Hi friend! Sherry and I are back in Thailand, so I’m back in the studio, able to produce again. Thanks for your patience. Let’s dive in.
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:
“He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still. He who is holy, let him be holy still.”
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.
If this is true, then we have to live like he’s actually the boss.
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.
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