Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Eyes Forward

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:40:41 -0400

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Eyes Forward

Don’t look back in shame, don’t look sideways in comparison — look forward into eternity as we follow Christ

We have made it. We are here at the end of John chapter twenty-one — our nineteenth week in the Gospel of John. We’re going to put the final touches on this Gospel.

And the nice thing about a last sermon is that we just get to touch on some really simple, easy things brought to the fore here in these last few verses of John. We’re just going to deal with shame, comparison, and eternity. No big deal. Just small little things.

Here’s how I think John puts the capstone on his Gospel: don’t look back in shame, don’t look sideways in comparison. But look forward — eyes forward — into eternity as we follow Christ.

“When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’

“‘Yes, Lord,’ he said, ‘you know that I love you.’

“Jesus said, ‘Feed my lambs.’

“Again Jesus said, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’

“He answered, ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.’

“Jesus said, ‘Take care of my sheep.’

“The third time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’

“Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ He said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’

“Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.’ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’

“Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is going to betray you?’) When Peter saw him, he asked, ‘Lord, what about him?’

“Jesus answered, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.’ Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?’

“This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.

“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:15–25)

Don’t look back in shame

We begin on the beach. They’ve just finished breakfast — bread and fish around a charcoal fire.

That detail is worth pausing on. Charcoal fire. Those are the only two times in the Gospels that phrase is used — and the other time is the night Peter denied Jesus, in the courtyard outside the high priest’s house.

Here’s something I learned preparing this week: our olfactory sense — how’s that for a word you can trot out at parties? — is one of the most powerful triggers for memory. Smells go deep. If I’m out shopping and a woman walks past wearing the same perfume my Mimi wore, it’s like bam — she’s right there with me. The church I grew up in in Pontiac still smells like my Mimi when I walk into that sanctuary.

So when John tells us they’re sitting around a charcoal fire, that smell probably brought it all back for Peter — that night, that denial — just as Jesus looks at him and says, “Do you love me?”

Peter denied Jesus three times. Jesus asks him three times: Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? It is a reinstatement.

Now, some pastors will do a whole thing in the Greek here — agape versus phileo — making big hay out of which word Jesus uses and which word Peter uses. There’s probably not much hay to be made there, to be honest. This is just what John does. He rotates words all the way through his Gospel. It’s like having an English teacher read your essay and say, “You’ve used this word six times. Let me introduce you to the thesaurus.” Good writing. He does the same thing with lambs and sheep. We don’t want to get overly caught up in it.

What we want to pay attention to is how Jesus deals with Peter’s shame.

Because Peter had to have been carrying shame. To look at Jesus and say, “I don’t even know him” — three times. The shame of that had to be soul-crushing. And we carry shame for lesser things: I didn’t read my Bible like I wanted to this week. I watched something with language in it that people would judge me for. We carry shame for all kinds of things, big and small, and our lives get weighed down by it.

And what does Jesus say to this guilt-ridden, shame-ridden man? “Peter, you lousy loser, get out of my presence”? No. He asks one question: Do you love me?

Jesus always starts with love.

The way to deal with the shame we carry is by embracing the love of Jesus — realizing he isn’t looking at us thinking, “Oh my gosh, you miserable sinner.” He’s looking at us and asking one simple question: Do you love me?

And Peter says yes. Three times, matching the three denials.

Then Jesus gives an equally simple and direct command: Feed my sheep. If you love me, care for everybody else. That’s it. That goes right back to the upper room: “They will know us by our love one for another.”

Put aside the shame that weighs you down, the shame that makes you feel unworthy — there is no past shame that leaves you unworthy to serve Jesus. If you love him, then feed his sheep. Care one for another. It is that simple.

That is what grace looks like. Grace is rooted in the love of Christ.

How do you know if you love Jesus? You’re seeking to take care of others, to love other people well. Because when you start trying to love other people, your life gets filled up with better stories. But when we get hyper-fixated on ourselves, that’s when the shame spiral starts — and a shame spiral pulls us away from Jesus.

