Why the people you lean on keep leaving

Near the end of His life, Jesus made His disciples a promise:

“He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.” (John 14:12)

Greater works. Not equal but greater. And not in spite of His leaving, but because of it.

This passage and promise certainly deserves the attention it receives, so long as we understand the meaning correctly.

Christians have spent centuries trying to explain the weight of that promise. Some reduce it to metaphor. Others inflate it into spectacle. But Jesus seems to mean exactly what He says: those who believe in Him will continue His work in a way that exceeds the boundaries of His earthly ministry.

Of course, we should be careful here. “Greater” does not mean more impressive than Jesus. He is God; no one is going to out-preach Him, out-love Him, or out-miracle Him.

So what could He possibly mean?

The answer lies in a simple limitation Jesus willingly accepted: flesh.

Confined to one body, Jesus could stand in only one place at a time. Only so many people could gather on a hillside to hear His voice. Only so many could watch Him heal, teach, rebuke, and restore. But pour that same Spirit into a hundred people, a thousand people, a million people, and suddenly the work spreads farther than one man ever could.

Greater means greater in reach. Greater in scope. Greater in multiplication.

And here’s the part the disciples struggled to understand: none of it could happen until He left.

As long as Jesus stood among them in the flesh, they remained observers of His power rather than participants in it. He had to go so that the Spirit could come, not because His presence was a hindrance, but because His mission was never to create spectators. It was to create sons and daughters who would carry the same life into the world.

That isn’t merely a statement about Jesus. It is a pattern for leadership itself.

And it quietly exposes how often we get leadership wrong.

— The Lie We Secretly Believe —

There is a lie that both leaders and followers are tempted to embrace.

The lie is that proximity to God proves superiority.

We assume that the person on the platform—the gifted one, the teacher, the visionary, the one who “hears from God”—must simply possess something the rest of us do not. We imagine that God’s choice of certain people is evidence that they are inherently greater.

Scripture tells a different story.

Moses was not summoned up the mountain because he was better than Israel. Peter was not placed at the center because he was the most dependable disciple; this is the same man who denied Jesus three times. Paul described himself as “the chief of sinners,” and while many dismiss the phrase as exaggerated humility, the point remains: God delights in displaying His power through unlikely people.

Again and again, God chooses weakness as His stage.

The gift in a leader’s hands is not a trophy. It is not proof of spiritual superiority. It is a demonstration of divine power. It’s a visible testimony of what God can do through ordinary people surrendered to Him.

And demonstrations are not designed to last forever. They are meant to teach.

— The Ache of Every Leader —

Paul understood something that every leader eventually feels.

Writing about his fellow Israelites, he says:

“For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” (Romans 9:3)

Read that slowly.

Paul is saying that, if it were possible, he would bear the curse himself in order to save the people he loved.

Every true leader eventually knows that ache.

I wish I could do this for them.

I wish I could hand you conviction. I wish I could transfer wisdom. I wish I could package obedience, courage, revelation, and faith and simply place them in your hands.

Parents feel it. Pastors feel it. Teachers feel it.

But God rarely allows it.

Instead, He leaves us in the uncomfortable work of demonstration. We can show the way. We can testify to what we have seen. We can teach, encourage, and correct. But there comes a point where every person must stand before God without leaning on someone else’s faith.

Even Paul had to learn that lesson. The apostle who planted churches across the Roman world spent years confined to prison, writing letters instead of rescuing people face-to-face. God would not permit Paul to carry what others were meant to learn to carry themselves.

Because people do not ultimately need a leader’s strength.

They need the Spirit formed within them.

— A Short Work —

Paul writes elsewhere:

“He will finish the work, and cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.” (Romans 9:28)

Whatever Paul meant in its immediate context, the phrase captures something profound about the way God works.

A short work.

Jesus’ public ministry lasted roughly three years.

Three years to heal the sick, cast out demons, preach the kingdom, reveal the Father, endure betrayal, die, rise again, and entrust the future of His movement to ordinary men and women.

Three years—not thirty.

He stayed long enough to demonstrate what life in the Spirit looked like. Long enough to convince people that the kingdom was real. Long enough to place the tools in their hands.

And then He left.

There is wisdom in that balance.

Leave too soon, and people never believe what they have seen.

Stay too long, and people begin to confuse dependence with discipleship. Their gifts remain dormant while they lean on yours.

The brilliance of Jesus’ leadership is not merely that He taught well.

It is that He stayed exactly long enough to no longer be needed in that way. Not that He became unnecessary—He is, and always will be, everything to us—but that His physical presence was no longer the thing they had to lean on. The Spirit would now carry what His hands once did.

Most of us measure faithfulness in the opposite way. We count years. We count influence. We count how indispensable we have become.

Jesus measured success differently.

He measured it by what remained after He was gone.

— The Trap of Being Needed —

The danger is subtle because being needed feels holy.

Leaders enjoy the feeling of carrying others. Followers enjoy the comfort of being carried. One side feels important; the other feels secure.

Everyone is validated.

And no one grows.

Much of modern Christianity has quietly built itself around personalities—ministries branded like personal empires, congregations that know themselves primarily by whoever occupies the pulpit. We may not intend to create dependency, but dependency is often exactly what we produce.

I have felt that temptation in my own life.

There is something deeply satisfying about becoming the fixed point around which other people orbit. Staying put feels responsible. Remaining available feels sacrificial. Continuing to carry the weight feels like faithfulness.

But obedience is not always found in staying.

Sometimes obedience means stepping aside.

Sometimes the most faithful thing a leader can do is create enough empty space for someone else’s gift to awaken.

Because as long as one person insists on doing everything, the prophet sitting three rows back never discovers that he is a prophet. The teacher never teaches. The person gifted with healing keeps waiting for someone else’s hands instead of trusting what God has already placed in their own.

As long as one person remains the demonstration, others may never become participants.

The kindest thing a leader can do is to become no longer needed in that way—not unloved, not unwanted, but no longer the one others depend on to carry what God means to form in them.

— The People You Lean On Keep Leaving —

Perhaps you have felt the sting of that.

A mentor moved away. A pastor stepped down. A friendship changed. A season ended before you were ready.

It felt like loss.

Maybe it even felt like abandonment.

But what if it was mercy?

What if the people you depended on kept leaving because God refused to let their gift become a permanent substitute for yours?

Jesus did not speak vaguely about this.

He told His disciples:

“It is expedient for you that I go away.” (John 16:7)

Better for you.

Imagine hearing that from the Son of God.

The disciples could not yet understand how absence could be an act of love. Yet Jesus knew that as long as they clung to His physical presence, they would never fully discover what the Father intended to do within them.

And perhaps the same is true for us.

Perhaps the people God places in our lives are not meant to become permanent crutches, but temporary demonstrations—living proof that the Spirit still moves, still speaks, still empowers ordinary people.

Their task was never to stand forever between you and God.

Their task was to show you that there was never supposed to be anyone standing there at all.

So here is the question I cannot escape:

What has God been asking you to step into that you keep waiting for someone else to carry?

And if you lead others, who might be waiting for you to step out of the way?

