• The Great Commission
  Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. - Matthew 28:19-20

• The Great Commandment
  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-39

• The Great Rule
  Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. -Matthew 7:12

• The Great Target
  You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. - Acts 1:8

But, there is one GREAT that we often miss that teaches us about God’s strategy for how He intended (and intends) His Kingdom to multiply throughout planet Earth! And without it, we’ll slow down and miss the exponential power of disciple-making multiplication!

Ephesians 4:11 lists the five distinct functions God gives His Church through the leaders He calls to equip: Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.

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APEST. The five-fold ministry.

Call it what you want, it’s not a hierarchical org chart. It’s not a structure where one leader has the authority and power to call all the shots. It’s the skeleton of a servant-leader team of ministers bound together to fulfill the Great Commission. It’s the Kingdom DNA of every healthy disciple-making community and movement that God puts together to reach and unreached people groups and lead them to full disciple-making maturity. This team was designed to function as one under the headship and authority of Jesus Christ.

And guess what? You can’t get that beautiful expression of faith family that is described in Ephesians 4:12-16 UNLESS you have a full expression of these equipping gifts represented in your ministry team. They work together to equip the saints for the work of the ministry and take beachheads among people groups in the places where we live, learn, work, and play!

How Does This Great Team Function?

For this team to work together, it’s important that each member knows their God-ordained function. There are a ton of assessments and tools. As a matter of fact, I built my own at thegreatteam.org (click to take it). But with all those tools, here’s the picture that finally made it click for a lot of people in our disciple-making network.

• A simple grid.

• Two questions.

• Four quadrants.

• One Cross in the middle.

1. Where do you prefer to work? Outside the church or inside the church?

2. How do you prefer to work? Structured or unstructured?

Plot those two questions on a graph, and suddenly the five functions stop being abstract theology and start being a map to your specific “GREAT TEAM” function in your mission field.

Two Ways to Read Ephesians 4:11

There are two ways to read that verse, and the one you choose determines whether APEST becomes an interesting theological footnote or a transformational framework for how you build a disciple-making team.

You can read it as a list of job titles. Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.

✅ Box checked.
🏃‍♂️ Moving on.

Or you can read it as a mission architecture. Five distinct, irreplaceable functions that together produce the full picture of the mature, multiplying leadership community we read about in Ephesians 4:11-16.

Learn more in My Book
“Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers.”
Click HERE or the image below and
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💥 Here’s the key shift💥

The APEST is not describing five types of professional ministers. These are not roles to be filled on a staff org chart. Verse 11 describes a leadership team representing five kinds of Kingdom DNA that exist in every healthy disciple-making community. The community best reflects the Kingdom of God when all five are present and active, not when they’re all crammed into a senior pastor’s job description.

🤯 And not when only two of the five ever get developed because they’re the ones that make Sunday morning run smoothly.

Think of it this way. A body needs more than one organ to function. A lungs-only body would not last long. A heart-only body would not get far. The body works because every system is present, connected, and doing its part. The APEST is the organic, Spirit-given ministry anatomy of leadership in a community of disciples. The APEST functions best when the church is on the move, both gathered AND scattered. And each of those five functions plays a 💪POWERFUL role in both spaces.

❓The real question is whether we’re developing all five, or just the two that make our Sunday morning wheels keep spinning.

CLICK HERE to download a PDF

The Four Quadrants

In this diagram, there are four quadrants. The X-axis represents whether a person thrives outside or inside the church walls. So the left half of our quadrant represents outside, while the right reflects those who prefer to work AMONG the believers. In other words, are you a gathered minister or a scattered minister?

The Y-axis represents whether you operate in a more structured pathway or if you prefer to work spontaneously and unstructured. Do you create pathways or operate in one-off relational encounters?

So let’s meet the team, and let’s put them on the map.

Top Left: The Apostle: Structured + Outside the Church.

The word apostle comes from the Greek apostolos, meaning “one who is sent.” The sent-ness is the whole point. The Apostle is the boundary pusher. 🤠 The pioneer. The person wired to look beyond what already exists and ask, “What is God doing over there, and how do we get there?”

They are missional visionaries by nature, drawn toward unreached people, uncomfortable with the status quo, compelled to expand the Kingdom into spaces where it does not yet exist.

Apostles see what is possible before anyone else does, and they have the courage and catalytic energy to go first. They see forests, not trees. How do we reach this city? And they think in movements, not maintenance.

They also have a God-given ability to connect different parts of the Body with one another; Paul wasn’t just planting churches; he was building a network of churches that served and strengthened one another.

💥 But the same drive that makes Apostles extraordinary pioneers can make them difficult teammates. They get frustrated with anything that feels like it’s slowing the mission down, which, in their view, is almost everything. They can leave a trail of unfinished things behind them in the rush toward the next frontier, and they can undervalue the shepherding and teaching that keep the people they launch connected and maturing.

• Without the Apostle, a team turns inward.

• The mission shrinks.

• The community starts serving itself instead of expanding the Kingdom.

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Top Right: The Teacher — Structured + Inside the Church.

This is the one who grounds everything in the Word. [Grk. didaskalos] one who instructs others in the truth of Scripture.

The Teacher can accurately handle the word of truth, break down the fundamental truths of the Bible, and communicate them in a way disciples can both understand and apply, moving people toward mature faith. They also protect the community from false teachers who show up with their own agenda.

An Apostle with a strong theological foundation is a far more sustainable pioneer than one flying on vision alone. A Prophet grounded in Scripture is far more discerning than one whose impressions answer to no one. The Teacher is what adds that balance to the whole team.

👀 But Teachers can mistake information for transformation. Explaining a passage is not the same as leading people to obey it, and their deep respect for tradition can calcify into a reflexive resistance to anything unfamiliar, exactly when a fast-moving Apostolic team needs to try something new.

Bottom Left: The Evangelist — Unstructured + Outside the Church.

This is the one who can’t sit still while people are far from God.

• They proclaim.

• They share the good news.

They scatter gospel seed into every relational soil they can find, and they thrive in unstructured, organic, outreach-shaped environments. They run ahead of everyone else, leaving a trail of gospel seed scattered everywhere, sometimes without sticking around to see what grows. Sometimes they seem flaky, or overly radical, or embarrass the rest of us by their boldness in public. Maybe they lead someone to the cross and then leave them in the dust.

• Is that irresponsible?

• Or is it by design?

Listen to it.

Bottom Right: The Shepherd — Unstructured + Inside the Church.

This is the nurturer and the caregiver.

That’s the gift everyone loves, until they realize the Shepherd has loved the flock into a holy huddle that forgot the world exists, or has failed to speak hard truth because their compassion overshadowed their truth-telling.

When the Shepherd goes silent, you’ve lost the heart of the mission. Don’t dismiss the compassionate heartbeat.

Listen to it.

The Center: The Prophet

Now look at the middle of the grid. Not a quadrant, a crossroads.

That’s the Prophet.

The Prophet doesn’t care about your categories. They couldn't care less about being inside or outside the church, or proclaiming to the whole flock, or sitting with one sheep at a time.

The Prophet can move into any quadrant, in any context, and ask the one question nobody else wants to ask: Is this actually what God said, or is this just what’s working right now?

That’s why the graphic puts the cross of Christ right at the Prophet’s center. Every function answers to the same Lord. The Prophet just refuses to let anyone forget it. And let’s kill the bad teaching right now, the Prophet isn’t a fortune teller or a doom-and-gloom guy in the corner. The Prophet is the one who sees and speaks truth in any environment, bringing insight, discernment, and direction wherever they go.

Of the five, this is often the most misunderstood and silenced, usually because it makes everyone nervous in meetings.

❤️‍🔥 But when they speak, the mission gets realigned.

Pathways, Trees, and Forests

Here’s a dynamic to pay attention to, because it shapes everything about how a real APEST team functions together.

About 80% of the believers you’ll encounter are not designed to create disciple-making pathways. They’re not wired to see the forest. They’re gifted at seeing and engaging the trees and the sheep,

• the individual people,

• the specific conversations,

• the one-on-one relationships that make up the actual substance of the mission.

They need someone to cut a pathway through the forest. They need someone to create reproducible tools that give all that individual-level engagement direction, structure, and a destination. They need someone to answer the question: “Where are we going, and how do we get there together?”

That’s the apostolic function, not just pioneering new territory, but creating clear, reproducible trails into that new forest. Not just casting vision, but building the road that makes the vision accessible to the 80% who are ready to walk it but cannot yet see it on their own.

You need all five.

Most disciple-making communities that are struggling are struggling because nobody has created a clear pathway, everybody is in the trees. And without a pathway, even the most gifted tree-level workers eventually get disoriented and discouraged.

Why Most Disciple-Making Teams Stall

Most disciple-making teams stall,

• 🚫 Not because the people in them don’t love Jesus

• 🚫 Not because they aren’t working hard, not because the vision isn’t compelling,

• 🚫 And especially not because they lack gifted leaders.

Some of the gifts are functioning, while others are absent, underdeveloped, or actively suppressed.

And the parts of the Body that are missing cannot simply be compensated for by working harder with the parts that remain.

Paul was explicit about this in 1 Corinthians 12.

• 👁️ If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?

• 👂 If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?

Every member is essential. Not every member is interchangeable.

A body that is missing members or treating certain members as unnecessary is operating at a fraction of its potential.

What does a broken body look like?

Here’s how it usually plays out.

🤕 A team led by Apostolic and Evangelistic voices expands rapidly, starts lots of things, reaches new people, but leaves a trail of relationally wounded, theologically confused, spiritually un-tethered disciples behind them.

⚠️ A team led by Shepherding and Teaching voices produces genuinely cared-for, well-grounded disciples who never actually go anywhere. The community turns inward, the front door quietly closes, and in five years, they’re a very mature club of already-convinced believers.

🔥 A team without a prophetic voice simply drifts. The prayer life becomes perfunctory. The discernment dulls. The gap between what the team is doing and what God is specifically calling them to do widens, and nobody names it because nobody on the team is wired to name it.

Every one of those configurations produces real fruit where their functions are strong. And every one of them fails where their functions are absent.

Picture a neighborhood soccer scrimmage. One team has players who are fast, aggressive, and can all shoot, great athletes, every one of them sprinting toward the ball the moment it’s kicked, leaving the rest of the field wide open.

• Nobody holds position.

• Nobody sets up plays.

• Just eleven kids chasing the same ball.

They lost 7-1.

The other team had one kid who hung back and held the defensive line,

• one who orchestrated passes from the middle,

• one whose only job was to see the field and communicate,

• one natural scorer who got the ball in the right spot every time because the right people put it there.

They won, and it wasn’t even close.

The difference wasn’t talent. It was team.

That’s the picture of every well-meaning, passionate group of disciple-makers running toward the same ball and burning out in the process.

Building a “GREAT TEAM,” Not a Club of One

The Apostle is frustrated with the Shepherd for slowing things down. The Shepherd is anxious about the Apostle moving too fast and leaving people behind. The Prophet is waiting for everyone to stop and pray, while the Evangelist is already out the door, meeting the next person. The Teacher is worried that nobody is reading deeply enough, while the Apostle wonders whether the Teacher is overthinking what should be a simple yes-or-no.

Sound familiar❓

Every one of those tensions is real. And every one of them is a gift, not a problem. If we know how to steward and disciple them to maturity.

The Kingdom doesn’t advance through lone rangers and spiritual superstars, but through a unified team: apostles pioneering, prophets discerning, evangelists reaching, shepherds nurturing, and teachers grounding, all five functions working together the way Christ designed them in Ephesians 4:11, so the whole Body is equipped for the whole mission.

We tend to build teams by affinity instead. We find the people who think as we do, who are wired like we are, who share our vocabulary and pace, and we pour our investment into those relationships because they’re comfortable and energizing.

Before long, we’ve assembled a group of people who are deeply aligned, and deeply incomplete. Five Apostolic people in a room is fast, visionary, and a lot of fun. It is also a house with no foundation, no walls, and no roof because the functions that provide them were never invited to the table.

And here’s the good news buried in the tension: the apostle and the shepherd, in productive tension, build communities that both expand and sustain. The prophet and the teacher, in productive tension, build communities that both discern and ground. The evangelist, held in healthy check by the shepherd and the teacher, builds an outreach that is warm, relationally rich, and doctrinally solid.

Know Yourself. But Don’t Stop There.

Every person reading this is wired primarily toward one or two of these five functions. Identifying your primary function isn’t optional; it’s the foundation of healthy team contribution. You cannot give what you do not know you have. You cannot develop what you cannot name. And you cannot build a team around giftings you’ve never clearly identified.

But don’t stop at self-discovery. Knowing about the APEST is not enough. Identifying your primary function and then retreating into your lane misses the whole point. The goal is not to figure out which one you are and operate exclusively out of that function while merely tolerating the others. The goal is to function as a genuine, collaborative, mutually submitting team where every voice is heard, every gift is deployed, and the result is the mature, unified, equipped Body Paul describes in Ephesians 4:12-16.

Jesus himself was not half a team. He pioneered new territory (apostolic). He heard and declared the Father’s word (prophetic). He sought and saved the lost with the message of His relentless love (evangelistic). He laid down His life for His sheep (shepherd). He taught with an authority that transformed lives (teacher). He was the whole team in one person.

But you, friend, are not the savior of the world. You need a team of co-laborers, and they need you.

So What Do You Do With This?

First, find yourself on the grid.
Are you wired for structure or for flexibility?
Inside the walls or outside them?
That’s not a value judgment.
It’s a calling.

Second, stop building your disciple-making team by affinity.
Go find the function you’re missing and invite that person to the table, even when their instincts feel like friction against yours.
The friction is the feature, not the bug.

Third, when the Prophet in your group says something that makes everyone squirm, don’t check your phone. Listen.
They’re not trying to derail the mission. They’re trying to keep it pointed at the Cross, which sits right in the middle of the map.

Hand to the plow, friend.

But know which row you were built to plow, and who else needs to be standing in the field beside you.

❓Where do you land on the grid — structured or unstructured, inside the church or outside it?

❓And which function is missing from your team right now?

✏️ Drop it in the comments. Let’s map this out together.

If you are interested in making disciples where you live, learn, work, or play in a way that is natural and effective, join the Missional Disciple-Making Collective Premium Cohort. Click Here to learn more.

😳 Spiritual conversations can get awkward!

You’ve had that talk before. From “that guy” at work who can’t get off his soapbox. Let’s call him Tinfoil. The topic is irrelevant. You just know it was uncomfortable. You were thankful he cared enough to strike up a conversation, but he didn’t know when to stop. Or how to avoid crossing the line into your personal space. So you silently avoided him, hoping he wouldn’t think you were just being rude. You heard his voice in the breakroom and quickly walked the other way. You caught a glimpse in the corner of your eye over by the coffee maker and decided you didn’t need to fill your cup after all. You know what I’m talking about!

Maybe you’ve also instigated that conversation. We can be so anxious to have spiritual conversations that we go a bit overboard. It’s wonderful! It’s a beautiful thing to share Jesus with your neighbor, or co-worker, or the parent at the basketball court.

But if you are not wise and strategic, it could be your last opportunity at a discipling relationship with your new friend. You may limit your chance to share Jesus with him to a one-shot deal. And in light of a huge credibility gap you have with that perfect stranger, it’s unlikely that you’ll make an impact with one meeting.

Back in the day, we could have spiritual conversations and get away with it. Faith wasn’t such an awkward topic, and most people had some understanding of God and the story of Jesus. But not anymore! Now, most people relate any faith topic to their awkward relationship with Aunt Suzie, who always brings up how they should be living differently or going to church.

When the leap from non-faith to faith was more unattainable, we used the analogy of a non-believer standing on one side of a canyon and Jesus on the other. All we had to do was drop the cross and bridge the gap, and the unbeliever could have a casual stroll right over to the opposite cliff. Effortless!

That model served us well. But the world changed.

It’s more like her standing on one side of a river and Jesus on the other. And what she needs is simply the first stepping stone. Then she has to make a decision whether she’s going to hop on the stone. The job of the one leading her to Jesus is to observe whether she hops on. If she does, then he can drop the next stone. And the next. And the next. Until she gets to the other side and falls into the arms of her Savior.

So if this is how it works these days, baby steps to faith, then what tools do we use to replace the canyon cross?