So: don’t look back in shame. Jesus didn’t ask Peter for an apology or a pledge of self-reliance. He addressed his love and gave him the command. Shame tells you your past disqualifies you. Jesus says, “I love you — come further up and further in with me.”

Don’t look sideways in comparison

As they’re walking — you can almost picture it, Jesus with his arm around Peter, talking intimately — Peter turns around and sees John kind of following along behind them, like a little brother trying to hear what’s going on. And Peter says, “What about him?”

Now, remember what just happened. Jesus had said to Peter, essentially: when you were young you went where you wanted, but when you’re old they’ll lead you where you don’t want to go — indicating, John tells us, the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Tradition says Peter was crucified in Rome. So Peter hears about his own death and immediately looks around: “What about John? What’s his deal going to be?”

Jesus answers — and our English doesn’t catch the intensity of the Greek: “You. You follow me.”

He is looking the comparison trap dead in the face. Don’t look to your left and don’t look to your right. Don’t compare yourself to anybody else. Your calling is going to look different than somebody else’s calling. You follow me.

This is a tough one for me. As a pastor, it is so easy to look around and go, “Man, I feel like I’m more talented than so-and-so, my sermons are better than so-and-so — and they’ve got this huge church.” We have a saying for it: keeping up with the Joneses. The new car, the fancy TV, the upgrade. Everything is always about the upgrade.

I’ve spent a lot of time with people in their twenties because of my kids, and it’s amazing how many of them share the same fear: “I feel like I’m behind.” Somebody’s engaged, somebody’s married with kids, somebody’s got this career — and I’m just over here doing this thing. And we live in a world of curated Instagram feeds and curated Facebook feeds. Everybody’s life is absolutely perfect. Their outfits are just right, their family pictures are ideal, nobody’s crying, their vacation was the best vacation ever — it didn’t even get cloudy. It’s all fake. We all know it’s fake. And still we go, “Dang, I wish I had their life.”

Sure wish I could just sit around and watch Premier League soccer on Sunday mornings instead of going to work. Sure wish I could travel the world instead of sitting here stuck in Flint.

We all fall into the comparison trap — looking left and right.

Here’s the thing: when we’re trapped in the comparison spiral, we start going, “Well, I’m not as good as them” — and we’re right back in the shame spiral. Shame and comparison feed each other. Jesus undercuts both of the two biggest problems with actually following him: don’t look back in shame, don’t look left and right in comparison. Set your eyes on Christ and Christ alone, and follow him into your own particular mission and calling.

Eyes forward into eternity

And then these last couple of verses: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

What John is doing here is lifting our eyes. He takes us from these very present, right-here-right-now things — shame, comparison — and points us to the vastness of Christ. The cosmic Christ. The enthroned Christ. The Word, the Logos, who was before all things and by whom all things were created. We go right back to John chapter 1.

If we tried to write down everything he has done, the creation itself, the cosmos itself, could not hold all the books. There is no end to this story. You’re just at the beginning.

It’s like standing at the Grand Canyon and looking out over the edge going, “Wow.” That’s the picture John wants in your mind as you set your eyes to follow Jesus. You’re following him into infinity and eternity, into this grand story so beyond anything you could ever imagine that all the books it would take to tell it would not fit in the cosmos. It is just further up and further in.

And here’s the beautiful thing: two thousand years after John wrote this, the story is still being written. Each of us has been invited into the story, to follow Jesus wherever he leads us, to do the things he prepared beforehand for us to do — that’s Ephesians 2:10.

If we don’t get sidetracked by looking back in shame or left to right in comparison, we get to experience this great adventure of following an infinite Christ.

Faith my eyes

We began this series nineteen weeks ago talking about believing is seeing — that when we believe, we begin to see spiritual realities. And believing is life — Jesus came that we might have life, and have it to the full.

Caedmon’s Call sings a song called “Faith My Eyes,” and I think that’s the picture for where we want our eyes to be. Because believing changes the way we view the world. When we believe, when we set our eyes on Christ, when we follow him — we stop looking back in shame, we stop looking left to right in comparison, and we just stare down the endless adventure of eternity, and follow him to the very ends of it.