The sea was heaving. Seasoned sailors who had spent their whole lives on the water were terrified, throwing cargo overboard and crying out to their gods. And somewhere below deck, in the belly of the ship, the prophet of God was sleeping…sleeping!

The shipmaster found him there and asked the only sane question to be asked in the middle of a catastrophe: “What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God” (Jonah 1:6).

In other words, how can you sleep at a time like this?

Although Jonah didn’t respond directly, I’d like to suggest an uncomfortable but plausible reality: Jonah didn’t just fall asleep. He went to sleep on purpose.

Sleep Is Not An Escape From Reality

How did we arrive here? God said, “Arise, go to Nineveh.” But Jonah rose—and went the opposite direction. He went down to Joppa. He found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare, went down into the sides of the vessel to lie down. Every single step in the story is a step down and a step away from the Lord’s command and his calling. Down to the coast. Down into the ship. Down into sleep.

If you’ve ever flown, you understand it. You wedge yourself into seats that seem to lose another inch of legroom every year, next to someone you’ve never met, and you know there are hours of travel time ahead of you. So what do you do? You close your eyes and go to sleep. The hope is that you hasten the time, skip the turbulence, and wake up on the other side of the discomfort you don’t want to endure.

That is exactly what Jonah was doing. He wasn’t tired. He was hiding. Sleep was the most efficient way he knew to avoid his assignment, his purpose, and the God he was running from.

He would soon find out that sleep is not an escape, and living your dream life doesn’t make the troubled world around you any less of a reality.

The Calling We’re Running From

Before we shake our heads at the sleeping prophet, we should recognize what’s happening. Because “Go to Nineveh” is not so far from what we’ve been told: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel.” The wickedness of Nineveh came up before God. So does the wickedness of the world we live in. And we are surrounded by Ninevites we’ve been sent to reach.

So here’s the honest question: Are you trying to find a comfortable place to sleep?

Are you closing your eyes to what’s happening around you? Shutting your ears? Looking for a quiet corner of your own life where nobody expects anything of you, where you never have to open your mouth, where your assignment can’t find you?

We rarely say it out loud. Mature believers don’t announce, “I am avoiding the purpose of God.” We say something more respectable like I just want a little more money. I want to live in a certain neighborhood. I want to go to a certain church. I want these connections, these resources, this comfortable life on my terms. None of those things seem inherently evil. But underneath the respectable language, the flesh is often running the same play Jonah ran—looking for a place below deck where the storms of life can’t reach.

Why? Because obedience isn’t always easy. Rejection doesn’t feel good. Saying thus saith the Lord at the risk of losing conveniences isn’t easy to stomach. So we do what human beings do: we avoid the friction and call it wisdom.

Comfort-seeking is often nothing more than purpose-avoidance wearing respectable clothes.

The Storm Is the Mercy

But here is the mercy most of us miss: God sent the storm.

He would not let Jonah get comfortable. He refused to let the prophet sleep his way out of his purpose. And He does the same thing for us.

The turbulence in your life is not always punishment. Very often it is God refusing to let you sleep through your calling. He’ll cause waves to crash on a plan you were too comfortable in. He’ll let winds rise until you can’t doze anymore. Not because He’s cruel—because it’s time to move, and He loves you too much to let you miss it while sleeping.

This is why the command is what it is: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is” (Mark 13:33). Take heed. Stay awake. Don’t go to sleep.

Even the disciples missed it. In the garden, at the hour of Jesus’ deepest agony, He came back and found them sleeping. “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40). They had no idea what was on His shoulders, so they found it easy to sleep. After all, the One they’d watched calm storms and slip through every mob would surely protect them and do whatever was necessary. How often has that been us—comfortable precisely because we didn’t grasp the weight of the moment we were sleeping through?

A Gospel That Refuses to Be Comfortable

The gospel itself was never built for comfort. Jesus said it plainly: “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The message we carry rubs against the grain of the world by its very nature. It convicts. It exposes. It creates friction, both in the one who preaches it and in the one who hears it.

This truth alone is uneasy. If you are perfectly comfortable, and everyone around you (especially unbelievers) is perfectly comfortable with you, it’s worth asking whether you’re squarely in the purpose of God or a watered-down version. It’s worth asking whether you’re living out His Gospel or your own.

If your faith never makes anyone uncomfortable, including you, there’s a real chance you’re living out your plan instead of the Lord’s purpose.

We live in a civilization engineered for comfort. Comfort food, comfortable clothes, comfortable homes, comfortable cars. When the World Cup came, people from other countries laughed at us over our obsession with these comforts. We’ve built an entire culture around never having to be uncomfortable for a moment. And then we wonder why the call to take up a cross feels so foreign.

Our Comfort Is In The Holy Spirit

Now, watch how Jesus frames His departure: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you” (John 16:7).

He calls the Holy Spirit the Comforter. Here’s something you may not have considered: if you have already made yourself comfortable, on your own terms, by your own plan—what exactly do you need the Holy Spirit for?

The gifts of the Spirit were never given to decorate a comfortable life. Look at how they appear in Scripture. They are always standing next to hardship: troubled on every side, yet not distressed; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. The power shows up precisely where opposition is greatest. Your spiritual gifts are the undeniable evidence of God’s power in you—and that power is necessitated by conflict, not comfort.

When you finally stop running, when you get up to face the world where you have been sent, you don’t lose your peace. You find it. This isn’t the counterfeit peace of a quiet life with the shades drawn, but a real peace that holds in the middle of the storm, because you’re finally where God wants you.

This is the peace we are seeking.

God may be trying to wake you up. The storm that stirs you, the discomfort that finds you though you search for refuge, the disturbances in the life you wish to live—all of it is steering you toward the same path. Go ye.

This is why it was expedient that Jesus go. The disciples needed to sit in the discomfort between His death and the arrival of the Comforter at Pentecost. Now, it is expedient that we go, so that a world full of Ninevites can finally hear.

It’s expedient that we go.

So let me ask you the shipmaster’s question, the one that cuts straight through the noise: what meanest thou, O sleeper? What storm has God sent to wake you—and now that you’re awake, will you finally go?

And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron…
Exodus 32 (KJV)

That word delayed is a key part of this familiar story.

Israel had just been delivered from Egypt. Having watched Pharaoh’s chariots swallowed by the Red Sea, they were now in the wilderness with no leader in sight, no clear future, and centuries of bondage still fresh on their minds. Whether they were aware or not, they were in desperate need of something to bring them together and give them direction. And when Moses did not come down, the patience James chapter 1 talks about began to perform its work. It drew the truth of their hearts to the surface.

Today, we find ourselves in the same position. Humanity, whether we are aware or not, is waiting for a Savior who has not yet returned, and the delay we’re experiencing isn’t a failure. It’s a divine mechanism being use to draw out who we really are.