Let’s talk about the stepping stones of conversations.

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Three Types of Conversations - Stepping Stones Toward Faith

Let’s talk about three types of conversations and some tools to bridge the gaps that will help your friend get to the other side. The differentiator between those talks relates to the depth they go. And the pathway they take leads your friends to Jesus.

You’ll find yourself in many discussions throughout the week that we call casual conversations. A few of those will drive a bit deeper and become crucial. And if you ask the right questions and tell the right stories, some of them will become spiritual conversations. And spiritual conversations lead to faith decisions over time.

Casual Conversations

The conversation that we categorize as casual happens many times on any given day. It could be as simple as a quick conversation about the weather or how well a kid has played in the local sports league.

These conversations lack real depth and usually elicit no emotional response. For example, you might lean toward a parent and say, “Wow! Johnny is really shooting the ball nicely today.” Although they may seem totally surface and purposeless, they are the conversations that become the doorway to deeper talks.

On average, you will have about 85 of these casual conversations per week. Dan Grider encourages us to increase this number to about 200 or more. As you engage in more casual conversations, you’ll see an increase in crucial and spiritual conversations.

More Casual Conversations = More Opportunities to Take Them Deeper

Crucial Conversations

Conversations we categorize as crucial are those that delve deeper and carry emotional or relational significance. These conversations move one step closer to becoming spiritual conversations.

For example, the conversation about how well Johnny is shooting the basketball may transition to crucial with a question such as, “By the way, how is Johnny doing with the loss of his Grandfather?” This engages the person at the next level and shifts the talk from casual to crucial.

And crucial questions are the bridge to spiritual conversations. They engage a different part of a person’s brain and require a different response that requires trust.

Spiritual Conversations

The goal of the disciple-maker is to lead to the most significant category of conversation – the spiritual conversation. These prompt your friend to reflect on faith, eternity, or another spiritual issue. A spiritual conversation is usually not a church invitation. In the Disciple-Making Collective, Dan Grider taught us to call this “going church” on someone. That will likely cause your friend to change their afternoon walking route or break time at the office to avoid the awkwardness.

Stay focused on asking questions that are timely and relevant to the user. Ask those that make them think about spiritual matters without feeling like they just stepped in a pile of poop when you asked them. We call these “just in time” questions instead of “just in case”. They are the questions asked right when a person needs to consider them. Don’t rush to these questions. The Holy Spirit will lead you when the time is right. If they don’t come naturally, pray for a future opportunity to dig deeper.

As Johnny’s mom tells me that Johnny is struggling with his transition, I may ask something like, “How are you doing, Amy? Do you have the support you need during this time? Would it be okay if I pray with you right now?”

Relevant Questions and Genuine Stories – The Conversation Bridges

There can be a wide gap between the three types of conversations. It may seem like the gap is so vast that it’s challenging to get from one to the other. But remember, the stepping stone to closing the gap is often a relevant question or a genuine story.

We’ve already talked about relevant questions. The genuine story is an experience you’ve had that offers hope for a person to resolve spiritual conflict. It could be a story about how you overcame a similar obstacle. Or it may be a story that illustrates a passage of scripture that speaks to the internal struggle.

“Amy, I remember the months following my dad’s car accident. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t even get out of bed. Over time, I trained myself to rest in the fact that God knew exactly what I was going through and would help me overcome the pain I was experiencing. Over the course of a few months, things got better”.

Spiritual Conversations Take Practice

Each of these types of conversation takes practice. Even the simplest one requires us to get out of our comfort zone and initiate the talk. The more we force ourselves to ask the first question, the easier and more comfortable it gets.

• What can you do this week to practice moving casual conversations to crucial❓

• Crucial to Spiritual❓

• And how can you increase the number of casual conversations to open up opportunities❓

👉 If you’d like to learn more about spiritual conversations, check out my new book called Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers (click here and use SUBSTACK to get a 20% discount). And also make sure to pick up Dan Grider’s book, Crucial Conversations.

“Do you have an apartment that you rent out on your ranch?”

I asked at the end of a fifteen-minute phone call from my South Nashville desk in the busy office at Groove Life. It was our fourth call in six weeks. We were planning our upcoming trip and video shoot in Colorado. He answered slowly as he processed the question, “Why do you ask?” That started a conversation I’ll remember for the rest of my days.

One Answer to a Crisis of Faith

About this time, my youngest son and I had been reading about the macro-mysteries of a universe with no end and the micro-mysteries of DNA's blueprint in living beings. He’d been having a bit of a struggle with his faith, and somehow, when we are completely overwhelmed with things that we can’t explain, our faith is reignited. So we talked about things we can’t explain.

Something about realizing how small, fragile, and infinitely complex we are awakens the reality that a Creator may be the only solution to our belief problem. It’s like we begin to grasp the truth of an infinite God because of our inability to understand the mysteries of that very Creator. Sometimes the very questions that threaten to destroy our faith may be the only things keeping it alive.

I Found a God Big Enough

The first time I stood below the 18,000-foot mountains of the Wrangell-St. Elias peaks in eastern Alaska, I was face-to-face with the realization that there was nothing I, nor any other human, could do to rival the beauty that stares back at us when we open our eyes to creation. A simple sunset or a newborn baby awakens curiosity and wonder. Creation really does reveal the glory of God, and as Romans Chapter 1 teaches, we are stopped dead in our tracks on our path to find another answer apart from an intelligent designer.

The Call

On the last call before the trip, something made me ask the question. I didn't plan it. The street address landed, and something shifted, something quiet and instinctive. It was the kind of familiarity you feel toward certain people without being able to name why. I'd had that feeling about Ty for a while. I just couldn't trace it back to anything. Until the moment he told me the address.

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About eight weeks before the phone conversation, my boss had asked me to scour the internet to find a coach for an episode of an adventure show we were filming. “If possible, I’d like to use someone who works with the Lyle Sankey school.” That was his only request in my random Google search for a coach.

I found a bull-riding trainer who worked with Sankey. Ty Rinaldo of TZ Bucking Bulls in Larkspur, Colorado. Larkspur is a small, out-of-the-way town halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. It’s one of those towns that seems like it’s just there to bridge the gap. Hardly anyone knows where it is. But “coincidentally,” I did. I actually lived there for a short time, about twenty years ago. “Of all places,” I thought. “Randomly searching for a bull riding trainer, and he happened to live just a few miles from where I started my adult life.”

It took me a couple of tries to get in touch with Ty, but I soon knew that he was the guy we were looking for. Respectful, excited, and animated, he would be perfect for filming this episode. I didn’t think much about going back to Larkspur; time was short, and we were busy. We just spent the next couple of weeks planning the shoot.

“Why do you ask?” Ty said. As soon as he said it, I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been to TZ Ranch. My wife and I had lived in a temporary home for the first few months after we moved to Larkspur, just after we were married. When we had to find a new home, I came across a short classified ad describing a small studio apartment on a ranch. Julie and I headed out to see if this little apartment would be for us. After three miles of dusty dirt road with twenty-mile-per-hour winds, we arrived at the ranch. We both decided it was too much dust and wind to work for us, but we enjoyed a few minutes with a man named Ty and his wife. They told us about their two boys, and their cowboy-friendly, charismatic hospitality stuck with us.

Twenty years later, a random Google search that could have turned up a trainer anywhere in the 3.8 million square miles we call the United States of America, among the 327 million people who call it home, led us to a man and his 2 boys that we had stood face-to-face with approximately 7,300 days earlier.

“Why do you ask?”

“This is going to be hard to believe, but I’ve been to your house before.” I honestly couldn’t quite get the words out. I was in awe. You can believe what you want about chance, but that was too ridiculous to call anything other than “on purpose.” Two men meeting, with no obvious connection, no common friends or family, and nothing at all to make sense of the mystery. We met again after a chance, short-lived, inconsequential handshake twenty years earlier.

More to the Story

I can’t know God’s full intentions for the 2nd chance meeting. No one can see the full story God is writing of our lives. But I can tell you that probably both Ty and I needed a slap-in-the-face reminder that God hasn’t forgotten us. I needed to remember that the marriage relationship is one of the most sacred (and fragile) gifts on this side of a restored creation. Ty needed to feel the embrace of a heavenly father in the midst of one of the loneliest and most confusing seasons of his life. God still loves to make his care tangible to us with occasional surprises that can’t be written off as chance.

I’m sure there is much more to this story. Only God determines when we get to peer through the window of our finite time-bound barriers to His yet-to-be-seen reality. But it was an honor to glimpse the power of His authorship. Maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t just my youngest son who needed a rekindled faith. Maybe God knew that the boy’s struggle was so that his dad might see the unexplainable mysteries and once again…

BELIEVE.

Adapted from an Article Written for the June 2026 Issue of the Priority Newsletter of the Missionary Church, USA.

😳 37 years now 😳

Thirty-seven years in various forms of ministry.

You might say that I’ve tried it all.

• Sunday church services.

• decentralized disciple-making communities.

• marketplace ministry.

• faith-based non-profit and for-profit.

• traditional and contemporary services.

You could certainly call me a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. But if there is one thing I’ve mastered in almost four decades of service, it’s flexibility. In other words, my experience has trained me to partner with Jesus’ Great Commission in each of those ministry contexts.

That must have blossomed from the proverbial ”School of Hard Knocks.” Raised in a community of cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents in rural Alabama, I only attended church for the occasional wedding or funeral. And that was often in the extravagant Catholic cathedral in our German-influenced closest “big city.”

Church, for me, was inaccessible amid financial, relational, and spiritual challenges.

Although I lived in the buckle of the Bible belt, I didn’t know the language or the stories. Once, when I was around 11 years old, a neighbor picked me up for VBS. The teacher asked my friend John Haynes (I still remember his name) to share how he was “saved” in the church parking lot. All I could imagine was John being pushed from in front of a moving car. For a couple of years, I thought I would only be ready for heaven when something happened that physically saved my life.

Give me a break, I was only 11!

And then at 15, I got it good. I embraced the only answer to my deepest need, Jesus Christ. I never turned back! I was mesmerized by this person who gave me incredible hope. But my new life of faith didn’t mean that I understood or “fit in” with the other half of the folks in my neighborhood who understood the Sunday culture. They would spout off big Bible words as if they were household knowledge. I felt like I had arrived at a movie an hour late.

Obviously, I caught up over the years (mostly), and I love a great sermon or seminary-level Bible class. But I also understand why there is a chasm between the Sunday gathering and the rest of culture.

The week after I moved to Spring Hill, Tennessee, I went to lunch with a Christian co-worker and asked about the town’s spiritual climate. He looked up and said, “Oh, everybody in Spring Hill goes to church.” The very next week, I went with another guy, who answered the same question with, “Oh, no one goes to church in Spring Hill.”

🤯 Seven days apart, same restaurant, same company, perfectly opposite perspectives.

Why? Because, just like that gap in my childhood experience, there is a chasm between our Sunday church culture and the uninterested “nones.”

As missionaries in the places we live, learn, work, and play, we must recognize that the river is too wide in our current culture for those far from God to jump. We must discover how to drop one stone at a time and see who hops on. And when they do, drop the next stone.

Drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat ➠ drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat.

Until our friends, co-workers, and neighbors make it to the other side and embrace the Savior who is waiting for them.

How Do We Do This?

How do we, as missionaries, equip Joe and Mary to drop stones and bridge gaps?

And more importantly, how do we model for our people to do the same despite the differences we carry in how we prefer to experience “church”?

Step #1: Embrace the actual GREAT COMMISSION, not only some form of it.

We all read the Great Commission through the filter of our ministry experience. We often think, “How do we do this through worship, teaching, and pastoral care?”

Or, in Simple Church settings, we are always looking for the silver-bullet tool to accomplish this.

Those are not bad things; it is actually good stewardship to think of the commission in the context of our comfort zones. But the problem is that we often limit the command to those obvious places and tools and fail to bridge the gap between the contexts all around us.

🚫 That’s not at the heart of the Great Commission 🚫

Jesus didn’t point to a form of ministry, but a set of ministry behaviors. He didn’t tell us WHERE to make disciples or even HOW. He didn’t tell us to “plant a launch-large church.” And He didn’t tell us to start a “simple church” or “micro-church.” He didn’t tell us to move overseas or to start a Bible study at our workplace. He knew if He gave us a form to build, the form would be the focus.

🔥 Instead, he told us WHAT to do.

WHAT NOT WHERE

In order to bridge the gap for that co-worker at lunch, we must be about the BEHAVIORS of making disciples in whatever FORM God assigns us to. And we must equip and train others to do the same. Making disciples is the command. The place and method we use to do that is simply the context.

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Step #2: Activate both disciple-SHIP and disciple-MAKING in your faith community

We have used discipleship and disciple-making as if they were the same word with the same meaning. They are not. They are related. They are both critical to walking like Jesus, but they are not the same.

✔︎ Here’s the clearest way I know to draw the line:

• Discipleship is primarily inward.

• Disciple-making is primarily outward.

• Discipleship is the process of sanctification.

• Disciple-making is the process of multiplication.

The suffix, “-ship” changes the meaning of a word to reflect the “act or state of being.” So, in other words, discipleship is the act or state of BEING a disciple. Of course, making disciples first requires one to BE a disciple, so it is a critical part of becoming a disciple-maker.

We have taught people that once they get their disciple-ship right, once they have grown enough, read enough, matured enough, gotten enough of their stuff together, THEN they will be ready to make disciples. That is not the Jesus model. Of course, there was teaching and training as they journeyed together, but they assisted in the ministry of Jesus as they grew toward readiness to be sent.

Jesus called His disciples while they were still in process.

✔ Simon Peter had an anger problem.

✔ Thomas had a doubt problem.

✔ The Sons of Thunder had a power problem.

These were not polished, put-together spiritual giants. These were works in progress.

• Just like you.

• Just like me.

And Jesus sent them out to make disciples anyway. Before they had it all figured out. Before they fully understood the resurrection. He sent them on mission in the middle of their own growth journey.

💥 The closest person to those on the other side of the river is the one who has most recently become a follower of Jesus 💥

Discipleship and disciple-making are not sequential.

They are simultaneous. That’s a game-changer. You do not graduate from discipleship into disciple-making. You grow in both at the same time. Don’t wait for a perfect disciple before you send them to the mission field in the places where they live, learn, work, and play.

Step #3: Provide a pathway to make disciples in their mission field

We can preach the Great Commission in our congregation churches and disciple-making hubs, put it on the wall, write it in our vision statement, and still have a community full of people who have no idea how to actually do it.

Intention without a pathway is just inspiration. And inspiration, without direction, creates great disciple-teachers, but not true disciple-makers.

We believe in disciple-making. We celebrate it in theory. But when the one among us who genuinely wants to reach a neighbor, co-worker, or college roommate asks how to actually do this, the answer they get can be too complicated, too institutional, or too vague to act on.

Jesus gave His disciples a pathway by walking with them. He modeled the conversations. He formed the small group. He created the community. And then in Luke 9 and 10, He sent the 12 and then the 72 to simply do what He already modeled for them on the road and in the villages.

That’s the pattern.

And it STILL works.

What your faith community needs isn’t another program. It needs a clear, reproducible, Jesus-patterned pathway that anyone, not just the spiritually gifted few, can follow in the places where they already live, learn, work, and play.

🚫 That’s not a strategy.

🟢 That’s a movement.

And it starts when we model a set of behaviors for them.

Have you and your co-laborers spent the time and energy to model behaviors that work in your context and equip your people to follow the model of Jesus and to incarnate themselves in their workplaces and neighborhoods to bridge the gap?

Conclusion

👉 Here’s what I’ve learned after almost four decades of watching what works and what doesn’t.

The river is too wide to jump. You cannot get the guy who told me “no one goes to church in Spring Hill” from where he stands to where Jesus is waiting in one giant leap. The gap is too wide, the credibility is too thin, and the discomfort is too real for that to work. But you can drop a stone. And you can do that whether you worship in a building or a coffee shop.

The river between two guys eating lunch at the same restaurant seven days apart is not an obstacle to multiplication, but an opportunity for mission. Not a mission to build a bridge for people to admire, but a mission to drop stones for people to navigate the gap.

And that’s the movement we’re after.