And that calls us right back to believing is seeing — and believing is life.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for John. We thank you for his invitation to move past shame — to no longer look back, to no longer look left and right in comparison, but to simply set our eyes on Christ and follow him into the never-ending adventure of his loving grace. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:29:20 -0400

A beautiful Saturday hike at Matthaei Botanical Gardens today before sitting around and watching college football.

Ragamuffin Gospel - Wonder and Gratitude

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:00:16 -0400

To listen to the whole unabridged class: Wonder and Gratitude

Beyond Sunday School — The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 5 and 6

When was the last time something ordinary stopped you right in your tracks?

Not a polite “oh, that’s kind of cool,” but a real wow. You just had to stand there and take it in.

I asked our room that question, and the answers came fast. Geese flying low overhead, honking away, never gets old. The red trees, aflame with fall, every single time. Light beams breaking through the clouds at sunset on Silver Lake Road — six columns of light against a dark sky. A road lined on both sides with yellow trees, all the way down. One of us made blueberry pancakes yesterday and fed them to the birds and squirrels, and this morning two little birds were sharing a piece instead of fighting over it. “Only Wendy would make pancakes for the birds,” someone said.

That, right there, is the world of chapter 5, “Cormorants and Kittiwakes.”

Wonder is what grace looks like when you’re paying attention

Here is the thought that has been rattling around in my head since I reread this chapter: wonder is a result of a depth of knowledge of grace.

That was a new way of thinking about it for me. We have to keep discovering grace — keep rediscovering it — so that we can move through this world with a sense of wonder and awe. The two are tied together.

Manning tells the story of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who prayed, “I asked for wonder,” and God answered him. He gave it to him. What a prayer. What an answer.

And then comes one of the longest and most beautiful passages in the book. Let me give you the heart of it:

We get so preoccupied with ourselves, the words we speak, the plans and projects we conceive, that we become immune to the glory of creation. We barely notice the cloud passing over the moon, or the dew drops clinging to the rose leaves. The ice on the pond comes and goes, the wild blackberries ripen and wither. The blackbird nests outside our bedroom window. We don’t see her. We avoid the cold and the heat. We refrigerate ourselves in summer and entomb ourselves in plastic in winter. We rake up every leaf as fast as it falls. We are so accustomed to buying pre-packaged meats and fish and fowl in supermarkets, we never think and blink about the bounty of God’s creation. We grow complacent and lead practical lives. We miss the experience of awe, reverence, and wonder. Our world is saturated with grace, and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit, but in matter.

I have been thinking about that phrase — the lurking presence of God — for two days. The lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit, but in matter. In a deer leaping across a meadow. In the flight of an eagle. In fire and water, in a rainbow after a summer storm, in a gentle doe streaking through a forest. In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In a child licking a chocolate ice cream cone. In a woman with windblown hair.

God intended for us to discover his loving presence in the world around us.

And how quickly we blow through it.

Children don’t blow through it

Someone in our room said the thing that unlocked it for the rest of us: children don’t.

Children see a flower or a bug or a butterfly and they want everything to stop. Everybody, stop. Look at this.

When Jesus pulled the little children to himself and said, “Unless you become like one of these, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven,” the theology we usually draw out is trust — and that’s right. But I wonder if there is more. I wonder if he also wants us to move through this world with that kind of wonder and awe.

One of us remembered all the dandelions her students used to bring her. Somebody started it, and pretty soon there were dandelions piled on her desk. They loved her — and grace transforms a pile of dandelions into a bouquet.

Another told us about two little hanging baskets of purple and white petunias, three dollars apiece, repotted and stuck out on the deck. God just made them glorious. Every morning they go out and the petunias greet them like a smile — as if they had spent a hundred dollars apiece.

We talked about that Call the Midwife scene where the older midwife starts declining, and the gardener finds her out replanting weeds — dandelions she had seen as flowers, putting them back in the garden. George Washington Carver’s line came up: a weed is a flower growing where you don’t want it. One of us has a neighbor who mows around certain weeds in his yard — because for a while, they were flowering.

I love that man’s neighbor.

The gospel of grace in the world of grace

Manning writes that we must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace. I want to tweak it: we must rediscover the gospel of grace in the world of grace.

