Jesus Didn't Die to Get You Into Heaven
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God became man so that man might become God. Did you flinch as I said that? It's okay if you did. That would be an understandable reaction. That statement sounds like the oldest lie in the book. "You will be like God." said the serpent.
But the guy who said it is the opposite of the serpent. It was Athanasius of Alexandria, the most ardent defender of the deity of Christ, trusted by the church more than almost anybody on that subject. Now, whether or not you believe in the Trinity isn't the point. I know some people who watch this channel don't. The point is the guy who said that was very much a Christian. If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right, but still running on fumes, let me share what I discovered after exiting the cult I was raised in. Thanks to what I've learned, I don't run on fumes anymore, and you don't have to, either.
So, how does the most quoted defender of Christ's divinity end up sounding like a heretic to modern-day Christians, most of whom believe in Christ's divinity? Hi. It's been far too long since I've posted to this channel. God gave me the nudge I needed to come back here from an unlikely source, a member of the cult I grew up in. You see, I was raised in the cult of Jehovah's Witnesses. I spent 40 years inside it. I run a separate ex-cult channel, and sometimes sincere, but misguided defenders of the group will leave comments there.
The one that brought me back here accused me of attacking the cult while not offering people a better alternative. Well, that's not true, of course. I have this channel. I even wrote a book about what I learned in my 7 years of wandering the spiritual wilderness before being brought back to Christ. But that guy's comment did prompt me to look back here and realize that it's been far too long since I posted. So, praise God for that person and for his comment. It reminded me of what Joseph said when his brothers stood before him after he was sold into slavery in Egypt and became Pharaoh's second in command.
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. That commenter, they meant evil against me, but God used it as motivation to create this video. I trust the person who left the comment will be let out of the cult soon. So, yes, I came back to Christ. The thing that brought me back happened in a grocery store and I'll tell you more about that later in case you're new here and haven't heard it yet. What I found when I returned wasn't anything new though. New ideas based on men's thinking, that's exactly what creates cults like the one I was born into.
No, what I learned was very, very old. So old that it was considered normal Christianity before it became highly controversial. There's a word for what Athanasius was describing when he said God became man so that man might become God. Theosis. Don't file that statement under exotic Eastern thinking just yet. Hold up. It's true that the East kept the word, but the West kept the doctrine.
John Calvin referred to it as a kind of deification. The teaching wasn't lost to the West, the telling of it was. It's why we can sit in church for years, even decades, and never hear that word even though the teaching's not hard to find in the Gospels and in the New Testament letters. And to be straight with you, if I'd heard that word, theosis, and had it explained to me even one time in my 40 years inside the cult, I don't think I'd have spent 7 years wandering that spiritual wilderness wondering if God was a story that I just outgrew.
I'm going to throw up a warning here. The second you hear what theosis means, it's going to scare you. Alarm bells will sound in your head. You'll think it's what the serpent offered Eve in the garden and you'll look at me and wonder if I've got a fork tongue, too. So, I'll deal with that head-on. I promise you have nothing to fear.
Let's start with what most of us were told in church. It almost doesn't even matter which church. If it was a Western modern church, you were very likely told that you are a sinner. God is holy. Sin separates you from God, which is why God sent Jesus to die and pay for your sin. Accept his sacrifice and you'll be forgiven. Once forgiven, heaven awaits you when you die.
Now, there's some variation of that, of course, but it's going to sound something similar to that. And what's sad about it isn't that it's false. The cross really did deal with our sin, but it's the way the story's told. It's handed to you as a legal problem being solved. The cult I came out of even presented it that way as a legal problem. They were very direct about it. There's a charge against you.
There's a verdict and when the verdict comes down, your standing before God changes. Your record changes. But in that version, what actually happens to you, not your record, you? Your sins are forgiven, sure, and that's beautiful, but how does that change you as a person and a child of God? The best teachers never stopped at the courtroom story. But unfortunately, what works its way down to the Sunday sermon isn't usually from the best teachers. We got handed the verdict without the union.
I lived in that verdict for 40 years, and you know what it produced? Frustration and exhaustion. Did I feel forgiven? Yes, I did. I knew all the right doctrine, or so I thought. I could defend it from the scriptures, and I did so with zeal and with skill. But underneath that, I was white-knuckling my way through my own supposedly saved life.