Studies have shown that under this kind of pressure, societies typically do one of two things. They unite and fight, or they fracture and lean into excess. In order for the former to occur, there is usually some shared moral and spiritual foundation, leaders worth trusting, a clear belief that work produces results, and often a recent shared hardship that reminds a people of what God can deliver us through, together. If you look at the world now, the absence of these things is glaring. Trust in leadership is gone. Moral foundations are scattered. The future feels uncertain enough that many have quietly concluded we might as well all live for pleasure. Isn’t all going to just fall apart anyway?

For believers in Christ, our calculus is different. We have a foundation. We have a future. We have a Leader, Jesus, who we can trust, and the memory — if not in our own generation, then in our spiritual lineage — of God delivering His people through impossible things. As scripture says, For the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross. For the joy set before us, we too will endure.

But we cannot stay so insulated in that hope that we miss what the rest of the world experiences in waiting. Despair without a Savior turns inevitably toward distraction, and in our age, the door to distraction has been widened beyond anything any previous civilizations could imagine.

Gold Was Not Just Gold

2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.
3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.
4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

Exodus 32:2-4

To perceive the greater significance of this story in relation to us, we should recognize that the ancient world didn’t see gold the way we do. To us it is a store of value, a precious mineral, a market commodity. To them, it was the flesh of divine beings. Gold was understood as the literal substance of certain gods — the sun god especially. Gold was their flesh, and silver was their bones.

Why? The properties of these materials were even more astonishing in that age. Gold didn’t rust, corrode, or tarnish. It was malleable and luminous, unlike anything else they had ever encountered. So they did what humans always do when something extraordinary appears. They assigned it divinity. When they overlaid a statue in gold, they weren’t merely decorating it. They believed they were giving the unseen god a body they could touch.

Now this reframes Aaron’s strange answer to Moses. When he says, “I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf,” he wasn’t dodging blame. He was articulating a real ancient belief: that even though human hands shaped the object, the resulting idol was simultaneously self-existent, divine and alive in some sense. The golden calf wasn’t a giant piece of decor. It was, in their minds, the god of the moment, manifest in the most advanced material of their day, and gold was the technology they built it with.

Now ask yourself, what is the gold of our day? What new and astonishing material that has so captured us that we have begun, almost without noticing, to treat it as divine? What is the technology that we build our idols with?

Our Calf Is Made of Technology

The answer is silicon. It is the network of compute, connectivity, and now artificial intelligence that has quietly become the place we turn before we turn anywhere else. The most valuable companies and leaders in the world use silicon to create processors, and data infrastructure, and they have asked us to participate in building the idol. Like the golden calf, for many it has become the thief of the Lord’s worship.

Imagine showing a smartphone to the Hebrews at Sinai or to the Babylonians at the height of their empire. Do you doubt for a moment that they would have worshiped it? So, on what basis do we assume our generation isn’t? We are doing the same thing, just with increased familiarity and awareness of more advanced materials.

In times of trouble, people who lack trust in the Lord build the gods they believe will save them. Nimrod built a tower. Israel built a calf. Today, billionaires are pouring trillions of dollars into data centers. These are simply physical monuments to the hope that artificial intelligence will solve the problems mounting on our world, but the return on investment is not there. Those inside the industry talk openly about an AI bubble, but what if the return on investment isn’t only financial? When men have nowhere else to place their hope, they place it on what they have built. Those with the means to do so are taking off their gold to build an idol. That is not investment. That is a wager on a false god.

2 You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.
1 Corinthians 12:2

And the goal or end result of building idols is always the same. Notice the moment the calf was finished:

They sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

Every idol provides an occasion for excess. That is its function. Israel built the calf and feasted. Nebuchadnezzar praised the gods of gold and silver and threw a banquet. The pattern is consistent across scripture and across history: the idol is the permission slip for superfluity, debauchery, and reveling.

Have you heard what is being promised today? Elon Musk has said openly that artificial intelligence will become so powerful that it will require universal basic income, because human beings will no longer be needed to work. The eschatology of many technologists is identical to the posture of Israel at Sinai. Rise up to eat, to drink, and to play. No labor. No toil. No struggle. Just consumption.

I cannot count the people I have heard say, “I just wish I could make social media videos for a living.” Social media has manufactured the illusion of an existence in which work is optional and pleasure is constant. The people who actually succeed at it work harder than anyone realizes; the dream sold to the rest of us is a fiction. But whether it is a data center built by a billionaire or the latest iPhone bought by the masses, the underlying hope is the same: that technology will deliver us from the very trials God allows in order to drive us back to Him.

We all carry a little gold in our pockets.

“Bring Me Your Gold”

Aaron’s call at the foot of the mountain hasn’t left. It has only been translated into the vocabulary of our age.

Sign up. Approve the permissions. Hand over your accessibility, your time, your attention, your data, your identity. Contribute it to the network, and the network will become our god. It will keep us safe. It will make us prosperous. It will carry us into the future.

It is the same offer. And scripture tells us where it ends. The mark of the beast operates on identical logic — give us your identity through technology, and we will build an image that the whole world can worship together. Same mechanism, same promise, new era.

What We Will Be Made to Drink

Gold was their “technology.” Technology is our “gold.” The most advanced material of the ancient world became the body they gave to the god they could not see. The most advanced materials of our world are becoming the same thing.

But remember, when Moses came down, he ground the calf to powder, scattered it on water, and made the people drink it. He forced them to consume the very thing they had worshiped, so they could taste, in their own bodies, how powerless it really was.

AI, no matter how dazzling, will reach its own ceiling. When it does, those who staked everything on it will be made to swallow the bitter water of an idol that could not save them.

Let us be prayerful, especially over our youngest generations. They are most exposed. We all are. Our sense of community, identity, and possibility is filtered through technology, but we must fight to keep its gravitational pull from permanently shaping our worship.

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Discovering Divinity: The Pleasure Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

One of the most common questions I get as a pastor, probably the most common, is one nobody wants to ask out loud: “How do I defeat lust?”

It comes in whispers. In DMs. After service when everyone else has left. People are ashamed to even form the words, which is exactly why the thing has so much power. If it can get in and dig in and you’re too embarrassed to bring it into the light—that’s what gives it hooks. That’s what makes it stay.

And I’ll be honest: I’ve never felt like I had a good enough answer. You see the look on someone’s face when they ask that question, and you know they’re looking for some magic pill to make it go away. But It doesn’t work like that. It never has.

But recently, something clicked. And it didn’t start with a sermon or a scripture. It started with a YouTube video about dopamine.

The Thing Behind the Thing

Dr. Berg, a health and nutrition YouTuber I’ve followed for years, dropped a video about defeating porn addiction. I almost scrolled past it, because it’s not usually his lane. But I continued out of curiosity got me, and what he said got my wheels turning because it exposed something much larger than pornography.

Here’s what he explained: dopamine isn’t a pleasure hormone. It’s a motivation molecule, a neurotransmitter that drives anticipation and pursuit, not the enjoyment itself. It’s the excited feeling before you eat the cake, not the satisfaction of eating it. The rush of standing in line for the roller coaster, not the ride itself.

That distinction changes everything.

