Back in January, I started having some numbness and weakness in my right hand and leg. I’ve had multiple sclerosis for about six years now, so my first inclination was that I was having a flare. My wife thought the same thing. So I reached out to my neurologist, who had me go get lab work. That all came back clear, so the next step was a brain MRI. Not a big deal, I have one of those yearly. So, I made the appointment, waited a couple of weeks, and had that done. It, too, came back normal, or at least unchanged since last year. So, the next step was to send me for three days of high-dose steroid infusions to see if that would settle things down. It didn’t. As a matter of fact, by this point, things were worse. My right hand was noticeably having trouble controlling my mouse, and my right leg would start to get weaker to the point that I would walk with a limp most days.

Something was causing this, but we just couldn’t figure out what. That’s when my neurologist ordered another MRI, this time of my neck and back. She mentioned the possibility of lesions in the spinal area, which could happen with MS. So, I made another MRI appointment, but this time, instead of a 35-40 minute brain scan, I had an hour and a half scan, fully submersed in an MRI machine. The brain MRI that I have yearly never bothers my claustrophobia, because I don’t go all the way into the machine. But I had to make sure they gave me something to keep me calm, because you have to be super still during these things, or they have to start over. They gave me something that pretty much knocked me out for the rest of the day. But when the results came in, there weren’t any lesions found, or maybe I should say, any new lesions found. There was evidence of older areas, but nothing new or active.

They did find something, though. Actually, they found a lot.

The MRI showed tons of stenosis and degeneration in my neck and lower back.

Look at the MRI image above. This is from my neck. I added the red arrow, but do you see the oblong thing the arrow is pointing to? That’s my spinal cord, and it’s supposed to be round. Mine is flat.

Basically, my neck and back are in bad shape, bad enough that she sent me straight to an orthopedic surgeon. I’d had no pain at all, so this caught me off guard. I had no idea anything was wrong below my neck.

I saw the surgeon the very next week, and he told me I needed surgery. Two weeks after that, I was on the table. I had a C3-6 cervical laminoplasty and an L2-5 lumbar laminotomy at the same time. Not sure what all those ten-dollar words mean, but I had two major spine surgeries at the same time with the goal of taking the pressure off my spinal cord, and hopefully relieving the numbness and weakness I was experiencing.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to write about my recovery, a little at a time, as things occur to me. I don’t know how many of these there will be, and I’m not putting them on a schedule. They’ll come when they come. But the recovery (so far) has taught me some things I didn’t expect, and I think some of this is worth examining. Especially, this first observation. Out of all the things I may wind up discussing over the next few weeks, this one is by far the most important.

Let me start with how fast it all happened, because God’s grace and mercy are all over this.

Two weeks is not much time to prepare for major surgery. I had zero time to research the surgery, my surgeon, or anything else, really. I had to focus all of my effort on preparing my job for my absence.

For those who don’t know, I am the Executive Producer of all things radio and audio-related at Fortis Institute.

What that means practically - I produce two daily radio shows/podcasts. One I host, the other I co-host. Then I produce six weekly podcasts with a seventh coming later this year. Click here to listen to them all, if you’re interested.

All that to say, I stay kind of busy at work, and I only had two weeks to figure out how this ball keeps rolling while I’m out recovering.

I have no backup or assistant. It’s only me in my department, and that’s no one’s fault but my own. I’ve had (and still do) the ability to hire help, but I can’t find the person I’m looking for, and until then, it all falls on me. It’s not the purpose of this article, so I won’t go too deep into this, but I’m not an easy person to work for. I recognize that. I’m not mean or authoritarian, but I do expect excellence. “Good enough” has never been a standard I’m comfortable with. If the work is not excellent, then by definition it isn’t good enough. The work I have the privilege of doing is work God has given me, for the purpose of making much of Him. If I’m not giving Him the most excellent version of that work, I have failed. I won’t accept less than that, which is why it has been hard to find the right person. Pray for me, as that search continues.

In the meantime, back to my observations. I had only a short time to come up with a work plan, so my sole focus for those two weeks was that.

Then, the morning of the surgery, my wife and I noticed a few things. One person after another kept telling us how good my surgeon was. We both realized we’d never even thought to check, because it all came together so fast. There was no second opinion, I just went where I was sent. This is God’s grace, because as it turned out, he happens to be one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country, good enough that a neurologist sent her patient to him instead of to a neurosurgeon. And I had no idea.

God also orchestrated the speed at which this all happened. He knows me better than I know myself, and I know if I had more time to think, with no pain to push me, I probably would have talked myself out of the surgery.

I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot the last few days, and one thing that’s become increasingly clear to me is the difference between knowing something and having it settled in you. Let me explain.

A child can know a stove is hot because their mother told them. They can repeat that fact back to her over and over again. They can even warn other kids to keep their hands off the stove. But the child who puts his hand on the hot burner of that stove knows the stove is hot in a way the other didn’t. Because the lesson went from just information to remember to an actual memory of something. Memory is the version that changes how he acts around a stove for the rest of his life.

I’ve spent a lot of years holding truths the first way. I knew them well enough to repeat them or teach them. But when you only know a truth in that way, it doesn’t carry much weight. You know it, but you haven’t had to live it. Usually, something has to happen before that truth becomes real to you, and most of the time, it’s something you never would have chosen.

The speed of the surgery was the first place that happened to me. The second thing has been harder to write about, and I’ve taken my time figuring out how to say it.

I’ve been married to my wife, Melissa, for twenty-three years this September. She loves me, I love her, and we’ve got three sons who turned out better than either of us deserved. It’s been a great marriage. Not one without issues, we’ve certainly had those. But quitting has never once been on the table for either of us, and the love between us has only gotten deeper over the years.

I knew all of that before this surgery. On any day, you could’ve asked me, and I would’ve told you my wife loved me. I was sure of it.

The knowing I had then (just two weeks ago) is not the knowing I have now.

This recovery has put me in a place I’ve never really been. Melissa has had to take over a lot of things I normally handle myself, and I’ve had to sit there and receive it. That’s hard for a man.

But it’s also made me see something I should’ve noticed more before. This isn’t Melissa rising to the occasion. This is Melissa. She serves because that’s who she is. I’ve known that, but this recovery has made it impossible to miss.

What I’ve watched is a woman who’ll go without sleep before she lets me lie there hurting. I watch a woman who only gets upset when I tell her to quit helping and go rest. She builds her whole day around her family without noticing she’s doing it.

Seeing all this has brought some guilt. I don’t want to be the man on the couch who needs his wife to bring him things, and I hate that she’s losing sleep because of me.

But God is using Melissa to care for me, and I’ve had to stop resisting it. That has been one of the hardest parts, because accepting her help means admitting I can’t do what she can do for me right now.

There was a low moment early on when I told her I wasn’t the man she married, and this wasn’t what she signed up for.

She told me I was right about one thing. I’m not the man she married. We’ve been married twenty-three years. Neither one of us is the same person we were then.

But she said I was dead wrong if I thought this wasn’t what she signed up for. We get older, and we go through sickness and health. The vows covered this.

She reminded me that I was there for her when she had surgery last year.

Let me say again, I’ve never doubted the love my wife has for me, or that she would do anything at all for me. What’s been new is being able to sit there and watch her do it.

God put that in front of me every day during this recovery. I’ve seen my wife do the things she’s always done.

So, I’ll say it plainly. I’m more in love with my wife than I’ve ever been in twenty-three years of marriage. It’s not because she did something to earn more love from me, but because God slowed me down, put me in a place where I couldn’t miss it, and opened my eyes enough to see what’s been true the whole time.

I don’t deserve this woman. She’s one of the greatest gifts God’s given me, and I’m more grateful for her than I know how to say, and that’s why I wanted to write this.

Most people who know me know I’m pretty transparent. There’s not a whole lot I’m unwilling to share. But I’m not writing this just for the sake of sharing it. I’m writing it because I don’t want to forget it.

I want to spend the rest of my life making sure Melissa is loved and cared for the way she’s loved and cared for me. I’m not trying to pay her back. I just don’t want to go back to the normal of two weeks ago and let this fade.

A person can go through something like major spine surgery and feel all the feelings, then start to lose sight of it when life gets easier. I don’t want that to happen. So I’m writing this down where people can see it. And if you know me personally, I’m asking you to hold me to it.

Melissa has loved me well, and I want to spend the rest of my life loving her well.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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We were standin’ in line at the church potluck. You know the kind.. folding tables with mismatched tablecloths, and a smell in the room that could make a grown man cry.

I was hangin’ back near the deviled eggs, strategizin’ my plate like a man about to make important decisions, when Pastor Bo’s voice rose up over the clatter of casserole lids.

“Brother Emmett, why don’t you bless the food for us?”

I turned slow, hopin’ maybe there was another Emmett standin’ behind me.

No such luck.

The whole room went quiet.

Brenda shot me that be serious look she keeps reserved for special occasions like this…

I took off my hat,

“Lord,” I started, “thank You for this… um… these potato things… and the casserole creations… and Miss Darla’s banana puddin’, which I already snuck a bite of, but I’m still real grateful for.”

Brenda sighed.

I kept goin’.. mostly because I didn’t know how to stop. By the time I was finished I’d thanked God for the food, the church, the farmers, the folding chairs… and at one point I think I thanked Him for napkins.

After I sat down fast. Too fast, I almost missed the bench.

Pastor Bo walked by, gave me a pat on the back.

“Wasn’t bad. You managed to name half the dishes.”

“Well, figured it’d be rude not to.”

Levi said it was the longest grace he’d ever heard.

Bobbi Jo said I talked more in that prayer than I did on the ride to church.

I said to ‘em both, “Sometimes when you don’t know what to say, you just say thank You a bunch and hope the Lord don’t mind repetition.”

Truth is, I was nervous. Not ‘cause I was scared to talk to God but ‘cause I didn’t wanna mess it up in front of people.

But you know what? The food still got blessed. And the Lord didn’t seem put off by my poor delivery.

Deciphering Emmett

Prayer is a matter of the heart. In Matthew 6:5–6, Jesus warned His disciples about the hypocrites who turned it into a public performance, praying loudly on the street so everyone would see how spiritual they were. They wanted an audience, and an audience was the only reward they got. Jesus pointed His followers the other way, to a quiet room with the door shut.

Then He gave them the pattern in Matthew 6:9–13,

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]”

He was showing them that prayer wasn’t focused on themselves but followed a different pattern altogether. Prayer should start with God’s name lifted, turn to our real needs, as they align with His will, and end by trusting Him with the rest. The strength of prayer like that is the grace of the Father who hears it, not the faith of the one who prays it.

A lot of believers stay quiet when it’s their turn to pray out loud, afraid they’ll stumble over the words. Somewhere along the line, they picked up the idea that God responds only when the words sound holy. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit Himself steps in and helps us when we don’t even know what to pray. Broken words still reach the throne of grace just the same, because the Spirit carries them there, not because God is grading your grammar.

When Emmett prayed, he was grateful, and he meant every word. Heaven welcomes a prayer like that with joy, because it’s real.

So the next time someone asks you to pray, and you feel your chest tighten, remember who’s listening. You’re talking to your Father, and He already knows what you need before you speak a word of it.

Even a quiet “thank You for the napkins” is worship. What God welcomes is a grateful heart, not an impressive one.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

Support

Miss Patsy got the prayer chain rollin’ again last week.

Which, if you know Miss Patsy, means someone’s business is about to hit the airwaves in Jesus’ name.

She called Brenda late in the afternoon and said she had a “burden on her heart.”

Brenda put the call on speaker while she was cookin’ supper, and I listened from the table.

Patsy started in with, “Now I don’t know if this is my place to say, but I just feel led to share it for prayer…”

That’s how you know it’s about to get real unspiritual, real fast.

She brought up the youth pastor’s wife. Said she’s been lookin’ “awful different lately,” maybe tryin’ a new shampoo or “somethin’ more serious.” Then said she saw her at the store buyin’ almond milk and asked if that might be “a cry for help.”

Brenda tried to interrupt her and get the whole thing steered back,

“Miss Patsy,” she said. “Maybe we oughta just go ahead and pray right now.”

“Oh, absolutely dear. But before we do… you didn’t hear this from me, but I heard he’s been counseling that new girl, the one who always sits in the back…”

That was about all Brenda needed to hear. I know my wife, and I could see it on her face. But she didn’t raise her voice or make a show of it. She just stayed calm.

“Let’s pray, Patsy.”

And when I say she prayed, I mean Brenda prayed.

She prayed Scripture. She prayed for folks by name and asked the Lord to give us all some humility and grace.

It was five minutes straight of actual, Spirit-led intercession.

Then… there was silence.

Miss Patsy didn’t have much to say after that.

Brenda hung up the phone and stirred the gravy.

“Sometimes people forget God’s still listenin’ too.”

She’s right. Gossip tends to die quick when the room gets holy.

Deciphering Emmett

Gossip doesn’t always sound wicked. In the church, it often comes disguised as concern. But under the surface, it’s the same old sin of pride and a heart that would rather talk about people than pray for them.

James 3:10 is clear,

“From the same mouth come both blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be this way.”

You can’t praise God and poison others with the same tongue and call it righteous.

Gossip destroys and breaks trust. It puts words in people’s mouths they never spoke and thoughts in others’ minds they didn’t need.

“A perverse man spreads strife, and a slanderer separates intimate friends.” (Proverbs 16:28)

God calls His people to something loftier. Ephesians 4:29 says our words should build up and give grace. Gossip doesn’t do that at all. And when we treat it casually, we forget that the Holy Spirit hears every conversation. That includes every “we need to pray for” update.

Brenda’s response was the right one. She didn’t shame Miss Patsy or argue with her. She simply redirected the entire conversation from something casual and flippant to something holy and reverent. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.

We don’t need to confront others or try to cleverly convict them. All we need are hearts that remember God’s always listening.

Real prayer doesn’t need gossip to stoke it. It needs love and concern for people. Because that love will cover a multitude of sins, not gather them.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch; you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

Support

I don’t know much about the internet except that everybody on it appears to be standin’ too close to a wasp nest.

Levi tried to explain Twitter to me one time, then said it was called somethin’ else now, which I took as proof the thing was already ashamed of itself.

I got a phone that rings, and tells me when Brenda has put “milk” on the grocery list three separate times. That’s enough wires in my life.

But I do cut hair for men who know all about it.

Randy Haskins came into the barbershop one Tuesday needin’ a trim and carryin’ a face like he’d swallowed a spark plug.

He sat down and said, “People can’t handle the truth no more.”

I put the cape around him, “That right?”

“It was over that school board mess,” he said, “Caleb posted somethin’ ignorant, so I corrected him.”

Caleb was Randy’s nephew. Good kid.

“What’d you say?” I asked.

Randy shrugged, “Nothin’ but facts.”

Mr. Talley was waitin’ by the magazine rack. He lowered a Field & Stream from 2009 and said, “Facts got handles. Some folks swing ’em like axes.”

Randy ignored him, and I kept cuttin’.

Turns out Randy had written a long response under Caleb’s post. Then Caleb wrote back. Then Randy answered. Then Caleb’s mama got involved. Then Randy’s sister, Donna, said he’d always thought too highly of himself. Then Randy said Donna raised boys who couldn’t change a tire without watchin’ a video.

That’s how a school board meetin’ turned into three cousins not speakin’ and one aunt cancelin’ Sunday dinner.

Randy said, “They all took it personal.”

I trimmed around his ear, “You did mention the tire thing.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“So’s a thermometer,” I said, “But I don’t stick one in a man’s eye and call it medicine.”

He looked at me in the mirror like he wanted to argue, but I had scissors near his head.

After a minute he said, “I’m just tired of everybody bein’ soft.”

I nodded, “Could be.”

The shop got quiet except for the clippers hummin’.

I thought about how Randy talks in person. He ain’t cruel. He’s a little loud sometimes, and plenty opinionated. But I’ve seen him tote groceries for widows, and once he fixed a starter in the church parkin’ lot for a fella passin’ though.

But online, from what I was hearin’, he was carryin’ on like a rooster that found a mirror.

I brushed hair off his collar, “Donna still makin’ that banana pudding?”

He frowned, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Nothin’, just wonderin’ if facts taste better than banana pudding.”

Randy stared at himself awhile.

Then he said, quieter, “Caleb blocked me.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it sounded like the modern way of shuttin’ a door.

I said, “Well, doors open different than they shut.”

He sighed, “You think I ought to call him?”

“I think you ought not call him to finish the argument.”

He nodded, which was different from agreein’. Sometimes it’s just a man lettin’ down his defenses.

When I finished, Randy paid and left without sayin’ much.

That evenin’, I saw him at the gas station sittin’ in his truck on the phone.

Sunday, Caleb sat with Donna two pews ahead of Randy. After church, Randy walked over and handed Caleb a socket wrench.

I don’t know what was said. Probably not enough, but families are funny that way.

Caleb took it, and nobody in the room had to click a thing.

Deciphering Emmett

Scripture treats speech as a serious matter because words reveal and guide the heart. James says the tongue is small but can set a great fire (James 3:5–6). That warning doesn’t become less true when the words are typed instead of spoken.

Randy’s mistake wasn’t that he had an opinion that was different from someone else. Christians aren’t commanded to avoid disagreement. But we are commanded to speak in a way that reflects the holiness of Christ.

“Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” (Ephesians 4:29)

Truth isn’t a license to hurt people carelessly.

The internet removes the ordinary restraints of actual, face-to-face conversations. Meaning, we can’t see and discern things like facial expressions or tone. But God still sees the heart behind every word. Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Repentance doesn’t always require some big, public speech. Sometimes it starts with declining to continue a fight and looking for peace where pride may have caused harm. Romans 12:18 says, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.”

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

Support

We live in an age of experts.

There’s an expert for everything now, or at least an expert for everything the modern American believes might be wrong with him.

Having difficulties in your marriage? There’s a therapist for that.

Are your children being rebellious? Well, fear not. There’s a parenting psychologist for that.

Are you suffering from anxiety or insomnia, maybe you’re having trouble with your job, or feel that overwhelming sense that your life isn’t exhibiting enough meaning to suit you? There’s literally nothing under the sun that we can’t find a specialist to address.

The class of available experts has grown in our generation in a way no generation before us experienced, and the American Christian has been saturated with those choices for as long as he can remember.

And below that, for the Christian, is a doctrine the church has confessed in substance from the beginning. That would be the sufficiency of scripture, which is simply the teaching that God’s Word is enough for the Christian life.

