Imagine your name in the Bible.

Not because you were part of a perilous mission trip. Not because you wrote a psalm. Not because you did something heroic for the kingdom.

Imagine your name in the Bible because you and another Christian couldn’t get along.

That’s exactly what happened to two women in Philippi.

I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to agree in the Lord.

— Philippians 4:2

Just like that. Right there in the letter. Read aloud in the assembly. Forever.

We don’t know what the disagreement was about. Paul doesn’t tell us. What we do know is this: these were not bad women. In the very next verse, Paul calls them “co-workers” who “labored side by side with me in the gospel.” They were faithful. They had history. They had served Christ together.

But somewhere along the way, something between them had drifted. And Paul, sitting in a Roman prison, was concerned enough to put their names in writing.

Same Word, Different Direction

Here’s what you might miss when you read that verse.

The word translated agree? It’s our friend phroneō. The same word Paul has been using since chapter 1.

On Friday, we saw it pointed at love — I think about you with affection. Today we see it pointed at unity: think the same thing.

Same Greek word. Different shade of meaning.

And it goes all the way back to chapter 2, where Paul made the same plea on a bigger scale —

Make my joy complete by thinking the same way, having the same love, sharing the same feelings, focusing on one goal.

— Philippians 2:2

He uses phroneō twice in that one verse. Twice. Like he can’t say it enough.

Be of one mind. Set your minds together.

Paul isn’t asking for everybody to think the same thing about every issue. He’s not demanding identical opinions on what color to paint the interior of the building. He’s asking for something deeper — a shared inner orientation. Same love. Same purpose. Same Lord at the center.

That’s what unity is. Not sameness. Direction.

Two Oxen and One Yoke

Moses gave Israel a strange-sounding command in Deuteronomy 22:10: “Do not plow with an ox and a donkey together." It wasn't about animal cruelty. It was a picture. Two animals built differently, pulling at different speeds, with different temperaments. The work won't get done. The yoke punishes both of them. And the principle isn't just about livestock. It's about anyone trying to pull together when they're not actually thinking together.

That’s what disunity does in the body of Christ.

It doesn’t matter how strong each ox is on its own. It doesn’t matter how much they each love the farmer. If they’re not thinking together — if they’re not pulling the same direction — the work stalls.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen churches over the years where this is exactly the picture. Good people. Faithful people. People who individually love the Lord deeply. But somewhere along the way, somebody started pulling one way and somebody else started pulling the other, and now the whole field sits unworked while the oxen wear themselves out fighting the yoke.

Paul knew that picture. He’d seen it. And he wanted no part of it for the church he loved in Philippi.

“In the Lord” Is the Hinge

Now here’s the part I don’t want you to miss.

When Paul tells Euodia and Syntyche to agree, he adds two words that change everything —

In the Lord.

He doesn’t tell them to agree about whatever the argument was. He doesn’t pick sides. He doesn’t say, “Euodia, you were right. Syntyche, apologize.” He doesn’t even tell us what the issue was.

He says: come back to common ground in Christ.

Because that’s where unity actually lives. Not in winning. Not in being proven right. Not in everybody finally seeing it your way.

In the Lord.

When two Christians get stuck — when something has drifted between them — there’s only one place to go to fix it. Not deeper into the argument. Not into the politics of who’s right. You both go back to Christ. You stand in front of him together. And you let his mind become your mind.

That’s the only way unity actually holds.

Where Have You Stopped Thinking Together?

So here’s the question I want think about.

Is there a relationship in your life right now where you’ve stopped thinking together?

A marriage? A friendship? A brother or sister in Christ?

You don’t have to agree on everything. You never will. But have you stopped phroneō-ing together? Have you stopped sharing an inner orientation toward Christ and toward each other?

If so, Paul’s word to you today is the same word he had for Euodia and Syntyche.

Agree in the Lord.

Go back to Christ together. Stand in front of him. Stop trying to win and start trying to think with the other person, not against them.

Because the body of Christ doesn’t get its work done when the oxen are pulling in different directions.

The mind that loves remembers. The mind that’s united moves forward.

Set your mind there.

1. Not That I’ve Obtained It

   1. Philippians 3:12: Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, …

      1. The thing he is most insistent on refusing is already-ness.

      2. Maturity looks like a man who refuses to claim to be finished.

   2. Philippians 3:12 (ESV): I press on to make it my own, …

      1. “press on” — to pursue. To chase. To hunt.

      2. 3:6: Persecuting. Same Greek word. Pursuing, chasing, hunting.

      3. Same intensity. Same fire. Same drive. Redirected.

   3. Philippians 3:12: …because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus.

      1. “Taken hold of:” to seize, to grab.

      2. Paul just said: I press on to lay hold of, because Christ Jesus has laid hold of me.

      3. A reciprocal grip. Paul’s pursuit is a response, not a foundation.

2. Forgetting and Straining

   1. Philippians 3:13: But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead,

      1. What is the one thing your life is leaning toward?

      2. Pick it. Plant it. Lean toward it.

   2. Philippians 3:13: Forgetting what is behind …

      1. Forgetting is not amnesia, and it is not “ignore your past.”

      2. The runner doesn’t have a rear-view mirror. He’s not looking back at all.

   3. Philippians 3:13: straining toward what is ahead,

      1. “stretching yourself out toward.” The runner is out beyond himself. That’s maturity.

   4. Philippians 3:14: I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.

      1. The goal is the mark a runner fixes their eye on.

      2. What is the prize? The prize is knowing Christ fully, finally, face to face, i.e., Christ himself.

3. Think This Way

   1. Philippians 3:15: Therefore, let all of us who are mature think this way.

      1. The mind of vv. 12–14 is not optional. If you are mature, this is how you think.

      2. Paul says think this way. Set your mind here.

      3. A mind locked on Christ is not blown around.

   2. Grace for the slow learner

      1. Philippians 3:15: And if you think differently about anything, God will reveal this also to you.

         1. He keeps revealing. He keeps shaping. He keeps growing.

      2. Philippians 3:16: In any case, we should live up to whatever truth we have attained.

         1. In other words, keep what you have, and trust him with the rest.

         2. You belong by pressing on.

4. As We Close

   1. What is the portrait of the mature Christian?

   2. Not the saint admiring the trophies. It is the runner who is still leaning.

   3. Today is a good day to set the mind. What will you choose?

You know that moment when somebody just pops into your head.

You’re driving down the road, or doing the dishes, or trying to fall asleep, and out of nowhere, a face comes to mind. An old friend. A family member. Someone from years back you haven’t seen in a while.

The next thing you know, you’re picking up the phone. “Hey, I was just thinking about you.”

There’s something special about that. Because most of the time, when we tell somebody we were thinking of them, we’re telling them something deeper. We’re telling them they matter. That somewhere underneath the noise of our own life, they’re still there; still occupying real estate in our heart.

It’s more than just sentiment. That’s love.

And it turns out that’s exactly the kind of thinking Paul keeps coming back to in his letter to the Philippians.

A Word You Might Have Missed

I’ve focused quite a bit on Philippians this year (I’ll be preaching there this Sunday), and something jumped out at me I hadn’t quite seen before.

Paul uses one little Greek word — phroneō — ten times in this letter. More than in any other letter he wrote. It usually gets translated think, but it’s deeper than that. Phroneō is the kind of thinking that sets your inner compass. The orientation of your mind. What your heart leans toward when nothing else is demanding your attention.

Ten times. In four short chapters.

That’s not a coincidence. Paul’s writing to a church he loves, and he keeps coming back to the same point — watch your mind. Where it goes is where you’ll end up.

Over the next few days, we’re going to walk through this together. Five articles. Five different angles on what Paul means when he says think:

1. - Today — The mind that loves (Phil 1:7 + 4:10)

2. - Tuesday — The mind that’s united with others (Phil 2:2 + 4:2)

3. - Wednesday — The mind of Christ (Phil 2:5)

4. - Thursday — The grown-up mind (Phil 3:15)

5. - Friday — The mind that’s pointed the wrong way (Phil 3:19)

Same word. Five different shades of meaning. One message running underneath the whole letter — set your mind on the right things.

Let’s start where Paul starts.

Paul’s People Were on His Mind

Listen to how he opens his letter —

There’s the word. Phroneō.

He’s not saying, “I’ve made a logical determination about you all.” He’s saying, “I can’t get you out of my head, and that’s right where you ought to be.”

Here’s a man writing from a Roman prison. Chained. Uncertain about his future. He has every reason to be turned inward — thinking about his own troubles, his own discomfort, his own next meal.

But his mind keeps drifting back to a little church in Macedonia.

That’s love. That’s phroneō pointed toward people.

They Were Thinking of Him Too

What’s beautiful is what comes back the other direction at the end of the letter.

In chapter 4, Paul writes —

Same word. Phroneō.

The Philippians had been thinking about Paul too. Carrying him in their hearts. Praying for him. Watching for chances to send him help. And when the chance came, they took it.

So you’ve got these two ends of the letter, and they make a quiet little frame. Paul is thinking of them. They're thinking of him. Affection going both directions across the miles.

That’s what the body of Christ is supposed to look like.

Where Your Mind Goes Tells the Truth

Here’s the thing I want us to consider today.

Where your mind goes when you’re not trying to direct it tells you the truth about what you love.

If you keep finding yourself thinking about money, that’s where your heart is. If you keep replaying old offenses, that’s where your heart is. If your mind keeps drifting toward your kids, your spouse, your church family, that’s where your heart is.

Paul knew this. That’s why he chose the word phroneō. Because the inner orientation of your mind isn’t a separate thing from your love. It is your love.

You can say all the right things in public. You can show up at every gathering. But if God’s people never actually cross your mind during the week — if their names never surface, their faces never show up while you’re driving home — then something’s drifted. Something needs to be reset.

The mind that loves is the mind that remembers. That carries people. That can’t quite shake them.

Who Are You Carrying?

So here’s the question to take with you into the weekend.

Whose face shows up in your mind when nobody’s directing the traffic?

Who do you carry?

And maybe more piercing — who should you be carrying that’s been off your radar too long?

Pick up the phone. Send the text. Pray that prayer. Because the mind that loves doesn’t just stay in your own head — it eventually reaches across the miles, the way it did between Paul and the Philippians.

That’s where we’re headed over the next week. Same word. Five lessons. Today, just sit with this one:

The mind that loves is a mind that remembers.

Set your mind there.

Most of us don’t have a fighting problem. We have a noise problem.

When life corners us, the first instinct is to do something. Anything. Make a list. Make a plan. Make a phone call. Make some noise.

What we don’t tend to do is be quiet. This is especially true for me.

The Trap

Picture Israel for a minute. They’re three days out of Egypt and they’re already trapped.

Pharaoh’s army is closing in from behind. Cavalry, chariots, the works. The Red Sea is dead in front of them. Mountains on either side. There’s no exit. There’s no contingency plan. They’re done.

