Most of us have some idea of how our lives are supposed to unfold.

We have work to do, families to care for, bills to pay, and ambitions we hope to fulfill. We try to live faithfully before God while pursuing the opportunities in front of us.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But occasionally, in the Bible, something remarkable happens. God reaches into someone’s ordinary life and gives that person an assignment they never anticipated.

That’s what happened to Amos.

A man with a life of his own

Amos lived in the eighth century BC, when Israel was divided into two kingdoms. He came from Tekoa, a small town in Judah, south of Jerusalem.

He wasn’t a priest. He wasn’t a member of the religious establishment. He wasn’t even from the northern kingdom of Israel, where God would eventually send him.

Amos worked with livestock and tended sycamore-fig trees. He had a livelihood. Presumably, he had customers, responsibilities, relationships, and plans for the future. It was most likely the life he inherited from his father and grandfather.

We know very little about his personal circumstances, but there’s no reason to imagine that he was sitting around waiting for a spectacular religious career to begin.

He had a life.

And then something happened to reorient him.

God called him to leave his familiar world and travel north with a message that powerful people would not want to hear. He was untrained for this responsibility.

An unwelcome visitor at Bethel

The northern kingdom was enjoying a period of relative prosperity under Jeroboam II. The wealthy were accumulating property, business was booming, and the religious institutions were operating at full capacity.

When God looked down at this prosperous nation, he saw a completely different picture.

The rich were exploiting the poor. Courts decisions were for sale. The outward show of religious worship continued, but the moral character of the nation was deteriorating. They didn’t love him. They were not committed to follow his ways. They used worship as insurance against bad things happening and to try to tilt the scales of luck in their favor.

Amos arrived with a devastating message: God had seen what was happening, and judgment was coming.

As you might imagine, he was particularly unwelcome at Bethel, one of the kingdom’s principal religious sanctuaries.

There he encountered Amaziah, the priestly institution keeper of Bethel.

Amaziah regarded Amos as another itinerant religious professional, someone who made his living delivering theatrical “prophetic” messages.

And he wanted him gone.

In Amos 7:12–13, Amaziah tells him:

“Get out of here, you seer! Go back to Judah. Earn your living prophesying there. But don’t prophesy here anymore. This is the king’s sanctuary.”

You can hear the contempt. Take your business somewhere else. We don’t need your show. You’re not welcome here.

But Amaziah had completely misunderstood Amos.

This isn’t my business

Amos responds with one of the most revealing descriptions about calling in the entire Old Testament.

He says:

“I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I took care of sycamore-fig trees. But the LORD took me from tending the flock and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” (Amos 7:14–15, NIV)

What an answer. Amos wasn’t pursuing a religious career.

He hadn’t inherited the family prophecy business. He wasn’t trying to build a reputation as a spiritual authority. He hadn’t traveled north because he saw a promising market for his services.

Amos’s courage and spiritual authority rested on the conviction that God had personally commissioned him.

When God interrupts an ordinary life

This is a pattern we encounter repeatedly throughout Scripture.

• Moses was tending sheep when God confronted him at the burning bush.

• Gideon was threshing wheat when an angel announced that God had an assignment for him.

• David was looking after his father’s sheep when Samuel arrived to anoint Israel’s future king.

• Mary was a young woman in Nazareth when Gabriel announced that her life would take a direction she could never have imagined.

These people were not all seeking public prominence or extraordinary responsibility.

Their assignments came looking for them.

That raises an interesting question about the way we understand calling.

We sometimes use the word to describe our occupation, our personal ambitions, or the work we find especially meaningful. “I found my calling.” Fair enough. Our ordinary work can be deeply significant before God.

But Scripture also describes another kind of calling: a particular commission, arising from God’s initiative, that redirects someone’s life toward an unexpected responsibility.

And these assignments are not necessarily promotions.

Amos didn’t receive wealth, status, or an easier life. His assignment made him unpopular and placed him in danger. Sometimes the privilege of being sent by God carries an enormous personal cost.

What about the rest of us?

I think we need to be careful when we’re talking about callings like this one.

We can become so fascinated with spectacular biblical assignments that we begin to treat ordinary faithfulness as something inferior. Amos’s work as a shepherd and agricultural worker was not meaningless simply because God later gave him a prophetic commission.

Most of our lives are lived in the ordinary rhythms of work, marriage, friendship, parenting, service, and responsibility. These are worthy places to live faithfully before God.

On the other hand, I don’t think we should assume that the life we’ve planned (or even the career we have just completed) is necessarily the only life God might ask us to live. People are living long lives today. You can easily do a 30-year career and still have the expectation of 25 or 30 more years of robust health.

I’ve seen this happen many times. I’m sure you have also.

That doesn’t mean every strong feeling or attractive opportunity is a divine command. Such claims deserve patient discernment. But on the other hand, I think it’s sad to become so attached to our personal plans that we lose the capacity to respond when God redirects us.

Available to be sent

I keep returning to the simplicity of Amos’s explanation.

The LORD took me.

There was no elaborate strategy. No evidence that Amos had spent years dreaming of becoming a national prophetic figure.

He had a certain kind of life, and then he received an unusual assignment.

So when challenged by the religious establishment, he knew why he was there.

I think it was helpful that he was a second-career prophet. He had the maturity of having completed his previous life, dealing with all the challenges that go with farming.

It’s not our job to manufacture an extraordinary destiny. We can live faithfully today, with open hands toward tomorrow.

Because sometimes God calls a shepherd to remain a shepherd. And sometimes he sends that shepherd to confront a king.

Amos did not need a prophetic assignment to make his ordinary life significant. But when God gave him an extraordinary responsibility, his previous plans no longer determined his future.

I hope you can live with that much freedom. Sherry and I are trying to. We live with both our arms wrapped tightly around the people God has called us to serve, but all of us have to keep our ears open to new responsibilities and opportunities God may be pushing us toward in his quiet way.

On this journey together.

Chuck and Sherry

Although they and our staff are from Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, the Philippines, the USA, Korea and Thailand, this lesson is for everyone. She’s lived it, and this one lesson has helped her overcome so many difficulties and setbacks in life. Everyone who knows my wife knows her as a sparkling, upbeat cheerleader. Here’s her secret in this episode of Grounded.

Every Blessing,

Chuck

When I was a kid, sometimes my mom and I would watch Let's Make a Deal Hosted by Monty Hall. This is the show where contestants chose between doors (or boxes/curtains) to win prizes.

Carol Merrill was the original model who stood by the doors and displayed the prizes. You never knew if you were going to blindly choose a box that had the keys to a new car or choose what you thought was a luxury item in a large space, but when the curtain came back, it would turn out to be just a goat.

Two options sit in front of you. Both are reasonable. You’ve prayed. Maybe you’ve fasted. You’ve asked people you respect. You’ve read your Bible hoping something would jump off the page. You’re watching doors open and close, trying to decide whether that phone call yesterday meant something.

And everyone seems to have a method. One friend says you’ll have peace. Another says God will open the door. Someone else simply says, “God told me.”

That last one can sting. Because God doesn’t seem to talk to you like that. So you start to wonder whether something is wrong with you. Maybe you’re not close enough to him. Maybe you’re not spiritual enough to hear.

And quietly, a career decision has become a referendum on your relationship with God.

The meticulous sovereignty approach

Usually it goes something like this. God has a detailed plan for my life. Inside that plan is one correct choice for every important decision. God knows it. I don’t. My job is to discover what he has already decided. And if I miss the signal, I could end up out of his will, living Plan B. Then Plan C. God knows the will where I’m supposed to end up, which was chosen before I was even born, but He’s holding the cards really close to His chest. I’ve got to become really good at guessing so I can figure it out.

That is an exhausting way to live. It turns the Christian life into signal detection. Open doors, closed doors, feelings, dreams, coincidences, verses.

I’m not saying God never speaks. He does. I’m not saying the Holy Spirit doesn’t lead. He does. Prayer matters deeply. But I want to ask whether this is the picture of mature people that Jesus actually produced.

What Jesus was building

Watch how Jesus worked with his disciples. Yes, he gave commands. Follow me. Go here. Don’t do that.

But look at the direction of their growth. He taught them. He let them watch him. He corrected their motives. He showed them how God thinks about money, power, enemies, forgiveness, and the poor. Then he sent them out to deal with real people in real situations, without him standing beside them making every call.

Jesus wasn’t just handing out answers. He was forming judgment—discernment, wisdom.

He ends the Sermon on the Mount talking about two builders. One builds on rock, one on sand. The difference is simple: one hears what Jesus says and actually does it in his life as a habit based on principle.

We can spend enormous energy hunting for God’s specific will on things he hasn’t made clear (whether to be a plumber or a pilot), while walking right past what he has made very clear. Be honest. Forgive everyone for everything. Be generous. Keep your word even if it hurts you. Love your enemies and stop the cycle of resentment. Seek the kingdom first and above all.

And look at Jesus himself. Perfectly aligned with the Father, yet never passive. He doesn’t sit around waiting for a fleece, a confirmation, or a dream so he can know what to do.

He chooses. He initiates. He crosses the lake, climbs the mountain, withdraws, rests. He isn’t frantic about falling out of the Father’s will. His alignment produces freedom to act.

When a child is 4 years old, you have to tell them everything. What to wear. To put on their shoes before they leave the house. To look both ways before crossing the street. But if a 40-year-old stands pleading before you, saying, “Please, please tell me which shirt to wear today” we wouldn’t say that man is really close to his parents. We’d say there’s something wrong with him.

Good parents don’t raise a forty-year-old who needs to be told which shirt to wear. They raise an adult who can carry responsibility. That’s what Jesus is doing with you.

A different prayer

So alongside “God, tell me what to do,” try praying this: Jesus, make me the kind of person who can be trusted to decide.

Show me the fear driving me. The greed. The insecurity. The thing I want so badly I’m trying to get you to sign off on it even though I know it’s probably the wrong way. Then help me choose.

Here’s a little help in making decisions.

When you’re facing a decision, bring five questions to it:

1. Has Jesus already made something clear that applies here?

2. What does wisdom say, apart from fear and wishful thinking?

3. What do I actually want? Your desires aren’t infallible, but they aren’t automatically wrong either. As a person with agency and dominion over their own life, what do you want and need right now. What are you trying to accomplish?

4. What do a few wise people who know me and know Jesus see?

5. What does my reality reasonably allow? Money, family, health, timing, commitments. These things place helpful boundaries on our lives, and we can’t always move them. If you have a weighty family responsibility, you may have to scale down your ambitions a bit and do a little less than you might do if you were single and had no family.

Pray. Listen. And if you’ve done all of that and God still hasn’t told you what to do, make a decision. Not carelessly. Freely. Then own it.

You won’t get every one right. I haven’t. I don’t think the goal is getting to the end of your life, looking back, and saying, “I made every single decision perfectly.”

We basically create ourselves and the story of our lives through the decisions that we make. So use your agency and make decisions. I don’t think Jesus is trying to make you good at guessing God’s will from a collection of dreams and conversations and coincidences. I think he’s trying to make you wise, loving, courageous, and free. Fully human.

Go deeper

Following Jesus is the heart of my book ReJesus Everything: Jesus himself, reclaimed from everything built around him, and the God-given agency to own your faith and your life. If this episode stirred something in you, the book will take you further. You can find it here on Amazon.

This week: What decision are you waiting for God to make for you? Let’s talk about it.

This is the age where they want to erase the line between male and female, a mother and the baby inside of her, parents and children. Drawing a line invites hostility these days. So yes, it’s unpopular, but there’s a bigger and more important issue at hand.