Let’s work together in every ministry and mission context to embrace the behaviors of the Great Commission and not cling tightly to the forms of ministry that are most comfortable to us. No matter the context, let’s lock arms and commit fully to the work of Loving Like Jesus and Living Like Missionaries.

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Stay focused on your passion and call, disciple-making multipliers!

I am not bitter. I am not anti-Sunday church, despite what some might think or say.

I am pro-Jesus and for His people, including all forms of church gathering that are committed to obedience and mutual submission.

I am subject to spiritual authority and held accountable by a community of followers of Jesus who walk together in faith and in biblical principles.

With that said, I have struggled for 21 years with the fire in my bones to explore new forms of church that respond to the reality around us. And for the sole purpose of advancing the BEST NEWS of the Gospel of Jesus.

The disengagement of men, and now women (see this), in the prevailing form of church has been the motivating factor in my life’s work. My primary passion is to walk with others to restore the transformational ethos of the 1st-century church and see a viral welcoming of those far from God into the Kingdom and to the feet of Jesus. And then to invite them into a life of missional living for the advancement of the Gospel.

Along with that commitment…

• It has been intellectually and emotionally painful.

• It has meant being misunderstood by leaders, churches, and ministries.

• It has required tremendous effort to pay the bills while remaining engaged on the front lines.

• It has meant painful conversations with people whom I looked to for affirmation.

• It has, at times, led to confusion with my wife and kids.

• It has led to tension in my own heart about whether I am hearing God or misunderstanding His leading.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything the world has to offer!

When we ask ourselves hard questions and examine our hearts, we make sure we are doing our best to pursue the calling God has placed deep inside our hearts and not from a place of rebellion. We are not victims. We have been called by God to be reformers and revitalizers.

And sometimes that is HARD! Be at Peace.

• Love those who don’t get it.

• Stay pure and keep your motives checked.

• Remain humble and teachable.

• Band together with those who understand your call.

Co-Laborers who are committed to following the Jesus Pattern in a multi-generational disciple-making movement, let us be among those who are counted in the number of those who say YES when Jesus calls!

Let’s do this!

This excerpt below is from a book by Dee Hock that comforts me in a very deep place and helps me turn my bitterness and hurt into hope and compassion.

I hope it helps you, too!

Note: Dee Hock is not a follower of Jesus. As a matter of fact, I’d suspect he is a pantheist of sorts. But, he came way before his time and pioneered a change movement that collided with an institutional, top-down, command-and-control culture of industry that was just as stressful and challenging as the one we face as church form “re-formers.” He feels what we feel when we lie in bed at night and wonder if we are unholy rebels.

From Dee Hock’s “One From Many” Page 199-203

When our internal model of reality is in conflict with rapidly changing external realities, there are three fundamental ways to respond:

First: We can cling to our old internal model and attempt to impose it on external conditions in a futile attempt to make them conform to our expectations. That is what most institutions compel us to attempt, and what we continually dissipate our ingenuity and ability trying to achieve. It is futile.

Second: We can engage in denial. We can refuse to accept the new external reality. We can pretend that external changes are not as profound as they really are, deny that we have an internal model, or that it bears examination. When the world about us appears to be irrational, erratic, and irresponsible, it is all too easy to blame others for the unpleasant, destructive things we experience. It is equally easy to abandon meaning, embrace fantasy, and engage in erratic behavior. Denial is also futile.

Third: We can attempt to understand and change our internal model of reality. That is the least common alternative, and for good reason. Changing an internal model of reality is extremely difficult, often terrifying, and always complex. It requires a meticulous, painful examination of beliefs. It requires a fundamental understanding of consciousness and how it must change. It destroys our sense of time and place. It calls into question our very identity. We can never be sure of our place or our value in a new order of things. Changing our internal model of reality requires an enormous act of faith, for it requires time to develop, and we require time to grow into it. Yet it is the only workable solution.

Those with the greatest power and wealth and the most prominent place in the old order of things have the most to lose. It is, therefore, understandable that so many of them close their minds to different possibilities and cling tenaciously to the old order of things. It is understandable that they engage in cosmetic change to palliate their discomfort and placate critics. It is understandable that they seek one another and merge the institutions they control to amass more and more power and wealth in order to perpetuate that to which they cling. It is understandable that they blind themselves to the fact that they are attempting to preserve the form of things long after form no longer serves function, a certain formula for failure, since the closest thing to a law of nature in the organizational world is that form has an affinity for expense, while function has an affinity for income.

Those in positions of power, wealth, and prestige who tenaciously cling to the present order of things deserve understanding, not condemnation, for they intuitively sense what Machiavelli discovered five centuries ago when he wrote: “Nothing is more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain of success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

No one should be condemned for failure to welcome change. This pervasive problem plagues us all. Dostoyevsky put it into perspective in the last century when he wrote: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”

But, what if those with the greatest power, wealth, and position were to open their minds to new possibilities, loosen their tenacious grasp on the old order of things, abandon the palliative of cosmetic change, open their eyes to new forms of organization, seriously question and change their internal model of reality?What if they were to cage the four beasts that devour their keeper-ego, envy, avarice, and ambition-and take the lead in a new order of things? What if they were to go before and show the way? Now there’s a challenge worthy of both the best among them and the best within them. I know that they can. And I will never give up that belief, or hope, that in time, enough of them will.

Hock, Dee. One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. Kindle Edition.

“Before the spies lay down for the night, she came up to them on the roof and said to them, ‘I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us... for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.’” - Joshua 2:8-9, 11

I am Rahab.

My name means the proud one, and it was almost enough to mask what was happening on the inside. Below the surface, I was anything but proud.

You’ve known people like me. I was the talk of the town. Every woman in Jericho knew my name. Not because of anything worth being known for. But for the kinds of things that turn every eye when you walk by. The kinds of things that only happen with women like me when more acceptable women have settled in for a quiet night’s sleep.

I had learned early that the world would give you what you needed as long as you sold yourself for what they wanted. That kind of survival required you to decide what you were willing to give and what you would protect at any cost. I had already decided. I had drawn my lines. And I had built a life inside the walls of the most fortified city in Canaan, in a house embedded in those very walls. Somehow, I thought they might just be thick enough to protect my heart.

After the spies left my house, a red rope hung from my window. But before they left, it wasn’t a rope, but a reputation that hung over my head. It made religious men cross the street and kept safe ones at a distance. Despite my name, I was not proud of it. I want you to understand that clearly.

No, I was not proud.

I was surviving.

There is a difference, though most people who have never had to survive don’t bother to try to understand it.

The Stories of the Coming Army

You have to know what it was like inside those city walls. The stories moved through the market stalls and down the alleyways of Jericho like wind before a storm. And before the spies arrived, those stories focused on Israel's strength. A wandering nation that should have been about as threatening as an ant in a trap.

• The Red Sea? Parted.

• Two kings east of the Jordan, Sihon and Og? Destroyed utterly.

• The God of their strength? Unstoppable!

Those realities couldn’t be explained by human strength.

An entire nation of slaves, wandering the wilderness for a generation, being forged into something none of us had a category for. An army that didn’t fight as other armies fought. A people who carried their God with them in a box and followed a pillar of fire through the night.

Our king reinforced the gates. He doubled the guards on the wall. He held councils and drew up strategies and spoke publicly about the invincibility of Jericho’s defenses. But it was obvious to us.

He was terrified. We all were.

But in my heart, somewhere underneath the fear, something else had taken root. Because the God of these people, this God who split seas and swallowed armies, He was not like the gods of Jericho. Our gods demanded. They consumed. They were hungry and unpredictable and as indifferent to human suffering as the sun is indifferent to what it scorches. We were required to serve them.

But this God was different.

I couldn’t have explained it then with the words I have now. But even before the two strangers climbed the stairs to my roof, something in me had already begun to point to belonging to a story I had no right to be part of.

I knew who they were the moment I saw them. Not because they necessarily looked like Israelites; all varieties of travelers came through Jericho. But there was something about the way they moved. The way they watched. And the particular nervousness of men who know that the city they’ve walked into is looking for them.

My life had trained me to read people quickly. It was a survival skill. I had a choice in that moment that I’ve rehearsed in my head a thousand times since. I could have sent word to the king’s men. I would have been rewarded. I would have been safe, another year, another negotiated season away from a life of living in fear and rejection.

Instead, I heard a small voice say, “There’s a better way.”

I hid them beneath the stalks of flax drying on the roof. And when the king’s messengers came to my door, I looked them in the eye and lied. Let’s rest there for a moment. As broken as I was, I am not a liar. But I lied. I chose these strangers over the king, who owned every stone of the city I lived in. I chose a God I had only heard rumors about over what I could see with my own eyes.

I’ve asked myself many times since, “What compelled me?”

I had already seen enough of how the gods of Jericho treated women like me. And the stories I had heard about this other God, the way He moved through history, the way He remembered His people, the way He made a way where there was absolutely no way, something in the most calloused corner of my heart whispered that a God like that might be worth the risk.

Desperate people make desperate choices.

And perhaps the most desperate thing of all is deciding to believe in something you cannot yet see. Risking it all that He is real. And that He cares about me. And that He would also make a way for me, a lost woman in a brutal culture, serving cruel and punishing gods.

When I went back to the roof, I didn’t pretend.

I told them what I knew. I told them that the fear of their God had fallen on all of us like a heavy stone. And then, with my heart pounding in my chest like a fist banging on a door, I asked for the only thing that mattered to me.

I asked for the protection of my family.

Not wealth. Not status. Not even my own life, I had long since stopped valuing that the way I should have. My mother. My father. My brothers and sisters. The people who had never quite known what to do with me but who were all that I had. The only people in my known world that I still trusted.

“Swear to me by your God,” I said. “Swear that you will show kindness to my family as I have shown kindness to you.”

There is something extraordinary about that word. Kindness. In their language, it is the word that means covenant love. Loyal love. The kind that doesn’t evaporate when circumstances change. I was asking strangers, in the name of a God I didn’t yet fully trust, for a promise that I couldn’t believe until it could have been too late to matter.

They swore it.

And I let them down from the window by a rope.

A scarlet cord.

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The same color as blood. As a sacrifice. As the mark on a doorpost (they have told me since) that tells the destroyer to pass over. I didn’t know all of that then, not with the fullness of understanding I carry now. But I tied that cord in the window, and I looked at it every day, with intense anticipation, as the sound of a marching nation grew louder on the other side of those walls.

Six days of grinding it out. Thinking that it was all a myth. But the shaking began on the seventh day of their march around the city.

I had gathered my family in that room. My mother was weeping. My brothers were pacing. We pressed ourselves into the center of the floor as the walls of Jericho, walls wide enough to build houses in, walls that had stood longer than anyone in the city could remember, began to crack and groan and give way in a roar that I felt in my chest more than I heard with my ears. My blood was pumping, and questions were screaming at me.

• Would they be trustworthy?

• Would they follow through with their promise?

• Were they even still alive?

And then.

Every wall fell.

Every wall.

Except the ones that, for years, had hidden my shame and fear.

I don’t have adequate words for the moment I realized that. I don’t have words for what it does to a person when the thing they staked everything on, a promise, a scarlet cord, a God they’d only heard rumors about, is fulfilled. And in a way that human reasoning cannot explain.

When the dust settled, two familiar faces appeared at my doorway. They took us out, my mother, my father, my brothers, my sisters, all of them. I wept in a way I hadn’t let myself weep in years.

I wasn’t a weeping of grief.

It was something rawer, and stranger, and better than grief.

The feeling of being known and remembered.

Of having been seen, across the distance of my worst decisions and my longest nights, by a God who apparently had been keeping track of a woman in a window with a scarlet cord and a desperate prayer.

They brought us outside the camp of Israel first. As a Gentile, ceremonially unclean. Not yet fully in. I understood that. I didn’t rush it. I sat in that in-between space and let it settle over me that I was alive, when many of my friends and acquaintances weren’t.

My family was alive.

And the God who split seas had somehow thought it important to look after a woman from Jericho who had no business being in this story at all.

I’m told that is how He works.

Finding the ones that the rest of the world has already written off and writing them into something they couldn’t have imagined for themselves.

I have a new family now. A new home.

A name that is being slowly redeemed from everything it used to mean. They tell me that my name will go down in their record books as one who helped them take Jericho. That their… wait… that OUR people will remember my name forever.

Me? A prostitute in a foreign land and belonging to a foreign people?

How could it be?

I still think about that scarlet cord in the window. The desperate, reckless, barely-believing act of hanging it there and trusting that someone on the other side of the wall would see it and keep their promise.

And I want to ask you, today…

• What wall have you been hiding behind, convincing yourself you’re too far outside the camp to ever truly belong, and what would it cost you to hang the cord anyway and find out if He sees it?

• What if you just took a chance and risked seeing if He would be faithful to you, too?

• Why not?

• What have you got to lose?

I am Rahab. I was a prostitute and a Gentile.

And my name will go down in His story for the ages to know that I chose to trust Him when there was no way.

Although I’m in a foreign country that speaks a foreign language and transacts life with a foreign currency, the gap is paper-thin from here. Language doesn’t matter through a window. And we paid our bill at the front desk last night with our credit card, which knows no boundaries between pennies and centavos.

As I look out the window at 7:30 AM, the traffic is building, and people are scurrying to find a place to park. People are walking hurriedly down the sidewalk. Some are in suits and others in jeans. A horn here and a siren there. The guy at the parking garage just thumbs-upped a woman in a car as she slid her identification card through the slot.

And I’m sitting five floors up on a window ledge watching it all happen without the privilege of ears to hear their conversations. And if I hadn’t taken three flights to get here over the last two days, I wouldn’t be able to discern a single difference between them and me. Or their city and mine.

They say this is literally the most dangerous city in South America. That’s why I’m sitting on this window ledge, waiting on the commuter flight to my final destination. Otherwise, I’d be at the coffee shop and bakery a few doors down. But, I was told, not only by my friends, but also by my government, not to leave this hotel.

This is not how it is supposed to be!

It’s a strikingly beautiful hotel with a name on it I’d find in every city back home. It’s nicer than my average stay because safety was important since I have my entire family here. And between us and whatever lies on the other side is a fifth-floor window. I feel so safe. And yet I feel so present here as the streets produce this low rumble five floors down.

It’s funny how, sometimes, we distort both sides of reality. We keep our eyes focused on the extremes. And it’s not all bad. There is some measure of healthy survivalism in doing so. Our soul couldn’t handle the constant stress of how much danger we are really in when we drive 80 miles per hour down a stretch of interstate just a few feet from a 37-ton machine six times larger than us, trusting that he got a good night’s sleep last night. And it is good that my defensive awareness was sharpened as I walked through the airport in the most dangerous city on this continent. Those things either enable me to face danger or sensitize my survivalist instincts, helping me steward my family well.

But, this is not the Gospel!

No, they are not even shadows of the Gospel.

Those things are consequences. Ramifications of the brokenness of human imagers of God. One suggests that I am in control. That I am good enough to protect myself in the face of mortal danger. The other is an awareness that there are people around me who would harm me for their own gain. Both are equally dangerous and are rooted in a fractured world that operates from the pain of the first human’s failure to submit to their identity and to trust the Maker. And all of this led to the two behaviors and mindsets that have left me stuck in this room, sitting on this ledge, and looking out this fifth-floor window like a kid at the zoo, hoping to steal a peek at the elusive lion behind the glass.

And, this is not the end!

No, it’s not, friend. As I’m peering down at the chef adorned in her white digs, the homeless guy in his tattered walking shoes, and the businessman in his fancy suit, I know that whatever pain is hidden behind their eyes will someday soon be washed away by the redemption that comes with the restoration of the original plan fully envisioned by the One who spoke all this into motion. There is a day coming when we will dive headlong into the fullness of the vision the Creator has for a new city and a restored people in a place called New Jerusalem.

Paul gave us a foretaste of how the people might see one another.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. - Paul in Galatians 3:28

And God Himself, through the mouth of Isaiah the prophet, offers us a taste of how opposing forces who live in fear of one another will submit to the ways of the Maker.

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fattened steer will be together; And a little boy will lead them. - God in Isaiah 11:6

And John the Revelator, in his great vision of what is to come, pulls back the curtain on what it might look like.

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. - The Apostle John in Revelation 21:2

I long deeply for that coming City!