What you have to see is that they didn’t wander into this trap by accident. Read Exodus 14:1–4. God led them there on purpose. The trap was the setup.

When the Israelites see the dust cloud of the Egyptian army on the horizon, they panic. Of course they do. They cry out to God, then immediately turn on Moses: Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you took us away to die in the wilderness? (Exodus 14:11).

Fear has a quick tongue.

Four Commands in Two Verses

Moses’ response is one of the most famous speeches in the Old Testament. Read it carefully. There are four commands packed into two verses.

“Don’t be afraid. Stand firm and see the Lord’s salvation that he will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet.”

—Exodus 14:13–14

Count them.

1. Don’t be afraid.

2. Stand firm.

3. See the Lord’s salvation.

4. Be quiet.

The first three are encouraging. The fourth one is the killer.

The Last Command Is the Hardest

The Hebrew word translated be quiet is charash. It means “to be silent,” “to hold your peace,” “to stop talking”. Some English translations soften it: hold your peace, keep silent. But the word is sharper than that. It’s the kind of silence you’d ask for when you needed someone to stop.

Stop strategizing. Stop running scenarios. Stop second-guessing. Stop fighting battles that aren’t yours.

Just be quiet.

That’s the command most of us trip over.

I notice it in myself. When I’m under pressure, my instinct isn’t to fight. I’m a preacher, not a fighter. My instinct is to talk. Talk it out. Talk through it. Talk myself into a better mood. And the more I talk, the harder it is to hear what God is doing.

I think this is what Moses is putting his finger on. The two halves of the verse aren’t separate. They’re hinged. The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet. He isn’t waiting for us to be silent before He fights. But our noise keeps us from seeing the fight. Quiet doesn’t cause God’s action. Quiet just lets us watch it.

He’s Already in Motion

Here’s the other detail we need to see.

By the time Moses delivers this speech, God is already moving. The wind that will dry up the seabed has already been ordered up. The pillar that will stand between Israel and Egypt has already been positioned. The angel of the Lord is already on the move (Exodus 14:19–21).

When God says the Lord will fight for you, He isn’t promising a future intervention. He’s narrating something that’s already underway. That’s a hard truth and a beautiful one. You may be in something right now where you’ve been waiting on God to start. He started already. You missed it because the noise was too loud.

Stand firm. See what He’s doing. Be quiet long enough to let Him do it.

A Different Storm. A Different Boat. Same God.

Skip forward fourteen hundred years.

The disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee at night. A storm rolls in. A bad one. The boat is taking on water. The disciples are bailing, panicking, sure they’re going to die. And Jesus is asleep in the back.

They wake Him up, terrified, of course, and Jesus stands up in the boat and speaks to the storm. He says, Silence! Be still! (Mark 4:39). “Silence” is the Greek echo of charash. Be silent. Be quiet. Stop. And the storm stops.

What I want you to see is that this isn’t a coincidence of language. It’s the same voice. The God who spoke to Israel at the Red Sea and said be quiet is the same God who spoke to the Galilean storm and said be quiet. The word is the same because the authority is the same.

If He could quiet a multitude trapped before the sea, with an army closing in, He can quiet your situation. If He could quiet a storm, He can quiet whatever has you cornered tonight.

Jesus is in the boat. He isn’t asleep at the wheel of your life.

So..

Here’s the move. Pick the place in your life where you’ve been the loudest — the situation where you’ve been doing the most strategizing, the most worrying, the most trying-to-figure-it-out — and try silence.

Don’t stop praying. But stop reasoning out loud to God like you’re going to land on the answer if you just say enough words. Just be quiet. Charash. Stand firm. Watch what He does. Most of us have never given God thirty seconds of actual silence to work with.

He’s already fighting. Stop fighting Him for the wheel.

“The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet.” — Exodus 14:14 (CSB)

There’s a story we like to tell ourselves. The self-made story. The bootstrap story. The “I clawed my way out” story.

And then God speaks to a million tired people standing at the foot of a mountain, and with one sentence He undoes the whole thing.

“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”

— Exodus 19:4

This is the preamble at Sinai. Before God says one word about commandments. Before He spells out a single expectation. He says this.

I carried you. I brought you to Me.

The whole covenant sits on top of that sentence.

You Didn’t Walk Out

The Hebrew verb behind “carried” is nasa. It means to bear, to lift up, to carry away. It shows up close to six hundred times in the Old Testament, and the verb itself does a lot of work. It can mean to lift the eyes, lift the voice, even to lift away guilt. But when it's used the way Moses uses it here, the picture is unmistakable. God isn't offering to help with the suitcase. He's picking up the whole house..

Now look at what that means for Israel.

They didn’t escape Egypt. They were transported out of it. The plagues weren’t their idea. The Passover wasn’t their plan. The path through the sea wasn’t their engineering. Every step of the way, somebody else was doing the heavy lifting. They were the ones being lifted.

And here’s the question for us:

How much of your life do you think you’ve been doing on your own?

I’m sure I’m not alone, but there have been times where I’ve been worn down by life and the complexities of life — problems that come in waves. A few times, I’ve thought, “I just don’t know how I’m going to keep doing this.” And what I’m continuing to learn is that I’m not. I haven’t been. There are times I think I’ve been carrying it. I’ve been carried.

And it’s not just me. We also have the testimony of a million people standing at Sinai.

On Eagles’ Wings

Then comes the image. Eagles’ wings.

That picture isn’t for decoration. It’s load-bearing. Moses will come back to it at the end of his life and unpacks it more fully:

“He watches over his nest like an eagle and hovers over his young; he spreads his wings, catches him, and carries him on his feathers.”

—Deuteronomy 32:11

If you’ve ever watched a documentary on eagles, you know exactly what Moses is describing. The mother eagle teaches her young to fly by stirring up the nest. She makes it uncomfortable. She breaks up the soft places. The young eagle has to leave the nest because the nest isn’t a comfortable place to stay anymore.

But, while she’s stirring the nest, she’s also hovering. Watching. Wings spread. Ready. The moment that young eagle starts to fall, she dives underneath, catches him on her back, and carries him until he can fly on his own.

That’s what Moses is saying about God.

The wilderness was God stirring the nest. Hunger. Thirst. Wandering. Hard lessons. He wasn’t making life miserable for sport. He was making the nest uncomfortable enough that His people would actually leave it. And the whole time, He was hovering. Close enough to catch.

That’s the God we serve.

Maybe you are in a season right now where the nest feels stirred up. The job changed. The marriage is hard. The diagnosis came back. The kid isn’t doing well. And you’re falling, or you feel like you are.

Look up. Wings are spread. He’s closer than you think.

Brought to Myself

Now look at where He says He’s carrying them.

I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

Not to Sinai. Not to the land. Not to a destination on a map at all.

To Himself.

That’s the whole point of the rescue, and most of us miss it. We treat redemption like a delivery service. Get me out of trouble. Get me through the week. Get me to heaven. We think God is taking us somewhere.

And He is. He’s taking us to Him.

The destination of your salvation is not a city. It’s a Person. Every step of being carried has a direction, and the direction is His presence. That’s why John can write at the end of Revelation that the great promise of the new creation is not gold streets but this: God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. (Revelation 21:3).

From Egypt to eternity, the destination has never changed. He’s been carrying His people toward Himself the whole time.

And Then He Carried More Than That

Here’s where it gets really beautiful. That same Hebrew verb — nasa — shows up again in one of the most important verses in the Old Testament:

“Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains.”

— Isaiah 53:4

Same word. Same lifting. Same picture.

What God did for Israel in the wilderness was a shadow of what He would do for the world in His Son. He didn’t just carry a nation out of Egypt. He carried our griefs all the way to a cross. He bore the weight that would have crushed us forever.

Peter says it like this: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). The lifting language is everywhere. The God who said I carried you kept on carrying. He still does.

Every saint walking with Christ today is on those wings. We were carried in our redemption — buried with Him in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). We are being carried in our daily walk. And one day He’ll carry us across the last river into His presence.

That’s not soft theology. That’s the spine of the whole story.

Where in your life have you been operating like you’re carrying it alone?

Be specific. Not generally exhausted — specifically. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s a fear. Maybe it’s a season at work that’s wearing you out. Whatever it is, name it.

Then bring it to God in prayer, “God, I’ve been acting like I’m carrying this. I’m not. You’ve been carrying me.”

That’s nothing more than the truth. And the truth has a way of putting weight back where it belongs. You didn’t get here on your own. You won’t get the rest of the way on your own either. And that’s good news, not bad.

“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”

— Exodus 19:4

I am really enjoying teaching a class on Monday nights for new Christians. “My First Year in Christ” will be a one-year study helping Christians grow up into Christ. Last night’s lesson was on prayer, and one of the primary passages we looked at was Matthew 6:9-13. We spent quite a bit of time on “Give us this day our daily bread,” and what that means. It is the inspiration for today’s article.

Israel had been out of Egypt about six weeks when the complaining started. Six weeks. That’s it.

It’s almost mind-boggling. These are the same people who watched the Red Sea split down the middle. They walked across on dry ground while a wall of water held back on either side. They saw Pharaoh’s army go under. And now, a month and a half later, they’re standing in the wilderness with their hands on their hips, telling Moses they were better off as slaves.

Fear has a short memory.

What’s That?

Here’s where the story turns. God hears the grumbling, and He doesn’t blast them. He feeds them.

In Exodus 16:4, He says, I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. And every morning, that’s exactly what happened. The dew lifted, and the ground was covered with little flakes of something they’d never seen before.

The Hebrew is delightful. They look at it on the ground and say man hu — literally, what is it? That’s where the word manna comes from. They didn’t even have a name for it. They just had a question. And God answered the question by feeding them, day after day, for forty years.

But there’s a catch. He told them to gather only what they needed for that day. No more.

The Hoarding Problem

Verse 20 tells us some of them tried it anyway. Tried to gather extra. Tried to put a little aside, just in case. And the next morning, the leftovers were full of worms. It stunk.

Now look. That’s not God being petty. That’s God being a teacher.

The hoarding wasn’t a food problem. It was a faith problem. They didn’t trust that He’d show up again tomorrow. So they tried to take tomorrow into their own hands today.

I get it. We do this constantly.

We want the pantry, not the kitchen. We want six months of provision sitting on the shelf, so we don’t have to trust Him for six months. We want to know how the surgery is going to go, how the kids are going to turn out, what the next quarter looks like, and whether the diagnosis will come back clean. We want it all settled. Visible. Stockpiled.

And what God offers instead is a kitchen. He’ll feed you. But He’s going to feed you one meal at a time. And that’s on purpose.

Why Daily?

Here’s what I want you to see. God could have given Israel a year’s supply at the start and let them sleep in. He didn’t. Forty years of breakfast meant forty years of waking up and remembering that He was still there.

Manna wasn’t just calories. It was a relationship.