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When I say enough, I mean it in an all-encompassing way. It’s enough for salvation, enough for sanctification, enough for matters of marriage and parenting and identity and suffering and everything else that shows up in the believer’s life. That doesn’t mean Scripture gives the Christian every technical detail for every earthly situation, but it does mean Scripture gives the final word on the heart, the conscience, obedience, sin, repentance, wisdom, worship, and the fear of God. Conservative evangelicals affirm this doctrine and would defend it without a moment’s hesitation.

And yet, when life actually gets bleak, the same Christians who’d defend the sufficiency of scripture will reach out for one of these experts.

Like the husband whose marriage is crumbling will make an appointment with a therapist, much faster than he’ll run to his Bible. Or a mother whose relationship with her teenage daughter has changed and turned cold will buy a parenting book by a clinical psychologist before she mines the scriptures for wisdom.

The pattern is pretty hard to miss. The expert is the first place we tend to turn, instead of the Word we claim to live by.

This has been written about a great deal, and the usual explanation sounds like this. Christians say they believe scripture is sufficient, but their actions don’t line up with their profession. Their affirmation is just lip service, and their behavior is evidence of their unbelief.

The fix typically given is that Christians need a stronger conviction about what the Bible can really do.

I’ve said that before, myself. I believed it for a very long time, but.. I don’t believe that to be a blanket judgment we can make anymore.

I think many of the Christians running to experts believe the doctrine just fine. The problem isn’t always that they doubt scripture is sufficient. The problem, I believe, is that they’re pretty sure it is, and that’s exactly why they go somewhere else.

Allow me to explain what I mean.

The doctrine of sufficiency, when a man takes it seriously, makes specific claims about what scripture has authority over. It says the Word of God has the final word on every matter of the human heart, including the hardest ones a person will face in life. Anything and everything from marriage to parenting, anxiety, anger, grief, suffering, finances, work, hobbies.. The list can literally keep going and going.

And the Bible doesn’t only have a verse or two to quote on these things. It has a specific position that comes with specific demands on the Christian’s life. It may not give the technical mechanics of every circumstance, but it does give God’s moral and spiritual judgment over every circumstance.

That’s a lot to submit to, and if a Christian actually believes the Word covers all of it, then he’s to submit to it. It’s the difference in affirming a verse that sounds good for your situation and submitting your life to what the Bible says about every one of those areas.

That’s the part many Christians don’t want. In conversation with other Christians, sure, they want it. But in actual, fleshed-out reality, they will pray for anything but.

The expert is the way around it. Not the way around the doctrine, because the doctrine stays right where it is in their life. The expert becomes the way around the demand of the doctrine.. The expert can give a man a way to think about his marriage that doesn’t involve repentance. The expert can address the problem without sending the believer back to the Word of God, which is exactly what every believer needs.

So when I say Christians believe the doctrine, and that’s why they run to the experts, this is what I’m getting at. The running isn’t necessarily unbelief, at least not in the way we usually mean it. In many cases, it’s what happens when belief in the doctrine clashes with the cost of obeying it. The believer goes looking for somebody who’ll soften the blow.

Let me give you an example. Of course, this is to illustrate my point, not to say this is true across the board.

Let’s consider a husband and wife who have been having trouble. They’ve been arguing for months, and the arguments have been escalating. As a matter of fact, the arguments have escalated into increasingly long stretches of ignoring one another. Finally, the husband suggests they see a marriage counselor, and she agrees. They find one with a master’s degree on the wall and the right kind of books on the shelf.

The counselor sits them down and starts asking questions about their communication patterns. He has them figure out each other’s love language. He uncovers a lot about their family-of-origin issues that might be affecting how each of them deals with conflict. By the end of their time with this guy, their marriage has been outlined as a problem of conflicting needs. The homework he gives them is a list of activities designed to strengthen their communication.

None of that is nefarious on the surface. There are actually things couples can learn from some of those exercises. But let’s pause and ask what the Bible would’ve said to this man that didn’t come up in the session?

The Bible would’ve told him that his first calling, as a husband, is to love his wife the way Christ loved the church. The Bible would’ve pressed him on whether the harsh words and tone he’s been using are sin in need of repentance, rather than communication issues that need polishing. And the Bible would’ve called him to confess his sin of failing to lead his home before he ever asked anything of his wife.

The counseling session with the expert never touched on any of that. The husband walked out feeling better, because no one told him he was sinning against his wife. He was told he had a communication issue, and that’s a much easier thing to fix. He bought a workbook on the way out the door and felt like he was doing the work.

But the work the Bible would have him do isn’t the same work. The Bible would have him repent, while the workbook will have him learn techniques.

And I want to be fair to the counselor in this illustration. He's competent at what he’s trained to do. His training was built on an anthropology that has no category for sin and no place for the regenerating work of the Spirit. So when a Christian husband walks into his office, the counselor doesn't have the tools to see what's actually going on. He sees communication patterns and family-of-origin issues because those are the categories he knows. His job was never built to address what the Bible says is wrong with this man.

And here’s the kicker in this scenario. The husband didn’t drive home, confused about what the Bible says about his marriage. He drove home relieved that he’d just spent ninety minutes in a room where the demands of the Word never came up.

This is what I’m trying to put my finger on. A lot of Christians have figured out the Bible can be affirmed theoretically, while being kept out of the particulars of their life. The Bible has authority, in general. Meaning it’s sufficient, in principle. But in their specific circumstances, they’ve learned to set the Bible to one side and consult someone else.

The mistake is to call this only hypocrisy.

It really isn’t, in the technical sense. The believer isn’t denying anything he’s affirmed. He’s willing to affirm the doctrine as long as it stays in the category of belief and never becomes a matter of obedience. That’s a different problem than open unbelief. Unbelief denies the doctrine. What I’m describing keeps the doctrine intact while ensuring it never touches the areas of his life that demand obedience. It’s still hypocrisy, but it’s a more subtle kind than the obvious kind. He hasn’t denied the doctrine with his mouth. He’s protected himself from the doctrine with his habits.

Scripture has a name for that. James calls it self-deception. A man hears the Word and walks away from it. The same letter says a faith that produces no obedience is dead. That's a harder question than the one I've been asking, and Scripture puts it to every one of us. A man can hold the doctrine in his head and still find himself outside of what the New Testament calls living faith. I'm making no assertion on any particular soul. The point is that the pattern is serious enough that we shouldn't comfort ourselves with the idea that the doctrine is intact when our lives keep saying otherwise.

Paul wrote about something like this in 2 Corinthians 10, he says,

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
(2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

Paul’s describing spiritual warfare, and notice where he places the battle. He places it in the realm of speculation, in lofty things raised up against the knowledge of God. The fortresses Paul wants the church to destroy aren’t only out in the unbelieving world. They’re inside the believer’s own mind, where ways of thinking have been welcomed in and given a seat they were never supposed to have.

Every thought has to be taken captive. Every category the believer is using, outside of scripture, to understand their own life. Paul doesn’t make an exception for the categories that come from the experts. He says every one of them is subject to the obedience of Christ. The believer who imports a category from a therapist or a podcast, without ever asking whether that category fits with what the Word teaches, has failed to do the work Paul calls every Christian to do. Paul’s not only interested in behavior. He’s after anything that would resist the rule of Christ.

Paul makes the same point in Romans 12. Transformation comes through the renewing of the mind, and a mind renewed by Scripture has been refusing the categories of the world for a long time. The renewing is the daily work of letting Scripture set the terms for how a believer thinks about his own life.

Now, I want to be careful here, because what I’m saying can be misread, and I realize that.

I’m not saying every counselor is dangerous, or even that medication is forbidden. There are physical conditions that require physical care, and there are people who walk through hard situations with believers, under the authority of Scripture, and serve the church well. There are also Christians who run to experts because they’ve never been taught how to bring the Word of God to bear on these areas of their lives. Some of them are confused, and others are exhausted. Then there are those discipled by churches that say Scripture is sufficient, while still sending the hard cases somewhere else. That has to be said, too.

Also, good biblical counseling exists, and a counselor who sits under the authority of scripture and a local church is doing real ministry. Proverbs speaks of safety in a multitude of counselors, and the New Testament assumes believers will be helped along by other believers who know the Word. The argument isn't against counsel. The argument is against the kind of counsel that asks Scripture to step aside while the “real” work gets done.

So what do you do with this?

First, pay attention to where you go when something hard hits. Not what you’d say if your pastor asked you, but where you actually go. If your friend is the first person you call, or a therapist is the first appointment you book, and the Bible doesn’t come up until everything else has already been tried.. That pattern is telling you something true about where Scripture actually sits in your life. Where you go first is a more honest confession than anything you’d say out of your mouth.

Second, do the harder work of letting scripture do its job before you bring in anyone else. This doesn’t mean you can never call a counselor, it means the Word comes first. Not in a five-minute devotional, but in an honest way where you sit with what God has actually said about the thing you’re facing, and you let the Word press on you the way it was given to press. The Christian who does that before he picks up the phone to schedule a session is being shaped by the right voice first. Whatever comes after that, however useful or unuseful, will land on a foundation scripture has already laid.

The third one is the hardest, and I’m saying it carefully. If you’ve spent the time in the Word and you know what God is saying about a particular issue in your life, don’t go shopping for a voice that’ll tell you something different. That’s most of what this whole article has been about. Often, Christians aren’t running to experts because they’re confused. They’re running to experts because they’re not confused, and the word they have from God is one they don’t want to obey. Receive the hard word when it comes. The hard word from God is always for your good, even when obeying it costs you something.

Fourth, do this work in the local church, not alone with your Bible at the kitchen table. The New Testament knows nothing of sanctification in isolation. Christ gave qualified elders to shepherd His sheep, and Hebrews tells us we're to provoke one another to love and good works in the gathered assembly. When a Christian gets serious about letting Scripture press on his life, the place that happens is under the preaching of the Word and around brothers and sisters who'll speak the truth in love. If your pattern has been to handle things outside the life of your church, the issue isn't only what voice you're listening to. It's where you're listening from.

The sufficiency of Scripture, finally, isn’t a doctrine to argue. It’s a posture toward the Word of God. You either let the Word do its work in your life, or you find a way around it. And when you find a way around it while still saying you believe it, you haven’t evaded the problem. You’ve only made the disobedience harder to see. Most of the Christians I know who say they believe the doctrine actually do believe it, in the sense that they know what it teaches. What the issue comes down to is letting Scripture speak with authority in the areas they’re afraid to surrender.

That’s the work in front of us. All of us. Letting the Word have its say in the areas of our lives where obeying will actually cost something.

The Word is sufficient for those areas. It always has been. The question is whether we’ll submit to it there.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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We were halfway out the door for church when..

“Wait!”

Bobbi Jo tore back inside and came out holdin’ that little pink Bible of hers. The one with the worn-down zipper and leftover glitter in the seams from last year’s VBS.

“Daddy, I got my tithe.”

She unzipped the Bible and pulled out an envelope that’d clearly been through some things. Folded twice and puffed up like it was carryin’ state secrets.

Inside was a crayon drawing of Jesus, ridin’ what I think was a horse, though it might’ve been a cow.

Next to that, a small collection of three gummy bears (two red, one green), and two quarters stuck to a Post-it note that said, in big block letters..

FOR GOD.

I blinked. “What’s all this?”

She stood proud, “It’s everything I had in my purse.”

Brenda got misty-eyed, and I didn’t say much, mostly because I was tryin’ not to choke on the toothpick I’d been chewin’.

Come offering time, Bobbi Jo marched right down the center aisle, and held that envelope in both hands. She eased it into the plate like she was settin’ down something sacred.

Nobody else noticed.

But I did.

After church, Pastor Bo was standin’ by the door as usual, shakin’ hands. He leaned in, “I saw what she gave.”

I nodded. “Yeah… she gets her generosity from her mama.”

He smiled.

“And her investment strategy?”

“From me.”

He chuckled, then paused.

“That might be the most honest gift we’ve taken up all year.”

On the way home, Bobbi Jo asked if God liked gummy bears.

Brenda said, “Sweetheart, He made the man who invented ‘em.”

I don’t know exactly what heaven’s treasury holds, but if there’s a place for heartfelt, sticky, five-year-old faith.. I reckon Bobbi Jo just added to it.

Deciphering Emmett

God doesn’t measure gifts the way we do. He’s not looking at the size of what’s in your hand, but rather the surrender in your heart. In Mark 12:41–44, Jesus watched people give at the temple, and it was the poor widow who caught His attention.

True giving isn’t about checking a box or proving devotion. It’s about whether your heart says, “Lord, I’m Yours—and so is everything I have.” Second Corinthians 9:7 reminds us that “God loves a cheerful giver.”

Bobbi Jo’s handful of gummy bears didn’t have any economic weight, but it had something much larger.. eternal meaning. She gave with open hands and love. That’s the kind of offering God treasures, because it reflects childlike trust in Him.

Psalm 50:10 says He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He’s not short on resources, and He’s not waiting on your contribution to finish His plan. He invites you to give, because giving is sanctifying. It molds you more and more into His image.

It doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to make sense to others. Whether it’s money, time, or your talent, what matters is the heart behind it.

Last Saturday started normal and went sideways around lunchtime.. which is about par for the course around here.

Levi had been readin’ his Bible a lot lately. And let me just say, I’m proud of that. It’s a beautiful thing when a young boy starts askin’ eternal questions. But when Levi gets real quiet and real focused, it either means he’s bein’ led by the Spirit… or he’s lookin’ for a loophole.

This time, it was a little of both.

Brenda had been talkin’ to him all week about salvation and about what it means to really follow Jesus. He’d been soakin’ it up like a dry sponge. But Levi ain’t exactly the wait and ask questions type.

I was out back changin’ the oil in the mower when Bobbi Jo comes tearin’ through the yard like the house is on fire, hollerin’, “Daddy! Levi went full John the Baptist down in the creek!”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound like something I oughta ignore.

I slipped my boots halfway on and jogged down toward the creek, Blue barkin’ the whole way like revival broke out without him. Sure enough, there’s Levi, standin’ knee-deep in the coldest water in Georgia, arms raised, lookin’ like he’s about to call down thunder.

He sees me and grins big. “Daddy, I did it! I baptized myself!”

I blinked a few times. “You what now?”

“I prayed, and repented.. then I dunked myself three times. Once of the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit!”

I stood there, mostly tryin’ to figure out if I should be proud or concerned. “Son,” I said, “I appreciate the enthusiasm, but baptism ain’t a solo sport.”

He thought for a second and said, “Well, Bobbi Jo was watchin’.”

I said, “Bobbi Jo also once told us her stuffed rabbit could see angels and cried for an hour when the vacuum ate her sock. We’re not usin’ her as a witness.”

Right about then, Brenda came walkin’ down the trail.. She had that Sunday school teacher tone.

“Levi Emmett Jackson, you’re not allowed to perform your own ordinances.”

“But Mama, I meant it!”

And you know what? I believe he did. But we got him dried off and drove straight over to Pastor Bo’s. Told him the whole story. Pastor Bo laughed so hard he had to sit down, then looked at Levi and said, “Well son, seems like the Lord’s workin’ on you. But let’s do it the right way next time, with the church, and preferably with warm water.”

Levi nodded. Then asked if he could still count the creek one, just in case.

Deciphering Emmett

Levi baptized himself in the creek, and Scripture never shows a believer doing such a thing. The ordinance is always administered by another, because the Lord placed baptism in the hands of His church.

In Matthew 28, Christ commissioned His disciples to make disciples and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The assignment was given to the church, and from Pentecost forward, baptism has been carried out that way.

Levi’s heart was in the right place, but sincerity doesn’t give a believer authority over an ordinance Christ defined. The structure belongs to the One who instituted it, and the administering belongs to the people He commissioned.

Baptism also says something to those who see it. The believer confesses Christ before the watching church, and the church receives that confession and rejoices in it. Romans 6 teaches that the water represents a finished work and union with Christ in His death and resurrection. The old man is buried, and the new man is raised. That’s meant to be displayed before the church, not performed alone.

Writing has always been part of my life in some form or fashion. I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing, but never really fiction. Most of what I’ve written over the years has been tied to my work in radio. As I got into ministry, more of my writing shifted toward sermon preparation, but nothing in me ever really thought about creating fictional people who lived in a fictional world.

Until a few years ago.

A few years back, the ministry I work for, Fortis Institute, was getting ready for a rebrand. As part of that, we talked through a lot of new content ideas, and one idea that kept coming to me was from something I remembered from my previous radio job.

It was a daily radio feature called Earl Pitts: Uhmerikun. If you’ve lived in the South or listened to country radio, you might be familiar with it. Earl Pitts was created and voiced by Gary Burbank, and it was a bit about this fictional character who would talk about politics or whatever he wanted, really. It was comedy built around a conservative worldview.

The idea I kept coming back to was a character-based daily feature, but instead of focusing on politics, it would focus on theology. I wondered what it would look (or sound) like to have a character talk about theological truth in a plain, ordinary way that everyday people could understand.

I thought the idea had potential, so I wrote out the concept and put together a few sample scripts. Then I sat down to record them, and that’s where my problems started.

I have a decent enough radio voice, but character voicing is a different animal altogether. I figured that out pretty quick. No matter how many times I tried, every version sounded forced. I knew the writing had something to it, but the delivery just wasn’t working. It sounded like me trying to be somebody else, and not in a good way. Eventually, I gave up on it and moved on.

About a year later, I was digging around on my home computer looking for some tax documents for my wife, and I came across those old scripts. I opened them up mostly out of curiosity, and as soon as I started reading, it hit me. This wasn’t a daily radio feature. It was an entire world.

That afternoon, I sat down and started trying to figure out who this man was, and that’s where Emmett Jackson was born. His wife, Brenda, came with him. So did their children, Levi and Bobbi Jo, and their blue tick hound, Blue.

Over the next few weeks, the pieces started falling into place. I know there’s a lot of language writers use for that sort of thing, like character development and worldbuilding, but I don’t really understand much of that. All I know is telling stories through the voice of Emmett Jackson comes easy to me.

So who is Emmett Jackson?

Well, the basic idea is that Emmett is a man living with his family in a fictional Southern town, and he tells stories from his own life. They’re normal stories about his job, family, church, marriage, and the kind of situations all of us find ourselves in sooner or later. Some of them are funny, and some of them are a little uncomfortable. Most of them are the kind of things we would probably recognize in our own lives.

But under all of the stories is theology.

Emmett’s not focused on the theology, which is part of the point. Most of us are not walking around thinking about the theology of our lives either. But it’s there, whether we recognize it or not.

