by Thomas Abshier | Jul 3, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Watchman: Amir Tsarfati’s Israel News, Prophecy, and the Sons of Issachar Standard
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 3 July 2026, revised 7 July 2026
Source Material: Podcast Episodes – Behold Israel episode 399
Occasion. On June 30, 2026, Amir Tsarfati released one of his periodic video updates through his ministry, Behold Israel (https://beholdisrael.org). Tsarfati is an Israeli believer, a former IDF officer, and one of the most widely followed Bible-prophecy teachers in the world; his updates are valuable to us because he is an informed Israeli reading Israeli sources from inside his nation’s war, and because he asks what the events mean against the map the Hebrew prophets drew twenty-six centuries ago. This update covers the American memorandum of understanding with Iran, a new Israel–Lebanon agreement brokered by Secretary Rubio, the demolition of Hezbollah’s underground fortifications, Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and Turkey’s hardening posture — and Tsarfati closes by locating all of it on the Ezekiel 38 horizon, calling the moment “a step closer to the Ezekiel war.”
But this essay is not about how to grade his report. It is about a standard the fellowship carries on its own banner, 1 Chronicles 12:38 — of one heart to make Christ King. Six verses above it, in the same muster roll of the tribes gathering to David, stands the tribe this essay is named for: the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do (1 Chronicles 12:32). Mark the grammar: understanding of the times is not the deliverable. It is the input. The deliverable is what ought to be done. An essay that ends with understanding — that weighs the watchman’s report and sorts the evidence into three parts. The parts must come in order: first the report and the epistemics; then the text of Ezekiel and where our eschatology places it; then the deliberation and the action — the Issachar sections, which are the point.
I. What Amir Reports
His account, fairly and in his framing. The United States negotiated a memorandum of understanding with Iran — talks at Lake Lucerne, signature at Versailles. His judgment is scathing: worse than Munich, he argues, because Chamberlain appeased before a world war revealed what Hitler was, whereas this MOU was signed after a forty-day war in which Iran was beaten to the floor — and it revives the IRGC with oxygen and billions, and treats Iran as the guardian of Lebanon, obligating Israeli withdrawal and throwing Hezbollah a lifeline. Against it he sets the Rubio-brokered fourteen-point agreement between Israel and the elected Lebanese government — the Lebanese, he reports, having concluded they fear Iranian guardianship more than Israeli presence — permitting the IDF to remain in southern Lebanon until every militia outside the Lebanese Armed Forces is dismantled. He shows the demolition of the enormous Hezbollah fortress under Majdal Zoun and reports the destruction of a ten-mile Gaza tunnel system neutralized with thirty thousand cubic meters of concrete. He describes Iran’s remaining weapon — the Strait of Hormuz, attacked repeatedly with token American response — and Iran’s open refusal to meet. He plays the President’s unguarded remark that Erdoğan “stayed out of the war,” which Amir reads as an admission that Turkey nearly entered it on Iran’s side; he reports — citing an Israeli general, a ministerial hint, and an Emirati official — the claim that a Mossad plan to arm the Kurds and Iranian minorities against the regime was leaked by the Vice President to Erdoğan, who smothered it; he reports Erdoğan’s declaration that Zionism has set its sights on Turkey, Netanyahu’s cabinet reply that Israel takes annihilation rhetoric seriously, Israel’s formal recognition of the Armenian genocide, and the administration’s intention to sell Turkey F-35s. He reports a statistician’s analysis finding the Hamas-ministry casualty figures internally incoherent, and famine photography that concealed medical context. And he closes on the horizon: Iran emboldened, Turkey positioning, Russia estranged, Libya and Sudan in the wings — the Ezekiel coalition assembling.
II. The Watchman’s Epistemics: Assertion, Action, and the Adversary’s Archive
Now the epistemics: In one movement. Amir’s report sorts into three tiers, and the fellowship should hold each at its level: public verifiable events (the agreements and their published points, the filmed demolitions, Erdoğan’s speeches, the Armenian recognition, the Hormuz attacks); informed interpretation (the Munich comparison, the motive attributions, the read of Lebanese and Iranian intentions); and single-chained claims (the leak, the statistics, the famine-photo analysis) — which we may not assert as established fact, because the ninth commandment governs what we affirm, and he that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him (Proverbs 18:17). One caution inside our own camp proves the tier system earns its keep — and this one has a happy ending that teaches the whole method. A figure of $300 billion for the MOU circulated in the channels that carried this story to some of us, while Amir’s own update said only “billions.” Checked against the record, the figure verifies — with a precision that matters: Al Jazeera, quoting the MOU text directly, reports that the document commits the US to undertake with regional partners a plan of “at least $300 billion” for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development, with the implementation mechanism left to a sixty-day negotiation, the President publicly denying any direct US payment, the Vice President assigning the funding to regional Arab states and outside investors, and no country yet confirming a contribution (aljazeera.com, June 18, 2026); the same MOU separately commits to the immediate lifting of sanctions on Iran’s fossil fuel industry and negotiations to unfreeze billions in Iranian assets — which independently substantiates Amir’s “oxygen and billions.” So the loose version (“the US pledged to give Iran $300 billion”) overstated, the cautious version (“billions”) understated, and the verified version — a US-brokered plan with a $300 billion floor, funders and mechanism undetermined — turns out to be more damning than the rumor, because it is undeniable. Precision is the sharper weapon. That is what the sixty seconds of checking buys.
That is the hygiene. Here is the correction this revision exists to make: the triage governs assertion; it does not govern vigilance, investigation, deliberation, or action — and treating it as if it did is not righteousness but paralysis. The two-or-three-witnesses rule of Deuteronomy 19:15 is a conviction standard: it tells the court when it may punish. It was never a standard for when the watchman may cry out, when the city may investigate, or when the council may deliberate. Read it as an action threshold, and you have silenced every whistleblower, every confidential informant, every lone bystander, every Rahab — you have built a world in which the wicked act on rumor while the righteous wait for adjudication, and the adjudication never comes. Scripture names this failure mode without sympathy: He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap (Ecclesiastes 11:4). Different acts carry different evidentiary thresholds. A single credible witness cannot convict — but a single credible witness absolutely triggers the investigation, the protective detail, the demand for answers. And moral deliberation requires even less, because it can proceed conditionally at full strength: if the leak occurred, here is what it was and what repair requires — a sentence that violates no commandment and surrenders no force.
And there is a second depth the first draft lacked: the character of the source is itself evidence, and weighing it is commanded, not forbidden. The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going (Proverbs 14:15) — one verse holding both credulity and paralysis at arm’s length. Courts have always known this; impeaching a witness’s credibility is half of trial practice. And the modern age handed us the definitive parable. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers — a single witness, a confessed perjurer, an ex-Communist courier, a rumpled man with no standing — accused Alger Hiss, the most immaculately credentialed man the American establishment could produce: Harvard Law, clerk to Justice Holmes, present at Yalta, secretary-general of the founding conference of the United Nations. Under a flat two-witness rule, Chambers is dismissed on the first day. Under “weigh the credentials,” Hiss wins forever — and very nearly did, while the respectable institutions closed ranks around him and poured on the establishment’s favorite solvent, ridicule. What actually resolved it was the third way: the disreputable witness was taken seriously enough to be tested — and the fruits appeared, the details only a participant could know, the typed documents, the microfilm in the pumpkin. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. And in 1995 the archive itself surrendered: the declassified Venona decrypts of Soviet cable traffic settled for essentially all serious historians that the penetration Chambers described had been real all along — that what a generation had been trained to call a paranoid conspiracy theory had been sitting in Moscow’s own communications the entire time.
The Chambers case teaches the fellowship three things at once, and all three belong in our permanent equipment. First: single witnesses can be right, and the tier system exists to weigh them, never to dismiss them — tier three means “hold loosely and test,” not “discard.” Second: consensus can be manufactured, and ridicule is its favorite tool precisely because ridicule substitutes for evidence — Saul Alinsky codified it as a rule because it works, and the fellowship should feel its skin prickle whenever a claim is answered with mockery instead of documents, for woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil (Isaiah 5:20) describes an industrial process, not merely a personal vice. When state-level resources are committed to deception — and Venona proved they were, and nothing in fallen human nature has retired the practice — “everyone knows” is not evidence; it is frequently the product. Third — and this is the discipline’s vindication, not its refutation: what converted Chambers’s testimony from contested claim into settled history was verification. The pumpkin papers and the decrypts did what indignation never could. The triage and the courage were never enemies; the triage is what gives the courage its ammunition.
One guard rail, and the doctrine is complete. “Consider the source” must attach to demonstrated track record, never to tribe — or we become the mirror image of the whispering campaigns we deplore. An outlet or institution with a documented record of manufactured narrative has earned its discount, and applying it is Bayesian prudence, not partisanship. But the measure must be one we can survive when it is turned on us: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again (Matthew 7:2). A friendly source that inflates pays the same discount as a hostile one that lies. That symmetry is not a concession to the adversary; it is the only thing that keeps our testimony worth more than his.
III. The Ezekiel Text Itself
Now the text Amir’s whole update leans against, held to the same honesty. Ezekiel 38–39 describes a war that has never occurred: a northern coalition descending on a regathered Israel — Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal… Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them… Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters (38:1–6) — in the latter years (38:8), against a people brought back from the sword dwelling safely, all of them dwelling without walls (38:11), drawn down by God Himself — I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws (38:4) — for God’s stated purpose of self-revelation: and they shall know that I am the LORD (38:23).
The identifications, graded honestly. Persia is Iran without a single interpretive step — the name changed only in 1935; the chief engine of the current war against Israel is named in the text outright. Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, and Togarmah are, by the sober consensus of historical geography, peoples of ancient Anatolia — the Assyrian records’ Mushki and Tabal, the Cimmerians, Til-garimmu in the Armenian highlands: the landmass of modern Turkey. This is worth pausing over, because the popular prophecy tradition spent seventy years hearing Moscow and Tobolsk in those names on phonetic resemblance alone, while the historically grounded reading puts Turkey — not Russia — at the coalition’s mass. Rosh is the contested term: Hebrew for “head” or “chief” (so the King James: the chief prince), read as a proper noun “Rosh” only on a disputed parsing — so Russia’s participation is possible and would surprise no one, but the text requires Turkey and Persia in a way it never requires Russia. Cush and Put are the upper Nile (Sudan) and North Africa west of Egypt (Libya).
Set the moment against the text. What fits: Israel regathered after near-annihilation — the precondition that made the chapter a dead letter for eighteen centuries and a live one since 1948; Persia wounded and vengeful; the coalition’s Anatolian core turning, its president speaking of Israel’s existence as a threat to Turkey’s survival; Sudan and Libya broken and available. And a detail the fellowship should notice: the Ezekiel coalition conspicuously lacks the inner ring — no Egypt, no Jordan, no Lebanon, no Hamas, no Hezbollah — and the news of this very update is the inner ring being dismantled, the battlefield the text presupposes being cleared before our eyes. What does not fit, and must be held with equal firmness: Israel does not yet dwell safely, without walls — Israel in July 2026 is mobilized and watching every border. It is even possible that the current agreements, if they hold, will one day manufacture the false security of 38:11 — marked speculation, offered as such. So: is Amir right that we are “a step closer”? On the alignment — yes, and the honest geography makes his case stronger than the pop-prophecy version, because it puts Turkey where the text puts the weight. On nearness — of that day and that hour knoweth no man (Mark 13:32). Closer is defensible. Close is more than anyone may say.
IV. Watching to Endure, Not Watching to Leave
Our one difference with Amir, stated plainly and with love. He teaches within the pre-tribulation system: the Church removed before the trial, the aligning events a departure board. Our fellowship, after the study in Endurance, Not Escape, holds the historic eschatology of the Church — one return of Christ, public and glorious, after tribulation, the saints kept in the trial rather than from it (John 17:15). The difference does not touch the value of his watching — what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch (Mark 13:37) belongs to no rapture position, and the alignment is the same alignment on either eschatology. What it touches is watching’s purpose. The pre-trib believer watches like a traveler at the departures board; the believer of the historic eschatology watches like a garrison — and a garrison’s preparation is character, fellowship, provision, courage, and a faith that has made peace in advance with loss. This is the entire logic of the Christian Underground: if the nations are aligning on the Ezekiel pattern, the endurance reading does not pack a suitcase; it deepens its roots. And it prepares for something else the traveler never trains for — which brings us to the section this essay exists for.
V. The Sons of Issachar: What Ought to Be Done
Understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. The watchman has reported; the tiers are assigned; the text is open. Now the council sits, and the questions Amir’s update forces are moral and political questions that deserve answers — deliberated on the merits, judged provisionally but judged, because no regime was ever unseated, no policy ever corrected, and no people ever rescued by a discussion of information fidelity. Four questions. Note as we begin how little of the deliberation depends on the contested tier-three claims: the plan’s existence is now openly sourced by Israeli and Emirati officials; the MOU’s shape, the F-35 intention, and Erdoğan’s rhetoric are on the record. The moral case proceeds almost entirely on tier-one ground.
First: now that the plan to arm the Kurds and the Iranian people is public knowledge, should it be implemented in the open? The case for is heavy: forty-seven years of the IRGC; a population that has risen again and again — 2009, 2019, 2022 — and been shot down in the streets for lack of means; the principle that a people’s right to reclaim their own government is not a favor foreign powers may withhold indefinitely; and the fact that secrecy’s value is already spent — exposure converted covert support into a test of open resolve. The case for caution is not cowardice, and it has a name written in blood: Iraq, 1991, when an American administration openly called on the Iraqi people to rise, and then stood aside while Saddam’s helicopters slaughtered the Shia of the south and the Kurds of the north by the tens of thousands. Half-hearted open support is the most lethal policy on the menu — it identifies the brave for the regime’s gunmen and then abandons them. So the deliberation does not resolve to “arm them: yes or no.” It resolves to this: either commit to support that is sustained, adequate, and survivable for the people who answer — or do not summon them to die. The middle posture, encouragement without commitment, is the one option righteousness rules out — and it is, on the visible evidence, the posture now on offer. The judgment: the plan’s exposure obligates the administration to choose publicly between real commitment and honest disavowal, and citizens — including this fellowship — should demand that choice be made in daylight.
Second: should Erdoğan be opposed, and how — beginning with the F-35s? Here the record needs no tier-three assistance. A NATO head of state declares, on the record and repeatedly, rhetoric that Israel’s prime minister publicly characterizes as calls for annihilation; he frames Israel’s existence as a threat to Turkey’s survival; and the administration proposes to sell him the alliance’s premier strike fighter. The deliberation is brief because the principle is old: I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee (Genesis 12:3) is not a mystical abstraction — it is, at minimum, a policy instruction to nations that claim biblical inheritance, and prudence arrives at the same verdict by its own road, for weapons sold to declared eliminationism do not change the declaration; they arm it. Netanyahu’s own stated standard — when someone says he intends to annihilate us, we take him seriously — is the correct one, and it binds allies too. Israel showed what moral clarity at diplomatic cost looks like in this very news cycle: recognizing the Armenian genocide, naming a historical truth Ankara has spent a century suppressing, and absorbing the consequences. The judgment: the F-35 sale should be opposed openly — by Congress, which has the statutory power to block it, and by citizens who can demand they use it — and Erdoğan’s rhetoric should be treated as policy until his policy refutes it.
Third: the leak. Here the deliberation proceeds conditionally, as Section II licensed, and loses nothing by it. If an American official disclosed an allied covert plan to the leader it targeted, then what occurred was the betrayal of a people to their enemies — and not just any people, but the Kurds, whose twentieth- and twenty-first-century history is a ledger of American encouragements followed by American abandonments: 1975, when support was severed mid-revolt at the stroke of a realpolitik pen; 1991, the uprising betrayed; 2019, the withdrawal that handed their Syrian territory to — of all actors — Erdoğan. A fourth entry in that ledger would not be a diplomatic embarrassment; it would be a national sin of the recidivist kind, the kind Scripture says invites judgment when a nation’s word to the vulnerable becomes worthless (Ezekiel 17 spends a chapter on covenant-breaking statecraft). But notice what we may rightly do without resolving the condition — because the single-witness threshold licenses exactly this: demand the inquiry. The claim is sourced to named categories of officials; it concerns the integrity of the government’s most sensitive processes; Congress possesses oversight power for precisely this case. We do not need certainty to insist that those whose job is certainty go get it. And the repair obligation stands on tier-one ground regardless of the leak: the plan is exposed, the Kurds’ expectations were raised, and the administration owes them either recommitment or an honest release — see question one. The judgment: pursue the inquiry lawfully and loudly; pursue the repair immediately and unconditionally.
Fourth: is this instead a brilliant stratagem — the 4D-chess defense? The claim deserves a fair hearing, so state its best form: that the MOU buys time and low oil prices while Israel dismantles the proxies; that restraining Turkey from the war, by whatever lever, prevented a catastrophic second front; that the visible humiliations are the price of a deeper repositioning not yet disclosed. Perhaps. But a strategy that cannot be distinguished from folly by any visible evidence has placed itself under the Lord’s own epistemic standard: by their fruits ye shall know them (Matthew 7:16). The visible fruits to date, on tier-one and tier-two ground: an IRGC preserved, funded, and emboldened; a strait attacked with token response and a deterrent visibly eroding; a lifeline to Hezbollah cut off only when Israel and Lebanon went around the American process; an ally openly preparing to stand alone; and the message, legible to every dictator watching, that surviving an American war is a negotiating strategy. The judgment, rendered provisionally as all judgments of statecraft must be: on the fruits now visible, folly is the better-supported hypothesis than genius, and the burden of proof lies on the strategy’s defenders — a burden discharged by fruits, not by assurances. If the fruits change, this council will revise its finding, and gladly. That is not weakness; provisional judgment firmly acted upon is how all statecraft and all faith operate — faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1) describes people who acted, decisively, without the archive in hand.
VI. The Sovereignty Floor
Beneath the deliberation, the ground that makes deliberation sane rather than desperate. Amir says in passing that everything now happening — including the parts he finds disgraceful — happens because God allows it, and that leaders are used by God for purposes they do not share. That is the Bible’s explicit doctrine of history: the king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD… he turneth it whithersoever he will (Proverbs 21:1); he removeth kings, and setteth up kings (Daniel 2:21); why do the heathen rage… He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh (Psalm 2:1,4); declaring the end from the beginning… My counsel shall stand (Isaiah 46:10). Ezekiel compresses the mechanism into one image — hooks in Gog’s jaws: the coalition will assemble believing it acts from its own ambitions, and every ambition will be a hook. Conscious Point Physics gives this its ontological floor: if reality is the lattice of Conscious Points processed Moment by Moment by the Mind of God, then prophecy is not prediction from outside an uncertain system — it is declaration by the One who computes every Moment, in whom every actor lives, and moves, and has his being (Acts 17:28), whose orchestration of circumstance requires the violation of no man’s will. And the same ontology grounds Section II: in a universe sustained by the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2), deception is warfare against the structure of the real — which is why an industrial deception apparatus is not merely a political fact but a spiritual one, and why every claim we verify before repeating is a small act of worship. This floor is also why the sons of Issachar can deliberate without trembling: our judgments are provisional, our action is required, and the outcome was never in our hands to begin with. We are responsible for faithfulness, not for history. History has an Author.
