The Lie Christianity Told You About Yourself
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For 40 years, I believed I was a worm. I was wrong. And if you grew up in any Christian tradition, you probably believe the same lie about yourself. Sin is real. Grace is real. The lie is what we think those words mean about who you are. I'm going to tell you something that might shake your faith or it might finally make sense of it.
By the end of this video, you're going to understand something that the earliest Christians knew. Something that was taught for centuries, but it's been buried under layers of tradition and fear. And here's what's at stake. If you don't understand this, you will spend your entire life fighting a battle you've already won. You'll exhaust yourself trying to become something you already are. By the end of this video, you won't just think differently about God. You'll see yourself differently.
I spent 40 years in that cage. Seven years walking through the wilderness of deconstruction. And when I finally found what I'm about to share with you, everything changed. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Colossians 1:27.
Let me tell you how I got here. Picture an eight-year-old boy climbing a tree by a seaw wall. He's up there talking to God. Even then, in the middle of a childhood that was anything but normal, an alcoholic mother, a cult that promised Armageddon any day now, that little boy felt drawn to something greater. That little boy was me. I was raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. From the time I could understand words, I was taught the end of the world was coming.
Not someday, soon, any day now. The end of the world wasn't just a theological concept for us. It was a living, breathing fear that followed me everywhere. I had recurring nightmares, fireballs raining from heaven, the sky on fire, buildings crumbling, and through the chaos, I could see angels swooping down from the clouds. They were picking up the saved ones, carrying them off to safety. But they weren't coming for me. I'd run faster, my little legs pumping as hard as they could, but the angels just pass me by.
Just when I thought all hope was lost, just when the terror became unbearable, I'd feel strong arms scoop me up from behind, an angel had caught me, and we were rising into the sky. That's when I'd wake up, drenched in cold sweat, heart pounding like a drum. That dream captures what it's like to grow up in a cult. You're always running, always afraid, always wondering if you'll be among the saved. We were taught only a tiny number would go to heaven, and everyone else had to survive Armageddon in good standing with the organization.
By the time I was eight, I wasn't just attending meetings. We didn't call it church. I was on stage giving talks, trying to sound confident, even though my knees were shaking. Looking back now, I can see God's hand in that early training. He was preparing me to speak, giving me a gift I'd used decades later in ways I never could have imagined.
But let me tell you about the home I'd returned to after those meetings. My mother was an alcoholic, not the kind who quietly nursed a bottle in the corner. She was abusive, unpredictable, a storm that could break over our heads at any moment. My father was different. kind, gentle, the kind of man who'd give you the shirt off his back, even if it was his last one. He tried to protect us, but he worked long hours. We were left alone with her most of the time.
When I was about nine, she finally left. Just packed up and walked out. And you know what? It was the best thing that could have happened to us. Peace descended on our house like a blanket. But the damage was done. The fear was already wired in and the cult just reinforced it.
Eventually, I escaped that cult. But here's what I didn't expect. I traded one cage for another. After leaving, I went to some good churches with sincere people. And the message over and over was this. You are a sinner. Try harder.
Be better. Don't trust yourself. Your heart is wicked. And I believed it. I taught it. I was one of its most passionate defenders. But something was missing.
Picture a house built with sturdy walls, memorized scripture for bricks, rules for mortar, constant vigilance against the sinful nature as the highest turret. I wasn't just living in that house. I was standing guard. And yet my soul felt hollow. Then one ordinary Sunday, a question struck like a battering ram. If this is the abundant life Jesus promised, why does my soul feel so empty? That single crack was all it took.
The familiar rooms, once a sanctuary, now felt like a beautifully painted cage. What followed was 7 years of wilderness. Seven years of deconstruction, seven years where I genuinely didn't know if any of it was true. If you've been there or you're there right now, I want you to know something. That wilderness, it's not a deviation from God's plan. It's part of it. The spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness right after his baptism.
Think about that timing. He goes from the heavens opening, the father's voice thundering, "This is my beloved son," straight into 40 days of hunger and temptation and wild beasts. from the heights of divine affirmation into the depths of desert desolation. And the word mark uses for drove, it's the same word used when Jesus casts out demons. The spirit didn't gently suggest that maybe it would be a good idea for Jesus to take a spiritual retreat. It drove him there, cast him out into it. If Jesus had to go through that, why do we think we won't consider Job?
Blameless and upright, the Bible calls him. He had it all. wealth, family, health, a clear understanding of how righteousness was supposed to work. Do good, receive blessing, follow the rules, prosper, and then it all fell apart. In a single day, he loses his children, his wealth, his health. His wife tells him to curse God and die. His friends insist there must be a proper theological explanation.