That’s the purpose behind this whole concept. I want to highlight the theology that shows up in everyday life.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love theology, but I don’t believe it’s exclusive to pastors or seminary students. But that’s what the large majority of us have been trained to believe.

That’s just not true. Theology shows up in the way we treat our wives and children. It shows up when we’re upset or disappointed, when we’re dealing with money, or when we’re confronted with our own sin. It’s everywhere.

That’s the reason behind Emmett Jackson.

The stories you’re going to read here are fictional, but the truth under them is real. My hope is that they help you see theology a little more clearly, not as something academic, but as something that’s already showing up in the life you’re living.

Well, if you’re readin’ this, I reckon somebody told ya, “You gotta meet this fella,” or you just stumbled across it lookin’ for somethin’ worth your time.

Either way, hello.. Name’s Emmett Jackson.

I ain’t famous or anything. I drive a school bus in the mornings and cut hair in the afternoons. Been livin’ in the same county my whole life, and truth be told, I don’t have much ambition to leave it. We got everything a person needs right here.. a grocery store that still sells rag bologna, a Baptist church with one good pew and two broke air vents, and folks who’ll bring you banana pudding even when you didn’t ask for it.

I’m married to Brenda. She’s a school teacher, and the smartest person I know. Got a tone in her voice that can stop a child, or a grown man dead in his tracks. She’s the glue that holds this whole thing together, even if I don’t always tell her like I should.

We got two young’uns, Levi and Bobbi Jo.

Levi’s eleven, and has the energy of a raccoon in a fireworks stand. He’s got a good heart, buried under a layer of poor decisions and pocket lint. Bobbi Jo is younger but acts older. She runs the house and knows it.

We also got a blue tick hound named Blue. Not real creative on the name, I know. But he answers to it, and that’s more than I can say for half the folks I went to high school with.

We go to that Baptist church I was talkin’ about. Our pastor, Pastor Bo, preaches the truth and sweats through every dress shirt he owns. He’s a good man, I trust him, and that’s sayin’ somethin’ these days.

I don’t have a degree in nothin’. But I’ve seen a lot. Sat through funerals, held babies, lost my temper, asked for forgiveness, and changed more mower blades than I care to count.

So if you’re goin’ to stick around, you’ll hear some stories. Some are funny, and some are dumb. But they’re mine, and they come from tryin’ to follow Jesus the best way I know how.

Pull up a chair. I’ll put the coffee on.

This is the second part of a two-part article on the loss of reverence inside the walls of good churches. The first part, which can be found here, laid the foundation by probing how a church can hold to sound doctrine while simultaneously losing its reverence before God. That “decay” often shows up in the way we speak and how we fill our church calendar. If you haven’t read Part One, that’s where I’d encourage you to start, because what follows will pick up where that left off.

When irreverence is neglected long enough, it rarely stays among the ordinary habits of church life. The same patterns that create an environment of careless speech and busyness as an alternative to reverence won’t just linger at the level of the average member. It eventually moves on to how the church handles new members coming through the door, and from there to how it identifies the men it brings into leadership. By the time it reaches that stage, it’s settled into the structure of the church, and damage like that can take generations to undo.

Let me explain what I mean. A new believer joins a solid church, the kind of church we’ve been discussing. The leadership and longtime members receive him warmly, and within a few weeks, the requests start coming. Would he be willing to help on Wednesday nights? Could he get into a rotation somewhere? Each request is reasonable by itself because healthy churches need members who serve. Taken together, though, they can communicate to the new member that his fellowship and standing will be measured by his participation. And participation gets measured by how willingly he says yes.

Again, as before, I want to be careful here, because nobody in the leadership of these churches is consciously manipulating anyone. Most of the members asking are sincere, faithful people who truly want a new member to feel welcomed into the life of the church. When I use the word manipulation, I’m talking about the structure of the church rather than the motives of the people. The church has been operating for years on the notion that participation is a marker of growth, and that notion can form the entire arc of how a person develops through the life of the church.

The harm in this isn’t immediately apparent, but over time it becomes evident. The new member will say yes to almost every request, because he’s eager to “get plugged in." So his Saturdays go to the men’s breakfast, his Wednesdays to the kitchen team, his Sunday mornings to the sound booth, where he’ll have to miss Sunday School to make sure everything is ready for service. He’s busy at the church and seen at the church and known by the people of the church, the way active members get known. And after two or three years of this, when somebody asks him how his walk with the Lord is going, he won’t have a very good answer, because he hasn’t been alone with the Lord in any perpetual way for a while.

The manipulation doesn’t stem from anyone in the church desiring to bring him harm. What's actually happening is that the church has conflated the appearance of faithfulness with the substance of it, and developed the new member to live by that same confusion.

The care of a new member in a healthy church would look very different. The first question asked would be about the state of the man’s soul, not his availability for serving. The first investments made in him would be in his understanding of Scripture, in his prayer life, in his marriage, if he’s married, and in his parenting, if he has children. The deeper questions would be either forming or fortifying this man’s foundation, and any service he eventually does would grow out of that foundation. Activity, in the healthier model, would be the fruit of fellowship with the Lord rather than the replacement for it.

But, unfortunately, that’s not what we see in many good churches. Many good churches function the other way around. The new member is signed up to serve first, and the question of his fellowship with God is left to come up on its own, if it ever comes up. By the time the deeper questions are asked, the man has been living by the wrong criteria for so long that he can’t even understand why the question is asked.

Once a church has been measuring spiritual maturity by this type of activity for long enough, the same standard eventually outlines how the church identifies its future leaders. The men who get tapped for elder consideration are usually the men who have been most visible in this “volume-of-service economy.” They’re the busy ones and the ones the members see at every event. These are the people whose names come up first when the existing elders ask who’s been around the longest or contributed the most.

But visible service was never the qualification for elders.

The qualifications for elders are given in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and we need to note two things: what they emphasize and what they leave out. Paul says in 1 Timothy 3 the overseer,

“must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but considerate, peaceable, free from the love of money; leading his own household well, having his children in submission with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to lead his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?), and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation of the devil. And he must have a good reputation with those outside the church, so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.”
(1 Timothy 3:2-7)

Then in Titus 1, he adds,

“must be beyond reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of dishonest gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to reprove those who contradict.”
(Titus 1:7-9)

Of course, these qualifications must be observable. An elder can’t be an invisible man. His home, doctrine, reputation, hospitality, self-control, and ability to teach must be known to the church in some meaningful way.

But, read that list slowly. Almost every qualification Paul identifies is a quality of character or competence rather than a marker of activity.

• Sober-minded points to the man’s inner life.

• Hospitable describes how his home is open to others.

• Able to teach speaks to his competence in handling the Word, which is a function of years spent in careful study rather than on committees.

• Not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited, may be the most pastorally important qualification on the list, because it warns directly against the pattern of bringing a man into leadership before he’s been tested long enough to know whether he meets the qualifications at all.

The standard of visibility and activity won’t produce men who match this list. It will produce men, however, who’ve been seen and involved, which is a different thing than men who have been formed by the Word and the Spirit into the kind of overseer Paul described. Some of those visible men will turn out to be qualified anyway, by the grace of God. Many of them, unfortunately, won’t. Some of the men who are truly qualified are quieter than the men who are most noticeable. They’re the ones whose understanding of Scripture has been formed and refined over years of study, and whose private walk with the Lord has shaped them into the kind of men other believers naturally trust.

This kind of measurement tends to skip those men. They didn’t sign up for as many committees, so they aren’t on the radar. They get written off as men who don’t care or who aren’t really involved in the life of the church when, in some cases, these are the very men who should be caring for the souls of the congregation. Meanwhile, the busy man who’s been on every committee for a decade gets nominated for elder, and the existing elders affirm him because they’ve seen him serve.

That’s where the corruption starts, but it doesn’t stop there.

Once elders have been selected by the wrong standard, they begin evaluating future candidates by the same standard that brought them in. Men who were chosen because they were noticed will naturally look for the same in the next round of candidates, and the same is true of every other surface-level indicator the church has been using. Men who confuse activity with maturity in their own growth will confuse activity with maturity in everyone else’s. Within a generation or two, the leadership of the church will be made up almost entirely of men who match the wrong list. The right list will have been forgotten, if it was ever even known, by everyone in the room.

This is the consequence Paul was protecting the church against in 1 Timothy 5:22 when he wrote,

Do not lay hands upon anyone hastily and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others; keep yourself pure.
(1 Timothy 5:22)

When the church takes a shortcut and treats activity or being seen as a sufficient marker of qualification, it lays hands hastily, regardless of how respectable the man being appointed appears.

The leadership a church ends up with is the leadership it deserves, in the sense that the standard it uses to select that leadership is the standard the leadership will use going forward. A church whose elders were chosen for visibility will select future elders with that same standard of visibility. A church whose elders are chosen for biblical qualification will produce future elders who are chosen for biblical qualification. The pattern reproduces itself, and the consequences for the church’s spiritual health will accumulate over decades.

I want to handle this carefully, because there are good men currently serving as elders in churches where the selection process was flawed. Some of those men are growing into the qualifications Paul lists, even if they were chosen for the wrong reasons. The Lord is gracious, and He can use imperfect leadership to feed His people, just as He’s done for two thousand years. The point isn’t that every elder selected by the wrong standard is unfit for office. The point is that this kind of standard does damage. It’s been doing damage for a long time, and the churches living under it are paying the price whether they recognize it or not.

So we come again to the practical question. If a man recognizes his own church in what I’ve been describing, the question now is what to do about it from where he sits.

A few thoughts.

The first has to do with the new members in your own circle. You probably know one or two, maybe more. The pattern I described, where a new member is welcomed and immediately enrolled into service can be interrupted at the member level long before it ever reaches the leadership. When a new family joins your church, the first thing you should do is get to know them and invite them into your home, where you can ask about their walk with the Lord. Be the kind of member who shows them what fellowship in a faithful church is supposed to look like, so that what they experience from you sets the standard. The activity will come. Let it come second.

The second concerns how you’ve been measuring the spiritual life of other men in your church. The standard I’ve been describing doesn’t just live in the leadership. It lives in every member who has unconsciously assumed that the busy guys are the godly ones and the quieter men are somehow falling short. If you’re being honest with yourself, you can probably think of a man in your church right now whose walk with the Lord is genuinely deep, but who you’ve written off because he isn’t on the committees and isn’t seen at every event. Pay attention to those men and honor them by taking them seriously instead of treating them as second-tier members because they aren’t busy. As a matter of fact, many of these men are likely more spiritually equipped than your present leadership. That’s not a blanket statement, and it isn’t true across the board, but in many cases, it is.

The third concerns what you do when your church is in an elder selection process. Most members assume that the process belongs entirely to the existing leadership and that they have no voice in it. That’s not biblically accurate. Sure, some church polity is elder rule and not elder-led, but that doesn’t mean, as a member, you can’t raise your voice. We’re church members, not cult members. The qualifications Paul gives in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are observable, meaning church members are positioned to evaluate them in ways elders alone may miss. When your church is gathering input on potential elders, your voice matters, and you should use it to name the men whose walks you’ve come to respect, even if their involvement isn’t as much as others. Raise honest questions about candidates being put forward whose primary qualification seems to be how often they’ve been seen serving. Do this respectfully and privately, but do it. A member who’s noticed a pattern in his church and remains silent during the elder selection has missed an opportunity Paul intentionally gave him.

The fourth is for any pastor or elder reading this. If what I’ve described matches the leadership culture in your own church, the work that follows is yours to lead. Examine your selection criteria honestly. The questions before you are whether the men currently being considered for office are being considered because of their character and competence rather than their visibility, and whether the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 are actually being evaluated rather than assumed because the candidate has been around long enough. Look hard at whether there are men in your congregation whose qualifications match Paul’s list more clearly than the men currently on your radar. The leadership a church ends up with is the leadership it deserves, and the church under your care will end up with the leadership your selection process produces. The man who corrects this hands the next generation a healthier church than the one he received, and the Lord himself sees that work even when no one in the present generation does.

Everything I’ve described in the last few sections traces back to the claim I opened with. When the reverence for God’s holiness disappears from the life of a church, the things that fill the void tend to be activity-based, because activity is the easiest replacement to manage and the most visible to measure. A church that took the holiness of God seriously wouldn’t accept busyness as an alternative to spiritual maturity.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.
(Hebrews 12:28-29)

The text doesn’t say acceptable service is a substitute for reverence and awe. It says that acceptable service flows from reverence and awe. Reverence is the root, service is the fruit. Reverse the order, and the service that gets offered isn’t the service the verse is calling for.

That’s what’s at stake. The good churches I’ve been describing look faithful from the outside, and by every external measure, they are. But 1 Corinthians 3 warns us that the day is coming when the Lord Himself will sort the wood and hay and stubble from the gold and silver and precious stones. That day is closer than most of us live, and when it arrives, any activity that wasn’t rooted in reverence will be exposed for what it was.

Iain Murray, in The Forgotten Spurgeon, writes that Spurgeon was remembered as climbing the steps to the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, whispering, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” Murray ties that detail to what he calls the true explanation of Spurgeon’s ministry, which was the person and power of the Holy Spirit. Spurgeon understood that the man preparing to preach needed to be a man who was dependent on the Spirit of God, because without that, the preaching would be empty.

What’s true of the pulpit is true of the whole church. A church that no longer trembles before God will lose its power to shape its people into the image of Christ.

I want to close by acknowledging that nothing I’ve written here is meant to be an indictment, and I’m not so jaded that I don’t understand how it can be taken. But I’ve written this because I love the church, and because the God Isaiah saw in the temple is the same God we claim to worship today. The question we all need to ask ourselves is whether our churches still know how to come into His presence the way Isaiah did.

Whatever you do, don’t accept the substitution of activity for reverence. The work of the church is real, and the activity that you and I are involved in as members of our churches is necessary. The New Testament expects every believer to be involved in the life of their local church. But the activity itself is the fruit, not the root. The root of all this is our ability to fellowship honestly with a holy God. A church full of activity can be a healthy and good church, as long as it hasn’t put its roots in that activity, because the church that does will eventually fall.

The God we worship is a consuming fire. He’s the One whose glory caused Isaiah’s temple to fill with smoke and whose voice shook the threshold of His own house, and the seraphim who stood before Him in that vision covered their faces because seeing that God would have been too much for them. That’s the God we serve. That’s the God who has invited us, in Christ, to draw near to Him. That invitation isn’t a casual one, and the response to it shouldn’t be either. The faithful church that’s forgotten how to tremble before the One it worships has forgotten the most important thing about itself.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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There’s a specific type of “decay,” and I choose that word carefully, that’s been happening in American evangelicalism for quite a while. This “decay” isn’t the same kind that comes out of seeker-sensitive churches and the rest of the entertainment-driven evangelical machine. That stuff has been written about for decades. There’s another issue I want to address, and I believe it’s happening more and more inside the walls of good churches.

This problem has more than one layer to it, and trying to handle the whole thing in a single article would do the subject a disservice. So I’ve broken this into two parts. This first article deals with the loss of reverence itself. It looks at how a church can hold to sound doctrine while slowly losing reverence before God, and how that loss begins to show up in the way we speak and how we fill our church calendar. The second article, which will be released on Thursday, May 14, deals with what comes next when that decay is left alone, especially in how a church receives new members and decides how to select leadership.

When I say good churches, I mean the conservative ones. The churches with expositional preaching and sound doctrine, with pastors who actually believe the things they preach. These are the churches that you and I would recommend to people, where the preaching is solid and, by every external measure, the church is operating as a faithful church should.

And yet, somehow, in these same churches, the reverence for God that once marked His people has slowly taken a back seat. Good churches can lose reverence without losing their doctrine, and that’s what makes this hard to see. The signs of the “decay” aren’t obvious, but the result is a Christianity that holds the right doctrine on paper but no longer trembles before the God it confesses.

A lot of churches that should know better have lost their reverence for God.

But, before we look at how this happened, we need to start in Isaiah 6.

Isaiah sees the Lord seated on His throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe fills the temple. Above Him are the seraphim, whose first instinct in the presence of God isn’t to look at His face. Instead, they cover their own faces with two wings, and their feet with two more, and with the remaining two, they fly. As they fly, they call out the only word that adequately describes what they see.

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.
(Isaiah 6:3)

Their voices shake the threshold of the doorway, smoke fills the temple, and Isaiah sees himself clearly for the first time.

“Woe is me, for I am ruined, he cries, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”
(Isaiah 6:5)

That’s the response of a man who saw holiness and became undone. Isaiah collapsed and confessed his inadequacy in the strongest words his language had available.

We don’t see that anymore, and when the holiness of God disappears from the life of the church, reverence dies, and what’s left is a Christianity that uses the language but doesn’t take it seriously.

Before we go any further, the doctrine has to be put back on the table, because most Christians have inherited a version of holiness that doesn’t hold up to what Scripture actually teaches.

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Holiness, in the Bible, isn’t just a moral category. It’s also an ontological one. The Hebrew word qadosh and its Greek equivalent hagios both carry the meaning of separation. To call something holy in the biblical sense is to say that it’s been set apart. When Scripture calls God holy, the first thing it’s saying is that God isn’t like us. He isn’t a bigger version of human goodness with more power or wisdom. He is the Creator, not the creature, self-existent and set apart from everything He has made.

R.C. Sproul, in his book The Holiness of God, gives several pages to explaining why the seraphim repeat the word three times in Isaiah 6. Hebrew didn't have superlatives the way English does, so to make something the highest degree of itself, you said it three times. Sproul writes,

Holiness is the one attribute of God elevated to that level. Sproul said,

It says He is holy, holy, holy, and it’s the strongest statement the Hebrew language could make about anything in existence.

The moral aspect of holiness is bound up with the ontological one. Because God is separate from creation, He’s also separate from the corruption that entered creation through the fall. His moral purity isn’t an added feature in Him, but part of the beauty of who He is. He can’t be tempted by evil because there is no evil in Him, and He can’t look on sin with favor because sin rebels against the order He established. Habakkuk 1:13 says,

Your eyes are too pure to see evil, And You cannot look on trouble.
(Habakkuk 1:13)

That doesn’t mean God is unaware of evil, God sees all things. It means He can’t look at evil with approval. That’s a statement about the kind of being God actually is.

The Puritan Stephen Charnock wrote that “holiness is the crown of all his attributes, the life of all his decrees, and the brightness of all his actions. Nothing is decreed by him and nothing is acted by him that is not consistent with the beauty of his holiness.”

Charnock argued that of all God’s attributes, holiness is the one the angels most insist on in their worship. They don’t cry out Eternal, eternal, eternal or Mighty, mighty, mighty. They cry out Holy, holy, holy. That’s the attribute through which all the others are seen.