Jesus picked up the same thread when His disciples asked Him how to pray. Give us this day our daily bread. (Matthew 6:11). The Greek word there — epiousios — is one of the most debated words in the New Testament. Translators have wrestled with it for centuries. The most likely meaning is something close to the bread we need for the coming day.

Not next month’s bread. Not next year’s bread. Today’s. Tomorrow’s at the latest.

That’s not poverty thinking. That’s covenant thinking. It’s the same lesson God taught Israel in the wilderness, lifted up and handed to a brand-new people.

What You’re Carrying That Hasn’t Arrived

Most of us aren’t worried about food. Let’s be honest. The fridge is full. The lights are on.

What we’re carrying is something else. Tomorrow’s hypothetical. Next year’s worst-case. Some scenario that has not even happened yet, that may never happen at all, and we are carrying the full weight of it today.

Jesus had something to say about that, too.

That verse sounds simple until you realize how much of your mental real estate is rented out to a tomorrow that isn’t even here yet.

God isn’t asking you to figure out next year. He’s asking you to trust Him for tomorrow’s breakfast. And the morning after that, when you wake up and look outside, the manna will be there again.

A Challenge for Us

Sit with this question this week. What is the one tomorrow you have been carrying that has not even arrived?

Name it. Be specific. Don’t generalize. I’m worried about money is too broad. I’m worried about the bill in October — that’s specific. That’s something you can put down.

Then put it down. Not forever. Just for today. Trust Him for the breakfast that’s actually in front of you.

He fed Israel for forty years in a desert that grew nothing. He’s not going to forget you on a Tuesday in May.

I am going to rain bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. This way I will test them to see whether or not they will follow my instructions.

— Exodus 16:4 (CSB)

1. The Painful Diagnosis (5:11-12a)

   1. Hebrews 5:11: We have a great deal to say about this, and it is difficult to explain, since you have become too lazy to understand. Slow, heavy. Sluggish.

   2. By This Time

      1. 5:12: Although by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again. You need milk, not solid food.

      2. They ought to be teachers. Although by this time you ought to be teachers,

      3. They ought to be mature enough to feed someone. You need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation again.

   3. Diagnosis, Not Accusation

      1. Hebrews 5 is a diagnosis. We are being called up. The diagnosis isn’t the end … it’s the start of getting better.

      2. Hebrews 6:1: Therefore, let us leave the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to maturity , not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works, faith in God,

2. Milk vs. Solid Food (v. 12b-13)

   1. Hebrews 5:12-13: You need milk, not solid food . Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness, because he is an infant.

      1. What is milk? What is solid food? See 6:1-2.

      2. What is solid food? Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness , … This is applied doctrine. It’s not knowing more. It’s knowing how to live.

   2. Why We Get Stuck on Milk: Milk is Comfortable. Milk is Easy to Fake. Milk Feels Safe Because Everyone Else is on it Too

3. The Mark of the Mature (v. 14)

   1. Hebrews 5:14: But solid food is for the mature —for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil. Real-time discernment. Christ-shaped decisions.

   2. Let’s focus on the word trained.

      1. Hebrews 5:14: for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

      2. Maturity is the long-compounding interest of a thousand small obediences.

4. As We Close…

   1. So … back to the math we did at the beginning.

      1. The number is just years. The question is what has been built during those years.

      2. But, hear the rest of it too. Therefore, let us leave the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to maturity, …

   2. Let us go on… He’s in it with them. He’s not above them. He’s coming with them.

   3. You can grow up into Christlikeness. Are you ready?

I want to ask you something honest, and I want you to answer it honest.

When did your faith start feeling so heavy?

Not the kind of heavy that comes from carrying a real cross — Jesus said to expect that one. I mean the other heavy. The heavy that shows up in your shoulders on Sunday afternoon. The heavy that wakes you up at 3am with the news cycle still ringing in your head. The heavy that makes you feel like if you don’t argue louder, vote harder, post sharper, or fight one more round at the kitchen table, the whole thing might just collapse.

A lot of us have been carrying that for a decade now. And somewhere along the way we started to believe a lie that the Bible never told us.

We started to believe the kingdom of God needed us to hold it up.

Listen to what the writer of Hebrews tells a church that was watching their world come apart:

Stop and feel the weight of that. The shaking is His voice. Not Washington’s. Not the algorithm’s. Not the universities’. Not whatever bad news is going to break this afternoon. The shaking we’ve been watching — at the deepest level — is the voice of the God who has been holding the world together since before the world started.

And the purpose of His shaking is not to destroy you.

The purpose is to strip away everything that was never going to last so that what actually lasts can finally be seen.

Then verse 28 lands the punchline:

Look at that verb. Receiving. Present tense. Right now, today, this morning, the kingdom is being handed to you. You’re not building it. You’re not earning it. You’re not defending it. You’re not holding it up. You’re receiving it. With open hands.

That’s what worship is. Worship is what you do when you have empty hands and a kingdom is being put in them.

And here’s where I think a lot of us have gotten lost.

We’ve been trying to do something with our faith in this cultural moment that God never asked us to do. We’ve been trying to hold the kingdom up. Like if we lost the argument at Thanksgiving, the kingdom would tip over. Like if the election went the wrong way, the kingdom would fall. Like if the next generation didn’t see it, the kingdom would die out.

Today, I'm telling you what the Hebrew writer told the shaking church. The kingdom you belong to cannot be shaken. It does not need you to hold it up. It is holding you up.

Read that twice if you need to. Because some of you have been carrying weight that was never on your shoulders to begin with, and your hands have been so full of trying to keep heaven steady that you forgot heaven is the thing keeping you steady.

Paul says the same thing a different way:

He picks that word citizenship on purpose. Philippi was a Roman colony. Most of those Christians had Roman citizenship or knew somebody who did. They knew exactly what it meant. Citizenship wasn’t where you happened to live. It was who you belonged to. The law that covered you. The kingdom that claimed you, no matter what province you were standing in.

Paul says the kingdom that claims you is not the one with the flag over the courthouse. The kingdom that claims you is the one in Hebrews 12. The mountain. The assembly. The blood. The city no empire can touch.

Here’s a test. You can do it without leaving your chair.

Watch what makes you angriest. Watch what you can’t stop talking about. Watch what wakes you up at three in the morning. Watch what you’d defend before you’d defend the gospel.

Whatever passes that test in your life — that’s the kingdom that’s actually got you.

For some of us, our citizenship is technically in heaven and functionally somewhere else. We sing about Zion on Sunday and live in Babylon on Tuesday. We confess Jesus is Lord and let some other lord set our calendar, our temper, our anxieties, our conversations.

The fix is not to try harder. The fix is to put the weight down.

You don’t have to hold the kingdom up. You never did. You picked it up somewhere along the way and you’ve been carrying it ever since, and your shoulders are aching, and your prayer life has thinned, and your patience with your family is shot, and the joy has quietly drained out of your faith — and the whole time, the kingdom was holding you, and you didn’t know it.

The most defiant thing a Christian can do in a shaking world is worship. Not louder politics. Not sharper arguments. Not bigger platforms. Worship. Because worship is the thing you do when you finally let go of pretending the kingdom needs you to keep it up.

And then the writer of Hebrews adds one more line:

That’s not a threat. That’s a comfort. Everything shakeable in our lives, in our culture, in our hearts — eventually meets that fire. And the fire burns up what cannot last. What’s left, when the fire has done its work, is the kingdom that could never burn.

You don’t have to be afraid of the shaking.

You belong to the One doing it.

So this week, when the news breaks and your phone lights up and somebody says something at the dinner table that would normally have you reaching for your sharpest line — try something different.

Put the weight down.

Worship instead. Sing on the way to work. Pray for the grandkid you’ve been carrying alone. Be patient with your spouse. Love your neighbor with your hands instead of arguing with strangers with your thumbs. Refuse to be ruled by the algorithm. Live like a citizen of an unshakeable kingdom living in a shakeable world.

And when everything else shakes — and it will — stand.

You’re not holding it up.

It’s holding you.

Most of us have a list.

We don’t call it that. We’d never say it out loud. But if you’re honest with yourself for ninety seconds, you can name them. The grandkid who’s deconstructing. The brother who said the thing at Thanksgiving three years ago. The friend who walked away from the church and hasn’t looked back. The cousin whose Facebook posts you stopped reading because you couldn’t stomach them anymore.

You used to bring those names to God. You used to lie awake thinking about them. You used to pray real prayers — not throwaway bless them, Lord prayers, but the kind where you actually wept on their behalf.

Then somewhere along the way, you stopped.

Maybe it was too painful. Maybe you decided they were too far gone. Maybe praying for them required you to feel something you didn’t want to feel anymore. Whatever the reason, the prayer quieted, and in the silence something else moved in. A verdict. You didn’t announce it. But it got rendered all the same. That one’s done. That one’s not coming back. That one made their choice.

And here’s what I’ve learned, both as a preacher and as somebody who’s done this in his own life. Once that verdict is filed, you can’t weep with that person anymore. You may still talk to them. You may still send the birthday text. You may still sit across from them at Christmas. But the tears are gone, because you decided the case before God did.

And here’s the trouble. God didn’t.

Listen to what He says through Ezekiel:

Read that twice. The God of heaven, who has every right to file every verdict on every wandering soul who ever lived, says He takes no pleasure in it. None. He’d rather they turn and live. If that’s God’s desire for the people we’ve written off, what in the world are we doing with the case files we’ve been keeping in our heads?

Look at John 11.

Jesus stands outside the tomb of His friend. The sisters are wrecked. Mary falls at His feet and says the same thing Martha already said: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. That sentence has some accusation buried in it. Where were you? You knew. You could have come. You didn’t.

Now here’s the part that should stop us. Jesus knew what was coming. He knew Lazarus was about to walk out of that tomb in roughly ninety seconds. He had the answer in His mouth before He ever stepped back into Bethany.

And He wept anyway.

The shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. (John 11:35) Two words we’ve quoted a thousand times and drained of all their weight. He didn’t fast-forward past the grief because He had the resolution coming. He didn’t tell Mary to pull herself together. He didn’t lecture the crowd on the doctrine of resurrection. He stood there, tears running down His face, for a man He was about to call out of the grave.

That’s the Jesus we follow.

He held the truth — I am the resurrection and the life — and the tears in the same body, on the same day, in the same conversation. He didn’t pick. The conviction didn’t dry up His compassion. The compassion didn’t soften His conviction. Both, at full strength, in the same human face.

The Christian who has the truth but not the tears is not following the Jesus of John 11. He’s following somebody else. Maybe a Jesus he made up. Maybe a Jesus the news cycle made up for him. But not this one. Not the one outside the tomb.

And here’s the thing about tears. You cannot manufacture them. You cannot work them up. They come from somewhere down underneath, and they only come when you’ve actually let yourself feel the weight of who that person is and what’s at stake for them. Tears are evidence that you have not yet filed the verdict. They are evidence that the case is still open in your heart.

Which is why a lot of us don’t have any.