Can anything we create actually survive without boundaries?

Start a marriage, and immediately there are boundaries around it. Start a business, and you need a budget, a mission, and a clear distinction between company money and personal money. Start a nonprofit, and eventually you have to learn to say, “That’s a worthy cause, but it isn’t what we do.”

Write a song, and it has a beginning and an ending.

Take a photograph, and it has a frame.

Plant a garden, and eventually you discover why people build fences.

Whenever we create something valuable, we soon face a question:

How do we protect this thing so it can survive long enough to become what it was created to be?

And that’s when we notice something on the first page of the Bible.

God creates. We give him a lot of glory for the things that he creates, from sun, moon, and stars to the tears of a baby, but we seldom think about perhaps his greatest gift to creation, and that is structure—Boundaries.

God enters into a swirl of chaos in order to bring life out of all that mess, and He does it by drawing lines.

Creation Begins With Distinction

Genesis 1 describes the primordial earth as tohu va-vohu—usually translated “formless and void.” It means that the thing has no boundary, no structure like just an endless oozing goo, and because it has no boundary, it also has no meaning, identity or purpose.

Something with potential is there: darkness, water, the deep. But it isn’t yet in an ordered, inhabitable state.

Then God speaks.

“Let there be light.”

Notice what happens next:

“God separated the light from the darkness.”

The Hebrew verb is badal—to separate, divide, distinguish.

God creates light, then establishes a distinction.

Light is not darkness. Darkness is not light.

This is this.

That is that.

And the pattern continues.

Waters above and waters below. Sea and dry land. Plants and animals according to their kinds. Day and night. Seasons and years. Eventually, male and female.

Creation produces distinct things with distinct identities. Distinct things need identifying names and labels. Sun, moon, God, human, male and female.

And once something has an identity, that identity becomes something worth protecting.

The Sea Needs a Shore

The sea gives us a beautiful picture of this.

Genesis begins with water everywhere. But God doesn’t destroy the water. He gives it limits.

Job 38 pictures God saying to the sea:

“Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”

And once the water is bounded, dry land appears.

Now plants can grow. Animals can live. Humans can build and cultivate.

The boundary doesn’t destroy the sea or the land. It allows both to exist with their distinctiveness intact.

Our Body Has a Boundary

Your own body works this way. All of our bodies have a lot going on. We have lungs, heart, and large and small intestines, but around all of it is our skin.

Your skin is a boundary. Without it, you’d puddle up and die.

But your skin doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the world. You touch through it. Feel through it. It is your interface by which you can engage other created things in the world.

That’s a very different way to think about boundaries. Most people just think of them as restrictions.

Gray Goo

There’s an old thought experiment from nanotechnology called the “grey goo” problem.

Imagine microscopic self-replicating machines that consume the material around them to make more copies of themselves.

Eventually everything gets converted into more of the same thing.

Trees. Animals. Buildings. Ecosystems. All dissolved as building material for a spreading nanobot grey goo until there is nothing else in the world.

Whether that scenario is technologically realistic isn’t the point. (And I really, really hope not.) But it’s a clear illustration of why boundaries are so important in creation.

Distinction in Diversity

Look at a rainforest. Trees, insects, birds, fungi, water, soil, predators, prey—thousands of different organisms interacting while remaining distinct.

The bee can have a relationship with the flower precisely because the bee isn’t the flower.

Grey goo moves the other direction.

Difference disappears.

Everything becomes everything else: Parent-child, sacred-secular, man and woman—all one thing on a sliding scale.

This is not the message of the Bible. Genesis 1 recognizes increasing distinction, complexity, relationship and life.

Learning to Distinguish

This idea of Badal continues into Israel’s holiness code.

Leviticus tells the priests:

“You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.”

There’s that idea again: badal.

Distinguish.

Everything isn’t interchangeable.

Every desire doesn’t need to be acted upon. Every relationship doesn’t have the same boundaries. Every opportunity isn’t your assignment. Every dollar isn’t yours to spend however you please. Everything does not belong to you. Your neighbor’s cattle are not your cattle.

Maturity requires learning to distinguish.

What about Jesus?

Jesus challenged plenty of human boundaries. He touched lepers, ate with people others rejected and crossed social lines that religious people defended.

But Jesus himself wasn’t boundaryless.

He withdrew from crowds. He went away to pray. He slept. He chose twelve. He didn’t heal every sick person in the Roman Empire or personally visit every village.

He knew who he was, whose he was, and what his Father had given him to do.

And that meant there were thousands of good things he didn’t do.

In your personal life

Maybe some of the limitations we experience in life aren’t defects.

Maybe the boundaries in your life are like the banks of the river. A river without banks is not a better, freer river.

A river without boundaries is a flood—a force of destruction.

Maybe work and home have become one continuous stream. You’re at dinner but answering messages. You’re “resting” but checking email.

Maybe every need you hear about feels like your responsibility.

Has a lack of boundaries limited your creativity? Maybe you have twenty creative ideas and twelve unfinished projects because you can’t bring yourself to choose just one, since that means limiting yourself from following other possibilities.

Maybe what you need isn’t greater intensity. Maybe you don’t need to work harder.

Maybe what you need to do is badal. You need to discern and divide and recognize the different categories things go into.

This is work time.

This is rest time.

This is mine to carry.

That isn’t.

This belongs inside my marriage.

That doesn’t.

This is enough.

My line stops here.

Then ask:

What boundary does this precious thing need in order to survive and become fruitful?

• Maybe it’s a relationship with one of your children or grandchildren. Maybe this relationship needs a boundary of time set aside to nurture it.

• Maybe you need financial boundaries: ways you will and will not spend or invest your money.

• Maybe you need to create creative space, a literal space with a literal budget of time, just for you to exercise more creativity. If you want to be a writer, you need a writer’s desk, and you need a time of day that is your writing time. You need to close off all other distractions and do the thing that belongs inside that boundary space.

If you want your life to thrive draw those lines, friend!

Not because you’re afraid of what’s outside the lines, but because you love what’s growing inside it and you want it to flourish, be fruitful and multiply.

Stay Grounded!

Chuck

Boundaries have never been more unpopular.

This is the age where they want to erase the line between male and female, a mother and the baby inside of her, parents and children. Drawing a line invites hostility these days. So yes, it’s unpopular, but there’s a bigger and more important issue at hand.

Can anything we create actually survive without boundaries?

Start a marriage, and immediately there are boundaries around it. Start a business, and you need a budget, a mission, and a clear distinction between company money and personal money. Start a nonprofit, and eventually you have to learn to say, “That’s a worthy cause, but it isn’t what we do.”

Write a song, and it has a beginning and an ending.

Take a photograph, and it has a frame.

Plant a garden, and eventually you discover why people build fences.

Whenever we create something valuable, we soon face a question:

How do we protect this thing so it can survive long enough to become what it was created to be?

And that’s when we notice something on the first page of the Bible.

God creates. We give him a lot of glory for the things that he creates, from sun, moon, and stars to the tears of a baby, but we seldom think about perhaps his greatest gift to creation, and that is structure—Boundaries.

God enters into a swirl of chaos in order to bring life out of all that mess, and He does it by drawing lines.

Creation Begins With Distinction

Genesis 1 describes the primordial earth as tohu va-vohu—usually translated “formless and void.” It means that the thing has no boundary, no structure like just an endless oozing goo, and because it has no boundary, it also has no meaning, identity or purpose.

Something with potential is there: darkness, water, the deep. But it isn’t yet in an ordered, inhabitable state.

Then God speaks.

“Let there be light.”

Notice what happens next:

“God separated the light from the darkness.”

The Hebrew verb is badal—to separate, divide, distinguish.

God creates light, then establishes a distinction.

Light is not darkness. Darkness is not light.

This is this.

That is that.

And the pattern continues.

Waters above and waters below. Sea and dry land. Plants and animals according to their kinds. Day and night. Seasons and years. Eventually, male and female.

Creation produces distinct things with distinct identities. Distinct things need identifying names and labels. Sun, moon, God, human, male and female.

And once something has an identity, that identity becomes something worth protecting.

The Sea Needs a Shore

The sea gives us a beautiful picture of this.

Genesis begins with water everywhere. But God doesn’t destroy the water. He gives it limits.

Job 38 pictures God saying to the sea:

“Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”

And once the water is bounded, dry land appears.

Now plants can grow. Animals can live. Humans can build and cultivate.

The boundary doesn’t destroy the sea or the land. It allows both to exist with their distinctiveness intact.

Our Body Has a Boundary

Your own body works this way. All of our bodies have a lot going on. We have lungs, heart, and large and small intestines, but around all of it is our skin.

Your skin is a boundary. Without it, you’d puddle up and die.

But your skin doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the world. You touch through it. Feel through it. It is your interface by which you can engage other created things in the world.

That’s a very different way to think about boundaries. Most people just think of them as restrictions.

Gray Goo

There’s an old thought experiment from nanotechnology called the “grey goo” problem.

Imagine microscopic self-replicating machines that consume the material around them to make more copies of themselves.

Eventually everything gets converted into more of the same thing.

Trees. Animals. Buildings. Ecosystems. All dissolved as building material for a spreading nanobot grey goo until there is nothing else in the world.

Whether that scenario is technologically realistic isn’t the point. (And I really, really hope not.) But it’s a clear illustration of why boundaries are so important in creation.

Distinction in Diversity

Look at a rainforest. Trees, insects, birds, fungi, water, soil, predators, prey—thousands of different organisms interacting while remaining distinct.

The bee can have a relationship with the flower precisely because the bee isn’t the flower.

Grey goo moves the other direction.

Difference disappears.

Everything becomes everything else: Parent-child, sacred-secular, man and woman—all one thing on a sliding scale.

This is not the message of the Bible. Genesis 1 recognizes increasing distinction, complexity, relationship and life.

Learning to Distinguish

This idea of Badal continues into Israel’s holiness code.

Leviticus tells the priests:

“You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.”

There’s that idea again: badal.

Distinguish.

Everything isn’t interchangeable.

Every desire doesn’t need to be acted upon. Every relationship doesn’t have the same boundaries. Every opportunity isn’t your assignment. Every dollar isn’t yours to spend however you please. Everything does not belong to you. Your neighbor’s cattle are not your cattle.

Maturity requires learning to distinguish.

What about Jesus?

Jesus challenged plenty of human boundaries. He touched lepers, ate with people others rejected and crossed social lines that religious people defended.

But Jesus himself wasn’t boundaryless.

He withdrew from crowds. He went away to pray. He slept. He chose twelve. He didn’t heal every sick person in the Roman Empire or personally visit every village.

He knew who he was, whose he was, and what his Father had given him to do.

And that meant there were thousands of good things he didn’t do.

In your personal life

Maybe some of the limitations we experience in life aren’t defects.

Maybe the boundaries in your life are like the banks of the river. A river without banks is not a better, freer river.

A river without boundaries is a flood—a force of destruction.

Maybe work and home have become one continuous stream. You’re at dinner but answering messages. You’re “resting” but checking email.

Maybe every need you hear about feels like your responsibility.

Has a lack of boundaries limited your creativity? Maybe you have twenty creative ideas and twelve unfinished projects because you can’t bring yourself to choose just one, since that means limiting yourself from following other possibilities.

Maybe what you need isn’t greater intensity. Maybe you don’t need to work harder.

Maybe what you need to do is badal. You need to discern and divide and recognize the different categories things go into.

This is work time.

This is rest time.