Part of the reason we miss grace — the reason we lose our sense of wonder — is that there is so much of it. We exist in a world held together by God’s providential hand. If his grace were not flowing in and out of everything, holding all things together, this world would fall apart. And so grace becomes… commonplace. We take it for granted. Rediscovering the gospel of grace is seeing again all the little graces all over the place — the sunbeams through the clouds, the dandelion, the red trees we drive past a hundred times a day — and actually taking notice.

One of us read Manning’s line that God is being edged out of his world by science, and it bothered her all the way home. She had been watching a PBS special on the universe — planets, stars, all of it — and every scientist kept saying “science, science, science.” Only one said, “Somebody must have made all of this.” She was ready to throw her slipper through the TV.

I don’t remember which physicist said it, but somebody famous once said that science really ought to lead us to worship. The problem is not science. The problem is that we want an answer and an explanation for everything, and so we lose a sense of mystery. That is where wonder dies.

Think of how Manning opened chapter 2 — the slant of the earth, tilted at twenty-three degrees, producing the seasons. All science. But where do you land at the end of it? That one scientist in the documentary landed at awe. Others land at: okay, solved it — what’s my next math problem? What’s my next equation to crack? Same facts. Completely different landing.

One of us kept coming back to how perfectly everything is set — how a variation of less than a percent and nothing works. And nobody can answer how it got to that exact slant. Not scientifically.

And somebody else sang us a song she’d heard at a youth conference years ago, a line that has stayed with her: “I want to thank you for this day, for the sun that shines this way, for the green against the blue. And I wonder what all the people do who don’t feel grateful, who don’t know how to thank you.”

How sad, she said. How sad not to know how to thank him.

We did the same thing to grace that science did to the world

Here is the hard mirror Manning holds up to the church: we have taken the wonder and awe of grace, and we have made it scientific. We have removed the mystery and turned it into a math problem.

You’re a sinner. You can’t get to heaven apart from God. Therefore you must place your faith in Jesus. QED.

We define grace as “unmerited favor” — and, wow, doesn’t that just capture your heart? (It doesn’t.)

But then you hear a story. Manning tells the one about Fiorello La Guardia, the judge, when a woman who stole bread to feed her children is brought before him. He says, “The law says I have to fine you.” Then he takes out ten dollars and pays it himself — and then he collects fifty cents from every person in the courtroom, “because it is pathetic and sad that we live in a city where a woman has to steal bread to feed her children.” They collect $47.

That is overwhelming grace. That is awe.

But we have taken the story of Jesus and turned it into a series of postulates. Apologetics. We will make a case for Christ. We will present evidence that demands a verdict. We watched the world do the science thing — answer all the questions — and we thought, that’s how they’ll fall in love with Jesus. We’ll just answer all their questions.

It’s not working. Because when we talk about Jesus that way, we leave people feeling the same way we feel when nonbelieving scientists talk about science — no sense of wonder and awe, just mechanics. And we think, don’t they know the One behind it all?

Meanwhile our friends are thinking: if that were true, wouldn’t I see a little more wonder and awe and love and mercy coming from the people telling me about it?

Manning writes, near the end of the chapter, that “troubadours have always been more important and influential than theologians and bishops.” Music reaches people. It affects your emotions in ways cold reason does not. Somebody in the room said of a theologian, “After about thirty seconds my mind goes, oh wow, look at that red tree — but if the first verse gets you, the refrain gets you, you want more.”

I’m Gen X — I quote movies and TV shows. My dad’s a Boomer — he hums. I say a word and he starts singing some lyric from the back of his brain. If I wanted to be a better preacher on Sunday mornings, I’d quote a few more songs instead of just movies. Somebody asked if we could turn Sundays into musicals. I said, please do.

C.S. Lewis understood this. Children need fairy stories, he said, because they live in a world of dragons — and they need to know the dragons can be slain. They learn it in the stories. Those stories grab us, because grace is better sung and storied than it is systematized.