Paul puts the question to us this way:

Stop and let that one land. The thing that brings people home — including you and me — is God’s kindness. Not His verdict. His patience. His restraint. The slow, faithful refusal to write somebody off when every reasonable accountant in heaven would have closed the books years ago. That’s the kindness that got you here. Despise that kindness, Paul says, and you forget how you got in the door.

James drives the same nail one swing harder:

That’s a verse to read with the lights on. The case file you’ve been keeping on somebody else cuts both ways. The mercy you withhold is the mercy you’re forfeiting. The verdict you file gets filed back. James is not threatening — he’s warning. The verdict-filer is not in a safer place than the person on the receiving end. He’s in a worse one.

Eight hundred years before Jesus walked through Galilee, Micah said it like this:

Most of us read that as a checklist. Three boxes. Check, check, check. But it isn’t a list. It’s an equation. The third verb — walk humbly — is what holds the first two from falling apart. Without humility, justice turns into contempt. Without humility, kindness turns into cowardice. The third verb keeps the other two from becoming what the world has already seen too much of from people wearing the name of Christ.

Filing a verdict on somebody is what justice looks like when humility is gone. It still uses the language of conviction. It still feels righteous in the moment. But there are no tears in it anymore, because there is no humility in it anymore. You stopped seeing yourself as somebody who got loved off a list, and you started seeing yourself as somebody who gets to keep one.

Let me give you two questions to take into today.

First — whose face do you need to see when you think about that issue you’ve been so sure about? Not the issue. The face. The name. Because the moment that issue has a face attached to it, your conviction has to learn how to walk with your tears. And if it can’t — if the face changes nothing about how you carry the conviction — something has gone wrong somewhere upstream.

Second — whose name have you stopped praying because you’ve already decided how the conversation goes?

You know who.

There’s a person you used to carry to God on your knees, and somewhere along the way you stopped. The verdict got filed. The case got closed. The tears dried up. And now when their name comes up, you feel something that isn’t grief and isn’t love. It’s just the cold quiet of a decision you made when nobody was watching.

Pick that name back up this week.

Bring them back to God. Don’t argue with them in your head. Don’t rehearse what you’re going to say next time. Just bring them. Sit with them in prayer long enough that something in you breaks again, the way it used to break, before you decided you were done.

Cry first. Then go have the conversation.

You can’t weep with someone you’ve already filed a verdict on. So go un-file it. Then weep.

Then you’ll be ready to talk.

We’ve all had the conversation we wish we could redo.

The one at the kitchen table when politics came up. The text to your sister you halfway regret. The tone you took with the friend who said something you couldn’t believe she said. You walked away thinking, that’s not who I want to be in those moments. But you didn’t know what else to be.

Paul knew. He gave the Colossians one verse on it that most of us have been reading wrong our whole lives.

Most of us read that as a balance. Some grace. Some salt. Find the middle and don’t tip too far either way. That’s not what Paul wrote. He said always gracious. And seasoned with salt. Both. All the time. Not a dial you slide between. A meal that has both ingredients in every single bite.

And the reason this is vitally important is that almost all of us are heavy on one side and light on the other. Paul names two failure modes without naming them, and most of us are living in one of them right now.

Salt without grace. We know these Christians. They’re correct and unbearable. They can quote the verses. They can name the heresies. They can win the argument before the other person finishes the sentence. They show up to every conversation already loaded.

The trouble is, nobody listens to them. Their adult kids stopped bringing things up around them years ago. Their coworkers learned not to mention anything spiritual within earshot. The family group text goes quiet when they post. They are loud, sharp, and right… and the people God put in their lives are all running the other direction.

That’s not faithfulness. That’s just being difficult and calling it conviction.

I’ve been that guy. Maybe you have too. You walk away from a conversation feeling like you held the line, and three weeks later, you realize the line is the only thing you held. The relationship is somewhere on the floor.

Grace without salt. We know these Christians too. They’re sweet. Agreeable. Easy to be around. They never disagree with anybody. They never bring up anything uncomfortable. Their faith is pleasant and private and almost entirely unobjectionable.

People love them. Nobody is changed by them.

That’s the cost. Their friends like them. Their family enjoys them. But there’s nothing to lean toward. Nothing to ask about. The hard true thing has not been said in years, and the people they love are drifting toward eternity without ever having heard it from the person who claims to love them most.

That’s not grace either. That’s just being agreeable. The people in your life can tell the difference.

So here’s the honest question. Which side are you heavy on?

Some of you know your stuff. You’re not going to be moved on truth, and good for you — that part matters. But the people in your house have stopped bringing things up around you, and you’ve started to wonder why. Here’s why. They’ve learned that bringing it up costs more than it’s worth. You win every round. You haven’t won a heart in a long time.

Some of you are warm. Patient. Kind. People love being around you, and that’s not nothing. But you have not said a hard true thing to anybody you love in years. You’ve told yourself that’s grace. It isn’t. It’s avoidance wearing grace’s clothes.

Both are sub-Christian speech. Paul is calling us up to something fuller.

Look at what salt actually does. Three things. Most of us only remember two.

Salt preserves. Christian speech preserves something — the truth about God, about people, about sin, about hope. Speech that’s lost its salt has gone soft on truth to keep the peace.

Salt flavors. Christian speech is supposed to be the kind people notice. Not because it’s loud. Because it’s different. Hopeful where everyone else is cynical. Honest where everyone else is hedging. Kind where everyone else is performing.

And here’s the one we forget. Salt makes you thirsty.

The best Christian speech leaves the other person thirsty. Curious. Wanting more. Not pummeled. Not lectured into the ground. Thirsty. Some of us have been trying to drown people in the gospel for years. Paul says salt them. Make them thirsty. Then trust God for the water.

Now put grace back next to it.

Gracious doesn’t mean weak. Gracious doesn’t mean you won’t say hard things. Jesus said hard things constantly, and people walked away from those conversations more loved than when they walked in. That’s what we’ve forgotten how to do. Gracious means the person you’re talking to walks away knowing they were seen. Not steamrolled. Not dismissed. Not handled. Seen — even when you disagreed.

And here’s the part that’ll preach if you let it. The grace in your speech is not generated by you. It’s not a tone you manufacture. It comes out of a heart that remembers what God has been like with you. The same God who has been patient with your sin. Slow to anger over your rebellion. Kind in your foolishness. Faithful when you weren’t. That’s the God whose grace is supposed to season your speech with the people you love.

If your speech with them has gotten harsh, the answer isn’t to try harder to be nice. The answer is to go back to the cross and remember how you got here in the first place. The Christian who can’t speak with grace usually has a short memory.

Grace and salt together is the speech that actually works. The kind where the person walks away thinking, I don’t agree with everything she said. But I want to keep talking to her. The kind that doesn’t end the relationship. The kind that opens the next door. You don’t have to choose between being kind and being clear. Jesus didn’t pick. Paul didn’t pick. You don’t have to pick either.

Grace and salt. Always. In every conversation that matters.

This week, before the next hard one comes — and one is coming — take ten minutes and ask yourself which side you’ve been heavy on. Then ask the harder question. Why? If it’s salt without grace, your problem isn’t conviction. It’s that you’ve forgotten the cross. If it’s grace without salt, your problem isn’t kindness. It’s that you’ve decided being liked matters more than being faithful.

Both are fixable. Neither gets fixed by accident.

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Ask most of us what’s hurting our faith right now, and we’ll point straight out the window.

The Supreme Court. Hollywood. The school board. Cable news. Whatever party we’ve been told to be mad at this month. We’ve spent the last decade convinced the enemy is out there somewhere, holding a microphone or a gavel, and if we could just push hard enough, our faith would finally get to breathe again.

Then you open Peter’s letter to a slandered, hurting church, and the very first instruction he gives them is not what you’d expect. Look at 1 Peter 2:11. He calls them “strangers and exiles.” Beloved ones living in soil that doesn’t claim them. And right there, in the next breath, comes his first command:

Abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul.

Notice what’s missing. Notice how he doesn’t say abstain from the Romans. He doesn’t say abstain from the slander, the gossip, the pressure at work. Peter turns the exile inward before he ever turns it outward. The first battle is in here.

And that’s the one most of us are losing.

The Greek behind “wage war” is strateuomai. It’s the language of an army on campaign. Boots on the ground. Siege works going up. Something is camped outside the city of your soul, and it didn’t come from Washington. It came from somewhere a lot closer.

You know, the Supreme Court has never reached into my life and made me a worse husband. It has never made me a lazier father. It has never weakened my prayer life by a single minute. My phone has done all three. My appetites have done all three. My own laziness has done all three. The Supreme Court? Not once.

Most of us are not losing to the culture out there. We’re losing to Netflix.

For some, the war is being fought over cable news. You wake up angry at people you’ll never meet. Your blood pressure is in the hands of strangers who don’t know your name. They get your first hour of the day. God gets the leftovers, if anything.

For some, it’s the phone. The endless scroll. You can’t sit still for ninety seconds without reaching for it. You used to pray in those gaps. Now you check.

For some, it’s food. Or drink. Or one more episode at midnight when you should’ve been asleep two hours ago.

For some, and this one’s quieter, it’s grievance. You’ve been nursing the same resentment for fifteen years. You feed it. You walk it. You rehearse the wound to anyone who’ll listen. It’s become a pet. And it’s eating you.

For some, it’s respectability. The need to look right, sound right, be admired. You’ve built a tidy little kingdom out of being seen the way you want to be seen, and Jesus barely fits in it anymore.

Whatever yours is (and you have one, we all do), Peter says it is at war with your soul. Something is laying siege to the part of you that matters most. And it isn’t, I promise you, who’s on the Supreme Court.

How does this fit into the bigger picture?

Jesus said it in Matthew 5:13. You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt should lose its taste, how can it be made salty? You can’t season a culture you’re being quietly conformed to. You can’t call a world to Christ while you’re being chewed up by the same things chewing that world up.

This is one of the quieter failures of many Christians right now. We’ve got folks loud about the culture war out there and losing the culture war inside. Christians who can recite every outrage on the news but couldn’t tell you what they read in their Bibles this morning. Households where the adults argue politics over dinner and haven’t prayed together in a year. Men who’ll fight strangers online about biblical manhood while their own wives have felt invisible for a decade.

I’m not scolding anyone. I’ve been some version of every one of those people. So have you.

So Peter says: because you are beloved, because your real citizenship is somewhere else, abstain. The Greek word is apechomai. It doesn’t mean balance. It doesn’t mean moderate. It means hands off. Walk away. Quit feeding the thing that’s trying to kill you.

Paul says it the same way in Romans 12:2. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. You will not bear witness to a world you have not first refused to be conformed to. Period.

Beloved exiles travel light. You can’t carry the weight of those appetites and carry the gospel at the same time. One of them has to fall. Peter is telling you which one.