The “decay” we’re tracing is the natural consequence of a church that's stopped taking seriously what Scripture actually teaches about who God is, even when the church still confesses the doctrine on paper.

The good church doesn’t fall into irreverence the way a seeker-sensitive church does. There’s no fog machine, and the pastor isn’t walking out in a hoodie with an energy drink. The music is generally traditional, and the preaching is most often expositional. By every external metric, the church is operating the way a faithful church should.

And yet, somehow, the reverence for God you should be able to identify has slowly taken a back seat. No one would immediately agree with that, and most members of these churches don’t want to admit such a thing about their own. But hear me out.

The first place you’ll notice this is in the vernacular used. This is something I learned from my friend, Jim Osman, in his book God Doesn’t Whisper. The basic premise is this. A pastor, let’s say a man I respect, who pastors a church I’d recommend, will sometimes catch himself saying that he “felt led” to a particular conclusion, or that he “sensed God saying” something during his prayer time. He’ll talk about having “a peace about” something, or about how the Lord “put it on his heart” to make a particular call.

Now, he doesn’t mean what a charismatic pastor would mean by those phrases. He’d be the first to defend the sufficiency of Scripture and the closing of the canon. If pressed, he would probably say he meant providence or wisdom. But that isn’t what he said. The language has slipped into his vernacular anyway, because the language has so thoroughly saturated American evangelical culture that even careful men borrow it without realizing they’re borrowing it.

But language shapes thought. When the words we use to describe a believer’s relationship with God are imported from a movement that takes God’s holiness less seriously, those words pull the whole notion of God in a direction the careful pastor never intended. The congregation, hearing the sermon, picks up on the speech and starts using the same phrases at home and with their friends. The kids in the youth group hear the phrases used by their parents and assume they’re the standard Christian vocabulary. By the time anyone notices, if they ever do, the reality of God’s holiness has weakened across the entire congregation, even though the church or its leaders never changed or moved from their doctrinal beliefs.

That same tendency shows up in how we pray. A faithful man will stand up to pray during service, and he’ll begin with, “Hey God, just want to say thanks for this beautiful day.” The casualness isn’t nefarious, and the man would never describe himself as irreverent. The rest of his prayer may even be sincere and biblical, but it started in a way the seraphim in Isaiah 6 wouldn’t recognize as worship.

These are small things, I realize. And each one taken in isolation looks like a minor preference issue. But the damage comes not from one small issue, but from the cumulative effect. A thousand small decisions about how we address God and how we describe Him will eventually produce a church in which the language of careful reverence is replaced by the language of casual acquaintance.

That’s the first layer of the “decay,” and most members of the church it’s happening to never notice.

The second layer is even harder to see, and it does even more damage when it isn’t addressed. The language issue I just described is something a discerning member can notice, but this next issue is something most members never notice at all. That’s because this whole structure looks and feels faithful, and the church itself has been operating like this for so long that nobody questions whether this is right and healthy.

This structure is ultimately best described as busyness. Specifically, the framework I’m talking about is the exchange of activity for reverence as the way the church measures the spiritual life of its members.

A solid church can fill its calendar with activities that are good things to be a part of. Their youth group may get together and perform a service project for some of the more senior members of the congregation. Or, the men of the church may gather for breakfast and fellowship on a regular basis. Or the women of the church may have regular, weekly Bible studies. Someone is always planning the next event, so the calendar stays full months in advance. None of those activities is wrong. Many of them are unambiguously good for the spiritual life of the church when they’re held in proper balance.

The problem isn’t the events and activities themselves. The problem is what these events and activities have come to mean.

In a church where the holiness of God has faded from the heart of corporate life, the activity itself starts to function as a proxy. The believer who can’t articulate what real, tangible reverence is will tend to appraise his spiritual life by his calendar. He’ll calculate the events he’s been to this month and the service projects he signed up for, and that total will be his standard of faithfulness. Don’t misunderstand me. Those metrics aren’t wicked, but they also aren’t a matter of reverence for God.

Now, I want to be careful here, because the temptation in writing this kind of thing is to swing the pendulum in the other direction and end up implying that involvement at church is somehow questionable. That’s not what I’m saying at all.

And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
(Hebrews 10:24-25)

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
(Galatians 6:2)

And they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And fear came upon every soul; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were dividing them up with all, as anyone might have need. And daily devoting themselves with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number daily those who were being saved.
(Acts 2:42-47)

The New Testament expects active and ongoing involvement in the life of the local church, and any reading of what I’m saying that treats it as permission to be uninvolved has misread it.

The point is that participation was never meant to be the primary measure of a man’s spiritual life. The man who’s busy at church every day of the week and hasn’t been still before the Lord in months has exchanged the work of the church for the worship of God, and that replacement does appear faithful, especially when the heart of the man is to serve the church and the Lord.

But we’re missing a vital detail that Luke 10 makes clear. Martha was distracted serving, and the verb the text uses is a strong verb. It’s the word perispáo, which means to be over-occupied or too busy with the work she’d taken on. Mary, on the other hand, was sitting at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. When Martha complains that Mary is leaving her to do the serving alone, Jesus says to her,

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things, but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
(Luke 10:41-42)

Is that not what the modern church has reversed? In our churches, Martha is the model member, and Mary is the one we’d worry about and pray for. Jesus’s verdict is exactly the opposite of how the modern church functions, and the difference is one of the clearest signs that something has gone wrong with our standards.

So we come to the question of what to do with all of this. If a man reads what I’ve written and recognizes his own church, what follows now must be practical. A few thoughts to leave you with..

The first is your own communication. The vernacular issue I described doesn’t start and end with the pastor. The members of the church pick it up and carry it home, and from there it spreads. Which means a member who’s reading this with conviction has to start by listening to himself before he listens to anyone else. The phrases I described are likely already in your own vocabulary. If they are, the place to start is to take them out and replace them with words that mean what you actually mean. If you mean providence, say providence. If you mean that you prayed and made the best decision you could with the information available to you, say that. Replacing careless language with careful language is one of the few things every member can do without anyone’s permission.

The second thing concerns corporate prayer. You may not be the one asked to pray during service, but you probably will be at some point, in some setting. When that time comes, the casual speech and greetings are something you can’t do. You don’t have to read from the Book of Common Prayer to address God reverently. You just have to remember who you’re speaking to and let your first words reflect that. Some of the older men in your church already pray this way. Listen to how they pray, and when it’s your turn, follow their pattern instead of the pattern that’s become so common and irreverent.

The third thing is harder, because it insists on a conversation. If you’ve recognized the speech issue in your pastor, or if you’ve noticed the busyness problem in the way your church mainly operates, the right step is to have a respectful, private conversation with your pastor or one of your elders. Be specific about what you’ve noticed and bring the texts that informed your concern. Go in to ask honest questions and express what you’ve seen, and then trust the leadership to receive it the way faithful leadership should. They may receive it well, but they also may not. But the conversation itself is part of being a faithful member, and it costs you nothing to have it the right way.

The fourth thing is the calendar. The draw to be involved in everything is genuine, and a faithful member can’t pull back from the life of his church to protect his soul, because Hebrews 10 won’t let him. But he also doesn’t have to say yes to every request. The man who serves on six committees and signs up for every event is going to find that the depth of his fellowship with the Lord isn’t what it once was, and the way to address that is to evaluate what he’s actually been called to do and what he’s been recruited into because the church needed bodies. Stay involved in what genuinely fits the gifts God’s given you.

None of these things will fix a church on their own. But every one of them is a faithful response from a man who’s seen the problem and refuses to add to it.

That's the first half of what I want to address. The “decay” of reverence inside the walls of good churches is the foundation for everything else, but it doesn't stop with the vernacular used or the church calendar. When a church functions like this long enough, this will work its way into how new members are treated and shaped and how future leaders are chosen. I'll address that in the next article, releasing Thursday, May 14.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch.. you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

I’ve written this article over and over for a couple of years. I’ve worked on a draft here and there, but I’ve always ultimately decided against it. I don’t write about my health much at all, and it isn’t that I’m exactly private about it. It’s more that I’ve never desired to be the face of a disease. That sounds a bit counterproductive to my condition, I know. But there’s a trend that effectively takes a person’s malady and turns it into a platform, and I’ve seen enough of that to know I want no part of it.

I’ve also been cautious about writing from inside a situation, rather than from the far side of it. MS doesn’t really have a far side, at least not this side of heaven, but I think you understand the point.

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Still, some things are worth saying once, especially when the purpose isn’t to draw attention to the suffering itself but to the God who has ruled over it. MS Awareness Week gave me a fitting occasion to write something I’ve wanted to say for a long time, and if I’m going to say it, I want to say it the way it actually happened. I don’t want this to read like one of those polished sickness testimonies where everything gets sanded down to a clean little inspirational lesson. That doesn’t help anybody. It certainly wouldn’t have helped me in the early months after my diagnosis.

I’m also aware that there are people reading this who are further along in a much harder version of the same struggle. People with progressive forms of MS that mine hasn’t become, or people with cancers that won’t respond to treatment. There are those out there who have buried children or lost spouses, and I don’t want to write a single thing that suggests I’ve suffered the way they have, or that my relatively mild six-year experience entitles me to lecture them about theirs. What I can offer is what the Lord has done in me through what He has chosen to send, and the hope is that something in that will serve people whose situation looks different than mine.

So let me begin where this has to begin, with a sentence I wouldn’t have predicted writing six years ago.

I want to be careful about how that comes across. When I say I’m grateful for MS, that doesn’t mean I’m grateful for the numbness I occasionally get down my entire right side. It doesn’t mean I’m grateful for the brain fog and fatigue I fight every day. I’m not grateful for what I’ve had to give up or the daily concessions the disease demands. None of that stuff is pleasant, and I won’t be disingenuous by pretending it is. But what God has done through this disease is a different matter entirely, and that I am grateful for without reservation.

To understand why, you really need to know who I was before October of 2020. The diagnosis itself won’t make sense unless you see the man it hit. I’ll ask you to walk with me through some of that before we get to the disease, because the disease isn’t the main part of this story. The main part of this story is the Lord, who was at work on me well before October of 2020, and who used MS as one more instrument in a much longer project of sanctification.

I grew up in the South, which, in the 1990s Bible Belt, means you grow up with a familiarity with Jesus almost the same way you have a familiarity with sweet tea. He’s around, and He’s so normalized that saying His name out loud doesn’t cost you anything. So I knew the stories and enough Christian language to convince myself, like so many others around me, that I was a Christian.

The truth is, I had no real spiritual foundation. There was some church exposure, but there was no real gospel influence in my life in any meaningful way. I had sparse exposure to church. I played church league basketball in middle school, which meant I had to show up on Wednesday nights if I wanted to be on the team. That was about the extent of it for me. Once that ended after a couple of years, my church involvement was over, too. Jesus may have been familiar to me, but He wasn’t precious to me.

There’s a specific kind of confusion that doesn’t think of itself as confusion at all. It says the right words at the right time without ever having been broken by what the words mean. That was my condition, and I didn’t know it. I would’ve told you I was saved, and I would’ve argued the point if you’d challenged it. And I would’ve been dead wrong the entire time.

By high school, my attention narrowed to the usual things, football and chasing girls. I wasn’t hostile toward Christianity, I was just indifferent to it. Whatever my mouth might have said about faith on the rare occasions it came up, my life told a different story.

I met the woman who would become my wife in the summer of 1999, just as I was about to start my senior year of high school. I was driving around with a friend, and stopped at a gas station, where we both spotted her. My buddy did what teenage boys apparently feel obligated to do in those moments. He dared me to go talk to her. So I did, and I got her phone number. That was 1999, and we’ve been together ever since.

She grew up very differently from me. She was in church every time the doors were open, and her family was deeply involved in the Church of Christ. Melissa was never baptized in the Church of Christ, so according to their theology, she wasn’t saved. And that would be a partially accurate summation, because she wasn’t saved. Though her lack of salvation had nothing to do with her not being dunked, and everything to do with her never hearing the gospel. Her years of church involvement amounted to a lot of religious activity, and much of it produced resentment in her rather than love for Christ. She saw people who acted one way on Sunday and another way the rest of the week, and that kind of hypocrisy has a way of making a dead religion smell even worse to someone who already hates it.

She didn’t hate church because she was rebellious. She hated church because she recognized, probably rather profoundly, what was all around her. That recognition turned her off to all of it, and by the time we got married in 2003, she had no interest in going back.

So when we got married, we brought two very different backgrounds into the same house, and neither one of them included saving faith in Christ. I had a cultural familiarity with Christianity. She had church experience without the gospel. We were both lost, though we’d taken different roads to get there.

Life has a way of exposing that stuff.

When there’s no foundation underneath a marriage, the pressure doesn’t have to be too tense to reveal the cracks. It just has to be consistent, and what it revealed in me was a deep selfishness that I didn’t have the spiritual eyes to see at the time. I wasn’t leading Melissa the way a husband is commanded to lead and love his wife. What I was good at was chasing whatever made me happy and treating her concerns as interruptions to a life I thought I deserved.

Here’s a perfect example of exactly how ignorant and unaware I was. Around 2010, I bought a brand new truck. This was the first brand-new vehicle I ever owned, and I spent $30,000 without first talking to Melissa about it. I didn’t ask for her opinion or whether we could even afford it. And the delusional part, I drove home excited to show it to her, expecting her to be thrilled. When she wasn’t, in my mind, she was once again standing in the way of my happiness.

That’s how twisted sin makes a man. It takes selfishness and makes it feel like an affliction. It can take a husband’s refusal to lead and turn it into a husband’s right to be happy. I couldn’t see any of that at the time. I thought I was being a reasonable man, that was being treated unfairly by an unreasonable wife. Every conversation where she tried to raise a concern ended up filtered through the same worldview. She was standing in the way of me trying to be happy.

I tell that story now because I want to be honest about what the Lord saved me from, and I want to be honest about what the Lord had already been teaching Melissa to endure. By 2010, she had been carrying the weight of a marriage to an unsaved husband for seven years. Whatever God would eventually do in our home, He was already doing something in her long before He did anything in me.

Not long after the truck fiasco, a close friend of mine went through some serious struggles in his own life. Through those issues, I watched him reach out to his pastor, and I watched that pastor walk with him and help him. That was intriguing to me because I had no category for that kind of thing.

Eventually, my friend started seeing some light in his situation, and at that point, he started inviting me to church. Every week he would ask, and every week I had a new excuse. I had no intention of going, and so for weeks, I would politely decline. But he was persistent, and after ten or eleven weeks of not taking the hint, I finally told Melissa we probably should go just for the sake of being decent friends. So, we went.

I can honestly say I didn’t expect what I received. I expected the kind of church welcome lost people imagine when they have their defenses up. I thought people would stare. I thought I’d spend the whole service feeling judged, and that judgment would give me a reason not to go back.

None of that happened.

What I walked into was handshakes and hugs and a room full of people who were honestly glad to see me. Remember, this was small-town Southern America, so I already knew most of the people there. And you know what? That reaction disarmed me. I’d gone planning to be a good friend and then be done with it, but the truth is, the love and the warmth of those people made me go back.

It was after the second Sunday that the pastor told my friend he wanted the three of us to get together for lunch. I didn’t think too much about it. I just assumed he wanted to get to know me a little better, and that was the truth. But God had other plans, because at the table that day I heard the Gospel for the first time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d heard the words before. I lived in the Bible Belt, remember? Of course, I’d heard the Gospel and knew the story. But that day, God gave me ears to hear the Gospel for the first time in my life. My sin was exposed to me in a way it had never been exposed before, and the Christ I had treated as familiar and insignificant suddenly became essential. No, I didn’t walk an aisle during a church invitation or pray some polished prayer. But I walked out of that restaurant a different man.

I remember telling my wife later that day, I thought I’d gotten saved. Her reaction was, “Saved from what?” My response was more profound than I even understood in the moment, but it’s what I honestly felt as I said, “I think I got saved from myself.”

I wasn’t fully aware of things then, but I was a dead man walking. I was dead in sin, and at that Applebee’s table on August 27, 2013, God breathed new life into me spiritually. It wasn’t a rededication or some kind of religious epiphany. No, I walked into that restaurant as dry bones, and God raised me to life.

About six months later, He saved Melissa, too.

I’d love to tell you everything immediately became easy, but that’d be a lie. The gospel didn’t sprinkle a little religion on an already healthy marriage. What it did was resurrect two spiritually dead people living under the same roof, and then the Lord began teaching us how to live as new creations. That kind of work is beautiful, but it’s not always neat and tidy. There were things in our marriage that had to be reckoned with. There were years of sinful patterns that didn’t dissolve the moment we were both converted. What regeneration gave us was the capacity to do the work. The work itself still had to be done, and in some ways, we’re still doing it, and I suspect we will be until the Lord calls one of us home.

Now, this is where we skip a whole lot and fast-forward over quite a bit. Remember, this isn’t an article about my life, but rather about MS and the impact it’s had on my life.

But first, I do need to say one thing about radio. Because the story doesn’t make sense, especially as I attempt to explain what the disease has taken from me, if I don’t first explain what radio had given me.

I never grew up dreaming of being on the radio. It wasn’t some childhood ambition for me. It was something I just fell into and fell in love with. I started out as a part-time weekend board-op for sports or remotes. Over 18 months, I worked my way into a full-time role, and as I said, it got into my blood. I fell in love with every aspect of this business. I loved the timing and the pressure of it. That stuff fascinated me. To hit a post cleaner than the time before was a thrill for me. There’s a flow to live radio that you either have or you don’t, and once you have it, the microphone feels like an extension of you, rather than a tool you’re using.

For twenty years, that was my world. Same station that I never thought I’d leave. I honestly believed, at some point, I’d buy the place. That was the trajectory I was on. I’d turned down larger opportunities over the years because nothing appealed to me the way my hometown did. Some men are built for ladder climbing. I wasn’t. I was built for the place I was born in, and I figured I’d spend the rest of my career there.

Then the Lord opened a door I never expected.

My path to Wretched I couldn’t have orchestrated if I tried. When God has His hands on something, He uses people and circumstances that seem insurmountable to us, but are nothing to Him. Nothing will ever alter the providential will of God. You are where you are right this moment because God deemed you to be there, and He used people and circumstances to lead you there. As He did with me.

Without going into too many details, I met Todd Friel in February 2020. By August 2020, my family and I were living in Atlanta, GA, and I was the producer of the nationally syndicated Wretched Radio.

The Lord had been arranging this for longer than I’d realized, but that wasn’t all He was arranging.