This is mine to carry.

That isn’t.

This belongs inside my marriage.

That doesn’t.

This is enough.

My line stops here.

Then ask:

What boundary does this precious thing need in order to survive and become fruitful?

• Maybe it’s a relationship with one of your children or grandchildren. Maybe this relationship needs a boundary of time set aside to nurture it.

• Maybe you need financial boundaries: ways you will and will not spend or invest your money.

• Maybe you need to create creative space, a literal space with a literal budget of time, just for you to exercise more creativity. If you want to be a writer, you need a writer’s desk, and you need a time of day that is your writing time. You need to close off all other distractions and do the thing that belongs inside that boundary space.

If you want your life to thrive draw those lines, friend!

Not because you’re afraid of what’s outside the lines, but because you love what’s growing inside it and you want it to flourish, be fruitful and multiply.

Stay Grounded!

Chuck

What will change you, however, is creating. It’s kind of amazing God math. One of those “Give, and it will be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” kind of things. In real world math, it should say, “TAKE, and you will have more.” But in God’s way, if you create something new with Him, you’ll end up richer than if you consume.

No one learns more than a teacher.

It has certainly been true in my life concerning the Bible. No one learns more than the teacher, and I thank God for giving me the opportunity to serve in the role of teacher for so many years. Most of the things I have learned have come because I was living inside that position, and I had to create presentations of Bible thought blocks every week as a pastor and seminary leader for 20 years.

So now I find myself a pastor without a church for the last 18 years. Thankfully, I have had Medialight. I’m the primary teacher there, but we have many others, and that’s been one of our major goals, creating more teachers.

Online is a New Space for Ministry

I’ve been doing face-to-face ministry for almost 50 years, but only three years ago did I start treating the online world as a real place that deserves my best effort. That’s when. I started making online content weekly, whether I had time or not. I’m embarrassed to look at my earliest efforts. It’s always like that. You learn by doing, and it’s the only way to learn, so you just have to push through those early stages to learn the workflow and production systems of a TV station, basically.

In the last year, I have increased my flow, an episode a week plus a book, and we’re just now in September. It’s been a very demanding load, and it’s starting to feel like about 50% of my ministry. The online space allows you to reach people in different time zones when it’s convenient for them, and I think it has so much to offer beyond just being marketing for people to attend the Sunday service.

I want to explore the fruitfulness of the 24/7 decentralized online environment, and also I want to share my journey with the next generation of creators and help launch dozens of new voices online. We really need effective, skilled gospel communicators online to combat the flood of antichrist values and pure-out news lies that flood through our phones into our minds every day. Half of what we read is probably not even true or has been done just to create a news story. It’s really crazy.

Becoming a public person is scary.

Becoming a public person is a very powerful thing. It’s scary, but it yields a harvest of personal development. I would encourage everyone to do it, even if all you do is think seriously and make five-sentence Facebook posts designed to encourage other people. Just stop mindlessly consuming and try to add something of value to the net.

Anyway, each week I have really poured my life into careful study of the Bible, and I have done my best to bring credible research to you. ReJesus everything is sort of my manifesto.

This year I want to adjust down a little from being a Bible scholar type creator (there are a lot of those already in all our lives) and tune my attention to the real purpose for this platform: Grounded is about forming resilient disciples of Jesus who stand firm while the world shakes. I want to explore what the worldview, practices, commands, and mission of Jesus mean for all of us in the decade we’re entering. I want to try to turn this into an opportunity for a true gathering online of young disciples, and that our discussions can become part of their formation, not just information.

You might sense a change in my tone and my topics. There are lots of great Bible teachers out there. The Bible will still be central to what I’m doing, but I’m not going to try to bring a deep and careful Bible study to every episode this year.

But I hope to bring a flow of younger people join this space and help them become resilient disciples, even as they raise elementary and middle school kids, try to figure out how they’re gonna ever own a house, and work hard to shine a light for Jesus in a culture that is becoming aggressively anti-Christian. So you might feel my content and topics starting to turn a little younger.

One thing I promise is not to turn this into a Christian self-help podcast and newsletter. no easy answers—just disciples learning to follow Jesus together into whatever comes next. I really hope you’ll join me, and I hope for some of you that I can turn this into a place where your children and grandchildren feel comfortable.

Thanks for praying for me and Sherry. There are so many moving pieces in our lives, and we are listening carefully to the Lord, as I’m sure you are also, to discover the best way to focus our time and energy in 2027. It’s time to start making that plan already.

Love and every blessing,

Chuck and Sherry Quinley

PS: The shirt is Japanese. The brand means to say “Old School” although I do have an old skull also by now—just trying to keep my brain young. It’s possible.

Every reader of the Bible comes with a lens. A framework. A big story about what the Bible is fundamentally about. And that lens determines everything—how you interpret individual passages, how you understand Jesus, how you live your life.

Most of us don’t realize we have a lens. We think we’re just reading the Bible objectively. But we’re not. We’re reading it through a meta-narrative. A spine story that tells us what all the smaller stories are about.

The question is: Which meta-narrative are you reading through? And more importantly—have you actually decided for yourself, or have you just accepted what someone else told you the story is?

The Responsibility Is On You

All of us can read. All of us have access to a Bible. The responsibility is on each of us to read that Bible, to study it, to meditate on it until we can step back and see the lines of the big story before us.

We need to decide which meta-narrative is the spine of Scripture. We cannot force a narrative into the text or blindly accept what someone else says the narrative is. This choice determines how we interpret every passage we read. It’s crucial.

Alternative Meta-Narratives

Each meta-narrative captures something true. Each also obscures something important.

The Personal Salvation Meta-Narrative reads the Bible as fundamentally about getting individual souls into heaven. The Fall happened, humanity is sinful, Jesus died to pay the price, and now if you believe in Him, you go to heaven when you die. Everything is interpreted through this lens: Does this passage help me get to heaven? Does this teach me how to live a better personal life?

This captures something real. Personal redemption matters. Your individual relationship with God is genuine and significant. But this lens makes the entire cosmic drama secondary. Why would God care so much about the politics of Persia and Greece if it’s all just about getting souls to heaven? Why would He speak so extensively through the prophets about the rise and fall of empires? Why the genealogies, the territorial conflicts, the prophecies about nations and kingdoms?

More troubling: if the whole Gospel is about me—my salvation, my happiness, my eternity—then we’ve just baptized selfishness. We’ve made the central message of Scripture an appeal to the most basic human impulse: self-preservation. If one of the main struggles of the human spirit is selfishness, how can this be the whole Gospel? It seems to continue appealing to “me, me, me—my favorite person, me.” I want to be saved. I don’t want to go to hell. I want to live in heaven and be happy forever.

If that’s the whole Gospel, it’s self-centered from beginning to end. For me, that’s the problem with it.

The Moral Development Meta-Narrative chronicles humanity’s spiritual evolution. We start primitive and gradually grow more enlightened. The Old Testament is harsh because people were barbaric. God has to deal with them in physical ways because they weren’t spiritually developed. The New Testament is gentler because we’ve evolved morally.

This sounds sophisticated. It appeals to our modern sensibilities, especially those raised in the age of Darwin, with the sense that we are the pinnacle of human development.

But this denies the transcendent, unchanging nature of God’s own character and His Word. Is the God of the Old Testament not the same God who is the Father of Jesus?

The Liberation Theology Meta-Narrative focuses on God’s love and priority for the poor and oppressed. This captures genuine biblical truth. God does care about justice. He does defend the vulnerable poor.

But when this becomes the primary lens, it can reduce God’s concern to only the human struggle for fairness in society while ignoring the layers of spiritual corruption that fuel these problems. Staying at the individual, physical level, we can completely miss the eternal scope of God’s purposes. On top of that, this view often reduces Jesus to an example of the suffering good people endure at the hands of the rich and powerful—an activist who pays the price for bringing change.

Jesus is much more than this according to Scripture.

Why the Cosmic Conflict Meta-Narrative Rings True with me.

The Divine Council/Cosmic Conflict Worldview doesn’t dismiss these other readings. It includes genuine elements of personal salvation, moral development, and justice. But it places them all within a larger, cosmic story.

It rings true for several reasons.

First: It takes Genesis 1 seriously. God creates humanity in His image and gives us dominion over the earth. Not incidentally. As the foundational purpose for human existence. We are meant to be God’s vice-regents, exercising His authority in His world. Every other biblical narrative—the Fall, the Flood, the nations, the covenants, the prophets, Jesus Himself—can only be understood in light of this original commission.

Second: It explains the patterns that recur throughout Scripture. The story of the elder son who resents his role and attempts to seize what belongs to another appears again and again. The conflict between faithful stewardship and rebellious usurpation is everywhere. The territorial language makes sense only if we understand this cosmic drama about the stewardship and control of the earth.

Third: It provides the best explanation for Jesus. Why did He have to die? In a purely Personal Salvation reading, the answer is reduced to: to pay a debt so you can go to heaven. That’s true, but I feel it is incomplete, like zooming in on one facet of the diamond and saying it’s the whole diamond. In the Divine Council meta-narrative, the cross has cosmic significance and individual salvation. It cancelled the record of human debt that justified the rebel powers’ occupation of the earth. It disarmed them. It removed their grounds for dominion. And it installed a Human King on the throne so the entire creation can be redeemed and restored.

This explains why Jesus had to be human. Only a human could reclaim human dominion. Only a faithful human could overcome what an unfaithful humanity had forfeited.

Fourth: It unifies the entire arc of Scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, you see one consistent narrative: the Creator establishing humans as steward kings, rebel powers infiltrating and occupying those stewardships, God working through history toward restoration, Jesus defeating the powers and installing a Human King, and us being seated with that King to reclaim all of creation in the heavens and on earth.

The prophecies, laws, histories, psalms—they all fit. They’re not disconnected stories. They’re chapters in one cosmic drama.

What It Means to Be Seated with Christ

Ephesians 2:6 says: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

It’s crucial to understand what this does not mean. It doesn’t mean you’re physically sitting in a chair in heaven. The throne of God is not a physical location in floating in outer space.

When Paul says you’re seated there, he’s describing your position in God’s government, your actual standing in the seen and unseen universe.

This is not aspirational language. This is the description of your actual reality right now, in this moment.

Christ in You: The Indwelling Reality

In Colossians 1:27, Paul writes about “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Not Christ separate from you, dwelling in some distant heaven. Christ in you. Animating you. Filling you. Making His presence and power active through your physical, earthly life.

Colossians 3:3 says: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Your life—your actual, daily, embodied life—is “hidden with Christ in God.” Your ultimate security, your truest identity, is rooted in your union with the risen Christ.

This is why Paul can then command: “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Your work. Your art. Your parenting. Your leadership. All of it is done from the position of being seated with Christ. All of it is an expression of His authority flowing through you.

Greater Is He That Is in You

You are not alone.

1. You are assisted by the loyal sons of God—the angels who embraced their role as stewards and guardians and actively work alongside you.

2. More importantly, you are filled with the Spirit of God—God’s breath, God’s wind, the life force that created and animates all existence. The Holy Spirit indwells you. He fills you. He empowers you with divine life force.

This is why John writes in 1 John 4:4: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.”

Not greater is he that is with you. Not greater is he that watches over you. Greater is He that is in you. The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, is greater than every rebel power, every domain authority, every force arrayed against you.

Your Call: Reclaim the Creation

This brings us to your fundamental calling: to reclaim the creation for God.

The rebel powers have occupied the pillars of civilization—government, finance, education, military, arts. They have corrupted them. But they do not own them. They are squatters.