That’s the Gospel. That all things are being made new again. That the original dream that was birthed in a beautiful garden will return from the ashes of what it has become in this broken city that I am overlooking from this room in the sky.

Oh friend, it is TRUE! The stories are true.

There will come a day when all will speak in one tongue. Where we will “come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost” (Isaiah 55:1) because the currency of the entire world will be the love of God. Where we will sit with our former enemies, and war will be no more. Where every tear will be wiped away, and every fear washed clean because the heart of humanity will be made right.

As Sam Gangee says in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, it will be a place

Where, “All Sad Things Will Become Untrue”

In that city that will appear in the sky and come to rest on this wartorn planet, I will not be sitting on this fifth-floor window ledge peering down into the streets, stuck inside to protect my children from dangerous people. You will not be toiling from dawn to dusk simply trying to pay the bills and stay afloat. We will not be visiting our friends and family in hospital rooms and hospice beds. No way, friend. All will be made right.

• Wars will be silenced.

• Violence will be no more.

• The lamb will lie with the lion.

And I will be drinking coffee and eating pastries in that quaint little coffee shop just around the corner.

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, On Earth As It Is In Heaven!

Adapted from the stories of Paul and his letters to Timothy.

Twenty years.

That’s how long it has been since Paul was dragged from the Mamertine prison and led beyond the walls of Rome to die. Twenty years since the sword flashed in the sunrise light and the voice that once thundered through synagogues, marketplaces, prison cells, and storm-tossed ships finally went silent. At least in the form of spoken words and proclamations.

Voices like Paul’s do not stop speaking when they die. These voices become words in the mouths of those they leave behind. And men can’t help but proclaim them boldly despite his absence.

I am an old man now. My beard has gone white, and my hands quiver when I write. Ephesus has changed. Rome has changed. The churches he left behind have changed. Some of the young eyes never landed on the face of Paul, but knew him only through fragments of parchment read aloud in gatherings. To them, he is adjacent to myth now. The apostle. The church planter. The man who stood facing governors and kings.

But I knew the man when his feet were in chains. I knew the sound of his groans after floggings. I knew the look in his eyes when mobs turned against him. I knew what it was like to watch him pray through tears for churches that would later wound him deeply.

And I remember the exhilaration I felt when he called me “my true son in the faith.”1

Sometimes I still wake before dawn and imagine his voice quoting the Scriptures from memory while chains rattled against cold stone walls.

“Timothy,” he would say, “My true son in the faith. Persevere even in trouble. You will see God.”2

I have always believed him. But I have not always understood him. Not fully. You understand a man differently after you survive long enough to shoulder the weight he carried. After you face some of the same struggles he endured

I was young when we first met in Lystra. Half-Jewish, and he pursued me still. Timid, quiet, and afraid of disappointing those around me. Paul saw something in me I could not yet see in myself. That frustrated me sometimes. He kept calling strength out of me while I was still playing around with fear. Sometimes I just wanted to take my time. I always felt safer when I had space to process. I was slower than him.

I remember that day he asked me to join him. No grand speech or manipulation. Just VISION. Purpose that was grander than where I was. His body already carried scars from stones and rods and prisons. Most men would have slowed down after suffering like that, but Paul burned hotter. And that fire in his belly felt irresistible to a young, purposeless wanderer like me. Although I was quiet on the outside, there was a fire burning on the inside that couldn’t be quenched.

“Follow me,” he said.

When Paul said those words, you felt as if Jesus Himself were calling.3 I followed him into riots and miracles. Into hunger and holy moments I cannot explain. I watched demons scream and leave bound-up people. I saw hardened jailers collapse in repentance and put their lives on the line for the good news he carried. Entire households would enter baptism waters and weep with joy. And Paul could absorb pain like an anvil under the pressure of hammer blows.4

What kind of man keeps singing after being beaten nearly to death?5 What kind of man keeps loving those who constantly misunderstand him?6 Who walks back into cities where mobs tried to kill him just hours earlier?7 Only a man utterly possessed by the vision of Jesus and the passion of this great commission. It wasn’t intelligence, charisma, or grit that drove him. It was His uncompromising love of Jesus Christ, the Holy One. Paul never missed a moment of passionate service after meeting Him on the Damascus road.

Most of us slowly adapt Jesus into our lives. For Paul, it was in a flash of time that he abandoned it all. He never turned back from the moment he encountered our Messiah on the dusty, dirty road. And honestly, that terrified me sometimes. Because walking with Paul meant there was no safe version of Christianity left available to you. No half-hearted obedience. No compartmentalized faith. No serving Jesus on the Sabbath and building your own kingdom the rest of the week. Paul forced you to confront the possibility that Jesus actually deserved EVERYTHING.8

I remember one night after everyone else had fallen asleep. We were exhausted, hungry, and hiding. Again. I asked him quietly, “Do you ever wish for a normal life?” He softly laughed. Not mocking. Just tired. “Timothy,” he said, staring into the small fire between us, “I had more than you can imagine, and I was miserable. My life was garbage.”9

That sentence has haunted me for decades. I think many believers secretly want enough of Jesus to feel safe but not enough to ruin their plans. Paul had no such interest. Jesus ruined ALL his plans. And Paul considered it a gift from his Creator. He viewed the abandonment of his life as an honor. He expected nothing in return and held nothing back.

NOTHING.

I have buried friends now. So many friends. Some were killed. Some abandoned the faith. Some simply drifted into contentment and disappeared slowly into ordinary life until the fire in their belly went cold. Demas still hurts to think about. Paul saw it coming before I did. I’ll never forget the shocking plea in his letter to me. “Timothy, come quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.”10 The pain of that line stays with me even these twenty years later. He could always discern when love for the world was creeping into someone’s heart.

Near the end, Rome felt darker than ever. Nero’s madness poisoned the empire. Christians were hunted. Fear grew through the churches. People became cautious about their association with Paul once prison became a reality. I hate admitting this now, but even I wrestled with fear. Not fear of death exactly, but fear of suffering the way I had seen my friends, and even my family, writhing in pain. Martyrdom sounds noble when discussed in safe rooms around warm fires. But suffering makes the clock tick slowly, grinding out long nights. It wears down the soul. It attacks the resolve of the most loyal followers of the Way.

Paul understood this better than anyone.11 That is why his final letter to me was not so much a manual of strategy and instruction as it was of endurance in the face of challenge.

• “Do not be ashamed.”12

• “Share in suffering.”13

• “God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear.”14

• “The Word of God is not chained.”15

I can still feel the texture of the parchment. I can still see my tears falling onto it. It was as if I sat beside him and shared the pain of loneliness with him.

“Only Luke is with me.”16

The great apostle. The church planter. The miracle worker. Sitting in a cold Roman prison with only one friend beside him.

We secretly think faithfulness should eventually produce comfort. Paul’s life taught us the truth that shattered that lie into a million shards. Faithfulness produces resemblance to Jesus, nothing more, nothing less, and that is enough. That is the truth our hearts long to hear.

Twenty years later, I understand Paul far better than I did when he walked with us and admonished us with pen in hand. At times, I resented how hard he pushed me. How directly he confronted weakness. How unwilling he was to settle for shallow discipleship.17 Now I thank God for it.

The churches today face different pressures, but the temptations remain the same.

• Fear.

• Comfort.

• Compromise.

• Endless distractions.

Many want the benefits of the Kingdom without the surrender required to carry it. Paul would grieve that. But he would not despair. He never despaired of the gospel. Not once. Even chained in prison awaiting death, he still believed the Word of God was more valuable than the wealth of this world. And that lives of faithfulness would lead to ultimate fulfillment.

And somehow, for me, it has.

Nero is dead. Rome is fading. But the gospel keeps moving from household to household, city to city, nation to nation. Just as Paul said it would.

Sometimes those younger ask me what Paul was really like. I usually pause before answering. Because how do you explain a raging wildfire to someone who has only seen flickering candles? How do you explain a man who loved Jesus so completely that incredible suffering became secondary to faithfulness?18

I often think about his final moments. Did he quote Scripture as they led him away? Did he pray for Nero? Did he bow his knee to Jesus before the sword fell?

I do not know.

But I know this: Paul was never the hero of the story. He would never want us to make him one. No, Paul was a WITNESS. A blazing, relentless witness to the reality that JESUS CHRIST IS ALIVE.

And now my own life is nearly spent. I feel it. The race is drawing nigh before me. Soon I will be with Paul again. And together, we will be with the Rabbi. The One who was worth shipwrecks and scars. Worth prison and rejection. Worth loneliness and death. Worth throwing our entire lives away in order to accept the mission to make Him known above all rulers and royalty.

Paul taught me many things over those years on the road. But perhaps the greatest was this: The Kingdom of God is not carried forward by impressive men.19 It is carried forward by wholly surrendered followers of Jesus.

Twenty years ago, I walked with him. I saw his abandonment. I benefited from his example. Although the context is different, the words of Christ stand. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”20 The further we move away from the story, the more likely we are to lay down the cross and embrace another pursuit. One that is easier and seems to bring more promise. But stop and reflect on the life Paul lived for us to see. I dare you to dream of what it must feel like to die for the sake of a mission that has eternal consequences for a multitude of people living without the knowledge of our God.

Twenty years later and beyond, how do we respond to a radically submitted life like that? We do what he instructed us to do, and we do it with full abandon. He said it in that last letter I received.

“Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others.” 21

Think about it. Count the cost. I beg of you, consider the payoff and the consequences of radically turning toward the mission and linking arms with Jesus.

What might that mean for your tomorrow❓

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Footnotes:

Although these are not always directly quoted in the story, we can assume that Paul would have spoken these things to Timothy, as he had many other disciples throughout his ministry.

“Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, ‘God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.’” - Genesis 4:25

He is sleeping peacefully now.

Seth. His name means granted or appointed. The Father granted me this gift. Even though I did not deserve it. Even though I rejected His original and perfect plan for us.

I am watching the rise and fall of his tiny chest in the lamplight, and I cannot stop the tears that have been gathering behind my eyes since the moment he was placed in my arms. They are not tears from a single source. They never are, not anymore. Joy and grief have become such close companions that I am no longer able to distinguish them sometimes. They arrive together now, always together, like two rivers merging into an ocean of forward-facing hope.

I have been sitting here for what must be hours. Thinking. Remembering. I do that more than I should.

There was a morning. The morning. The only morning that truly matters in the recounting of all my days, when the world was different. When we were different. The air smelled like something I no longer have a word for. Clean is too small. Whole is closer, but still not enough. The light fell through the leaves without effort or obstruction, and the sound of His voice moving through the garden was the most natural sound we heard in the garden teeming with life.

I had everything. Everything. And I sat on that rock and looked at the one thing I had been told I could not have. As infatuating as the ideas were, I decided that I knew better. Better than to desire. Better than to fantasize. I shouldn’t have allowed my curiosity space to breathe. But I did. Far past the point of no return. I stood up, unable to retreat to safety.

I have turned that moment over in my mind ten thousand times since we were sent out of Eden. I have pressed it and examined it from every angle, trying to understand how I could have been so completely, catastrophically deceived. The serpent was convincing; that much is sure. His words had a logic to them that felt like wisdom. “You will be like God,” he said. As if I were not already made in His image. As if what I was already given was not enough.

But I cannot credit the serpent with all of it. That would be too easy. I wanted it, no, I craved it in the depths of my soul.

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That’s the part that still burns. I saw the fruit, and it pulled at me from the inside. And I took it. I made the choice with both hands open. I handed it to Adam, and he took it without argument, without hesitation, without asking a single question of the One who had given us everything we needed for wholeness and simply asked us to trust Him with this one thing.

We both knew the moment it happened. There was no dramatic announcement. No booming voice to condemn us. Just an awful, sudden awareness. The presence of ourselves, of each other, of the distance that had not been there a moment before. We scrambled for fig leaves like children caught in a lie, trying to hide the evidence of our crime.

And then He called out quietly.

“Where are you?”

He knew where we were. He has always known. That question was not for His benefit. It was for ours. It is still for ours, I think. Where are you? Where have you gone? How far have you run from the perfection I gave to you? Why are we distanced?

I have been asking myself those questions ever since.

The ground in our new home is hard and unforgiving. I know every stone of it now. My hands are not the hands I was given, they are cracked and calloused from pulling and planting and fighting for things that once required no effort. Adam labors until the sweat drips off his chin, and still the thorns come back. The earth resists us now. It was not made to resist us. That is the part that breaks my heart again and again, not that the work is hard, but that it was never meant to be this way..

I did that. We did that. Adam and I. And somehow, you too. We did this TOGETHER.

And then Cain. Oh, my firstborn. Oh, the weight of his choices in my chest.

When he was born I thought, well, I genuinely believed, that he was the promised one. The seed who would crush the serpent’s head. I held him up, and I declared it out loud. “I have brought forth a man with the help of the LORD.” I, as if any good thing could come from me. I was still believing I had something to offer more than what He had given me.

Cain. I thought he was our hope. I wanted so badly for the story to begin its redemption with him.

And then Abel.

And then the field.

And then silence, the kind of silence that has no answer, the kind a mother falls into and is never entirely the same when she climbs back out. The kind that changes you in ways you wish would never be known.

I have grieved in ways that I cannot explain to anyone who has not stood over the body of a child they held as an infant. I have screamed at the sky. I have gone days without eating. I have looked at Adam and seen in his eyes the same hollow place that lives in mine and found neither of us had words sufficient for it.

Two people who broke the world together, now sitting in the wreckage together, with nothing to offer one another but presence. And a mutual embrace of the One who can redeem our failures. Who can make all things new and begin again, although different this time.

But Seth. This boy sleeping beside me. “God has granted me another child in place of Abel.” I said. When I said those words aloud, I tasted something I had almost forgotten existed. Not Eden, I am not confused enough to think I can go back to Eden. That road is closed and guarded, and I have made my peace with that. No. It was something else. Something new.

Seth will grow up in a hard world that we, Adam and I, perpetuated. He will feel the ground resist him, and fight the grief of what this family has carried. He will know what his brother did in that field. He will know the weight of what his parents lost and what it cost every generation that will follow.

But he will also know this. That his mother sat in the lamplight and watched him breathe and chose, again, to believe that God does not abandon what He loves. That the God who came walking in the garden, who called out to two people hiding in shame, did not walk away and leave us there.

He clothed us.

He covered what we could not cover ourselves. And He spoke a promise over us before He sent us out into the hard and beautiful and grief-soaked world we had broken. I did not deserve that. I have never once, not for a single morning, deserved that.

And that is precisely the point. He chooses not to give us what we deserve! He chooses to replace it with an incalculable measure of unearned and unadulterated Grace.

Seth is stirring now, his tiny fingers stretching wide and then curling back. His eyes open for just a moment, dark and searching and new, and then closed again. I pull him close and feel the warmth of him against my chest, as pure and innocent as that gift of redemption, and I weep. Not from despair. From the staggering, reckless grace of being given again what I forfeited on that wretched morning.

You have been handed things you didn’t earn. You have stood in the wreckage of choices you cannot take back.

So here is the question Seth is asking you just by breathing:

Do you believe the story is still moving toward something good, and are you willing to live like it is?

Adapted from Matthew 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-43, and Luke 8:40-56.

Jairus, Archisynagogos of Capernaum, Ruler of the Synagogue.

A man could get drunk on a title like that, and I did. Granting or denying access to the courts. Representing the congregation to outside authorities. Ordering or stopping floggings. Excommunicating. That kind of power feels invigorating to a mere man.

Until his daughter is dying.

I knew the Scriptures. I stood in the synagogue week after week, overseeing the reading of the Law, making sure everything was in order. I knew where people sat, who carried influence, who needed correction. I was respected. Deferred to.

When I spoke, people listened.

There’s a certain rhythm to that kind of life. You begin to believe you can manage things. That if you just stay faithful, stay sharp, stay disciplined, you can keep the world from unraveling.

But death doesn’t respect your position.

Her decline started small. A fever. Nothing alarming at first. We had seen it before. Children get sick, and they recover quickly. Every parent knows that and expects it. My wife tried to stay calm, but I could see it in her eyes before she said it out loud. This time it was different.

The fever lingered, and it climbed. Then it consumed until it grew out of control. All my authority, all my clout and power, all my strategically built reputation meant nothing in that small room where my daughter lay burning and fading away right before my haughty eyes.