VII. What the Fellowship Does
So — Susan, Charlie, Leonard, Michael, Armond, and all who read these essays — the council’s findings come to the floor, and honesty about our levers is the first act of seriousness: a fellowship in Montana does not move fleets. But Zechariah 4:10 forbids despising the day of small things, and our levers are real.
Pray with names in your mouth. Not atmospheric prayer — specific prayer. For the Iranian people and the Kurds, that the God who broke Pharaoh would break the IRGC and that no brave soul rises only to be abandoned. For Secretary Rubio by name, and for the administration — for kings, and for all that are in authority (1 Timothy 2:2) does not exempt administrations we distrust; pray that Rubio-shaped courage multiplies and that folly is turned back, for the King of kings turns the king’s heart like a watercourse. For the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). And for the captured on every side of this board — the Iranian conscript, the Turkish citizen taught to hate a nation that never threatened him, the Lebanese villager whose home was hollowed into a fortress over his head, the Gazan child ruled by men who built bunkers under his hospital. Our settled discipline: hate the evil; love the captured.
Speak where speech reaches power. Two specific asks, this month, to our members of Congress, in our own words on paper: oppose the F-35 transfer to Turkey while its president’s annihilation rhetoric stands, and open the oversight inquiry into the leak allegation — not as verdict, but as the investigation a single credible witness has always warranted. This is precisely the infrastructure the Christos Voting Network was built for: a congregation that knows what it asks and asks it together. Add a third, positive ask: public clarity on the Kurdish question — commitment or honest release, no more encouragement without covenant.
Form the discernment this essay practiced. Teach the assertion/action distinction and the tier discipline in the fellowship, so that we are neither the simple who believe every word nor the paralyzed who sow nothing for watching the wind — a congregation that can tell moral courage from moral theater will reward the former with its voice and votes, and that, multiplied across ten thousand congregations, is how a nation’s character turns.
And guard the watcher’s soul. Amir confesses in this very update that the news cycle sickened him into stepping back from constant posting — the honest testimony of a professional watchman in the digital age, and the confirming exhibit for Luke’s double command: look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh (21:28), and six verses later, take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged… with cares of this life (21:34). Watch enough to be sober; not so much that the watching becomes the drunkenness. The believer’s information diet should leave him looking like my peace I give unto you (John 14:27), not like the world’s doom-scroll with a prophecy chart stapled to it — because the deliberations of Section V are the work of a settled heart, and a heart inflamed cannot sit on the council of Issachar.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever (Isaiah 40:8). Amir opened his update with that verse over the news of one week. It will still be standing over the last week of the age — and over every provisional judgment this council has rendered in the meantime, correcting what we got wrong, and vindicating, we trust, that we did not wait for certainty to love righteousness out loud.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 30, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Love of the Father: His Draw on the Hearts of His Children to Atonement and Sonship
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 28 June 2026
Occasion. This Sunday’s essay elaborates on last Sunday’s discussion. Please refer to the original essay. In that essay, we took up the question of what kind of world we must live in for Jesus’ death two thousand years ago to affect my standing before God. (What is the nature and substance of the spiritual and physical realm? What are the laws that govern it? Why was such a system set up? Why did such a spiritual architecture require the Son of God to die for the sins of man to be in relationship with God the Father?) That essay was based on my conversation with Charlie earlier in the week.
It is not a conventional story. My understanding of the physical and spiritual world and of God’s relationship to it came through an altered-state vision in 1987. It radically changed my life. It came to me after a 10-year-plus deep dive into 40 cults, religions, and philosophies, and ultimately altered states. Last week’s fellowship discussion did not cover the essay or that question directly, but it is good background material for what we did discuss. The foundational substance of creation and the rules that govern the universe are important. It is upon this foundation that we postulate the moral code among men and our relationship to God.
My story: Over a 10-year period, from my mid-teens to mid-20s, the unanswered question about the fundamental nature of reality gradually led me to explore other religions and examine their perspectives to see whether the answers to these questions had been found in other spiritual traditions/paths/religions/esoteric knowledge. I was a fully committed believer in Jesus Christ as my Savior, and the truthfulness of the Biblical revelation at age 4. I remained deeply convinced of the Bible’s truth until I was introduced to other religions in my early teens. I remember the location and conversation where I heard my Mom talking with a friend. Her son had gone to college, studied world religions, and had left the Christian faith. That was all it took. The door had opened, and I had to find out what other religions believed. Earlier, as a young teen, I did the Ouija board at a Halloween party and was hooked. I read about ESP, channeling, and psychic phenomena (A Search for the Truth by Ruth Montgomery). In college, I joined Ekankar, a religion promising to teach astral projection and firsthand experience of the spiritual worlds. Soon, my sense of truth about the spiritual world had no anchor. I couldn’t explain why Christ’s death was necessary for salvation; in fact, I couldn’t see any logical sequence to it at all. I had nothing to rely on other than “believe this” as the testimony of my elders and peers. It was clear that I was missing something. This left me open to any spiritual teacher/guru that came along. After college, I started reading books about different spiritual paths: martial arts, Autobiography of a Yogi, and a Hindu book (Lords of Light). While still stationed at Pearl Harbor, an opportunity to attend a yoga class came up. I was placed on shore duty after a panic attack while preparing to go on a submarine cruise in Guam. I went to the Yoga class and immediately knew this was the path for me. The teacher was authoritative and confident in the path. The book they offered as an introduction to the spiritual path (How to Know God by Christopher Isherwood, the Sutras of Patanjali) promised direct experience of God and liberation from this world. I was entranced. After 3 months of attending the daily 3:30 AM, 2.5-hr meditation at the ashram, I precipitously switched spiritual allegiance. I joined their Sikh/Yogic sect without consulting my parents or any peer group. I didn’t have the courage to face them, knowing the disapproval I would face and fearing I wouldn’t be able to resist the pressure. I stayed for 6 years, till 1982, and then went to Naturopathic College, where I was introduced to altered states on a teacher’s recommendation, and the real ride began. 3 years of altered state seeking with a Friday night vision quest group yielded insight, but nothing held up; I ended in confusion. On the final trips, I saw a vision: a galaxy, stars, and a line between them, which lasted the entire trip and recurred on the next trip. I knew it meant something, and I believed it was a divine answer to my prayer, “Who is the True God and what is the nature of reality that justifies Jesus dying for our sins?” I asked, and received the answer. This ministry, the Conscious Point Physics theory, my 30 years of Christian counseling of marriages, personal growth, trauma, addiction… my 2003 Senate run with 50,000 votes in the primary on a radically Christian platform, and continuing 2024 and 2028 Presidential run; my faith in the Bible as a revelation from God, and the Truth of Jesus declaration came from that one vision and subsequent insights. God can use anything to bring us to Him. We are all different, but there is a path to every heart to connect to His.
Last week’s essay documents my conception of the structure of the spiritual world: A God from whose mind the entire manifest world arises – a world composed of consciousness at the smallest particulate level. Love is the nature of the God upon whose consciousness the universe rests. Therefore, He made free creatures who could love or refuse Him. His law and definition of goodness defined evil. He created humans with an innate desire for the satisfaction of animal pleasure, which is good when applied according to His patterns, and evil when the animal drives seduce him into excess, deficiency, or wrong application. He gave man the freedom to choose his animal nature (and the associated evil). The entire universe is formed from the substance of His mind. We are in/a part of/ His universe, His body. “For in him we live, and move, and have our being…” (Acts 17:28). We are sinners/choose evil of our free will. His purity cannot abide evil in His mind/being. God’s nature requires the elimination of every speck of evil in His body. Man is inside the body of God; he is impure, he has been judged, and death/elimination/separation from the body of God is his sentence. It is not optional; it is the nature of God. Man, as a sinful being, and sin/evil/impurity/unGodliness cannot live within the body/mind/existence/being of God. The problem is that God desires companionship, relationship, as this was the purpose of man’s creation. As the One, the only existent consciousness, with a nature of love, that love cannot be satisfied without the experience of the other to receive and give back love freely. Therefore, He devised a plan to exercise the wrath/death/purification of His being that His nature/existence required. The plan was prepared from before the beginning. He created the Son, who is a full image of Himself, the exact same as He, only with a separate perspective (looking at the Father, with the identity of the Son). The Father gave the Son the authority to create all the Conscious Points from/by/of His mind, and to give life to men whose spirit was created in the image of the Father and Son. The Son incarnated was sinless and was killed without cause, having been judged by earthly authorities who were operating under the power of their egos and tempted by Satan. When Jesus was being crucified, God the Father expressed His judgment on the Son, condemning the sin that was performed by the creatures which He had created. Christ did not pass the death delivered toward sinful man to the individuals, but received the penalty of the violation in his body/mind/spirit. Thus, He has paid the price of our sin, and is willing to offer us the full pardon, having already paid the price. Thus, this is a loophole in the construction of the universe. A fully holy God is capable of hosting evil within Himself, in the hope that there will be those who will choose to accept His offer of purification and grow into the likeness of Christ and be fully mature sons.
The questions the group explored in our meeting were the purpose of the cross, the mechanism of its purification, and the way the Father draws men to Him through Christ.
I. Purpose and mechanism of the atonement
When I laid out the question, Leonard heard me ask about the purpose and plan behind the sacrifice. He was saying there has to be a plan for life and purpose associated with the sacrificial death, or that Christ’s death means nothing. That is true, and it is one half of the question. The other half of the question was how He did it. I wanted to know the cause-and-effect sequence of “how the cross affected the spiritual structure of the universe” when I embarked on my spiritual pilgrimage to find truth. This question is a restatement of Charlie’s request for a mathematical proof of the atonement. So, the question concerns how Christ’s death is applied to my life/my account, so that I move from being under wrath to standing clean/pure/sinless before the Father, which is the only state in which it is possible to be in His presence?
That is the question this essay answers. The answer is both a ledger and a relationship. To understand that question, we must first settle what kind of beings we are.
II. Are we made within God, or coexistent with Him?
My theory of creation and existence rests on this foundation: God is everything, and we are an aspect of God experiencing God. There is nothing we can experience that is not part/aspect of God. We are not independent beings standing alongside Him, but points of awareness within/of Him. We are aspects of the one divine being. We are self-aware and made, for a time, to forget that we are inside the whole. That forgetting is not a flaw; it is the very thing that makes free will possible. A point of view that knows itself to be God could not genuinely choose to love another besides God (which is a primary criterion of love, the gift of oneself given freely, when there are viable options). Only a point of view that has been allowed to feel separate can freely choose for Him or against Him. So God compartmentalizes His own awareness. He minimizes the scope of our awareness as spiritual beings within Him. Thus, we are created to be of His nature, and within His being, and aware of a limited portion of his totality. It is this separation that allows relationship, as relationship is definitionally impossible without an “other” to be in relationship with. Thus, he has created the ability to be separate from others by partitioning awareness. It is obvious how such partitioning can be done in the material/physical universe, with the limitations of the senses and time- and space-based perception. But there is probably another realm, maybe an extension of this one, where the composition of individual souls in the spirit realm also feel and believe themselves to be fundamentally and inherently separate. Regardless of the realm, heaven or earth, there is God alone, and from that arose first the Son, whom the Father brought forth; and there is everything else, which the Son made — and all of it is within God. The self-aware entities within the body of God are not the entirety of God. Any part that declared, or believed, like Shirley McLain on the beach saying, “I am God,” is mistaking a piece for the whole. This is the mistake of believing that because we are part of the whole, we are the whole. We are (in some way) a part of God, but we are not God. This is the perspective of a human misperceiving himself as God (the Shirley McLain fallacy).
According to the Bible, there is only one God, and the Father and Son truly are both all of God. I base this theology on the opening verses of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” John 1:1-3. The Word was with God and was God. This is not a Shirley McLain fallacy. The Son is the same as the Father, “I and my Father are one.” John 10:30. The distinction between Father and Son is one of perspective. The Son has the perspective of obedience to the will of the Father. The Son has a different role, a different function. It seems that the role is to shield the Father from evil, isolating it within His being so that the Father can remain pure and unexposed to the evil that is necessarily existent in a universe where men behave like animals and are called to act like gods in His image. This is why the Son was the creator of everything that was made. It is because of this role that He is able to shield the evils of humanity from the purity and wrath-against-impurity of the Father. After the crucifixion and the acceptance of that substitutionary sacrifice, it is possible for sinful man to be cleansed and for man to be in relation to the Father. The key step is the cleansing of the man by acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice.
Leonard challenged my theology to see whether it holds. In his understanding, we are not created out of God at all; we are coexistent with Him — eternal intelligences, of the same cloth, never made and never beginning. The distinction is that the Father has simply progressed far ahead of us and now helps us climb toward where He is.
This conception of God is very different from my ontology. If Leonard is right, my argument collapses entirely. In my conception, our very existence is borrowed from/based upon God’s being. In Leonard’s conception, our existence is our own and eternal, standing beside Christ’s existence. I do not hold his view. I think John 1 gives a sequence: the Father first, then the Son, then all things made through the Son. I think it is important to record Leonard’s perspective, as we are in the Fellowship doing a very strong study of comparative religions, and Leonard’s conception is a true distinction that is significant enough to call it a different religion rather than simply a doctrinal distinction within a religion. When Leonard heard me say “we are God experiencing God,” he suggested I meant little-g gods, a perspective he held that men were a crowd of separate, independent deities. I do not hold that view. I do not hold that we are little gods standing apart from God in a substantive way. We are gods in the Biblical sense of being created in His image, and Christ being the light of men. When I say we are gods, I mean we are aspects/entities within God. I believe we are aspects of God Himself, and He is experiencing Himself from countless interior vantage points, each created with ego boundaries. We, as entities within His whole, have forgotten our origin, and we are fully partitioned in our sense of being separate from God, to the point of not believing He exists. In general, man does not recognize his/your/their/our source. We are made in His image (Genesis 1:27) — and we are made of Him and within Him. He is the foundation upon which the entire construction of my worldview stands.
III. The partition: how the One became Two
The fundamental problem of the generation of a universe is how nothing becomes something. That is, where did God come from? How was He made? If He was not caused, and existed forever, how did His existence as an eternal being arise? These are fundamental problems which cannot be answered, and I make no attempt to do so. My project/theory/belif is only that the entirety of all creation is consistent with His existence, and His existence as the source of all.
The second problem is how the One/the Singularity/God the Father becomes two (Father and Son). According to Leonard, the Mormon framing of God’s origin is essentially that God arose from nothing (or existed forever). Christ is a little g god, as are we. He is teaching us to mature. I don’t think that in the Mormon doctrine, according to Leonard, that we (humans) were created by Christ/the Word, although I might be wrong on this. I think Leonard’s statement is essential that we are all gods, learning from God, as massively multiplied eternal gods. (I will look forward to correction, and adjust accordingly if I have misunderstood Leonard’s conception.)
In my interpretation of the Bible (John 1), the Father/God Almighty is the timeless/eternal/self-created God. This is the problem of the first generation of reality: “Why and how is there anything in the universe?” The second problem is, “What is the foundational method by which God satisfied the problem of relationship and the creation of substance?” In short, how did a God who is inherently utterly alone become a God who is in relationship, rather than staying eternally alone surrounded by nothingness?
I do not think the Son arose from the Father merely becoming self-aware. I think it was by a more generative process. As a postulate, the Father may have been able to partition His own point of view by visualizing/imagining Himself looking back at Himself. In this way He was the “other.” He was able to do this so completely that, even while remaining one, He could be the Father, look at the Son, and identify Himself as the Father. Likewise, the Son could look at the Father and see Him as other, and identify as the Son. This was a foundational aspect of the realization I had in my 1987 vision. In that vision/revelation I saw, rightly or wrongly, God the Father looking back at Himself from the perspective of the Son, and seeing the Son looking back at Him (the Father). That perspective is what gives meaning to the answer God gave to Moses when asked His name, and He said, “I AM THAT I AM.” Exodus 3:14. Each side beholds the other, and each says I am THAT I am, both of them are the same One; they are both the whole, and hence why Jesus said, ” The Father and I are one.” That separation of consciousness into parts is what I call the partitioning of awareness, which produces the experience of the other within a unity. This process of partitioning of awareness is the foundation of relationship itself. The one became two. Because there were two, it was now possible to meet each other’s needs. This satisfies a fundamental aspect of love. With an “other,” there is now the possibility of someone to love and be loved by.
Susan and Isak both contributed their perspectives. Susan wanted to make sure that my model contained both separateness and real, individualized personalities for the Son and the Father. She wanted the spirit of both Father and Son to be distinct enough to have their own consciousness and free will. She wanted a conception in which the Son could, in principle, have chosen otherwise and has freely chosen obedience to the Father. I agree that such must be the case. I freely acknowledge that the specifics of how this distinction was implemented are a mystery that I can only explain qualitatively. My only real clue is to suggest that the distinction, however real, arose out of a oneness rather than alongside it.
Isak offered the image of one point becoming two by the two “time-sharing the awareness of I,” and each side selects only the slices of the awareness of the assigned/chosen identity. The time slice of awareness switches so fast that both perceive the experience of “I” continuously. Susan offered the analogy of the rainbow: each of us carries some real portion of the one white light; none of us is the whole of it. Both of these analogies suggest that the experiences of two separate persons could arise from a single source. Having established that two can arise from literal oneness, the more practical consideration is how we, in the human experience, may also participate in that oneness of harmony of the Father and Son. This is the oneness of Father and Son that the Biblical interpretation commonly refers to. Paul alludes to this goal, this end, when he says that oneness is the end goal of life in Christ: “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
And notice that the partition and the multitude are the same act at two scales. The Father holding Himself as an “other” is the first forgetting — the first One choosing an identity, for the sake of allowing relationship, and to regard the relationship between two. The making of every soul is that same move repeated without number: God permitting points within Himself to forget the whole, so that each feels itself a separate “I.” This is why we can be of the same essence/substance/origin as the Father and Son, and yet be so blind to it that we act like animals, never suspecting that we are aspects of the very source we are violating. Forgetting is what buys the freedom of free will. We do not see clearly the consequence of choosing to act out the nature of the Father vs. acting on the attraction of the animal desires.
The result of this blindness, the inability to see that we are a cell in the body of the great oneness of God, allows us to have a real sense of self/ego and free will. We can honestly feel free to act independently of God’s will when we do not see the oneness of all and the certain consequence of violating the nature of the One. Knowing the true nature of God and the structure of the universe validates the Oneness as factual reality. The feeling and knowing of the Holy Spirit’s pull on the heart validates the necessity of following God’s way. When we are convinced by these signs, teachers and knowledge, and by the leading of the heart, we can rend the veil of the illusion of separateness. We can choose to follow the way and Law of God and be drawn back into conscious harmony with Him. We can freely choose, with open eyes, to act in harmony with the very nature of reality and do so as a service to God, as a sacrifice.