I tried to squeeze patience and love and joy out of a heart that knew it was missing something fundamental and had nothing left to give. Sometimes I would go to the church and sit alone inside the sanctuary. The The cult called it neither a church nor a sanctuary.
I would sit there and look up at the ceiling in silence, just to be with God alone. No words, no sermons, no scriptures. Because I knew something was missing, and I knew that I wasn't going to find it in the words that I was being told. Where, I wondered, is the abundant life Jesus promised me? Why does it all feel so hollow? I never asked whether I was forgiven. I was sure that I was.
The question I was asking was, is this it? Is this all I should expect? You see, when the apostles talk about the cross, they don't stop at the courtroom story. They go much deeper, much further to a place that most of us were never led. Second Peter chapter 1 verse 4. Peter's near the end of his life and is writing his final epistle. In it, he says that God has given us his promises so that through them, and here's the phrase, you may become partakers of the divine nature.
Partakers of the divine nature. That word partakers in Greek is koinonos. It's really an ordinary word. It's used in business. The word is used in Luke chapter 5, too, right after Jesus fills the apostles' nets with fish. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were partners with Simon. Partners.
It's the same Greek word underneath, koinonos. Keep that picture in mind because that's the right flavor here. We're not spectators watching someone else fish. We're partners. But, that's not the shocking part. The shocking part is what Peter says you're a partner in. He says we're a partner, a partaker, in physis, nature.
We're not partakers in a project or a mission or a movement. We're not partners in some set of beliefs about God. No, we are partakers in God's own nature. The phrase Peter uses there, partakers of the divine nature, that doesn't appear anywhere else in the New Testament. In Peter's old age, and in the wisdom that he'd gained through his years, he reached for language nobody else in the Bible had ever used before.
Now, let's slow down a bit because the church spent centuries carefully considering what Peter did and did not mean when he said that. The line they drew is the difference between the truth of it and the counterfeits that exist in the world today. When Peter said you're a partaker of the divine nature, he was saying that you share in God's life, his love, his holiness, his strength. All of that is at work in you. What God does, what God gives, you share in that. What you never share in is God's own being, the quality that makes God God while you remain human being. Calvin put it well when he commented on that verse.
the word nature he said isn't about essence, it's about quality. The Eastern Church puts it differently. You participate in God's energies, never in his essence.
When you understand that distinction, everything else you'll hear me say becomes ordinary Christian orthodoxy. Lose it and you'll think I'm a heretic or a pagan. What this means is simply this. Peter isn't saying you got issued a piece of God. What he's saying is that God's own life comes to operate inside yours. Once you know that, it changes everything about the way you view your life. Paul put it like this in Colossians 1:27.
Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not Christ near you or walking alongside you or watching you from heaven with a clipboard keeping track of your steps. In you. And in Galatians, Paul says, "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." Now, scholars argue about whether Peter actually wrote that letter himself or if it was just attributed to him. It's probably the most disputed letter in the New Testament, but the church kept it for a reason and it barely even matters here because Paul and John and even Jesus Christ himself made the same claim with different language. If this was just one strange-sounding verse in a disputed letter, I wouldn't build anything on it.
But it's well supported in the Gospels and the New Testament. So, either the Bible is using wild hyperbole in a dozen places, each written by faithful pillars of the early church across different decades, including Christ himself, or the gospel we've been given is much smaller than the one that they all wrote down. Here's where this stops being a word study and starts being about you. Because if what Peter wrote is true, if you are a partaker in the divine nature, in the essence and energies of God, then that tiredness you're carrying, that's not a discipline problem. It's not that you're not doing enough. It's that you've been given the wrong diagnosis.
To a lot of people, Christianity is forgiveness plus effort. If that's what you were taught, then every morning you get up and you try to generate love, patience, joy, all the fruits of the spirit out of your own supply. And when that supply runs out, which you know it does and far more often than we'd like, you assume you're failing at Christianity. So, what do you do? You go to God, you beg forgiveness for the day's failures, and you try again tomorrow. It's a treadmill that leads nowhere.
Let me give you the picture the early church used for the alternative. You're going to need this image for the rest of your life, so hold on to it. If you take a cold bar of iron and you put it into a furnace and you leave it there, what happens? First, it'll turn red. Then orange, then white. First, it glows, then it burns, then it gives light. The heat and light of the fire are genuinely operating inside that bar of iron.