You must have sinned. Confess it. Get your doctrine right. But Job's suffering didn't have anything to do with fixing his doctrine. At the end of the book, after God appears to him in the whirlwind, what does Job say? I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Job went from hearing about God to seeing God, from correct belief to direct experience.
The wilderness made that possible. You see this pattern everywhere. Israel's 40 years. Paul counting his credentials as dung. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. That dark night isn't God abandoning you. It's God stripping away everything you've been depending on that isn't him.
So that when you finally come through it, you'll have something real, something that can't be shaken. But here's what I didn't tell you yet. Everything I just described, the fear, the striving, the exhausting treadmill of try harder, be better, it's all built on a lie. A lie about who you actually are. And that lie, it's not in the Bible. The earliest Christians didn't believe it. The church fathers didn't teach it.
For the first thousand years of Christianity, they understood something radically different about human nature. To be clear, this is not new age divinity. This is union with Christ by grace. I'm talking about something that's been there all along, hidden in plain sight. If you hear me say, "Participate in the divine nature," and your mind shouts, "Heresy," don't click away. I used to react the same way. Give me 8 minutes and I'll show you it's straight scripture in early Christianity.
And I'm not talking about self-help. I'm not talking about positive thinking. I'm talking about the risen Christ living in you. But first, you need to understand the metaphor that changed everything for me. Imagine God as pure, infinite, uncontainable light. Not just brightness, but the essence of all love, truth, goodness, creativity, and joy. This light is the source of everything.
Now, this is crucial. We human beings were created as mirrors, not dime store mirrors. Exquisitely crafted ones with a single glorious purpose to catch and reflect that divine light. You weren't made to generate light. You were made to reflect it. Think about what that means. A mirror that tries to create its own light will burn itself out.
But a mirror that simply faces the light, it shines effortlessly. But then the story takes a tragic turn. The mirrors, through a choice born of deception, turned away from the light. They became covered with dust, with grime, with layers of misunderstanding and fear. Eventually, they were so caked with residue that many forgot they were mirrors at all. They began to believe they were just dark, opaque objects, fundamentally separate from the light, capable at best of standing in its distant presence, but never ever of truly reflecting it. The grime isn't cosmetic.
It's real distortion. It bends the reflection and fractures our loves. And that misunderstanding slowly reshaped Western theology. When Jesus came, he appeared as a perfect mirror, utterly clean, astonishingly clear, flawlessly reflecting the Father's light. When people looked at him, they saw what humanity was always meant to be, what a human life fully aligned with the divine actually looks like. Some were captivated. Some were confused.
Others were deeply offended. How could a mere human shine with such divine radiance? But here's what most people miss. Jesus didn't come just to be the sole admirable clean mirror in a world of dirty ones. He came to remind all the other mirrors what they truly were beneath the grime. He came to show us that we weren't dark objects pathetically longing for a distant light. We were and are mirrors made for light, designed for glory.
You are the light of the world. Matthew 5:14. Not you will be, not you should try to be. You are. Present tense. How can both Jesus and his followers be the light of the world unless we are designed to share his nature, to reflect his very light, not equal to Jesus, united to Jesus. Now, I know what some of you are thinking.
Hold on. This sounds dangerous. Isn't this new age stuff? Dressed up in church clothes. Aren't we supposed to be humble? Didn't Jesus say we need to deny ourselves? I get it.
I had every one of those objections. I was trained to have them. But here's what I discovered. When I actually dug into scripture without the interpretive framework I'd inherited, the Bible says things about human identity that most Christians have never actually wrestled with. Okay, here it is. The sentence that changed everything for me. Let me show you.
Peter writes that God has given us his very great and precious promises so that through them you may participate in the divine nature. Participate in the divine nature. Second Peter 1:4. That's not me. That's scripture. Paul cries out, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." Galatians 2:20.
Not with me, not near me, in me. And when Jesus prays in John 17, listen to this. That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me that they may be one as we are one. I in them and you in me. John 17:21-23.
He's praying for believers to experience the same kind of unity with God, the same intimate indwelling that he himself experiences with the father. That's not organizational harmony. That's mystical union, a shared life. Do you see why this changes everything? What I'm about to share isn't some fringe idea. And I want to be crystal clear before I quote these men. We're not talking about becoming God in essence.
We're not talking about replacing God. We're talking about participating in his divine life by grace through Christ. With that understanding, listen to what the earliest church fathers, the generation right after the apostles, actually believed. They had a word for it. Theosis, deification, divonization.
Because if theosis is true, salvation isn't just forgiveness, it's participation. Now, here's the key. God has an essence. What he is in himself. That essence is unknowable, unique to him alone. We can never become that. But God also has energies, his life, his grace, his glory, his love flowing out from his essence.
