Why Your Church Never Taught You This
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For most of Christian history, the church openly taught something about you that I bet you've never heard preached from the pulpit. It wasn't some fringe teaching or some secret gospel that required special knowledge and was dug out of an ancient cave. It was a teaching preached by the people just one lifetime removed from the apostles themselves. It got written down, quoted, and passed along for centuries after they were gone. The teaching is simple but profound. God doesn't just forgive you. He moves in.
[snorts] As a believer, you come to share in God's own life in a very real way. Peter called it being partakers of the divine nature. Jesus defended the teaching to a group of men holding stones ready to kill him over it. That's what I discussed in my last video. In 40 years of Bible study and going to church, I never once heard anyone teach it or even mention it. And judging by what a lot of the comments on that video said, you probably haven't heard it either. That fundamental truth raises the question, where did it go?
Why was that teaching lost? Was it taken from us on purpose? The answer to that is actually much worse than a conspiracy or cover up because those things require a villain, some nefarious person looking to cause you harm for their own gain without you even realizing it. That's not what happened here. What happened was slower, sadder, and much more human than some big conspiracy. Even if that would make for a more exciting or intriguing story. A conspiracy can be exposed, but this it has to be fought continuously in every generation, especially ours.
There were four reasons the brightest jewel in the gospel got wrapped up in a protective cloth and locked away in a vault. By the end of this video, you'll know all four. Why it happened and how it's backfired on every believer in the world. But first, I'll prove to you this jewel actually existed. will walk through the history from the students of the apostles all the way to that book that's probably sitting on your shelf right now. The church used to teach this is actually a common claim and it's an easy way to convince people that you have the truth in a way that nobody else does. It's what's caused the birth of so many different flavors of Christianity and cults, particularly starting in the late 19th century and into the early 20th.
So, I'll give you the receipt so you know that's not what I'm doing here. Here's the cast of the story. Irenaeus of Lions of the second century, just one lifetime removed from the apostles, he famously said that Christ became what we are that he might bring us to be what he is himself. Athanasius of the 4th century, a man who spent his entire life fighting for the deity of Christ. He said that God became man so that man might become God. Athanasius was no heretic. He was a defender of orthodoxy itself.
Then there's Augustine of the fifth century commenting on the psalm Jesus quoted to those men ready to stone him. He said, "If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods by grace of adoption, not by nature." Augustine is considered the architect of Western theology. But it didn't stop there. The river of truth kept flowing into the future as God no doubt intended.
Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century said, "The only begotten son of God wanting to make us sharers in his divinity assumed our nature so that he made man might make men gods." That same sentence is quoted today in the official catechism of the Catholic Church. It's not some fringe belief. To this day, in every Catholic mass, the priests praise these words over the bread and wine. May we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity. It's the ancient exchange formula being prayed more often than it's ever been preached. Why you've never heard it preached, we'll get to shortly.
Then there's the Reformation. John Calvin himself, he read Peter's Partakers of the Divine Nature and wrote that the purpose of the gospel is quote a kind of deification. But he put a fence around it. As you might rightly expect, it was a sharing in God's quality, not his essence. The Eastern Church built the same fence, and it's the fence I put around it every time I talk about it. Fencing in a truth isn't denying it. You put a fence around something living to make sure it doesn't stray where it shouldn't.
And it's easy to take this truth beyond where it was meant to go. A lot of people have. You see it in new age teachings everywhere.
Even the Puritans, sober, wearing all black, almost allergic to anything that resembles enthusiasm. John Owen, perhaps their greatest theologian, put that same fence around the teaching, but didn't deny it. He insisted that your union with Christ causes the same spirit that filled Christ to dwell within you, too. You probably know the song where this teaching gets sung. Charles Wesley wrote it in 1739. You hear it every December. Born to raise the sons of earth.
Born to give them second birth. Second birth. With the sons of earth raised. It's the ancient teaching set to a tune many Christians have known since childhood. And let's not forget about CS Lewis. You know him no doubt. The evangelical approved Oxford Dawn who wrote Mere Christianity.