When we have accepted the actual oneness of God, Christ, man, and all of creation as the fundamental underlying model of reality, we can understand the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice. The barrier of the mystery of “why was it necessary for Christ to die for our sins” is lowered. Knowledge and understanding of the necessity of Christ’s death and suffering for our sins allow us to believe by knowledge and faith. We can study and decide whether the model is plausibly true, if the spiritual implications follow logically, and most importantly, whether we are willing to sacrifice indulging our animal lusts. With this sequential cause-and-effect explanation, it is easier for man to accept the repair that Christ offers as operationally effective and see the necessity of the repair of the rupture created by our sin. With a logical-mechanical model of reality, we can see the implications of accepting Christ’s sacrifice for salvation. With understanding of the construction of the universe, we can see the costs and benefits, and understand the justice and necessity of the plan as it was implemented. With knowledge of the fundamental nature of the universe, we can see that reconciling the relationship broken by sin requires Christ’s sacrifice. Logic and understanding make the decision comprehensible, and the choice to accept Christ’s atonement is both attractive and costly, requiring us to submit to God’s law and way rather than continuing in pandering to our lusts.
IV. The mechanism I was missing: the Father draws us through the Son
Now to the heart of it. I had built my account of salvation as a mutual drawing. Christ pulls, and I respond; He calls, and I answer; and step by step I am drawn closer and made like Him as I accept His invitation. I described it as His pulling on my will until His will, felt inside me, became the option I chose. Susan’s insight deepened by noting that it is God who is pulling us through Christ.
Susan’s first insight: it is not Christ who draws us first — it is the Father. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). Before we ever sincerely turn, the Father is already drawing. We already carry the light of Christ. “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1:9). The drawing is the Father’s act, reaching us through the Son.
Susan’s second insight: This is the mechanism that completes the cross essay I wrote for this week. That essay answered the legal half of the relationship resolution. The commit is a violation within God’s own being; His purity must discharge its wrath against it to the point of death. This is where salvation lives. Christ was made sin for us and God executed His required/automatic/necessary death-dealing wrath against our sin. Christ took the death we deserved. Whoever is hidden in Him is shielded from God’s wrath, as Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock. “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by.” (Exodus 33:22). Being in Christ is the covering; God’s wrath is executed against sin to purify His being/body of impurity, and the ledger is cleared. The wall separating God and man falls. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
But clearing the wall is not yet a changed heart. That is what the second half of Susan’s insight provides. What the cleared wall opens is reconnection to the Father’s love. When we accept Christ and pass from under wrath to peace with the Father, even while we are still far from perfect, that relationship with the Father is itself the new heart. The empty place in us, the one we kept trying to fill with everything else, is filled by the Father’s love. It is being loved like that that allows us to love back. “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The change of heart is not a separate gift added on after pardon; the change of heart is the restored relationship. So the full mechanism has two faces of one act: the cross shields us in Christ from the wrath that purity must spend on sin, and through the door that opens, the Father’s love draws us — and the love is the power that turns us.
This is what I had left out of the essay. Susan’s insight describes departing from sin as something we cannot accomplish by our own power. To follow sin is to follow the animal instincts, which we do even when we know better. When we witness to and recommend resisting sin as God’s requirement for relationship, the person we are witnessing to hears the old covenant: keep the rules and live. That is true, but it is not the whole truth. The difference between the old and new covenant is that it is “by the power of Christ” that we are drawn. The power of Christ is the reconnection with the Father’s love through the Son. We are not able to do any of it. We cannot pay the debt of our sin, and we cannot change our hearts to be like Him. If we only speak of obedience, we have preached law, not the grace and transformation of the gospel.
V. Justification, then sanctification — and how to picture the pull
This is the cause-and-effect mechanism, and it has the two movements Susan named.
- First, justification: in a single moment, even the prostitute who sold herself the night before can say I choose You, Christ, and right there peace is made with the Father — not because she is yet changed, but because the Son’s righteousness is reckoned to her and the relationship is opened. The thief on the cross had minutes, and heard, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
- Then, sanctification: the long road that follows, in which the Lord “leadeth me in the paths of righteousness” (Psalm 23:3), failing and obeying and failing and obeying, until the changed heart is worked all the way through and we are at last presented to the Father without blemish.
I had not considered that the briefly expressed, but momentarily sincere sinner’s prayer would be effective for salvation. It did not seem that a single moment at a Billy Graham altar was sufficient dedication to be a salvation transaction. But according to the testimonies Susan relayed, the key may be genuine acceptance, even for a moment. And, as per Susan’s testimony stories, perhaps the bar is even lower. Perhaps even skeptical acceptance may be enough.
Salvation and justification are synonyms. They are both aspects of a right/pure relationship with the Father. These two names are two aspects of the same state of relationship once established with the Son. The gate, the initiation, the determinant of the opening of that relationship, is the sincere acceptance of the gift of Jesus’ death on the cross as atonement for my sins. I think for this saving/justifying relationship to be adequate, there must be a threshold degree of desire and voluntary action that is sufficient to open the relationship and receive the gift of salvation/justification of my soul. But as we saw, it is the Father’s love that is the draw that produces our desire.
Sanctification is the ongoing process of maturation and purification, of becoming like the Son. The Son is the perfect pattern of the God-man, and acting as He acts creates harmony between God and man. It is the process of living daily with Jesus Christ as Lord (master, pattern of emulation, lawgiver and standard of perfect relationship). It is through listening to and following the voice of conscience (the Holy Spirit guiding us and speaking to our hearts) that we develop the habits of character, which imprint the soul, lay up treasure in heaven, and establish us as sons in mature relationship. “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” (Romans 8:19)
It is through feeding on (daily reading) the Word, the Bible, the words of law, prophecy, wisdom, and developing understanding that we know His way. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27). The transformation process that the open relationship makes possible provides us with that standard of identification of Him, and the transformation that occurs because of it. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” (Psalm 119:11).
Thus, the process of coming close to Him, developing character and maturity in Christ, and full relationship with the Father includes the sequence: the Father draws, through the Son; I feel the pull and answer; He draws again, I answer again; and call by call, answer by answer, I am brought closer, not by my own engine but by His. “Draw me, we will run after thee” (Song of Solomon 1:4).
VI. The seed, the soil, and the honest ask
This reframes what we are actually asking of a person when we witness to them, and it sends us back to the parable of the sower. If there is ever a genuine moment of a sincere desire to make Jesus Lord, to be cleansed of sin, to enter relationship with the Father — then a real seed has been planted. But a seed is only a beginning; it is not a harvest. Some of it falls on the path and is snatched away; some on rocky ground and withers when affliction comes; some among thorns and is choked by the cares and riches of the world; and some on good soil, where it bears thirty, sixty, a hundredfold (Matthew 13:3-23). The sinner’s prayer is a seed of exactly that kind.
Susan, who regularly listens to podcast testimonies of people who have come to faith, has heard more than one of them report being changed even by a prayer prayed without sincerity. The evidence seems to be that Christ honors any real movement toward Him — however small, however halting. It appears that He continues to speak to the heart/conscience/inner voice, drawing those who have called on Him. The work of the Holy Spirit appears to begin on the heart when we express any level of openness to accepting Jesus as Savior.
As I have said, salvation (justification – being clean before God) is the beginning. It does not remove the necessity that follows. The seed that has been planted must be tended for it to grow. The growth is sanctification: becoming habitually pure, which is the development of Christ’s character. “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope:” (Romans 5:1-4)
I believe developing the habits and character of sanctification lays up treasure in heaven. I think the parable of the talents may refer to the work of developing our character in Matthew 25:14–30, where Jesus tells of a master who entrusts his servants with 5, 2, and 1 talents. I think it may be that those who do not develop their character on earth will have little authority in heaven. “If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” (Luke 16:11) This may also connect with the parable of the minas, “…because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities.” (Luke 19:17) There is the implication that the kingdom of Heaven has authority and faithful service corresponds to ruleship/control of some type.
This may segue with the verses regarding being salted with fire. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” (1 Corinthians 3:11-15). “Every one shall be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49). This may correspond to a man’s works and character. The reward will probably be for the righteous works and righteous character. And this reward may be in terms of ability and authority. The key concerns in these warnings are “he shall suffer loss,” and “everyone will be salted with fire.” This means that everyone will suffer loss. I believe that loss will be to the extent that we have not developed Godly character and our works are unrighteous. This is the process of sanctification. The deathbed confession is good, but it does not leave time to lay up treasure in heaven.
So the honest invitation to faith is not “Say these words, and you are done.” It is: “Come, take the first real step — and then learn the ways of righteousness by reading the Word; meditate on those works to sensitize your heart to the ways and character of Christ; listening to the Holy Spirit in each moment to guide in each situation; prayer for relationship with God, alignment with His will, transformation into his image, petition for our needs, warfare against eavil, worship and awe in his presence, partnership in His establishing the Kingdom and pure church, and cleansing from the sin and error of this world; repent and mourn for our errors; and settling the score in all relationship, loving neighbor as self, leave no debts unpaid; and ask for God’s love to flow through you, His love be your love, and draw others to Him.” The sinner’s prayer opens a relationship; it does not complete the maturation of character or accomplish the works we are called to do in building His Kingdom (purity of governance in His way of the city, state, nation), bringing harmony to His church (community peace, cooperation in accomplishment, creating a beautiful environment), enjoying His life lived through you (loving self, using your gifts to make life better), and bringing the full joy He desires to experience as you relate to others (sevice, loving neighbor).
Susan’s story of people who made an insincere confession of faith is evidence that God is willing to take even the smallest gesture of invitation as an opening/authorization to enter a person’s heart. This is basically a restatement of the rules of freedom, space, and authority over substance. He enters with the level of permission granted. He spoke to the hearts of those who had asked that He speak to them. I’ve heard it said, “God is a gentleman.” “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20). The subjective experience of those who ask Jesus to be their savior reported feeling the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. It appears they felt the draw toward maturity in Christ after that initial gesture.
That is a comforting thought: God continues to work on the soul that gives Him an opening. But there is another point about discipleship and maturation that has civilization-level implications. I believe we have seen it play out after the Billy Graham era, the Jesus Movement of the 60’s, and Campus Crusade for Christ-type evangelism. A great deal of effort is placed on salvation. I know they have prayer counselors and make referrals to churches for discipleship at the large evangelism rallies. But I think there is a large gap between the practicalities of discipleship. I don’t think any ministry teaches that, but there is an easy assumption that a moment of salvation is the major part of the work. The emotional moment of surrender at a Billy Graham-style revival is a start, but it is not the same as growing into a mature, world-changing, Christ-representing Christian. The initiatory commitment does not, by itself, produce the transformation that yields character and fruit. And I believe Christendom was lulled, across the years of the great stadium revivals, into imagining that a profession of faith secured from everyone would be enough to change the world. It was not. The plain fact is that most of the people who walked into the stadium walked out with the same habits and character they brought in. Somewhere the impression settled in that saying the sinner’s prayer was what it meant to be a Christian. That step is necessary — but a very large piece was missing, and the newly converted soul who has just confessed Jesus as Lord needs to be told plainly that there is far more ahead. That confession is only the first step on a long, hard road of trial, endurance, and the slow building of character.
This confusion (or mis-emphasis) has to be countered openly. The Christian culture needs to be warned and counseled to reframe the invitation to salvation as an initiation only. Salvation is supremely important; it must not be underemphasized, but it must be put in proper perspective. Your life will not suddenly change. (Having said that, you might experience a miracle; many people do. The first miracle is a kind of first fruit, a promise of what is to come with maturity. After that you will probably have to work very hard for every inch of transformation.). It is very easy for the eager evangelist, the new believer, to sell salvation. It’s flashy and exciting; it’s being saved from death and separation from the Father. Salvation is a very good thing; it’s what Jesus died for. The entire arc of Biblical history was the record of God preparing for the Messiah, in code so that Satan would not thwart it, and it would still be recognized by those who were looking. God went through the entire trouble of the incarnation, the arc of history, so that you and I could claim the gift that God wants us to have so that He can be in an intimate love relationship with us – living through us and in us. But it’s only a start.
The problem is that when people emphasize salvation, and people who call themselves Christians have not been regenerated, the watching culture, everyone outside the Christian subculture, sees people who act like everyone else acts, and they say, “Why would I be part of a group of people that say “do x, and don’t do y,” and when you look at them they don’t do x, and do do y?” That is an extremely poor witness for the power of God in transforming lives. And they are right. The problem is that such people who said the sinner’s prayer and didn’t do the work of sanctification are not even trying to access the transformative power of God. They are just acting according to their animal lusts, and calling themselves Christians, bringing dishonor to the name of Christ, and squarely acting out the role of “hypocrite.”
In summary, the “say this prayer, now you are saved, now you are a new man in Christ” message gets heard as though the decisive work were finished at the altar. The mature Christian, by contrast, is the person who has followed that moment of acceptance with years of study and discipline. He has been tried by loss and pain. He has failed to be what Scripture prescribed, and he wanted, and he has humbled himself, mourned his failure, confessed to those he has wronged, and repented to God for the pain inflicted on HIm — God, as resident in the heart of every man lived/experience the sin committed, (“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight…” Psalm 51:4). And finally, did I make it right? Did I square the deal/pay the debt/remunerate for the cost of the violation? When we are humble to that extent, of no reputation, living only to serve the God that lives in and through us, we are truly “Christ-in-us/Christians. This is sanctification. It happens through repeated trials, failures, and renewals. In the process we become new men, reborn in Christ. This transformation takes time. It requires committing to the discipline of transforming the old man.
Everything turns on keeping the distinction clear between salvation (justification with God) — and sanctification (the long maturation into Christ’s likeness). Without that distinction, people can focus on saving their own soul from hell and think that is all there is. Others see changes in themselves, and grow enthusiastic about evangelism and the saving of souls. Both are good, but neither personal salvation nor preaching salvation is enough. The real work of everyday life is the harder work of overcoming the animal nature and becoming like Him. Salvation is the first step on a long road; sanctification is the deep, transformative work where life is lived every day, all day, for a whole life. If we blur the two, then Christianity will appear to the world like a psychological fix by people who are unrealistic about life and expect their lives to get better by praying/having faith for miraculous changes. Miracles are good/wonderful and do happen, but most of the time we have to take out the garbage and pick up the kids after soccer practice.
Again, if the sinner’s prayer is the focus, there will be people in whom the seed takes and grows, but the good soil was one of four types, and the other three. As we discussed, we need to help people become good soil, and that is hard work for both the teacher and the disciple. Often both will grow in the process of tending the soil. If we don’t tend to the discipleship part, the body of Christ will appear impotent, as people continue in their old ways, appearing morally indistinguishable from the surrounding culture. A campaign that offers Christ as the solution while emphasizing only salvation will fail. Sanctification — becoming like Him — is the single greatest tool we have for cultural restoration, because when men actually love their neighbor as themselves, prosperity and peace follow in their wake. There are no shortcuts. We must be a holy people (not just individuals, but all of humanity) who expect holiness as the heart of the culture; where that expectation is absent, no lasting change comes, to the individual or to the society.
So when we isolate the question to, “Can a superficial commitment and a bare request for forgiveness really touch the soul and shape one’s experience in eternity?” The testimonies Susan has gathered show that, for some people, that initiatory gesture of acceptance and submission was indeed enough to crack the hard shell of ego and cultural capture. But I remain adamant that a strong, overt distinction must be drawn between that first gesture and what it means to be a real, mature, effective, Christ-power-manifesting Christian. It is telling that neither Susan nor I would say the sinner’s prayer as adults until we had been persuaded of its truth. We both came to the same surrender, the same heartfelt/all-in commitment, but by different routes. The results were identical; we are both working toward sanctification. Each of us wanted to understand the mechanics first. I came through science and metaphysics; Susan came through being called, responding, and God gradually changing her heart. The end result is the same: both of us continue the daily labor of seeking understanding, being open to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and spending time each day in the Word, becoming familiar with His voice and hearing His words rise. The process never ends. The goal is to run the race, love His law, and not turn against Him or bring His name disgrace. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7)
And that is exactly why testimony matters so much in this work. It illustrates the need to be convinced of the truth of His Way, for without understanding there is no passion, no commitment, and no real belief in the efficacy or the reality of the way of Christ. Testimony models the life of Christ and shows how the journey begins, and our lives illustrate where it leads. Human beings infer meaning most naturally through stories — a story is life in condensed form, and it resonates with the way we actually learn, by watching how life responds to various forces in various situations. So testimony is essential to bringing souls into the Kingdom. There is no single formula for how God will draw them, because the drawing is individual – we are all different; we all respond to different symbols, gestures, models. What we can do is tell our stories, illustrate the principles of life with Scripture to show the ideal, be the best example of who God wants us to be, truly care about those with whom we share the good news, and disciple them in maturation. The love of the brethren is the real witness. We are to be Christ’s hands and God’s heart extended. We are the vehicle that the Father uses to draw His sheep to Him. His love coming through us is the real draw.
Closing
The Sunday discussion was initially focused on how a death two thousand years ago could be effective in accounting for sin/cancelling my debt by accepting the sacrifice of the Son, and thus restoring relationship with the Father. But that discussion was already written in last week’s essay. Instead, the discussion centered on the transformation of the living human heart. After the discussion, my conception has enlarged. I now see that process as the iterative process of God calling me through Christ. It is my duty/job/role to seek, find, and, by action, habit, and character, move, step by step, a little closer to His character and way.
Susan’s insight about the Father drawing man through the Son provided new insight into the source of the pull which draws a man toward God/Sanctification. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” (John 6:44). This insight aligns with my perspective: the Son bears the wrath of our sin, as required, because God keeps a perfect account of evil and exercises His destructive/death-dealing, cleansing from His body, wrath against every sin. The clearing of the books of sin is the foundation of the establishment. Christ is the way to the Father. “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6). Through that opened door, the Father’s love speaks to us through the still small voice, the voice of conscience/the Holy Spirit. That is the missing relationship that we all feel, and nothing is secure until we have that lock on eternity. Thus, God calls us through Christ. If we accept Christ as Savior, we have opened the door to the source of all force, the Father who draws us. He calls, and we answer. The path between salvation and sanctification is long, perhaps lifelong, but that is our goal: to appear before Him without blemish.