Three months later, the first symptoms came.

It was a Sunday when I woke up and noticed the right side of my body was numb. My arm, leg, and part of my face didn’t feel right. I was off balance as I walked, and my thinking felt slowed. At first, I thought it would pass. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and just blamed it on that, because that’s what you do when something strange happens, you don’t want to acknowledge. You find reasons not to mention it to anyone.

The next day at work, Todd noticed something was off and asked me what was going on. I told him my whole right side felt weird, and I was falling over when I walked. Told him about the slowed thinking and hard time focusing, which is what he noticed as we were doing radio. He told me I needed to see a doctor, but I’m stubborn and said I wanted to wait a couple of days. This is where you and your wife working in the same place can be a benefit and a detriment, but only a detriment if you want to continue being stubborn, I guess. Todd went straight from me to Melissa and told her to take me to a doctor right then. Not tomorrow. Right then.

But, to speed this up again, and not get into unnecessary details, I went to the ER that day, where I was given a diagnosis of possible MS. Possible because there’s only so much they’ll say in the ER. A lot of testing by a neurologist has to be done, and a lot of things need to be ruled out before they finally give an MS diagnosis. The official diagnosis did, indeed, come in January 2021.

So, quickly, if you don’t know much about multiple sclerosis, it attacks the central nervous system. It damages the protective covering around the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, which affects how signals travel between the brain and the body. That’s the simple explanation. The fleshed-out, real-life version is harder to put into words because the disease doesn’t affect every person the same way. Different people have different symptoms. Some people have more numbness, and some have more cognitive difficulties than others. For me, fatigue and cognitive function have been my biggest challenges.

I could handle numbness better than I could handle losing my cognitive reaction. That may sound strange, but if you’ve lived your professional life by being reactively quick, you understand why it mattered to me. Live radio is a different kind of beast. It’s not as life-or-death as some jobs where thinking on your feet is critical. It’s not law enforcement, or being a doctor, nurse, or fireman, or a 911 operator, or a pilot, or any number of other professions. But there is a specific kind of mental processing that has to happen immediately. As a person hears something, they simultaneously process it, decide whether and how to respond, before the moment disappears. I loved that about radio. I had spent years doing it at a high level.

After MS, I couldn’t do it the same way anymore.

I’d sit with Todd and feel the delay. He’d say something, and by the time my mind found the thing I might have added, we’re 60 seconds past the moment, the conversation’s moved on. It wasn’t that I had nothing to add. It was that my brain didn’t pull it up in time. For a man whose life had been lived on a live microphone, that was a kind of death.

That’s the part people may not understand. The grief wasn’t only medical. I was grieving the loss of a version of myself I trusted entirely too much.

There was a period in that first year after the diagnosis where I felt like I was watching another man do my job. I knew what to do, could still even do most of it. But the part that made me who I was on the radio, it was gone, and you have to try to put yourself in my shoes to fully grasp it.

I spent 20 years developing skills in small-market USA, skills I knew would translate to larger areas. Now, here I am. The opportunity has come, I’m on national radio, on 1,000+ radio stations daily, doing unscripted radio about my favorite thing in the world - theology. I should thrive. And then, BOOM. My ability to communicate and operate in that setting was taken away.

Radio people know what I’m describing. If you haven’t done live daily radio, the closest comparison would be losing a step as an athlete. The body and mind are still in operation, but not at the level they were. In live radio, just like on a football field, there’s no way to hide a lost step. The microphone doesn’t lie. The audience doesn’t know you’re doing everything you can to compensate. They just hear what you said, or what you didn’t say.

Now, I do want to pause here, because if this article stops at just an MS diagnosis and loss of cognitive ability, it’s really just a testimony to my professional life.

But what nearly six years of living with this has exposed is that God was doing something long before the disease arrived.

Before MS, I built so much of my identity around being quick-witted and having impeccable timing. I liked being able to respond in the moment and being the guy who always had the right thing to say. Some of that was personality, and some of it was training. But far too much of it was pride.

Back home, before I came to Wretched, I had a podcast with some friends. On that podcast, I was sharp-tongued. I didn’t mind calling out false teachers or saying the hard thing that made people uncomfortable. Now, there certainly is a biblical place for that. False teaching must be confronted, and the church has become too allergic to the kind of warning these days.

But my problem wasn’t that I believed errors should be confronted. My problem was that I liked being the one doing it.

I didn’t always ask whether a situation needed my opinion, or whether what I was about to say would serve the people listening. I didn’t consider my tone and whether it matched the seriousness of the topic. I had the ability to speak and think quickly and with clarity, and I treated that ability like it was the same thing as wisdom.

It wasn’t.

Then MS took that away from me, and God used that loss to teach me restraint. He made me sit in silence, for months, and watch Todd.

What I learned from Todd, through his example, was that the ability to say something doesn’t mean the specific moment requires it, and that a man can be technically right while still being spiritually careless.

Proverbs says,

“When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, But he who restrains his lips is wise.”
(Proverbs 10:19)

James says,

“This you know, my beloved brethren. But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger”
(James 1:19)

I used to read that as a command and as an instruction. Now I read it with gratitude for the affliction that’s forced me to obey in ways I avoided before.

I sat with Todd on the radio for months, trying to catch up to a conversation, and through it, the Lord taught me grace and humility and the discernment I lacked before. He taught me not everything needs my opinion, and that even when something does need a response, the question isn’t whether I can be clever. The question is whether what I’m about to add is actually helpful to the person hearing it.

Todd was patient with me, and still is, in ways I’ll never be able to repay. He could’ve been frustrated or decided this wasn’t working out. He could’ve justifiably concluded that I wasn’t the man he hired. He’d hired someone with abilities he no longer possessed. Instead, he graciously gave me room to find my way back, and the Lord used his patience as one of the instruments of my sanctification. If I’d been working for anyone else during that period, I’m not sure I would’ve made it through the adjustment.

All that to simply say, if it took a disease to make me close my mouth long enough to listen, I’ll gladly take it.

Again, I thank God for MS, but I don’t thank Him because MS is pleasant. I thank Him because He’s used it to make me more dependent on Christ. I thank Him because He’s done spiritual work through it that I’m convinced wouldn’t have happened any other way.

That doesn’t make the disease good. It means God is good enough to use it. Those are two different claims, and faithful Christians need to be able to hold them both at the same time. If you conflate them, you get the prosperity gospel. If you separate them entirely, you get a God who only works around the edges of a world He can’t really control. The biblical picture is that a good God uses painful things for holy ends, and that the goodness of the ends doesn’t sterilize the hardness of the means.

MS took my quick thinking and wit and slowed me down. At first, I only felt the loss, but over time, I began to see the gift inside the limitation. The writing I do now requires a slower man than the one I used to be. Before MS, I could talk quickly, but I didn’t sit with things long enough. The Lord slowed me down, and the slower pace has become fruitful.

I say that carefully, because MS is frustrating. Don’t hear that it isn’t. There are days when my mind feels like it’s moving through mud. There are conversations where I know what I want to say, but the words don’t come when I need them.

Even so, I can look at the Lord and see His kindness.

I also don’t want to waste this. MS took things I once built my identity on, but God gave me something better through the loss. He built a deeper dependence on His word than I had before. His sovereignty has become more than a doctrine I can defend.

I wouldn’t have chosen this for myself, but I can look back now and say the Lord has been kind, and I can look ahead to whatever comes next and say with Job,

“Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.”
(Job 13:15)

That’s what MS has done in me.

The hard hand of God is still the hand of a Father. He knows how to bend His children without breaking them, and He knows what to take, and what to give back in its place.

This isn’t the life I planned. It’s the life He gave me.

And in the end, that is enough.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch.. you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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On April 12th, Pastor Michael Grant released a live podcast on his YouTube channel titled, “What Does It Mean To Mark & Avoid?” in reference to Justin Peters and Jim Osman for hosting Gabe Poirot on Justin’s YouTube channel. Grant’s argument was straightforward. Romans 16:17-18 and 2 John 9-11 prohibit the kind of extended, on-camera engagement Justin and Jim gave Gabe. By providing Gabe two and a half hours to speak, even for the purpose of rebuke, Justin violated the plain meaning of both passages and set a dangerous precedent for the wider discernment community.

I watched the full podcast, and I’ve worked through his reasoning carefully. I want to engage his argument seriously because I believe Pastor Grant is a sincere brother who takes Scripture’s authority with the seriousness it deserves, and because the question he raises matters to how the church handles false teaching in the public square. But I also believe Grant’s argument rests on a hermeneutical failure, and that failure is worth walking through in detail because it’s the same failure, methodologically, that enables the heavenly tourism industry I’ve spent the last two weeks writing about in my own work on Gabe Poirot. What Grant does to Romans 16 and 2 John is the same kind of move Gabe Poirot does to 2 Corinthians 12. Both men claim to be reading the text “plainly” while skipping the interpretive work that faithful reading of Scripture actually requires. And the result, in both cases, is a conclusion the text won’t support when it’s examined with care.

Grant said something important in his podcast that I want to honor throughout this piece. Multiple times across his broadcast, he invited correction from Scripture. His exact words, near the end of the program, were,

Share Wretched Jim

I’ve taken that invitation seriously, and what follows is an attempt to do exactly what Grant asked for. Using the scripture, engaging it grammatically and historically, and showing the work at every step so the argument can be evaluated on its biblical merits.

Let me state Grant’s position as fairly as I can, using his own words where possible, so there’s no question about what I’m responding to.

Grant argued that Justin Peters was wrong, biblically, to host Gabe Poirot for a two-and-a-half-hour conversation on his YouTube channel, and that this misjudgment was clear from a plain reading of the two aforementioned passages.

He quoted Romans 16:17-18,

“Now I urge you brethren note those or mark them who cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you learned and avoid them. For those who are such do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ but their own belly, and by smooth words and flattering speech they deceive the hearts of the simple.”

He then quoted 2 John 9-11,

“Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds.”

Grant’s explicit claim was these texts mean what they appear to mean on the surface, and the surface meaning prohibits the kind of engagement Justin conducted. His exact quote was,

Later, he said,

Grant acknowledged the text doesn’t prohibit saying hello to someone in the grocery store, and that John MacArthur’s own commentary notes the passage is primarily about hospitality and aid rather than a casual greeting. But he maintained that Justin’s warm introduction of Gabe and the extended dialogue that followed crossed the line the text draws.

Grant also argued, citing MacArthur’s commentary on Romans 16, that Paul’s model wasn’t debate or dialogue with false teachers but rebuke, and the Apostle Paul,

Grant’s conclusion was that Justin’s format gave Gabe control of the narrative, and the overall effect was to benefit Gabe rather than to expose him.

That’s the argument. I want to respond to it directly, but the response has to begin with a prior question that Grant’s argument never actually takes up.. the question of what it means to read a biblical text responsibly in the first place.

The phrase Grant uses repeatedly throughout his podcast is some version of

He treats this phrase as though it settles the interpretive question. It doesn’t.

Every biblical text was written in a specific language, by a specific author, to a specific audience, at a specific historical moment, addressing a specific situation. The Reformers called the method of reading Scripture with attention to those specifics the grammatical-historical method.

Grammatical-historical interpretation requires three things at a minimum. First, the text must be understood in its original language, attending to the grammatical structures the original author used. Second, it has to be located in its original historical setting, with attention to the cultural practices and the specific occasion the author was addressing. And third, any application to the present has to be bridged carefully, accounting for what’s changed between the original setting and the modern one, while protecting the fundamental principle the author was articulating.

Grant’s argument skips the second and third steps entirely. He reads Romans 16 and 2 John as though Paul and John were addressing modern podcast hosts. He doesn’t ask what cultural practices were being addressed or what the specific occasion of the letter was. He simply takes the English translation and applies it directly to a modern platform that the original authors couldn’t possibly have anticipated. The interpretation sounds literal, but it’s actually acultural. It treats the text as though it stands alone.

That same hermeneutical failure is what causes Gabe Poirot to read 2 Corinthians 12 as biblical precedent for his own 29-chapter book. He’s making the same move Grant makes. He takes the text at surface value and applies it directly to his own situation as though no exegetical work were required between the first century and the twenty-first. The result is an interpretation of 2 Corinthians 12 that’s wholly inaccurate. Gabe reads the text “plainly” and concludes it justifies his book. Grant reads Romans 16 and 2 John “plainly” and concludes they prohibit Justin’s interview. Both conclusions are equally unsupported by the texts when the texts are examined properly.

The method is the problem.

The Romans 16 Work

Paul wrote Romans from Corinth sometime in the winter of AD 56 or the early months of AD 57. The letter was written to a church he hadn’t yet visited, a mixed Jewish and Gentile congregation meeting in multiple house churches across Rome.

Chapter 16 is the closing section. The bulk of the chapter consists of personal greetings to twenty-six named individuals Paul knew in the Roman church. The warning in verses 17-18 sits between the greetings to specific Roman believers (verses 1-16) and the closing greetings from Paul’s co-laborers at Corinth (verses 21-23). In other words, it’s a pastoral warning to a specific church about a specific kind of threat, delivered at the close of a letter that spent fifteen chapters developing a theology of the gospel.

The immediate context of the warning is the pastoral situation Paul addressed in chapters 14 and 15. Those chapters deal with tensions in the Roman church between Jewish and Gentile believers over matters of food and the observance of special days. Paul pleaded for unity and laid out the theological grounds for common acceptance. As he closed the letter, he turned to a specific concern. Some might enter the Roman congregations and take advantage of existing tensions by introducing teaching contrary to what the believers had already learned, creating division (dichostasias) and laying stumbling (skandala) blocks within the body.

The Greek verb Paul uses in verse 17 is skopein, meaning "to watch closely.” The command is skopeite, present imperative, and it’s directed to the gathered church. The object of the watching is tous tas dichostasias kai ta skandala... poiountas, “those who are causing divisions and occasions of stumbling.” The participle poiountas is present tense, signifying ongoing activity. These aren’t hypothetical teachers. They’re people actively causing divisions among the Roman congregations.

The verb Paul uses in the second half of verse 17, translated “avoid” or “turn away from,” is ekklinete, from ekklinō. The word means to steer away from. It carries the idea of refusing to go down the path these teachers are on and refusing to give them the hearing they want.

All of this is happening in the context of the local gathered church. Paul’s speaking to the house churches in Rome and telling them that when such teachers show up in their gatherings, they’re to identify them publicly, and keep them from gaining a foothold in the body. That’s what the command means in its original setting.

The reason this matters for Grant’s argument is that the first-century gathering was the only platform available to false teachers. There were no podcasts or YouTube channels. If a teacher wanted to spread his teaching, he did it by traveling from city to city, arriving at a local church, being given the opportunity to address the assembly, and using that opportunity to introduce his teaching to the body. Paul’s command is addressed to that reality. Don’t grant the platform of the assembly to teachers whose teaching contradicts the gospel you’ve received. Watch for them and refuse to give them access to your body.

Connecting that command to the twenty-first century requires asking what the functional equivalent of the first-century assembly is today. The answer is the local church. The command still has a direct and original meaning when applied to the modern church. A church shouldn’t give its pulpit to a false teacher. A pastor shouldn’t extend the platform of the gathered body to someone whose teaching contradicts the gospel. An elder board shouldn’t invite Kenneth Copeland or Joseph Z to address the congregation. That’s exactly what Paul forbids.

But the functional equivalent of the first-century assembly isn’t a discernment podcast, because a discernment podcast isn’t the gathered church, and doesn’t operate according to the purposes of the gathered church. A discernment podcast is clearly designed to examine and publicly refute false teaching. Bringing a false teacher into that format for the stated purpose of cross-examining him is the categorical opposite of giving him the platform of the assembly. It's close to what Paul himself modeled on Mars Hill in Acts 17, where he stood among the Athenian philosophers and refuted them publicly in their own hearing. Paul didn't give the Epicureans and Stoics a pulpit in a church, he engaged them in a public forum, and he used that forum to proclaim the truth against their error. That's the category Justin's interview belongs in.

Grant’s reading breaks down this distinction. He treats any extended engagement with a false teacher as equivalent to giving him the platform of the church. The grammatical-historical method won’t support that interpretation. Paul’s addressing a specific cultural practice, and the modern equivalents of that practice are things like pulpit invitations and joint ministry partnerships that effectively legitimize a false teacher as a brother. Those are the actual modern violations of Romans 16:17-18. A discernment ministry's YouTube interview isn’t one of them.

The 2 John Work

2 John was written by the Apostle John near the end of the first century, likely between AD 85 and AD 95, from Ephesus. The letter is addressed to “the chosen lady and her children,” which most faithful commentators understand as a local church and its members, though some read it as addressed to a specific Christian woman and her household. Either way, the setting is a local congregation in Asia Minor facing a specific pastoral situation.

The situation John addresses is evident in the letter itself. Verse 7 names the problem.

“Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.” (2 John 7)

The teaching John’s responding to is a system that denied the genuine incarnation of Christ. The teachers promoting this doctrine were traveling through the churches of Asia Minor and seeking to set themselves up through standard first-century Christian hospitality.

Christian hospitality, in the first century, wasn’t just normal, common courtesy. It was a moral and social obligation. Traveling teachers depended on it. When one would arrive in a town, the expectation was a believer in that town would receive him into his house, give him food and a place to stay, and also money to help with his traveling expenses when he left. But, while he was there, it was typical to give him the platform of the household to address the family and the larger local assembly. The entire infrastructure of the first-century church relied on this practice. Paul’s own ministry depended on it, and 3 John, in fact, is a letter commending the practice toward faithful traveling teachers like Demetrius.

2 John addresses the same practice in reverse. When the traveling teacher is a false teacher, the command is to refuse him hospitality that the culture would otherwise require. Verse 10 reads, ei tis erchetai pros humas kai tautēn tēn didachēn ou pherei, mē lambanete auton eis oikian kai chairein autō mē legete.

“If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house, and do not speak to him a greeting.” (2 John 10)

Three grammatical characteristics of that verse matter for a faithful interpretation.

First, the phrase lambanete auton eis oikian.. “receive him into your house.” The noun oikia in this context is the household, not a hotel room for casual lodging. In the first-century context, the home was the center of early church life. Churches met in homes, and meals were the main expression of Christian fellowship. The verb lambanō here is the verb for taking someone in and making him part of your home.

Second, the term chairein was the formal greeting that indicated “you’re welcome here as one of us.” The word served a social function closer to what we’d now call an endorsement. When you expressed chairein to a traveling teacher, you were saying to everyone watching that you stood behind him and that your household would provide for him. To refuse chairein was to withhold that endorsement, not to ignore the person’s existence.