I remember standing there, watching her chest rise and fall, uneven and shallow. I remember thinking, “I oversee the synagogue. I am one of the most powerful men in town, and I cannot help my own child breathe. I can’t command her body to do what it is supposed to do without thinking.” That’s when control started slipping through my fingers.

At first, I did what any man in my position would do. I sought out help within my circles. I have the ear of EVERYONE who can bring answers for ANY problem. The best doctors and healers. But the more I reached, the more I realized that I was grasping at air.

There’s a moment every man faces, no matter how much we try to avoid it. The moment when you realize your strength has a ceiling, that your influence has limits, and that your authority means nothing to the uncontrollable circumstances of life. I faced that moment standing beside her bed that morning.

Helpless.

Clueless.

Powerless.

And then there were whispers about Him. I had heard them before, of course. Everyone had. Stories of healings. Of authority that didn’t come from training or position. Some of us were cautious. Some skeptical. A few outright opposed. You don’t build a system of order and then easily embrace someone who disrupts it. But desperation has a way of cutting through your defense mechanisms.

When your daughter is dying, you stop debating. YOU ACT. Even if it is contrary to everything you built for yourself. I didn’t announce my decision. I didn’t gather a council. I didn’t ask permission.

I LEFT TO FIND HIM!

I remember the walk, or was it a run? I was out of my mind. It felt longer than it should have. Every step carried the weight of what I was risking. Not just my reputation, though that was certainly on the line. It was more than that. It was everything I had built my identity on. Independence. Capability. Self-reliance. The confidence of knowing I could make things right.

How would I approach Him? If I went to this wandering teacher, this disruptor of order, and begged, then I was admitting something. That I wasn’t enough. That everything I had relied on wasn’t enough now.

I found Him in the crowd. Of course, there was a crowd. There’s always a crowd when hope shows up in a place that’s been suffocating under oppression and tyranny.

As I approached Him, I didn’t even think about it, as a matter of fact, I did the unthinkable. I fell down before Him. Right in front of the crowd. Not as a leader or a man of status. Just as a desperate father trying to seek help for an unsolvable problem with his precious little girl.

“My little daughter is dying. Please come. Put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.”

On my knees at His feet, I didn’t dress it up. No formal language. No theological framing. No leaning into my authority. Just raw, unadulterated desperation. And He said yes. That should have been enough. That should have settled everything in me. He was coming. But if you’ve ever walked through a crisis, you know, faith doesn’t always feel like confidence. Sometimes it feels like holding onto a thread while everything inside you is scratching for hope and finding doubt.

We started moving toward my house. His eyes turned in the direction of my daughter’s sick bed. He heard my cry! He joined my pursuit to save my little girl.

And then He stopped and turned his head to look down behind Himself.

“Wait. Please. Don’t Stop. Let’s keep moving.” My words were respectful, but my gut was wrenching and screaming to take control.

He looked back at a lady I had seen lingering outside the Synagogue walls many times. An unclean beggar is not allowed into the presence of the religious. A woman who had been an outcast for years due to her chronic pathological bleeding. She was prohibited from entering the worship and synagogue life. She was perpetually unclean, and no one would touch her in order to protect themselves.

Here she was, a socially and religiously rejected outcast. And my daughter, the daughter of the Ruler of the Synagogue, lie at home in her deathbed waiting for the Healer. And he was taking time for the vagabond! How could this be? How could this happen to a man of my stature? At the point of my greatest desperation.

On the inside, the father in me raged for control. But standing before the only hope for my daughter’s life, I was forced to silence as I watched Him divert his attention to this hopeless beggar. How could He do this to me? Didn’t He know who I was?

She had touched Him, and He turned to find her. He asked questions. He listened. He spoke to her as precious seconds passed and my daughter’s life grew more fragile and fleeting.

Didn’t He know that EVERY second mattered? Didn’t He realize that this woman had been bleeding for 12 years? It could wait one more day! Just one more day, while He hurried to save my daughter’s life! I wanted to grab Him. To say, “Please! You don’t understand! She doesn’t have years as this woman did. She has minutes!”

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t risk losing Him. So, I watched.

And something strange happened in that pause. As frustrating as it was, as unbearable as it felt, I saw something in Him. He wasn’t rushed. He wasn’t anxious. He was fully present with her.

As I stood watching, I heard a commotion from behind me. The voices became more familiar as they moved closer.

“Step aside, I’m getting to the ruler of the Synagogue. Move to the side. We have an urgent message.”

“Sir, leave Him be, your daughter is dead.”

Even in the midst of the shouting crowds and the weeping woman, my world became dead silent. The kind of hush that only comes with news like that. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of hope. Everything inside me collapsed in that moment.

It was over. He was too late. My one hope for a miracle was wasted on a beggar! He turned to me. Not to the crowd. Not to the messengers. To me.

“Don’t be afraid. Just believe.” His voice was some mixture of tenderness and confidence.

“Believe what? She’s gone.” I thought. “You cold-hearted healer.”

But there was something in His voice that softened me. It wasn’t urgency. Not panic, but authority. A kind of steady certainty that didn’t match the situation, but overshadowed it.

I turned toward home and started walking. One hundred paces, and for some reason, I looked back. Maybe to say one last goodbye to my daughter’s last chance for life. And when my eyes met His, I realized He was following me. Why? It was too late. Is he mocking me?

When we arrived, the house was already filled with mourning. The wailing had begun. Professional mourners, neighbors, and family. Everyone was doing what we do when death comes. Making noise around the silence. As the mourners and the family came running to see Him, He said something that made my blood boil all over again.

“She is not dead, but asleep.”

They laughed at Him. Of course they did. We always laugh when the situation is beyond belief. We laugh to relieve the tension of being confronted with something too good to be true.

Why would He put me through the agony of insisting on going to her room to see her? Why would He make this harder? Why would he pierce me with having to see Him standing over her body when He could have treated this with more urgency when I fell at His feet two hours ago?

He asked everyone else to leave. And then it was just us. Me. My wife. A few of His closest followers and Him.

And her.

Lying there.

Silent and Still. LIFELESS!

He took her by the hand. Such a simple act. Such a gentle gesture. No performance. No ritual. Just a comforting touch.

“Talitha koum. Little girl, I say to you, get up.”

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen next. I really had no framework for seeing her breathe in life after the last breath had left her lungs. I really don’t know what I thought was coming. But what I saw was nowhere in my realm of possibility.

Her chest rose. She gasped. She heaved as she inhaled deeply. And her eyes opened!

She rose from a posture of death to sit in a posture of life. Everything I thought I knew about power, about authority, about control shattered in that moment. The most powerful man on the planet cannot command life into a dead body. This was something far from the natural system by which we rule.

Her mother screamed. Then she fell into her daughter’s arms and wailed. Tears of rejoicing began to fall from my eyes for the first time in decades. What we saw Him do was more than I could have ever asked or imagined just a few minutes earlier. Life itself bent to His voice. And somehow it didn’t just flow back into our daughter, it spilled out into the hearts of her parents in a way that I can not put into words.

As I reflect back on that day twenty years back, I feel like it was just a day ago. The life that He breathed into her still flows through my lungs. Things are different now. Power and influence have new definitions. Life and death look different. I have surrendered my existence and purpose to His glory and honor.

And through this whole experience of life and death and life again, there’s something that still grips me as I’m lying in bed at night thinking about what I saw that day.

He wasn’t in a hurry. Even with death on the line, He wasn’t rushed. Because what feels final to us isn’t final to Him. An interruption by a bleeding beggar on the road doesn’t have to wait to defer to a situation that was literally life or death. I thought I needed Him to move faster. But what I actually needed was to trust Him more deeply.

Most of us are still trying to control outcomes. Manage timelines. Protect what matters most to us with whatever authority we think we have. But sooner or later, you’ll face something that strips all that away. And in that moment, you’ll have a choice.

Cling to what you can control? Or fall at the feet of our savior and trust what you can’t? I’ve done both. I’ve tried to power my way through problems and solutions, relying on my ingenuity and skill. And I’ve failed in the face of the uncontrollable. And I’ve come to the end of my influence and power and been forced to fall before the feet of Jesus in humility, risking my reputation and relinquishing my control.

And I will tell you without reserve that, either way, you will fall hard and be forced to trust deeply. So do yourself a favor and fall into His arms as my wife fell into our daughter’s. And let your self-sufficiency and willpower drain from your head to your toes and out of your existence and lean deeply into the One, the only One who has the authority to conquer death and breathe life into a lifeless soul.

When He seems distracted by the beggar and slow to embrace the urgency of your situation, give Him the freedom to take the situation into His own hands. Grieve, but don’t lose hope. Question, but don’t doubt. Walk toward Him and not away.

Right now. This very moment. As you read this last paragraph. What is it you are holding on to? Where is your life out of control? What are you waiting on, and what seems to be distracting Him from running with you?

He knows. And He cares.

Trust Him With the Delay.

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Jesus came, died, and rose again to give us the fullness of His life!

What better weekend to release a book about the disciple-making pattern of Jesus!

🔥 The paperback edition of Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers is now live on Amazon. If you’re the kind of person who dog-ears pages, scribbles in margins, and carries your books until the spine gives out, it’s time to get your copy!

Order Hand to the Plow Paperback Version TODAY!

Click Here to Order!

❗️Listen up before you click “Add to Cart”❗️

This is not a book for people who want to get a gentle pat on the back. It’s not another devotional to stack on the nightstand next to the other books you’ve started and not finished.

This is a FIELD GUIDE. And it is meant to get tattered with use.

It starts with a question that might already be keeping you up at night:

“Why have I gone to church week after week, year after year, and never seen anything that even remotely resembles what we read about in the book of Acts?”

That’s not a cynical question. That’s the question of a Great-Commission-loving, Jesus-following, Bible-believing disciple who is hungry for more. Not more programs, not more sermons, not a cooler Sunday morning production. More of what Jesus actually described and the early church actually practiced.

You’re going to discover that disciple-making is not a program your church runs. It’s a lifestyle you learn to live. In the places where you live, learn, work, and play. Your neighborhood. Your job. Your school. Your gym. Your coffee shop.

That’s your oikos. That’s your mission field. And it’s waiting for you.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

📖 A clear, biblical pathway for becoming a disciple who actually makes disciples, no seminary required.

🗺️ The Prayer Map tool, one of the most practical and powerful missional tools you’ll ever use.

👥 The team-based disciple-making model, because Jesus didn’t send people out alone, and neither should you.

🌱 A multi-generational pathway, from the first conversation all the way to a multiplying simple church.

🔥 The Campfire Architecture — a simple gathering structure that changes everything about how communities of disciples meet together.

Plus a Glossary of Terms, 59 One-Anotherings from the New Testament, Disciple-Making Prayers, the iMACS Training Cycle, and the full Pathway to a Simple Church in the appendices.

This book represents twenty years of failure, small wins, rebuilding, and finding tools that help everyday disciple-makers multiply disciples in the everyday places of life.

Grab your paperback copy on Amazon today. Search Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers by Kevin E. Beasley, or follow the link below.

Let’s do this together!

Order Hand to the Plow HERE!

🛑 Nope. It’s not an April Fool’s Joke. It is live in the webosphere! And if you already ordered your Kindle version, it will be readable in your app TODAY!

After months of writing, editing, rewriting, and praying over this project, the Kindle version launched two weeks early. That means you don’t have to wait for the paperback to start reading.

And to celebrate the early launch, the Kindle version is on sale for $4.99 for the next few days. After April 4, it will move to the normal price of $9.99.

ALSO, the paperback version releases Saturday, April 4, on Amazon, and if you order a signed copy directly from me, that will be mailed out after April 13th.

Order Signed Paperback Copy HERE.

If you’ve been planning to grab it digitally, now is the time.

Get KINDLE Version for $4.99!

🔥 CHECK THIS OUT! 🔥
In pre-release, the book hit #1 Hottest New Release in all three of its categories.

• #1 in Christian Discipleship

• #1 in Evangelism

• #1 in Missions and Missionary Work

And it hit as high as #5 in the Bestseller List in several categories.

Launch Timeline

✔︎ Here’s how everything will roll out:

🗓️ Right Now (CLICK HERE to order)

• 💥 Kindle version is live 💥

• 🔥 Early release sale: $4.99

🗓️ Saturday, April 4

• 📚 Paperback launches on Amazon for $14.99

🗓️ Saturday, April 4

• ❗️Kindle sale ends

• Kindle price becomes $9.99

🗓️ Wednesday, April 13

• 🤯 Signed paperbacks ship in the mail - CLICK HERE to order

What’s Inside the Book

This book isn’t written for professionals or ministry experts.

It’s for everyday followers of Jesus who refuse to stay passive.

Here’s a look at the journey inside the book:

• CHAPTER 1: DISCIPLE-MAKING IS A LIFESTYLE

• CHAPTER 2: THE BEHAVIORS OF DISCIPLE-MAKING

• CHAPTER 3: WHO CAN BE AND MAKE A DISCIPLE?

• CHAPTER 4: MULTIGENERATIONAL DISCIPLING RELATIONSHIPS

• CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS A PRAYER MAP AND WHY IS IT CRITICAL?

• CHAPTER 6: DISCIPLE-MAKING AND THE “GREAT TEAM”

• CHAPTER 7: BUILDING A GREAT TEAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

• CHAPTER 8: A SAMPLE PATHWAY TO SIMPLE CHURCH

• CHAPTER 9: THE CAMPFIRE ARCHITECTURE OF A GATHERING

• CHAPTER 10: HEALING AND DELIVERANCE IN DISCIPLE-MAKING

• CHAPTER 11: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

I wrote this book because I’ve spent the last couple decades watching something beautiful happen when ordinary people realize they don’t have to wait for permission to live on mission with Jesus.

The Kingdom isn’t built by professionals.

It’s built by faithful people who simply say yes to Jesus where they live, work, and play.

I hope this book encourages you, challenges you, and maybe even pushes you to step into the adventure.

Thanks for being on this journey with me,
Kevin

Adapted from Genesis 22:1-18

“Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’” — Genesis 22:13-14

I will never forget what the threshold of tragedy tasted like that day on the mountain as I lifted the blade high above my son’s bound body.

My mouth had gone desert-dry. A metallic, copper bitterness pooled under my tongue, the unmistakable flavor of a man at the edge of doing the unthinkable.

Adrenaline and Fear. Excruciating, bone-deep fear.

I was already an old man when it happened. I had lived a long and adventurous life. One where I had foolishly assumed that the season of impossible demands had passed, that the hardest roads were behind me. I had been through enough to believe that surely I had earned the right to enjoy what remained.

I happily obeyed when I left my homeland and walked away from everything familiar years ago. It’s not too difficult when you hear a Voice that you know to be the One True God. He told me to go. Seventy-five years is enough to learn how to discern the voice of God. I didn’t want to live the next seventy-five regretting a lack of obedience.

I had waited decades for a son. Decades. I watched Sarah’s face in the firelight every year, watching hope fight a slow losing battle against the natural seasons of life and fertility. Even after the voice, I left my homeland as an old man and waited another quarter of a century.

And then came that little baby. Hope against hope.

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Isaac.

Have you ever waited so long for something that you stopped believing it was possible? You give up, but you keep silently hoping, somewhere in the back of your mind. I waited that long and then watched it come out of nowhere. You must understand what that boy was to me. He was not just my son. He was the evidence that the Voice was real and the promises were not the delusions of a senile old man. Every time I heard that little baby cry, something in me exhaled that had been holding its breath for one hundred years.

But then something happened. One of those life events that splits time in half. Into before and after. The Voice, the same one I had heard before the baby came, whispered in the night. It always seemed to come when the darkness was deepest, and the silence made every word land like a stone dropped into still water.

Ripples. Extending into the most uncomfortable places.

“Abraham.”

“Here I am.”

There would never again be a me that did not know what it felt like to wrestle with the next words.

“Take your son. Your only son, Isaac, whom you love. Go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering.”

I want to give you the dignified version of what I felt next. The patriarch, steady as stone, rising in the night with calm resolve. The version that makes a good story and requires nothing uncomfortable from the listener. I want to ensure that the Maker would never whisper something so scandalous in the ear of one who loves Him so.

But you deserve the truth.