• When you lead your family with wisdom rooted in God’s Word, you’re reclaiming family for God.

• When you act with honesty in your business dealings—probably making less money because you’re honest—you’re reclaiming commerce.

• When you create beauty and inspiration in the arts, you’re reclaiming culture. When you speak truth in education, you’re reclaiming the formation of young minds.

• When you stand for justice in government, you’re reclaiming society. When you serve in the military and refuse to participate in senseless violence, you’re reclaiming legitimate defense.

These aren’t small things. They will cost you. These are acts of cosmic enforcement. Each one expands the territory of Christ’s dominion. Each one declares that the King has returned, that His authority is real, and that the rebellion is over.

Which Story Are You Living?

If you read it as primarily about personal salvation, you’ll withdraw from the systems of the world and wait to get out of here.

But if you read it as the Cosmic Warfare Worldview meta-narrative—as the story of God establishing humans in dominion, rebel powers occupying that dominion, God working through history toward restoration, Jesus defeating the powers and installing a Human King, and you being seated with that King to reclaim creation—then you’ll understand that your life has cosmic significance.

You’re seated with the King. You’re filled with His Spirit. You’re assisted by His angels. And the creation is waiting for you to rise up and reclaim it for God.

The responsibility is yours. The choice is yours. The story you decide to read—that’s the story you’ll live.

Discussion for this week: Which meta-narrative of Scripture have you been reading through? And how does the Cosmic Warfare Worldview change your understanding of your own life and calling?

Rise up. Enforce His victory.

Stay grounded,

Chuck

Let’s dive into the fourth installment in our series on understanding the supernatural worldview of the Bible.

We didn’t understand why. We just felt it. The weight of it. The impossibility of it. We tried to push back against forces we couldn’t see, couldn’t name, couldn’t comprehend. And we lost. Over and over, we lost.

Ancient people understood this instinctively. They saw humans as devolving from greatness—From living as those unexplainable civilizations whose ruins we still marvel at, whose architectural feats we can’t replicate today. They blamed our downfall as humans on the elohim.

They blamed the weight of spiritual powers that ruled over human territories and nations. When Daniel prayed, he encountered resistance from the prince of Persia. That wasn’t metaphor. It was the reality of a spiritual realm that occupied the physical world.

We’ve rationalized it away. We’ve convinced ourselves that power operates only through politics and economics and human ambition. But the spiritual reality hasn’t changed. The elohim are still here. Evil is intelligent. The domain authorities still occupy territories. They still rule through the systems we navigate every day.

What’s changed is our awareness of them. We’re the first generation that doesn’t see them. We pretend they don’t exist. We look at the coordinated manipulation of government, business, education, military, and arts—and we assign it all to human agents.

But according to Scripture, the elohim are real and terrifyingly powerful.

The Gospel That Changes Everything

Here’s the gospel that changes that reality: Jesus confronted them. He went to war with them. And He won through his sacrifice on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and his ascension to the right hand of God.

He won as a human. He defeated them by perfect faithfulness, by perfect alignment with God’s character. He lived the only human life perfectly aligned with the heart of the Creator. He did what we were created to do—take dominion over our world as humans made in the image of God.

Today, Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, a human, ruling as co-regent with the Creator. He holds all authority in heaven and on earth.

Jesus Installed You

And then He did something almost incomprehensible. He installed you—yes, you—in your designated seat of authority. He gave you the power to take charge of your little world. Your family. Your workplace. Your creativity. The limitless development of your own mind. The sanctity and strength of your own body.

You are no longer helpless.

As you exercise that authority aligned with Him, you’re not just fixing your own life. You’re contributing to the march of Jesus across the planet.

This is the gospel. Not the small version we’ve reduced it to. The massive, cosmic, everything-changes gospel that doesn’t just get you to heaven—it restores the universe itself.

What Seated Actually Means

Present tense. Right now. You are seated. With Christ. In the heavenly realms.

This isn’t poetry. This isn’t a future promise. This is your current spiritual reality.

Think about where Christ is seated. Far above every rule and authority and power and dominion. Above every elohim that ever ruled a nation. Above the powers that occupy government, business, education, the military, and the arts. Above all of them.

And you are seated with Him in that same position.

This means you have authority. Not because you earned it. Not because you’re special or particularly spiritual. Because you are united with the one who holds all authority. Your authority is derived—it flows from your alignment with Him, your union with Him, your participation in His victory.

An ambassador carries the authority of their nation. But only when they act as a representative of that nation, only when they’re aligned with their sovereign’s interests, only when they operate within their commission.

You are an ambassador of the Kingdom of God. Seated with the King far above every power. Carrying His authority into every sphere where you have influence.

The question is: will you exercise it?

Territory and Expansion

Dominion is not domination. It is not aggression. It is not greed. It’s stewardship. It’s the wise, faithful exercise of authority to bring order and flourishing to a specific territory or realm. We have power under the authority of the King.

You have dominion over your little world. Your family. Your workplace. Your community. The sphere of influence you actually occupy. And the degree to which you exercise that dominion—the degree to which you enforce Christ’s victory in those spaces—determines the expansion of His kingdom right now.

This is not passive. This is active. This requires you to show up. To take a stand. To make decisions based on who Christ is and what He values, even when it costs you.

When you lead your family with intention, you’re enforcing Christ’s dominion in that space. When you act with integrity in your workplace instead of participating in corruption, you’re reclaiming territory for the King. When you create something beautiful in the arts to the glory of God instead of joining the celebration of darkness, you’re declaring that Christ reigns. When you speak truth in education instead of accepting lies, you’re enforcing the victory. When you stand for justice in government and the military instead of accepting that “that’s just how power works,” you’re challenging the occupation.

These are acts of cosmic significance. They matter. They expand the territory of Christ’s dominion.

Here’s the promise: as you exercise dominion faithfully, He gives you more. More territory. A bigger life. Greater sphere of influence. Not because you’re accumulating power for yourself, but because a faithful steward receives more to steward for the master.

Alignment Is Everything

You’re facing opposition. The forces that occupy these pillars won’t step aside when you decide to enforce Christ’s victory. They’ll push back. They’ll make it costly. They’ll offer compromises and shortcuts.

This is where alignment with Christ becomes absolutely critical.

Your power in any situation is proportional to your alignment with Christ’s heart, His character, His values. If you’re operating out of your own ambition, your own hurt, your own desire for revenge or control, you’ve already lost. You’re fighting in your own strength, and you’re outmatched.

But when you act in alignment with Him—when your motivations are His motivations, when your character reflects His character, when you’re pursuing what He pursues—you carry His authority. That authority is far above every power.

Open prayer is the practice of maintaining that alignment. Not begging God to act, but positioning yourself under His authority so that His power can flow through you. It’s not weakness to pray. It’s the source of your actual strength.

Your physical body matters in this too. The rebel powers covet physicality. How you treat your body—your choices about health, purity, how you use your senses—declares whose kingdom you serve. Your body is sacred territory. Use it as an instrument of Christ’s dominion.

The Personal Challenge

I don’t know what you’re facing. I don’t know what battle you’re in right now. I don’t know what pressure you’re under. I don’t know what compromise you’re being offered. I don’t know what cost you’re being asked to pay for standing up for what’s true.

But I know this: you’re seated with Christ far above the powers arrayed against you. You carry His authority. You have access to His strength. The victory is already won.

The only question is whether you’ll enforce it in your little world. Whether you’ll exercise the dominion He’s given you. Whether you’ll let His character flow through you as you face what’s in front of you.

You don’t have to win. He already won. You just have to be faithful. You just have to show up aligned with Him. You just have to refuse the shortcuts and stand even when it costs you.

Because the King is seated. The dominion is His. And as you exercise authority aligned with Him, His kingdom expands. Your territory grows. Your life deepens. And the occupation slowly retreats.

The Lamb has conquered. Now rise up and enforce His victory in your world.

Every blessing!

Chuck

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But the answer isn’t about God’s power. His power was never in question. The answer is about His character—and specifically, about His stubborn, unwavering commitment to His own word.

In our last episode, we established that God’s gifts and callings are irrevocable. He built our world by using His voice and speaking commands. Those commands become the fabric of the universe. When He makes a decree, it stands forever.

When He gives humans the gift of dominion over the earth in Ge. 1, it remains our dominion, even when the holder of that dominion fails God. If God makes a person a king they may be a great king or a horrible king, but they will be the king for the rest of their life. God’s gifts are permanent. He stands by his word. The universe exists because his word cannot pass away. God governs his world by faithfulness to His word.

So although he had the ability, and they surely deserved it, YHWH wouldn’t just swat the rebels like flies. There’s no point building a society of free-willed beings if all of them only obey you because you threaten to nuke them if they don’t.

Secondly, dominion over the earth wasn’t given to Heavenly Beings. It was given to humans. To us. Irrevocably. Therefore, since humans are already the ones in charge of this planet, it was up to the human to defeat the cosmic powers who had seized this power and take back dominion over the earth.

That created a cosmic dilemma. A human had to reclaim what humans had lost. But no ordinary human could defeat the host of celestial beings who had seized control. The domain authorities, the territorial powers, the principalities that rule over nations—these aren’t enemies you fight with swords or missiles. A mortal can’t stand against elohim if the battle is going to be power vs power.

God could have done it alone, but that would have violated the very structure He established. From the first day of our creation, He declared that humans shall have dominion over all of his creation.

Only a human could take back from this occupation army the dominion that already belongs to humans. The solution was the Incarnation—the God-man. Fully divine, fully human.

Only a human had the legal standing to reclaim dominion that was given to humanity. Only an unblemished human, operating within the bounds of human limitation, could undo what humanity had lost.

But that human also needed divine power, because fighting celestial forces requires power beyond human capability.

This is the strategic brilliance of the Incarnation. Jesus is the Human Champion. The one being in all of creation who could rightly reclaim dominion while possessing the power to pull it off.

He was aware of this calling.

You see it in the wilderness temptation. Satan didn’t tempt Jesus to do evil in the way we usually imagine. He tempted Him to bypass being bound by the human condition. He tempted him to meet his own human needs and to engage the fallen powers using the supernatural abilities of God. He baited him to reclaim authority without going through the cross.

Turn stones to bread. Use divine power to escape hunger. Jesus refused. He limited Himself to what was possible for a human. He stayed hungry.

Throw yourself from the temple. Force God’s hand. Demand the miraculous rescue you deserve as the Son of God. Jesus refused. He wouldn’t use His divine power to bypass human limitation. He chose to remain subject to the consequences of His own actions.

Show Respect to Satan for all the kingdoms of the world. The ultimate shortcut. The rebel powers offered Jesus the very dominion He came to reclaim—minus the suffering. Just acknowledge that Satan’s authority is legitimate. Take the kingdoms without the cross.

Jesus refused absolutely. Every single time, He stayed within the boundaries of the human condition. He chose the hard path of perfect human obedience, perfect trust, even in agony. He would win not through divine force, but through living out a loyal life as a righteous human.

That brings us to the pivot point of cosmic history.

The cross wasn’t just about personal salvation. It was a legal revolution.

The rebel powers had used the law as their weapon. They had a case. Humanity was too sinful, too disloyal to God to exercise dominion on the earth. We had proven ourselves unfit. Every failure was recorded. The Bible uses a specific legal term for this: cheirographon. A handwritten certificate of debt, written in the debtor’s own hand, self-condemning in court.

The powers could point to this document and say, “God, your own law condemns them. Dominion was given to humans, but look at the evidence. They are unfit to rule. The contract is void.”

