We want to suggest something different. Those moments were not anomalies. They were your spirit going home.

In Episode 7, we begin mapping what we are calling the interior country — the spiritual landscape within the believer that most of us were never taught to navigate. We look at what Scripture says about the mobility of the human spirit, why Peter and Joel declared dreams and visions to be the hallmark of the entire Church Age, and we place two specific destinations on the map: the Inner Room and the Storehouse.

This is the opening of a longer arc. Today we lay the foundation and take the first steps.

Come explore with us.

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

In most churches, communion works like a cafeteria line. The congregation forms a queue and shuffles forward, row by row, to receive the bread and the cup from someone standing behind a table at the front of the room. It is orderly. It is efficient. It moves a large number of people through a sacred act in a reasonable amount of time. And it communicates, without anyone intending it to, that grace flows from the periphery toward the center — that the people must come to the Table rather than the Table coming to the people.

Nobody designed this to make a theological statement. It simply evolved as the most practical solution to a logistical problem. But the room encodes the theology before anyone speaks, and this particular encoding reverses the direction of the gospel.

The gospel does not summon the hungry to form an orderly line. The gospel goes out.

Here is a different picture. Imagine the elders taking the bread and the cup from the Table at the center of the room and moving outward — not waiting for the congregation to come to them, but going to the congregation where they stand. Moving through the room, offering what they carry to each person in turn. Kneeling if necessary. Pausing. Looking the person in the eye. Placing the bread in their hands.

Grace moves from the center toward the periphery. The shepherd goes to the sheep. The feast comes to the guest.

This is not a liturgical novelty. It is a recovery of the oldest instinct of the gospel. Jesus did not tell the hungry crowds to form a line. He took five loaves and two fish, gave thanks, broke them, and sent the disciples out through the crowd until everyone had eaten. The feast moved. The bread went to the people. That is the direction grace travels.

Behind the elders, in this vision, come the prayer ministers — moving through the same room, laying hands gently on those who have just received, praying quietly over each person as the Spirit leads. The two ancient acts of the Church — Eucharist and anointing — held together in a single movement through the Body. James 5 and 1 Corinthians 11 in the same moment. Healing and remembrance. Presence and participation.

No line. No queue. No management of the sacred from behind a table. Elders moving as servants, bringing what they carry to each person in turn.

The picture this creates in the room is worth sitting with.

The congregation is standing within the surrounding worship environment we described in Part 2 — inside the music, inside the imagery, no stage, no front wall. The Table is at the center. And now the bread and the cup are moving outward from that center like light from a source — elders carrying the feast through the gathered Body, prayer following in their wake.

This is the Body functioning as it was designed. Not an audience receiving from a stage. Not a queue shuffling toward a table. A gathered community of Spirit-filled believers, each of whom came full from their own Inner Room, standing together in the presence of God while the elders move among them with the bread that says: He gave Himself for you. He is still giving Himself for you. He has not stopped.

This five-part series has been about unbuilding — dismantling the assumptions that accumulated around gathered worship over the centuries until the room no longer said what we believe. The stage that made us an audience. The Table pushed to the side. The children sent away. The teacher elevated above the people. The feast administered from behind a barrier.

We are not innovating. We are remembering. Every element of this vision is older than the model it replaces, rooted in Scripture, practiced in the early Church, and waiting to be recovered by a community willing to ask: what does the room confess?

At The Furnace, we are asking. And we like what the answers are beginning to look like.

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The pulpit is not neutral furniture.

It is a piece of architecture that makes a theological claim before a single word is spoken. It places one person above all the others. It faces the congregation from a height. It signals, as clearly as any creed or confession, that truth flows in one direction — downward, from the platform toward the people — and that the job of the people is to sit still and receive it.

We inherited this model. We did not choose it so much as find it already in place when we arrived. Most of us have sat in those rows since childhood, facing forward, taking notes, absorbing what the person at the front had prepared for us. It feels natural because it is all we have ever known. It feels sacred because it is where we first heard the Word of God proclaimed. And the proclamation of the Word is sacred — nothing in what follows should be heard as a dismissal of that.

The pulpit is not the only way. It is not even the oldest way. And it carries theological freight that we should at least examine before we assume it is the only faithful option.

Jesus did not use a pulpit.

He walked. He sat among His disciples on hillsides and in boats and around tables. He asked questions as often as He gave answers. He paused beside one person and then moved to another. He drew the room into the inquiry rather than delivering conclusions to it from above. His teaching was participatory — not in the sense of being unstructured or without authority, but in the sense that wisdom was sought together rather than dispensed from a height.

