but it’s reality.

He also prays we’d be sanctified — set apart — by the truth: “Your word is truth.” Sanctification is a purification process: us being changed, made more like Christ, and he says it’s done by the Word.

That doesn’t feel good. Remember John 15 — the pruning of the branches? The pruned branch produces more fruit: more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. But pruning is cutting. Pruning hurts.

So when we bump into hard stuff out in this dark world, remember two things. One, we’re going to be protected — the Father is caring for us; Jesus prayed for it, so it’s real. Two, we’re going to be sanctified — pruned — and that’s going to hurt. It’s a both/and, an already-but-not-yet tension we live in as we go on mission.

The easiest way to avoid all of it is to simply not live on mission — to live a self-centered life. You might live comfortably that way. Plenty of people do. But we’re called to mission, sent into the world to live sacrificial lives. So if we’re serious about following Jesus, we don’t get to hide out on our couches watching bad TV. We go out putting on display what love looks like.

The Glory of Missional Unity

And we do it through missional unity — Jesus’s final prayer request. Now he’s praying not for the disciples in the room but “for those who will believe in me through their message.” That’s us, gang. Jesus is praying for us here — a remarkable thing.

There are very few places in Scripture where you can know with absolute certainty, “This is directed at me.” Read Paul or Peter or John, and you’re reading secondhand mail — written to someone else at a different time and place. But here, on the night of his betrayal and death, Jesus looks into the future and prays for those who would believe through the disciples’ message. That is us.

And what is his prayer? That we would be one — brought to complete unity. That is his prayer for the church through the ages, because living in unity puts on display, for a watching world, love. “They will know you by your love for one another.” Complete unity is how we display that at the corporate level.

So look around at this here world and ask: how’s the unity thing working out?

Not so well. This should challenge us to our core. It should make us ridiculously uncomfortable — that the global church is most known for its factionalism and disunity. I can’t think of any major denomination in the United States that didn’t have contentious, disunifying debate at its annual meeting this past year — to the point where churches left and denominations split again.

We live in a world so utterly given to a wrong view of glory that we practice disunity. It’s all tied together: when you start chasing the world’s notion of power and glory, your values get shifted. It becomes about you — about being right, being the best. My position is right, yours is wrong. My pet issue becomes essential to the faith, and I’m willing to separate from you because, by God, the church carpeting ought to be blue and you think it should be red — or heaven forbid, you believe in vinyl plank. Gray millennial vinyl plank! And then you go to some churches and they’ve got it hanging on the walls. It’s not even on the floors. It’s crazy. No wonder we split.

We get so caught up chasing power and glory for ourselves that we split churches over flooring. What happens when there’s a global pandemic and you have to decide whether to meet or not meet? Can a church stay together over that? Nope. Not that that would ever happen. Oh wait — it did.

Jesus looked down the ages with a clear understanding of who people are. We struggle with self-centeredness, selfishness, an unwillingness to practice any kind of self-sacrifice. He knew our individualism — our desire to protect ourselves, our comfort — would create disunity. And yet he said the way the world would know we are his followers is by our love for one another. So he prayed: make them one.

Friends, we need to do some soul searching here. Do we really believe that displaying Christ to a watching world is ultimately done through our unity? That’s a tough question. But this is Jesus’s prayer for us — that we’d pursue unity, carried out in mission. We’re a sent people, just like those early disciples were sent. That’s tough.

So here’s my challenge: tomorrow morning, when real life hits, where will your heart hesitate?

Will you doubt God’s glory and sacrificial love — go out into the world thinking, no, that’s not really how glory works?

Will you doubt that God’s hand is keeping you safe when the proverbial poop is flying?

Or will you doubt that the oneness of the church is powerful enough to change the world? That maybe instead of being one more voice of disunity, we try to practice some unity — find the common ground, be a blessed peacemaker standing between two parties trying to bring them together? Do we believe the unity of the church is enough to change the world? Or do we think we need a whole bunch of apologetics, a big billboard, more money, more power, a different politician?

Wherever you hesitate — that’s the very place Jesus is praying for you. We read it. Hesitating on God’s sacrificial love? Jesus is praying for you. Don’t really believe God will keep you safe? His prayer meets you there. Think the unity of the church is overblown? Jesus will meet you there too. Because we have his prayer. We know what he prayed for.

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:44:08 -0400

Apparently, I was dreaming about Sunday worship. Woke up thinking it was Sunday. Turned on the coffee pot and was getting ready to do Sunday stuff and then realized today is Saturday. #PastorLife

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:09:53 -0400

Watched: The Transformers: The Movie 🍿

Seeing this in the theater again at 50 after seeing it when I was 10 was remarkable. The emotions still hit. The soundtrack still hit.

The Prologue with Peter Cullen? 🔥

The Epilogue? Man. That was redemptive for 10 year old me.

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:37:08 -0400

🎙️ New episode: “Community After Deconstruction”

Naming church wounds honestly. Why isolation feels safe after deconstruction — and what it costs. Four questions to ask of any community.

Boundaries aren’t bitterness. Caution isn’t cynicism.

🎧 Community After Deconstruction

2.5 Community After Deconstruction

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:34:38 -0400

For many people, deconstruction isn’t just theological — it’s relational. It involves the church, people, community, and sometimes deep wounds. This week, I talk honestly about church wounds, the pull toward isolation, and how to discern and slowly re-enter healthy community after deconstruction. Restoration, like Peter’s on the shore in John 21, happens in relationship — not apart from it.

In This Episode

Naming church wounds — I want to name the real ones: spiritual manipulation, legalism, political coercion, leadership failure, being silenced, and being shamed for asking questions. Pain does not make you dramatic. Hurt does not make you rebellious.
The temptation of isolation — After deconstruction, isolation feels safe. You’re in control, nobody disappoints you. But while isolation protects us from pain, it also protects us from growth.
What healthy community looks like — No church is perfect, but some are safer than others. A healthy community allows questions, makes room for disagreement, centers Christ (not control), values humility, and practices repentance.
Four questions I ask of any community
1. Are questions welcomed?
2. Is power accountable?
3. Is love visible?
4. Is Jesus central?
How to re-enter, practically — You don’t have to jump all in. Sit in the back. Visit without committing. Find one safe person. Be cautious about small groups. Re-entry is allowed to be gradual. Boundaries are not bitterness. Caution is not cynicism.
Young and old, questioning and settled — Younger Christians naturally question; older Christians are often confused by questioning. Both need to remain humble — and we need each other: the courage of questions and the steadiness of a long obedience.
Staying without pretending — You don’t have to agree with everything to belong. You don’t have to suppress doubt to stay. Stay honest, stay humble, stay anchored in Christ.

Scripture I Referenced

John 21 — Jesus restores Peter on the shore. He doesn’t say “Explain yourself.” He says, “Do you love me?” and invites him back into relationship.
Gospel of John — Our greatest value as the church is to love one another.

Quotable Moments

“Isolation feels safe after deconstruction. In isolation we think that we are in control… but it also protects us from growth.”
“Boundaries are not bitterness. Caution is not cynicism. No is a complete sentence.”
“You don’t have to agree with everything to belong. You don’t have to suppress doubt to stay.”
“Restoration happens in relationship.”

Questions to Sit With

What wounds from community are you still carrying — and have you named them honestly?
If you’ve pulled away, what would it look like to take one small, low-pressure step back toward community?
Do you have one safe person you can ask hard questions of — and be asked hard questions by?

Next Week

We’ll close out Season 2 together: What Mature Faith Looks Like — a faith that can carry you forward without fear.

Until next time — love well, my friends.

Transcript