But, according to Paul, Jesus did something unexpected on the cross. He took that record of debt—all our sin, all our shame, all our legal condemnation—and He became it. Then He nailed it to the tree in His body.

He disarmed them of their right to assert the need to be at least a provisional government over the Creation. Jesus didn’t destroy them yet. He removed their primary weapon—the legal justification for humanity’s oppression. The cross was a cosmic act of legal liberation. It canceled the debt that justified the occupation.

Jesus didn’t just die so we could have nice feelings about God and go live in heaven after we die. He died to legally disarm the powers that had oppressed humanity since the beginning, removing their supposed grounds for taking dominion (like forcing a drunk driver out from behind the wheel of his own car).

The story culminates in the Resurrection.

In Matthew 28:18, the risen Jesus declares: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Not partial authority. All authority. Every corner of the cosmos.

This is the legal transfer of dominion from the defeated rebel powers back to the rightful King—a human being. A physical, resurrected human. He appeared in a body. He ate fish. He bore the marks of crucifixion.

Then comes the Ascension. A physical human body is now seated at the right hand of Yahweh. This echoes Psalm 110:1, where Yahweh invites a second figure to sit on His throne and rule.

Paul is explicit in Ephesians: Jesus is seated “far above every rule and authority and power and dominion.” Those aren’t poetic flourishes. Arche, exousia, dynamis, kyriotetes—these are technical terms for the territorial powers that rule over nations. The same beings allotted the peoples at Babel. The same powers sentenced in Psalm 82.

Jesus is seated far above every single one of them.

A human now holds dominion over the powers that occupied the earth. Every rebel power is under His feet, waiting for final judgment.

This is the answer to ending refrain of Psalm 82: “Arise, O God, and inherit all the nations.” God inherits the nations—by enthroning a man.

The dominion lost by the first Adam, forfeited at Babel, has been reclaimed by the Last Adam. Here’s what changes everything: we don’t have to wait for heaven to participate in this. One human has done it perfectly. And one human doing that is enough.

Jesus has ascended the throne. He is King of earth and heaven, and all powers are subjected to Him. We have authority through His authority as we live in alignment with Him. We can now rule our little worlds in Jesus’ name—not through brute force, but through the same stubborn faithfulness that won the cosmos back in the first place.

The war is won. The King is crowned. The only question left is whether we’ll live like it.

Ready to dig deeper into the ancient biblical worldview that reshapes your faith? Get the full series and discover how ReJesus Everything is calling believers back to the Jesus of Scripture—not the domesticated version we’ve inherited, but the King who reclaimed the cosmos. Order here.

We often blame individual corruption, dysfunctional systems, or that it’s just human nature. And yes, those factors matter. But the Bible offers a more unsettling explanation: we’re living in occupied territory.

The Envy That Never Dies

Imagine you’re one of the elder elohim—a spiritual being who has existed for ages, powerful beyond human comprehension, serving in God’s heavenly court. And then, God creates humans. Fragile. Physical. Temporary. And He crowns them with glory and honor. He gives them dominion over the earth.

You might expect the response to be graceful acceptance. These elder beings were assigned to be shepherds, tutors, guardians to help humanity steward the world. A sacred role. A partnership.

Instead, according to Scripture, envy festered in many.

The implication is clear: this was unexpected. Humans—shorter-lived, weaker, more vulnerable—were exalted above the elder spiritual beings in terms of delegated authority regarding planet Earth.

The beings who had been closest to the throne, who had served longest, found themselves subordinate on Earth to creatures they might have viewed as inferior.

This, it seems, is the birthplace of the cosmic rebellion. Not from ignorance—from wounded pride. From the refusal to accept God’s mysterious choice to place authority for this world in human hands.

The Hunger for the Physical

Even to powerful spirit world beings, according to Genesis chapter 6, humans are beautiful. Part of our attraction is that we are part of the physical reality. We have bodies and experience being alive through our bodies. These spiritual beings don’t just want power—they want physicality. They want bodies. They want to feel.

There’s something unique about physical existence that transcends mere utility. To taste. To touch. To experience the weight and texture of the material world. To inhabit a body and feel its sensations. This is not something disembodied spirits possess. And according to the gospels, they want it.

The demoniac of Gadara illustrates this graphically. When Jesus confronts a legion of demons, they beg Him with a specific request: “Send us into the herd of pigs.” Not freedom. Not peaceful annihilation. Pigs. They would rather inhabit filthy pigs than remain disembodied. Why? Because physicality itself is the prize.

This hunger drove them to something far darker. Genesis 6 describes how the bene elohim—the sons of God—”saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married (took) any of them they chose.” This wasn’t romance. It was strategy.

By interbreeding with humans, these rebel powers sought to do something brilliant and horrifying: they attempted to merge with human bloodline. If they could corrupt the human line, they could seize claim to human dominion. They could make the earth theirs not by stealing it, but by infiltrating it, by becoming part of it.

The result, according to the Genesis account, was the Nephilim—hybrid beings trying to rule the physical realm with absolute authority. Giants. Tyrants. The visible manifestation of spiritual rebellion in physical form. Most ancient cultures have stories of superhuman beings that were in the form of humans but were much larger and had impossibly great size and abilities.

God’s response was the global flood because this corruption and the ensuing violent downward struggle of human society threatened the very foundation of His irrevocable decree to humanity. Human dominion had to remain human. The bloodline had to be preserved.

But the spirit of this rebellion never died. It just adapted.

The Parable of the Tenants: A Cosmic Story

Jesus tells a parable that speaks directly to this rebellion, though most of us read it as mere social commentary.

Matthew 21:33-41: A landowner plants a vineyard, leases it to tenants, and goes away. At harvest time, he sends servants to collect his share. The tenants beat and kill them. Finally, he sends his son. And the tenants say: “This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.”

On the surface, it’s about corrupt workers. But read in context of the cosmic rebellion, it becomes something else entirely. I think the “tenants” are stand-ins for the rebel elohim—the spiritual beings assigned by God to help steward the earth for humanity. But they decided to squat on the property. To occupy. To claim ownership of what was never theirs to possess.

They saw humanity’s irrevocable gift of dominion and wanted it. They couldn’t take it by force—God’s word is unbreakable. But they could plot. They could scheme. They could be a provisional government that drags on and on. And when the Son came to reclaim the land that was rightfully His, their response was murder. “Kill him and we’ll get it forever!”

This parable reveals the core sin of the angelic rebellion: Coveting. The refusal to accept the order God established. The determination to seize what belongs to others.

The Fingerprints on Society’s Pillars

The rebellion isn’t abstract theology. It’s tangible. If we open our eyes, we can see it woven through the institutions that shape civilization.

Government everywhere consistently wants more and more control. This lust for power always corrupts it absolutely. Instead of justice, it becomes oppression.

Finance could be the stewardship of resources to make sure that everyone flourishes. Instead, the banking system in every nation becomes machinery for exploitation. The love of money drives the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Greed becomes structural.

Education that’s meant to transmit truth. Knowledge is a wonderful thing. But once the stewardship of knowledge becomes institutionalized it gets perverted. Young minds are indoctrinated rather than enlightened. The transmission of wisdom becomes the propagation of rebellion against God. Enlightenment is another word for independence from our Creator.

The Arts are designed to reflect beauty and divine creativity. Institutionalized, they become twisted into celebrations of darkness and rebellion. Beauty gets corrupted into obscenity.

This isn’t coincidence. It’s not mere human sinfulness (though that’s present). Ephesians 6:12 names it explicitly: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

These are intelligent, organized entities. They’re not just tempting individuals—they’re occupying entire systems, bending institutions toward their rebellion, marking civilization with their fingerprints.

The Divine Courtroom: Psalm 82

But Scripture doesn’t leave us without hope or clarity. Psalm 82 pulls back the curtain on the divine courtroom.

“God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the elohim he holds judgment.”

Yahweh is presiding over the assembly of spiritual beings. And He speaks an indictment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”

He condemns them for corruption. For defending the unjust. For failing to uphold the cause of the poor. For betraying their original stewardship role.

Then comes the sentence: “Nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”

This is a legal proclamation—shockingly, it’s their death sentence. Their time is limited. Their authority is revoked. They stand condemned before the highest court in creation.

What This Means for You

If you understand that your world is occupied by intelligent spiritual powers bent on subverting human dominion, you’ll see things differently. The systems you navigate daily aren’t neutral platforms. They’re battlegrounds. They’re occupied territories.

But through Psalms 82 you also understand something crucial: their occupation of the pillars of human society is already judged. The sentence has been pronounced. The rebels know their time is short, and they fight with increasing desperation.

This is the moment we live in. The indictment has been issued. The rightful King is moving to reclaim His vineyard. Our response isn’t to despair at the occupation of our world’s power positions, but to see them clearly. To be discerning. To recognize the anti-God bent in the structures around you—not with paranoia, but with the clarity that comes from biblical realism.

The occupation is real. But it’s also—Praise God!— temporary.

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In Our Next Podcast

The rebellion of the elder sons is the backdrop against which the entire drama of redemption unfolds. In our next episode, we’ll explore how a human—fully human, perfectly human—became the key to cosmic victory. Because only a human could legally reclaim what humans had lost.

Ready to dig deeper into the ancient biblical worldview that reshapes your faith? Get the full series and discover how ReJesus Everything is calling believers back to the Jesus of Scripture—not the domesticated version we’ve inherited, but the King who reclaimed the cosmos. Order here.

Stay grounded. God’s Lamb has conquered. His kingdom is advancing.

Every Blessing,

Chuck

It’s a vital question. Philosophers wrestle with it. Scientists challenge it. We all, in our own quiet moments, feel the weight of it. And rightly so.

But after Sherry and I had served for 25 years in the 1040 window, the home of every world faith where millions of gods are named and sacrificed to, I had to face another question:

Are the gods also real?

I’m not asking if there are idols of wood and stone that sit in temples. We have lived within sight of temples filled with images of deities for the last 18 years. We have sat in Buddhist temples for hours observing and interacting with the worshippers. We have witnessed processions and festivals to deities.

The real question is whether the deities that are worshiped around the world are just products of superstition and folklore or actual, intelligent, spiritual beings with real authority, territory, and often malevolent influence over the course of human history. Are the “gods” real or not?

I was watching Jordan Peterson’s video series on Genesis and was surprised to hear Dennis Prager of Prager University say that only very recently has he even considered the possibility that there might be a real Satan. That’s how strong his monotheism is.

I felt that I had to answer this question of whether the gods are real not because of Asian polytheism, but because of the Bible. The writers of the Bible simply assume it. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture operates from a foundational worldview that the space around us is populated with intelligent beings we cannot see and that these beings engage human society and are a real factor in developments within our history.

If you just ignore dealing with this, you’re reading the Bible with a fundamental blind spot AND you’re going to miss some of the most powerful messages the Bible is trying to transmit to you.

The Elohim: A Category of Being

In Hebrew, these spiritual beings are called elohim—a plural, generic term that appears throughout Scripture without explanation or introduction. The psalmist refers to humans being made “a little lower than the elohim“ (Psalm 8:5). Job describes divine beings gathering in the council of the Lord. Daniel encounters an angelic hierarchy of intelligence and power. And yet, most modern readers treat these references as metaphor or mythology, when the biblical writers intended them as straightforward theology.

Elohim isn’t exclusive to God. Yes, it’s used for Yahweh, the uncreated Creator. But it’s also used for members of the divine council, the “gods” of nations, even the spirits of the dead in certain contexts. It’s a category—describing a type of being, specifically those who exist in non-physical form.