I lay on my mat, shaking like a leaf, for a long time in the dark.

Sarah was breathing softly beside me. I listened to the inhale and exhale like a man who knows he is about to walk off the edge of something. Isaac was asleep nearby, and I could hear him too. That boy could sleep through anything. I had watched him sleep a hundred times and thought, this is it. This is what it was all for. THIS is what gives purpose to the pain of decades of confusion, waiting, and fights with Sarah to help her hold on to some form of faith.

How long I lay there, I cannot say. I know that I made every argument a man can make. Every negotiation. Every reframing. Every attempt to soften the words into something less dangerous and excruciating. Surely He meant something else. Surely this was a metaphor. Surely there was a way to interpret it that didn’t require me to saddle a donkey and walk my son to his death.

The words wouldn’t bend. The assignment was sure. There was an earthquake in my soul that ripped me wide open like a great canyon.

I got up because I couldn’t sleep for a second. I split the wood. I saddled the donkey as night turned to morning and anticipation turned to action.

I want you to hear this clearly, because it is the truest thing I know about what happened in those three days of walking: I was wrestling with incredible double-mindedness. The two paths followed up that mountain, side by side, the whole way. Denial or obedience? My way or His? Life or death for my precious Isaac? Since the wretched day, I have heard people describe what I did as if it were easy for a man of such faith. Heresy, I say! It was not easy. It was torture. Excruciating torture every step up the mountain.

Isaac was not a child anymore. He was strong. Curious. The kind of young man who asks not to be difficult, but because he genuinely wants to understand the world. He never hesitates to ask me the hard questions. We love each other so.

Halfway up.

“Father?”

“Yes, my son?”

“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

I have replayed that moment so many times that the memory has worn grooves in my heart. His face turned toward mine. The earnest, believing, utterly unsuspecting look of a son who has no reason to doubt that his father knows what he is doing. The assured trust of an intimate relationship and confidence that one of my greatest lots in life was to keep him safe.

I told him the only true thing I knew to say.

“God Himself will provide the lamb, my son.”

I believed it when I said it, although I couldn’t imagine how it would be given. At the same time, I did not believe the words as they rolled off my tongue. Both of those are true, and anyone who has ever stood at the precipice of something so unseen and spoken faith out loud into the dark knows exactly what I mean.

We kept walking.

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Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers

I will not linger long on what happened at the top. Some things are too sacred for many words. I built the altar. I arranged the wood. I bound my son, my laughing, trusting, beloved boy, and I placed him on the wood. He looked at me the entire time. He didn’t fight; I knew he wouldn’t. I think that is the detail that wrecks me most, even now. He did not fight.

I reached for the knife. How could I possibly raise a hand against my boy, my precious long-awaited gift? I had to fracture in that moment. I had to split in two and ignore the part that raised the blade. It was the only way. I had to make it feel like it was someone else. So I coped as the passive half of me screamed. It was the only way.

I heard something whisper. I thought it might be an echo of my outcry, but I stopped to listen anyway. And the Voice came again. It wasn’t mine. It was so familiar. I’d heard that voice many times before, including the night just before the blade was drawn.

“Abraham! Abraham!”

“Here I am.”

“Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from Me your son, your only son.”

My hand came down shaking so violently that I nearly dropped the knife. My legs buckled. I fell down on the edge of that altar and tried to remember how to breathe. Isaac was huffing, the kind that happens to children when they are so upset they can’t control it. Even though he was a young man.

Through the sound of my heavy breathing and Isaac’s sobbing, I heard something behind me. The sound of an animal struggling in the underbrush. I turned to find a ram, caught by its horns in a thicket. Not wandering nearby. Not passing through by coincidence. Caught. Held captive by an unseen hand. Waiting for a savior to rescue him from the trap. Already there. Already provided. Already present in that place before I had even taken my first step up the mountain, an hour before.

Imagine what it must be like to untie your son with hands that are still trembling and watch his feet hit the ground alive. I cannot describe what it was to look at that ram caught in that thicket and understand, not just in my mind, but in the deepest part of my soul, that the God who made the stars and the seas had placed that animal in that thicket at that exact moment for no other reason than for me to prove that He can TRUST ME.

I sacrificed the ram. I named the place. Jehovah Jireh. The Lord will provide. The Lord who sees in advance. The Lord who places provision in the thickets of our lives before the moment of need is even known.

I have had years now to sit with what happened on that mountain. Years to turn it over and look at it from every angle that only an old man can see through the eyes of a multi-layered life. Through the pain of the memory and the understanding of hindsight, I have come to one conclusion.

He was never asking for Isaac.

He was asking for my tight-fisted grip on my long-awaited son. He was asking whether the gift had slowly and quietly become larger to me than the Giver. Whether the miracle had imperceptibly edged out the God who performed it. Whether I could hold the most precious thing in my life with an open hand, or whether my fingers had curled so tightly around it that I couldn’t tell anymore where Isaac ended and my faith began.

That is the question that the climb up the mountain asks of every man. Every woman. Every person who has ever received something so precious that life before it seems impossible to remember.

It is not a comfortable question. I know.

But the ram was already in the thicket.

Whatever it is you have been white-knuckling at the top of your mountain, whatever it is you love so fiercely that even God asking for it feels like an unreasonable request, the provision is already placed. The ram is already caught. He has already seen your terror and made arrangements you cannot foresee.

The only question is whether you trust Him enough to open your hand before He shows you.

What mountain are you climbing? What are you clinging too tightly to with both fists? What would it mean for your faith, and for your freedom, if you finally let it go?

Let me tell you, from a man farther along and looking back on provision from a God who never fails,

It is WORTH IT.

Let go.

Breathe.

Be set free to discover the freedom of knowing that your provision is waiting.

🤯 I told my wife, Julie, it only took 8 weeks to put on paper.

That’s true.

What I didn’t say is that it took 20 years of getting my hands dirty in the field, planting, watering, failing, learning, and watching God do what only He can do, before I had anything worth writing down.

This is my 20th year in decentralized, multi-generational disciple-making. Twenty years of oikos maps and Simple Churches and kitchen tables and campfires and conversations that turned into confessions. And confessions that turned into communities. Twenty years of watching ordinary people step into the most extraordinary calling Jesus ever gave in the Great Commission.

Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers is what I wish someone had handed me on Day One to simplify and take the mystery out of the disciple-making pathway.

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There is a woman I keep coming back to in this book. I don’t know her, but someone told me. She is 72 years old. She loves Jesus, really loves Him. She has served, given, shown up, and sung every worship song on more Sundays than most people can count. And when young disciples asked her to pour into them, she froze.

“I’ve attended church services my entire life, and I’ve never been discipled. I can’t disciple them. I don’t even know where to start.”

Seventy-two years. No idea where to start.

She is not the problem. She is the symptom of a system that has done an incredible job of producing sincere, faithful believers and a far less impressive job of producing disciple-making multipliers.

This book is for her. It’s probably for all of us.

The pathway in these pages is not new. I did not invent it. As a matter of fact, I stole most of it from other missionaries. But, it is the one Jesus walked with twelve unimpressive, unqualified men on the dusty roads of Galilee. It is the one that missionary practitioners have used to break into unreached people groups. It is ancient, reproducible, and it has never stopped working. What it requires is not a title, a seminary degree, a building, or a budget.

It is not based on programs and curriculum, but on LIFESTYLE!

No title required. No budget required. No building required. Just the Holy Spirit and the people God has already given you.

Curtis Sergeant, one of the most respected disciple-making practitioners alive and a man who has given his entire life to seeing movements multiply globally, wrote the foreword. When Curtis says something is worth your time, it is.

Here’s the deal.

The book officially releases April 15. But right now, for a limited time, you can grab the Kindle version on Amazon for just $5, half of the full price.

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Told from the perspective of the adulteress

If there was ever anyone in the history of creation who had the right to condemn me to die, it was Jesus, the Christ.

And although those men didn’t earn it with their sinlessness, as He did, those angry religious hypocrites towering over my limp body had the right by Law. I was stretched across that hard cobblestone roadway with knees bleeding from the fall. It seemed inevitable that they’d stone me to death and demand lifeblood for my sin against the Most High God.

I deserved to die, not only by the letter of the Law, but because I had spent my years slowly killing myself with my own choices. One dreadfully bad decision at a time. One compromise after another. Morning after morning, waking up in the wrong place next to the wrong person. Each time, telling myself again that this was simply who I was now. That the girl I used to be, the one who had dreams and a name people loved to love, was too far gone to find her way back.

That’s what shame does, if you let it run long enough. It stops being something you feel and starts being someone you are. It hijacks your identity before you even know you’re in danger.

I had embraced my own shame and claimed it as my unspoken name. I had worn it like a second skin for so long I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began.

The hollow place inside me had been growing since the world made clear, in the way the world does, what kind of woman it had already decided I would become. And somewhere along the way, exhausted from fighting an identity I didn’t choose, I stopped fighting.

When they came pounding on his door that morning to drag me out, I knew they had been waiting for an opportune time to execute their “justice”. It was too early in the morning to have been unplanned. They had been watching as I made my way to his quarters in the cover of darkness the night before. They knew that early in the morning, the traffic in the courtyard would be ideal for parading me through the streets as their latest show pony, playing puppet to their power.

They grabbed my arm. My tunic tore at the shoulder. I stumbled forward into the street, then into the crowd, then into the temple courts, and then that cobblestone came up fast, and my knees hit the rock. The pain shot through me like a declaration.

This is where it ends, I thought.

There is a particular tone that the voice of religious fury takes. I’ve heard it before. The hatred is dressed in the language of righteousness, but underneath it reeks of something else entirely.

Control?

Maybe.

Fear?

Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to make someone else more guilty than the mob.

“Teacher! This woman was caught in the act of adultery!”

In the act. They wanted to make sure everyone understood. They wanted the picture in every mind. They wanted my humiliation to be as complete as possible before the stones were thrust toward my brow. Their words were a much more ferocious projectiles than those jagged stones.

“The Law of Moses commands us to stone such women. What do you say?”

I pressed my palms flat against the ground. I kept my eyes down. I waited.

And then, NOTHING.

Not the nothingness of silence as a criminal awaits the judge’s verdict. Something stranger than that. A nothing that rang louder than the warning bell that sounds a prisoner’s escape. I could feel the crowd shifting. The figurative knife’s edge of the Pharisees’ certainty seemed to soften, somehow.

I looked up.

He was crouched down, writing in the dust with His finger.

Just writing.

As if the most urgent matter before Him was whatever His hand was sketching in the sandy surface of the temple floor. The Pharisees pushed again, louder, more insistent. Their voices had taken on the edge of men who expected an answer to their demands.

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He stood slowly, and His eyes shifted almost lazily toward me. And then His compassionate eyes changed as they turned toward them. And the courtyard went so quiet I could hear my own breathing.

“Let any one of you who is without sin be first to throw a stone at her.”

And then He bent back down.

And kept writing.

He started where He left off and just continued to write. Like the outcome was settled. Like He had already seen the end of this and found nothing in it worth worrying about. The calm of it was almost more startling than the words.

I watched it happen one man at a time. The oldest first, I’ve always been fascinated by that wisdom that was enough to make a man hear what the younger ones could not yet receive. They turned. Their sandals scraped against the stone.

And then the next.

And the next.

And the stones dropped, not thrown, just dropped to the ground with a small thud that sounded like the proclamation of a verdict.

The crowd peeled away. The noise thinned to a murmur and then to quiet.

Until it was only Him.

And me.

Quiet and alone, face-to-face in that courtyard that felt like a torture chamber. It should have been the den of my execution, but it became the place of my unearned favor.

He stood up again, slowly, and looked at me.

Looked at ME.

Not at the outside of me, but the heart of me. Not at the woman they’d dragged in from the street. Not at the category or the verdict or the sum total of every wretched decision that had led to that particular Tuesday afternoon drama. He looked at me like I was a person. Like I was the ONLY person in the entire nation.

I was not ready for that.

I had been prepared for condemnation. For the public proclamation of my failures. The remembrance of my identity as an outcast. For the long list of everything I had done and everything I had become. I had rehearsed my guilt on the way across the courtyard. I had made my peace, or something that passed for peace, with what was coming.

I was not prepared to be seen. I was expecting to be dismissed.

“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

I had to find my voice from somewhere far down inside me.

“No one, sir.”

He nodded. And there was this expression I have never been able to fully translate into words, though I have tried a thousand times since. It wasn’t pity. Pity looks down. This looked straight across. It wasn’t tolerance or mercy extended at arm’s length. It was something warmer and more scandalous than either of those things. Something that saw all the way through the outer shell of shame and the years of desperate hiding. Those eyes of compassion found, not what I had done, but who I REALLY was in the deep and most innocent frame of my heart.

He looked like He had already decided about me, and what He’d decided was not what they had proclaimed.

“Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

I still don’t get it.

No conditions attached. No performance required before the pardon was issued. No waiting period to earn back what He’d freely given. Just a verdict to negate the charge. A few words from the same mouth that spoke into existence galaxies from nothing. Impossible, right? And so seemed this. That He would proclaim my freedom and negate the justified claim that should have led to my bleeding out on that cold cobblestone roadway.

I got to my feet slowly. My hands ached where they’d pressed against the stone. The tear in my garment was still there. Drops of blood spilled from my knees. I was still the same woman who’d been dragged across the city. Every external fact of my situation was identical to what it had been an hour before.

But something had shifted in me.

In that hollow place, the one I had been filling with all the wrong things for so long, something shifted. Like a door opening that I had assumed was sealed forever. Like light piercing the darkness in a room that hadn’t seen light in years. Not dramatic. More like a slow, quiet exhale after holding your breath for longer than you realized.

He didn’t ask me to do anything for it. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. He didn’t ask me to justify the years or explain the choices or trace the long chain of decisions that had brought me to my bloody knees in the courtyard dust. He didn’t make me promise. He didn’t outline the conditions of my freedom. He just looked at me with that expression that saw all the way through to the truest part of me, and He said: Neither do I condemn you.

I want to tell you that I walked out of that courtyard a perfect woman and never stumbled again. I want to give you the “happily ever after” because the clean version is easier to tell.

But He didn’t say go and be perfect. He said, "Go and sin no more." And I have spent every day since learning the difference between those two things. Learning what it means to walk forward toward something rather than simply away from something. Learning that freedom isn’t the absence of struggle, but it’s having a reason to struggle that’s bigger than your shame.

Because here is what I know now that I didn’t know that morning:

Condemnation keeps you on your bloody knees. It was designed to. The men who dragged me into that courtyard didn’t want me to change; they wanted me as a visual aid. A warning. A moment of public theater that confirmed their power and their purity and their right to decide who was worth saving and who was not.

He had that same power, actually infinitely more, but He used it differently.

He used it to free me.

I think about the men who dropped their stones sometimes. I looked at their feet as they screamed condemnation at me. I don’t hate them. I spent a long time thinking I should, but I don’t. I think they were as trapped as I was. Trapped in performance and position, and the exhausting work of maintaining a righteousness that had to be proven over and over again by pointing at someone who made them feel more righteous.

We were all of us broken that morning. Every last one. The difference is that only one of us encountered the only person in that courtyard who had both the right to throw the stone and the love to put it down.

The same person.

Again, if there was ever anyone in the history of all creation who had the authority to condemn me to die, it was Him. And He looked at me. He looked at all of me. All of me. The innocent me as a little girl and the wretched me as an adulterous sinner. He looked at me, and He said:

Neither do I.

I still don’t fully know what to do with that. I’m not sure I ever will. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe grace was never meant to be fully understood. Maybe it was meant to be overwhelming, a little too large to fit inside your head, so that you lie in bed at night and consider what could have been, and celebrate the gift you didn’t earn.

The stones are still out there somewhere in the temple dust. The one that, if not for His grace, would have been destined to swallow up my wretched life that morning.

He never picked up even one of them.

And the question that has followed me out of that courtyard and into every unearned day since is a simple one.

If the only One who was truly qualified to condemn me chose instead to look me in the eyes and call me free, what could I possibly do in return for that amazing grace that set me free and broke the chains on the jagged cobblestone road where the Savior walked?

It wasn’t the trickle of my blood that covered my guilt. My blood wasn’t worthy. It was His.