So the mechanism is this: the Father draws through the Son; the cross removes what kept us out; the Father’s reconnected love is the power that draws the heart; it is our part to answer the pull. “We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19. That is how it works. That is what kind of world we live in. We live in a world built of the substance/of the essence of the God whose nature is love. The cost of establishing a relationship after it was broken by sin was the perfect accounting of cleansing His world of sin, which requires the death of sin. It was the giving of His own Son/Himself to die, and delivering the death blow to His Son, who was made sin for us. By accepting that credit for sin established by Jesus Christ, our account is clean. This opens the door to us, as clean spirits. The cross is the door back to Himself. He stands on the other side of it, drawing us to Him.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 27, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
What Kind of World Would Require the Cross?
The Plan of Existence, From First Principles
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 25 June 2026
Occasion. Charlie asked me, in our Thursday evening conversation, what the hard question was — the one Christianity could not answer for me, the one that made me leave it and go searching through forty religions before I came back. I told him. It was not “does God exist,” and it was not “did Jesus rise.” It was this: “What kind of world do we actually live in, such that one man’s death two thousand years ago could put me right with God? How could such an offering have been causally effective? What is the nature of a universe where death is required for sin, and a substitutionary sacrifice is meaningful?” Draw me the line. Connect, step by step, from Jesus dying on a cross to me being able to stand in the presence of God. No one I asked could draw that line, and a religion whose central claim I could not make sense of was a religion I could not hold with integrity. I was not understanding something really basic about life. I had to know and understand it. So I left and went exploring the world’s religions to find a clue to understand the fundamental nature of existence.
Over the years, I built an answer. I have not found it laid out this way in any book, and I will not pretend it is anything more than the account that has become adequate for me. Charlie asked me to write it down. Here it is — told as plainly and as much like a story as I can manage. It is becoming closer to an intelligible, coherent story of how existence arose (assuming God exists). Having understood the fundamental platform upon which existence stands, more functions become possible to answer. We are trying to understand the meta-story: What is the purpose of life, and why and how does it have to include the cross to fulfill that purpose?
One paragraph spoiler: God is everything. We are God experiencing God. God has worked it out so that aspects of Himself, within His being, are capable of exercising free will that opposes His central purpose and nature. He is capable of this compartmentalization by forgetting or minimizing aspects of His awareness, so that, from points of view within His being, individual points feel/think/believe they are separate from the totality of God’s existence and awareness. It is this limited perspective that allows for free will. God is capable of any action within Himself, including creating parts that forget or do not perceive that they are part of the totality of reality. It is in the recognition of the integration of that totality that the perspective of life emerges, in which Jesus’ sacrifice can be understood as logically necessary to re-establish a relationship with the estranged, rogue aspects of God’s being.
I. Begin with God, alone
Picture the situation God is in before anything exists. He is alone, because there is nothing else — no world, no angels, no company. Set aside, for now, the question of where He came from; whether He arose from nothing or simply always was. That is a question that requires an answer beyond our minds’ comprehension. We have no cause-and-effect frame that allows us to even imagine something from nothing. And we have no comprehension of the edge of infinity where beginnings happen or continue forever. The best we can do is put it in terms that disguise the fact that we have no clue how God arose. We say, “He is the uncaused source of all that would ever be, and the question of His own origin is one we are not equipped to ask. Take Him simply as He is.” But we really cannot justify that. We simply have to accept existence and the God who underlies its manifestation.
And here is the one thing about Him that sets the whole story in motion: His nature is love. “…for God is love” 1 John 4:8. By His own self-identification, that is what He is. Now follow what that means, because it contains a problem. Love is not a thing a being can have all by itself. A heart whose very nature is love can only be satisfied by love freely returned to it. Love that has no one to receive it and no one to give it back is love-starved. So a God who is alone, and whose nature is love, is a God whose own being presses toward a someone — someone who could love Him in return. There was no such someone. He would have to make one.
II. Why free will — and therefore why evil
But notice the trap inside that requirement. Love, to be love at all, must be freely given. A love that is forced, programmed, or compelled is not love; it is a puppet bowing on a string, and it would satisfy nothing in a heart that wanted to be truly loved. So the creature God creates to love Him must be genuinely free, which means genuinely able to refuse Him, to turn against Him, to choose evil. You cannot have the one without the other. The very same freedom that makes real love possible makes real evil possible, by the identical door.
(Aside: Evil is any act within God’s creation that opposes/violates His nature. Evil is defined by Good. Good is that which God does and is, and Evil is that which He is not. Man can choose either, but we are condemned to death when we choose evil, as God cannot allow evil within His being and kills/eliminates any evil that arises within His being.)
This is why I say God did not stumble and accidentally let evil into His good world. He opened the door to evil on purpose, because it was the only door through which freely-given love could also walk in. Charlie noted that this is the only way a parent can ever be effective. You have to let the child choose, sometimes suffer the consequences. Children learn through cause and effect and by instruction. You can warn him in advance about the pitfalls. But you can’t warn him about everything, and you can’t warn him his whole life. You do not leave him to discover everything on his own like a feral animal. There is protection and nurturance in childhood, followed by gradual exposure to more serious real-world threats, until he is ready to defend himself alone against them. Parents are God’s agents; His hands extended. He desires to be unseen and loved for the law that we follow. A performance displayed when expected is not as meaningful as a spontaneous expression of appreciation. That is the job of parents: to provide protective nurturance and education in wisdom and learning the ways of the world. Parenting is controlled threat exposure. It creates a real person, skilled in the ways of life. God wanted real children who would become adults and chose to follow His way freely/out of love for His world, which is His body/mind/person extended. He desires love from real spirits, rather than puppets that He directs. It was a risk; they might not love Him. He bet it all and invested His being in creating the universe, feeling the pain required to make life meaningful.
III. The animal, and the backwardness of God’s way
Now look closely at what God actually made: man, who is, among other things, an animal. He is more than an animal — he is made in God’s image, able to choose God’s way — but he is built of appetite and passion. And here is the thing worth seeing clearly: the animal wants the very goods God made to be good. Food, pleasure, mating, safety, status — these are not evil; God made them and called them good. The animal simply wants them without measure, for himself, and now. God’s way is those same goods held in their right proportion and turned outward — appetite mastered rather than served, your portion spent to lift the wounded man rather than hoarded for yourself.
And as for the animal’s perspective, the priority is inverted. It makes no sense to pour yourself out for someone else when everything in you is built to secure yourself first. So loving God — which, since you cannot embrace an immaterial God with your arms, can only mean living the way God lives — requires the animal to reject the very center of what it is. That free rejection of the flesh’s demand, chosen for the sake of God, is what love of God actually consists of in the flesh. It is the only embrace available to us. And because the animal is real and strong and central in us, the failure is not occasional but universal: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Every one of us, left to ourselves, follows the animal’s way, and often, even when we do not want to.
IV. Why purity must answer sin with wrath
Here is the part that sounds harsh until you see that it is structural, not moody. God is perfectly pure. Purity is not a temper He is in; it is what He is, all the way down. And perfect purity cannot simply coexist with its own violation. It is not that God works Himself up into anger at sin and could, on a better day, choose to let it slide. It is that holiness reflexively and non-negotiably consumes what defiles it, the way light does not decide to abolish darkness but simply does, by being light. So everything that is against God’s nature is against Him to the point of death; what is evil cannot live in His presence, because His presence is purity, and purity annihilates its opposite. The person who sins is within His body/being/existence; He feels the imperfection, walls Himself off from it, and eventually eliminates it through the death of the rebellious/imperfect/against-His-nature aspect of Himself which has arisen.
That is the wall the whole story runs into. A holy God and a sinful people cannot be reconciled by goodwill and a handshake. The sin has to be answered — fully, to the point of the death it warrants — or God would be denying His own nature. And understand why that matters even to us: a God who could wink at the violation of His purity would not be the pure God whose love is worth wanting. The very holiness that makes Him worth loving is the holiness that cannot abide our sin. The wrath is not a flaw in the love. It is the other face of it.
V. The long preparation, and the One who could bear it
So the plan was laid before the world began — “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) — and God spent ages preparing a people who could understand it when it came. Moses and Aaron, the prophets and the kings, the whole long story; and the altars, the goats and lambs offered year upon year, teaching one pattern into the bones of a nation: sin costs a death, and a substitute can bear that death in your place. Beneath all of it ran the growing promise that One was coming who would save.
And then He came, and what He announced was, in effect, this: God hates the sin and in His purity cannot abide it; His holiness must discharge its full wrath against every violation, to the point of death; and I am the one who can receive that wrath and not be destroyed by it. Only He could. Being God and being without sin of His own, the Son could absorb what would simply annihilate any of us and still live after having borne it.
VI. The substitution and the settled ledger
Here is the mechanism, this is the line no one could draw for me. At the cross, Christ takes onto Himself the sin that was truly mine and truly yours — He is “made… sin for us, who knew no sin” 2 Corinthians 5:21. When I put my whole heart in Him, I am placed into Him, so that when God turns His gaze on me, He sees the Son; and the sin I committed He sees borne there by the Son; and He pours out His full and perfectly just wrath upon it. He took on the sin of the entirety of humanity, for all time, at the cross. That wrath is the death Christ suffered. He literally died, as is the judgment against all who have ever sinned. That death-dealing judgment has been spent against Jesus. It was already discharged, and Jesus experienced it. It is only for us to accept the required credit/payment for the death that has already been exercised. It is being in Christ that allows us the protection, the union with His being that allows us to fully transfer our sin to Him so that His experience of the pain and extinction due our sin touches our being and cleanses our souls, and renders us fit for being in the presence of the Almighty.
God, in this sense, is an accountant who never lets a single sin go unpunished and never sweeps anything under the rug. He does not pretend the debt away; that would violate His justice as surely as ignoring the sin would violate His purity. He establishes relationship only when the account is completely clear. And by my confessing my sin and letting Christ be sin for me, the account is cleared — the debt genuinely paid, justice genuinely satisfied — and I am free. Not because the wrath was waived, but because it was discharged in full, on Him, in my place. That is the line from His death to my standing clean before God: my sin was really transferred, the penalty was really paid, and the books are really balanced.
VII. What is then asked of us
This is where things can go wrong because of our misunderstanding. There is a difference between living life well, fully putting yourself into everything you do, and trying to be like Christ with every fiber of your being, but failing, and closing the gap between our effort and inevitable imperfection. The closing of that gap, the restoration of relationship with God, is wholly God’s act. It is accomplished through the sovereign act of Christ. Nothing I do can close it, nothing I can do can force it. My best effort could never atone for my sin. Good works do not balance out sin. Only the expression of God’s death-dealing, vaporizing of sin-wrath at sin balances the ledger. God must eliminate sin, and His total, unmitigated, destructive wrath burns away the imperfection. He is casting sin utterly out of His kingdom/universe/self. He is eliminating sin by sending it to its full/utter/complete death.
The cross is the place where God spent His full fury on all the sin that would ever happen for all time, and gave Jesus Christ control of who He cleansed. He directed His wrath at Jesus Christ fully, who was made sin for us. “…He made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin…” 2 Corinthians 5:21. The anger the Father expressed toward the Son, that the Son felt, was complete, total, and utter. There was no spot, speck, or remnant of sin that was unaccounted for in its cleansing/destruction. It is the accounting for all sin, and attributing the debt against God paid, that cannot be added to by my good works. But receiving that finished work, appropriating that credit, dedication of my sin to that fire of destruction, is not a passive thing. The heart that truly casts itself into Christ’s protection from the wrath of the Father at sin, confesses, repents, and gives itself to living His way. This giving is not effective as a strategy to avoid punishment or to get into paradise (although those are certainly byproducts); it is effective because it is an expression of the heart in gratitude for His law – His perfect standard of being that pleases the Father and gives Him joy in living through us; it is in the appreciation for creating a creation worthy of living in conscious attention for its interest, its fulfillment, and its continued adventure; it is for creating a plan for free will, error, rescuing, and being willing to pay so high a price for reconcilliation. It is for creating a creation so grand and glorious that it is worthy of living in for eternity. It is a complete and total giving of self, in love, to the creator of the universe, in service to giving Him the experience of living in the joy of my experience living in His perfect way. It is in gratitude for the purchase of my pardon. It is the committed turning, because that is what gratitude for receiving the pardon looks like from the inside. A heart unwilling to turn has not actually trusted, loved, felt the gravity of the violation of sin, or the gratitude for the reprieve. The freedom Christ buys is not freedom to keep following the animal with a clear conscience; it is the chosen commitment to live God’s way, to sacrifice satisfaction of the animal pull. And this out of gratitude, not out of payment. Justification is His gift, given from His side. Our commitment is the appropriate, grateful, conscious, willful, purposeful response to that gift.
Closing: the plan of existence
So this is the answer to the question that once drove me out of the faith, and it turns the question on its head. We do not live in a world where the cross is a strange or arbitrary intrusion. We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. A God whose nature is love had to make free creatures who could love or refuse Him. Their freedom made evil real. Evil is simply the violation of what/who God is. God is the entirety of all creation, and the choice of a part of Himself to violate His nature must be destroyed to maintain His integrity. The Son, the Word, God Himself in the Son/as the Son, created the entirety of the universe. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” John 1:3. As such, the Son could shield those within Himself from the wrath of the Father to those who committed to being within Him. This covering, hiding in the cleft of the rock, being in Christ, is the option we have, the contract that Christ offers to us, that allows our evil to coexist with the absolute purity of the Father, in whom we live and move and have our being. Christ was able to discharge the wrath of the Father against sin by being made sin for us, which He experienced to the point of death. Jesus Christ, who is God in spirit, and clothed Himself in the body of a man, suffered the full weight of God’s wrath bodily in a way that was impossible for us to experience and live. We are guilty, and He was perfect, sinless, and the wrath directed against Him was without warrant; therefore, He can apply the credit of having experienced the required death for sin to our account, and the ledger of God’s perfect accounting of sin and death is balanced. The death-dealing wrath of the Father is completely and inescapably effective and required against every sin to maintain/be His nature. God the Father, the Almighty, the perfect, must eliminate every sin with an application of wrath and death. Jesus Christ was able to take the full blow, the total exercise of annihilation from the Father, and died physically, from the force of God’s blows against His flesh. But the warrant exercised against Jesus was without merit, and He arose, being raised because death cannot hold the man against whom no sin is accounted.
Thus, the credit of death that Satan stole/unlawfully extracted from Jesus was paid against a debt that He had not incurred. The credit of Jesus dying for a sin He did not commit is an open ledger, an open entry, a credit for a paid death, and available for redemption. It is that credit that can be called in, in faith, recognizing its efficacy and power to overcome and pay for the death we owe. In payment of the debt, we are both freely given and fully reconciled with God the Father Himself. It is through His Son, who took the place of the condemned on our behalf, took the death we owed, and gave us the opportunity for eternal life, that we are justified before the Father. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
We are living a life that is lived by God. He desires to experience our expression of love toward Him by our obedience, our desire to live His Way, and experience that love of having made that choice in the tension of the other lover, which is our innate love of the animal experience. We are the someones God created so that He could experience love through our daily choice to live His Way. It is our living in His Way that our love for Him is returned/felt, and experienced by Him. The cross was the price God Himself experienced to a credit that the sinful-repentant man could redeem. He died in the hope that we would choose to accept that credit to pay the ledger entry of death we owed because of our sin. As gods, as men created in His image, He gave us freedom to choose sin while living/being inside His body. We were given the sovereignty to choose to live within His Way or choose the flesh satisfaction of the animal as our lover. The freedom He gave is our opportunity to freely choose glory or the fate of the animal. His sacrifice, accepting it, living it with the gratitude of a man given reprieve on death row, gives us the opportunity for a life of relationship with Him forever, whether in the body or present with Him in Spirit. There was no other world God could have created in which a God of perfect purity and love could have experienced what love requires (freedom to choose another seductive/attractive lover, and yet chose Him instead). There is no other bridge across the gulf between His purity and our sin than the one He built with the sacrifice and substitutionary penalty, accounting for our sin, than to experience it within His own body and attribute it to our account.
Charlie asked for the drama, passion, and stakes of creation and the redemption to be told as a story. He asked me to draw it out, to illustrate the steps of that story one frame at a time. That is the medium the human psyche is wired to receive meaning and establish understanding. Maybe someday that actual graphic will be created. In the meantime, this is that story in words. It is ready for the eventual illustration in picture, word, and song. The world is the shape it is because love requires the freedom to choose another. The cross is the shape it is because we had to choose the freedom bought with the price of the pain and death of Him who created and is All.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 27, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts, Uncategorized
Stay and Let Your Light Shine: On Witnessing from Within Rather Than Leaving
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 25 June 2026
Occasion. Charlie and I had a long phone call on Thursday evening. Charlie left Mormonism for a version of Christianity that offered the liberty of Christ he felt was missing in the Mormon culture. Most of his family and many of the people he loves are still inside it. So the question he set before me was this: now that he confesses Jesus as Lord and Savior and the Bible as God’s revelation, and does not elevate the Book of Mormon above the Bible, what does he owe to the people who remain? That is, should he go back among them to witness and draw them to the same freedom he has found? I want to set down the answer we worked toward because I think it is the answer for more people than just Charlie, and because it runs counter to the message most new believers hear.
I. The question Charlie carried
Charlie was repulsed by how badly a religious system can fail when men are put in charge of conscience. The particulars are not what this essay is about, and I will not repeat them; what matters is the lesson he drew. When people place another scriptural authority above the Bible with its promise of liberty, men who profess direct revelation from God will use that currency to justify the usurpation of others’ will and act as the director and final authority in human affairs. Such men take the historical respect accorded to prophets, direct revelators, apostles, and holy men. They replace the free working of God’s Spirit with their voice, declaring themselves the directors of men’s lives, morals, possessions, and affairs. They sit in the seat that belongs to Scripture and conscience. There is no limit to the demands that such self-styled “messiahs” and “messengers from God” can justify. That realization renewed in Charlie an old grief. He loves people who are still inside the system. The question is what he owes them, whether it is worth trying, and the pain of going back into the system and enduring resistance.
He floated the option most ex-members consider, going back as a cultural visitor — the way a secular Jew might show up for Passover, present but no longer a believer, melded in without conviction. And underneath there were more questions. What is the danger? Is the grip so strong on those in the system that resistance is futile? Is there a danger to his soul being in that environment? Is the grip so strong that the loving thing is simply to leave them to find their own way out, and simply stay far away to protect himself and his family from the control and influence?
II. Stay — and put the Bible on top
My counsel to Charlie may not be what most pastors would say. I do not think that people who have come to Christ, who are living inside of a religious community, where their entire social system lies, should leave.
Here is the principle as I have come to hold it, and I have said it in the fellowship before, but I have never heard anyone else say it. When a person comes to genuine faith in Christ within a tradition that teaches a doctrine you believe is unBiblical, my counsel is usually not to leave. Stay and be a missionary, an evangelist, a witness to the light you have found. If you are in a non-Christian religion, put the Bible on top. Keep the relationships you have. Stay in the fellowship and the family that has filled your life. But set the Bible above every other authority and every other book. Establish it as the standard by which all the rest is now judged. Change your own heart first. And then be a light from within, sanctifying the house one person at a time. Your mission is to be a witness to the light until, little by little, the people around you have had their own hearts changed, and the group, religion, cult, family, or ashram is reformed from the inside out.