Think of how we use the word “human.” It can mean a specific person (like me), or it can refer to the entire species of us. The same logic applies to elohim. It’s a classification. And while Yahweh is elohim, He is utterly unique—the uncreated Creator of all other spiritual beings. He’s the Lord of lords, the elohim of elohim. Another way of putting it is that, while Yahweh is an Elohim, no other Elohim is Yahweh. He stands in an uncontested position as Creator of everything that exists.

This distinction matters. It’s the difference between monotheism (belief in one God) and the biblical worldview (which acknowledges one Creator and multiple intelligent, created spiritual beings). Some scholars say we would do better to say that the Jews were commanded to monolatry (the worship of only one Elohim, YHWH), not monotheism (the belief that there are no divine beings except one). Opening your mind to allow for the existence of the multiple Elohim mentioned in the opening verses of scriptures reshapes everything that follows in the Bible.

God’s Irrevocable Word: The Foundation of Everything

If the populated cosmos is the backdrop of Scripture, then God’s irrevocable decrees are the framework that makes sense of the entire drama.

Romans 11:29 states: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

Most of us skim past this verse. We apply it to individual callings—”God won’t take back the purpose He’s given you.” But Paul’s statement goes far deeper. He’s articulating a principle about God’s fundamental character: When Yahweh assigns authority, grants a gift, or makes a decree, it cannot be revoked. Not because He lacks the power. But because His character demands He keep His word. His faithfulness is absolute. Once His commands are released, they stand in force forever.

Consider the implications. If God makes an irrevocable decree, then that decree remains in force regardless of whether the recipient remains faithful. A king appointed by God remains a king—his authority is a real, persistent legal standing—even if he becomes corrupt or rebellious. This isn’t arbitrary. It’s God’s commitment to the stability of His own established order. To revoke the word would be to make God capricious, His universe unpredictable, His promises fragile.

In the creation narrative of Genesis 1 and 2, God creates the universe by making verbal decrees.

Go back to Genesis 1. What do we witness? Chaos. Formlessness. Darkness. And what imposes order? The voice of Yahweh: “Let there be light.” “Let the waters be gathered.” “Let the earth bring forth.” Each spoken word is a divine decree that brings cosmos out of chaos. These decrees become permanent. They form the architecture of creation itself—the laws governing both physical and spiritual realms.

Isaiah 40:8 reminds us: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

Jesus Himself says (Matthew 24:35): “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”

And again (John 10:35): “Scripture cannot be broken.”

This isn’t sentimentality about the Bible as a book. It’s a statement about the nature of God’s spoken commands. They create something in the substance of reality itself. Unbreakable. Eternal. The fabric holding creation together.

The Crown: Human Dominion

Against this backdrop, God makes one of His most consequential declarations—one that sets the stage for everything that follows in Scripture:

Dominion. Authority. Rule. Given not to the elder spiritual beings. Not to the celestial powers who had existed for ages. But to humans—fragile, physical, mortal humans.

Only humans will be the rulers of God’s world. He has installed us as kings over his creation. Humans, not angels or any other celestial power. God’s eternal decree installs humans, with all of their weakness and frailty, as the image of God for planet Earth.

This is the crown jewel of God’s creation: the capacity to exercise authority, to steward, to choose. It’s the power to have true agency: to decide what kind of person you will be and what you will do and not do, and how you will affect the people, animals, and world around you in your little domain assigned by God. Agency is woven into your very identity as someone made in the image of God. Your dominion over creation isn’t incidental. It’s irrevocable. It’s part of what makes you human. Caring and nurturing for all the life on this planet is the reason for which we exist.

Here’s the paradox that drives the entire cosmic drama: genuine dominion cannot be coerced. It’s built on real agency. Real choice. Real consequences. God’s own name means freedom and complete agency—“I am what I am.”

This can only happen if we truly have the ability to follow or not follow God, to be loyal to him or as disloyal as we want to be, to be a positive force in the world, or a true monster.

This is the risk God takes in creating beings in His image. And it’s the reason there can be spiritual rebellion in the cosmos—which we’ll explore in future episodes.

Why This Reshapes Everything

If you understand that heaven is populated with real spiritual beings, and you understand that God’s decrees are irrevocable, then you’re ready to see the biblical narrative as it truly is: not a story about humanity’s moral progress, but a cosmic drama about the reclamation of humanity’s stolen dominion.

You’re ready to understand why the systems of our world—media, government, finance, education, the arts—seem always bent against God’s order.

You’re ready to grasp why Jesus had to become human and live a perfect human life to reclaim what humans had lost. You’re ready to see yourself not as a passive believer waiting to die and go to heaven, but as an active agent of the Kingdom right now, reclaiming lost territory.

Most importantly, you’re ready to understand your own significance. You are not a minor character in a story controlled by cosmic forces. You are a steward of real authority, a carrier of divine image, an agent of restoration in a world under occupation.

This is the foundation. The populated cosmos. A world filled with intelligent beings, both seen and unseen. Two realms overlapping on this one-of-a-kind planet. Our planet as the meeting point between the heavenly and the physical realms, with man as the connection. We are created from the carbon of this planet. Our feet are grounded in the earth, but our head is in the heavens. We have the ability to think and have a vision for the future and the capacity to interact with God and, surprisingly, with the Elohim as well. These pages of scripture tell us. Humans enter into conversation with members of the Elohim. Jacob wrestles with one and has his hip knocked out of a socket. Daniel receives a map of the future rise and fall of empires from a member of God’s inner circle. Humans have the amazing capacity to tend to the animals and speak to God himself.

The irrevocable decrees. Your irrevocable dominion.

In the next episode, we’ll explore the rebellion—how some of these spiritual beings grew jealous of humanity and sought to seize what was never theirs. We’ll see the “fingerprints” of this rebellion on the very pillars of our society. And we’ll begin to understand why the world feels like occupied territory.

But first, sit with this: your purpose is not borrowed. Your authority is not provisional on your being fit for the job. Your calling as God’s king or queen on planet Earth is woven into the cosmos itself.

Do you have a destiny secured by God’s eternal decree. Let’s live like it.

Ready to dig deeper into the ancient biblical worldview that reshapes your faith? Get the full series and discover how ReJesus Everything is calling believers back to the Jesus of Scripture—not the domesticated version we’ve inherited, but the King who reclaimed the cosmos. Order here.

You and I have been taught that the Bible is about getting our life together through Jesus so we can go to heaven when we die.

That’s not what the Bible is about.

The Big G Gospel

The real story—the one Scripture actually tells—is cosmic in scale. It’s about spiritual powers that have taken over our world and now rule territories and human nations. It’s about a war happening in a realm you can’t see that touches everything in the realm you can.

The core story of the Bible is about the victory of Jesus over these powerful beings, what he has restored to all humans, and the authority Jesus has already given you and me to enforce His victory in your corner of the world. Our salvation is part of the liberation of all of the created world. Once we have been set free, we are called to join the Liberation.

For the next four weeks, the Grounded Podcast is diving into the Cosmic conflict Worldview of the Bible—the foundational story of Scripture that most of us have never heard. This isn’t abstract theology. This is the framework that explains the coordinated evil you see in media, government, business, education, the military, and the arts.

What You’ll Discover

Episode 1: The Populated Cosmos

• Why ancient people understood spiritual reality better than we do

• Who the ones known as “the Elohim” are and why it matters

• How the elohim operate in the physical world

• Where the ones Paul calls “principalities and powers” came from and how they gained their power

• How the way God created the world affects humans everywhere.

Episode 2: The Occupation & The Pillars

• How supernatural evil operates through five specific spheres of power

• Why media, government, business, education, military, and the arts are always battlefields

• What it means that we are all living in “occupied territory.”

• How to recognize the occupation in the systems around you

Episode 3: Our Human Champion

• Why humans—not angels—are the centerpiece of God’s plan

• What it means to bear the image of God in a cosmos at war

• Why only a human could defeat the powers of heaven and restore dominion to the human race

• How only Jesus, as the God-man, could defeat these powers and how he did it on the cross

Episode 4: Enforcing the Victory

• It’s important that a human being is sitting at the right hand of God as co-ruler of all creation

• Your position of authority right now, today if Jesus is your Lord

• How to exercise dominion in your sphere

• The cost and the reward of standing aligned with Christ as He expands the reach of God’s Kingdom on Earth

Who This Is For

This series is for who’s sensed that politics and economics can’t explain everything happening around them.

It’s for people who want to understand the Bible not as a self-help book, but as an epic story of cosmic conflict and their personal calling as a child of God.

It’s for people who love Jesus and want to have a bigger and more accurate understanding of His work on our behalf.

Why Now?

We live in a moment when the occupation has never been more visible. The coordinated manipulation of information, the normalization of corruption, the celebration of darkness across every major institution—it’s not random. And it’s not unbeatable. Jesus is Lord of Heaven and Earth.

But you can’t fight what you don’t understand. You can’t exercise authority you don’t know you have.

This series can give you both.

Subscribe & Listen

New episodes drop weekly every Tuesday for the next four weeks. Each one builds on the last. Invite your friends. This may be one of the most interesting studies you’ve ever had.

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Share this with someone you know who’s ready to see the Bible—and their life—differently.

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The war is real. Your authority is real. The victory is already won.

Let’s learn about it together.

Every Blessing,

Chuck

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Every Blessing,

Chuck

Imagine there’s an author and podcaster you genuinely admire. You own all her books. You never miss an episode. You’ve held onto every personal detail she’s ever mentioned — her husband’s name is Victor, she has three kids, she loves glamping, glamorous camping in those rolling houses on wheels, with soft beds and real creature comforts. If there were a quiz about her, you’d win it. You know more about this woman than most of her own relatives do.

Then one weekend you’re at a distant friend’s wedding, and by some miracle you’re seated right next to her at the reception. You hit it off immediately. On impulse, she and her family invite you to join them in their RV parked outside, right after the wedding. You go. And it changes you. Their wholeness somehow rubs off on you. Their stability becomes something you carry. One day you’ll probably mention that you’d been a fan for years — but by then it won’t matter, because now you’re a friend. Part of the family.

Do you see the difference?

On the first level, you knew about her. You knew the details. Her words had shaped you and you respected her deeply. But you didn’t know her. Then you met her. You talked, ate, and traveled together. And from that point on, you could be anywhere in a crowded room, and the moment your eyes met, you’d both smile and start making your way toward each other.

There’s actually a dedicated region of the brain for remembering the faces of people you truly know. Everyone else functions as background — never really seen, instantly forgotten as you walk away. The people you truly know are different. Specific. Real. Present.

I’ve come to believe this is the single most important distinction in the Christian life, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough.

There is an enormous difference between the tangible presence of Jesus and a religion about him — even a religion done perfectly. Religion isn’t just a substitute for knowing Christ. It actually stands in the way of knowing him. That’s the most frightening thing about it. You can go extraordinarily deep into a religion about Jesus — become a raving, devoted, lifelong fan, keep every observance, deny yourself everything fun in life — and still never actually know him.

I’m not the one who came up with that. Jesus said it himself, and he said it in the most sobering way imaginable:

Not “you got the doctrine wrong.” Not “you didn’t work hard enough.” I never knew you. Now, these are people with a résumé — prophecy, deliverance, miracles—all of it in his name. It’s like owning the jersey, the signed photos, and the game ball of a sports hero. You might be completely genuine in your devotion. But that doesn’t make you family.