Think of the sun. We can't become the sun, but we can experience its light, feel its warmth, be utterly transformed by it. When the church fathers spoke of theosis, they meant becoming partakers of God's divine energies, being filled with his life and love by grace. We become God's by grace, never God by nature. If that last statement shocked you, it's not my words, it's scripture. I said, "You are God's. You are all sons of the most high."
Psalm 82:6. Jesus famously quotes that scripture in John 10. Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, I have said you are gods?" If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came and scripture cannot be set aside, what about the one whom the father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? John 10:34-36.
Let that sink in. Irenaeus is one generation after the apostles. His teacher knew Polycarp who knew John. And Irenaeus put it this way. God became what we are so that we might become what he is. Become what he is. Clement of Alexandria declared, "The word of God became man that you may learn from man how man may become God."
Athanasius, the man who gave us the Trinity doctrine, said, "He became man that we might be made God." But he clarified immediately, "We are not made gods by nature, but by grace and participation." by grace and participation.
Hold that thought. Gregory of Natanzus gave us a vital principle. What is not assumed is not healed. For Christ to redeem all of human nature, he had to take on all of human nature, body, soul, mind, will. Let us become like Christ, Gregory urged, since Christ became like us. This isn't fringe theology. This is the mainstream understanding of salvation for the first thousand years of Christianity.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition has never lost it. participating in his divine nature, his life, his glory, his love flowing through us. So if this is what the earliest Christians believed, what happened? Why do most Western Christians today believe they're fundamentally wicked? That their hearts are corrupt, that their best efforts are filthy rags. Here's the uncomfortable truth. Somewhere along the way, Christianity became more about managing behavior than facilitating transformation.
It's easier to give people rules to follow than to guide them on the journey of discovering the Christ who lives within them. It's easier to keep people dependent on institutions than to tell them they have direct access to God. And frankly, a congregation taught they're fundamentally broken is a congregation that keeps coming back for help. And sometimes leaders mean well. Fear just became the operating system. But here's the good news. The truth was never destroyed.
It's been there all along, hidden in plain sight. When Paul writes that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, that's not poetry. A temple is where God dwells, where his presence resides. You are the sacred space where the creator of the universe has taken up residence. Remember second Peter 1:4, "Participate in the divine nature. That's your birthright." And John, the beloved disciple who leaned on Jesus's chest at the last supper, writes, "See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are."
1 John 3:1, "That is what we are." Not what we're trying to become, what we are, dear friends. Now, we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 1 John 3:2. There's an already and a not yet found here. We already are children of God.
We already participate in his nature, but there's more coming, a fuller unveiling. When we see him as he is, we shall be like him. Once you see this thread, it's everywhere in the New Testament. But the foundation is already laid. The reality is already true. The identity is already yours. You are not a worm trying to earn your way to God.
You are a child of God with Christ's life in you, learning to live from what's already true. You're not becoming a new creation. You already are one. The work now is removing what obscures the reality. like polishing a mirror. The reflection was always there. The light was always shining.
We just couldn't see it through the grime. A year and a half ago, I was standing in a grocery store. I know, not exactly Mount Si. Nothing special about the day, just picking up milk, bread, some fruit. I was in the produce section looking at apples when it hit me. And when I say it, I mean love with a capital L. It wasn't an emotion.
It was a presence, a reality, a truth that became as obvious as the floor beneath my feet. I was loved completely, unconditionally, eternally loved. And not just loved, I was filled with love, overflowing with it. I looked at the other shoppers, strangers I'd never met, whose names I'd never know, and I loved them. Not in some abstract love your neighbor kind of way. really loved them like they were family I'd been separated from my whole life. For years, I had looked at people and seen biological accidents or sinners to be converted.
But in that produce aisle, I saw Christ in them. I'm not saying everyone was automatically saved. I'm saying I could suddenly see the image of God and the reach of Christ's love everywhere. It lasted maybe 2 minutes. 2 minutes that changed everything. I made it to my car before I broke down. Tears streaming, shoulders shaking.
This wasn't about me being special. It was about finally getting out of the way. Because in that moment, I understood. For seven years in the wilderness, I thought I was alone. I thought God had abandoned me. I thought I was making my own footprints in the sand. But I was wrong.
He was carrying me the whole time. All those nights of doubt, all those questions without answers, all those moments when I was sure God had given up on me, he was there carrying me every single step. You know that poem, Footprints in the Sand, the one where the person asked God why there was only one set of footprints during the hardest times of their life, and the Lord replies, "That's when I carried you." Sitting in that parking lot, tears running down my face, I realized it was literal. Those seven years of wilderness, those weren't my footprints. They were his. So, here's what I need you to understand.