Third, the phrase koinōnei tois ergois autou tois ponērois.. “shares in his evil deeds.” The verb koinōneō means to participate in. John’s point is giving hospitality to a false teacher was, in effect, a partnership in his ministry. The teacher depended on the hospitality to continue his work. The host is actively enabling the spreading of the false teaching.

All of this is what John is addressing. He’s telling the churches of Asia Minor not to participate, through the cultural system of hospitality, in the spread of teaching that was circulating among some traveling preachers.

John MacArthur’s commentary on the passage, which Grant himself quotes, explains the historical situation correctly. MacArthur writes false teachers in John’s day “were typically itinerant preachers who needed aid and support,” and that “having established themselves in homes, the false teachers hoped to eventually worm their way into the churches.” MacArthur understood the text addresses a specific practice and that restriction is against participating in the spread of false teaching through that system. What MacArthur doesn’t do is apply the restriction as a blanket ban on all forms of engagement, regardless of format and purpose.

Bringing this into the twenty-first century means asking what first-century hospitality looks like now. Once you ask that question, the answer becomes fairly plain. The modern equivalent of the hospitality John forbids would be things like promoting a false teacher’s books, inviting him to speak at your conference, funding his ministry, or giving him your pulpit. It would also include the kind of public friendliness that presents him to others as a trustworthy Christian voice. Those are the practices that place a modern believer in the role of the first-century host who received the traveling teacher and stood behind him. Those are the kinds of things the text forbids.

A public, adversarial examination of a false teacher’s claims on a discernment ministry’s YouTube channel isn’t the modern equivalent of first-century hospitality. It’s actually the exact opposite of first-century hospitality. Gabe wasn’t being welcomed as a brother, and his ongoing ministry hasn’t been supported. He was brought into a setting where his claims were challenged, and his errors were exposed in his own words.

That’s not lambanete eis oikian. It’s much closer to Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18. Elijah didn’t shrink back from the conflict, he actually brought it into public view so the lies could be seen for what they were before the watching nation. That’s not what 2 John forbids. What 2 John forbids is giving false teachers the kind of hospitality that would treat them as brothers and advance their ministry.

Grant’s breakdown at this point gets to the heart of his hermeneutical failure. He reads the English, “receive him into your house nor greet him” as though it forbids any verbal engagement at all, then admits that a casual greeting in a grocery store doesn’t fall under the command. Once that’s admitted, the issue’s settled. The text deals with a specific cultural practice, not with every form of verbal acknowledgment. Faithful application, then, requires identifying the modern equivalent of that practice.

Grant doesn’t do that work. He applies the text broadly, then makes exceptions for situations he considers reasonable. That’s not grammatical-historical interpretation.

One of the clearest ways to test an interpretation is to ask whether it ends up condemning practices the church has long recognized as faithful. Grant’s reading of Romans 16 and 2 John, if applied consistently, would put almost every major act of apologetics and discernment in the church’s history under suspicion.

Athanasius debated Arius publicly at the Council of Nicaea and spent decades in steady written communication with Arian theologians. The entire post-Nicene controversy unfolded as an extended dialogue between orthodoxy and heresy. Augustine devoted a large part of his ministry to ongoing public dialogue with the Manichaeans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians, debating Faustus the Manichaean in person, writing lengthy essays against Donatist bishops, and corresponding with Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum.

Luther debated Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation in 1519. Luther also engaged Erasmus in print with The Bondage of the Will. Calvin engaged Servetus, Osiander, Bolsec, and other false teachers in public exchanges.

R.C. Sproul repeatedly engaged in public dialogue with Catholics, while James White has built a significant portion of his ministry around public debates.

The pattern is evident. Grant’s reading of Romans 16 and 2 John, applied consistently, would condemn a large portion of historical apologetics and public theology. It would’ve forbidden Athanasius’s challenge of Arius, Augustine’s engagement with Pelagius, Luther’s debate at Leipzig, Calvin’s answer to Servetus, and Sproul’s dialogue with Catholics. A reading that produces those conclusions can’t be the correct reading of the text.

What the text actually prohibits, when read in its original context, is the extending of the church’s platform and the endorsement of false teachers in ways that approve of them as brothers. That restriction has power in our modern context, and faithful shepherds need to apply it vigilantly. But the restriction doesn’t forbid the public examination or the cross-examination of false teachers in settings designed for discernment. If it did, the church would’ve lost every significant theological battle it has ever fought, because every significant theological battle has required exactly that kind of public engagement.

Grant said near the end of his broadcast,

I’ve taken that invitation seriously across this piece, and I want to close by addressing him directly.

Pastor Grant, if you read this, I want you to hear it as a brother engaging you in the same spirit you’ve said you welcome. I believe your concerns about the state of discernment ministry in contemporary American evangelicalism are legitimate and important. The decline of marking-and-avoiding has produced weak-kneed Christians who refuse to call a false teacher a false teacher when the moment demands it. Those are problems, and you’re right to name them. I’ve written about the same problems from a different angle in my own work, and I’d stand shoulder to shoulder with you in addressing them.

But the argument you made against Justin and Jim doesn’t hold. The interpretive method you applied to Romans 16 and 2 John 9-11 is a method the Reformers rejected when they recovered grammatical-historical interpretation from the allegorical tradition. Taking the English translation at face value and applying it directly to a modern format, without asking what the original author was addressing in the original setting, isn’t the plain meaning of the text. It’s a flattening of the text that skips the exegetical work faithful reading requires.

The texts you cited address real sins. The affording of the church platform to false teachers, and hospitality that endorses the spreading of false teaching. Those sins are real, and they deserve the rebuke you’re trying to deliver. But they aren’t what Justin did. Justin brought a false teacher onto a platform specifically designed to cross-examine him and expose his errors in his own words. That’s the opposite of the sins the texts are addressing.

Your call to apply Scripture carefully is a call I honor. But applying Scripture carefully means doing the grammatical and historical work to locate the text in its original setting, and then faithfully connecting it to the present. The result of that work, in this case, is that Justin didn’t violate the texts. He exemplified what the texts would’ve required of him if Gabe had sought a platform in his local church. And he added to that the additional service of publicly documenting Gabe’s errors in a format that will now serve the church for years as a case study in how false testimony collapses under faithful cross-examination.

I’m grateful for your willingness to name false teachers publicly when many wouldn’t. And I’m grateful that you invited correction from Scripture at the end of your own broadcast, because that invitation is the ground rule that makes brotherly engagement possible. You said you wanted to be shown from the Bible. I hope this piece has done what you asked. And I trust, because of the character you’ve displayed in your own work, that if the argument is sound, you’ll receive it in the spirit it’s offered.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch.. you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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Gabe Poirot’s book, 18 Days in Heaven, is out, and it’s everything his interviews promised it would be, emotionally compelling and theologically disastrous.

I wrote a piece a couple of weeks back evaluating the two-and-a-half-hour Zoom conversation between Poirot, Justin Peters, and Jim Osman. In that conversation, Poirot systematically walked back claim after claim under basic theological pressure. He retracted a direct quote he’d attributed to God. He conceded that Jesus is omniscient after having said publicly that Jesus “was never aware” of what he was thinking. He backed off his descriptions of nurseries and libraries in heaven, telling Justin and Jim that those explanations didn’t represent his “full heart.”

His book changes the landscape of that conversation because the claims Poirot was willing to soften verbally are now in print, permanently, with his name attached. He can’t walk them back anymore. And the book is far worse than anything he said on camera.

I’ve read the entire thing, and what follows is my evaluation.

The first thing I want to point out comes from the bonus chapter at the end of the book. In that chapter, Poirot writes,

I want that statement to serve as the foundation for this entire review. Because if that’s the standard Poirot set for himself, his own book fails on virtually every page.

The book describes libraries in heaven filled with eternal wisdom, universities where revelation never ceases, monuments that tell God’s story, mansions handcrafted by Jesus as a carpenter, a sapphire floor in the throne room, flowers and trees that sing in harmony, colors that can be heard and tasted, prayers that build literal bridges between earth and heaven, fallen angels that continue to interbreed with humanity after the flood, “Gabriel” written on the scars of Christ’s wrists, Father God speaking specific sentences about Gabe before creation, and Jesus speaking prophetic words over Gabe at various ages throughout his childhood.

None of that’s in the written Word of God. Every one of those claims goes beyond Scripture. Poirot says he hasn’t offered his opinion and has “simply given you His Word” in a book where he describes Jesus as roughly 5’11” with purple eyes. The disconnect here is so extraordinary that it’s hard to know whether Poirot is being dishonest or whether he genuinely doesn’t understand what “go beyond the written Word” means. Either way, the disclaimer crumbles under the weight of the book it’s written in.

The contradictions in the book are significant and follow a pattern. Poirot consistently makes two claims that can’t coexist, apparently without noticing the tension between them.

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In Chapter 5, he writes the Father “knew everything about me” and “saw me as if I were Jesus Himself.” One chapter later, in Chapter 6, he writes, “He sincerely had no memory of my sin. There was no record of my mistakes in heaven.” The Father who “knew everything” about Gabe just one chapter earlier now had no memory of his sin. To know everything about someone and yet remember none of their sin is impossible. Those claims are mutually exclusive.

In Chapter 16, Poirot describes the throne room, “There was nothing I could hide. There was nothing I could fake or put on a show about. The very oxygen of heaven only exists in 100 percent truth.” In Chapter 6, he says, “In His very presence, my sin did not exist because it wasn’t who I was.” If heaven operates in 100 percent truth and nothing can be hidden there, then Gabe’s sin history is part of that truth. It’s a historical fact. Saying it “did not exist” in a realm where only truth exists is a contradiction Poirot never attempts to resolve.

Chapter 1 closes with the thesis statement, “Heaven is not just a location. Heaven is Him.” The rest of the book proceeds to describe heaven as the most elaborately detailed location in the history of the heavenly tourism genre.. mansions, libraries, universities, golden streets, pearly gates, sapphire floors, mountains, beaches, cities, a river of life, an ocean, canyons, flowers, butterflies. He spends chapters cataloging the geography of a place he says isn’t really a place.

In Chapter 9, Poirot writes, “The entire time I saw how Jesus was only focused on me, throughout all of eternity. He could never take His eyes off me.” Throughout the rest of the book, Jesus functions as a tour guide.. “He then took me to a place where He showed me a film” (Ch. 9), “Jesus took me on another timeline” (Ch. 14), “I was then taken back to the time Jesus spoke” (Ch. 16), “Jesus then took me to another place on the circular timeline” (Ch. 27). Jesus can’t be simultaneously locked in exclusive eye contact with Gabe and conducting multi-chapter guided tours of heaven’s resources. The intimate-gaze narrative and the tour narrative require a different Jesus, and both are functioning in the same book.

The Christological problems go deeper than the book simply contradicting itself. The claim in Chapter 6 that Jesus “sincerely had no memory” doesn’t just conflict with what Poirot wrote in Chapter 5. It also conflicts with what Poirot himself conceded in the Zoom interview with Jim and Justin, when he said, “Of course, he knew. He already knew. It was not that he was unknowing.” Poirot told them to read the book, and they’d understand his heart. Fair enough. But readers are also entitled to understand his words. The book says Jesus “sincerely had no memory.” Either that concession wasn’t true, or the book isn’t. Both can’t be true.

But the damage in Chapter 6 goes further than that single line. Poirot puts a direct quote in Jesus’ mouth, “My brother, why are you looking for that which does not exist?”“My brother, why are you looking for that which does not exist?” The judicial language in Hebrews 8:12, where God chooses to no longer hold forgiven sins against the believer, is a legal declaration. Poirot’s version is something else entirely. This is Jesus presented as genuinely confused about why Gabe is looking for something. The phrasing “that which does not exist” means Jesus is saying Gabe’s sin literally has no existence in any form. That contradicts every text in the New Testament that describes Christ’s ongoing knowledge of His people.

That’s the Jesus of Scripture. Poirot’s Jesus can’t do what the biblical Christ does by nature.

Chapter 6 also describes “Gabriel” written on the scars of Christ’s wrists. That sentimentalizes the atonement and strips it of its true character. Christ didn’t die for Gabe to the exclusion of everyone else. He died for His people. The scars point to what Christ suffered in order to redeem His people. Putting one man’s name on the Savior’s wounds turns the atonement into a private souvenir.

The open theism in this book is more deeply embedded than the one quote Poirot later tried to retract in the interview.

In the Zoom conversation, Poirot publicly repented of attributing to God the words, “you are even better than I thought you would be.” Justin rightly identified the open theism in that statement. It presents God as surprised, one who learns new information that he didn’t previously know. Poirot retracted it.

But the book is built on the same theological framework. Chapter 25 says it outright, “God is not in control or causing everything that occurs on the earth. He is a gentleman.” The same chapter goes on to argue that Jesus “couldn’t” do miracles in Nazareth because human free will limited His ability. So this is bigger than one bad sentence that got retracted in an interview. It’s a theological system. Chapter 7 makes that even clearer, putting these words in the Father’s mouth before creation, “This one is the one I have always wanted. He is going to be just like me. Finally, one I can fellowship with and talk with.” That word “finally” implies God lacked fellowship before creating Gabe, which denies the eternal, perfect fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Trinity didn’t need Gabe. God has never lacked anything.

Then, in the same chapter where Poirot says God isn’t in control, he quotes Romans 8:28,

He even adds, “Notice the contingency there.” But the text says “all things,” and Poirot just said God isn’t causing everything. The verse and his theology can’t coexist, and they appear in the same chapter.

The book's soteriology confirms this. The salvation prayer at the end, “Jesus, yes. I say yes. I am done living life on my own. I want to know You today. I say yes to what You say.” There’s no mention of sin as offense against a holy God, no substitutionary atonement, no repentance, and no faith in the finished work of Christ. This is the same “give Him your yes” non-gospel that Justin and Jim identified in the interview, now permanently published as the book’s closing invitation.

The 2 Corinthians 12 problem is now worse than it was during the interview, because Poirot addresses the passage directly in his bonus chapter.

He quotes 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 as biblical precedent for his book, “I was caught up to the third heaven fourteen years ago... But I do know that I was caught up to paradise and heard things so astounding that they cannot be expressed in words, things no human is allowed to tell.”

The verse actually reads, in reliable and literal translations,

He quotes the passage that says “words, which a man is not permitted to speak” as the foundation for writing 30-something thousand words telling those things. The text he chose as his defense is the text that condemns his entire project.

Two facts from 2 Corinthians 12 apply directly to this book. Paul was forbidden to speak about what he heard and deliberately refused to let the experience become a qualification for his ministry or authority.

Instead, Paul boasted only in his weaknesses, specifically so no one would credit him with more than what they see in his life or hear from his mouth. Poirot published 29 chapters on the experience. He’s built, or is attempting to build, an entire public ministry on these claims. And God gave Paul a thorn in the flesh for the express purpose of keeping him from pride over the revelations he received.

Nothing about Poirot’s public ministry suggests that kind of humbling. It reflects the very self-exaltation God was protecting Paul from.

As I pointed out in my previous evaluation of Poirot’s conversation with Jim and Justin, Poirot tried to soften the force of arrēta by treating it as “beyond capacity to describe” rather than “not permitted to speak.” But that still creates a problem for him. If Paul was describing something too great for words, he still kept quiet. Poirot wrote a book. So the problem doesn’t go away by changing the definition. It only changes the slant of the contradiction. Either Poirot’s experience wasn’t as profound as Paul’s, or he’s relating things he never actually experienced. On his own reading, the claim still implodes.

Chapter 24 makes a claim about the crucifixion that needs to be addressed on its own.. Poirot says what Jesus endured in hell “was eternal death. Complete and utter separation from the Father. Forever.”

He then argues that the three days Jesus spent in the grave were experienced as an eternity of separation from the Father. This goes so far beyond penal substitutionary atonement and into territory that belongs to Kenneth Copeland’s theology.. the claim that Jesus died spiritually and suffered in hell as a lost sinner. The orthodox position is that Christ’s cry of abandonment on the cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) expressed the judicial reality of bearing God’s wrath against sin. It was real suffering, but it wasn’t an ontological separation of the Trinity. The Son was never “eternally separated” from the Father. That’s a Trinitarian impossibility. The divine nature of the Son can’t be severed from the Father, because the Trinity is one God in three persons, undivided and indivisible. If the Son were truly, ontologically separated from the Father, the Trinity would cease to exist. Poirot probably doesn’t realize the theological weight of what he wrote here, but that doesn’t reduce the damage. It’s in the book, and people will read it and absorb it.

A note about translations. The book leans heavily on The Passion Translation throughout. TPT has been widely critiqued across the theological spectrum for inserting theological content into the text that isn’t present in the original Greek. Bible Gateway removed the translation from its lineup in 2022, stating, “additions that do not appear in the source manuscripts, phrases meant to draw out God’s “tone” and “heart” in each passage.”

When Poirot uses TPT for key theological points, he’s often citing a “translation” that’s already injected the theology he’s trying to prove. That kind of circular reasoning should trouble any reader who actually cares what the original text says.

In the beginning, before we get to any substance from Poirot, we get the endorsement page, which functions as a theological roadmap. Rick Renner and Randy Kay wrote the forewords. The endorsement list includes John Burke (Imagine Heaven), Joseph Z, Lance Wallnau, David Diga Hernandez, Troy Brewer, Mike Signorelli, and Shaun Tabatt. Greg Stephens, identified as Poirot’s Bible college instructor, endorses the book and is listed as a professor, news anchor, and pastor in Fort Worth. This is the charismatic/prophetic/heavenly tourism ecosystem operating exactly as it’s designed to operate.. mutual endorsement, shared vocabulary, zero theological accountability. Every endorser affirms the book without engaging a single claim critically. That’s the world this book was written for, and it’s the world where it will do its damage.

2 Peter 1:16-21 is the passage that should frame how any Christian evaluates a book like this.

Peter, who personally witnessed the Transfiguration.. who saw the glorified Christ with his own eyes and heard the voice of the Father with his own ears.. writes that the prophetic Word is “more sure” than what he himself witnessed. Peter ranks the documented Word above his own eyewitness experience of Christ’s glory. If apostolic eyewitness testimony is secondary to the written Word, then the claimed experience of a 21-year-old who was in a coma carries no authority at all. The written Word is the standard. Everything else, including heavenly tourism, is measured against it.

Verses 20-21 are the foundation for what Peter is saying. Prophecy never came by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were “carried along” (pheromenoi) by the Holy Spirit. Poirot’s book came from his will, his memory, his theological framework, and his charismatic vocabulary. It was not pheromenoi. It’s the opposite of what Peter describes as authoritative speech from God.