If you grab the iron, be prepared to be burned by the fire that's now within it. But the iron is still iron, it never becomes the fire. It's just not cold or dark anymore. It's burning hot and it lights the room with the fire that's infused within it. Now, you felt that when I said it, didn't you? You've had at least some moments where you felt the fire of God's spirit. Maybe not in church, probably not actually, not that it can't happen there, but at some point when you had to do something or decide something and you weren't sure which way to go and you looked up to God not even saying a word with just the trust on your face and in your heart.
In that moment it hit you and you knew it. I feel that fire now as I speak these words to you and that testifies to the truth about what it really is. For years I was painted iron. From the outside I looked like the real thing. I taught, I served, I could hold my own in pretty much any doctrinal argument you wanted to have. But every time life bumped into me hard, the paint chipped a little and revealed the facade. My first marriage was a disaster.
I woke up to the fact that I'd been raised in a cult, my faith dissolved and I wandered for 7 years. Why? Because I didn't live in the fire or rather the fire didn't live in me not most of the time. I stood next to the furnace. I could feel its warmth. I admired it and described it to other people but I never once climbed in.
So when the going got tough, I had nothing real to give. I wasn't connected to the source. That wasn't God's fault. He was always right there waiting for me to climb in out of the cold, but I was looking to the doctrine, the dogma, the words on the page and the words on the platform, my own inner strength. Painted iron looks like glowing iron right up until the moment that it matters.
So this question isn't some academic debate about a Greek word and what it meant. It's whether God is just handing you a set of rules and a record that gets swept clean every time you beg him to clean it or whether he intends to move in and set your heart on fire. Which brings us to a part of church history you won't hear about on Sunday morning. I want you to meet a man named Irenaeus, writing around the year 180.
Irenaeus matters because of who taught him, Polycarp. Polycarp knew John. Now, scholars debate about which John that was, but I'll take Irenaeus at his word. Regardless of which reading you take, Irenaeus is standing about as close to the source of written Christianity as you can get. Look at what he wrote. Jesus Christ, he says, did through his transcendent love become what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself.
There it is again. It's the same shape as the quote from Athanasius I started with. Except Irenaeus wrote it over a century before he did. Then there's Gregory of Nazianzus who said, "What is not assumed is not healed." Whatever Christ didn't take on, he couldn't repair. So, he took it all on. And here's the point.
Christ didn't come to rescue us out of our humanity, he came to repair it. These folks weren't the outliers in the corners of the early church. They're the people who fought against the Gnostics, the movement that taught there was a secret divinity available only to a special chosen few. The people the early and modern church trust to tell us who Jesus is are the same people telling us who we are. So, theosis, the idea that God intends to share his own life with you, that's not a modern invention or some mystical add-on born from the lunatic fringe of early Christianity. It's what the people closest to the apostles taught the gospel was.
Now, if you're still with me, kudos for being able to keep the alarms in your head at bay for a few minutes. I promise you we deal with those alarms and we will now. The first thing I'll say about that is that it's good that you hear an objection. Isn't that exactly what the serpent offered in the garden? You will be like God. Isn't that the oldest slide there is just dressed up in a robe? Good.
Thinking that way protects you from false teaching. You want an alarm system. But let me give you the answer that should quiet those alarms and shut them off. In the garden, the serpent didn't offer Adam and Eve anything they'd been excluded from. They were already made in God's image. They already carried God's breath. They were already like him in the way a creature can be.
What the serpent offered was to seize it, to take it on their own terms, on their own schedule, apart from the giver. And they got something all right. Look at Genesis 3:22. God says it there like somebody looking over the wreckage with a sigh. The man has now become like one of us, knowing good in evil. They got the knowledge and they lost the garden.
The lie wasn't you could become more like God. It was the lie that you can take it from God. The gospel is the reverse of that lie. What Adam attempted to steal, God gives freely to anyone who stops trying to grab it and just receives it. One is theft, the other is inheritance.
The modern version of the serpent's lie is pretty much the same thing. You are already divine, you just forgot. I encountered that claim a lot during my seven years and to be fair, it is reaching for something real. The problem is that it leaves you as the source and we've already talked about how that never works. That was the lie and it still is today. The early church fathers taught the opposite. You are not the fire.