So here’s the question to sit with this week. Forget the headlines. Forget the news cycle. Forget whoever you’ve been told to be mad at. What’s actually waging war on your soul right now? It’s probably in your pocket. Or on your screen. Or in your grudge. Or in your pride.

Name it. Then put it down.

The world doesn’t need another Christian with a strong opinion. It needs salt that hasn’t lost its saltiness. And that work doesn’t start at the courthouse. It starts in your kitchen. Your phone. Your morning. Your heart.

Today.

I am preaching a meeting this weekend in New Carlisle, OH. The theme is called “Faith in the Public Square.” Today’s article is one of the takes from last night’s sermon, Planting Gardens in Babylon. I hope you enjoy it.

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The verse shows up in a lot of places. Framed above a desk. Inside a graduation card. Tattooed on a forearm. Cross-stitched on a pillow. Texted to a friend after a hard phone call.

Jeremiah 29:11. One of the most quoted verses in the Bible. It might also be one of the least understood.

I want to tell you what it actually says. Not because the verse is less beautiful than you thought, because it’s more. Because the version on the coffee mug is a shrunken, domesticated copy of something that, in its real context, is almost unbearably strong.

Let me paint you the scene it was written in.

It’s 594 BC. You’re a Jew living in Babylon. You didn’t choose it. Three years ago, the army of Nebuchadnezzar came through your city and hauled you and your family into exile. You walked nearly a thousand miles in chains. You watched parts of Jerusalem burn on the way out. Your temple was looted. Your neighbors were killed or captured. And now you live in a foreign city whose gods you don’t worship and whose language you barely understand.

But you’re holding on. Because word has reached you that a prophet back home, a man named Hananiah, is saying it’s almost over. Two years. That’s all. Two years and Babylon falls, and you go home.

You want to believe him. You need to believe him. Because two years, you can survive. Two years, you don’t have to unpack. Two years, you don’t have to teach your kids this language.

Then a letter arrives from Jeremiah, the prophet still back in Jerusalem. You open it expecting him to confirm Hananiah’s timeline.

He doesn’t.

Build houses, Jeremiah writes. Plant gardens. Marry. Have children. Let your children have children. Seek the welfare of the city I have sent you to, and pray for it. And then the hammer falls: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and bring you back.

Seventy. Not two.

Do the math. If you’re forty years old reading that letter, you’ll be one hundred and ten before the exile ends. You’re not going home. Your children might. But you? You are going to die in Babylon. In a foreign city. Buried in foreign soil.

And then, right after delivering that news, Jeremiah writes: For I know the plans I have for you. Plans for your welfare, not for evil. Plans to give you a future and a hope.

That’s the verse.

Read it again with that context. It’s not a pep talk for a graduating senior. It’s not a reassurance for a career pivot. It’s a promise spoken to a man who just found out he will die before God’s rescue arrives.

Here’s why this matters. Because the mug version of the verse, the one that promises everything is going to work out, that your plans will prosper, that the thing you’re hoping for is just around the corner, that version wasn’t written for the life you’re actually living.

That verse falls apart in the waiting room. It falls apart at the graveside. It falls apart when you’ve been praying for ten years for a child who hasn’t come home to faith and you don’t know if they ever will. The coffee-mug verse can’t hold a grown-up grief.

But the real verse can.

Because the real verse isn’t a promise that your plan will work. It’s a promise that God’s plan is good, on a timeline that might be longer than you. The Hebrew word translated “prosper” or “welfare” is shalom. It doesn’t mean what we mean when we say prosper. It doesn’t mean a good salary and a paid-off house and healthy kids. It means wholeness. Things the way they’re supposed to be. Relationships working. Justice holding. The whole broken world set right.

God’s plans for His people are shalom. Not a quick rescue. Not a comfortable life. Wholeness. A future where the whole story gets finished.

And notice: the exiles reading that letter would not live to see that future. Most of them died in Babylon. But their grandchildren walked back into Jerusalem seventy years later and rebuilt the temple. The gardens those exiles planted in 594 BC fed the generation that came home in 538 BC.

God kept His word. It just took longer than anybody wanted.

So what do you do with this verse now, knowing what it actually says?

Three things, I think.

You can stop waiting to be rescued. A lot of us are holding our breath for things to turn around. A relationship. A diagnosis. A child. A country. We’re treating our current life as a waiting room for the life we actually want. The verse isn’t a promise that the waiting will end soon. It’s a promise that the God who hasn’t rescued you yet hasn’t forgotten you either.

You can plant in soil you won’t harvest. Some of what you are doing right now — the praying, the showing up, the hoping for someone who hasn’t come back yet — you may not live to see the fruit of. That doesn’t mean it’s wasted. The exiles planted gardens their grandchildren ate from. You may be doing the same.

You can trust a plan you can’t see the end of. The people receiving Jeremiah’s letter couldn’t see how seventy years of exile could possibly fit into plans for welfare. It didn’t feel like welfare. It felt like loss. But God was doing something longer and better than any of them could track. That is almost always what God is doing. The fact that you can’t see how your current chapter fits into a good story doesn’t mean it doesn’t fit. It usually just means you’re inside the chapter.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

If you’re the parent praying for a kid who hasn’t come home, the coffee-mug verse was never going to hold. Plans to prosper you isn’t strong enough for the weight of a decade of unanswered prayers. It couldn’t be. It was never meant to be.

But the real verse? The one written to a man who would die before the exile ended? The one that promises shalom on God’s timeline, not ours? The one that assumes the plan is bigger than your lifetime and still insists the plan is good?

That verse can hold.

That verse has been holding people in impossible circumstances for twenty-six hundred years.

The question isn’t whether the verse is true. It is. The question is whether you’ve been reading the real one, or the one someone cross-stitched onto a pillow.

And the real one is the only one strong enough for the life you’re actually living.

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It’s dark in the camp. The spies came back yesterday. Ten of them talked about giants. Two talked about God. The people picked the ten, and now Moses is on his knees.

You probably know the prayer. “Please pardon the iniquity of this people, in keeping with the greatness of your faithful love.” He’s quoting God back to God. Exodus 34, the words God had spoken about Himself after the golden calf. Moses doesn’t argue Israel’s innocence. He can’t. He argues God’s character.

And God answers. Directly. Four words that should have made the whole camp weep with relief:

“I have pardoned them.” (Numbers 14:20)

If the chapter ended there, we’d have a clean story. Unity fractured. Leader prayed. God forgave. Nation moves forward.

But the chapter doesn’t end there.

In the very next breath (literally, the next sentence), God says something else. None of the men who have seen my glory and the signs I performed … will ever see the land I swore to give their ancestors.

Pardoned. And excluded. In the same answer. In the same moment.

That’s the sentence the rest of the wilderness is built on. Everything after Numbers 14 flows from it. The forty years of wandering. A whole generation dying in the desert. Kids burying their parents, one by one, in sand that was never supposed to be home.

What do we do with that?

We want one or the other

Here’s something I’ve noticed, teaching this stuff for a while. When we hear “God forgives,” we naturally want the forgiveness to do more than it does. We want pardon to mean the whole problem is gone. Clean slate, zero residue, move along. Anything less feels like God is secretly still holding it against us.

So we do one of two things.

Either we over-read the pardon. God said he forgave them, so the consequences must not really count as punishment. Let’s not make too much of them.

Or we over-read the consequences. If they really lost the land, how real was the forgiveness in the first place?

Numbers 14 won’t let us do either.

God pardoned them. That word isn’t decorative. The nation was preserved. The covenant held. The relationship continued. Moses kept leading. The cloud kept going. God did not walk away.

And the generation did not see the land.

Both. At once. Neither cancels the other.

What forgiveness actually does

Think about it this way. Forgiveness restores a relationship. It doesn’t rewrite history, and it doesn’t always reverse outcomes.

If I lie to my wife and she forgives me, the lie still happened. The trust still has work to do. The relationship is restored (and that’s real, that’s the whole point), but the shape of what I did still lives in the room for a while.

This is the pattern all over Scripture. David is forgiven after Bathsheba, and the sword still doesn’t leave his house. Peter is restored after the denial, and the denial is still something Peter has to carry. The thief on the cross hears “today you will be with me in paradise,” and he still dies that afternoon.

God’s mercy is not a delete button. It’s something deeper, and honestly better. Mercy is the presence of restoration, not the absence of weight.

The part that should shake us

Here’s where this gets uncomfortable.

The New Testament doesn’t treat Numbers 14 like a quaint Old Testament footnote. Hebrews 3 and 4 reach all the way back to this specific episode, by name, and hand it to the church as a warning.

Stop and think about what the Hebrew writer is doing. He’s looking at a room full of Christians (baptized, in the body, inside the covenant) and telling them this could be you. The generation that came out of Egypt was God’s people. Redeemed. Pardoned. Loved. And they forfeited the promise because their hearts went hard.

That isn’t a story about them. It’s a story about us.

The danger isn’t that God secretly stops forgiving. The danger is that we keep choosing unbelief until the shape of our lives can no longer hold what He wanted to give us. Not because He changed. Because we did.

Read Hebrews 3 slowly sometime. Count how many times the writer says today. He’s urgent for a reason. Hearts don’t harden in an instant. They harden one small refusal at a time, over years, until what used to soften us doesn’t anymore. Kadesh wasn’t the first bad night in the wilderness. It was the cumulative one. The night all the small unbeliefs finally added up.

The good news, and it’s genuinely good

Here’s the turn. Because this can’t end as a warning alone.

The same chapter that says “none of you will see the land” also preserves the people. Their children go in. Joshua and Caleb, the two who believed, lead the crossing. The covenant God spoke to Abraham lands in the ground that was promised. Mercy wasn’t a pretense. It did what mercy does. It kept God’s people as God’s people.

And the character Moses appealed to, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, is the same character revealed fully in Christ. The God who pardoned at Kadesh is the God who forgives through the cross. Fully. Not partially. Not with a catch.

But we have to let forgiveness do what forgiveness actually does, not what we wish it did. Restoration, yes. A delete button, no. And the warning stands: hearts can still harden. Promises can still be forfeited. The wilderness still preaches.

So what does faith look like, standing at our own Kadesh today?

Not a performance. Not a bargain. Just a soft heart, a willingness to hear, and honest trust in the God who said both things at once. The God who is still, to this hour, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love.

Today, if you hear his voice.

“Devote yourselves to prayer; stay alert in it with thanksgiving.” — Colossians 4:2

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series. Gratitude for salvation: where it all begins. Gratitude for growth: the slow, quiet work of God in our lives. Gratitude for fellowship: the gift of a community that walks with you. Gratitude for opportunities to serve: the privilege of carrying His name into the world.

Now we land here. At prayer. And, this might be the one that requires the most courage, because to be grateful for answered prayer, you have to actually pray. And you have to trust that what God hears, He responds to. And you have to develop eyes for what that response looks like, even when it doesn’t come the way you expected.

Colossians 4:2 packs a lot into one short verse. Let’s take it apart.