In his book, Lewis points at Psalm 82. again the one Jesus quoted under threat and he wrote he said in the Bible that we were gods and he is going to make good his words. Lewis also says that the whole purpose of our existence is to be taken into the life of God. That's the trail down through the centuries from the generation after the apostles all the way to our modern day. 1,800 years of witnesses to this truth. In my book, The Broken Mirror, I call this current the hidden stream. Remember that.
It's the key that unlocks everything I'm talking about here. A stream can go underground, hidden from plain sight, but it doesn't disappear. People just can't see it in the open and stop to take a drink without digging a little deeper. Rome kept it in the catechism and in their mass. The East kept it in their liturgy. The right question isn't where did the church hide it. The question is why did the pulpit go quiet about it?
Especially the revivalist evangelical lowurch world that most of us come from or the high control groups that splintered off of it in the late 18th century like the one I came from. Why didn't even they pick it up and hand it out from behind the lectern? You'd think they would have used it as a way to claim that they and only they have the real truth from God. But this is the truth. But even in all their zeal to set themselves apart from the rest of the church, they didn't preach it either. That's why I need to tell you the story of the four forces at work here. There's no villain twirling their mustache here like in the old movies and in the cartoons.
And that's why it's important to understand this because if it's not the devil trying to stop this truth, that means the forces preventing it from being preached are working on your church and on you right now. The first force is gravity. An inddwelling God makes the middleman optional. Think about it. The Bible says you're a temple of the Holy Spirit, Christ in you, the hope of glory. That's what it says. We are all partakers of the divine nature.
That's direct access and direct communion. And if you have direct access to God without the need of any religious system or organization, what happens to those institutions once all believers know that now these groups didn't vote to bury the truth? It's still in the liturgy. The words still get spoken even if they're not taught. What drifted was practice. The deep things migrated to the monks and the mystics. They got filed under advanced practice.
The rest of us got the ordinary manageable stuff. Attend, obey, behave. That wasn't a conscious decision. Gravity decided it just like it works on every institution humans have ever constructed. The parts that make the organization necessary, that keep it alive and growing, that's what gets emphasized. The truth that makes the janitor and the grandmother a walking temple of the living God. The single most decentralizing truth in the history of the world.
Well, that gets shelved. It's in the books, but not the ones the rank and file are encouraged to read. The way I put it in my book is that it's easier to shepherd a flock that believes it needs a shepherd to reach distant pastures than a flock that knows the good shepherd already lives inside each sheep. I'm not throwing rocks at your pastor here. Pastors often fight for their congregations to go deeper. They're not the problem. It's gravity.
You don't vote for gravity. It just happens. The second force that's prevented this truth from being universally understood is fear. And I actually have real sympathy for this one. Shortly after the truth was revealed by Jesus and Peter and Paul and others, counterfeits came in as their want to do to exploit it for their own ends. The Gnostics claim you have a divine spark that's yours by nature and that it takes secret knowledge to unlock it. No cross required.
In beautiful response to that, the early guardians of the faith countered the counterfeit by teaching the real truth even harder. That's where Irenaeus comes in, the church's chief gnostic fighter. When the Gnostics printed a counterfeit coin, he didn't hide the real one or lock it away. He showed people how to tell the real thing from the fool's gold. The retreat from this truth came later in waves. Every time somebody took Christ in me and used it to justify lawlessness or elitism or some other form of madness, the teachers of those times were faced with a choice. They could teach it more carefully or they could teach it less.
Unfortunately, the later generations chose less over careful. Think of it like a gardener so afraid of thorns that he prunes the roses back too far to the point where it barely blooms at all. And to the shame and detriment of us all, the Protestant West came to preach human depravity, who we become apart from Christ, so loudly and so exclusively that the truth of our restored glory got drowned out completely. That's like the opposite of Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer who in an effort to remove the weeds destroys most of the wheat along with it. The irony of that is something I've discussed on this channel before. When you actually understand the true teaching, you could never use it to inflate your pride or ego if you tried because the whole thing is a gift.
You didn't work for it. You didn't earn it. You can only be humbled. The Pharisees were proud because they believe their righteousness was due to their own actions. Nobody brags about being adopted. They're just grateful that they were. But fear doesn't accept nuance, does it?