When you experience a dopamine spike, whether from pornography, a purchase, a promotion, a social media notification, or even achieving a goal, there’s a high followed by a letdown. And because that letdown is such a sharp contrast to the rush, it’s not long before you’re chasing again. Only this time, you don’t chase what you had before. You chase something more. Something greater. Something you haven’t tried yet. Dopamine responds powerfully to novelty, literally wiring your brain to pursue the new.

This is why the porn industry offers 99% of its content for free. They understand human psychology well enough to know that if they can hook you with the chase, the 1% who pay will generate billions. They don’t care about your well-being. They want you addicted because addiction is profit.

But here’s what convicted me: this isn’t just a pornography problem. It’s a pleasure problem. And it’s everywhere.

The Sickness We Won’t Name

I started this with pornography because it illustrates the worst-case scenario. But the same mechanism, the same dopamine hijacking, operates in far less obvious places. Career ambition. Financial goals. Academic recognition. Athletic achievement. Even ministry.

Think about it. The Bible says people will invent new ways of doing evil (Romans 1:30). Now, why would anyone need to invent new evil? Because the old evil doesn’t produce the same high anymore. That’s perversion at its root—the aggressive, escalating pursuit of more pleasure. And it doesn’t start extreme. It builds. Slowly. Over time.

“For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. But he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.” —Galatians 6:8

The source of the sickness is simple: we sow to our flesh far more than we realize. Every scroll through TikTok at the end of a long day. Every impulse purchase on Affirm or Klarna because you couldn’t wait to save up. Every binge of content, even good content, (consumed at a speed God never designed us to receive it) is an investment into our flesh.

I had to check myself here. I love learning. I love having information. And God basically slowed me down, by asking: Did you ask Me what’s going on? Did you consult me regarding this information? Especially Artificial Intelligence, which can information, including scripture with stunning accuracy, can become a shortcut that trains your soul to expect revelation without relationship. There’s a dangerous, unhealthy high in religious information when the speed at which you consume it isn’t the speed at which God designed you to grow from it. That’s why you can absorb all the theology in the world and still not change.

God teaches by experience. That’s where transformation actually happens.

The Symptoms That Sting

Here’s where the effects of pleasure get personal.

You consume faster than you replenish. You eat more than you need. You spend more than you earn, putting things on credit because the craving outpaces the means. During a recent ice storm, my family was stuck inside for four or five days. The bank account didn’t move. The very next day after we got out? We overspent on just a couple of fast food runs. My wife and I had been cooking healthy meals the entire time we were home, and we even lost weight doing it. But the minute convenience was available again, we chased it.

You devour more than you develop. This one stung the most because it applies to relationships. When you’re wired for pleasure, you don’t have the patience to let God develop the people around you. You expect your spouse, your kids, your friendships to be everything you want right then. And when they’re not at their peak, you lash out. You devour. You destroy what God was still building.

I’ll be transparent. I’ve always held myself to high standards, and I project that onto my family. A few days ago, my son Elijah forgot to do his homework until bedtime. I was tired, frustrated, and I threw his papers on the floor and told him to go finish. Five minutes later, I sat there knowing I shouldn’t have done that. Then at his soccer game the next day, after he played well but didn’t score, I started coaching him on what he could do better. He shut down completely. He said, “Why do you always say something?” It wasn’t what I was saying—it was why he said it that hit me hard. I saw my own dissatisfaction bleeding out onto him, effecting him.

You know what convicted me the most? That night with the homework, my wife Brittney didn’t say a word to me. She didn’t correct me or lecture me. She just went and sat down next to Elijah and started helping him. And that silence wrecked me more than any rebuke could have. So, I swallowed my pride, got up and helped him myself—because she exposed my impatience without ever opening her mouth.

The moral of the story is, an expectation of pleasure makes you destructively impatient. In your relationships, you end up destroying much more than you develop. Patience isn’t doing nothing—it’s actively resisting your flesh’s desire to act out of frustration rather than purpose.

Broken Hope

There’s a phrase I want to introduce: broken hope. It’s the failure to expect from God because your flesh is overstimulated.

If all you get is pleasure, if that’s all you pursue and all this world wires you to want—it will break your ability to wait on God. Your endurance collapses. Your perseverance evaporates. You can’t sit still long enough to hear Him because everything in you is screaming for the next hit.

I thought about spelling “enjoy” differently: I-N-J-O-Y. It suggest that we should focus on living in joy, and pleasure robs you of that. It steals your ability to appreciate your relationship with God through all of its highs and lows.

My marriage to Britney isn’t always sunshine. But I’m enjoying every part of it, because joy isn’t about the peaks. It’s about being thankful for the relationship regardless of where you are in it. Pleasure addiction steals that. All you want is the high. And when every moment isn’t a high, you’re miserable.

“To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life.” —Romans 2:7

The Solution Nobody Wants to Hear

At the end of Dr. Berg’s video, he gave the solution: aggressively attack the addiction with boredom. Sit in the urge. Observe what your body wants to do. And intentionally do nothing. Over time, your dopamine recalibrates to normal.

When I heard that, I thought: we have an even greater weapon.

“This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” —Matthew 17:21

Prayer is boring to your flesh. You don’t sit down and start talking to God and immediately see blessings materialize. You don’t hear an audible voice. You don’t get instant satisfaction. Your flesh hates it—which is precisely why it works. Prayer starves the thing that’s been devouring you.

But I’m not talking about the prayer you mumble before bed or toss up on the way to work. I’m talking about the kind where you sit down and say, “God, I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything right now. I just want to talk to You. Let me INJOY this relationship.”

When’s the last time you prayed like that? When’s the last time you and your spouse joined hands and said, “God, we’re just here. We’re not begging. We just want to talk to you.”

Jesus, after His baptism, went into the wilderness for forty days. He told His flesh no and His Father yes. And when He came out, He came out with power.

Discovering Divinity—Tat’s what happens when you pray. You discover the authentic thing that pleasure has been counterfeiting. You stop chasing the imitation and you find what’s real. Not just God’s purpose for you, but His purpose in everything around you. Your family, your marriage, your calling, your suffering.

If you can put pleasure down long enough, you’ll finally see what’s worth waiting for.

Ancient Precedent: When Nations Staged Their Futures

Before rejecting the notion too quickly, take a moment to consider history. Ancient peoples grasped something profound: that ritual and performance are not mere theater…..They can be instruments through which reality is formed.

Rome’s fetial priests threw spears into enemy territory before wars, dramatizing divine favor and inevitable victory. Egyptian pharaohs commissioned temple reliefs depicting conquests before campaigns even began (Ramesses II’s “victory” at Kadesh was carved in stone as propaganda, though the actual battle ended in stalemate). Greek tragedies during the Persian Wars weren’t mere entertainment; they were psychological preparation for conflict.

These weren’t predictions. They were pre-enactments—theatrical performances that conditioned public consciousness that, perhaps, involved spiritual forces in earthly affairs.

The Coincidences That Demand Attention

Let’s start with what everyone saw: two historically ‘cursed’ franchises, 176 combined seasons without a championship, battling through seven games that kept viewers on the edge of their seats. But look closer at the symbols on display.