And what about you? Are you holding a stone? Or are you looking at the feet of your accusers?

Either way, we have the same fate apart from His freedom. But His freedom is freely given. Will you receive it? And when you do, what will you do in return for the grace you didn’t earn and don’t deserve?

Seriously, what changes on the day that he looks you in the eye and says, “Neither do I. Now, go and sin no more?”

“So Pilate, wanting to gratify the crowd, released Barabbas to them; and he delivered Jesus, after he had scourged Him, to be crucified.” — Mark 15:15

Twenty borrowed years.

That’s how long it has been since I was scheduled to die.

Twenty years ago today, I sat in a dark, dingy prison cell, breathing what should have been my last breaths and waiting patiently to hang lifeless on a prisoner’s death cross. It’s what I deserved. It’s what I had earned ever since the day I enlisted in the Sicarii, that most ferocious sect of zealots that carried the curved dagger concealed in our tunic, ready to take a life at any moment the opportunity presented itself.

I meant well, leading the insurrection against the Romans, trying to free my people from their oppression. As one of the most passionate of zealots, I always dreamed of climbing to the top, to have my name known among my people.

Barabbas - Aramaic for “son of the father.” What a fitting name to be carried by a great warrior. But the end never justifies the means. And rebellion, thievery, and murder were the means I chose to try to climb the ladder of fame.

It landed me in that dark cell underneath Pilate’s mansion, hopeless and future-less, awaiting my own punishment by death. “An eye for an eye,” they say. That gets costly when you’ve taken another man’s life. Death was my fate, and only hours away, until He showed up on the scene.

Jesus rode into town just a day before Passover. I knew the tradition of the “Paschal privilege” was nigh, but I would have never imagined that I’d be the prisoner released in exchange for another, much less in exchange for an innocent victim of a brutal plot against his claim to be the Messiah.

The smell of that wretched cell never leaves you.

Rot and human waste.

Dried blood baked into stone by a Jerusalem sun that showed no mercy to men like me. I had memorized every crack in that wall over the weeks I’d sat waiting. I’d counted them a thousand times. I had run my finger over each of them to feel the texture, trying desperately to quiet the deep agony of knowing I was powerless. And attempting to ignore the memories of the look on that man’s face the day I strangled life out of him with my very own hands.

I wasn’t anything close to innocent. I felt the warmth of his blood on my skin. I looked into his eyes as they went dark. I told myself it was for the cause, for the people, for the liberation of Israel from Rome’s crushing heel. I told myself that so many times that I almost believed it.

Almost.

Deep down, I knew that it was for my own glory. I knew in the depths of my heart that I wasn’t fighting for the freedom of my people, but for the glory of hearing my name shouted among them. I was addicted to glory, but not the glory of our Father or my people. I was bloodthirsty for the glory of my name.

Barabbas - “son of the father.”

I heard the crowd gathering outside before I could make sense of what was happening. The Passover feast. The governor’s custom of the Paschal privilege. I had heard the rumors that Pilate would release one prisoner to appease the people. I pressed my face between the iron bars and listened. Voices. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. The kind of sound that vibrates through stone and finds the marrow of your bones.

I heard them shouting a name. It must be the name of the one who would be freed.

Jesus.

Of course, it would be Him. I had heard His name many times. Everyone had. The Galilean. The healer. The one who turned the world upside down with His teachings and stories. Even here, behind these walls, His name had traveled. One of the other men in the block swore he had seen Him give sight to a man born blind. I told him he was a fool; blind men don’t suddenly see. I told him it was trickery. A magician looking for fame.

I’ll never forget what I heard from the crowd next. I had heard it in my dreams dozens of times, but never in my ears. I had given up on the possibility, because I’d disqualified myself a hundred times over. But, right there in the darkness of the prison cell, I heard it shouted, though not for the reason I’d always imagined.

“Give us Barabbas,” shouted one of the religious leaders of the Sanhedrin.

And then the crowd.

“Barabbas. Barabbas! BARABBAS!“

Not once. Over and over. Like a drumbeat. Like a war cry. Like the sound of something I couldn’t yet comprehend. For a split second, I thought they were honoring me. And then reality hit.

They must have been preparing to celebrate my execution. The time had come, and my end was at hand. I kneeled beside the chains that held my feet in bondage. Images of my childhood began to flood my mind. Floating in the salty Dead Sea with my siblings. Lying in my mother’s arms late at night, feeling the warmth of a mother’s acceptance. Tears began to fall upon the dry dust of the prison cell floor.

The guard’s sandals scraped the floor outside my cell. The sound of keys. The groan of the door swinging open on its rusted hinge. I stood up, pressing my back against the far wall. Condemned men learn quickly that when a door opens unexpectedly, it rarely means good news.

The guard diverted his eyes from mine when he spoke.

“You’re free.”

Two words. I laughed at him. I thought it was a cruel joke, the kind soldiers play on the men they despise. I looked up at him and waited for him to laugh at me in disdain. But he reached in and grabbed my arm. I stumbled forward into the corridor. Into the light.

“What happened?” I demanded. “What is this?”

“The crowd chose you, sleazeball.” He shoved me forward, and my face hit the ground.

The crowd chose me.

I stood in the street and squinted at the sun I hadn’t seen in weeks. My legs were weak. My lungs burned with the first breath of open air. I could hear the crowd still chanting somewhere ahead, past the Praetorium. The shouting had shifted. The tone was darker now, angrier. Like a dangerous storm rising in the west, bringing death along with it.

I wanted to run away. Instead, I walked toward it. I don’t know why. Some invisible draw I couldn’t name.

I pushed through the edges of the crowd until I could see the platform. And there stood a man, mostly naked, beaten and bloody, with some thorny crown pierced into his head.

I had expected a brutal criminal. A hardened face and piercing eyes. A man who looked like he deserved the choice over a murderer like me. Instead, I saw a man already broken. His face was a wreck of blood and bruising. He was barely standing. And he looked so… I remember my mind searching for the word even as I stood there. He looked so INNOCENT.

He wasn’t looking at the crowd. He wasn’t looking at Pilate. He was looking somewhere I couldn’t discern. Somewhere peaceful that had no business existing in the middle of all that chaos and cruelty. It appeared his body was giving up, but something else inside him, maybe His soul, was full of joyful anticipation. Whatever it was seemed to be giving him unimaginable hope in the midst of such torment.

“Crucify Him!” The crowd roared behind me, and I felt the sound rattle my chest.

Crucify Him. Crucify Him. Crucify Him.

A wave of nausea broke over me. I gripped the shoulder of the man next to me to keep from sinking to the ground. Because in that moment, I understood that I was the one who deserved to be standing in his place. This man, this innocent man, was about to experience the most brutal death Rome had to offer. And it was the death that I had earned.

I had taken a life, and somehow, in a transaction I could not explain, His life was being taken for mine.

I watched them lead Him away. I watched the cross laid upon those torn and bleeding shoulders. The crowd surged, and I stood still. I felt like a deserted island in the middle of it all. A man who should have been dead, watching a man who should have been free, marching toward a hill I should have been ascending.

I followed at a distance. I don’t know what I was looking for. Maybe I owed him my presence. Maybe I owed him that much. Maybe it would honor Him if I’d just take this journey alongside Him.

I watched Him fall. I watched them drive the nails. I watched Him lifted up against a rumbling grey sky. And I stood at the foot of that terrible hill, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to look away.

He looked down once, and I was sure His eyes met mine.

I don’t know why I feel certain He saw me, like REALLY saw me. Among all those faces, among all that screaming and sneering and weeping. That look. That same look I’d seen on the platform. I can’t begin to explain this to you, but whether I saw his lips move or not, I know in the deepest places of my heart that I FELT HIM SMILE.

And His eyes. Peace. Unbearable, inexplicable peace.

“It Is Finished.”

After the hill went silent and they took his body down, things got deafeningly quiet for me too. I cried hundreds of tears in the days that followed, sitting alone with my new freedom and the unbearable weight of what it actually cost.

Three days later, it still wasn’t quiet. The city was still turned upside down. The tomb was empty. The stories were spreading like fire among dead evergreens. I heard them all. Every one of them. As a matter of fact, I sought them out. A man who didn’t even know who I was grabbed me outside the market and told me He was alive, that He had appeared to hundreds of people.

I didn’t argue with him. How could I?

I had stood at the foot of that cross. I had looked into those eyes. Something had happened there that my words are not eloquent enough to describe, something that cracked open the hard, calloused shell I had built around myself during years of fighting and scheming and killing for causes I told myself were holy.

I am Barabbas. Insurrectionist. Murderer. A man condemned by his own choices, who stood in a cell that smelled like the beginning of death.

And now I am free. At the cost of this innocent life.

Not because I earned it. Not because I deserved it. Not because the crowd suddenly discovered I was a good man worth saving. I am free because someone else stepped into the sentence that had my name on it, and He did it without a word of protest. Without lifting a finger to defend Himself. Without blaming His past, His enemies, or the system that wrongfully took His life.

I still don’t understand it. Maybe I never will, not completely, not in this life. But I know this, I spent years trying to liberate myself and everyone around me through force. Through fire. Through blood. Through my own power. And all it bought me was a stone cell and a death sentence.

He did what I could never do. In one moment. On one hill. For me.

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AND FOR YOU!

There’s a question I can’t shake loose, and I think you might be carrying it too. I’ve been carrying it for twenty years now on borrowed time.

If you knew that someone innocent had stepped into the punishment that was meant for you, taken your sentence, carried your weight, died your death, what would you do with the borrowed years you were given in return?

How are you going to use your borrowed time? Because you, too, friend, deserve death. And you, too, received life you didn’t deserve the day you bowed before that cross and recognized He was dying for YOU.

The spiritual life you now have, you attained in the same moment I received my unmerited bonus years. The moment he died a criminal’s death. During the three days he lay in the borrowed tomb. And it was sealed the moment Life surged back into his motionless, spiritless physical body.

What will you do with your remaining earthly life, co-criminal?

How will you respond to the gift of life you didn’t earn?

It’s in your hands. Just like my response is in my hands. I choose to return to Him the gratitude and service He earned by giving me life that I didn’t deserve.

Let’s together offer all that we have back to Him in response to His gift of all that we weren’t able to provide for ourselves.

Thank You, Jesus, for my twenty borrowed years!

Connect With Our Hosts & Guest:

Kevin Beasley — Co-host, Kingdom Effect Podcast & Discipleship Network Leader
🌐 Website: kevinebeasley.com
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/kevinebeasley

Glenn “Buckshot” Buckley — Co-host & Former Law Enforcement
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/rambler113.6

Lauren Pinkston — Independent Gubernatorial Candidate, State of Tennessee
🌐 Campaign Website: pinkstonfortn.com
📞 Schedule a Call with Lauren: Available Tuesdays at pinkstonfortn.com

Kingdom Effect Podcast Community
👥 Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/472921304143638

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Show Notes

What happens when a woman who spent years on the mission field, working with trafficking survivors on three continents, begging God to make her good at baking sourdough, finally stops running from the one thing she was built for? You get one of the most unexpected political stories in Tennessee history. Lauren Pinkston isn’t your typical candidate. She’s a seventh-generation Tennessean, a faith-driven independent, a mom of four, a former missionary, and a woman who has said yes to Jesus every single time He’s asked, even when the ask made zero sense on paper.

In this episode, Kevin and Buckshot sit down with Lauren Pinkston for a conversation that starts with politics but quickly becomes something much bigger, a raw, honest discussion about obedience, identity, calling, humanizing our enemies, and what it actually looks like to let God write a story you could have never written for yourself.

🎯 What You’ll Discover:

The Woman Behind the Campaign

• Kids born on three continents, a PhD pursuit in international development, and a desk at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

• The prayer that broke her: “Lauren, it’s cute that you want a flashy ministry, but if you haven’t learned to love the people you come from, you haven’t learned to love at all”

Why an Independent? Why Governor? Why Now?

• The math that made her angry: how a potential new governor could win office with as little as 7-8% of the popular vote, and why that felt like an injustice she couldn’t ignore

• Why she tried everything else first, county office, state legislature, jobs that “made more sense,” and how every door closed except this one

• What Kevin asked her over coffee that reframed everything: “How do you define success?”

Faith, Obedience, and Running the Improbable Race

• The Abigail principle: why Lauren doesn’t have to be the best man in the room, just an obedient woman

• What the Enneagram revealed about her marriage and her ministry (and the legendary comeback her husband gave her in Laos)

• God doesn’t call us to the finish line; He calls us to the starting line.

Healing a Divided State (and Nation)

• The grassroots plan to host 510+ living room events across Tennessee before November

• Why the cul-de-sac was a tragedy for American connectedness, and what we’ve lost without our front porches

• The legislative accountability tool Lauren plans to launch from the governor’s office to make every vote public and every citizen heard

Grace, Politics, and Speaking Truth in Love

• Lauren’s response to people who say politics is too ugly for Christians to touch

• How she holds firm on her beliefs while building some of the deepest relationships of her life, including with people who disagree with her completely

• Why stripping people of dignity strips you of the authority to speak love into their lives

💡 Standout Moments:

“I tried so hard to be a quiet, meek Southern woman. I even tried to bake sourdough through COVID. God refused.” — Lauren Pinkston

“I don’t think God cares who’s governor of Tennessee. But I do think that who is better for us to serve than the image-bearers of God around us every day?” — Lauren Pinkston

“He doesn’t call us to something and show us the outcome. He calls us to the starting line.” — Glenn “Buckshot” Buckley

🔥 Key Moments in the Conversation:

Lauren described the first week she’d spend in the governor’s residence if elected, inviting every legislator in Tennessee, their spouses, their kids, and making sure every person at the table sits next to someone from across the aisle. Not a policy meeting. Not a debate. A meal. Because you cannot write legislation together if the only time you talk is inside a debate circle. You have to humanize each other first.

That one image said more about Lauren Pinkston’s vision for Tennessee than any policy platform ever could.

📚 Resources Mentioned:

• Book: The Great Good Place — Ray Oldenburg

• Book: Bowling Alone — Robert Putnam

• Campaign Website & Open Office Hours: pinkstonfortn.com

• Policy Positions (all 91 of them): pinkstonfortn.com

Want to Get Involved?

• Schedule a personal call with Lauren on Tuesdays at pinkstonfortn.com

• Host a living room event in your community

• Share this episode with someone who feels like they have no one to vote for

“I am not okay if someone doesn’t vote for me because of how I’ve used my faith among them. That’s something I have to answer to God for.” — Lauren Pinkston

Kingdom Effect Podcast — Where ordinary people say yes to extraordinary things. Available on all major podcast platforms.

Learn More About Simple Churches

You have heard the old saying – “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” That is highly relevant when discussing launching a house church, a simple church, or a discipling community. As overwhelming as it might seem to start a church in your home or other neutral location, it’s just about baby steps and significant relationships. The Disciple-Making Collective can walk alongside you on the journey with tools and pathways that will simplify your efforts.

Download the Simple Church PDF Tool

We outline five stepping stones to building a faith family from scratch with the people in the places where you live, work, and play.

• Everyday Spiritual Conversations

• Meeting with a Seeker Group

• Launching an X-Group

• Hosting a Discipling Community

• and Growing Into a Simple Church

See the Simple Church Pathway Here

Step 1: Start a Simple Church with Spiritual Conversations

WE DO NOT PROMOTE STARTING SIMPLE CHURCHES WITH PEOPLE IN SUNDAY CHURCHES! Start simple churches with those not already plugged into a Sunday church. Find them in the mission field where you live, work and play.

We embrace the Jesus pattern of disciple-making that we read about in the gospels. Jesus modeled a clear pathway to inviting people into spiritual community and shared mission. It began with conversations that led to an invitation to follow Him. And that’s how our journey to launching a simple church begins.

We often say that to make disciples, one must first be a disciple. And a disciple, by definition, embraces the philosophy, behavior, and practices of his/her teacher.

Are you having conversations in the places where you live, work, and play that move toward an invitation to grow together in faith communities?

It’s as simple as that. To take the first steps to start a simple church, you have to begin having conversations that move from casual to spiritual. Click here to read an article to help you along that practice.