I said in my evaluation of the interview that the Poirot who showed up on that Zoom call was already well on his way to retracting his claims. He just didn’t know it yet. The book complicates that assessment. Because the book takes everything he was willing to soften in conversation and hardens it into print. The verbal retreats are gone. What remains is over 30-thousand words of claims about heaven, Jesus, the afterlife, and the nature of God that contradict Scripture at every significant point.

Jim Osman said in the interview, “If you did that with every single claim that you’ve made, you wouldn’t have a book to sell.” The book proves Jim right. Strip away everything that contradicts what Poirot himself conceded in the interview, and what’s left is the gospel that’s already in Scripture.. which doesn’t need a trip to heaven to proclaim, and never did.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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Every Christ-honoring church in America that’s endured the fall of a shepherd was at some point led by a man who believed it wouldn’t happen to him. He preached faithfully and loved his family and the church. But somewhere along the way, something changed that he either couldn’t see or refused to notice, and by the time anyone around him did, the church that trusted him was in ruins.

The conversation about pastoral failure in the church has been going on for years, and yet it keeps coming back to the same categories.. exhaustion, public pressure, family strain, and loneliness. Those are real issues, don’t misunderstand me. But they’re also the explanations we prefer because they make the pastor a victim of his environment rather than a man responsible for his own spiritual collapse. And as long as the conversation stays there, the outcome will stay the same.

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What makes that especially dangerous is that it keeps us talking about the pressure the pastor is under, while ignoring the patterns that have become so obvious. Behind a lot of church leadership in this country is a layer of sin so common and sanitized by “Christianese” that we don’t recognize it for what it is. And this sin is wrecking shepherds from the inside while their churches appear to thrive. Paul warned Timothy that in later times some would fall away from the faith,

“by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron” (1 Timothy 4:1-2)

A conscience isn’t usually seared all at once. It’s worn down over time by little compromises that seem too small to matter. But they do matter, because they leave a man increasingly numb to the very things that grieve God.

Scripture gives us the standard for pastoral leadership, and it’s explicit,

“Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according to the will of God; and not for sordid gain, but with eagerness; nor yet as lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2-3).

What follows are ten sins that, in my judgment, are quietly wearing away at that standard internally. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive. But every one of them is active in church leadership in this country right now, and each one feeds the next.

1. The Neglected War

We’ve stopped believing we’re in a war, and that’s the sin that makes every other sin on this list possible.

Paul described his ministry as warfare,

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses” (2 Corinthians 10:3-4)

Paul spoke about ministry as spiritual warfare, and we talk about it like a machine to maintain.

We train men to handle Greek and argue theology, then send them into ministry with little sense that they’re entering a battlefield. We may still preach on the armor of God from time to time, but the way we actually live and lead reveals the truth. Functionally, we operate as if ministry success depends entirely on strategy. The evidence is in our schedules. We say we believe in prayer, but we spend our weeks keeping the machine running and then wonder why there’s no power in the pulpit.

Luther prayed like a man who knew he was at war, but we often pray like men, begging for God to help us handle our troubles without ever considering the enemy behind them.

And because we don’t think in those terms, the drift goes unnoticed. It begins in the place where ministry can be faked the longest.. the pastor’s own heart.

2. Discontent with God’s Assignment

This is something a lot of pastors won’t admit. We look around and start wishing our life looked more successful, and we feel embarrassed about how ordinary it is. If we’re honest, it stings that the world couldn't care less about our ministry. This is more than just wanting nice things. It reveals a genuine disappointment with the life God has given us.

Jesus said,

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24)

But we’ve found a way to live with both, haven’t we? We speak openly about serving God, yet quietly want the kind of life the world admires. We tell ourselves that a bigger platform means greater effectiveness for the kingdom, but the truth is, what we really want is the attention that comes with having influence. That’s what makes this so deceptive. A man can call it zeal for God, but still be chasing something for himself.

Some men are called to serve in small churches, and they’ll spend half their ministry resenting that fact. But if God puts a man in a small church and he spends his time trying to work his way into a bigger one, that’s not a godly intention, that’s being discontent and dissatisfied with the wisdom and providence of God.

Paul told the Corinthians,

“But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10)

That’s contentment with what God has ordained. George Whitefield preached to thousands, while Richard Baxter pastored a small church. One wasn’t more valuable than the other, because his church was bigger. But we’ve created a ministry culture that celebrates size while God measures by obedience. The heart that desires the large congregation while resenting God’s assignment in the small isn’t qualified for either.

And the discontent doesn’t stay repressed. It will either move toward the people we serve or turn inward toward chasing something bigger.

3. Despising the Sheep

Discontent in a pastor’s heart eventually hardens into contempt for the very people he was called to love and lead. This one lands close because I’ve felt it.. that slow resentment toward a congregation that still seems spiritually immature after years of faithful teaching. And once that contempt takes root, it shows up in the pulpit. His tone will sharpen. There will be a subtle condescension in how he preaches. The congregation feels it long before he recognizes it. We love the idea of shepherding but despise the smell of sheep.

Jesus said,

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart”
(Matthew 11:28-29)

That’s how Jesus relates to His sheep. We’ve become like the Pharisees. We preach standards while offering little help for our people to meet them. We hold to some idealized vision of what the church should look like.. and come home frustrated that they aren’t like that.

Peter gave us the model,

“Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according to the will of God” (1 Peter 5:2)

That requires loving actual people.. the specific, frustrating people God has committed to you to watch over. Resenting the sheep disqualifies us from shepherding them.

4. The Applause Addiction

When the discontent turns inward, it will manifest as the constant need for human approval.

I’ve watched it happen. A pastor preaches a sermon that winds up getting some attention online. The joy he once found in God alone gets mixed with the joy of being recognized. From that point forward, the ministry centers on what delivers the emotional payoff rather than what actually matters to God.

Jesus said,

“How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?” (John 5:44)

You can’t believe rightly when you’re seeking glory from men. He also warned,

“Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way” (Luke 6:26)

Faithful ministry causes conflict. The desire to be liked leaves us unable to have the hard conversations. We choose sermons that will trend rather than the texts that most need preaching. Sometimes the most loving thing a shepherd can do is say what makes people angry.. because their souls depend on hearing it.

The Puritans talked about mortification for a reason. They understood that the desire for human approval is a competing affection that must be starved to death if God’s approval is going to matter above all. Once you’re hooked on approval, courage becomes a cost you can no longer afford to pay.

5. Cowardice Disguised as Wisdom

Leaders have built an entire vocabulary that lets them frame fear as virtue. They call conflict avoidance prudence, while refusing to confront error because they’ve labeled it as “not being divisive.”

Paul told Timothy,

“For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline”
(2 Timothy 1:7)

Jeremiah also dealt with this,

“Then I said, ‘I will not make mention of Him, or speak anymore in His name.’ But His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I was weary of holding it in, and I could not endure it” (Jeremiah 20:9)

He tried to avoid the conflict, but the word of God burned in him, and he couldn’t hold it back. That’s the mark of a man called to speak truth.. the inability to remain silent regardless of what it costs. We’ve lost that. We choose safety over faithfulness and call it wisdom.

Jesus said,

“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me” (Matthew 5:11)

If you’re experiencing zero opposition for your leadership, you’re either perfectly wise or perfectly compromised. When courage disappears from the pulpit, sentimentality takes over. Sadly, in our generation, it’s shown up as therapeutic chin boogie.

6. Therapist in the Pulpit

The modern pastor has ingested the therapeutic culture so thoroughly that he no longer knows who he is. We’ve traded the authority of Scripture for the techniques of psychology. Pastors now describe their ministry as “creating safe spaces” and “helping them feel seen and heard.” These aren’t biblical categories, they’re therapeutic pillars imported from secular psychology.

Paul told Timothy,

“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction” (2 Timothy 4:2)

Three of those four verbs are confrontational; only one is sensitive. Our balance is off. The faithful pastor speaks God’s word whether people want to hear it or not. The therapist speaks what people need to hear to feel better about themselves. We’ve chosen the therapist. The church is dying of validation while starving for truth. The therapeutic shift has changed how we counsel, and it’s changed how we lead.

7. Masculine Leadership Abandoned

The church has absorbed therapeutic and relational structures that lean heavily feminine. Many male leaders have grown uncomfortable providing the masculine leadership the church desperately needs. They fear being seen as harsh.. so they lead with endless empathy and little authority.

This is easily misunderstood, so let me be careful, because feminine qualities matter. Paul describes his own ministry as being,

“gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children”
(1 Thessalonians 2:7)

Gentleness is crucial, but Paul was also the same apostle who said,

“Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14)

The church needs that kind of leadership. It needs men who will guard the flock and refuse to collapse into emotional retreat when leadership is required. But many pastors have become embarrassed by that kind of leadership. So they stay vague where they should be clear. They keep everything soft and call that Christlikeness.

It isn’t Christlikeness. It is abdication.

When masculine leadership disappears, the church feels it. The people aren’t protected, they’re managed. And once a pastor becomes uncomfortable with biblical masculinity, his teaching will eventually reflect it.

8. Theology Replaced by Narrative

Pastors are called to feed the flock with truth, and many have traded that calling for storytelling. Congregations can repeat familiar stories about grace, but can’t define justification.

Paul told Timothy,

“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Sound doctrine is how believers are strengthened, and we act like doctrine is a problem. Stories are what people want, so stories are what they get. The result is a generation of professing Christians who can’t recognize false teaching even when it’s right in front of them. The Puritans knew that changed lives require changed minds, so they worked tirelessly to build careful, ordered theology. We’ve largely neglected that work. And when the importance of theology is removed from a church, its discernment goes with it. At that point, even the oldest heresies can walk through the front door unnoticed.

9. Christian Words, Empty Obedience

One of those heresies is Gnosticism, and it’s come back speaking the Christian language. We’ve created a version of Christianity that separates spiritual maturity from obedience.

As long as someone “loves Jesus,” we overlook everything else.

“He’s struggling with pornography, but he loves Jesus.”
“She’s living with her boyfriend, but she has such a heart for worship.”

We’ve heard these statements so many times that they’ve stopped sounding absurd.

James leaves no room for that kind of religion,

“What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself”
(James 2:14, 17)

We’ve stopped calling sin what it is, just as long as people seem spiritually sincere. And at the center of it all is the same lie that Jesus receives people as they are and leaves them as they are.

Scripture says otherwise. Genuine conversion creates new life. Anything less is just Gnosticism speaking Christian words..

What makes it worse is that this way of thinking is all over the place, even when pastors would never come right out and say it.

10. Chronological Arrogance

The mindset underneath all of this is the belief that our generation has finally seen what faithful Christians for centuries somehow couldn’t. We believe we’ve moved past the Reformers. That’s theological progressivism, and it always travels with another danger.. the hunger for whatever feels new. Pastors are afraid of sounding dated, so they keep chasing what’s current.

Paul told Timothy,

“Retain the standard of sound words which you have heard from me, in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you” (2 Timothy 1:13–14)

Every generation has to take the same truth and teach it in its own context. That part is necessary. But that’s very different from acting like we’ve improved on Christianity. Putting old truth into clear language is one thing. Acting like we’ve discovered something the church somehow missed for two thousand years is something else.

The Puritans gave themselves to prayer and study in a way that should humble us. But it doesn’t. No, we act like we’re beyond them because we know how to build a brand or work an algorithm. That kind of pride makes a man easy to fool. He stops listening to wisdom and starts getting pulled along by whatever sounds fresh.

The early church was the most effective church the world has ever seen, and they did it without any of the stuff we now act like we can’t live without. They had the Holy Spirit and the gospel, and they turned the world upside down. Christianity doesn’t need to be reinvented. It needs faithful men who will preach it clearly, and without being ashamed of how old it is.

And when you mix thin theology with that kind of arrogance, you get exactly what you’d expect.. leaders who are embarrassed by the very gospel they were called to preach.

Our Path Forward

Under all of this is one root problem. We don’t really believe God will build His church, so we start taking over like the outcome depends on us. We say God is powerful, but then we operate as if the Holy Spirit is standing off to the side waiting on our creativity.

“Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.” (Psalm 127:1)

That’s the issue in ministry. Unless the Lord does it, all of our effort amounts to nothing. But functionally, we don’t live like we believe that. God becomes the blessing we ask for on top of our plans, instead of the One everything rests on.

Honest question.. If God removed His hand from your ministry, how long would it take for anyone to notice? If that’s hard to answer, there’s a good chance you’re building something God’s allowing, not something God’s doing. And whatever we build in our own strength will not last.

Jesus said,

“I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it”
(Matthew 16:18)

That means He builds the church, and our job is to obey. And when we start acting like those roles are reversed, we’re living like practical atheists.

When a man stops believing the promises of God, what real use is he in the work of God?

The way forward isn’t complicated, but it is costly. It’s repentance, and it’s faith. It’s getting low before God again and walking with Him.

Paul’s final words to Timothy say everything that needs to be said,

“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word”
(2 Timothy 4:1–2)

That’s the foundation for all ministry.. the presence of God, and the reality of a coming kingdom. We’re all going to stand before Christ and give an account. And the question will be, how faithful were you with what He gave you?

Christ is still building His church, and God is still raising up men who will serve Him with undivided hearts. May He give us eyes to see where we’ve drifted and the courage to repent without excuse, for His glory alone.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch.. you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Yesterday was silent. The body of Jesus was put in a borrowed tomb, sealed with a stone, and guarded by soldiers at the request of the men who killed Him. Saturday offered them nothing but the consequences of a Friday they couldn’t undo and a future they could no longer imagine.

And then Sunday came.

“Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men.”
(Matthew 28:1-4)

The women came expecting a corpse. They brought spices for a body that had been dead since Friday afternoon. Everything about that morning was shaped by the assumption that death had won, and the only thing left was to tend to the remains. They came to conduct one last act of devotion because, in their understanding, the story was over.

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But when they arrived at the tomb, the found soldiers were on the ground, paralyzed. The stone that was supposed to seal the grave had been moved, and an angel was sitting on it. The Roman authorities made the grave as secure as they knew how, and it held for exactly as long as God allowed it.

“The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying.’”
(Matthew 28:5-6)

He is not here. He has risen, just as He said.

That last part is easy to read past. Just as He said. Jesus told them this was coming. In Matthew 16:21, He told the disciples plainly that He would be killed and raised on the third day. In Matthew 20:18-19, He said it again with even more detail.. He would be handed over, condemned, mocked, scourged, crucified, and raised on the third day. He said all of this clearly more than once. And when it happened exactly as He said it would, they were somehow shocked. The men who killed Jesus secured the tomb because they remembered His prediction, but His own followers forgot it. The angel’s words carry a rebuke underneath the announcement. He has risen, just as He said. This shouldn’t have surprised you. He told you.

Every promise God made across the entire arc of Scripture materializes right here, on this morning, at this tomb. The seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3 has crushed the serpent’s head. The death that followed the fall, the curse that spread through every generation from Adam forward, has been broken by a man who walked into it voluntarily and came out the other side alive. The substitute God provided on Moriah, the ram that died so Isaac could live, was always pointing to a substitute whose death would be followed by something the ram could never picture.. resurrection. The Passover lamb whose blood saved Israel from judgment in Egypt has now been slain and raised, and the salvation His blood purchased is permanent.

Isaiah said the servant would be crushed, and He was. David wrote the cry of abandonment in Psalm 22, and Jesus spoke those words from the cross on Friday. But Psalm 22 doesn’t end there. It ends in worship..

“All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before You.”
(Psalm 22:27)

The psalm that gave us the voice of the suffering servant also gave us the end result of His suffering, and that is the nations on their knees.

And every doubter who demanded a sign from Jesus was told there would be only one, and this morning was that sign.

The angel told the women to go and tell the disciples, and as they ran from the tomb, Jesus met them on the road.

“And they came up and took hold of His feet and worshiped Him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and take word to My brothers to leave for Galilee, and there they will see Me.’” (Matthew 28:9-10)

They took hold of His feet, because there was a physical body. The resurrection wasn’t a metaphor, the women touched Him and He spoke to them.

And then pay attention to how He described the disciples. He called them “My brothers.” These men who ran when He was arrested. Peter denied Him and rest scattered and hid. They abandoned Him, and His first description of them after defeating - “My brothers.” The risen Christ’s first act toward the disciples wasn’t judgment for their failure, but rather restoration of the relationship.

Calvin wrote that “our salvation may be divided between the death and resurrection of Christ.. by the former, sin was abolished; by the latter, righteousness was restored and life raised up.”

The cross without the resurrection is a tragedy that ends in a sealed tomb. The resurrection without the cross is a miracle with no meaning. Together, though, they’re the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

For fourteen days, we’ve walked a road that Scripture built. It started with a promise in the garden and moved to a substitute on a mountain and the blood of lambs on doorposts and the voices of prophets who told what was coming centuries before. The One who set His face toward Jerusalem arrived at the cross, and the cross did exactly what it was designed to do. The sin of God’s people was paid for. The wrath of God was satisfied. The veil was torn open from heaven to earth. And on the third day, the tomb was empty.

He is risen.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

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Yesterday, Jesus died. The Son of God set His face toward Jerusalem, knowing what was waiting for Him there, and He yielded up His spirit on the cross while the sky went dark. The veil in the temple tore from top to bottom. A centurion looked at His body and said, “Truly this was the Son of God.” And then it was over, the crowds went home. Evening was approaching, and the body of Jesus still hung on the cross.

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“When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away.”
(Matthew 27:57-60)

Joseph of Arimathea sat on the Sanhedrin, the same body that condemned Jesus the night before. Matthew makes a point of telling us Joseph hadn’t consented to that decision. He was a disciple, though John’s account says he’d kept it quiet out of fear. Whatever fear kept him silent during the trial vanished at the cross. Joseph went to Pilate and asked for the body of a man who’d just been executed as a criminal. That request was risky. He was identifying himself publicly with a condemned man, putting everything he’d built on the line to do it.

He wrapped the body in clean linen and laid it in his own new tomb, one carved from rock that never held a body before. Matthew includes that detail because it matters for what’s coming. When the tomb is found empty on Sunday morning, there will be no question about whose body was supposed to be inside.

The religious leaders, meanwhile, were still at work.

“Now on the next day, the day after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate, and said, ‘Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, After three days I am to rise again. Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, He has risen from the dead, and the last deception will be worse than the first.’ Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how.’ And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone.”
(Matthew 27:62-66)

The irony here is incredible. The chief priests remembered what Jesus said about rising on the third day. The disciples apparently didn’t, or if they did, the trauma of Friday had buried it. The enemies of Jesus took His promise of resurrection more seriously than His own followers. So they stationed a guard and sealed the tomb, doing everything in their power to make sure what Jesus predicted couldn’t come true.