It just locks the vault to protect itself from what it believes to be potentially dangerous. Now, the third force is more insidious. It's the vocabulary that was lost. Tell a typical Christian that humans participate in the divine nature and watch them throw up a cross between you and them like you're a vampire and their soul is in danger of eternal damnation. To your average believer, that sounds like pantheism. Everything is God. You're God.
That tree over there is God. Even your pet dog or cat or gerbble, everything is God. The Eastern Church had guardrails for that in their worship. The distinction between what God is, which no creature can touch, and what God shares, his life, his light, his love. In the West, though, that dictionary started gathering dust until the layer grew so thick and so many other books got stacked on top of it that nobody remembers it even exists. And when a church loses the words to say a thing safely, the safest feeling move is to stop saying it at all. Try it in your next Bible study if you dare.
Say out loud that you believe God actually lives inside you. Not as a figure of speech, but for real. Then watch as the silence and the stairs sweep over that room. But it's right there in the New Testament. This silence isn't your failing. It's the failing of a church that's lost its vocabulary.
Peter and Paul never shied away from the claim. Peter said boldly that we are partakers of the divine nature. Paul said, "Christ lives in me." They used bold words and trusted the spirit to keep him true. Somewhere along the way, our teachers stopped trusting in the spirit to keep us safe from the real heresy to the detriment of us all. The fourth force is that the gospel got shrunk down to size. And this is the one that affects you most directly over time, especially in the revivalist movement that shaped American Christianity.
The message got narrowed down. You're a sinner. Christ died to forgive you. And if you believe that, then heaven awaits. And here's the thing. All that is true and precious and foundational. But it's not the whole story.
It never was. It wasn't supposed to be. It's just the door that leads into the foyer of the mansion that was to be your new home. But that by itself keeps you stuck living in the foyer, sleeping on a cotter or in a sleeping bag instead of the four poster king-size in the master bedroom. The foyer is lovely, but it's just one room of that home that you inherited. You've heard all the big verses if you spend much time in church. Christ in you, new creation.
Your body is a temple. Those things get preached, but they're preached small. Your body is a temple gets followed by, "So don't smoke that cigarette." Christ in you is just a figure of speech, a churchy way of saying you're a believer. New creation just means you kicked a bad habit, turning over a new leaf, as it were. The words survived, but the enormity of what they meant didn't. They got handed to us as metaphors and nice moral sayings rather than what Peter and Paul and Jesus really meant.
Those things aren't just things you should do. They're who you are. Believers today typically live as pardoned sinners, the worm and what's called worm theology. Forgiven, but repeating the things that make you guilty every day, returning to God in prayer each night to beg for forgiveness and keep trudging on day after day after wormlike day. We haven't been told about the fire we're carrying inside. The coin of forgiveness got handed out at the door, and it's a beautiful coin. But the jewel of transformation remains locked in the vault as if it's too dangerous for us to hold because we might break it.
And let's be real here, that kind of church is a whole lot easier. It's easier to schedule, to measure, to run. It wasn't chosen on purpose. Like I said, the forces at work slowly, gradually put pressure that caused those things to compound century after century. Gravity, fear, lost words, a shrunken gospel. Each of them working on the church over the centuries until the stream that used to run through the middle of town got buried under the ground and forgotten. People walk across it every day, parched in need of water, and all they get is a few drops on their tongue at Sunday.
It's something, but it's nowhere close to your cup that was meant to runth over. Once more, so you don't misunderstand me. This teaching was never officially denied. It's in the catechism, the mass, the liturgy, the hymns. It just stopped getting emphasized. It's on the books, but not on the pulpit. You can hop online and find it right now if you know what to look for.
And you can also sit in a pew for 40 years and never hear a word of it. Once you understand that, you understand the history. It's not sinister, it's just sad. Because once you see what it's cost us, what it's cost you personally, you might even weep over it. I'll tell you why. But first, let me handle the two objections I'm sure already in the comments about what I'm saying here. The first one goes like this.
John, if this teaching was really buried, how did you find all those quotes about it? Exactly. That's the whole point. It wasn't hidden from the shelf. It was taken out of the sermon. Every quote I read has been in print for centuries, and all of them are easily accessible from a web search. Some of them get prayed daily in churches around the world.