On your own, you're cold. But with Christ in you, the hope of glory, a partaker of the divine nature, the fire's own life becomes genuinely, actually yours. Just like that bar of iron gets infused with it, so do you when you receive it into yourself. And again, they were careful about how they said that. They drew a hard line. You share God's life by grace. You don't become God in his own being.
God's by grace, not by nature. You're not the creator, you don't become the creator, there's no merging into him here. This is different from what the Mormons teach. Theosis says that God was always God and that he's the only God and there will never be another one. You don't get promoted, you get included. It's participation, not promotion. You don't get absorbed into God and you don't stay outside of him either.
You get filled. Now, the question that naturally comes up when I talk about this stuff is, "If that's really what the apostles believed that the gospel was all about, why didn't anybody ever tell me? Why doesn't the church teach this?" Well, there's no conspiracy here. There's no secret council that was formed to hide it from you. What happened is slower and sadder and quite frankly a lot less intriguing than that.
The first reason is that theosis is, well, inconvenient, let's say, to systems. In an effort to keep people on the right path, a lot of religions became structures where the path to God went through their channels. However well-meaning that might have been, that's just not how it works. God already lives inside the believer. Christ in you, the hope of glory, a partaker of the divine nature, made in the imago Dei, the image of God, and infused with the neshama, the Hebrew word for God's breath used in Genesis. He's here, in you. You don't need a channel.
1 Timothy 2:5 says it plainly, Christ is your mediator, not some institution. The system setters aren't necessarily villains, but they are misguided. Every system will eventually prioritize protecting the system rather than the truth it was supposed to lead people to. And quite frankly, a system people have to buy into gives a person selling it a lot of power, and power is addictive. Telling people the good shepherd already lives within, and you don't need a preacher or a pastor or an elder or a priest, well, there's no power to be gained there. It doesn't mean it's wrong to teach. Obviously not.
There's lots of teachers in the New Testament. The error lies in looking to the teacher as the savior, rather than knowing the savior already lives within you. The second reason theosis isn't taught in church is fear. The early church fought hard against the Gnostics, who claimed special hidden knowledge and divinity. They fought so hard that they became gun-shy. So, anything that even sounded like it might be what the Gnostics were teaching got quarantined along with it. And the third is that we shrank the gospel down to the part we could measure.
Forgiveness can be counted. Transformation can't. It's not controllable. A spirit-filled person is beautifully unpredictable, likely to do things that surprise you because they're being led by God and not themselves.
Now, real quick, if this is landing for you, hit subscribe. I've got more to share, and it's coming in future videos you don't want to miss. And if this is helping you, and you want to deep dive further than I could possibly go in a video, I wrote a book on the subject called The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. It'll transform how you see yourself forever. The link is in the video description.
So, this is where we're at. Forgiveness got put up in the shop window and theosis got locked in the vault at the back of the store. The cost of that locking away has been enormous. Generations of sincere, faithful people have settled for a fraction of the gospel they're supposed to be living out. They're forgiven, but they're exhausted and starving. Can I put it plainly in words that I want you to write down and repeat again and again? Jesus did not die to get you into heaven.
He died to get heaven into you. Heaven is coming and it's real, but it starts now and it starts inside. Jesus said it in Luke 17:20 and 21. The coming of the kingdom of God is not like something that can be observed, nor will people say, "Here it is or there it is." Because the kingdom of God is in your midst.
Okay, John, I'm with you. But if Jesus died to get heaven into me, how does that actually work on a Tuesday? Good question. This is the part that turns a doctrine into your life. First, I should tell you what the fire is. I've been using a metaphor up till now and you deserve the thing itself. The fire isn't a force, it's a person.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians that God's spirit dwells in you and in the same breath says, "You were a temple of that spirit." The Holy Spirit takes up residence in an ordinary human being, in you. So, how do you get into the furnace? Well, you don't qualify for it. You don't earn your way into it. You get picked up and placed. The iron doesn't heat itself up in the corner and then apply for admission to the furnace.
Look at how warm I am. I deserve to go in. No, it gets picked up by the great artisan and set in. Paul's favorite description of a Christian isn't a forgiven person. It's in Christ, in Christ, in him, in the Lord. He says that over 150 times depending on how you count. Okay, John.
Then what? Well, his life starts operating through you, your faculties. Not around them, not as suggestions coming in from the outside, through you. His patience becomes available to you, his love, his joy, his endurance. You're connected now. You can stop trying so hard and let him take over. Because look, we all hit the end of our patience.