The Chicago Cubs took the field wearing red, white, and blue—these are the exact colors of the Russian flag. Their mascot? A bear cub. Russia’s national animal is the bear. Their opponent, the Cleveland Indians, carried the name of America’s indigenous people.

This symbolism is curious. But let’s look continue.

In the eighth inning, Cubs reliever Aroldis Chapman, the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball history, surrendered a game-tying two-run homer, and the lead evaporated. The momentum shifted. Despite this, manager Joe Maddon sent Chapman back out for the ninth inning, a decision that puzzled commentators. Chapman held. The game remained tied.

Then, after nine full innings, with the score knotted at 6-6, something unusual happened: the sky opened, and a sudden cloudburst drenched Progressive Field, forcing a 17-minute rain delay. Players retreated to their clubhouses, and the tension grew.

Cubs player Anthony Rizzo would later call that rain delay “the most important thing to happen to the Chicago Cubs in the past 100 years.” The Indians had momentum before the pause. After it, the Cubs regrouped and seized control, ultimately winning in extra innings.

When play resumed, Chapman, who had previously blown the lead, returned once again and became the winning pitcher, and the team bearing Russia’s colors and mascot had defeated the Indians.

It was a game for the ages—A historic win by an iconic franchise and a once-in-a-lifetime pitcher. The curse was broken. It will never be forgotten, and perhaps there are more reasons why.

Here’s where the story takes a turn into the uncanny.

The 2016 World Series ran from October 25 to November 2.

From October 16 to 28, 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis—humanity’s closest brush with nuclear annihilation—captured the world’s attention. The crisis began when the Soviet Union (modern-day Russia) secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading to an unprecedented standoff with the United States.

The dates of these two events overlap almost perfectly, 54 years apart, except the World Series picked up where the Cuban Missile Crisis left off on the calendar and moved forward in time.

This time, finally, the winning team was the Cubs. And the winning pitcher? It was Aroldis Chapman, from Cuba, whose nickname is “The Cuban Missile.”

A biblical understanding of numbers deepens the connection further. The game paused with the score tied 6-6. In Revelation, dramatic pauses occur after the 6th seal (Revelation 6:12) and the 6th trumpet (Revelation 9:13), before final judgments unfold. Revelation 8:1 even describes “silence in heaven for about half an hour” between the 6th and 7th seals—a cosmic pause before the end. The parallel is striking: both narratives pause at the number biblically associated with human incompleteness and impending finality, then move toward resolution.

But why would a baseball game mirror the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why would there be a symbolic replaying of the Cold War’s most dangerous moment on one of America’s most visible sporting stages? The answer requires understanding what was truly at stake during that 13-day confrontation in 1962.

The Ideological War Behind the Curtain

Perceiving the possible spiritual significance requires understanding what was truly at stake during the Cold War. It was not just about nuclear weapons, but it was a battle between Democracy and Communism—two fundamentally opposed visions of human governance.

Democracy distributes power among individuals, protecting personal liberties and limiting state control. Communism centralizes power in the state, subordinating individual rights to collective authority. The Cold War wasn’t merely about geography or economics or nuclear weapons; it was an ideological contest for humanity’s future. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, democracy effectively won. The “end of history” was proclaimed, as American capitalism and individual liberty became the global standard.

But from a spiritual perspective, this victory poses a problem for the kingdom of darkness.

Why Democracy Must Fall for Antichrist to Rise

Scripture describes an end-times system of total control—a globally connected government where no one can “buy or sell” without the mark of the beast (Revelation 13:16-17). This requires some form of centralized authority, which Democracy fundamentally opposes.

2 Corinthians 4:4 calls Satan “the god of this world.” If we take this seriously, we must consider that he operates through “the systems of this world”—including governments, economies, and yes, entertainment.

Although democracy grants its citizens the greatest liberties, its downside is that it serves Satan’s purposes for promoting individualistic sin and pride. It is also counterproductive for establishing unified totalitarian control. For an Antichrist system to emerge, the world must move away from distributed power and toward centralized authority—something more like Communism than Democracy.

This is where the 2016 World Series becomes prophetically significant.

The Announcement Hidden in Plain Sight

Ironically, only weeks before Donald Trump’s election, this World Series—an event that would accelerate political polarization and international tensions—played out a symbolic drama:

The team bearing Russia’s colors and mascot defeated the Indians in a contest that mirrored the Cuban Missile Crisis timeline. The “Cuban Missile” himself secured the victory after a pause at 6-6—a number biblically associated with incompleteness and human limitation, pointing toward final judgment.

What was potentially being proclaimed?

That the ideological war “resolved” by the USSR’s collapse wasn’t over—it was merely delayed. That the communist-like model of centralized control, now existent in nations like China, would return to challenge Western democracy. That the spirit realm was signaling a resumption of conflict.

If nothing else, it is incredibly interesting that Six years after this World Series, Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and nuclear threats returned to international discourse. This alone is enough to make the entire situation incredibly eerie. As we are well aware, the world began sliding back into Cold War dynamics, but this time with additional players: China’s surveillance state, digital currency systems, and social credit scores that make Soviet control look primitive.

Questions are often raised about whether professional sports are secretly orchestrated. But what if the manipulation isn’t merely human? What if unseen forces—spiritual rather than physical—operate under the appearance of fairness to shape perception and, ultimately, reality itself? Could that World Series have served as a form of spiritual propaganda?

If we accept that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ephesians 6:12), then we must consider that spiritual forces have the motive and power to stage events in the physical realm to accomplish their purposes.

The Question That Matters

Whether you accept this interpretation or not, certain facts remain undeniable:

• The 2016 World Series occurred during the exact anniversary dates of the Cuban Missile Crisis

• It featured a pitcher nicknamed “The Cuban Missile” winning for a team bearing Russian colors and symbolism

• The game paused at 6-6 before resolution—mirroring biblical patterns of finality and judgment

• Six years later, Russian aggression returned nuclear fears to global consciousness in their war against Ukraine.

• Democratic systems worldwide are under unprecedented strain as centralized, authoritarian models gain influence and popularity

You can call this coincidence, but when “coincidences” align with biblical patterns, historical precedent, and current geopolitical trajectories, perhaps we should pay attention.

Where Do We Go From Here?

If Satan is indeed “the god of this world” with temporary authority to deceive (2 Corinthians 4:4, Revelation 12:9), and if he works through worldly systems, then major cultural events deserve spiritual scrutiny. Not paranoid fear-mongering, but sober discernment.

The purpose isn’t to be afraid—” God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). The purpose is to recognize that we’re watching spiritual warfare play out on historical stages, and to respond with wisdom rather than blind consumption of the narratives we’re fed.

Ancient peoples understood that what happens in the spirit realm manifests physically. They even staged pre-enactments because they recognized that symbolic acts have the power to shape reality.

As we watch democracy strain under internal division and external pressure, as authoritarian systems expand their influence, as nuclear fears return after decades of dormancy, perhaps we should ask:

In a game that ended the most known curse in all of professional sports, was that rain delay in Game 7 just weather? Or was it a pause—like those in Revelation—before the final act begins?