Jesus came to be our King — but also our brother. And brothers know each other.

So there’s really only one question underneath all of this. Religion or presence — which one do you actually want? Some people, honestly, want religion. They want to keep God in his place. They’re happy to follow a religion about him and they don’t need a backstage pass to meet him personally. That’s a real choice, and it’s available.

But other people aren’t that easily satisfied. They want to know their Maker. They want to know why they’re here. If that’s you, I want you to hear that what you’re after is not only possible — it’s the whole point. Jesus wants to live with you. He wants to animate you from within and do his work for others through you. People who encounter you should encounter him. You’ll find yourself in conversations where strangers open up about the deepest things in their hearts without quite knowing why. That’s not an elite spiritual tier. That’s the normal life with Jesus as Lord.

If you’ve never had that experience, the way in is embarrassingly simple. Start talking to Jesus about it. Get hungry for it. Silence your feed. Seek it earnestly. You don’t find true north through a rational analysis of whether Christianity is historically valid. You find it through an encounter with a Being who is both otherworldly and your Creator. He gave you the promise himself: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

We can keep being a fan. Or we can get in the RV.

ReJesus Everything is available now on Amazon — a letter to the generation inheriting the Christian movement, about trading a religion about Jesus for the real thing. Grab a copy, and bring a few friends: the free discussion guide on the website is built for exactly this kind of conversation.

Every Blessing!

Chuck

In Hebrew, the word Ruach means wind. It also means breath. It also means spirit, immaterial intelligence. Not three related concepts — one word, carrying all three at once, whenever it appears.

When Genesis 1 says the “Spirit of God” was hovering over the waters — that’s ruach. The Spirit is the breath of God and the wind of God—all three simultaneously.

I don’t believe The ancient Hebrew reader had to choose between those meanings; they felt all of them at once.

Then in Genesis chapter two, God bends down and breathes ruach into the clay body of the first human. Wind. Breath. Spirit. Entering a body made from the ground, and the man becomes alive. That’s where your life came from. Not just biologically — eternally. The breath of God is the source of human life.

And then Jesus comes. He teaches about this wind you cannot control, cannot predict, and cannot contain. He breathes on his disciples and says, receive the Holy Spirit.

This is what he came to release. The breath of God. Back into human beings. The way it was always supposed to be.

That is your birthright. Not a doctrine about it. Not a religion organized around the memory of it. The actual thing. The ruach of God, alive in you, doing what it has always done — creating, restoring, delivering, bringing life out of death.

That is what’s at stake in this conversation. Not church attendance. Not doctrinal correctness. Your birthright. Let’s talk about it.

The Oldest Story in the World

I want to walk you through the biblical thread of ruach, because once you see it, it completely reframes the way you interpret all that Jesus was doing and saying.

RUACH begins before day one of creation.

That word “hovering” in Hebrew is the same word used later for an eagle hovering over its nest, watching over its young. The ruach of God is intelligently hovering over chaos. Waiting. Present. About to move.

Then God with his breath speaks and everything comes into being. Light. Sky. Land. Life. All of it called into existence by the breath of God moving over the chaotic void.

Chapter two — God forms a body from the ground. Beautiful, detailed, complete. And then he bends down and breathes ruach directly into the man’s nostrils. And the man becomes a living being. The breath of God entering a human being and making him an embodied life, fully alive. Connected. Known. Animated. Fueled.

This is the original human experience. Ruach flowing freely between Creator and creature. No barrier. No intermediary. Direct. Intimate. Alive.

Then sin enters, and the connection breaks. Not God’s choice — humanity’s. We chose independence from God, and independence from God means separation from his ruach. And the whole rest of the Old Testament is the story of God working to restore what was lost. The breath keeps moving. The wind keeps blowing.

It dries the earth after the flood — ruach. It parts the Red Sea — ruach. It falls on the judges and the prophets and the kings when they need power beyond themselves. Ezekiel stands in a valley of dry bones and God tells him to prophesy to the ruach — to call the breath of God back into what is dead. And the bones come together and stand up and live.

The whole Hebrew story is a story about ruach. About the breath of God and what happens when human beings are connected to it — and what happens when they’re not. It is the oldest story in the world.

And then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, and he is burning with urgency, and his whole message is this: someone is coming! Someone who will baptize not with water but with ruach and fire.

He is saying: the original thing is returning. The breach is about to be healed. Get ready. God is doing something for you that you cannot do for yourself.

Jesus and the Wind

When Jesus arrives, watch how he talks.

He doesn’t primarily talk about religion. He doesn’t speak about proper church structure or how to do the rituals properly or how to organize a proper worship service. He talks about the wind.

In John 3, a religious leader named Nicodemus comes to him at night — a sincere man, a careful man, someone who has spent his whole life doing religion correctly. And Jesus tells him: you have to be born again. Born of water and ruach. Spirit. Wind. Breath.

Nicodemus is confused. How can a man be born again when he is old?

And Jesus says: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

John 7

Then in John 7, on the last day of a great festival, Jesus stands up and raises his voice and says: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:37-38)

Rivers. Out of the hearts of ordinary people. John tells us he was speaking about the ruach — the Spirit — which those who believed in him were about to receive.

Not a trickle. Not a substance so rare it has to be sprinkled, not a carefully managed flow through approved institutional channels. Rivers. Wild, life-giving, uncontainable rivers.

This is what Jesus is offering you, my friend. This is what he came to restore. The ruach of God flowing freely through human beings the way it was always designed to.

The Fire

And then there is the fire.

John the Baptist didn’t just say ruach. He said ruach and fire. Both. Together. And on the day of Pentecost, both arrived simultaneously.

Acts 2 — they are all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like a rushing violent wind fills the entire house. And what appeared to be tongues of fire rest on each one of them. And they are all filled with the Holy Spirit.

Wind and fire. Together. Exactly as John promised.

I want you to sit with the image of fire for a moment, because fire does specific things. Fire gives light in darkness. Fire gives warmth in cold. Fire purifies what passes through it. Fire spreads — it doesn’t stay contained in one place unless you smother it. And fire, once it is truly roaring, is very difficult to stop.

The disciples who walked out of that upper room were on fire. Not metaphorically — they had flames of holy fire upon them. There is no other explanation for what happened next. Uneducated fishermen stood up and spoke with such authority that thousands of people in a busy crowd, gave them their rapt attention and were cut to the heart.

The lame walked. The dead were raised. The message spread across the known world within one generation. No budget. No institution. No marketing strategy. Just ruach and fire in ordinary human beings.

This is your birthright. Not the memory of that day. Not a doctrine about that day. The same ruach. The same fire. Still available. Still moving. Still looking for human beings who want it badly enough to receive it.

What We Did With It — and Why It Matters

That’s why I do not believe Jesus came to establish a religion of any kind. The thing he brought did not fit in Judaism. It does not fit in Buddhism or Hinduism, and I don’t even think it fits in Christianity. The thing that Jesus brought does not fit into any concept of religion. It is above religion. Religion cannot contain it, although it will always try.

Every time ruach moves powerfully through a community of people, the same thing eventually happens. Institution keepers arise. People who are drawn to order and structure begin to build structure around it. They name it. Organize it. Incorporate it. Create guidelines for it. Establish who is authorized to handle it and who is not.

And slowly, without anyone intending it, the structure begins to replace the thing it claims to protect. The hurricane becomes a ceiling fan. The fearful blast becomes managed by a fireplace.

I have watched this happen in movements in my own lifetime. A community gets genuinely alive — ruach is moving, people are being transformed, there is an unmistakable presence in the room. And within a generation it is an institution. The structure remains. That superhuman energy is gone.

I am not saying structure is the enemy. Jesus himself had structure — he had twelve disciples, he had a clear mission, he moved with intention and purpose. The early church had elders and deacons and real accountability. Structure is not the problem.

The problem is when structure stops serving the ruach and starts regulating it.

And the reason this matters for your generation specifically is this: you are the ones who get to decide what you build. You are the ones who will lead the next movements. You are the ones who will choose, when the ruach moves, whether to follow it freely or immediately begin building a box around it.

Choose the wind. Always choose the wind.

Your Birthright — How to Claim It

So what does this mean practically? How do you actually claim this birthright?

Jesus gave Nicodemus the answer: you have to be born of the ruach. You have to receive it. And receiving it requires wanting it — actually wanting the wind itself, not just the structure built around the memory of it.

In his last week, Jesus gathered his disciples in a small room and simply breathed on them. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:22) That’s it. No elaborate ritual. No special qualification required. Just — receive it.

The path to ruach has always been the same. It is direct. Personal. It doesn’t run through an institution. It runs through surrender — Lowering your barriers and laying down your independence from God, trusting him like a child, opening yourself to be filled with what he has always wanted to give you.

Silence your feed. Get hungry for this. Talk to Jesus about it directly. Ask him to breathe on you the way he breathed on those disciples. He has not changed. He is still in the business of releasing ruach into human beings who want it.

And you know from the inside what it is to be carried by that wind — you will never be satisfied with the ceiling fan again.

Jesus did not come to give us a religion. Even a perfect one. A religion is too small a thing. Too containable. Too manageable. Too easily turned into a system that runs on human energy instead of divine breath.

He came to release the ruach of God back into human beings. The same breath that hovered over the chaos waters at the beginning of everything. The same breath that made the first human alive. The same wind that carried the disciples out of that upper room and into the world.

That is what he came to do. That is your birthright. And that is exactly what is at stake.

Don’t settle for a ceiling fan. You were made for the hurricane.

Next episode we’ll go deeper into one of the most important questions this raises: what is the difference between knowing about Jesus and actually knowing him? Because there is a difference, and once you see it, everything changes.

If this episode is stirring something in you, the book ReJesus Everything, go so much deeper. It is available on Amazon. And if you want to sit with these questions in a group, the free discussion guide on the website is built for exactly that.

One more thing: if you sense that God is calling you to something bigger with your creativity and your gifts, Medialight was built for exactly that kind of formation. Real training, real community, a whole team investing in you — and I’m there as one of the main instructors. Go take a look at medialight.network.

The ruach is still moving. Go find it.

See you next time.

Chuck

In forty+ years of ministry I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong inside churches, organizations, and movements. Leadership failures, church splits, burnout, abuse of authority, financial scandals — most of it up close.

And underneath almost all of it is the same root problem. Not bad theology. Not weak leadership. Not a lack of resources or strategy.

Not his absence. His subordination. He’s still in the building. His name is still on the sign. People are still singing songs about him and praying in his name and carrying Bibles with his words printed in red. But somewhere along the way, Jesus stopped being the actual authority. He became the mascot.

He became an advisor we consult when we need wisdom, a therapist we visit when we’re struggling, an emergency contact we call when things fall apart. We rarely treat him as Lord — the one with the final say over everything.

Influence and authority are not the same thing

Influence is the ability to affect someone’s thinking and maybe their behavior. Authority is the right to make decisions and expect obedience. You can have one without the other.

Jesus has enormous influence in Christianity. In practical terms, he often has minimal authority. People talk about him constantly. They study his teachings. They worship him on Sunday. But they don’t necessarily do what he says. He said it himself: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say?”

A secular historian named Michael Hart wrote a book ranking the hundred most influential people in history. He places Jesus third — behind Mohammed and Isaac Newton — despite Christianity being the world’s largest religion. His reasoning: Jesus’ ethical teachings are among the most remarkable and original ever presented. Then he says — Christians don’t feel the need to obey Christ in order to identify as Christian.

A secular historian just described the central problem of Christianity in one paragraph. We can never truly align with Jesus until we individually, and corporately, accept his authority over everything.