Devote Yourselves

The word Paul uses for “devote” — proskartereō — is strong language. It means to be steadfastly attentive, to persist and persevere at something without quitting. It’s used in Acts 2:42 to describe the early church’s commitment to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread — and prayer. It was a defining characteristic of the first Christians. They were devoted to it.

We tend to treat prayer more casually. We do it when we’re scared, when we’re desperate, when things fall apart. We come running to God like a kid who only talks to his dad when he needs money. Paul is calling us to something different. Something consistent. Something that becomes so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that prayer isn’t an emergency response — it’s a regular conversation.

Think about what the disciples asked Jesus to teach them. Not: “teach us to preach” or “teach us to heal.” Teach us to pray (Luke 11:1). They watched Jesus and noticed that the source of His power, His peace, His clarity, was in that ongoing conversation with the Father. They wanted that. And so He taught them.

Philippians 4:6–7 lays it out for us: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Prayer isn’t a backup plan. It’s the primary channel through which peace flows.

Stay Alert

Paul adds a second instruction alongside devotion: stay alert in it. Be watchful. Attentive. Expectant.

This is the opposite of sleepwalking through your prayer life, where you go through the motions with no real expectation that anything is happening. Paul is calling us to a posture of active, anticipatory faith. You’ve brought your request before God. Now watch. Pay attention to what He does.

Jesus told the disciples to ask, seek, and knock (Matthew 7:7–8). Three progressive actions. Three levels of intensity. And the promise attached: ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. That’s not a maybe. That’s a promise from the mouth of God.

John 15:7 adds a condition worth sitting with: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. The “if” matters. This isn’t a blank check for any desire that crosses your mind. It’s a promise to the person who is walking in deep, ongoing connection with Christ: keeping His commands, living in obedience, staying close to His word (John 14:15). Abiding isn’t passive. It’s an active, daily, obedient life with Jesus. The more you abide that way, the more His priorities become yours, His will shapes yours, His desires reorder yours. And from that place of genuine connection, prayer becomes powerful.

Here’s what I’ve noticed in my own life and in the lives of people I’ve walked with over the years: God almost never answers prayer the way I expected, but He almost always answers it better than I planned. That requires you to stay alert enough to recognize His answers when they come in unexpected forms.

With Thanksgiving

And then Paul ties it together: with thanksgiving.

Not just devotion. Not just alertness. Thanksgiving woven through the whole thing. Before you see the answer. Before you even finish the request. Thanksgiving.

This is where the rubber meets the road for most of us, isn’t it? It’s easy to be grateful after the prayer is answered the way we wanted. But Paul isn’t describing gratitude as a reaction. He’s describing it as an atmosphere, that is, the condition in which prayer happens best.

John 3:27 gets at the root of it: A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. Everything — the answer, the provision, the strength, the timing, even the ability to pray in the first place — all of it comes from God. When that becomes your settled conviction, thankfulness before the answer starts to make sense. You’re not thanking God for a specific outcome you don’t know yet. You’re thanking Him for being the kind of God who hears, who acts, who is working even when you can’t see it.

1 Thessalonians 5:17–18 keeps it simple: Pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. That phrase, “in all circumstances” includes the ones you didn’t want. The unanswered prayer. The answer that was no. The answer that was “not yet.” Thanksgiving in those moments isn’t denial. It’s faith.

What Does Answered Prayer Actually Look Like?

I think we complicate this unnecessarily.

Answered prayer doesn’t always look like the dramatic, specific thing you asked for showing up on your doorstep. Sometimes it does, and when it does, it’s glorious. But often it looks like:

• Peace in a situation that should have broken you. That’s an answer.

• A door closing on something you were pursuing that would have been the wrong thing. That’s an answer.

• A person appearing in your life at exactly the moment you needed them. That’s an answer.

• The strength to get through a day you didn’t think you could survive. That’s an answer.

Psalm 34:4 says I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Not from all my circumstances, from my fears. God specializes in what’s happening on the inside. And sometimes the most powerful answer to prayer is an internal transformation that changes how you experience an unchanged situation.

Romans 8:26–27 adds something remarkable: The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. You don’t even have to get the prayer right. The Spirit takes your groaning and translates it. God is for you at a level deeper than your own articulation. That’s staggering.

Build a Record of Faithfulness

Here’s a practical challenge: start keeping track.

I don’t mean a complicated journal. I mean a simple record of the things you’ve brought to God in prayer and the ways you’ve seen Him respond. Over time, what you’ll build is a record of faithfulness: your own personal testimony of God showing up.

That record does something powerful in the moments when prayer feels like it’s going nowhere. When you’re in a stretch of silence and you’re wondering if God is even listening. You pull out that record. And you see, He answered this one. And this one. And this one. And what you thought was the worst thing that could have happened turned out to be the setup for something better than you asked for.

The Psalms are full of this. Psalm 77 is a man in a dark night of the soul crying out, Has God forgotten me? And then, in verse 11, the turn: I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. He fights his way back to trust by remembering.

Build that record. It’ll be armor for you when you need it most.

The Whole Series in One Verse

Devote yourselves to prayer; stay alert in it with thanksgiving.

Devotion. Alertness. Thanksgiving. That’s a life of faith in three words.

We’ve spent the last week asking: what is there to be genuinely thankful for? The answer has been everything. Salvation that rescued and transferred and forgave us. Growth that we couldn’t produce on our own. Fellowship that carries us when we can’t carry ourselves. Opportunities to serve that make us participants in something bigger than our own lives. And prayer — the ongoing, daily, honest conversation with the God of the universe who hears and responds and works all things for our good.

This is the life we’ve been given. Carry thankfulness like a banner. Stay alert. And devote yourself to the conversation that makes all of it possible.

Thanks for walking through this series on thankfulness. Let the overflow begin.

“And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” — Colossians 3:17

Most people don’t think of service as something to be grateful for. They think of it as something to get through. A duty. An obligation. Something they signed up for when they weren’t paying close enough attention.

But Paul’s vision in Colossians 3:17 turns that completely on its head. He frames service not as a burden but as a privilege, and he wraps the whole thing in thankfulness. Whatever you do, he says. In word or deed. Do it all in the name of Jesus, with gratitude to God.

That changes everything about how you show up.

Service Is an Act of Worship

Let’s be clear about something: Paul isn’t drawing a line between the sacred and the secular here. He’s not saying worship happens on Sunday and service happens on weekdays, and never the two shall meet. He’s saying all of it is worship when it’s done in the name of Jesus.

The conversation you have with a struggling coworker. The meal you drop off for a grieving family. The class you teach. The setup crew you’re part of before people arrive on Sunday morning. The hospital visit. The phone call. The patience you show when you really didn’t have it. All of it, done in His name, is worship.

Romans 12:1 says it directly: present your bodies as a living sacrifice. That’s your everyday life laid on the altar. Not just what happens between four walls on a Sunday. Everything.

And here’s the thing that should produce gratitude: God didn’t have to involve us. He could run the whole operation without any of us. He doesn’t need our hands or our voices or our time. But He chooses to work through us anyway. That’s not obligation — that’s honor.

You’ve Been Empowered, Not Just Commissioned

Colossians 3:17 builds directly on what Paul has said in the verses before it. He’s been talking about putting on compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness… putting on love as the binding agent over all of it (3:12–14). Then he says, now go do.

The point is that service isn’t something you manufacture in your own strength. You’re not just sent out and left to figure it out. Christ in you, the hope of glory, as Paul describes it in Colossians 1:27, is the source. He is the life behind every act of genuine service.

Jesus said in John 15:5: Apart from me you can do nothing. That’s not a threat. That’s a relief. You don’t have to drum up the resources. You don’t have to fake the compassion. You go to the Source and let it flow through you. That’s the arrangement.

And Ephesians 2:10 gives us this remarkable statement: We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Notice the order. We are His workmanship first, saved by grace through faith (2:8–9), and then we walk in the good works He prepared. Service is never the ground of our salvation. It’s the fruit of it. Stop and think about that. The good works you’ll do today, those kingdom moments, were on God’s calendar before you were born. You don’t have to find them. You just have to show up and walk in them.

That ought to produce something. Gratitude. Humility. Anticipation.

The Joy That Comes from Giving

The most genuinely joyful people in any congregation are almost always the most consistently serving ones.

Not the people with the most comfortable lives. Not the ones who’ve figured out how to minimize their commitments. The servers. The ones who are perpetually giving themselves away.

There’s a reason for that. Luke 6:38: give and it will be given to you. Acts 20:35 quotes Jesus directly: It is more blessed to give than to receive. The word there for “blessed” is makarios. It’s the same word Jesus uses in the Beatitudes. It means deeply, genuinely, from-the-inside-out happy. The kind of happy the world can’t manufacture and can’t take away.

I’ve seen it in men’s retreats where guys who came in guarded and skeptical discover that showing up to serve someone else for a morning cracked open something in them they didn’t know was there. I’ve watched women pour themselves into service projects during hard personal seasons and come out the other side saying, “I don’t know how, but I feel better.” They do know how. They just hadn’t made the connection yet.

Service gets your eyes off yourself. And when your eyes are off yourself, you start to see God working, and seeing God working produces gratitude.

Not Obligation — Invitation

Here’s the shift Paul is asking us to make in Colossians 3:17: stop thinking about service as what you have to do, and start thinking about it as what you get to do.

You get to represent Jesus today. You get to carry His name into a conversation, a classroom, a hospital room, a difficult relationship. You get to be the hands and feet of someone who was willing to give everything for you.

Colossians 1:10 describes this as walking “worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.” Worthy. Not perfect — worthy. The word suggests living in a way that reflects who you belong to.

And 2 Corinthians 9:8 adds this promise: God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. You will not run out. The grace for the work is part of the supply. God doesn’t call you to something and then leave you empty-handed.

Where’s Your Place?

Let me ask you a direct question: where is God calling you to serve right now?

Not theoretically. Not eventually. Right now. This week.

Maybe it’s in your home first, which is where most of us need to start. Maybe it’s in your congregation. Maybe it’s in your neighborhood or your workplace. Maybe it’s in a ministry you’ve been circling for months without committing.

Wherever it is… go. Show up. Do it in the name of Jesus. And let thankfulness be the fuel that keeps you going when it gets hard and the results aren’t visible, and nobody says thank you.

Because here’s what I know after all these years: obedient service offered in gratitude to God is never wasted. Not a drop of it.

Whatever you do — do it all in His name. And give thanks.

Wednesday: we’ll finish the series by looking at the gift of answered prayer — and what gratitude has to do with how we pray.