“For we are not ignorant of his devices.” - 2 Corinthians 2:11

Still, they fight on as if borders could contain God’s kingdom…as if an enemy could somehow rob God of His word. And frequently, the fighting has gone too far.

The uncomfortable truth is, we do the same thing.

The Pattern God Established

Though it is true that God gave Abraham and Israel the land of Canaan, it is more meaningfully received as a physical token of a superior promise. Just as the seed of Abraham was temporally Isaac yet eternally Jesus, the promised land of the Jews is temporally Canaan yet eternally New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven as described in Revelation 12.

From the moment the Israelites entered that land, they’ve faced relentless opposition. Canaanites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans, among others, formed an endless succession of enemies preventing them from dwelling in peace.

So, why would God allow His chosen people to be perpetually harassed in the very land He promised them?

Because He never intended for them to mistake the symbol for the substance.

The physical land was designed to make them hungry for something they couldn’t lose, couldn’t be driven from, couldn’t be conquered. It was meant to turn their eyes upward to an everlasting kingdom. Instead, they’ve spent generations clinging to the shadow while the reality it points to remains largely discounted.

The tragedy isn’t that they want the land. The tragedy is that they’ve elevated the symbol above what it symbolizes, treating the signpost as the destination.

The Mirror That Indicts Us

Before we shake our heads at Israel’s supposed blindness, we should recognize ourselves in this pattern. We are spiritual Israel (Romans 9:6-8), grafted into God’s family, recipients of even greater promises. And we’re making the identical mistake with alarming consistency.

God blesses you with a career. You worship that career.

He grants you financial stability. You build your security around it.

He opens doors, provides opportunities, demonstrates His faithfulness through tangible blessings—and you promptly turn those blessings into your promised land. You camp there. You defend them with everything you have. And when they come under attack—when the promotion doesn’t come, when the money dries up—you devote yourself to recovery missions, fighting to reclaim what was “taken” from you.

But what if it wasn’t taken? What if it was removed?

The Question That Exposes Everything

So here’s what demands an honest answer: What physical, temporal blessing has become your functional promised land?

What gift from God’s hand have you elevated above God Himself? What possession, position, or person have you placed above your salvation, above the kingdom, above the purpose He’s given you to bring others into that kingdom?

And as a follow-up: How much energy are you expending to defend, recover, or maintain that thing?

Consider David at Ziklag. The Amalekites raided his camp and took everything—wives, children, possessions. He had every human justification to immediately pursue and recover what was taken. Yet before he moved, David did something we don’t do enough: he inquired of the Lord.

“Shall I pursue?”

That question reveals the heart posture God is looking for. David didn’t assume the answer. He didn’t treat his pain or his desire as sufficient justification for action. He asked whether this was a battle God wanted him to fight.

How often do we ask that question? When your career takes a hit, do you pause to ask God whether you should pursue recovery, or do you immediately launch into damage control? When a relationship ends, do you inquire whether you should fight to restore it, or do you automatically assume you should?

Too often, we see what we’ve lost and we immediately go after it—no prayer, no pause, no consideration that maybe, just maybe, God orchestrated the loss to break our idolatry.

The Attacks Are the Message

Frankly, your attack or situation doesn’t even have to be “fair.”

You can do everything right and still lose. The injury that ends your athletic career might be a freak accident. The lie told about you at work might be completely fabricated. Your financial setback might be a result of circumstances entirely beyond your control.

That’s not necessarily evidence that something went wrong. That’s often evidence that God is trying to get your attention.

The Philistines, the Jebusites, the Amorites, and all those who harassed Israel weren’t there by accident. God allowed them to test Israel, to reveal what was in their hearts, to prevent them from settling into comfortable idolatry.

The attacks on your physical blessings often serve the same purpose—to reveal whether you’re pursuing the shadow or the substance. They expose what you truly worship. They test whether your commitment is to God’s kingdom or to the comfortable life you think you’re owed.

God will keep allowing your idols to be attacked until you stop treating them as your treasure.

The Season of Testing

We are living in a moment when God is testing the church’s commitment to His kingdom versus our attachment to temporal things. The question isn’t whether you’ll face this test. The question is whether you’re recognizing it for what it is.

When doors close, do you pound on them, demanding they reopen, or do you turn to find out where God is actually leading?

When you lose something you thought was your “promised land,” do you mount a campaign to reclaim it, or do you ask whether God is trying to free you from an idol?

The Real Promised Land

Receive your tangible blessings with gratitude. Enjoy them as gifts. But for the love of everything holy, don’t mistake them for the kingdom.

They are tokens of His faithfulness, not the fulfillment of His greatest promise. They are meant to increase your hunger for what cannot be shaken, not to satisfy your soul with what will inevitably crumble.

Just as the physical promised land was meant to make Israel desperate for the spiritual one, your physical blessings are meant to do the same for you.

Don’t lose your spiritual inheritance fighting for shadows.

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When Everyone Claims the Prize

We live in a culture in constant competition over victimhood. If you can paint yourself as the victim, you win the greatest prize: money, consequences for your enemy, or the right to retaliate however you choose.

The formula is simple: the more innocent you appear and the more guilty you can make your opponent look, the more you’re entitled to some kind of payout. Frequently, that payout comes in the form of permission to respond recklessly.

Man’s substandard justice teaches that undue hardship gives one the right to unrighteous retaliation.

This creates a vicious cycle. People can be manipulated to support murder if they can be made to sympathize with the murderer. Tragically, by taking matters into our own hands and retaliating in the flesh, we become subject to the same methods of judgment we used against others.

As Jesus warned: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

This brings us to the core issue preventing forgiveness:

Satan makes people feel that forgiveness eliminates the earning potential of their pain.

When we hold bitterness and refuse to forgive, we’re hoping for greater sympathy from others and a greater payout for our miseries. Psychologically, we feel that by forgiving our enemies, they’ll never recognize how badly they affected us, and appropriate restitution may never be realized.

Because of this, we display as much emotion as possible to generate responses in others that favor our side. We skew stories to paint ourselves in the best light and our “enemies” in the worst light. We decide we’re ready to forgive only when we think our enemies have suffered enough.

If we’re honest, that’s wicked, no matter how justified we feel. Imagine if Jesus had operated this way.

People refuse forgiveness because they believe attention towards their agony is their greatest weapon against their adversaries.

We think that if we never visibly get over our pain and anger, our enemies will finally recognize the extent of their wrongs. But this is a lie from Satan. Holding bitterness isn’t the path to restitution—it’s the path to spiritual destruction.

Scripture is clear: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). This isn’t just talking about obviously wicked people. It includes you. It includes me. It includes the victims we sympathize with and the perpetrators we condemn.

If we see righteousness as something we’ve earned, we think we’re worthy to correct unrighteousness. But if we see righteousness as a reward from God, then we understand that only He can pay for damages done to His possession.

No matter how upright Job was as a man, forgiveness was still necessary. Righteousness is not generated in any person; it is given by God.

This changes everything about how we approach conflict and forgiveness.

The Relationship Breakdown

Unrighteous judgment has a devastating cumulative effect on human relationships. When everyone sees themselves as the victim, relationships deteriorate exponentially because no one thinks it’s their responsibility to initiate restoration.