That happens. It's gone. But the fire isn't out, it doesn't go out. And the two seconds before you say that thing you're going to regret forever, you turn inward, but not to dig deeper for what's left of your patience cuz it's gone, but to draw from his. Those words don't get spoken. You calm down. The matter gets handled and nobody gets hurt.
Okay, and the burning? Well, Peter says it in the same passage. He calls you a partaker of the divine nature. He says, "Having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desire." Now, he's not saying that's an admission fee that you have to pay, that you have to escape the evil desire before you become a partaker. He's saying that's what the fire does. It removes the evil desire.
The fire and your bitterness don't coexist. The fire engulfs it and melts it away. Now, that doesn't mean you're never going to encounter bitterness or angst or sadness again. You will. I certainly do. It means it's not your home anymore. When it rises up, the fire comes for it and melts it away every time.
This life can hurt, but not because God is punishing you. It's because the paint is coming off the iron bar. You're seeing yourself for what you really are the core, and the moment between the realization of who you are trying to be and the fire being infused with you to make you who you really are, that moment of real reflection can hurt bad. The ego doesn't like realizing that it wasted years never achieving what it could have had in a few seconds by accepting it. And your part? Because yeah, you have a part to play. It's not just the spirit taking over and you watching life happen to you as he takes control.
You got a job. You get a vote. Your job isn't to produce the heat. You know that now. Your job is to stay inside the furnace. Because unlike an iron bar, you have legs and free will, and you can choose to go back into the cold if you want to. God's love wouldn't be real if our free will wasn't real.
We'd just be robots. That's why Jesus said in John 15:4, "Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." The fire in that furnace is intense. It'll melt away the ego you've been carrying as you try to make yourself into what you think a Christian should be.
But your ego is not going down without a fight. So, hang in there. Remain in him.
Also, just because the spirit is within you and you can draw on it at any time, and you should, it doesn't mean you stop working. Look at what Peter follows his verse about being a partaker of the divine nature with. 2 Peter 1:5-7.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness and to your goodness knowledge and to your knowledge self-control and to your self-control perseverance and to perseverance godliness and to godliness mutual affection and to mutual affection love. Peter says partakers of the divine nature and then immediately says get to work. He doesn't say stop working. He says stop working from your own supply. Effort isn't the opposite of grace. Effort is the opposite of passivity. What you got to stop is your attempts at manufacturing those qualities.
You're the iron, not the blacksmith. Let yourself be shaped. Don't try to shape yourself. You're not the fire, so stop trying to be the fire. Just stay in it. Let it infuse you and use it. All the exhaustion I had before and I've had plenty, it all came from me trying to glow while standing outside the furnace.
We can't manufacture fire. We can only absorb it and radiate it. You can polish that iron forever and it'll look shiny, but it'll stay cold.
Now, I've hinted at what Jesus had to say about all this, but let's stop and look more directly at Christ's own words because he said it out loud on purpose the night before he died. What Jesus said was this, "I say these things while I'm still in the world so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them." That's from John 17. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in the Bible. Jesus wanted that prayer overheard and recorded and so we have it. Christ isn't praying for himself there. He's praying for his disciples.
And in verse 20 he does something that changes everything. He says, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. That's you, and that's me. On the last night before the cross, Jesus stopped and prayed for the people who would hear about him in the second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand thousands of years later. And here's what he asked for, verse 21. "That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me." Look at the comparison he chose there. "Just as you are in me." He didn't say get along with us or cooperate with us. He said, "May they also be in us just as Christ and his Father are in each other." The union he's asking for you to be brought into is his own union with the Father.
Verse 22. "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one." Past tense, given, already done in the mind of God before any nail got driven.
And then verse 23, he prays that the world would know that you have loved them even as you have loved me. Are you hearing what Christ is saying there? "Even as you have loved me." He's not talking about a smaller love, a runner-up love, whatever God happens to have left over for us sinners. No, the same love that he had for Jesus. Jesus was about to go to the cross to face the worst night of hell anyone could imagine, and what did he pray for? For you.
For me. That our Father watch over us and love us and bring us into union with him the same way he and the Son are. And what was that unity for? So that the world may believe. He wanted it visible. This isn't some private arrangement kept between you and God. The reason Peter's partakers of the divine nature sounds too big isn't that it's an exaggeration or that it's unreachable by us.