Three reasons stand behind that counsel. The first is that having a relationship is the precondition of influence. If you are not in a relationship with a person, you cannot influence them. If you are breaking bread with them, spending time, sharing life, then you are able to exert a constant influence. You cannot witness to people you have abandoned. The second is that the people inside the group are, in some sense, literally or functionally, your family. I lived in a yogic ashram for six years. I became close to them. They were like family. This is the norm. After so many years together, I was connected to them like family. To tear yourself out and announce, “I have found the truth; I am going to go find a different family,” the investment in the relationship is lost. The third is what often happens when people leave: they try to establish relationships in a new church where they have no relationships, which may or may not be successful or satisfying in finding others that they connect with. It is possible to end up adrift. The outcome may be trading a flawed family for no family. Paul’s word fits here: “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (1 Corinthians 7:20). To bloom where you are planted may require a great deal of effort, and it may or may not yield fruit, but witnessing to the unsaved in your own household is to bloom where you are planted. Every instinct may be to flee. Every person must make that decision. If it is dangerous, then leaving to protect the temple is wise and warranted.
III. The pattern of Jesus in the synagogue
Charlie noted that Jesus went to the synagogue His whole life. “As his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day” (Luke 4:16). He read in it, taught in it, worshiped in it. An honest assessment of the synagogue of His day was that it was practicing and teaching a tradition that was badly off course. It was run by men who would eventually conspire to kill Him. He did not separate Himself from it to be in a more pure fellowship. He stayed inside it and bore witness within it, right up until they tried to throw Him off a cliff.
As Charlie put it, when they pursue you to kill you, that is the time to join another church. Until then, you stay. The faithful witness works from inside the house until the house itself makes staying impossible. And note what Jesus prayed for His own: “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil” (John 17:15). The model is occupying, not extraction. I think this passage gives us a clue about the rapture.
IV. Why “the Bible on top” of all others
From what I have learned about it, I don’t believe Mormonism is an evil religion. I’ve learned a lot about Mormonism in the last few months, much of it from Leonard. So far, I have not heard anything that conflicts with Biblical scripture. It sounds like a religion that includes the Bible among its sacred texts, but it places the revelation of the Book of Mormon above the Bible. The Book of Mormon is presented as an undistorted revelation from God, received by a man who presented it as the undistorted revelation of the record preserved in the Bible. It sounds like it teaches moral/Godly behavior, family values, loving God, and following Christ. Because it is presented as being the revelation of a man who was asking what was the, who has added an extra book and come to esteem it above the Bible, with certain consequences that follow from that one move. So the problem is not a list of strange doctrines. The problem is structural, and it is the same structure that defines every closed system: a living human authority, or a continuing word, placed above the settled revelation of Scripture.
That single inversion is what does the damage, and it is worth naming exactly. Once you accept that a man’s new word can supersede the Bible, you have been trained to follow the next man who stands up and claims the word. You no longer get to weigh anything for yourself; you are always waiting on the latest authority to tell you what is true. You forfeit your freedom in Christ and live a man-directed life. This is the common signature of the cult, whatever its name: we alone have the truth, a single source of authority that decides everything, obedience prized above conscience, the hive mind, and the careful habit of keeping contradictory things on separate shelves in the mind so the cognitive dissonance never gets loud enough to force a choice.
Putting the Bible on top is precisely what dissolves that trap, because it restores the floor and restores your freedom. Every claim — including a leader’s, including a revelation’s — is now testable against a fixed standard you did not invent and no man controls. This is the Berean spirit Scripture commends: they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). It is Paul’s plain instruction: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It is the liberty Christ died to give: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Galatians 5:1). You do not have to leave the room to be free. You have to put the right book on top.
V. The cost of being the truth-teller inside
I will not pretend this is comfortable. It is not. Charlie has lived the cost of it. He is, by his own description, a contrarian — the boy who says the emperor has no clothes — and he stopped fitting in around sixteen or seventeen and stayed not-fitting for decades. Living inside a closed system while quietly refusing to toe the line is a hard way to exist; people sense you are not with them, and there is friction at every corner. He compared his earlier years inside to living in a brawl.
But discomfort is not a reason to leave. We are not called to an easy life; we are called to be like Him. Without trials, we will not grow. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth…” Hebrews 12:6 If sanctification were comfortable, it would not be meaningful. He wants us to grow “…unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Ephesians 4:13. If God wanted children, we would need only to say the sinner’s prayer once, and there would be no need for further lessons. be done. But the entire scripture is about growing up into full sonship. “…we are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.” Romans 8:29. But there is no growth of character in that. It’s a start, and a necessary beginning, but you only grow against resistance. The resistance of a roomful of people trying to pull you back is exactly the kind of resistance that grows a person.
I went through something somewhat like that challenge that required me to grow. When I first started counseling people in my Naturopathic practice, I just listened to them, heard them deeply, and they got better. But as I continued in practice, people with increasingly complex personality and relational issues came to see me. It was necessary for me to give stronger counsel to people to help those who were deeply entrenched in their disorders and habits. As a person, I grew up being agreeable to make friends. I just listened, never confronting anyone, because I had no strong opinions, and I just wanted to make them feel good. That didn’t help people grow. I eventually realized that it only makes people feel good, as they are going toward destruction – that is not love. But we should confront people. “…speaking the truth in love…” Ephesians 4:15. Listen before speaking. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” Proverbs 18:13. We earn the right to speak by hearing their full story. The spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down easily.
When Charlie was inside Mormonism, the system had a grip on him. Every exchange became a fight because he was still half-hooked. That hook is gone now. He has changed; the grip is broken; he has none of it left in him. Which means that if he went back now, it would not be the brawl it once was. He could say the true thing — even quote Christ in a room that does not want to hear it — calmly, kindly, and free, in a way he simply could not when he was still tangled in it. The witness who has been set free witnesses very differently from the one still struggling to get loose.
VI. Work the edges; build a new nucleus
Strategy matters, and the strategy is not a frontal assault. The center of a closed system is too well defended and too well supported from within; you will not break it head-on, and you will exhaust yourself trying. You go for the edges instead — the outliers, the questioners, the ones already quietly uneasy, the people whose shelves are starting to slide together. You find one like-minded soul, you nurture that friendship, you invite that person into fellowship, and you let a new center form — a small, strong nucleus that can grow and, in time, leaven the whole.
This is not conquest; it is infiltration by love and relationship. And Scripture knows the arithmetic of it: “Two are better than one… and a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). You are not trying to win a building. You are trying to find the one other person God has already been working on, and to bind your strength to theirs.
VII. Multiply by ones
The great commission spreads person to person, not by broadcast. I have a mailing list that goes out every week, and in all that time, exactly one person — Mike Sherman — ever actually came because of it. The open invitation, just dial in, does not work. What works is a friend who actually talks with you, who then brings another friend who wants in. That is the whole history of our own fellowship: Charlie invited Leonard, and Leonard came. I invited Mike, and Mike came. It moves by hand, one warm relationship at a time.
So the counsel is the same for anyone, anywhere — even a person with no church at all, even someone whose only fellowship right now is a bad crowd. Do not wait to find the perfect congregation. Find one other person, open the Word together on a Sunday, wrestle with the real questions, and invite a friend. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). That is how the culture actually changes — not by everyone funneling into one big church, but by countless small faithful cells, each going and teaching as the Lord commanded (Matthew 28:19-20), until it spreads everywhere. And the most effective form of it is often the least strategic: simply being yourself and sharing honestly. More than one person has come to Christ from something I said when I was not even trying to witness — just being who I am and telling the truth I had found.
VIII. The deeper aim: reconciliation, not one more schism
Leonard has asked me to take up Ezekiel 37 next — the valley of dry bones, and the two sticks that the prophet is told to join: “join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand” (Ezekiel 37:17). The deep work of God in that chapter is the healing of fracture — breath returning to scattered bones, divided houses re-joined into one. It is reunion, not separation.
And that is finally why I counsel staying rather than leaving. To leave the house you were raised in is to add one more fracture to a world already full of them. It creates one more fragment, one more lonely splinter group convinced it alone is right. To stay, with the Bible on top and a changed heart, is to take up the prophet’s posture: to work for the joining rather than the splitting, to be an agent of the re-knitting God does with dry bones. We are not trying to win an argument or to extract ourselves cleanly. We are trying to be present where God is breathing life back into what was broken.
Closing
When you have found Christ and put the Bible above every human authority, the call may be, not to flee the house but to stay in it as salt and light. “Ye are the salt of the earth… Ye are the light of the world… Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:13-16). Set the standard above every man’s word, so that you and everyone around you are free again to test all things. Bear the discomfort as the price of growth. Work the edges and multiply by ones. Stay until staying is made impossible.
We do not abandon the people we love in order to save ourselves. We stay, and we shine, and we trust the God who joins dry bones to do through our quiet, costly presence what no departure ever could.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 25, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
After All We Can Do: Commitment, Grace, and the Changed Heart
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 21 June 2026
Occasion. On Father’s Day, the fellowship gathered to talk over the Telescope essay I had written for Isak — the one about the seeker, the finder, and the cost of commitment. Isak said it read like a story that bobs and weaves but keeps coming back to one theme: the undecided life against the decided one. That was the essay’s spine, and I expected the conversation to stay there. It did not. Within the hour, the fellowship had pressed on the one place the essay leaned too hard, and what came back was better than what I had written. This essay is my attempt to keep what we found — chiefly that commitment and the changed heart are not rivals but partners, and that the gospel needs both.
I. The impotence of passive grace
When I first fed the Friday conversation with Isak into Claude and asked it to draft the essay, what came back was not the essay I eventually published. It was the standard article: we are all sinners, we are saved by grace, we are powerless to save ourselves, it is faith alone, full stop. I rewrote much of that framing, because, however orthodox it sounds, it is to my eye a large part of why so much of modern Christianity has lost its force in the world. If the message is that you can do nothing, you are a worm; grace covers it. Now relax. Then we, as witnesses, have initiated a new believer into a faith without power or responsibility. Passive people do not change a culture. They do not even reliably change themselves. The Telescope essay was rewritten to say the opposite: that something real and total is asked of us, that the commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.
I still believe that. But the discussion illuminated a subtle effect that I think is worth noting. There is a place for passive grace. Leonard was the first to attempt to rationalize both truths as part of a unified whole.
II. After all we can do
Leonard offered the line from the Book of Mormon: “we are saved by grace, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). The whole weight rests on that small qualifier. After all we can do. It does not say we are saved by all we can do — Paul forecloses that: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). But it does not say nothing is asked of us either. It says: give everything you have, and then know that the gift you could never earn is given anyway. The effort and the grace are not in competition. The effort is the form a committed heart takes; the grace is what carries the heart the rest of the distance it could never cross on its own.
This is exactly the resolution the Telescope essay was groping toward when it said the gap cannot be closed by our striving — Christ closes the gap — and yet a heart that will not lift a finger has not really committed at all. Leonard gave it a cleaner name. We labor as if it depended on us, and we receive as if it depended wholly on God, because both are true at once. That “after all we can do” is the hinge of everything that followed.
III. The changed heart
Susan supplied what the essay had underweighted, drawing on her own life rather than a doctrine. Her point was that the two great commandments — love God, love your neighbor — are already in the Old Testament and are good and true, but the law by itself never changes anyone’s heart. That is the whole burden of the prophets. What the New Covenant adds is not a better rule; it is a new heart. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Susan told us how it came to her. She had spent four months reading Scripture and praying every day, sincerely seeking the truth — not yet believing, half-convinced the God of the Bible, if He existed, was a tyrant. The persistent prompting came: it is time to accept Christ. She resisted, set the voice on a shelf, took stock of what she actually believed after four months of honest searching, and discovered she already believed. So she knelt, repented of her unbelief, and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior in a short and unadorned prayer. What followed, she did not manufacture and did not expect: a joy and peace and love for God that she assumed would fade and did not fade. It stayed. It changed what she wanted. Her prayers shifted on their own from help me do the things I am trying to do to what would You have me do today; how can I serve You?
That is the thing the law cannot give, and effort cannot counterfeit. Susan named the distinction precisely: there is head knowledge, and there is a changed heart, and many who believe in Jesus with their minds have never received the second. They have the doctrine and not the joy, and what their neighbors feel from them is judgment rather than love. The changed heart is not a happier set of thoughts you talk yourself into. It is something done to you that you could not do for yourself. It is the grace half of “after all we can do.”
IV. A confession, and a memory recovered
Then Susan turned the point of the essay directly, and on me. She said the second section — the one on the hardness of the commands — failed to make clear that it is by Christ’s power that we are able to depart from sin. She was right that it was missing, and I had to confess why. That note had in fact been in the machine’s first draft, and I was the one who cut it. I cut it because of an honest difficulty I carry: I have not, in the way others describe, experienced Christ doing things for me. What I experience are insights I receive and then work through, which I attribute to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I did not want to write a sentence that, for me, would be saying something I have not lived. The one unmistakable exception in my life was a single voice — don’t go — spoken to my being, not my ears, when I stood before the altar of another god and was, as I understood it, walking into hell. Beyond that, my testimony has been of revelation I help carry, not of a power that carries me.
Susan pointed to the testimonies where people accept Christ and find some besetting thing simply gone — the man delivered of cursing overnight, who still had to fight his lying for years afterward; Paul and his thorn that would not leave. There is, she said, a category of change that is given, not achieved, and to leave it out is to preach an incomplete gospel — a gospel of what we can manage by our own power.
And as she spoke, I remembered something I had filed under the wrong heading for thirty years. Long before I was a Christian, in a new-age Six Day intensive. It was at a mountainous site near Calistoga, CA, attended by hundreds of people. Part of the intensive was to the discipline of not using foul language for the entire six days. I was as committed as a man can be, with a support group and total intent, and I could not do it. I failed completely. Years later, when I had the vision of the Galaxy, the stars, and thin line connecting them, when I was able to in sincerity, realize the Bible spoke of the God of the actual world we live in and surrender my life to Christ, at the moment of my own turning, the prayer that was for me what Susan’s kneeling was for her, the curse simply lifted. The issue of controlling my tongue has never been an issue since. I knew it was a supernatural gift, but I had not connected that to an offer I could make to those to whom I witness. It was clear, the contrast between my will and God’s grace. He does intervene. I experienced the transformation. That is the very thing Susan was describing. I can offer that power to those who are seeking, but I cannot say what it will be. I take it as an indicator that God is present, not as a genie whose lamp we rub. The decision to make Jesus Christ our Lord has an effect, but I don’t think we can predict what that effect will be. After grace, there will be work that each of us needs to do.
I remain convinced that the Telescope essay was right to insist on expecting converts to engage with a masculine commitment, rather than to be seduced by the comfort of a limp and passive Christianity. The One to whom we commit is present, and “my grace is sufficient” is the indicator of what our commitment requires. Commitment and the changed heart are partners. We give all we can do; He gives the heart of flesh. It is dependent upon us to live the integrity of the character of Christ after the grace of the changed heart, however much or little, it is enough. The purpose of life is to develop character to give God the greatest experience of mature love.
V. Why love cannot be forced
If grace does the sufficient work, why is so much still asked of us, and why is the road hard? The discussion answered this the way the Telescope essay had argued it, but with an unforgettable living illustration.
The doctrinal frame came first. Leonard read the Garden as a parable for every life: God set His children in the garden, gave them the command, and then let the tempter in — on purpose. The point of this life is to meet evil and choose. We are, as he put it, in a testing center, and even a poor choice teaches, because we are eternal beings who go on learning. This is exactly the free-will argument at the center of the Telescope essay: God desires a love that is freely returned, and love that is compelled is not love at all, so He had to make creatures who could genuinely refuse Him.
Then Michael gave us the illustration. He told us of a childhood trauma, a life-threatening experience in which a parent used force to demand belief of an 11-year-old boy. He does not hate her; he says she did what she had been taught, and he counts even that suffering among his teachers, quoting the line from Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” The lesson is an important one: violence cannot produce love or belief. When you beat faith into a person, you do not convert him — you only teach him how to survive a beating. Conviction forced from the outside is not conviction; it is compliance worn until the pressure lifts.
This is a vindication of the gospel’s design. A God who manufactured love by force would be the tyrant Susan once feared, and Michael was made to fear — and such a god we ought, rightly, to resist. The true God does not compel; He draws, He woos, He winsomely attracts, He persuades from within. That is why the road requires our free assent at every step, and why no one can be argued, shamed, or frightened into the kingdom. The very hardness of the choice is the proof that the love, when it comes, is real.
VI. More light, sharper contrast
If we are born again when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord, and He gives us a renewed heart when we are born again, and we are committed to Godliness after our decision, why does life often get harder? Leonard, Isak, and Charlie circled this. Leonard observed that as a person draws nearer to God, he becomes more, aware of darkness because he is now aware of what is good and Godly. In contrast to the light of true goodness, the temptations of this world are more visible, more clearly dark in comparison to the light of God’s way. Isak noted that you can now see the contrast between good and evil. The man lost in his addiction cannot see the darkness he is in, because it is the thing keeping him alive in his own mind, to him his substance is the light. Once he is pulled out can he look back and see it for what it was. As your sight comes to resemble God’s, you see what He sees — both the light and the evil. The perceptions from immersion in evil are reversed; Godliness looks dark and vice versa.
Charlie noted from his own experience: on the days he fasted he found himself both quickened in ability and curiously under attack. The closer a life draws to God, the more the adversary opposes it; the apostles drew near and most were martyred. Christianity, he said plainly, is a terribly hard religion — it can be sweet, but it is not guaranteed to be easy. So, the changed heart does not purchase a comfortable life. It purchases clear sight and the strength to stand. Isak found the seal for this in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Rejoice, and be exceeding glad” (Matthew 5:10-12). The response to opposition is neither to collapse nor to go pick fights; it is to stand by what you know, and to be content that you need not win every argument the world offers.
VII. The absolute, and the two laws
Underneath the whole conversation ran a question Michael would not let pass without a strong defense: is there an absolute at all, or only our shifting opinions about reality? He pressed every image of our smallness — the blind men each certain of the whole elephant from one part, Plato’s prisoners reading shadows on a cave wall, a caveman drawing a map of “the forest, the pond, and the unknown” and calling it the world. We are that caveman. Our scope is severely limited; we have five senses and a few millennia of notes.
I agree with every bit of that. But that was not a point of contention. The question is not whether we can see the absolute whole — plainly we cannot — but whether one exists behind our partial views. Schrödinger’s cat was alive or dead regardless of anyone looking or not; the elephant is unchanged by the hand that gropes it; what is on the far side of the fence does not bend to fit the knothole we peer through. Michael eventually began to consider the postulate: there is an absolute, and life gives us various limited perspectives, each of which we can use to triangulate toward it. The fact, now we see through a glass, darkly. Each of our perspectives not to doctrine but to the moral order itself.