People figure that forgiveness is a one-way street the victim should never have to cross. But if God’s Word declares that none are righteous, then forgiveness can—and should—be initiated by any party.

This is why Jesus forgave us even when He was truly faultless. He has the power to pay for justice and the wisdom to do so justly. Our desire for justice shouldn’t be based on our limited perspective but on acknowledging that compared to the innocence of Jesus, we all owe Him everything.

The Way Forward: Releasing What We Can’t Control

The truth is, we can’t afford to pay for our own recompense, nor can we calculate the compounded damages our unrighteous sentences would cause. Who have we hurt without realizing it? Who have we transgressed against without knowing? What if they’re holding bitterness against us?

Vengeance belongs to the Lord. He must be the one to repay (Romans 12:19).

This doesn’t mean injustice should be ignored or that we shouldn’t pursue appropriate legal remedies when necessary. But it means we can’t allow bitterness to consume us while waiting for human justice systems to satisfy our desire for vindication.

Forgiveness isn’t primarily about the other person—it’s about freeing ourselves from the spiritual toxicity of unrighteous judgment and trusting God to handle what we cannot.

The Hardest Truth

Forgiveness is not easy, especially when terrible people do unthinkable things to undeserving victims. But it’s required for those who seek righteous resolutions and eternal peace.

The alternative—holding onto bitterness, playing victim games, demanding retaliation—doesn’t lead to justice. It leads to spiritual bondage and relational destruction.

Our righteousness was paid for by the forgiveness of Jesus. If we cease to forgive others, we forfeit the rewards of righteousness.

When your heart is truly geared toward salvation, you understand what’s coming for false accusers, manipulators, and those who’ve genuinely wronged you. And you might find yourself compelled to try rescuing the very ones you once called enemies.

That’s not weakness. That’s the radical strength that comes from understanding grace.

True compassion is motivated by the love of God and fights for justice because it’s right—not just when it benefits us personally.

The question isn’t whether the people who’ve hurt you deserve forgiveness. The question is whether you can afford not to give it.

What would change in your relationships if you stopped calculating who deserves what and started extending the same grace you’ve received?

If this resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe. The hour is late, but God’s Word remains our sure foundation.

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When Bad Things Happen to “Good” People

We’ve all wrestled with it—that gnawing question that surfaces whenever tragedy strikes: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” A child is diagnosed with cancer. A faithful spouse is betrayed. An honest employee is falsely accused. A devoted parent loses their child in a senseless accident.

Our human instinct is to categorize these events as fundamentally unfair. We look at the victims and think, “They didn’t deserve this.” We look at the perpetrators and think, “They deserve worse.” This seems reasonable, even righteous. After all, shouldn’t there be some cosmic balance where good people are rewarded and evil people are punished?

But this very instinct and tendency to judge who deserves what—or demand that God hasten His judgment—reveals a fundamental problem in how we approach forgiveness and justice.

Our Judgment Affects Our Compassion

Consider Job, whom God Himself described as “perfect and upright.” If anyone deserved protection from suffering, it was Job. Yet he lost everything—his wealth, his children, his health—while his friends sat around explaining why he must have done something to deserve it.

Job’s story turns humanistic justice upside down to expose the inherent flaws that we often fail to remember. It exposes a dangerous pattern in human thinking: our sympathy for people is determined by our carnal judgment of them. We often decide how much concern, compassion, and yes, forgiveness a person deserves based on our personal evaluations of their character. If we see someone as “good,” we’re outraged when they suffer. If we see someone as “bad,” we figure they should get what they deserve—and that often doesn’t include our prayers or forgiveness.

But here’s what Job’s story teaches us: righteousness was never something Job earned or deserved. Even this “perfect and upright” man needed God’s grace and mercy. And significantly, his restoration came only when he prayed for the very friends who had wrongfully accused him.

“And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before” (Job 42:10).

Job wasn’t the cause of his calamity, but forgiveness was still the key to his deliverance. His story underscores a critical truth that we do well to remember: righteousness is a reward from God, not an award from men.

The Justice Problem: When Human Courts Fall Short

On a basic level, justice means correcting imbalances—penalizing the guilty and compensating the innocent until the damage is made right. The problem is that human beings calculate damages primarily in temporal, physical terms, while God’s justice operates on a much deeper, spiritual level.

Jesus warned us about this limitation: “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).

Human justice systems—even well-intentioned ones—are fundamentally flawed because they’re run by flawed people with subjective, carnal value systems. Sentences get skewed by personal emotions, political considerations, and financial incentives. People care more when it affects them personally and less when it doesn’t. Penalties are too severe when emotion runs high or too lenient when empathy runs low.

In the worst cases, this system gets manipulated by those who profit from conflict. Divorce attorneys paint their clients as victims because larger settlements mean bigger fees. Media outlets sensationalize tragedies because outrage generates ratings and revenue. The result is a culture where atrocities that can’t be monetized or politicized get ignored, while those that can be “marketed” receive excessive attention.

This is certainly a situation where Paul’s warning applies: “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). When justice becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, true justice becomes impossible.

The “Hater” Heresy: When Christians Play the Victim Game

Perhaps most troubling is how this twisted view of justice has infiltrated the church. Consider how popular “hater” messages have become in Christian circles. Pastors build entire sermons around the idea that opposition proves God’s blessing, that resistance to personal goals somehow indicates righteousness.

Here’s an uncomfortable question: When you label someone a “hater,” what exactly are you basing that on? Is it because they were actually convicted by your obedience to Christ? Or is it because you assume they’re jealous of your possessions and position? Do they hate the Jesus in you, or just you?

Too often, these messages are nothing more than glorified judgment of others—a religious blame game hoping to find the twisted faith to believe you’ll get what you want just because someone else doesn’t like you. They cause people to blame others before examining their own actions, which is why people love them so much. It’s a doctrine that itching ears love to hear.

But God isn’t interested in defending your ego or your agenda. He’s interested in defending one thing: His standard of righteousness. If that standard isn’t operating in you—if you’re holding bitterness against your neighbor—then you’re harboring unrighteousness, and God isn’t obligated to come to your defense. In fact, it’s against His nature.

Here’s a sobering question to consider: When you think about your accusers, your critics, those who oppose you—what do you actually want for them? When your heart is genuinely geared toward salvation, you understand what’s coming for false accusers. You might find yourself compelled to try rescuing the very ones you’ve labeled as your enemies.

In too many Christian circles, hatred toward us has become the reason we expect God to bless us physically, regardless of our own righteousness. This is religion playing the victim game as if it provokes God to move. But God is moved by His loving desire for saved souls—not by our ability to paint ourselves as martyrs.

The Mirror We’re Avoiding

If we’re honest with ourselves, the resistance we feel toward forgiveness often reveals more about our hearts than about the offenses we’ve suffered.

We cling to our grievances because they serve a purpose. They justify our anger. They explain our failures. They give us permission to remain bitter. They provide leverage in our relationships. They make us feel morally superior. Eventually, they become our identity.