There’s a man named Mike McHarg — the internet knew him as Science Mike — who had been an evangelical Christian, had deconstructed, and was honestly wrestling with whether he believed anything anymore. One day he was sitting on a beach watching huge waves come in off the Pacific, and he was left in a state of absolute wonder and awe — and in that moment, he knew God was real. He wrote a book about it called Finding God in the Waves.

He didn’t reason his way back. Wonder brought him back.

That is what we, the people of God, are meant to give the world: not just better arguments, but lives left in wonder and awe. We need to be the people who point out grace, who point out the beauty of the mystery. When the world sees that, they’ll go, what’s happening over here?

And I’m not saying we check our brains at the door. We’re not doing the “pray about it and feel a warming in your bosom and then you’ll know” thing — that’s heartburn; go take an antacid. I mean people seeing other people captivated by wonder. A little kid walks up to you with a toy telephone and says, “There’s a phone call for you” — I don’t care who you are, you answer the phone. Their awe captivates you. Imagine the church doing that with grace.

Each moment: growing into more or retreating into less

One line near the end of the chapter landed hard with our room: each moment of our existence we are either growing into more or retreating into less.

It’s the Shawshank Redemption line — get busy living or get busy dying. Manning traces it to Norman Mailer. Either way, it’s true. Wonder is the “more.” Preoccupation with self, with our plans and projects, with raking every leaf the second it falls — that’s the “less.”

Grazie, Signore — gratitude as freedom

Which brings us to chapter 6, “Grazie, Signore” — thank you, Lord.

This was the trickier chapter. Manning opens it by talking about the parable of the dishonest steward, and quotes a commentary that I had to read twice:

The unjust steward who, hearing he is going to be fired, doctors his master’s accounts to secure another job, is commended precisely because he acted. The point does not concern morality, but apathy. Here is a man who finds himself in a crisis, and instead of wallowing in self-pity, acts resourcefully. … Immediate response is the mood of the kingdom.

I’ll be honest: when I first read it, I thought, where is he going with this? But then I saw how it connects to gratitude.

Gratitude is rooted in trust. When you truly understand that grace abounds — that it is so broad, so amazing, so beyond comprehension — it frees you to act. You don’t have to wallow. You don’t have to sit there paralyzed, wondering, Is God going to like this? Is he going to like that? You stop trying to figure out the will of God the way a college senior tries to figure out which job offer won’t ruin his life.

I wish I’d had this in my head back when I worked with college kids. Every spring, a fourth-year student would sit down and say, “I’m trying to figure out God’s will for my life.” And they picture God’s will like a shoe size — if you put on the wrong shoe, it’s going to be uncomfortable and hurt for the rest of your life.

That’s God’s will devoid of grace. Here’s the picture I’d give them instead: God’s will is a football field. The sidelines are immoral and illegal — out of bounds. God’s will will never lead you there. The end zones are your strengths and passions, your gifts and abilities — that’s what you’re moving toward. And anywhere on the field is, for all practical purposes, God’s will for your life. One season you might be on this twenty-yard line, another season on that one, sometimes you’re sitting at the fifty. Who knows? What matters is that you’re on the field.

God’s grace frees you to play the whole field.

I can’t tell you how many session meetings I’ve sat in where the elders are wringing their hands — should we do this? But what about this? Or what about that? And it’s like: it’s okay. We can just make a decision. If it’s the right decision, great. If it’s the wrong one, we’ll know pretty quickly, and guess what? We can change the decision. This is how big God’s grace is.

If we don’t live with gratitude for God’s grace, we won’t recognize our freedom to act. The mood of the kingdom is immediate response — and that posture demands a life that keeps saying, Grazie, Signore. I’m so thankful for this grace. Because that gratitude is what frees us to live responsively instead of frozen.

And the parable of the talents backs Manning up. The master wanted his servants to take risks. He wanted them to gamble with his money. You can’t always play it safe.

I know of a church right now that met with a consulting company — they’re between pastors — and the consultants said, “We’re not going to help you find a pastor. Our assessment is that you’re viable for eighteen to twenty-four more months.” It’s about money. A handful of people, not much coming in. And they have a few million dollars locked up in endowments from wills given back in the 1970s — when there were 700 people in the church — that they can’t touch to do things like hire a pastor. They were so safe with their money. Now they’re sitting there going, we have money and we can’t use it.