And Charlie named the part of that absolute we can see clearly. Our scientific scope has exploded; our moral reach has not changed and has not shrunk. Newton, before an ocean of unknown, called what we know a thimbleful — but the two great commandments were as true at the beginning as now and will be true on any world there is. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart… and thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). Charlie stated the basics clearly. if civilization were wiped to a remnant living among cockroaches, as long as someone remembered those two laws, we would come back. Even Michael, who challenges everything as a relative good, granted these two are the nearest thing to a universal standard of human morality. Ever culture has their own standards and traditions, but the Great Commandment to love God, and neighbor as self is universal. It is the moral absolute we are not free to vote away, the fixed star the planted telescope is fixed upon.
VIII. How the soil is made ready
Toward the end, I saw the Sower in a new way. I had always interpreted that verse as referring to four types of people. But during the discussion, it struck me that there may be a deeper message in this parable. Rather than treating the four soils as four kinds of people — the hard path, the stony ground, the thorns, and the good earth, I considered the possibility that this parable was not about four types of people but about the stages of one life? Every one of us begins as the trampled path, the rocky soil, and the thorn patch that must be worked before it can be nourish a seed that can grow and bear fruit.
Consider what good soil actually is. It is rock that has been ground into dust, and weeds that have grown to maturity, died, decayed as its organic matter fed bacteria that release acids that dissolve the dust into soluble minerals that plants need to grow. So, the hard objections — what about the Catholics and Protestants who slaughtered each other during what is perceived as wars over religion — are the rocks. These objections, whether philosophic, moral, psychological, or scientific must be broken down enough to understand how what appeared to be logical contradictions that proved that the teachings of a religion were false, contradictory, or evil, were misunderstandings of context and fact.
Other knowledge-type objections include that belief that God does not exist, that everything actually is relative, or that the universe is of our own construction. If we are God, and we are the source of our own reality and construct the moral rules of life independently of other people and the structure of reality, then individual truth is truth. When present, these scientific, ontological considerations, and knowledge/understanding-type rocks prevent the seeds of faith from growing. Not all people place understanding at the apex of judgment about life, but it is a fact for everyone. Each of these gateway criteria must be satisfied regardless of whether we process life in terms of emotions, morality, or axiom to theorem understanding.
I process the universe through understanding. I don’t have large supernatural effects happen regularly enough to validate God’s existence by the shows of metaphysical force or supernatural power. I come to the world with no perceptual data available to tip the scales of God’s existence by anomalies of the physical world. All I have to use as my dataset to confirm the hypothesis of God is the physical world and my power of analysis to determine if a model of life, structural existence, and rules of feeling/emotion/affective tagging to reverse engineer the likelihood of God’s existence and the Bible’s accurate reflection of His nature.
This pivots back to my postulate that we must all come to the acceptance of God’s literal existence to have a relationship with Him. And after having accepted that He exits, we must believe that it is valuable to seek Him. “…he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Hebrews 11:6 It is helpful to accept the postulate that the Bible is God’s revelation, but if not, then the Bible must do the work of revealing itself as being authored by Him. Thus, Susan’s advice to read the Bible every day, to implant His words, His evidence, His way in the heart. With a belief in God, and planting His word in our hearts, we have an internal power working on breaking up rocks which stand against the knowledge of Him. “…the weapons of our warfare are not carnal… but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations… and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God…” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. There are spiritual rocks that must be broken. Knowledge that is a stronghold against knowing Him. Strongholds are arguments, lies, and mental fortifications. These are the strongholds of misunderstanding, ignorance, and rebellion that rationalize themselves against God’s existence, His way, and submission to Him. The fullness of experience/knowledge of His existence and the nature are both confronted and advanced by reading, dwelling, and meditating on His word, but we should also explore nature to further deepen our experience of His existence. “For the invisible things of him… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made…” Romans 1:20. It is in this search that the Conscious Point Physics gives its most clear image of God, by implication of the structure underlying that which is seen.
I postulate that creating a strong enough justification for the existence and goodness of God is important for motivation to pursue a relationship and for overcoming the difficulty of being in one. Knowledge of Him, His way, and the world allows us to tolerate the pain of warring against the flesh. The rewards are great, but the cost is high, the turning from animal satisfaction. To make it to the end of the long, hard climb of sanctification (perfection of character), we must be motivated, exert our will, and have a reason, a felt desire, a goal worthy of achievement. The goal is serious. It is a committed relationship with Him. Accomplishing it requires a firm decision, community support, and accountability. The goal is to establish a new character. This commitment to Jesus as Lord in the sanctification of our lives aims us toward understanding God’s ways in various situations in life. The Bible is a consistent voice arguing for the existence of a good God, and we must believe it. That is a stone that must be broken through understanding and emotional processing (putting life’s hurts in perspective). The experience of good fruit from following His way is an immediate self-test of the validity of the Bible as an accurate revelation. Knowledge and the wisdom to act in life, with subsequent good fruit, along with a firm commitment to a relationship with Him, are the prerequisites for initiating and maintaining a relationship that can grow.
Faith cannot grow on the hard rock of erroneous conceptions about God’s existence and HIs nature. Misunderstandings are youthful ignorance and naivete; we all must grow out of them. They still require admission of error, humility, and loss of pride. Lies are the adult form of information error, consciously propagated fabrications used for motivated deception. They are crafted to go deep and hold hard, even in the face of disclosure. The adult pride of having been fooled makes admission and reversal much harder than correcting the childish error of ignorance.
The good heart and mind soil is blocked from contact with reality by neither childish nor adult error. To have a proper relationship with God, we must understand the structure and rules of the universe, the affective/emotional wisdom, and God’s nature. To perceive life clearly, we must properly comprehend the facts of physical, metaphysical, emotional, and spiritual reality. The task is not trivial, but you can and should ask for help. The primary obstacle is allowing the words, commands, and precepts of the Bible to penetrate your heart. It is the ignorance and lies that prevent their entry. By simply exposing yourself to the words, the Holy Spirit can work to bring errors to the surface where they can be examined and a new perspective adopted. New character develops with repetition
Feeding on the Word/The Bible is therapy by itself. Process the thoughts, questions, and emotions that come up. Find a counselor, parent, or other person wise in the ways of the world, and mature from spending time in the Word.
Until the lies, ignorance, and traumas are resolved with truth and peace, there will be mental, emotional, and spiritual rocks that need to be crushed, and the effort to read and heed the Word may be harder than continuing with the old life. It is important to know this because the effort required may tempt us to stop the transformation and return to our old way of life. The dissonant voices in our minds may seek to minimize the value and validity of the Bible and Christ’s life, and to maximize examples of poor witness (those who claim to be Christians but do not live the principles). The Bible, God’s revelation about His creation, may seem suspect, irrelevant, unreliable, or false. To the natural man, the deep and subtle message of God’s transformative power and the excellence of His way of life may seem foolish. But when the hard rocks of lies, ignorance, trauma, and rebellion are broken into sufficiently small lems, we can process them without being overwhelmed. We can see the errors as lessons, rungs on the ladder to understanding and new decisions, actions, and character. The key is to break the lessons down into increments of new behavior and understanding small enough to process and absorb.
The seductions, worries, riches, and distractions of the world are the thorns. They can distract us from our spiritual discipline, so we may not take the time to pray, meditate/listen, or reframe/process the hurts. Each of life’s issues, the hard things, the emotionally painful or unrighteously tempting, must be faced and rightly processed. Each situation of life is a lesson from which to learn about life, the forces, and the evaluation of God’s way vs. man’s way. The accumulation of data points about situations and righteous choices builds our character one decision at a time. After each lesson, it’s good to celebrate, rest, reflect, consolidate, and renew your strength before facing the next hard lesson. Sometimes, maybe even often, such rest and recovery is not possible. Meet your obligations, but sometimes it’s too much. Draw your strength, remember the high calling and the reward. Be courageous, fight the good fight. Bold confrontation with each situation reality presents requires courage. Do your best, deal with each situation, and learn from it. This time of trial will end, and there is a reward for doing well.
The trampled path is the heart that has been hurt — I gave myself to something once and was betrayed, and I will not be hurt again. The hard heart must be tilled until it is open to love after injury. Only when the rocks are broken, the thorns are digested, and the path is broken up is the soil prepared to receive the seed of the gospel and testimony of witnesses. As a witness, be patient: you may be speaking to ground that is not yet ready, and your job is sometimes only to break one rock.
IX. The work and the goal
The conversation converged on the purpose of the fellowship. What is our larger goal as a group? It is support for executing the Great Commission. It is to equip ourselves to move people toward commitment to living God’s way and feeling life deeply. Susan and I arrived at the same model from opposite sides. As a witness, tell the story of how your heart changed, honestly, as an offering and encouragement. My situation will probably not be yours, and I can only imagine what your pain and trials have been. Make the invitation. Make it real. There is a level of loving imposition we cannot avoid. Without a call to action, the activation energy may not be high enough for your friend to decide to take the step into the commitment of Jesus as Savior or Jesus as Lord. The invitation must be phrased as a question, not as an implied demand or declaration of guilt. The invite is the first small step. Acceptance of Jesus as Savior is a long journey that begins with Justification. The second step is the lifetime of steps toward sanctification. Susan’s own turning began not with the sinner’s prayer but with a small commitment to read and pray daily; that small commitment led her to ask Jesus to be her savior. She felt joy and peace, and she was eventually ready to make Jesus her Lord.
The process of accepting a new life lord takes time. The soil must go through the stages of accommodation. A seed cannot reliably survive the harsh conditions of soil preparation. That time is roughly equivalent to the learning experience of childhood, when there is great vulnerability, a need for protection, help in processing pain and injuries, and the development of trust in the care and maintenance of life, safety, and relationships. This translates to a need for tenderness, nurture, and protection of the seed of the Holy Spirit. The rocks of life correspond to the barriers that prevent hearing, understanding, trusting, or acting. A full surrender at the first hearing may require more nourishment, water, and space than the soil can bear.
And do not over-promise what accepting Jesus as Savior will realistically do. I have watched too many promise health and wealth and deliver only the preacher’s enrichment. I will not trade in that. But there is one thing we can promise without dishonesty: that the Lord will speak to our hearts. “If a man love me… my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” John 14:23. It is that indwelling that changes hearts. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20. That indwelling spirit is available to everyone who sincerely receives Christ as Savior and Lord. It comes differently to each — instantly for some, after years of dedicated study, service, and prayer for others. We cannot promise how any individual person will be changed by receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The honest word to the seeker is: commit to taking Jesus as your Savior. Read the Bible, pray for wisdom, confess your shortcomings with the goal of learning and overcoming with the next trial, and do not forsake the assembly or yourselves together. Persevere, even if the change is slow and you meet repeated failure. God will give you a heart of flesh if you ask and desire it deeply. It’s painful to feel life, but the openness to pain is required to feel the joy.
Leonard summarized the goal of the enterprise. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). How do we know Him? Leonard’s answer was, “The commandments are God’s self-portrait.” They are not arbitrary rules; they describe His character. He gives them because He wants us to be like Him. We should not follow His commands, but keep them. They should be held within, as a precious possession. The goal is to internalize them until His character becomes our own. Being of like character, we are drawn into oneness with Him. If we understand God’s character, attributes, and perfections, we can see that He is trustworthy because His nature, plan, and purpose for life are good. He desires us to have faith in Him; to keep His commandments from the heart. With His commands directing the man from within, he feels God’s nature and acquires knowledge of Him in His depths. Susan noted that we find Him when we “search for [Him] with all [our] heart” (Jeremiah 29:13), undivided, not “double-minded” (James 1:8). To know Him is to be changed by Him, and to be changed into His image, feeling as He does, imprinting on him the pattern of life that brings the fullness that comes with righteousness, justice, joy, peace, and love.
Closing
The Telescope essay was about commitment, and the importance of a stable platform from which to see self and others and judge righteousness. The commitment is ours to make, and the heart of flesh is His to give. The gospel has two error modes: 1) Grace that comforts but lacks correction of error, and 2) The standard of the perfect man, which is too high to meet for any man, leaving discouragement. Leonard maintained proper tension when he said, “We are saved by grace, after all we can do.”
The transformed heart and rebirth require breaking the rocks, mulching the thorns, and tilling the path. Daily Bible reading is a good first step on the path of commitment. This requires standing fast under opposition. But by faith, we expect that we will receive the grace to endure. We are blessed by putting His commands in our hearts; we are blessed by inviting Him and His Father to come in; we are made righteous in the eyes of the Father as Christ was made sin for us, and merely accepting that sacrifice and expressing our gratitude with our obedience to His Commandments. We cannot force the hand of God, but we can invite Him in, and when we do, His spirit acts upon us, and we are moved toward being like Him. “…when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2 We should not wait to be transformed till He comes in glory. We should strive every day to be like Him.
The great commandment, love God and neighbor as self, is the fixed star that should guide our emotional, mental, moral, and spiritual journey through life and relationships. Romans 8:2 “The law of the Spirit of life… has made me free from the law of sin and death.” gives us the key to transformation. The changed heart is a gift offered to every soul, but it is only effective if the soul willingly accepts the gift of His substitutionary sacrifice and strives diligently, desirously, passionately to obey His Law. Failure of perfection is inevitable, but striving, desire, and commitment are within our control. This is not salvation by works; it is a demonstration of salvation by works. “…I will show thee my faith by my works.” James 2:18
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
by Thomas Abshier | Jun 20, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
On the Planted Telescope: the Seeker, the Finder, and the Path to Commitment
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 19 June 2026
Occasion. Isak, you and I spent Friday afternoon in a long conversation. It began with the question of Michael, whose mandala system of categorizing all human knowledge has been his life’s work, and whose worldview sits more or less where mine sat 58 years ago when he and I were in High School and college. After Michael’s example, we moved on to discussing your sense of the impossibility of living/keeping the biblical commands, deciding whether Christianity is one of many paths or the one true path, the cultural questions of sexuality in the present day, the question of those who never heard the gospel, your own struggle with excessive attention to, and dwelling on, the pull of the flesh, the exchange about coffee and alcohol and the pre-made response to temptation. The conversation closed with your telescope metaphor — that of a telescope held by hand, the metaphorical arm of flesh, which is not steady enough to prevent large slews across the sky. It allows occasional glimpses of the desired star, but it does not provide sufficient stability to dwell on any high-magnification, deep-space object in depth. The telescope metaphor rhymes with the difficulty of focusing on achieving a life goal when there is no stable foundation.
Your questions and struggles with faith should be universal, but sadly, some never question, ask why, or realize the profound mystery of existence. You grew up around the Christian fellowship, and you have heard the conversations and read the essays. You probably know the Bible considerably better than most adult Christians. And you are still searching. You want to find the truth, but questions stand in the way. The question you face is whether to commit to the standard you already know or to keep searching, as Michael has been searching for the 58 years I have known him. You are not a baby Christian. You are not a stranger to the biblical revelation. You are an articulate, intelligent, and careful young man who knows the common answers given to those questioning whether to commit to the Christian faith. These are the issues we discussed today, and I want to document our conversation, sharpen my presentation, and address them for you to review in a format you can refer to again.
Nine sections follow. The first examines what Michael’s mandala actually is. The second engages the hardness-of-the-commands question that occupied much of the early part of our conversation. The third takes up the many-paths-versus-one-top distinction. The fourth engages the cultural questions of the present moment. The fifth addresses the question of those who never heard the gospel, which was one of the big questions that drove me to search 40 religions. The sixth returns to your telescope metaphor and develops it. The seventh picks up the addiction-and-pre-made-response thread that closed the conversation. The eighth is what I want to say to you about commitment under partial knowledge. The ninth is the closing, on Romans 5:3-5 and 1 Corinthians 13:11-13, which are the scriptures the conversation pointed toward without my saying so explicitly.
I. Michael’s mandala
Michael’s mandala filing system is his life’s work. It is a comprehensive, elaborate, decades-in-development framework for categorizing the universe into nested structures of relationship and meaning. Michael is extremely intelligent and articulate. The system is intelligent. It reflects an enormous amount of careful thought, sustained study, introspection, and disciplined attention over the course of thirty years. It is, by any measure of intellectual labor, a remarkable artifact.
It is also, by my reading, the cognitive monument to a life of not committing.
What I see is a reflection of what we discussed in a different language during our conversation. The mandala is what perpetual searching produces when applied with intelligence and discipline. Someone who keeps looking, who never lands on a worldview with absolute standards, who does not take a stand because every stand looks provisional and every alternative looks possibly better, will eventually produce a system of organizing reality. The system organizes what he has found. The system catalogs the alternatives. The system tries to hold everything at once because the seeker cannot bring himself to set anything down as authoritative. The system grows more elaborate over time because every new piece of information, every new possible perspective, has to be accommodated rather than evaluated and accepted as absolute truth or rejected as a distortion of perfection.
Michael and I grew up together. We probably met in 1968, on the schoolbus, 58 years ago. We both started in approximately the same place, searching for the answer to life, whatever that meant. We diverged because at a certain point, I committed, and he didn’t. The choice I made was specific. It was to take the Bible as the load-bearing standard against which everything else in my life would be judged. I accepted the Christological claim of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the central fact of history. I have organized my life and thought around those commitments since 1987. I was a childhood Christian of extreme commitment from age four till around 14 or 15 years of age. I was a searching Christian from adolescense till 25 when I joined the Sikh Dharma, 3HO, the Yogi Bhajan cult in 1976. When I had the altered state vision in 1987, I knew Jesus was the way and that the Bible was a true revelation. Since I made that choice, the search did not stop — I have learned considerably more in the nearly 40 years since I committed than I knew before I committed. I think the reason it has been so productive is that learning requies a stable reference frame upon which to compare knowledge. I now had a perspectiv from which everything else could be evaluated in relation to the anchor. Michael did not make that choice. He kept the search open. The mandala is what the open search has produced.
Michael is a good man. He is kind and thoughtful, and he stands in awe of the world around us; everything is a source of joy and wonder to him. He lives a good life and enjoys it greatly. But I mention this because I want you to consider taking the fork in the road where Michael and I diverged. You are clearly asking questions and trying to find the truth, but you have been unable to identify it. I am very familiar with being there. The choice seems to be between Christianity and some other coherent worldview that you have not yet found. But what your life is actually manifesting is a never-ending search with indefinite goals for understanding. You have a commitment to searching for truth as a standard that has the structural shape of being true, but it is actually a lifetime of producing your own mandala. Your mandala is your own elaborated, intelligent, sophisticated, never-quite-completed system of holding everything at once, but ending with nowhere solid to stand.
The seeker and the finder are not separated by the question of intelligence, dedication, or breadth and depth of the search. They are separated by their willingness to commit to the best available alternative and to change when the evidence is overwhelming that it is needed. The finder is the seeker who has committed. True riches flow from a commitment to the truth.