The people praying them just don't know the depth of what it means. The vault wasn't locked from the inside. It was locked from the outside. It's in the library of your church right now, most likely. It's just that almost nobody goes in there anymore. We all sit in the pews of the sanctuary and trust the pastor or the priest to tell us what's in the books. For all the reasons discussed, they almost never do.
The second objection is this. Maybe it isn't emphasized anymore for good reason. Look at all the cults now. You came out of one yourself, John. There's a lot of truth in this objection. I am from one of those cults. Spent most of my life in it.
And yeah, this teaching has been mishandled all the way from the Gnostics to the Mormons and on. That's why the fear force wasn't an irrational response, but it was a really expensive one. I mean, let's be real, hiding the jewel didn't prevent the cults, did it? They flourished. Some of them are huge with millions of ardent adherence. The cults offer people a sense of identity and destiny that the churches have stopped giving to them. a false sense of unity and a belonging and belief that they have all the answers if only they'll hand over the power to the men who have already unlocked all the secrets.
And the cult I was raised in, we were told we knew exactly how history would play out and what was coming in the future. There's a real sense of security in that, but it's false. Don't underestimate the human ego's need to feel it's right and knows what's coming. Meanwhile, the people who stayed in the safe mainstream churches got worm theology. You're a worthless sinner saved by the cross. Be grateful. Beg for mercy daily and you'll make it into heaven.
That kind of perspective has caused a lot of people to abandon Christianity altogether. I mean, think about what that sounds like if you stop and examine it critically. It sounds like somebody wants you to feel worthless so you'll obey when they tell you what to do. It sounds like a control mechanism. I can't tell you how many people leave comments on this channel and my ex-cult channel saying that all religions are cults. This is one of the big reasons they say that. And can I be very real and honest with you right now?
I understand their perspective even though I disagree with it. The vault the truth of who you really are got put into that vault protected exactly nobody. The answer to a dangerous truth isn't to make the truth smaller. You don't stop using fire because it can burn you. You don't stop driving a car because the occasional lunatic drives one into a crowd. You teach people how to handle the fire, how to drive the car safely. That's why this channel exists.
It's high time we got back to teaching the truth rather than hiding it in the theology books. Real quick, while we're being honest with each other here, if this is helping you, would you hit subscribe and let me know in the comments if you've ever heard this teaching before in any church from any pulpit? If you have, I want to know who's out there teaching it. If not, let me know how long you sat in a church without ever hearing it. And if you want the full history of all this, the early church fathers, the mystics, the verses, the whole hidden stream from end to end, it's all in my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. Chapter 20 is called The Brightest Jewel Hidden. It's this video with all the detail and references and footnotes that I don't have time to put here.
One reviewer predicted it will become a classic for group Bible study or for the lone seeker of deeper truth. The link is in the pin comment in the video description. Now, let's look at what locking this away has cost us believers because the bill has been steep. Hiding who we are in Christ has cost centuries of believers a life much greater than the one they're living right now. We sat outside our own house shivering in the dark as we put our hands against the windows to feel a little warmth radiating from inside. It costs the church her light. The church is just as anxious about the things the world is anxious about.
I was having a discussion with a friend of mine a while back, a Christian man. He had a great opportunity but was too anxious and afraid to step forward and take it because he was holding on to the crumbs his life was currently feeding him. I was in shock. How could a man who believed Christ was in him and he was a partaker of the divine nature be afraid to step forward in the power of God and change his life and the world for the better. But he wouldn't do it because he didn't actually know those things. That's what worm theology cost him. And let me throw myself into this group.
Worm theology costs me my freedom. Freedom of mind. freedom to read the Bible and see the truth and feel the swell of love and peace that comes when you know exactly who you are and what you were meant to do. The peace of knowing God dwells within and is always with you. That his spirit steps in when your gas tank is empty and propels you faster and further than you thought you could ever go. I used to fear the future. Was I good enough to make it through the destruction that was coming?
Had I done enough? Would I be saved? Now, I don't worry about the future at all. I let go and let God. It never fails to amaze me. Puts a big cheesy grin on my face every time when something happens that I handed over to God and told him that I trust him with. And there it is in some unexpected way I could never have imagined, more perfect than any plan I could have ever come up with.