1. Knowledge of the Son of God is the Target — Not the Starting Line

   1. Ephesians 4:13: until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.

      1. This is deep, personal, relationship, and experiential knowledge.

   2. Jesus Himself draws the line.

      1. John 17:3 This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent—Jesus Christ.

   3. This is not just for new Christians.

      1. Ephesians 4:13: Paul says until we all reach it …

2. The Root System — Rooted, Built Up, Established

   1. Colossians 2:6: So then, just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him,

      1. How did you receive him? By faith. By trust. By surrender.

      2. That’s still how you move. Same mode. Same attitude.

   2. Galatians 3:2-3: I only want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh?

      1. There is no second-stage Christianity where you outgrow your need for Jesus.

      2. The root keeps feeding the branch. Always.

   3. Colossians 2:7: Three images.

      1. Colossians 2:7: being rooted and built up in him and established in the faith,

         1. Rooted. Everything the plant becomes, it draws from what the root reaches.

         2. Built up. This isn’t just stability, it’s development.

         3. Established in the faith. Structural. Load-bearing. Firm.

      2. Three images. One reality.

3. Overflow is the Diagnostic

   1. Colossians 2:7: and overflowing with gratitude.

      1. Gratitude is the natural, almost involuntary response of a soul that is actually, genuinely resting in Christ.

      2. 2 Corinthians 9:15: Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

   2. So, how’s your gratitude level? Gratitude is a gauge.

   3. Three things that tend to kill overflow: Striving, Drift, and Familiarity.

4. As We Close…

   1. Paul’s vision is of a growing church.

   2. You can’t get there without this: a deepening, personal, relational, experiential knowledge of Jesus himself.

      1. Not a knowledge about him. A knowledge of him.

   3. Paul says we’re pressing toward the knowledge of the Son of God until we all reach it.

      1. Your growth in Christ doesn’t just affect you. It feeds this body. It makes the whole thing stronger.

      2. A body where people are genuinely knowing Jesus and genuinely overflowing is hard to ignore.

“And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.” — Colossians 3:15

We live in the loneliest era in human history. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s the data, and more importantly, that’s what I see in the eyes of people I engage with week after week. More connected than ever digitally. More isolated than ever actually. And sometimes, the church, if we’re honest, hasn’t always been the answer people hoped it would be.

But that doesn’t change what God designed it to be.

Paul’s vision of the church in Colossians 3 is staggering in its beauty. It’s not a religious club. It’s not a weekly program. It’s a body, living, breathing, interconnected, held together by the peace of Christ and marked by gratitude. And when it works the way God intended, there is nothing like it on earth.

That’s worth being thankful for.

The Peace You Couldn’t Manufacture

Before Paul ever gets to local church, he starts with something personal. “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”

The word “rule” here is brabeuō. It’s the word for an umpire or referee. Paul is saying let Christ’s peace be the deciding factor. When anxiety wants to call the play, let peace step in. When resentment is ready to make the call, let peace override it. When fear says one thing and faith says another, the peace of Christ is the arbitrator.

So, how does this matter for fellowship? Well, you can’t have genuine togetherness without it. People who haven’t settled the inner war bring that war into every relationship. They misread intentions. They carry offenses. They react instead of respond. Real fellowship, the kind worth being grateful for, requires people who have let Christ settle the battle on the inside first.

Romans 5:1 says: Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the foundation. The faith Paul describes here isn’t passive. It’s the obedient faith that responds to the gospel, turns from sin, confesses Christ, and is buried with Him in baptism (Acts 2:38; Romans 6:3–4). That obedient faith is where peace with God is established. You’re no longer an enemy of God. The hostility has been dealt with. And from that peace, peace with God, flows the possibility of genuine peace with each other.

That’s not a small thing. That’s where all real closeness begins.

You Weren’t Meant to Walk Alone

The isolated Christian is a vulnerable Christian.

Look at Colossians 3:15 again. As members of one body you were called to peace. The body language is deliberate. Paul keeps coming back to it throughout his letters because he wants us to feel the weight of it. A hand isn’t useful on its own. A foot doesn’t go anywhere disconnected from the leg. The eye isn’t seeing anything separated from the head. The parts need each other, not as a nice idea, but as a structural reality.

Ecclesiastes 4:9–12 says: two are better than one. If one falls, the other can help him up. But woe to the one who falls with no one there to lift him. That proverb is thousands of years old and it’s still true at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning when your life is falling apart.

Hebrews 10:24–25 tells us not to neglect gathering together, and the reason isn’t attendance for its own sake. It’s because we stir each other up toward love and good works. We need each other to stay sharp. We need each other to stay accountable. We need each other to stay honest.

What happens to people who disconnect from the local church? I’ve seen it more times than I can count. The drift is slow. They’d never call it that. But faith that isn’t being fed by others in the body doesn’t stay where it was — it shrinks. The enemy is patient, and isolation is one of his most effective tools.

The Gift of Being Known

There’s something specifically precious about being known by a group of people who are walking the same direction you are.

Not just acquaintances. Not just people who recognize your face on Sunday morning. People who know your name, know your story, notice when you’re off, and show up anyway. That kind of fellowship is increasingly rare in the world. But it’s supposed to be the norm in the church.

Galatians 6:2 says bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. The word for “burdens” there (baros) means a heavy weight — something too much for one person to carry alone. Paul isn’t talking about minor inconveniences. He’s talking about the real weight of life. Grief. Failure. Fear. Temptation. The stuff you don’t post about.

And 1 Thessalonians 5:11 gets practical: encourage one another and build each other up, just as you are already doing. Paul says it’s already happening in that congregation — keep doing it. Don’t let it stop. Don’t let busyness crowd it out. Don’t let church become a transaction instead of a community.

One of the moments in a person’s spiritual life that leads to the greatest transformation is often not a sermon. It’s a phone call from someone who just knew they needed to check in. It’s a meal that shows up at the door. It’s somebody sitting in the hospital waiting room who didn’t have to be there but came anyway. That’s fellowship doing what God designed it to do.

And Be Thankful

Paul closes verse 15 with three words that hit like a punctuation mark. And be thankful.

Not “and try to appreciate it.” Not “and notice it when it’s convenient.” Just: be thankful. It’s imperative language. A command wrapped in a gift.

The truth is that we can sit inside the gift of a local church family and still take it for granted. We can grow so accustomed to a congregation of people who love us and pray for us and show up for us that we stop seeing what we have. We start cataloguing the ways the church has let us down instead of remembering the ways it has carried us.

Romans 1:21 is a warning worth heeding. Ingratitude, Paul says, is where the downward spiral begins. When we know God and don’t honor Him as God, when we don’t give thanks, darkness sets in. Gratitude isn’t just a nice virtue. It’s a spiritual protection.

So today, think about someone in your church family who has meant something to you. A teacher. A friend. A person who prayed over you when things were hard. An elder who saw something in you before you saw it in yourself.

And thank God for them. Maybe even thank them directly. You’d be surprised what a word of genuine gratitude can do for another soul.

The Church Is Worth Fighting For

I know things any local church aren’t perfect. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. People disappoint us. Congregations go through hard seasons. Leadership makes mistakes. None of that changes the fact that this is God’s design: a family, a body, a community of people who have been called together by the same grace to live out the same faith. That is what the church is: God’s called out body.

That’s remarkable. It’s worth protecting. And it starts by being genuinely, openly, unashamedly thankful for it.

Let the peace of Christ rule. Live as one body. And be thankful.

Tomorrow: we’ll explore why the opportunities God gives us to serve are themselves a reason for deep gratitude.

“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and overflowing with gratitude.” — Colossians 2:6–7

Growth is slow. That’s one of the things that frustrates people most about the Christian life. We want the dramatic transformation. The overnight change. We want to look in the mirror on Monday and see someone noticeably different from who was there on Friday.

But that’s not how it usually works. Most spiritual growth is quiet. Gradual. Barely visible until one day, often when someone else points it out, you realize you’re not the same person you used to be.

And that is something to be deeply thankful for.

Look Back Before You Look Forward

Paul’s instruction in Colossians 2:6 begins with something important. He says “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him.” The word he uses for “received” — parelabon in the Greek — is the same word used for receiving a tradition, a teaching passed on with care. It points back to the moment of obedient commitment, the moment of baptism, when you confessed Jesus as Lord, were buried with Him in the waters, and were raised to begin a new life (Romans 6:3–4). That was the entry point. That’s what Paul is anchoring them to.

Here’s why that matters: Paul is saying don’t drift from what you started with. Don’t wander away from the foundation. And tucked inside that instruction is an invitation to remember, to look back at who you were when you first came to Christ and measure it against where you are now.

Maybe you’ve done this exercise with people before. You’ll ask someone, “Tell me who you were five years ago.” And what comes out is almost always the same thing — a quiet kind of awe. “I used to be so angry all the time.” “I couldn’t go a day without lying.” “I had no patience, no peace, nothing.”

And then you ask, “What about now?”

The growth they couldn’t see while they were living it becomes clear when they look back. That’s not accident. That’s God at work.

Rooted, Built Up, Established

Paul uses three powerful images in verse 7. They’re worth focusing on one at a time.

Rooted — this is agricultural language. Think of a tree that’s been in the ground for twenty years. The roots go down deep, they spread wide, they anchor everything above ground. You can’t blow over a deep-rooted tree. Paul says that’s what your connection to Christ is like. The word is in the perfect tense; it happened at a specific point in the past, and the effects are still present. Your roots were established when you came to Christ. You’re drawing life from Him, whether you feel it in the moment or not.

Built up — now the language shifts to construction. A building goes up over time, layer by layer, course by course. Every study you do, every Sunday you show up, every temptation you resist, every act of obedience, it’s a brick going in place. Some days it feels like you’re laying one brick. But over years? You’ve built something.

Established in the faith — this word (bebaioō) carries the idea of being confirmed, made firm. Like a contract that’s been notarized. It suggests stability, certainty, and a settled confidence. That’s not arrogance… that’s maturity.

Now, you may not feel all three of these operating in your life right now. Growth rarely announces itself. But Philippians 1:6 promises that God is not done yet. “He who began a good work in you will carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” That’s a promise worth claiming.

What Growth Actually Looks Like

Spiritual growth shows up in places we don’t expect. It doesn’t always look like a mountaintop moment. More often it looks like:

A guy who used to blow up at his kids, sitting down and actually listening. Not perfectly, but noticeably. That’s growth.

A woman who used to be consumed with anxiety learning to hand her worries to God before they consume the whole day. Not every time, but more often. That’s growth.

Someone who used to avoid the hard scriptures now sitting with them, wrestling with them, asking questions instead of shutting down. That’s growth.

Romans 8:28 grounds the whole process: God is working all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Even the hard seasons. Even the setbacks. Even the failures. They are not wasted in God’s economy… they are curriculum.

James 1:2–4 just lays things out: trials produce endurance. Endurance produces maturity. Maturity leaves you lacking nothing. There’s a straight line from suffering to growth if you’ll walk it with God rather than walk it alone.

And Colossians 3:10–11 reminds us that the process of transformation is ongoing. We are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of our Creator. That present tense matters. It’s still happening. God is still working.