It's that we've been reading a much smaller gospel than the one actually written in the pages of the Bible. So, what was the cross for? It was for your forgiveness. It really was. I'm not here to say otherwise. But, forgiveness wasn't the destination. It was the clearing of the ground.
The debt got settled and the barrier came down so that the thing God actually wanted could finally happen, to come and live in you. Christ wasn't coming to visit. He was coming to stay. Christ in you, the hope of glory. You're not some pardoned criminal being kept at a distance by God who just tolerates you for legal reasons. You are a temple of the Holy Spirit. The fire is lit and burning and meant to shine its light into the world through you.
It took me 40 years in a cult and 7 years of wandering through every alternative available, but only took 2 minutes in the produce section of a grocery store to realize exactly what I was. I was looking at apples. That's it. Nothing special about the day. It had been years since the last time I prayed and really meant it. That's when it came over me. Not a feeling, a fact as solid as the floor I was walking on.
I was loved, completely, permanently loved. And not only loved, I was full of that love. I looked at strangers picking through the fruit and I loved them like family I'd been separated from and was seeing after far too many years. It only lasted maybe 2 minutes. That's it. I managed to get to my car before I just fell apart. For 7 years, I thought I'd been walking alone along the beach because I only saw one set of footprints in the sand.
But, I was being carried. I just couldn't see it. When I got home, I opened my Bible. Not to study it, not to prove or disprove any doctrine, just to meet whoever that was that I'd encountered in the grocery store. That's when I hit Colossians 1:27 as if I had never read it before, even though I had it a thousand times, and I will never be the same. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not Christ in heaven waiting to see if I'd clean myself up well enough to warrant his attention.
Not Christ available through the proper channels if I put in enough time or said the right things or believed the right doctrines. Christ in me. In my broken, doubting, exhausted heart. The heart that spent 40 years being told it was worthless and seven more wondering if it was just a happy accident of random chance. And I will never be the same.
Here's what I want you to try this week. When your tank is empty and you're about to do or say something you'll regret, don't reach for the last two drops you think might be in that tank. That's not going to work. You've tried that before. Instead, reach for these four words. Not as a feeling or an inspiration, but as a fact about yourself. Christ is in me.
Christ is in me. Say it before your feet hit the floor every morning. Say it in the car before the hard conversation you know you're going to have to have that day. Then, walk in as though it's true, because it is. Say it when the voice tells you you're a fraud. I know that voice all too well. It's one of the things that held me back from recording this video until God finally told me he's been patient enough and it was time for me to get back to work over here.
And he told me that through the voice of a cult member. Never fails to amaze me how God can turn the evil into good. You can't, I can't, and that's why we'll never make it if we try to achieve it rather than receive it. >> [snorts] >> And you know what? You're going to lose your temper sometimes anyway. I still do, it happens. It doesn't mean the fire isn't there and it doesn't mean that you're just trying to fake it.
Iron in a furnace doesn't get hot evenly or all at once. It heats from the outside in. Those cold parts in the middle, the stuff buried the deepest in your core, those are always the last to go. The cold isn't completely gone yet, but it's losing the fight. You'll see that more and more every day as you put this into practice. You're not begging some distant God to show up in your life. He signed the lease.
He moved in. He's home. One winter afternoon in Jerusalem, Jesus said something so bold about up stones to kill him with. They accused him of blasphemy, of making himself God. What's amazing isn't what Jesus said initially, it's how he responded to that. His defense wasn't to soften his message. He quoted a Psalm at them.
He escalated that. The Psalm is the reason I can say everything I said today and it's what I'll cover in the next video on this channel. If this helped you, send it to somebody who's tired. Not somebody who needs better theology, somebody who's just tired of trying to make their own fire. And let this be our prayer. Abba Father, we've spent so long trying to be our own fire. We've polished the cold iron and we've called it holiness all the while wondering why we are exhausted with nothing left to give.
Forgive us for settling for a smaller gospel when you were offering your presence within us. Help us stay in the furnace as it burns, especially when our ego tries to defend itself because it doesn't want to give way to you. And when the tank is empty this week, remind us that the fire isn't ours. It never runs out. We are yours. Christ is in us. We are partakers.
In Jesus' name, amen.