Someone in our room answered that story with one of our own. Years ago, we had a financial person who was constantly saying, “The church is going to die because we don’t have money. The church is going to die because we don’t have money.” We’re still here. And she’s not.

Our pastor at the time finally said, “I don’t want to hear about money one more time. We’re failing as a church — not because of money, but because we can’t get past money.”

Safe isn’t faithful. The mood of the kingdom is immediate response.

Guilt that frees you instead of freezing you

Manning’s other big move in this chapter is on guilt — the difference between the healthy kind and the kind that disdains grace.

When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God’s gift of grace. Preoccupation with self is always a major component of unhealthy guilt and recrimination. … The image of the childhood story Chicken Little comes to mind. Guilt becomes the experience in which people feel the sky is falling.

That internal dialogue — demanding, accusing, blaming, condemning, reproaching, scolding — most of us know it by heart. Unhealthy guilt becomes bigger than life. It closes us in upon the citadel of self, and it preempts the presence of a compassionate God.

But healthy guilt acknowledges the wrong, feels remorse — and then is free to embrace the forgiveness that has been offered. Healthy guilt focuses on this: all has been forgiven. The wrong has been redeemed. Once again, it is gratitude for grace that sets us free — free so we don’t wallow, free so we don’t freeze.

Small steps of awe

One of us said there’s another sense of awe she keeps noticing: how, in all these little teeny steps, God has taken care of us. When Doug and Amy came to visit Peace, there were twelve to fifteen people, and they thought, will it last? When I said yes to coming, I told Amy, “I’m here to be the closer.” I’m about as good at closing as the Detroit Tigers bullpen.

Twenty-four hours after I said yes, my home church in Michigan — the church I came from — went through something that protected me from ever having to navigate. During COVID they imploded with conflict so bad they couldn’t hire a pastor, got subsumed as a branch campus of a larger church, and within the last twelve months the larger church sold the building and closed it down. Gone. And here we are. Here we remain.

Someone else, a veterinarian, said: if you want proof of God’s existence, he stopped telling clients the odds on their pets, because he saw animals that should have died live, and animals that should have lived die. “God will decide,” he said. “You don’t have any control over that at all. And it had to be some power far above me.”

Churches have life cycles too. There comes a day when every congregation dies — it just happens. (And nobody should underestimate the willpower of stubborn old Germans. Or stubborn old Dutch. Wait till you meet a stubborn Irishman. Then you’ll really see.)

But in the meantime, there is all this little awe. All these small steps of providence. Not done with us yet.

The leap in trust

Manning closes the chapter with one of his best lines:

Only love empowers the leap in trust, the courage to risk everything on Jesus — the readiness to move into the darkness, guided only by a pillar of fire. Trust clings to the belief that whatever happens in our lives is designed to teach us holiness. The love of Christ inspires trust to thank God for the nagging headache, the arthritis that is so painful, the spiritual darkness that envelops us, to say with Job, “If we take happiness from God’s hand, should we not take sorrow too?” To pray with Charles de Foucauld: “Abba, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all. I accept all. Let your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and I give myself, I surrender myself into your hands without reserve, with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.”

That’s the prayer of gratitude. That’s the mood of the kingdom.

So here’s what I want us to take with us: keep rediscovering grace, so the wonder never dies. And let the gratitude do what gratitude is meant to do — not freeze you, not bind you, not make you safe. Free you.

Grazie, Signore. Thank you, Lord.

Heavenly Father, I pray that we would indeed be a people who commend ourselves to you, who entrust ourselves to you, who gratefully give ourselves to you — because we love you, and we know that you are indeed our Abba, our Father. Amen.

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:29:29 -0400

“Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours."

St. Teresa of Avila

Hat tip to Englewood Review of Books

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:23:18 -0400

An absolutely stunning boat ride today around Ford Lake in Ypsilanti, MI. I am so grateful for friends who invite me into deep conversation and time well spent.