You are not a sinner struggling to be good enough. You are a beloved child of God whose new nature is more real than your temporary struggles. Let me say that again because it's the opposite of what most of us were taught. Your new nature in Christ is more real than your failures. Your identity as God's beloved child is more fundamental than your worst day. The Christ who lives in you is more powerful than the sin that harasses you. You were not designed to generate spiritual light through effort.
You were designed to reflect it by simply facing the source. Think about what that means practically. You don't have to manufacture peace. You don't have to work up joy. You don't have to generate love through sheer willpower. These are fruits of the spirit. And the spirit lives in you.
They flow naturally when you stop blocking them. When you stop striving and start receiving the transformation you've been striving for, it's not about becoming something you're not. It's about unveiling who you've always been in Christ. It's like a sculptor who sees the statue already in the marble. He's not adding anything. He's removing what doesn't belong. Revealing what was always there.
That's what sanctification actually is. Not adding virtue to a wicked heart, but removing the grime from a mirror that was always meant to shine. Christ in you. That's not a distant hope. It's a present, available, transformative reality. And when you finally believe that, when it moves from your head to your heart, everything shifts. You stop striving.
You start resting. You stop performing and start abiding. You stop trying to get God's love. You start living from it. Everything changes. Not because your circumstances change, but because you finally see clearly who you've been all along. That difficult person who tries your patience, they're an image bearer.
Perhaps deeply marred, but still designed for glory. Still a potential temple of the spirit. You can see Christ in them even when they can't see him in themselves. That fellow believer who stumbles and falls. They're a child of God whose new divine nature is more real and enduring than their momentary failure. You can extend grace because you know grace was extended to you. And you, you are not merely a forgiven sinner struggling to be good.
You are a beloved child of God, a sacred temple, a participant in divine nature, learning day by day to live from the glorious reality of Christ who lives within you. The broken mirror is ready to shine. It's been ready. It's been waiting. The light never stopped shining. You just couldn't see it through the grime. The question is, are you ready to see the reflection?
Now that you understand who you are, you need to understand how to live from it, how to actually practice this day by day. That's what I cover in my next video. And if you want to go even deeper, the full journey from Genesis to Revelation, from the fall to the restoration, from the earliest church fathers to practical daily application. That's what I wrote. the broken mirror to explore. This book will show you how scripture has always pointed to this truth. It will answer the objections you might still have and it will give you a framework for actually living from your divine identity instead of toward it.
The link is in the description. Hard copy, Kindle, audio book, whatever works for you. But here's what I really want you to know. If you're in that wilderness right now, if you're seeing only one set of footprints and feeling abandoned, take heart. Those aren't your footprints. They're his. He's carrying you through this valley, and he will set your feet on solid ground again.
Christ in you is the hope of glory. And that's not wishful thinking. That's a promise. The boy who climbed the tree by the seaw wall is still talking to God. Only now the fear is gone. Now he knows that the waves that crash against our barriers are no match for the love that holds us. Now he knows that Christ in us is the hope of glory.
Your story isn't over. Your journey isn't finished. And the one who began a good work in you will carry it on until completion in the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6. You are loved. You are held. You are never alone.
What part of this hit you the hardest? Let me know in the comments. And someday when you look back on this difficult season, you'll see it clearly. There was only one set of footprints because he was carrying you all along. Let this be our prayer. Aba, Father, thank you for never giving up on us, even when we gave up on ourselves. Thank you for carrying us through the wilderness when we thought we were walking alone.
Thank you for seeing the mirror beneath the grime when all we could see was the dirt. Lord, for everyone listening who's exhausted from striving, who's tired of performing, who's wondering if there's more to this faith than trying harder and failing again, let them see it. Let them see who they really are in you. Not worms begging for scraps, but beloved children, sacred temples, mirrors made for glory. Remove whatever is blocking the reflection. Polish what's been neglected. And help us live from the truth of Christ in us.
Not toward it, but from it. We trust you with our past, our present, and our future. In Jesus' name, amen. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. Readers call it a fantastic book where you will feel yourself discovering your identity in Christ. One reviewer praised it as five-star material for the spiritual mystic or group Bible study. It's time to escape legalism and shame.
Discover you're already God's beloved child with divine nature flowing through you with what reviewers describe as excellent writing style and elegant pros like a campfire discussion with a knowledgeable and gifted recon tour. Journey from Genesis to Revelation, uncovering your true identity. This book shows how to access God's peace, wisdom, and strength from within. Your struggles become opportunities for divine light to shine through. Available in hard coverver, paperback, Kindle, and audio book. The link to the book is in the video description. May God bless your journey along his path for you.