The Socratic tradition understood this. The great teachers of the ancient world did not stand still. They moved among their students. The movement was not incidental. It was pedagogical. A teacher who moves through the room signals something the pulpit cannot: wisdom belongs to the gathering, not to the platform.

Paul’s letters are full of this instinct. When he writes to the Corinthians about the gathered Body, he describes a community where each person brings something — a hymn, a teaching, a word of revelation, a tongue, an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. The gathering is not a delivery system for one person’s preparation. It is a community of Spirit-filled believers, each carrying what the Spirit has given, contributing to the whole.

The teacher among them is not above them. The teacher is the one who draws out what is already there.

At The Furnace, we are moving toward a model of teaching that looks more like this. The teacher moves through the congregation as he teaches — pausing near one person, addressing another, asking a question and waiting for the room to answer. Not because we are abandoning depth or rigor or the serious engagement with Scripture. Because we believe the Spirit has already been at work in the room before the teaching begins, and that good teaching finds what the Spirit has placed there rather than talking over it.

This recovers something that was present in the early Church and in the teaching of Jesus. It is not informality. It is fidelity to the oldest model of all — the Rabbi who moved among His people, who taught from within rather than from above, who trusted that the Kingdom of God was already present in the room and that His job was to draw it out.

The teacher who moves is not being casual. He is being faithful.

And when he steps down from the platform — or better yet, when there is no platform to step down from — the room changes. The congregation is no longer an audience. They are participants. They are the Body. And the teaching that emerges from among them carries a weight that no performance from above can replicate.

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At The Furnace, the children stay.

There is no children’s church. There is no parallel program running in a separate room while the adults do the real thing. There is no age-sorted environment designed to manage young bodies away from the gathered Body. When we come together, we come together — all of us, from the oldest to the youngest, in the same room, for the same gathering, around the same Table.

This surprises people. It surprises them because the alternative has become so deeply normal that most believers have never stopped to ask where it came from. Children’s church feels ancient. It feels like it must have roots somewhere deep in the tradition. Surely the early Church did this. Surely there is a scriptural precedent.

There is not.

The segregation of children from the worshipping body has no precedent in Scripture and no root in the early Church. It is a modern invention, born not of theology but of institutional convenience — a practical solution to the logistical problem of young bodies in a room designed for passive observation. When the church became a theater, children became a disruption. The solution was to give them their own theater down the hall.

We did not do this to harm them. We did it to manage them. The distinction matters, but the result is the same either way. A generation has grown up alongside the Church rather than inside it — attending their own version of church, learning their own simplified curriculum, watching their own age-appropriate presentation — and then aging out of that system into an adult congregation they have never actually inhabited.

Here is what a child receives when they stay.

They watch an elder move through the room carrying bread and a cup, kneeling beside their parent, offering what he carries with quiet reverence. They watch hands laid gently on a bowed head. They watch someone weep in the presence of God, or lift their hands, or stand very still with their eyes closed and their face turned upward. They hear singing that is not performed at them but arises from the people around them. They sit beside adults who are genuinely encountering something real — and they feel it, even if they cannot name it.

This is formation. Not information — formation. The kind that happens not through curriculum but through presence. Through proximity to something true. Through inhabiting the Body of Christ rather than watching a child-sized version of it from a safe distance.

Jesus did not send the children away. When the disciples tried to manage them — tried to protect the important adult business of the Kingdom from the disruption of small bodies — Jesus stopped them. Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them. The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. He did not say: take them down the hall and give them a simplified version of what we are doing here. He said: let them come.

There is a practical reality to acknowledge. Children are not silent. They move. They ask questions at inconvenient moments. They drop things. A gathered community that includes children looks and sounds different from one that does not, and the difference requires patience, flexibility, and a willingness to let the gathering be slightly less polished than it might otherwise be.

This is not a cost to be minimized. It is a feature of the gathered Body functioning as it was designed. A room full of only adults who sit quietly and listen in rows is not the Body of Christ at full expression. It is a subset of it, carefully curated for maximum efficiency.

The full Body is messier. It includes the very old and the very young, the composed and the restless, the ones who have words for what they are experiencing and the ones who do not yet.

The children were always supposed to be here. Let them stay.

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Here is a question worth sitting with before you read any further: When you walk into your church on Sunday morning, what is at the center of the room?

Not what is at the front. Not what is elevated. What is at the center — the gravitational heart of the space, the thing the room is arranged around, the object that everything else points toward or defers to?

In most contemporary churches, the honest answer is the stage. Or the pulpit. Or the screen. Or the band. Something that directs the eye toward a gifted human being and signals, before a single word has been spoken, that you have come to receive from one person what that person has prepared for you. The architecture confesses a theology. The question is whether it is the theology you actually believe.