Breakfast on the Beach

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:40:21 -0400

Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Breakfast on the Beach

Ordinary guys, ordinary work, and the extraordinary holiness of abiding in Christ

We are coming to the end now in our study of the Gospel of John. This is our penultimate message in the series. I just like saying penultimate. I think that’s a cool word.

So we’ve got this week and next, and then we will somehow have finished this entire Gospel in about nineteen weeks. Not too shabby, I suppose. And you have persevered well through it.

We pick it up in chapter 21, the last chapter — and scholars wrestle with it, because John’s Gospel really seems like it should have ended at chapter 20: “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.” Done. Finished. Great job, John.

And then we get chapter 21. It kind of feels a little bit tacked on — the guys fishing, Jesus hanging out on the beach, and Peter’s reinstatement, which we’ll get to next week.

We don’t know why it’s there. Maybe it was part of the Gospel all along, and with parchment being expensive, John finished chapter 20 thinking he was done — then went, “Ah, what was I thinking? I’ve got to tell this last story. This is just too good.” Maybe the chapter circulated later because people were asking, “John, what happened with Peter?” We’re never going to know. And that’s okay.

The easy thing would have been to sanitize it — some monk going, “That verse doesn’t fit, let’s take it out.” They didn’t. They left it messy. The Bible is messy: not always clean, neat, and easy, because these texts were written a couple thousand years ago. And part of the fun of taking the Bible seriously is that we get to ask why — and dig in, and study, and wrestle with it. I’m going to leave that unresolved for you. It’s part of the process.

“Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. ‘I’m going out to fish,’ Simon Peter told them, and they said, ‘We’ll go with you.’ So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

“Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. He called out to them, ‘Friends, haven’t you any fish?’

“‘No,’ they answered.

“He said, ‘Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.’ When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.

“Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, ‘It is the Lord,’ he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water. The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from the shore, about a hundred yards. When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish you have just caught.’ So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ None of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord.

“Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead.” (John 21:1–14)

The two other disciples

Can we pause at the guest list? Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, the sons of Zebedee — and two other disciples.

How would you feel about being one of the two? You get your copy of John’s Gospel, reading along — “yeah, Peter; Nathanael; Thomas; the sons of Zebedee, yep” — and then: and two other disciples. You’d want to find John at the next gathering and say, “Jerk. You left me out.” Those two guys were still alive.

Nothing in the nets

Jesus has appeared to the disciples twice now. They’re no longer hiding in the upper room, and they’ve had the Spirit breathed on them — but they’re still figuring out what any of this means.

And finally Peter just says it. You can almost hear the awkward small talk — “What do you want to do? I don’t know. What do you want to do? I don’t know.” — until Peter lands on the one thing they know how to do: “I’m going out to fish.”

Because that’s what they do. Peter was a fisherman. James and John were fishermen — generations of family expertise on the Sea of Galilee. The resurrection has happened, history has fundamentally split — and they still have to go back to work. They still have to eat.

They fish all night. And how many fish do they catch? Zero. Nothing. Nada.

Which is the whole illustration, because John 15 is hovering over this entire scene. “Abide in me, and I will abide in you. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Here we get the picture: the guys drift back into their self-reliant routine, leaning on their own strength and professional expertise, and their nets come up empty.

Does that sound familiar? “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”

Do we not do the same thing? We go about our days leaning into our own strengths and abilities and levels of expertise, thinking we’re the ones who make everything work. I do it as a pastor. I work really hard at communicating, at studying, at showing up for people — and in some sense, yes, there’s an aspect of that. But if I am only doing it in my own strength, I will eventually fall short, and Jesus will be standing on the shore asking, “What’s wrong? Don’t have any fish?”

Whatever you do — teacher, nurse, tradesperson — if you think you’re accomplishing everything on your own strength, eventually you’re going to run out. We cannot make our lives work apart from recognizing the presence of Christ in every part of them.

Four feet to the other side

Dawn rolls around. Jesus is standing on the shore. “Friends, haven’t you any fish?”

Just imagine it: a group of guys in their late teens and early twenties, exhausted after fishing all night, and some joker on the shore yells out, “Did you catch anything?!” They had to be annoyed.