Step 2: Start a Simple Church with a Seeker Group

At Our Best Story, we define a Seeker Group as an intentionally gathered group of curious Jesus seekers meeting to explore big questions of life and faith and build relationships. This is usually a group of 3 or 4 people of the same sex discussing significant life issues. It has a short life cycle, and if it goes well, it will quickly turn into the step 3 X-group.

The goal of the seeker group is to explore further how interested one’s co-workers, friends, neighbors, or acquaintances are in diving deep into knowing God and sharing in a common mission together. Once the leader recognizes that the group wants to take the next step, they invite them into a more formal and regular meeting to share scripture, prayer, and accountability.

The Seeker Group is a great intentional space where the potential disciple-maker can begin to ask more profound questions and share stories of their faith journey to see if the seeker leans in and wants to know more.

Step 3: Start a Simple Church with an X-group

The next bite of the elephant of starting a simple church is formalizing an X-group. There is intentionality in the name X-group that we will train you for, but for now, know that this is the next step of growth toward a simple church. An X-group meets intentionally and regularly, consists of 3-5 same-gender disciples, and engages in spiritual conversations and growth together.

We have several tools to utilize at this phase, including the 21-Day Challenge and the Gospel sharing icons. We will coach you on those when the time is right.

As this group begins to experience transformation together, they often desire to include their spouses and families in the journey, and this is when things get REALLY exciting. This phase of growth is when disciples usually accept Christ and get baptized. As they ask about including their family, it is time to move to the next phase.

Step 4: Start a Simple Church with a Discipling Community

Now it’s time to go co-ed and family-centric!

This process phase is when a group of disciple-making families agrees to go all-in on a co-mission together! It’s a group of families meeting intentionally and regularly to pursue a relationship with God, a relationship with one another, and a shared mission – TOGETHER!

These families begin to experience the same transformation as the X-group as they experience their faith journey together. We describe the discipling group as a transformative community. Click here to read more about what a transformative community looks like.

We coach specific tools for developing a discipling community. For a sneak peek, check out our document on facilitating a three-thirds group.

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Step 5: Start a Simple Church by Practicing the 12 Behaviors of a Biblical Church

You are almost there once you reach the discipling community stage – but not quite.

We believe the New Testament, particularly the book of Acts, lays out several characteristics that define the practices of a church. These can be added one at a time to a discipling community until they are all practiced. Once these twelve behaviors are regularly embedded into the discipling community, the group can self-identify as a church.

• Fellowship

• Passionate Prayer

• Worshiping Together

• Shared Communion

• Baptizing New Believers

• Engaging in Scripture Together

• Abundant Seed Sowing (Gospel Sharing)

• Giving and Sharing Financially with Others

• Accountable to Appointed and Identified Leaders

• Expecting and Praying for Signs and Wonders

In the model we see in the book of Acts, we do not define a church by a building, a style of meeting, a legal status, or any other characteristic other than a faith family that practices these 12 behaviors and is accountable to some form of leadership or spiritual oversight. We also believe that the abundant seed sowing that takes place in public settings with the members of this simple church will lead to the multiplication of new disciples and new simple churches. Curtis Sergeant, from metacamp.org, says it this way:

It is a blessing to know Jesus,

It is a great blessing to help someone else know Jesus,

It is a greater blessing to live in a community of people who know Jesus,

And it is the greatest blessing to help start new community of people who know Jesus.

As we begin with the end in mind, we must commit to multiplying disciples and new simple churches.

To start the journey, get in touch with us today with the button below!

Let Us Help You Start a Simple Church

This is what most of the church world in the West has missed, and it is costing us the multiplication of disciples. Both of these activities are core to becoming what Christ envisions for us. Both are critical to following Jesus❗️

For decades, maybe longer, we have used discipleship and disciple-making as if they were the same word with the same meaning. They are not. They are related. But they are not the same.

Here’s the clearest way I know to draw the line:

Discipleship is primarily inward. Disciple-making is primarily outward.

Discipleship is the process of sanctification. Disciple-making is the process of multiplication.

Discipleship is the process of growing in Christlikeness, learning His Word, surrendering your will, developing the fruit of the Spirit, renewing your mind, dealing with your sin patterns, and deepening your prayer life. It is the lifelong, never-finished, deeply personal journey of becoming more and more like Jesus. That is sacred work. Beautiful work. Absolutely essential work.

🚫 And it never stops. 🚫

The suffix, “-ship” changes the meaning of a word to reflect the “act or state of being.” So in other words, discipleship is the act or state of BEING a disciple. The act of making disciples first requires one to BE a disciple, so it is a critical part of becoming a disciple-maker.

But here is where we have made a critical error. We have taught people that once they get their discipleship right, once they have grown enough, read enough, matured enough, gotten enough of their stuff together, ➠THEN they will be ready to make disciples.

❌ That is not the Jesus model ❌

• Jesus called His disciples while they were still in process.

• Simon Peter had an anger problem.

• Thomas had a doubt problem.

• The Sons of Thunder had a pride problem.

James and John literally asked Jesus if they could call down fire from heaven on a village that rejected them (Luke 9:54). These are not polished, put-together spiritual giants. These are works in progress. Just like you. Just like me.

And Jesus sent them out to make disciples anyway. Before they had a seminary degree. Before they had it all figured out. Before they fully understood the resurrection. He sent them on mission in the middle of their own growth journey.

❓So what does that tell us❓

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Discipleship and disciple-making are not sequential. They are simultaneous. That’s a game-changer. You do not graduate from discipleship into disciple-making. You grow in both at the same time. In fact, one of the most accelerating things you can do for your own sanctification is to start investing in someone else’s spiritual journey. Nothing grows you faster than being responsible to teach what you are learning.

Paul instructed one of his young disciples, Timothy: “And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.” (2 Timothy 2:2). That is a four-generation chain of disciple-making from a man who was simultaneously working out his own sanctification, writing letters wrestling with a thorn in the flesh, with tension in relationships, with the mystery of suffering.

🏃‍➡️➠🏃‍♀️‍➡️➠🏃🏼‍♂️‍➡️➠🏃‍➡️➠

Discipleship is about working on your Christ-likeness. Disciple-making is about creating the culture and environments where others can enter and walk the disciple-making journey that Jesus modeled.

✔︎ You need both.

And you can practice both right now, wherever you are.

The person who thinks they need to be further along before they start making disciples will never start. I have watched it happen for years. Well-meaning, sincere followers of Jesus who are waiting for the green light of spiritual maturity or the permission from a spiritual authority often never really get moving. That green light is not coming, not the way they imagine it. The green light was given at the moment Jesus uttered the Great Commission.

🟢 Here’s your green light! So stop waiting. And start going. 🟢

He could have used his final few words to save Himself. He knew the time had come. He should have cried out for an angel army. But He wasted them on me!

I didn’t have the clarity of mind to even consider rejecting such a selfish desire as the iron spike tore through my wrist. I screamed until my throat burned like fire. And honestly, I don’t even know how I pulled it together to utter my final request before my deadly punishment.

In my mind’s eye, I’m staring at it now. That thick, rusted nail pinning my flesh to the wood. Blood running down my arm in rivers, dripping from my elbow to the ground below. I had tried to shift my weight, tried to find some position that didn’t send lightning bolts of agony through every nerve in my body. But there was no relief. Only the slow, agonizing rhythm of pulling myself up to breathe, then collapsing back down when my legs could no longer bear the weight.

Crucifixion. This is what it’s like!

I’d heard about it. Seen it from a distance once or twice when the Romans made their bloody examples of other rebels and thieves. But I never imagined. I never could have imagined what it actually felt like to hang there.

Naked.

Exposed.

Dying one excruciating breath at a time.

My name doesn’t matter now. Nobody will remember it. Just another criminal. Just another thief who got what he deserved. That’s what they were thinking down there, the soldiers gambling for my clothes, the priests who came to watch, the women weeping for the man in the middle.

The man in the middle.

Jesus of Nazareth. King of the Jews, the sign above His head read. They were mocking Him with that title. The religious leaders were spitting at Him, hurling insults toward his ears. “He saved others,” they shouted with judgment, baptizing every word. “Let Him save Himself if He is God’s Messiah!”

I had slowly turned my head toward Him just moments earlier. Through the blur of pain, I saw Him. Beaten beyond recognition. Blood covered His face from the thorns they’d twisted into a crown. Welts and gashes across His back from the whipping.

A black hole of my own agony was vying for my attention, but I couldn’t ignore Him. No matter how hard I tried.

There was something in His eyes. Something I couldn’t name.

Although I had never felt love before, never experienced another person’s heart being turned toward me, never felt the warmth of even my mother’s face shine upon me, I somehow knew love fully at that moment.

The man on my other side was Gestas, I think they called him. He’s been screaming at Jesus since they raised us up on that wood. “Aren’t You the Messiah? Save Yourself and us!” He spat the words between gasps for air.

Mocking.

Hardened.

Bitter.

Desperate.

I wanted to join him. I really did. Because isn’t that what we do when we need to justify ourselves? We blame everyone else to try to avoid facing the consequences of our own choices.

But, as much as I tried, I couldn’t.

I couldn’t because every time I looked at that man in the middle, I saw something that made my throat tighten with more than just the pain of suffocation. I saw innocence. I saw dignity. I saw peace. Strength I’d never witnessed in all my years of violence and theft.

Let me tell you how I got here.

I wasn’t born a thief. Nobody is. I was a boy once, running through the fields outside Jerusalem, helping my father tend sheep. Hoping for his embrace, but never receiving it. I never knew my mother. But what I do remember is still believing that goodness was attainable if I just tried hard enough.

But life has a way of beating hope out of you. My father died when I was twelve. He was crushed under a cart wheel that gave way on a mountain path. Roman taxes took our land. I was with my extended family in proximity, but far from the home I never had in the place of my heart. At 15, I sealed the deal and ran.

The streets taught me what I needed to survive. Steal or starve. Kill or be killed. Trust no one. Take what you can because nobody’s going to provide what you need. This was how life worked for a 15-year-old who lost it all before he had it to lose.

I was good at this lifestyle. It started with bread from the market. Moved up to coin purses. Eventually graduated to armed robbery on the trade routes. Gestas and I worked together. We did what we could to make it through another day.

The first time I killed a man, I vomited afterward. The second time, I cried. By the tenth, any reaction at all would have been more than I felt in my heart. I was cold. My heart was a hardened stone. All I thought about was dulling the pain of never knowing love.

I told myself they deserved it. The wealthy merchants with their loaded donkeys and their soft hands. The priests with their clean robes, their shallow prayers, and bellies full of yesterday’s sacrifices earned by more noble subjects. They’d taken everything from people like me. I was doing what any reasonable man would do. I was just taking it back.

But the truth? The truth I couldn’t escape as I lay in bed at night with my heart beating faster and adrenaline feeding my dark, empty soul.

I liked it.

I liked the power. I liked the fear in their eyes. I liked taking what wasn’t mine. I knew someday I would pay the price, but I didn’t care. It would be worth it.

But I never could have imagined this!

Not this kind of pain and agony.

They caught us three days ago.

We’d ambushed a small caravan outside Jericho. It should have been easy with four travelers and only two guards. But the guards were better trained than we expected. One of them was a retired centurion. He cut down two of our men before we even knew what hit us.

Gestas and I tried to run, but Roman patrols were already sweeping the area. We didn’t stand a chance. They beat us bloody, dragged us back to Jerusalem in chains, and sentenced us to crucifixion the next morning, anxious to see us bleed out before the start of their blessed festival.

I spent my last night in a cell, listening to the sounds of other prisoners weeping and cursing. My thoughts began to fade, and the wretched sounds grew faint as I thought about my mother.

My mother?

Why?

I never knew her. I’m sure my eyes took in her smiles when I was in my first days. But how could I remember my earliest days? How could I now feel her presence? The sadness was agony. The emptiness as dark as a covered tomb.

That memory of a moment I couldn’t have actually known triggered a torrent of emotions that flooded me like a dam breaking in a violent storm.

I thought about all the people I’d hurt. The faces I could still see when I closed my eyes. The merchant I’d beaten so badly he couldn’t walk. The old woman whose life savings I’d stolen to buy a night with a prostitute. The young man who begged for his life while I held a knife to his throat.

I’d spent so long telling myself I had no choice, that my story made me this way and there was no way out. But in that cell, with death waiting for me at dawn, I couldn’t hide from the truth anymore.

This was what I deserved.

And there we were.

Three crosses on a hill called Golgotha. The place of the skull. The hill of the dying. The home of the fate of so many wicked.

My body was shutting down. Every pull upward to breathe was harder than the last. My vision blurred and cleared in waves like a pendulum counting down my final moments.

Blood loss.

Exhaustion.

The slow shutdown of a body that couldn’t give any more. I’m dying. We were all three dying.

But somehow we were not dying the same death.

Gestas was still raging. Still cursing. Still demanding that Jesus prove Himself by coming down from the cross and taking us with Him. He couldn’t accept it, couldn’t accept that this was the end, that we brought this upon ourselves, and that we deserved our fate.

But I did accept it.

Maybe it’s because I was tired. Maybe it was because I had finally run out of excuses. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because something in me broke when I looked into the eyes of the man in the middle.

“Don’t you fear God?”

The words ripped out of my throat before I could stop them. I turned my head toward Gestas, ignoring the fresh wave of pain. “We’re getting what we deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong!”

Silence fell over this little corner of Golgotha. Even the soldiers paused their dice game to look up at me. The crowd quieted. I realized I had shouted more loudly than I had planned.

I turned toward Jesus. His eyes met mine, and I felt something crack open in my chest, something that had been locked away for so many years I’d forgotten it existed.

Hope.

Not hope that I’d escape this cross, that fate was sealed. Not hope that some miracle would spare me from death, I knew that story had already been written. But hope that maybe, just maybe, there was something more than this. Something beyond the pain and the shame and the wasted years. And just maybe there was still a way for me to walk into eternity with more than I deserved. Maybe it was in the loving gaze of the man in the middle.

“Jesus.” His name felt strange on my lips. Like more right than I could have thought possible. “Remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”

I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. I just knew that if this man really was a king, as the plague read, and if He really did have some kind of kingdom waiting on the other side of death, then maybe He had the power to remember me. Not for who I’d been. Not for what I’d done. But for who I wished I could have been.

One moment of clarity at the end of a selfish, seemingly wasted life.

He turned His head toward me. Through the blood and the pain, He smiled. He actually smiled.

“Truly I tell you.”

His voice was gentle, like He was sharing a secret just between us.

“Today you will be with Me in paradise.”

Paradise.

The word still echoes in my mind as tears fill my eyes.

Paradise.

I don’t deserve it. I haven’t earned it. I’ve lived a life of violence and theft and selfishness. I’ve hurt people. I’ve taken lives. I’ve spat in the face of every decent thing.

For a moment, I thought this was some disgusting joke, but as I glared into His eyes, I knew that couldn’t be. He meant it from the deepest places of His heart.

“Today you will be with Me in paradise.”

Not tomorrow. Not after I’ve made amends or done penance or somehow earned forgiveness. Today. Right now. In this very moment, when I have nothing left to offer except the broken pieces of a ruined life and a whispered prayer from a dying thief.

The darkness closed in. My lungs began to fail. Each breath was a battle I was losing. But, somehow, the fear was gone. Something I had never felt was transforming me from the inside out.

Grace.

The unearned, undeserved, unfathomable gift of radical, reckless, scandalous grace.

I wasn’t afraid any longer. Not of death. Not of what would come after. Because He promised. The King promised that a wretched thief would be with Him in paradise.

My eyes have closed now. The sounds of Golgotha have faded. The jeers, the weeping, the cries from children, the hammer of soldiers breaking legs to speed up death. It all feels long ago, like in a life I'd already lived or a nightmare from which I’d already awakened.

I died a free man.

Free from the chains of who I used to be. Free from the prison of my own making. All because I looked at a dying king and asked Him to remember me.

Here’s what I need you to understand.

It’s never too late. Even at the end. Even when you’ve wasted everything. Even when you have nothing left to offer but the ragged truth of who you are. I spent my whole life taking. In my final moments, I learned to receive.

So I ask you, what are you waiting for? What pride, what shame, what self-sufficiency is keeping you from turning your head toward Him and whispering, “Remember me”?

Because He will. Oh, He most certainly will.

Even if you’re dying on that rugged, splintered cross you built yourself.

He will remember.

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