II. The hardness of the commands and what salvation actually is
You raised, in various forms throughout the conversation, the worry that biblical Christianity asks of human beings what they cannot actually do. The commands are too high. The standard is impossible. A religion that requires what its adherents cannot deliver is, on its face, suspect — perhaps designed to produce permanent guilt, perhaps a sociological control mechanism, perhaps just badly engineered. The argument has precedent and cannot be dismissed.
What I want to say to you about this is what I tried to say at some length during the conversation, but I want to say it more carefully here.
The Christian claim is not that you can or will keep the commands. The Christian claim is that you cannot, that no human being ever has except Christ himself, and that this inability is precisely what the gospel addresses. The Levitical sacrificial system existed because Israel could not keep the law. The prophetic tradition exists because the people of God repeatedly failed to live the covenant they had been given. The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith exists because Paul knew, from his own zealous Pharisaical career, that the harder you try to keep the law in your own strength, the more clearly you discover that you cannot. The gospel does not say, “Here are the commands; keep them, and you will be saved.” The gospel says, “Here are the commands; you cannot keep them; here is what God has done about your inability.”
What God has done about your inability is Christ. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not an arbitrary theological invention. It is the answer to the structural problem the law itself names: the law is holy, and the people are not, and the gap between them cannot be closed by the people’s increased effort. No amount of striving lifts a sinful man to the standard of a holy God; finite effort cannot cross an infinite distance.
But notice what this does and does not mean. It does not mean that nothing is asked of you. The error that has hollowed out so much of modern Christianity is the inference that because we cannot close the gap by effort, we are therefore released from effort altogether — that grace is a blanket thrown over a life lived as an animal, that a man need only say the words and then go on exactly as before. That is not the gospel; it is the abandonment of it. What is asked of you and me is real and total: to confess our transgressions, to repent, to change course, and to do everything in our power to put on the character of the new man. This labor does not close the gap — Christ closes the gap — but it is the response of a heart that has actually committed, and a heart that will not lift a finger has not committed at all. The commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.
The gulf between the Father and man, which was made uncrossable by our sin because of God’s uncompromising hatred of sin, was bridged from God’s side. The wrath was discharged on Christ, “who was made sin for us who knew no sin,” 2 Corinthians 5:21. This was the only possible way God could build a universe of children who could choose sin, which is the rejection of God, or obedience to His way, which is the love of God. He created man in the hope that man would choose Him, His way, and obedience to His law, and so satisfy His desire for a love that is reciprocated and freely given. To make that love possible, He had to give men free will, for love that is compelled is not love at all.
He is the source of all. The Father, the One, the Almighty, performed the most mysterious of all acts: He is of Himself, owes His existence to nothing and to no one. His nature, by His own self-identification, is love, and a heart whose nature is love can be satisfied only by love freely given. But here is the conflict written into creation itself: His hatred of sin is absolute, His desire is for perfect love, and the beings from whom He desires that love are ignorant of the deep consequences of their acts, driven by the desires of the flesh, and are certain to choose the flesh over perfect love. That is a formula for inevitable, universal failure. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23.
To thread this needle of conflicting requirements, the plan was laid before the world began: “He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the earth,” Revelation 13:8. In the crucifixion, in the passion, Christ absorbed the wrath that human sin warrants. That wrath must be felt, and it must be discharged; it cannot simply be waived. his hatred of sin has no compassion — it is reflexive and non-negotiable, it is His nature, it is absolute. The purity of God is complete, and the hatred of any violation of that purity is unmitigated and inseparable from the character of the Father. It is not a mood He could choose to set aside; it is what perfect holiness is.
So the wrath of God toward sin is real. The fact of man’s sin is real. The discharge of that wrath upon the Son, who took our sin as His own and has borne it, is real. The substitution is real. The wrath that would otherwise have fallen on you and me for our violations of His purity fell instead on Christ at the cross.
And here is why your commitment and mine are not a small thing, but the hinge of the whole matter: we are released from that wrath because we have committed to make Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and to follow His words. For that commitment — that total dedication of our lives to walking His way — He has vouched for you and for me. Not because you or I will live it perfectly, but because we are committed to living it perfectly, and will rise, confess, and return every time we fall short. Because of that commitment, on your part and on mine, Christ is fully committed to stand as the substitutionary recipient of God’s wrath and to leave you and me clean. He became sin for us. He has taken the blows that had to be delivered for the violation that truly was yours and mine. Christ accepted what you and I deserved — and you and I are free to live in the Liberty of Christ, not because we have done nothing, but because we have given everything: our commitment to live His words, to follow His way, and to trust that His way is true, good, and right.
The shape of the Christian life, accordingly, is a life of commitment to living His way. It is the shape of falling short, receiving forgiveness, attempting obedience, falling short, confessing, receiving forgiveness again, attempting obedience again, falling short again, and continuing this pattern for the entire course of your life and mine. With maturity, by enduring in resisting temptation and living the great commandment to love God and neighbor as self, character is developed. The goal is sanctification, of becoming the perfect man. Salvation is not in the not-doing of the various sins; that is a byproduct of the development of character and aiming at the high calling. Salvation comes to the man who gives his heart to acting out the words of Christ: the committed giving of oneself totally to the relationship; your salvation lives in your commitment to live as the perfect man. There is no softening of the goal; no expectation of defeat is admitted or considered. If there is failure, your faith in His sacrifice is complete, your acceptance of it unconditional and without doubt. Your commitment is to be like Him. Your relationship with the Father is restored by Christ’s bearing of what you owed. The only appropriate response is gratitude, humility, and obedience. The not-doing (submitting to temptation/addiction/yielding to flesh attraction) is what you aim at because you love the one who paid the price for you (Christ). The not-doing is ultimately an expression of love for the Father/the Almighty God, who experiences all, and to whom is the ground of being and existence.
This is why the impossible commands are not, in the Christian frame, a defeater of the gospel. They are the reason for the good news. As humans, we cannot be good enough to meet the standard of Christ’s perfection; “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. This is not a license to sin because we are not strong enough to meet perfection. This is a reason to be grateful for Christ establishing a way to restore a relationship with the Father. That gratitude is appropriate because He has satisfied both the requirements of a creation that enables the free will necessary to express love, and the need to fully express His essence, His hatred of sin, and the need to destroy every spot of imperfection in His creation. “…that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle… but that it should be holy and without blemish.” Ephesians 5:27. The love of Christ is expressed by our commitment to live His way, obey His law, and not subject Him to the pain of our sin. We will fail; the commands are not easy; the flesh pull is strong; and no one does it perfectly. You cannot close the gap. The sacrifice of Christ is necessary to restore a relationship with the Father. The argument from impossibility is therefore not an argument against Christianity. It is an argument from within Christianity for the centrality of Christ.
What this means practically is that when you fall, you get up. You confess. You receive forgiveness. You try again. The temptation is to read the falls as evidence that the standard is wrong. The Christian reading is that the falls are evidence that you are a human being who needs a savior, and the gospel offers you that savior. If you are committed to living the perfection of Christ, every fall is an opportunity to be thankful for the gospel, the good news that Christ threaded the needle by disclosing His plan through prophecy while hiding it from Satan’s efforts to foil it. The cycle of fall and rise is not a failure of Christianity. It is the lived shape of Christianity in the world that fallen human beings actually inhabit. It is a remarkable plan, and it satisfies all the criteria for creating the world from nothing and establishing a meaningful relationship with the Creator and life.
III. Many paths up the mountain, and one top reached by one way
The second worry you raised — sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication — was the New Age mantra, “There are many paths up the mountain,” which attempts to counter the clear Biblical declaration of Christ as the only way. This concern addresses what appears to be the self-serving promotion of the Christian path and contrasts it with the obvious sincerity of spiritual seekers who embrace other traditions, not as rebels against Godliness, but as people who could not reconcile the language of the Bible with the realities of life. Is God going to condemn such people to hell because they could not comprehend the cryptic message of the Bible?
Other religions have moral teachings; all have serious adherents fully committed to living the Truth; all religions produce people who appear to live ordered and ethical lives. If Christianity is supposed to be the unique way, why does it look like one option among many roughly equivalent options? Why would a loving God set things up so that only those who happen to have been exposed to Christianity have access to salvation?
I want to make two distinctions here that I think the many paths framing collapses.
First, the many paths metaphor assumes that the goal is the same and only the routes differ. This is the assumption I think is wrong. The goal each religion proposes is not the same. Buddhism’s goal is the extinction of the self in impersonal nirvana, the cessation of desire, the recognition that all is suffering, and the understanding that the way out is non-attachment. Hinduism’s goal is multiple: moksha (release from the cycle of rebirth), reunion with Brahman, and the dissolution of the individual into the universal. Islam’s goal is submission to Allah, the doing of God’s will as expressed in the Quran and the Hadith, and ultimate paradise for those who have faithfully submitted. The New Age religion’s goal is self-actualization, the discovery of one’s authentic self, the realization of one’s own divinity. Christianity’s goal is reconciliation with the Father through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the destination being God’s dwelling with his redeemed people in the new creation.
These are not different routes up the same mountain. They are different mountains, with different summits and different things at the summits. The Buddhist nirvana and the Christian new creation are not the same destination reached by different paths. They are categorically different states. To equate them is not religious humility; it is conceptual confusion. The many paths metaphor only works if you ignore what each religion actually says about where it is going.
Second, the many paths framing assumes that the religions are roughly equivalent in their answers to the deepest questions: where did the universe come from, what is life for, what happens to us when we die, and how is the gap between human imperfection and divine perfection closed. I do not think the religions are roughly equivalent on these questions. I think Christianity gives answers that close the loop on the questions, and the other religions give answers that, when followed out, leave the questions still open in important ways.
Where did the universe come from? Christianity: from the Word of God, through whom and for whom all things were made, who is also the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. Buddhism does not seriously engage with this question because it is a distraction from the practical task of liberation. Hinduism gives a multitude of competing accounts. Islam offers an answer (Allah created the universe), but it is sparse on mechanism and does not include the Logos-as-the-pattern-of-creation move that gives Christianity its connection between the rational structure of the world and the personal nature of God. New Age religion typically dissolves the question into vague cosmic-consciousness language.
What is life for? Christianity: to know God and enjoy a relationship with Him forever, to be conformed to the image of Christ, to participate in the redemption of the world, to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. The other religions offer answers, but in my reading, they do not close the loop. Buddhism’s answer reduces life to a problem to be escaped. Hinduism’s answer reduces life to a single cycle on an endless wheel. Islam’s answer is closer to the Christian answer but lacks the love-and-fellowship dimension that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes possible. New Age religion’s answer reduces life to self-expression, which collapses into incoherence as soon as you ask what the self is and what it should express.
What happens to us when we die? How is the gap closed between our imperfection and God’s perfection? Here, the differences are sharpest. The Christian answer — that Christ has borne what we deserved, that we are forgiven through his death, that we are raised through his resurrection, that the new creation is bodily — has no real parallel in the other religions. The Buddhist annihilation of the self is the opposite of resurrection. The Hindu reincarnation is the opposite of final redemption. The Islamic paradise is closer, but lacks the substitutionary atonement structure that addresses the gap between human guilt and divine holiness. The New Age elevation of the self is the opposite of the Christian crucifixion-and-resurrection-of-the-self.
The distinctive feature of the Christian claim is that other religions do not say what Christianity says. They have moral teachings that overlap because moral teachings across human cultures generally identify what humans find pleasurable (good) and its opposite. This polarity is intuitively satisfied and implemented in all moral systems. The love-your-neighbor command appears in Leviticus 19, and in other religious systems. It can be identified in some form in most enduring moral traditions. What no other religion has is the singular event of God-the-Son becoming incarnate, living the perfect human life, dying the substitutionary death, and rising bodily to inaugurate the new creation. No other religion has anything structurally similar to claim. Krishna and Arjuna had a wise conversation; Krishna did not die for Arjuna’s sins and rise from the dead. Muhammad received what he understood to be a revelation from Gabriel; he did not die for the sins of his followers, nor did he rise from the dead. Buddha realized that the world was suffering and that the path to liberation was the cessation of desire; Buddha did not die for the suffering of his followers and rise from the dead. The structural shape of the Christian claim has no real parallel.
This is the move I had to make to settle the many paths worry for myself. The question is not whether other religions also have moral wisdom. They do. The question is whether any of them has the structural shape of the gospel. Is life a permanent record of acts and their necessary consequence, or simply a mark in the sand for a moment that blows away into incoherent meaninglessness? Or is this a world where each moment is significant because it is felt exquisitely by God, and is part of the eternal record of credits and debits? I hold to the latter. A world of permanent significance allows for a world with meaning, a world that has consequence because of the pain, pleasure, and experience of life that it brings, has an additional level of gravity, reality, and significance that makes it worth living and living well. Christianity is unique in closing the gap. It allows God to express His wrath against imperfection without limit. Jesus Christ’s rising from the dead opened the possibility of the renewal of life after sin had condemned it to death. The resurrection was the inauguration of the new creation, in which God and man could restore a full relationship, in which man could be imperfect. It was necessary to create a world where man had the freedom to love God, as demonstrated by his obedience or reject God as evidenced by his worship other gods (sensual satisfaction). The answer is that other religions lack the same structural justification for meaning and the purpose of life and existence. Christianity is not one of many roughly equivalent religious options. It is the one religious option that has the structural shape of being true.
There was an important realization around this issue that finally allowed me to become a Christian. I participated in somewhere around fourty religions, and the people I traveled with in that spiritual journey, nearly every one of them was sincere, awake, and good-hearted. They were souls who were honestly reaching for God. I could not accept a Christianity that required me to condemn them wholesale as enemies of God. What freed me was noticing that Scripture itself holds together two sayings of Jesus that only sound like a contradiction, but resolved the tension within the Christian frame for me. In one context, He says, “He that is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12:30). In another, He says, “He that is not against us is on our part” (Mark 9:40). I puzzled over these verses lightly in my youth to early adulthood as a Christian. Surprisingly, they were the key to resolving the conflict. I saw firsthand good people doing their best, but a scripture that condemned all who had not accepted Jesus as Lord. The resolution came when I saw that these two sayings describe two different states of the heart, not two contradictory rules. The sincere seeker who is honestly trying to do right and has not yet grasped Christ is not against Him — he is, in his groping, unfinished way, already turned toward the light he can see. But the man who has truly seen Christ and still turns deliberately away, who knows and refuses, has set himself against Him. The dividing line is not how much a person knows; it is the direction the heart finally faces once the light has actually reached it.
That distinction let me hold Christian doctrine as appropriately accounting for each soul’s culpability. This was an indicator of the truth of the path, the validity of the belief system. It allowed me to embrace what I saw that Christianity is uniquely true in its structural sense. The ontology, the existence of the creation as revealed in the Bible clearly corresponds to reality. It was that correspondence between scripture and reality was the source of the Conscious Point Physics as a description of what naturally followed/was clearly implied by scripture. The other aspect was the question of how the revelation/the Bible compares itself with other religions, other ways up the mountain. In truth, it is a logical necessity that there is only one summit where God actually dwells. God in His manifestation of His nature, and His desire for humanity, and His plan for His creatures is not mutually contradictory. As the shema says, “Hear oh Isreal, the Lord our God is One.” There is only one God, and He has only one nature. The pinnacles of each religious mountain are not interchangeable. The summit are different. The choice of religion matters because that choice biases our actions toward reaching that goal.
After seeing the truth of the ontology, the accuracy of the description of the ground of being, I was certain this was the true religion, But, I wanted to know how much I could trust the literal words of the Bible. It was the split, the two ways that Jesus described those who were with Him and those who were not against Him that allowed me to trust the words of the Bible as a self consistent revelation. Framed in that way, I could see that my fellow travelers, my spiritual co-religionists I had searched with, are not my enemies — I can honor their sincerity, love them as God loves them, and still long to hand them the very thing I searched through forty religions to find. The words and comands of the Bible and its good news, the gospel, does not oblige me to contempt; it obliges me to generosity, because I was once standing exactly where they stand now. It moves me to compassion. I know how lost I felt in the various religous paths I followed. All had good teachings, and were in various ways helpful to me to understand life. But to realize that the Bible is a book of compassion, that there is a place for redemption of those who are sincerely seeking, but have not found our understood the message, gave me a sense that I could defend and offer this path to others without the guilt of believing the path contained within it fatal errors that had to simply be ignored.
IV. The cultural questions and the rationalization of sin
You and I spent a significant part of the conversation on the cultural questions of the present moment, in particular, homosexuality, the love is love slogan, the Pride Month phenomenon, and the tolerance-as-virtue framing of contemporary discourse.
The cultural shift of the last sixty years has been engineered. It has not arisen organically from the discovery of new truths about human nature; it has arisen from the deliberate inversion of categories that the broader human tradition had previously held with near-universal consensus. The body was understood, across virtually every culture and every era of human history before the present, to have been made in a particular way and for particular purposes. Sexual union was understood to be between man and woman, oriented toward procreation and the bonding of the marriage relationship, with the moral framework around it serving to protect both the relational and the generative dimensions. This understanding is in Genesis. It is in Leviticus 18 and 20. It is in Romans 1. It is in 1 Corinthians 6. It is also in the moral traditions of cultures that have had no contact with the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures. The near-universality of the traditional understanding is not, in itself, an argument that the traditional understanding is right. But it is evidence that the contemporary inversion is not the discovery of an obvious truth that all previous generations missed.
The contemporary inversion has been accomplished primarily through the rhetorical strategy of moving the argument from the substantive question (what is sexual behavior for and what is its proper form?) to the tangential question (are you a kind person, are you tolerant, do you accept your neighbor?). The substantive question, when honestly engaged, has the answers it has had for most of human history. The tangential question, when substituted for the substantive question, allows the person who answers the substantive question correctly to be accused of failing the tangential question. You think homosexual practice is morally disordered? You must therefore hate homosexual persons. You hate. Hate has no home here. You are a bad person. The substitution is logically invalid — believing that a behavior is disordered does not entail hating the persons who engage in it; on the contrary, the love of the persons is what motivates the concern about the behavior — but the substitution is rhetorically effective. It moves the burden of proof from the side that has just departed from the universal moral tradition to the side that has continued to hold it.
The love-your-neighbor command is not violated by the refusal to celebrate what your neighbor’s flourishing is harmed by. The friend who watches another friend walk toward harm and says nothing, while smiling and affirming, is not being a friend. The friend who says I see what you are doing; I do not think it is right; I love you, and I am here when you need me, but I cannot celebrate this with you, is being a friend and loving his friend. The Christian framework treats the substantive moral question and the love-of-neighbor question as integrated rather than opposed. Go and sin no more, which Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:11), is the model. He did not condemn her, but he did not celebrate her sin. He told her the truth about what she was doing and called her to a different life, in the context of having defended her from those who would have stoned her. The integration of mercy and moral clarity is the Christian standard.