But what if the very thing we’re using as a weapon against our enemies is actually a weapon we’re wielding against ourselves? Every day you hold onto bitterness, you’re building a cell around your own soul while convincing yourself you’re punishing someone else. There is none righteous but God, and If we’re all standing before God based on what we deserve, we’re all in serious trouble.

The uncomfortable truth is that we frequently want justice for others and mercy for ourselves. We want people to understand our context, our struggles, our reasons—while refusing to extend the same grace to those who’ve failed us.

Remember, God’s economy doesn’t work that way. The same measure we use to judge others will be used to judge us. The forgiveness we withhold from others will be withheld from us.

The Challenge You Can’t Ignore

So here’s the challenge: Take an honest inventory of the bitterness you’re potentially carrying. Not the justified anger you tell yourself you have every right to feel. Not the wounds you display like badges of honor. Not the victim narrative you’ve perfected over years of retelling.

The actual, poisonous root of unforgiveness that’s been growing in your heart while you’ve been busy explaining why you’re entitled to keep it there.

Who are you refusing to forgive? What are you getting out of that refusal? How is your unforgiveness serving you? What would you lose if you let it go?

And most importantly: What makes you think you can withhold from others what God has freely given to you?

The righteousness you claim, the salvation you celebrate, the grace you sing about on Sunday mornings—none of it was earned. All of it was purchased by someone who forgave you while you were still His enemy. While you were still guilty. While you still deserved condemnation.

The hardest messages to hear are the ones that remove our excuses. This is one of them.

In Part 2, we’ll examine how the modern obsession with victimhood has created a culture where forgiveness becomes almost impossible, and what that means for the future of relationships—in families, churches, and society at large.

Those words were spoken over my life long before I grasped their weight or embraced their meaning. Over time, God revealed the unique gifts and perspective He entrusted to me for such a pivotal moment as this.

A Journey of Divine Redirection

I was born into a world of constant motion—following my father's baseball dreams across the Americas. My parents, Ronald and Janda Shepherd, were passionate believers who would soon discover that their unwavering faith and the profit-driven world of professional sports often don't align. When that clash came, it would bring my father's promising baseball career to an abrupt end and set our family on an unexpected path.

What followed were twenty years of relocations, roadblocks, and rejections as our family navigated dramatic changes—from luxury living and fame to an 850-square-foot house with no central heat or air. As the eldest of five siblings, I witnessed both extremes, yet my memories aren't filled with bitterness but with gratitude for the resilience our parents instilled in us through God's love.

I left for college with ambitious dreams of athletic success. After being drafted twice by the New York Yankees, I believed sports would redeem, through me, what my father had lost. But God had different plans.

A near-fatal car accident during my first summer away from home changed everything. Ejected from a pickup truck traveling over 80 mph, I suffered a broken neck and back, spinal cord damage, and temporary paralysis. The accident ended my athletic dreams and began a season of divine redirection that often felt like failure at every turn.

At 26, sitting on the edge of my bed with no job, no house, no wife, and a mountain of debt, I wept and told my father I felt like a complete failure. But God had me exactly where He wanted me. It was then that He began restoring my self-worth and validating His ministry calling in my life. Today, I have been blessed with a lovely wife, Brittney, and three beautiful children—Brooke, Elijah, and Amari. Together, we serve as pastors of our local church, God’s Promise Restoration Center.

Discovering the True Nature of Prophecy

For years, my perspective on spiritual gifts was clouded by cynicism. I had seen church titles and designations abused so often that they felt like little more than hollow labels. I watched contemporary preachers wield the gifts of the Spirit as tools of self-promotion, each striving to appear greater than the next. To me, it all seemed less like genuine ministry and more like prideful distortions of God’s intent.

Over time, through divine intervention and revelation, I have come to grasp the true meaning and purpose of spiritual gifts. Though I serve in a role most would call ‘Pastor,’ I have come to embrace the words spoken over me as a child—that my true spiritual gifting is that of a prophet.

The Problem with Modern Prophecy

I don’t take spiritual gifts lightly, especially prophecy. Scripture warns against false prophets more than any other gift. In Jesus' description of the end times, He discusses the prevalence of false prophets, suggesting their abundance signals the Lord's approaching return. This makes the importance of true prophets significant.

Prophecy has suffered tremendous perversion. Rather than exhorting and bringing comfort through revelation of God's will, many claiming to be prophets have degraded the gift to materialistic fortune-telling—essentially repackaging psychic readings focused on temporal treasures. On the opposite extreme, some claim prophecy ceased with the Apostles or the end of the Bible age, possibly as a reaction to such rampant abuse.

While reading Scripture, I encountered a definition of prophecy I had never realized before: "Forth-telling"—to utter forth or declare a thing which can only be known by divine revelation. It means interpreting and conveying the mind of God in ways that might otherwise seem unclear.

"I would that ye all spake with tongues, but rather that ye prophesied: for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive edifying." (1 Corinthians 14:5)

In that moment of understanding, I saw myself. I had always expected to be able see someone's house, car, spouse, or future wealth to verify a prophetic gift, missing its true purpose entirely. I began to recognize within me the gift to extract the eternal meaning of God's word and declare it over the children of God. I began to recognize a God-given ability to view the modern world through the lens of Scripture in a way only He could enable.

The Mission of Hour Watch

This brings me to why Hour Watch exists. I believe the foretelling element of prophecy remains, but not to mislead with extra-biblical doctrine or heretical instruction. Instead, there is a wealth contained within the Bible that has yet to be fully explored—and that's primarily what I want to accomplish through this platform.

Prophecy reminds us of the truth of God's will for our lives when we can't perceive it or fail to obey it. It lovingly exhorts us toward both our individual purpose and the promise of total redemption. True prophets bring reassuring comfort straight from the Father's heart, so that no matter how circumstances appear personally or communally, we remember that God has spoken and He is faithful to perform His Word.

What to Expect

Through Hour Watch, I'll be sharing what I believe is original, Bible-based insight for our present times. We'll explore:

• Forgotten truths hidden in familiar passages

• Prophetic perspective on current events through a biblical lens

• Practical exhortation for walking in God's will during uncertain times

• Comfort and encouragement drawn directly from Scripture's eternal promises

This isn't about adding to Scripture or claiming new revelation outside of God's Word. It's about mining the inexhaustible depths of what has already been given, allowing the Holy Spirit to illuminate truths that speak directly to our current hour.

Standing Watch

We are living in times that demand spiritual vigilance. The proliferation of false prophets Jesus warned about suggests we're approaching the culmination of all things. In such an hour, the church needs voices that can rightly divide the Word of truth, bringing forth the eternal from the pages of Scripture.

I don't claim perfection or infallibility—I'm simply a vessel grateful to be used according to God's perfect will and timing. Through polar extremes of wealth and poverty, success and failure, God has prepared me for a unique ministry in His Kingdom, and I'm honored to share what I've received.

Welcome to Hour Watch. Let's discover together what God's Word declares for such a time as this.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe and join this journey of biblical discovery. The hour is late, but God's Word remains our sure foundation.