Then he says, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.”

Okay, put yourself in their shoes. You’re an expert professional fisherman. It’s dawn. You’re exhausted. And this knucklehead from the shore yells, “Just put the net on the other side.” My response would have been, “You put the net on the other side, pal. Swim out here and show us how it’s done.” I’m a bad person — that’s why I’m a pastor.

These nets were heavy, unwieldy, waterlogged. Hauling one in empty was brutal work, never mind flipping it over the other side and clearing out the seaweed. They must have been truly at the end of their rope, because they just went, “Fine. Whatever.”

And within what seems like moments, the net is filled to overflowing — because they moved it four feet.

You can almost hear Peter: “Told you guys.” And the sons of Zebedee: “No you didn’t, you’re slow.”

They listened. They heard something, and they trusted in faith. That is what abiding is: trusting Christ in every moment of our day, looking for his presence in our ordinary, everyday routine.

The ordinary becomes extraordinary

We live in a Christian world absolutely obsessed with being radical. Radical Christianity. Radical this, radical that. Be awesome. Don’t be normal.

And yet what we see at the end of John 21 are ordinary guys doing ordinary things, having an extraordinary encounter — because they trusted. They began to abide.

There’s a monk named Brother Lawrence. He went into the monastery with big dreams: the greatest scholar, the best books. He gets there and they’re like, “Go wash the pots.” And that’s basically what he did for decades. But in the midst of it, he learned what he called practicing the presence of Christ.

Throwing the net on the other side of the boat — were they going to trust, or not? Were they going to practice the presence of Christ right there in that moment, or not?

When you’re going through your boring, ordinary, everyday life, are you going to practice the presence of Christ? When you walk into the coffee shop, are you going to see the depth of everything happening around you — that every single person you come in contact with is an image-bearer of the divine? C. S. Lewis said that apart from the Eucharist, the most holy thing you come in contact with throughout the week is your neighbor. Do we believe it?

Because when we practice the presence of Christ, this black-and-white world turns to color. Everything becomes infinitely interesting. All of a sudden there is depth, there is radiance — because saying yes to moving the net four feet changes everything.

He put his clothes back on

Then there’s this moment at the end of the section. John whispers to Peter, “It is the Lord.” And Peter does something strange.

Now, I’m not talking about jumping off the boat and swimming to shore — I would have done the same thing. The weird thing is that Peter put his clothes back on first.

Out on the boat, doing hard manual labor, they would have stripped down to their undergarments — basically a pair of swim trunks. But before Peter jumps in to swim to Jesus, he wraps his outer robe back around himself. Robes! That’s hard to swim in.

Why? Because Peter had denied Jesus three times, and he recognizes this moment as holy. It would have been inappropriate to stand before Christ in just a pair of shorts. He wanted to show up ready.

Do you see it? When we practice the presence of Christ — when we abide in him, when we stay connected to the vine — there are no moments that are not holy. Even breakfast on the beach becomes holy fellowship.

This was breakfast — guys after fishing, around a campfire, with some fish and some bread. They had probably had this exact meal a thousand times. And yet it was holy, because they were present with Jesus, and Jesus was present with them.

Where have you closed off your routine?

So here’s my challenge. Where in your life have you closed off your routine to God’s presence?

I’m not saying quit your job or retreat to a monastery. But tomorrow morning — when you open your laptop, or make breakfast, or start your commute — take a breath and pray this: Lord, I am available to you right here.

When we become available to Christ in the most mundane, ordinary things, they become holy. That is what abiding in Jesus looks like.

We get that glimpse here, at a breakfast on the beach.

Heavenly Father, I pray we would lean into the reality that there truly are no ordinary or mundane moments when we are practicing the presence of Christ. Make us a people who each morning acknowledge your presence and invite you to remain with us, so that we might see in the most ordinary things the depth and beauty of Jesus making all things holy. Amen.

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:06:26 -0400

A beautiful fall hike at Crosswinds Marsh on a perfect Saturday morning.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:58:18 -0400

Fall golf in Michigan is truly stunning.

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.