The love is love slogan is, structurally, the rationalization-of-sin move that has appeared in every era of human moral failure. The slogan conflates categories. The love of friend for friend, parent for child, husband for wife, neighbor for neighbor — all of these are real and good. They are not all the same kind of love, and they do not all warrant the same kinds of expression. Treating all loves as equivalent is not a deeper recognition of the truth about love; it is the collapse of the categories within which love operates meaningfully. When everything is love, nothing is love specifically; the term loses the content that gave it weight in the first place. The slogan is therefore not a moral advance. It is a moral evacuation, dressed up in the language of moral advance.
When you encounter these arguments in the cultural air you breathe, the rhetorical pressure of the contemporary moment is intense and deliberate, and resisting it requires a stable reference frame from outside it. The Bible provides that reference frame. The historical Christian tradition provides it. Your own conscience, properly formed, provides it. What the contemporary moment provides is the constant pressure to substitute the tangential question for the substantive question and to be shamed for noticing the substitution. Do not let yourself be shamed or seduced by it. The substantive question has the answers it has always had. The persons who have been caught up in the disorder are to be loved, prayed for, befriended, witnessed to, and helped — they are not to be celebrated in their disorder. Celebration of the disorder is not love. The integration of clarity and mercy is what the Christian standard requires.
V. The pygmies, the never-heard, and the question of proportionate judgment
You raised, in a different language, a question that contributed to my search for truth in world religions in the first place: what about those who never heard? What about the pygmy in the rainforest, the medieval Japanese farmer, the pre-Columbian indigenous American — none of whom had access to the gospel through any cause of their own? Are they consigned to eternal conscious torment for failing to believe in someone they never had any way of hearing about?
Christian theology commonly settles this question in a simplistic blanket statement of condemnation of all who have not confessed the name of Christ, which is trivially proof-texted. I, of course, cannot give a definitive answer to this question, because I do not sit at the judgment seat, and I do not want to give any sense of leeway or downplay the necessity and benefit of bowing and confessing the name, “…that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue should confess…” Philippians 2:10-11, and “…unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Isaiah 45:23. In the following are three considerations:
First, the Bible itself addresses this question more than the more aggressive forms of Christian apologetics usually acknowledge. Romans 1 says that the basic moral law is written on the conscience of every human being, and that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse (Romans 1:20). The argument is that everyone has access to enough natural revelation to know that there is a moral order and that they have not lived up to it. Romans 2 extends this: For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves (Romans 2:14). The pygmy in the rainforest is not without moral knowledge. He knows that murder is wrong, that theft is wrong, that infidelity is wrong, that cruelty is wrong, in the same way that the educated Westerner knows it. The basic moral order is accessible to every human being who has not deliberately seared his conscience against it.
Second, the principle of proportionate judgment is explicitly stated in the New Testament. Luke 12:47-48: And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. The principle is that judgment is calibrated to the knowledge the person has. The man who knew the gospel and rejected it is more culpable than the man who never heard it and lived as faithfully as he could to the natural-revelation light he had. The judgment is not arbitrary or uniform. It is proportionate.
Third, the universal-reconciliation question, which the fellowship engaged at length in the Sunday meeting two weeks ago, is the broader theological territory within which the never-heard question sits. I lean tentatively toward the view that all people will eventually be reconciled to God through Christ, while acknowledging that this position runs counter to the mainstream Christian consensus and that I cannot settle it from the texts with the certainty I would like. I believe judgment is real. I believe nobody enters into communion with God for free. I believe Christ is the only gateway. What I do not know, and what I think nobody who is honest about the texts can claim to know with confidence, is the cost for those who do not in this life accept Christ’s sacrifice, and the temporal scope of their reconciliation. I trust that the judgment is both just and merciful in proportions I cannot fully calculate. I trust that the God who is described in Scripture as not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9) is acting consistently with that description in the administration of his judgment.
What I can say is that the question about the fate of the pygmies who never heard is not a decisive judgment against the plausible validity of Christianity and the overt/obvious scriptural claim of Christ as the only way to the Father. The Christian tradition has resources for engaging it. The natural-revelation framework, the proportionate-judgment principle, and the question of universal reconciliation provide a substantial space within which the question can be addressed without either dismissing it or capitulating to it. The pygmy in the rainforest who lived faithfully according to the natural-revelation light he had is not, in my reading of Scripture, in the same situation as the educated Western atheist who heard the gospel, rejected it, and lived satisfying his sensual desires, having rationalized that there is no judge other than self as law. The judgment is proportionate. The mercy is real. The Christ who died for the world (John 3:16) died for the pygmy as much as for the seminary professor. How the application of that death to the pygmy proceeds in cases where the pygmy has never heard of it is a question I hold with humility, trusting the character of the one who created the Law and administers the judgment.
VI. The telescope, the planted instrument, and the depth of life
Late in our conversation, you offered a new metaphor for the search for meaning and understanding, and the importance of commitment. You spoke of using a telescope. When held by hand, it is unsteady, and focusing on distant objects allows only the occasional glimpse of a target star. This brief, seldom-seen glimpse of the target does not allow for in-depth examination. The wide field allows it to be seen continuously as one unremarkable object among many, without significant distinction as far as its individual character. A narrow focus and a stable platform are required for the in-depth examination needed to characterize a heavenly body in detail. Without that detailed focus, all stars look the same. With the steady discipline of commitment to a single goal, the richness of life is found.
The image is an analogy for Michael’s life. He has produced the mandala, the catalog of all stars, types, and their relationship. He has mastered the wide-angle examination of life. The record of what Michael has produced is comprehensive and impressive. But it has not, in the lifetime of searching, and thirty years of cataloging the mandala specifically, allowed Michael to see any one star with the depth that requires sustained attention to a single object. The telescope keeps moving and the wide angle view of life is seen.
It can seem like a loss, an ignoring of the whole, to point the telescope in one direction and spend all one’s time focused on that single object. But the planted telescope does not require one to give up examining every other star in the universe. The instrument planted on the North Star does not mean you never look at anything else. It means you have a fixed reference frame from which everything else can be located. You can walk around. You can look at the near field. You can attend to your work, your relationships, and the immediate practical demands of an ordinary day. You can, and should, return frequently and regularly to the object of your committed standard, the North Star that orients all other stars in its relation. Commitment to understanding the center and knowing the details of the absolute standard of life is important to put all other worlds in proper perspective. Committing to living that single standard of truth enables you to judge if your standard is rightly chosen. If you think you are pointed at the North Star, and its position changes every night, you have not identified the absolute truth. Over time, watching the same target across years, you see what a wide-angle or uncommitted platform cannot see — the slow evolution of the object, the changes that emerge only with patient integration over long periods, the depth that requires the discipline of returning frequently and looking in the same direction with a steady gaze.
In my experience, commitment to the Biblical standard as true and judging all else by that standard is required to gain the benefits of a life regulated by that perspective. It is the planted telescope. The instrument is fixed on the resurrection of Christ as evidence of the efficacy of the work that Christ did, and is available to us. Why it was necessary and meaningful is key to understanding the purpose of life and the requirements for creating the universe. From that fixed point, everything else can be located. The other religions can be examined without anxiety because they are examined from a stable reference frame rather than held perpetually as candidate positions, one of which might be the right one. Cultural pressures can be evaluated without panic because the evaluator has a place to stand from which to measure them. Personal failures can be confessed and worked through without despair because the framework in which they appear is grace, not self-justification. The depth of life, understanding its purpose, method, and structure, arises logically and can be extracted with sufficient effort. The pearl of great price can be found if one sells everything to buy the field – total commitment is required to find, have, and own the pearl. That level of commitment to exploring the depth of your chosen path allows you to discern truth. The wide field and unstable platform do not allow for a detailed experience of the distant goal.
The commitment does not produce certainty about every question. I do not have certainty about the question of universal reconciliation. There are many specific theological points that the broader Christian tradition has debated for two thousand years. All will be resolved when we see Him face to face. Uncertainty about details should not be used as a barrier to making a full-hearted commitment to living the Biblical/Christ-centered life. The Biblical paradigm, with the words of Christ as the bedrock of truth, provides a stable reference frame for examining life’s complexities and moral dilemmas. Uncertainties about details should not be used as a disqualifier for commitment. The broad view, the wide field scan of all religions, easily identifies the bright star. The wide-field should be searched, but it should be done with the perspective of an intent to settle, to explore the committed path. Are other religions evil and only Christianity good? Whatever is wrong, not of God’s way, should be identified and spoken clearly. “…whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… of good report… think on these things.” Philippians 4:8. Identify what is good, and dwell on the truth, and put aside that which is false.
What we all want is the fruit of the planted telescope, but we cannot have it without the commitment to exploring its depth. Realizing the advantages of the planted telescope requires commitment. Nobody can decide what the most likely religion in which to find truth is but you. The choice is yours, and the consequences, for gain or loss, are only borne by you. The one thing that is certain is that without commitment, you will not experience the fruit and certainty that commitment brings. The choice to commit to the Christian standard as the load-bearing reference frame of your life is the responsibility of every soul, made alone, without the comfort or support of culture or academics. I made it almost 40 years ago and have not regretted it. Michael did not commit to dedicating his life to deep searching along a single theological path; instead, he produced the mandala. The fork in the road to commit or keep searching is one we all must make. The results/fruit of commitment vs. continual searching will necessarily follow.
VII. The addiction principle and the pre-made response
Late in the conversation, we moved to the question of habit and addiction. I told you that I gave up coffee in 1994 — that I had to, for health reasons, rather than as a spiritual discipline, although it should have been the motivation. The improvement in my clarity and emotional stability was obvious. But I continued using alcohol extremely moderately until about four years ago. I had used alcohol as a once-weekly celebration; pizza and beer at McMenamins, the local Portland brew pub, were my way to reward myself for the victory over another week. But even that small indulgence had a cost. I knew it and felt it. My emotional instability across the entire week was compromised, but I continued that habit for years. I want to develop this thread here because I think it connects to the broader pattern of your question about commitment.
The addiction principle, as I have come to understand it, is universal. Every human being is addicted to something. The thing varies — alcohol, food, work, sex, attention, validation, control, fear, anger, distraction, the endless scroll of digital media — but the underlying structure is the same. There is a particular activity or substance or pattern of behavior that the flesh wants more than it should want, that produces a short-term reward at the cost of long-term integrity, and that the person engages repeatedly despite knowing that the engagement is costing him. The Christian tradition has been working on this pattern for two thousand years and has never claimed that human beings, in their natural state, can simply stop being addicted to whatever they are addicted to by an effort of will alone, but it does require commitment and will. The pattern requires what I call the pre-made response.
The pre-made response is the decision you make in advance about how you will respond when temptation arises. The decision is often made poorly in the moment of temptation. In that moment, the cognitive resources required to make the decision are overwhelmed by the flesh. The rationalization is fluent, the immediate appeal is overwhelming. The decision has to have been made beforehand, in a state of clarity, and carried into the moment of temptation as a settled commitment rather than an open question. No, I am not going to do that. I decided not to. I am not deciding now; I decided then. The decision stands.
I realized the two most dangerous moments for any addiction are the moment of pain and the moment of celebration. The moment of pain — the bad day, the relational rupture, the financial setback, the feeling of failure — produces the impulse to numb. The addictive substance is the available numbing agent. The moment of celebration — the good day, the success, the relational high — produces the impulse to amplify. The addictive substance is the available amplifier. Both moments require a pre-made response. The response is the same: no, I am not going to use the substance to numb the pain or amplify the joy; the substance is not going to be how I regulate life; I have decided this, and the decision stands. The pre-made response, the commitment, is what makes the difference between a person who is being lived by the addiction and a person who is living with the temptation, but handles it by simply saying no, rationalized by the refreshed commitment. And yes, “Just say no” is possible and necessary. Support and continued rationalization are necessary to support the commitment. The large perspective on the deep purpose of life helps us recognize how addiction plays into the fact of God’s experience of living through us. We are given freedom to choose, to modestly appreciate pleasure. “Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.” Proverbs 25:16
Of course, the commitment to sobriety, moderation in pleasure, and proper time connects to the broader question of what to commit to and when. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 The same structure that operates in the alcohol-addiction case operates in the searcher-finder case. The searcher’s moment of decision to commit is also a moment of temptation. He faces the temptation to keep the search open, to not commit, to imagine that the unsettled state is somehow safer than the committed state. Having committed to commit, the searcher girds himself with armor against the next temptation to continue the search as a seeker. The newly committed man must establish his defenses and prepare a pre-made response for the next moment, in which the reasoned response is always the same: no. I can explore, study, and learn, but now my search comes from a bastion of commitment, rather than the open fields of seeking.
We must live in the world. New ideas will continue to arise. Is this new argument a totally new perspective, never before considered? Compare it with the established commitment; does it stand up under all imaginable angles of attack? Ask for the support of your Christian brothers in meeting the objection. The seduction to leave the fortress of faith and brotherhood is real, but it should meet the same level of rigor as was applied in choosing your faith. Is this new perspective really truer and better? All such seductions should be met with the same cool reason and willingness to be proven wrong. Trust in the scholarship of the millennia of tradition, but remain open to being wrong, but not flighty. Approach all new offers to a new faith as seduction. The seeking is from the perspective of commitment, open but skeptical. The commitment stands; the response is that I am not returning to the position of an uncommitted seeker every time I hear a new opinion. I hear, I engage strongly, I defend with my best arguments, I understand the objections and new offer, and I continue to weigh the claims against those of my faith. I remain skeptical until time, counsel, and my heart have processed that opening thoroughly – rather than reopening the question every time the cultural air shifts, every time I encounter a new objection, or every time my own emotional state would prefer continued searching to commitment. Having explored, rationalized, and committed, the pre-made response makes the difference between a life that lives the commitment and a life that endlessly reconsiders and returns to foundational seeking without an anchor to stand upon.
Lest you think I am confusing commitment with stubbornness in the face of reality, please note that I think everyone must make an adult commitment to their religion. And everyone should be constantly testing the truth. Your birth religion does not determine its truth. You may have grown up on a metaphorical island, a monoculture that did not allow for comparison. As you grow up, expose yourself to new ideas, and continually test the rationality of your commitment. “…be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you…” 1 Peter 3:15. Does it meet the tests of freedom? “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free…” Galatians 5:1. Is your life showing fruit? “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance…” Galatians 5:22–23. Be open to seeing the world through new eyes. Defend your commitment with honesty and rationality. If it is true, it will stand up against the temptation to worship false gods. “…above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.” Ephesians 6:16. Stand tall, be vulnerable, and be a champion. If you are convinced you are wrong after all, you have earned your right to change allegiance. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.
VIII. Commitment under partial knowledge
The hardest version of the question is the worry that commitment under partial knowledge is itself a failure of intellectual integrity. If you do not know with certainty that the Bible is the word of God, that Christ rose from the dead, that the Christian framework closes the loop in ways the other frameworks do not, then how can you commit? Isn’t the honest position one of continued search until you find something that justifies commitment with certainty?
The Christian answer is that certainty in the deductive sense is not available for any of the deepest commitments human beings make, and that requiring it before committing is a recipe for never committing to anything. You cannot prove with deductive certainty that your wife loves you. You cannot prove that your closest friend would not betray you under sufficient pressure. You cannot prove that the basic structures of reality you depend on — that the sun will rise tomorrow, that your memory of the last hour corresponds to events that actually happened, that other people have the same kind of inner life that you do — are what you assume them to be. The argument from the requirement of certainty would, if pressed consistently, paralyze every commitment in your life. Nobody actually lives that way. Everybody commits to many things under partial knowledge. The question is not whether you will commit under partial knowledge. The question is what you will commit to.
The Christian framework, on inductive grounds, is the framework I commend to you as the framework most worth committing to. The argument is not that you should commit because committing is good in itself. The argument is that the Christian framework has the structural shape of being true: it closes the loop on the deepest questions in a way the other frameworks do not, it is historically anchored in events that the early witnesses were willing to die for, it has produced — across two thousand years of imperfect human implementation — more of the moral and cultural goods that make human life flourish than any other framework has produced, and it provides a stable reference frame from within which the depth of life can be seen. The argument is not deductive. It is the cumulative weight of converging considerations, none of which is conclusive on its own, all of which together produce the inductive case that commitment is the rational move.
Paul’s language for this, in Romans 5, is the language I want you to carry forward from this essay. We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:3-5). The Christian life is the long working-out of the commitment through the actual texture of a life — the falls, the rises, the cultural pressures, the personal failures, the unanswered questions, the seasons of certainty and the seasons of doubt — and what the working-out produces, by God’s grace, is character and hope. The hope is not ashamed because it is grounded in the love of God, which the Spirit has poured into the heart of the committed disciple. The commitment is what allows the working-out to proceed. Without the commitment, there are only the unsteady, random views through the unplanted telescope.
You know the material. You can articulate the objections better than most adult Christians can articulate their defense of the faith. What you lack is not knowledge. What you lack is the moment of commitment that turns the knowledge into a life direction. That moment is available whenever you are ready to take it. I am here when you want to talk it through further. The fellowship is here. Your father is here. Your mother is here. The conversation does not end when this essay ends. But the choice is yours. The fork in the road is the actual fork. Michael stayed on the path we were both on in High School and College, and, in the last 30 years, has produced the mandala, the detailed map of all of life’s roads. I chose a different path almost 40 years ago, developed Conscious Point Physics, which expands the first few verses of the Bible into millions of words, and spent 30 years as a counselor helping people make that choice. The choice is always available. “Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” (Led Zeppelin)
IX. Closing
And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
— Romans 5:3-5
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
— 1 Corinthians 13:11-13
The second of these passages names the structural condition under which all human commitments are made. Now we see through a glass, darkly. The partial knowledge is the condition of being human in the present age. The full knowledge — face to face — is reserved for the age to come. Within the present age, what abides is faith, hope, and love. The three are not three different things; they are three aspects of the one committed life, in which faith is the trust that what cannot yet be fully seen will one day be seen in full, hope is the anticipation of that fullness, and love is the way the committed life is lived in the meantime. The greatest of the three is love because love is what the fullness will turn out to have been about all along.
The Christian life is the life lived in faith, hope, and love under the condition of partial knowledge, with the planted telescope fixed on the resurrection of Christ as the load-bearing fact from which the rest of reality can be located. The commitment is not made under conditions of certainty. The commitment is made under conditions of inductive sufficiency, with the trust that the one in whom it is made will, in His own time, complete what was promised. Romans 5 names the working-out. 1 Corinthians 13 names the epistemological frame within which the working-out occurs. Both apply to us all, and we pray, by God’s grace, for the entire course of our lives that it opens, matures, and bears the fruit of the spirit.
We are all in this together. We have a fellowship that loves each other. Your family loves you. That love is not conditional on your decision. But I would much rather you decide for the planted telescope of Biblical revelation than the unsteady one held by human reason and theory. I have seen both lives. The planted one is the one I commend to you. The commitment is yours to make.
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38