The Gratitude That Overflows

Notice how Paul ends verse 7. After rooted, after built up, after established, he says you should be “overflowing with gratitude.”

That word “overflowing” (perisseuō) means more than enough. Beyond what was asked for. The image is a cup that’s been filled past the brim, spilling over the sides. That’s the picture Paul wants for your thankfulness.

Not just a quiet appreciation somewhere in the background. Not a gratitude that gets squeezed in between complaints. An overflow.

But here’s what produces it: looking at where God has taken you. Not comparing yourself to someone else. Not measuring yourself against an ideal you haven’t reached. Just an honest look at the distance between who you were and who you are now, and recognizing that distance as grace.

Take Stock Today

Here’s your challenge: before the weekend is out, take thirty minutes and do an honest inventory. Not a guilt list. A grace list.

Think about who you were when you first came to Christ, or ten years ago, or five. What did your anger look like? Your fear? Your faith? Your relationships? Your prayer life?

Now look at what’s changed. Write it down if it helps.

Then thank God for it. Not because you did the work, you didn’t, not alone. But because God, in His faithfulness, rooted you, built you up, and kept you moving.

That’s worth an overflow of gratitude.

Monday: we’ll look at the gift of our local church family — why the fellowship of the church is something to give thanks for, not take for granted.

“giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” — Colossians 1:12–14

Gratitude doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It has to be cultivated. Fought for, even. Life has a way of training our eyes to land on what’s missing instead of what we’ve been given, and left unchecked, that drift does serious damage to the soul.

Paul knew this. That’s why thankfulness shows up over and over again in his letter to the Colossians. It’s not an afterthought. It’s armor. When your mind is fixed on what God has done, it becomes a lot harder for the enemy to convince you that He hasn’t done enough.

So let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start where all gratitude should start: with salvation.

You Were Rescued

I want you pause and focus on that word for a moment. Rescued.

Paul doesn’t use soft language here. He doesn’t say God nudged you in the right direction or helped you make a better choice. He says God rescued you from the domain of darkness. That’s the language of someone who couldn’t get themselves out. That’s the language of someone who was in real trouble.

Think about that image. There’s a reason rescues make the news. When a coal miner gets pulled out after days underground, or a hiker is airlifted off a mountain ledge, we stop and watch, because we understand something profound happened. That person could not save themselves. Somebody came for them.

That’s you. That’s me. Not nudged. Not coached. Rescued.

And here’s where the Greek text sheds some light that’s worth seeing. The word Paul uses for “rescued” — rhyomai — carries the sense of being drawn out from danger by a powerful act. It’s vivid and deliberate. It implies a rescue operation. God didn’t wait for you to climb out on your own. He came in after you.

You Were Transferred

Not only were you pulled out of something, you were placed into something. Paul says you’ve been transferred into the kingdom of the Son He loves.

That word transferred — methistēmi in the Greek — was used in the ancient world to describe what happened when a conquering king would relocate an entire population from one kingdom to another. It was a decisive, permanent move. You don’t live under Pharaoh’s roof anymore. You live in a different kingdom now, under a different King, with a different future.

And the New Testament is clear about when that transfer happens. Peter’s answer on Pentecost wasn’t vague: Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins (Acts 2:38). Paul’s description of baptism in Romans 6:3–4 uses the same transfer language: buried with Christ, raised to walk in newness of life. That’s the moment. That’s when darkness gives way to light. Not a feeling, not a prayer, but an obedient burial and resurrection in the waters of baptism where God does the saving work.

Romans 5:1 tells us we now have peace with God. Not a ceasefire. Peace. The war is over. Romans 5:2 adds that we stand in grace, not on the edge of it, not hoping we qualify, but standing in it. Hebrews 7:25 reminds us that Jesus continually intercedes for those who come to God through Him. And Romans 8:1 seals it: there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for those who have entered Him through obedient faith.

You’ve been moved. You belong somewhere new.

You Were Forgiven

Paul completes the picture: In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The word for “forgiveness” here — aphesis — means a release. A dismissal. Like a debt that was stamped paid in full and handed back to you. Every sin you brought to the waters of baptism: gone. And the ongoing forgiveness available to the child of God through repentance and prayer (1 John 1:9) means you never have to carry guilt that God has already released.

I’ve talked with people over the years who have a hard time receiving this. They carry old guilt around like a weight they feel they deserve to bear. They believe in forgiveness theologically, but they don’t live in it. They still walk like prisoners even though the cell door is open.

Know this. Philippians 1:6 tells us that God, who began this good work in you, will carry it to completion. He’s not going to abandon you midway. The God who saved you is the same God who walks with you every day after. That’s not a blank check to take grace for granted; it’s a call to walk faithfully with a God who is fiercely committed to your growth and your ultimate redemption.

What This Should Produce

Here’s the practical question: does any of this move you?

Not as a guilt trip. As an honest check. Because Paul’s argument throughout Colossians is simple: if you really understand what God has done for you, thankfulness should flow. Not performance. Not religion. Gratitude.

Think about where you were before Christ. Maybe that looks different for each of us: some came to faith young, some came through years of hard living. But the condition was the same. Darkness. Separation. Sin with no solution in sight. Ephesians 2:1–3 describes it plainly: dead in trespasses, following the course of this world, children of wrath.

And then… grace. Not because you earned it. Not because you were better than someone else. Because God is rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4).

That ought to produce something in us. An overflow. A life that looks different not because we’re trying to keep a scoreboard, but because we can’t stop thinking about what we’ve been given.

Carry the Banner

Paul’s challenge — and mine to you today — is this: carry thankfulness like a banner.

Be the person whose default isn’t complaint but praise. When the week gets hard, when the schedule piles up, when the news is bad, let the anchor hold in what God has already done. He rescued you. He transferred you. He forgave you. He’s completing the work.

That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Let your life be a testimony to the transforming power of Jesus Christ. Not a perfect life, a grateful one.

And if you’re reading this and you haven’t yet responded to what God has done, you can. The gospel call is simple, and it’s always open: believe, repent, confess, be baptized, and begin walking in the new life He’s prepared for you (Acts 2:38; Romans 10:9–10; Romans 6:4). That’s not earning your salvation; that’s receiving it on His terms. And there’s no better reason for gratitude than stepping out of darkness into light for the very first time.

That’s where real thankfulness begins.

Tomorrow: we’ll look at what God does after salvation — and why the growth itself is worth celebrating.

What do you remember about the story of Balaam?

For most of us, it’s the talking donkey. Maybe a vague recollection of a false prophet, a warning about teachers who lead people astray. That’s where the story tends to live in our memory, filed somewhere between “strange Old Testament moment” and “cautionary tale for church leaders.” And honestly, that’s not wrong. But there’s a lot more going on once you actually get into it.

There’s a moment in Numbers 22 that we fly right over.

Israel is camped on the plains of Moab, right on the edge of the Promised Land. The Jordan River is in front of them. Jericho is visible across the water. After forty years in the wilderness, they are this close. And they have no idea that on the heights above them, a king named Balak is in a panic, and a prophet named Balaam has just been hired to destroy them before they ever cross that river.

No alarm went off. No prayer was recorded. No one cried out for help.

God handled it before Israel knew there was anything to handle.

That detail should catch our attention. Because most of us live as though God’s protection is reactive, as if He waits for us to notice the threat, name it, and ask before He moves. But that’s not what happens here. Balak plots. Balaam saddles his donkey. And God, without any prompting from His people, quietly dismantles the whole scheme. Every time Balaam opens his mouth to curse, blessing comes out instead. Three locations. Three altars. Three attempts. Same result every time.

Israel never prayed about it because Israel never knew about it.

Here’s what that should do to us: it should make us genuinely humble about how little we understand of what God is doing on our behalf on any given day. The threats we never saw. The doors that never opened because God quietly closed them. The conversations that happened, or didn’t, without our knowledge or input. We tend to measure God’s faithfulness by what we can see, what we can track, what we can point to and say that’s where He showed up. But Balaam’s story suggests that a significant portion of God’s work in our lives is happening completely off our radar.

That’s not a reason for passivity. It’s a reason for trust.

Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Take a good look at Balaam. He’s not a hero. He had compromised motives; he was hired, after all, and the text doesn’t let us forget it. He had to be stopped by an angel and rebuked by his own donkey before he got his bearings. He’s the last person you’d pick as the instrument through which some of the most sweeping blessings in the entire Old Testament get spoken over God’s people.

And yet. God used him anyway.

This is worth more than a cursory observation, because most of us have a quiet assumption running beneath our faith: that God’s work depends on the quality of the available instruments. That if we’re inconsistent, or struggling, or somewhere in the middle of our own compromised season, God is essentially stuck. Waiting on us to get it together before He can do anything significant.

But Balaam’s story doesn’t support that reading at all. God constrained a reluctant, morally compromised prophet and used him to declare His purposes over His people. The instrument’s character didn’t determine the outcome. God’s sovereign intention did.

That should challenge us. And then it should free us.

But here’s what holds all of this together, and it’s the most important piece: what actually protected Israel in the plains of Moab wasn’t their prayers, their awareness, their faithfulness, or their track record.

Look at where they were at this point in the story. These are the same people who had grumbled at the Red Sea, built a golden calf at Sinai, rebelled at the report of the spies, and just chapters earlier had been complaining about the manna again — the same provision that had kept them alive for decades. Their consistency was not the variable.

What protected them was God’s covenant promise. Sworn to Abraham. Confirmed at Sinai. Still binding, not because Israel had earned it, but because God had spoken it. And God, as Balaam is forced to confess, is not a man who lies, or a son of man who changes his mind.

That word from Balaam’s own mouth, spoken by a hired enemy standing on a pagan high place, is one of the most remarkable testimonies to God’s faithfulness in all of Scripture. He can’t curse them. Not because Israel is so righteous. Because God has blessed them, and that blessing cannot be changed.

And what secured that blessing wasn’t Israel’s performance. It was God’s covenant, His sworn commitment to a people He had chosen and redeemed. That’s not a statement about what Israel could get away with. It’s a statement about who God is. He doesn’t abandon His purposes. He doesn’t walk away from what He has spoken. He is not, as Balaam himself was forced to say, a man who lies, or a son of man who changes his mind.

The security is in His character. And for those who are in Christ, who have responded to His call in faith and obedience, that same unchanging character is the ground beneath your feet.

So here’s the question the Balaam story puts to all of us: what are you resting on?

If it’s your consistency, your prayer life, your spiritual discipline, your sense that you’ve been doing enough, then your security is more fragile than you think. Because the moment you have a bad month, a season of doubt, a stretch where the faithfulness isn’t coming easily, that foundation starts to shift.

But if what you’re resting on is God’s promise, sealed in the blood of Christ, confirmed by an empty tomb, held in the hands of a God who doesn’t lie or change His mind, then nothing the enemy plots and nothing he schemes can touch it.

They were trying to curse you. On the heights above you, unseen and unheard, the schemes were already in motion.

And God had already handled it.