I walked the path. There's effort involved in that. And it's a rocky path, but I let God guide me to the destination. And with God as your guide, why would you ever fear getting lost?
But there's another cost to shrinking the gospel the way it's been. When it shrank, everything it touched shrank along with it. I mean, think this through. [snorts] If God is far away and you're just a pardoned worm waiting for heaven, you know what prayer becomes? begging at the ceiling or at the floor depending on your position. What does Bible reading become? A performance for a distant audience.
Communion becomes prefuncter. Baptism is just a symbol instead of a transformation. Hearing God becomes something that only happens to church leaders and lunatics. Every practice of the Christian life that's supposed to burn with the fire of the indwelt spirit grows cold. We're trying to push the car down the road to life rather than starting up the engine and letting it take us into eternity. That's why Christianity can feel like a burden rather than a blessing. That car is heavy.
You can't push it on your own. You were never meant to do that. That's the cost of locking up who you are in a vault in the church library. It's not just a lost doctrine. It's the whole of Christian life getting taught backwards. But that vault won't stay shut. The comfortable cultural Christianity that's been surviving on attendance and a vague sense of guilt, that's visibly dying.
You've seen it happening. As awful and wrong and false as they are, why do you think people turn to all those cults? They long for something more. Their original practice from those mainstream churches, it felt hollow. But now, everywhere I look, including in the comments on these videos, I see people unlocking the vault and throwing away the cloth that's prevented the jewel from shining with the brilliance of a thousand suns. People are breaking out the shovels and digging down to the stream so it can be freely drank from once again. That's God doing that.
That's the spirit moving the church back to what he intended for us. His people are finally hungry enough to want it again. And here it is. So, here's this week's practice. It's the simplest one I've given you so far. I call it out loud. Sometime this week, open your Bible and read two things out loud.
Second Peter 1:4, that he has given us his very great and precious promise so that through them you may participate in the divine nature. And Psalm 82:6, I have said you are gods. You are all sons of the most high. Read the whole psalm while you're at it. It's short. And verse 7 is why this is grace and not flattery. I covered that in my last video.
Read it out loud in your own voice. Most of us have never actually heard those passages, not in a sermon or in Sunday school, and especially not coming out of our own mouth. It changes you when you say it out loud for yourself. So say the words. You're not chanting. You're not manifesting. You're reading scripture aloud.
And that is the oldest Christian practice there is. And if you read them but don't feel anything, you haven't failed. Remember, you're digging up the stream. That first shovel full isn't going to contain the water. So say them again the next day and the next until you feel the water wash over you. And if what you mostly feel right now is anger at the decades that this has been kept from you, that's okay. I felt that too.
Just don't live in that space for too long. Every day you stay angry instead of filled is another day in pain rather than paradise. Here's why I covered all of this now in this video. It wasn't just a doctrine that got shrank. It was everything the doctrine touches. Every practice of Christian life you were ever taught. That's why I'm starting a new series.
One at a time. We'll take the practices you know and relearn them the way they were meant to be rather than the shrunken versions that you were taught. And we'll start with the biggest one of all. My next video will cover how you were taught to pray backwards. If your prayers ever felt like you were leaving voicemails for a God who never answers the phone, that video will be for you. And if this video helped you, send it to somebody who gave up on church, but who didn't want to give up on God. The person who suspected there's got to be more to all this than what they were given.
You know who I mean. And they weren't wrong. There is more. So much more. Send this to them. And let this be our prayer. Aba, Father, thank you that your truth will no longer tolerate being locked away in a vault.
Thank you for all the witnesses throughout history that refuse to let the stream be buried and for the thirst that's awakening in your people now as they approach that stream. We confess the gravity, the fear, the lost words, and the shrunken gospel that reduced who we are and left us out in the cold, staring in through the window of the mansion you intended us to dwell in. Forgive us and make us brave. Teach us in the coming weeks to pray, to read, to worship, to remember, and to listen. Not as beggars at some distant throne, but as your children gathered at your feet to listen, to learn, and to feel the warmth of your love radiate in our hearts, reflected like mirrors off our souls into the hearts of others who have been robbed by a lesser gospel, but desire more. We love you. We reflect you.
We are yours in Jesus' name. Amen.