They made the grave as secure as they knew how. That phrase deserves consideration. It says they brought the full weight of Roman authority to stand guard in front of a sealed and borrowed tomb and believed it would be adequate. It’s the final act of a religious establishment that spent the entire week trying to control something that was never theirs to control.

And then Saturday came. The text gives us nothing about Saturday. The body of Jesus lay in a sealed tomb under Roman guard, and the world was silent. The disciples were grieving behind locked doors, and every promise Jesus made about rising again must have felt like words spoken by a man who was now dead. Whatever faith they’d carried into the upper room on Thursday night had crashed head-on with Friday afternoon. And Saturday was the long, unbearable time between the worst thing they’d ever witnessed and a Sunday morning they didn’t yet know was coming.

Tomorrow is Resurrection Sunday.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

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Maybe you’ve been following the story of Gabe Poirot. He’s a young man who claims to have spent 18 days in heaven while in a coma after a skateboarding accident, and he’s written a book about it. He’s made the media rounds promoting that book, Fox News, Sid Roth, Joseph Z, and others, and the claims he made in those appearances are, to put it charitably, wildly unbelievable. But the thing that’s stood out to me most isn’t the claims themselves. It’s that nobody ever pushed back. His descriptions of his experience were never lined up with Scripture in any of the interviews. The things he said about Jesus were never held up to what the Bible actually says. Every single one of his claims went unchallenged.

That all changed last week when Pastor Jim Osman and Justin Peters released a video on Justin’s YouTube channel where they walked through Poirot’s claims in detail and held them up against the only thing they should ever be compared to.. the Word of God. And what became clear is that Poirot’s testimony doesn’t hold up to a faithful reading of Scripture.

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That video got back to Gabe himself, and, to his credit, he reached out to Justin and Jim to have a conversation. What came out of that was a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom call between the three of them that I just finished watching.

This is my evaluation of that conversation. Over the course of roughly 143 minutes, Poirot did something I don’t think he intended. He dismantled his own testimony while fully thinking he was defending it.

The most important thing is the pattern of methodical retreat that develops across the entire conversation.

Poirot proposes that he went to the third heaven, saw Jesus, received a message, and experienced nurseries, libraries, liquid love, prayers in golden bowls, and all the rest. By the end, he’s walked back or reframed virtually every specific claim he’s made publicly to millions of people. The nurseries, he shouldn’t have described them that way. The Sid Roth television program in heaven, that doesn’t represent his full heart. Jesus being unaware of why he was concerned, he misspoke and will clarify in future interviews. God saying, “you are even better than I thought you would be,” he publicly repents of that sentence.

The issue here is theological at the core. If Poirot actually went to heaven and actually saw these things, he can’t unsee them. You don’t walk back eyewitness testimony because someone on a Zoom call told you it sounded extra-biblical. If he saw nurseries, there are nurseries. If Jesus spoke to him and was genuinely unaware, then Jesus was genuinely unaware.

The fact that Poirot is willing to retract and apologize for these claims under pressure tells you something he may not realize he’s communicating. He knows, at some level, these aren’t reports of observed reality. They’re embellishments built on whatever experience he may have had during a coma, then interpreted and expanded through a charismatic theological framework.

A man who actually saw the glorified Christ doesn’t come on a Zoom call and say “I didn’t communicate my heart correctly there.” He says “I saw what I saw.”

Justin pressed this point when he said, “What part of your trip to heaven that you relate are we to take literally and believe?” That’s the right question, and Poirot never answered it because he can’t. The moment he admits that some of his claims are embellishments, the entire structure collapses.

Count how many times Poirot says “that doesn’t represent my full heart” or “let me express my heart” in this conversation. Every time Justin or Jim pin him down on a specific claim, Poirot pivots to his “heart.” That’s a deliberate strategy, whether he’s conscious of it or not. It moves the conversation from what’s objective (is this true or false?) to the subjective (what did I mean?), where nothing can be pinned down.

Jim and Justin both called the strategy out with Justin correctly saying, “I’m not interested in your heart. I’m interested in what you said, the claims that you’re making.”

That’s the issue. Scripture measures prophetic claims by the truth of what’s said, not the sincerity of the one saying it. Deuteronomy 18 asks “did the word come to pass?” and “did the LORD command him to speak it?” Poirot keeps going back to his heart as though that settles the issue. But that replaces the biblical standard for testing prophetic claims with an emotional one. Instead of asking, “Is this true, and does it line up with Scripture?” the question becomes, “Did he mean well, and does he seem sincere?” That’s a charismatic move, and it should be named for what it is.

In his initial response to Justin and Jim’s first video, Poirot referenced John in Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah as biblical precedent for his claims, but omitted Paul. In this interview, Poirot finally addresses 2 Corinthians 12, and argues that the Greek word for “inexpressible” (arrēta) means “beyond human capacity to describe” rather than “not permitted to speak,” and he tries to engage 1 Peter 1:8 (joy “unspeakable”) as a parallel.

But Poirot’s own argument turns against him, even if you accept his preferred reading. If arrēta means “beyond capacity to describe,” then that creates a bigger problem, not a smaller one.

Paul, who actually went to the third heaven says nothing about what he saw, (using Poirot’s preferred reading), because the experience was beyond his capacity to describe. Poirot, who claims a similar experience, seems to find it entirely describable.. in a book, on Fox News, and in interview after interview.

So his position creates a problem he can’t escape. Either Poirot’s experience was less profound than Paul’s, (in which case why should anyone treat it as remarkable?), or Poirot is describing things he didn’t actually experience, (which is exactly what Justin and Jim have argued.")

His own exegetical argument doesn’t help him here at all.

But even bigger than the word study are the things 2 Corinthians 12 says plainly that are never dealt with. Paul was forbidden to speak about the things he heard or saw, and he also refused to use that experience as some kind of credential. He says he would not boast on his own behalf except in his weaknesses, so that nobody would think more of him than what they see in his life and hear from his mouth.

And then God gave Paul a thorn in the flesh for the purpose of keeping him from exalting himself. Think about that. God saw the danger of pride from a real experience in heaven serious enough that He afflicted His own apostle to keep that from happening.

That puts this all in perspective. Paul was kept from turning his experience into a platform.

A significant part of the chat was spent on Poirot’s argument from Joel 2:28-32 / Acts 2:17-21 “your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”

The standard charismatic proof-text for ongoing revelation and gifts, and Poirot leaned on it hard, repeatedly asking “where is the expiration date?”

Jim handled it well by pointing out that the text in Joel has eschatological pieces that haven’t been fulfilled. But the deeper hermeneutical problem is worth taking time to discuss.

Poirot’s argument assumes that because Peter cites Joel 2 at Pentecost, every element of that prophecy must remain fully active and ongoing throughout the entire church age until the end. Fulfillment of prophecy in Scripture doesn’t work that way. The “last days” Hebrews 1:2 talks about started with Christ’s first coming and stretches all the way to His return. Pentecost wasn’t the beginning of something that has to keep repeating the same way until the end of time. It was God doing something unique at a key moment in history.

The pouring out of the Spirit was real, and the gifts were real too. But those served a specific purpose. Paul says the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets in Ephesians 2:20, and foundations don’t get laid over and over again. You lay one foundation.

So what we should be asking is what role these gifts played in God’s plan and whether that’s already been fulfilled.

Poirot never really deals with that. He reads Joel 2 like a flat promise that works the same way all through the church age, with no category for how God might have used those gifts at a specific time for a specific purpose.

But, even if you set all of that to the side, and even if you allow for the sake of argument that some form of prophecy continues today, his claims still fall apart. The issue is the content.

Even a continuationist is still required to test what’s being claimed. And when you do that here, it doesn’t hold up. The Jesus he describes lacks knowledge Scripture clearly assigns to Christ. His explanation of the Trinity drifts into modalistic language. The gospel he presents centers on giving God your yes instead of repentance and faith in the finished work of Christ.

That’s the real problem. This goes past a debate about whether revelation can still happen. It comes down to whether what’s being presented lines up with the Jesus of the Bible. It doesn’t.

Justin and Jim also pressed him hard on his claim that Jesus “didn’t know” and “was unaware” of why Gabe was concerned about his sin, and Poirot’s answer exposed just how confused his thinking really is.

Poirot tried to use Hebrews 8:12, “their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” as justification. His point was basically that Jesus “not knowing” about his sin was like God “not remembering” forgiven sin. But that falls apart, and Jim was right to push on it.

Hebrews 8:12 is talking about a legal reality. God’s saying He no longer holds those sins against the believer. But make no mistake, God most certainly knows every sin every person has ever committed. He no longer counts those sins against those who are in Christ. That’s completely different from saying Jesus was unaware and didn’t know what Gabe was talking about, which is exactly how he described it in multiple places.

And then under pressure, he finally said, “Of course, he knew. He already knew. It was not that he was unknowing.” That confession damages his story because it directly contradicts what he said earlier on the Joseph Z program, where he said Jesus “was actually asking” and “he didn’t know what I was concerned about. He was never aware.”

So now, when he’s being pressed, Poirot’s saying something true about Christ. But when he does that he’s also confessing his earlier descriptions were false. He’s not clarifying, he’s correcting, and when you reach that point, the testimony itself starts coming apart.

If Jesus actually knew, as Poirot now says He did, then his earlier description of a Jesus who “was never aware” leaves him with a serious problem. Either he lied about what happened, or he badly misread his own experience. Either one wrecks the credibility of the testimony.

You can’t claim to have stood before the glorified Christ, looked Him in the eyes, and then report Him in a way that gets His nature wrong at such a basic level. And if the account can’t be trusted on something this central, whether Jesus knew what was in Gabe’s heart, then there’s no reason to trust it on anything else.

That’s the very point Justin made and Gabe never answered it. He couldn’t.

The Christological problem goes deeper than the omniscience issue here. The New Testament gives us a clear picture of the glorified Christ as He is right now. He searches minds and hearts (Revelation 2:23), nothing in creation is hidden from Him (Hebrews 4:13), He knows His people fully and intercedes for them continually as their great High Priest (Hebrews 4:15; 7:25), and even during His earthly ministry He knew what was in man and needed no one to tell Him (John 2:24–25). His knowledge was recognized by the disciples as evidence of who He is (John 16:30), in Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), and He now reigns in the place of highest exaltation (Philippians 2:9). That’s the Christ Scripture reveals, which means Poirot’s repeated claim that Jesus “didn’t know” and “was never aware” isn’t a small slip. It’s a direct contradiction of who Christ actually is.

My Observations

There are other things I could get into, like his refusal to call Kenneth Copeland a false teacher, but this blog is already getting long, and I want to make sure I point out a few things before I lose your attention.

The Joel 2 / Acts 2 exchange ate up too much of the conversation. Poirot kept dragging the discussion toward cessationism versus continuationism, and that’s the wrong framework for testing his specific claims. The real issue is what he’s claiming about Jesus. If what he’s describing doesn’t match the Christ revealed in Scripture, the argument is already over. And that’s true regardless of where someone lands on spiritual gifts.

The 2 Corinthians 12 argument has more depth that should be pressed in any future conversations. Paul didn’t just stay quiet because he was told to, he deliberately refused to build a platform on his experience. God gave Paul a thorn specifically to prevent self-worship. A real heaven experience brings a danger of pride, and God took action to keep that from happening. When you put that next to what Poirot is doing, the difference is clear.

The strongest single line in the entire interview came from Jim, “If you did that with every single claim that you’ve made, you wouldn’t have a book to sell.” The response was silence followed by a change of subject. Because Jim was right. Strip away everything that Poirot himself admitted was extra-biblical or poorly communicated, and what remains is the gospel that’s already in Scripture.. which needs no trip to heaven to proclaim.

Bottom line is this conversation confirmed everything Justin and Jim claimed in their first video, and it did so essentially through Gabe’s own words. His constant appeal to “my heart” rather than to the subject of his claims points in one direction.

This is a man who had some kind of experience during an 18-day coma, and has enhanced that experience using charismatic vocabulary absorbed from the Word of Faith world, and can’t defend those claims under even basic theological scrutiny.

Justin said he hopes Gabe will one day follow the path of Alex Malarkey and publicly retract his claims. I share that hope. The Gabe Poirot who showed up to this conversation, the one who kept saying “that doesn’t represent my full heart” is already most of the way there. He just doesn’t know it yet.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

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Last night, Jesus sat at a table with His disciples and told them that His body would be broken and His blood poured out for the new covenant. He washed the feet of the man who already betrayed Him. He prayed in Gethsemane until His sweat fell like drops of blood, and He asked the Father if there was any other way. Judas came with a crowd, and identified Jesus with a kiss. The disciples ran away, as Jesus was dragged before the religious leaders and then before Pilate, and the same people who days earlier shouted Hosanna were now shouting “Crucify Him.”

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“They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they knelt down before Him and mocked Him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They spat on Him, and took the reed and began to beat Him on the head.”
(Matthew 27:28-30)

The soldiers mocked what they didn’t understand. They put Him in a robe and gave Him a reed for a scepter, and all of the mockery was accidentally true. He was the King. The crown they pressed into His scalp was the only crown He would wear before the resurrection, and He wore it willingly.

“And when they had crucified Him, they divided up His garments among themselves by casting lots.” (Matthew 27:35)

David wrote about this in Psalm 22, a thousand years before crucifixion.

“They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” (Psalm 22:18)

The soldiers at the foot of the cross had no idea their actions had been codified as Scripture ten centuries before. They were just dividing the belongings of a condemned man, and in doing so, they completed a picture God had been painting since before David wrote a single word.

“Now from the sixth hour darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour.” (Matthew 27:45)

For three hours in the middle of the day, the sky went black. God covered the scene in darkness while His Son bore the full weight of what Isaiah described seven hundred years before, the iniquity of us all falling on Him. What happened on the cross in those three hours goes beyond what any human could’ve witnessed. The Son of God was bearing the sins of His people under the wrath of His Father, and the darkness was the visible sign of something invisible taking place between the Father and the Son.

“About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” (Matthew 27:46)

Those are the words David wrote in Psalm 22. The cry of abandonment. The voice of the suffering servant now comes out of the mouth of the man hanging on the cross. Jesus isn’t just quoting Scripture, He’s living it. The abandonment David described, Jesus is experiencing. The Father turned His face from the Son because the Son now bears the sin that the Father’s holiness can’t look at.

“And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split.” (Matthew 27:50-51)

The veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple tore from top to bottom. God Himself opened the way that had been closed since the fall, and He did it at the exact moment His Son died. The barrier between God and man that every lamb and every sacrifice temporarily addressed was now permanently removed by the death of the Lamb that all of them had pointed toward.

“Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, ‘Truly this was the Son of God!’” (Matthew 27:54)

The centurion, a pagan soldier who would’ve had no knowledge of the Old Testament, looked at the dead body of Jesus and came to the conclusion that this was the Son of God.

Everything we’ve walked through for eleven days has arrived here. The seed of the woman promised in the garden has crushed the serpent’s head, and the substitute God provided on Moriah has given His life. The Passover Lamb whose blood covers the people of God has been slain. The servant Isaiah described has been pierced and crushed, and the cry David wrote a thousand years before there was a cross to cry from has been cried over Jerusalem. The One who set His face toward the city has reached the end of the road He chose to walk.

Tomorrow is the silence of Saturday.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

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Yesterday, we saw two acknowledgments of Jesus put side by side. First, a woman poured what amounted to a year’s wages over His head in an act of worship. Second, Judas walked out and sold Him for thirty pieces of silver. By the end of the day, the plan to betray Jesus was progressing. Jesus knew all of this, even down to the most minute detail. Then He sat down to eat the Passover with the men He chose, including the one who already agreed to betray Him.

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John tells us something about that evening,

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He girded Himself. Then He poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”
(John 13:3-5)

John makes a point of telling us that Jesus knew, in that moment, that the Father had given all things into His hands, and He knew where He came from and where He was going. He was fully aware of His divinity, and with that awareness, He knelt and washed the feet of twelve men, one of whom was about to betray Him. This was deliberate, everything Jesus did was intentional, but this particular act is something that ought to humble every single one of us. Jesus took the position of a servant the night before His crucifixion, and He did it with the full knowledge that He was the Lord over everything.

Peter protested,

’Peter said to Him, “Never shall You wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.” Simon Peter then said to Him, “Lord, then wash not only my feet, but also my hands and my head.” Jesus said to him, “He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you.” (John 13:8-10)

John says Jesus said this because He knew who would betray Him.

Jesus washed the feet of Judas, knowing full well what Judas already set in motion. The same hands that would be nailed to a cross within twenty-four hours knelt down and humbled Himself to wash the feet of the man who sold Him.

Then came the meal, and what Jesus said changed the meaning of the Passover forever.

“And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He said, ‘Take this and share it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.’ And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.’ And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.’” (Luke 22:17-20)

For centuries, Passover was a reminder. Israel would sit every year and look back to the night when the blood of a lamb on the doorposts saved their firstborn from the judgment of God. That was the meal Jesus and His disciples were eating. And in the middle of it, Jesus took the bread and the cup and changed the entire meaning. The bread was His body, and the cup was His blood. The Passover lamb Israel had been sacrificing every year since the night they left Egypt was sitting at the table with them, and He told them He was about to fulfill everything the Passover had been pointing toward.

“This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.”

Every thread we’ve traced over the last two weeks runs through that sentence. The promise in the garden and the substitute on Moriah, the blood on the doorposts, and the voices of Isaiah and David, all of it comes together at this table where Jesus, on the last night of His life, told His disciples that the new covenant God promised would be established through His death. The lamb’s blood that once saved Israel from judgment in Egypt would now be replaced by the blood of the Lamb of God, poured out for the sins of the world.

Tomorrow is Good Friday.

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In His Service,

I talk about Jesus and the Bible a lot. Sometimes on the radio, sometimes to people who willingly show up to listen. Occasionally, I write things down.

Before You Go

Word of mouth predates every distribution platform ever built and still outperforms them. When someone sends you an article, you’re more likely to take it seriously because you trust the person who sent it. So, you’re not starting from scratch, you already have a reason to give it your attention.

Most of the people who read this got here that way. Passing something along like that is still the most helpful thing you can do.

Share

Support the Writing (if you want)

Wretched Jim is free to read. If the writing has been helpful and you’d like to support the work, you can give here. No paid subscription necessary.

Support