The seminary problem

As someone who worked in seminaries for twenty years, including as a seminary president, I think I’m entitled to an opinion on this one.

If I wanted to reinstall the authority of Jesus in Christianity worldwide, I’d start with the seminary — the place training the next generation of pastors and thinkers. You’d assume the primary curriculum in a seminary would be Jesus. You’d spend three years unpacking his words, his practices, his way of training people, his handling of conflict and power and poverty, how he dealt with the rich and the poor, how he made disciples.

But if you enroll in seminary expecting that, you’ll be disappointed.

In actual seminary, you’ll study a million other things. A dedicated course on Jesus is typically an elective — if offered at all. You get one course called The Gospels, but you’ll spend half the semester on technical arguments about authorship. etc.

Jesus is not even the chief theologian of his own movement. Paul is. You’ll spend two years studying every word Paul wrote.

Just as John the Baptist was the forerunner of Jesus, Jesus might as well be the forerunner of Paul if you judge by who gets the spotlight in the institutions built in his name. Let that sink in.

The authority he simply commanded

I want to talk about the kind of authority we’re actually reinstalling by intentionally placing Jesus not just as the most influential Person in our life, but actually as the central authority in our life.

What bothered the temple authorities most about Jesus was the authority he simply commanded. He held thousands of people on a hillside with no amplification — just his voice, while he sat on a stone. In every recorded conversation he speaks as the Master, never searching for words, never uncertain about what he wants to say.

The Pharisees kept throwing the same question at him: “Who gave you this authority?”

John answers it in the first line of his Gospel. He has it by creation. The Father confirmed it through miracles done by his voice alone — commanding demons, sickness, storms, and death. He now sits at the right hand of God, Lord of Heaven and Earth.

That is the authority we are reinstalling. Not a new ministry strategy. Not a doctrinal revision. This.

Jesus is higher than all the apostles. Higher than any ancient or modern prophet. Higher than Mary and the Pope. Higher than your pastor. Higher than the most brilliant theologians who have ever lived. He is higher than anyone else within the pages of the Bible. He is not a teacher — he is THE Teacher, THE Prophet, THE Messenger of God to us.

See Jesus. Then reJesus everything else.

Reinstalling the authority of Jesus starts with one decision: choose to treat Jesus as if he is actually in charge. Not an advisor. Not an emergency contact. The one with the final say.

That single decision changes what you read in Scripture, how you handle disagreements, and how you conduct yourself every moment of every day.

If you’ve got time to listen to this on video, I think you’ll get a lot more out of the podcast version this time.

Every Blessing! Chuck

ReJesus Everything is available now on Amazon. It’s a letter to the generation inheriting the Christian movement — about how to put Jesus back at the center of a faith that has quietly promoted other things in addition to him. Grab a copy, and if you want to work through it with a group, there’s a free discussion guide coming soon. PS: Please leave a review, even a short one. It’s a powerful way to expand the reach of the book on Amazon, the world’s largest book marketplace. Thanks!!!

Are you good at imagining things? Can you, for example, get an idea about the furnishing of a room so that it comes alive and becomes a place with a purpose? Can you see it before actually dragging furniture into the space?

I think we all have this ability, but some people use it more and so it becomes stronger with them. Anyway, we’re always trying to encourage people to release their creativity because creativity is worship. God is our Creator, and He invites us to create things with Him.

In this video, I want to invite you into the process that is involved in making a video out of a scripture passage. Today I was reading Psalms 148, and it just read like a script. I could see it in my mind. Read it with me in this video, and I think you’ll see it also.

Over the next few months, we want to convert this scripture into a powerful video that lays down the foundation of teaching behind the Old and New Testaments. I hope to have the liberty in the next year to build out some videos that can hopefully gain traction with young audiences online and teach them the big strokes of God’s message in a way that feels the most natural to them.

So, without further ado, let’s open up the Bible to Psalms 148 and start envisioning what a video of those few verses might look like.

Thanks for standing with us as we raise up a generation of content creators who put God’s words into artistic form so they can impact this digital generation.

Every Blessing!

Chuck and Sherry

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There’s a scene at the very end of the Bible that has always amazed me. It’s my new favorite Bible verse, and you’ll find it in the last chapter of Revelation — God’s final word to the world.

You’d expect something tender. Something like, “Please, my children, come back to me. I love you too much to let you go.”

That’s not what happens.

A glorious angel steps forward to deliver the closing message:

No pleading. No last-minute persuasion campaign. Just…

“Hey Humans, Make up your mind.”

I’ve come to believe that whole speech is basically a command to decide who you’re going to be and get on with it. Vote already.

If you want to be crooked, then lie, cheat, and abuse like a gangster. If you want to be lustful, then go roll in the filth. But if you’re going to follow Jesus — wake up, and do it with everything you’ve got.

What strikes me about that passage is that it doesn’t seem to matter to God whether every single person chooses him. He gave us free will. What matters is that everybody votes. He wants us to pick a team.

I’m picking Team Jesus.

The either-or

This is where I think a lot of churched people skip past too quickly. We think we settled it all when we prayed the sinner’s prayer one day so we wouldn’t have to go to hell.

All of us need to intentionally make up our minds about Jesus. Either he is the Creator come in the flesh to save us, or he is not. Either he is the only door to God, or he is not. If he’s none of those things, then he’s just a man — a good teacher, maybe — but not someone you build a life around.

But if he is that Savior, then he must also be Lord.

The early church didn’t have a twelve-point statement of faith. They had one doctrine: Jesus is Lord. That was enough. Everything else fit inside that one conviction. Compare that to what a lot of us grew up with — stacks of doctrinal positions and denominational distinctives layered on top of each other. Somewhere underneath all of it, the actual Lordship of Jesus has often gotten buried instead of being the one thing holding everything else together.

Lordship or nothing

The core of the Gospel message is that Jesus offers to be our Lord. The choice to accept this offer belongs entirely to us from that point on. But he won’t lower his position to make it easier on us. It’s Lordship or nothing.

That sounds like a hard sell, doesn’t it? Who actually wants a lifetime under the authority of a Supreme Lord? Our experience with power, in this life, is that power tends to end up unpleasant, even abusive. We chafe at the thought of someone else having the final say over us, and that’s a completely normal reaction.

But Jesus isn’t like any human leader you’ve ever lived under. The people who actually live under his Lordship discover something that surprises them every time: his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. His authority strengthens and lifts you rather than crushing you. It releases your creativity. It ignites vision instead of shutting you down.

This is not religion. Religion takes what you have and always demands more. What Jesus offers is the exact opposite — he’s offering to become your shield, your provider, your healer, your leader, forever. That’s an unbelievable offer, once you sit with it.

My own conviction

If Jesus is anything less than what he claims to be in the Gospels, I don’t want to follow him. I don’t need another moral teacher. I need a Savior. There’s no middle road. He’s either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord.

I spent my early years in the spiritual wilderness working through exactly what I believed about Jesus, and why. I looked at the alternatives. I sat with the doubts. And then I made up my mind.

I believe him because of the life he actually lived — he refused to compromise to be popular, wealthy, or to avoid pain. I believe him because five hundred witnesses were willing to face persecution and death to testify that they had personally seen him alive again. But more than any of that, I believe Jesus because I’ve experienced him for myself for fifty years now. He healed my depression as a teenager. He’s answered specific prayers more times than I could count. That’s not theory. That’s my own history with him.

Represent Jesus, not Christianity

Sherry and I have spent over forty years living in Southeast Asia. We have not spent forty years representing Christianity. We represent Jesus — not our denomination, not a nonprofit. Just him.

This Jesus thing has never been doctrine for us. It’s experience. So don’t follow a religion about Jesus, or a creed, or a particular church’s brand of him. Follow him. Know him.

Whatever else you do this week — make up your mind about Jesus. Vote.

If this question is stirring something in you, this is exactly where the book picks up.

ReJesus Everything is built around one conviction: Jesus is the standard, and the Christianities we’ve inherited are just our attempts to represent him — some better than others. This piece you just read is the opening move of a much longer conversation in the book: making up your mind about who Jesus actually is, before we ever get to what’s broken in how the church has tried to follow him, and what it looks like to rebuild from here.

It’s not a book about tearing anything down. It’s a letter to the next generation of leaders, written from fifty years of ministry across dozens of cultures, about how to put Jesus back at the center of a faith that’s drifted. If you’ve ever sensed that gap — between the Jesus you grew up believing in and the Jesus actually described in the Gospels — this book was written for you.

ReJesus Everything is available now on Amazon. Grab a copy, and if you want to work through it with friends, there’s a free discussion guide on the website too. Click here to order.

Please leave us a review on Amazon. It’s more powerful than you could know in causing the algorithm to show the book to other people. Thanks!

One of the concepts we talk about is the need to re-establish the central authority of Jesus and not treat Him just as one voice among many. The Medialight team came up with this diagram, which I share with you now.

Because I know Ross so well, I really think the conversation between us is special, and I hope you will check it out.

The book is available now on Amazon.

Order ReJesus Everything

Every Blessing!
Chuck

Buy the Book

Hey! I have exciting news, the book is finally live! ReJesus Everything is available on Amazon worldwide! We have a Kindle version already up, and we will produce an audiobook within a month or so.

This has been a passion project for many years. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been writing this book all my life because I have been thinking the thoughts that I was finally able to release along the journey of ministry that Sherry and I have been in these 45 years.

There were so many battles involved in bringing this book to its launch day. There were struggles with artists, struggles with the layout designer, and struggles with Amazon over technical parts of the physical construction of the book. Anyway, we expected some resistance anytime we create a new thing, but this one truly took so much grit to bring across the finish line, so please celebrate with us!

The past two years have largely revolved around this project, and now it’s completed. In this video, I talk about what’s inside the book so I won’t go into details on that here.

What I am hoping is that this book will become fuel for discussion in local churches and ministries. We are producing a companion leader’s guide for free that can be downloaded from the book’s website. In this guide, we lay out six to eight sessions that a church can have to create a safe discussion where church leaders and young people can process the dissonance many young people feel between the Jesus of the Bible and the organized version of Christianity around them. Like the book, the majority of this discussion centers around rebuilding our current version of Christianity with Jesus, His words, and the example of His life at the center.

A whole generation of Christian young people are avoiding any idea of serving in church ministry, even though they love Jesus. They just look at current forms of church and say, “That’s not for me.” We’re missing so much buy-in from this generation, and those of us who are mature in the Lord have to put some energy into making certain the baton relay continues.

Over the last two thousand years, if even one generation had failed to pass the baton to the next generation, the Christian movement would have stopped. I don’t want to see things break down in our generation. Sherry and I are spending much energy trying to help this generation pick up the ministry and create their own new version of things so that the powerful Gospel of Jesus continues forward.

We believe this book can be an important resource for the global church, and I want to thank you for supporting us up to this point. Thank you for opening my emails and for participating in this podcast. You have allowed me to work out my thoughts and bring them to a place where they could be published. Sherry and I are so grateful for this.

Can We Ask Two Things Please?

1. Give the book a try.

Here’s the Link to Purchase on Amazon

2. Write a 3 sentence review and give the appropriate numbers of stars in your rating.

If we could get 50 people to buy the book and give it a review, it will trigger an algorithm on Amazon where the book gets promoted to new viewers. This is the great chance for a breakout, but it needs to happen in the first two weeks, so please buy the book today and give us a review. We will be so grateful to you for that.

Thanks again!

Chuck and Sherry