We are in the early stages of dreaming about what a gathered space for The Furnace might one day look like. And the first decision — the one that shapes everything else — is this: what goes at the center?

For us, the answer is the Table.

Not the stage. Not the pulpit. Not the screen. The Table of the Lord — the Communion Table — at the gravitational heart of the room, visible from every point in the space, the thing the room is arranged around. Whatever occupies the center of a room is what the room confesses matters most. If the Table is at the center, the room says, before anyone speaks, before the music begins, before the teaching starts: this is why we are here. Not to watch. Not to be entertained. To eat and drink together in the presence of the One who gave Himself for us.

The Eucharist is not a concluding ritual appended to the real event. It is the reason the room exists. When the Table is at the center, the architecture confesses this before the gathering begins.

We are also dreaming about four walls, four screens, and no front.

Imagine a room where the congregation stands inside a continuous environment of image and lyric that wraps the entire space. There is no stage. There is no direction the room points except inward, toward one another, and upward, toward God. Wherever you stand, you are equally inside the worship. You are not facing it from a distance. You are not observing it from the cheap seats. You are standing within it.

This is not an aesthetic preference. It is ecclesiology made physical. The room says: there is no performer here. You have not come to watch. You have come to enter in.

If there is a band, the musicians are scattered throughout the space. The music does not come from a platform toward the people. It arises from within the room itself — surrounding, atmospheric, indistinguishable from the gathered body. The congregation is not an audience. It is a source.

None of this is innovation. Every element of this vision is older than the model it replaces.

The early Church gathered in homes, in catacombs, around tables. There were no stages. There were no platforms. There was no separation between the people who performed the sacred acts and the people who watched them performed. The Table was at the center because the meal was the center. The bread was broken among the people, not dispensed to them from above.

We did not lose this overnight. It drifted away from us gradually, one architectural compromise at a time, until the room we built no longer said what we believed. We are not trying to innovate. We are trying to remember.

A room that puts the Table at the center and wraps the congregation inside the worship is not a modern experiment. It is a very old confession, recovered.

The room itself can be an act of faith. Let ours say what we mean.

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There is an old quip about Sunday morning church that is funny because it is true: the ministers minister and the congregation congregates. The professionals perform. The people watch. It is, when you strip away the sacred language and the good intentions, a spectator sport.

Nobody designed it that way on purpose. Nobody sat down in the sixteenth century and said, let us build a system that turns the Body of Christ into an audience. It happened gradually, incrementally, one architectural decision at a time. The stage went up. The seats all faced forward. The lights separated the performers from the observers. The green room appeared. And somewhere in that slow drift, the gathered Body of Christ began to look remarkably like a theater — with a cast, a crew, and a crowd.

The problem is not the people. The people are hungry, sincere, and doing exactly what the room tells them to do. The problem is this: the room has already decided your role before the service begins. And the solution is not a better program or a more dynamic speaker or a worship band with more lights. The solution begins before anyone arrives.

Here is what we have been learning at The Furnace, slowly and wonderfully, over these past months.

When each person comes to the gathering already full — already having spent time in the Inner Room, already having listened for the voice of God in the quiet of their own interior — the meeting becomes something entirely different. It stops being a performance and starts being a chorus. Not a chorus where everyone sings the same note, but a chorus where everyone has been listening to the same Composer and arrives with their own part already learned.

We call this the “alone first, together second” rhythm. You go into your Inner Room. You sit with Christ. You listen. You let His word find you in the silence of your own soul. And then you come together — and what you bring is not an empty cup hoping to be filled. You bring what you have already received, and you discover that everyone else has been receiving too.

This is not theoretical for us. Not long ago, in one of our gatherings, two people shared what they had been hearing from Jesus during the week. One had been sitting with the image of the flowers of the field — how God clothes them in glory beyond anything Solomon achieved. Another had been sitting with the birds of the air — how God feeds them and they do not spend their days in anxiety. Two people. Two separate weeks of listening. Two fragments.

Together, they were one verse. Complete.

That is what happens when people come full. The gathering becomes the place where what God has been saying to each of us privately is confirmed and amplified in the company of one another. The congregation does not come to receive what the minister has prepared. The congregation comes to share what God has already given — and the minister, moving among them, draws out what the Spirit has already placed in the room.

This reframes everything about what Sunday morning is for.

It is not the weekly download. It is not the place where spiritually depleted people come to be topped up by a talented communicator before heading back into the week. It is the overflow. It is what happens when a community of people who have been living from the Inside Out all week finally get to be together and discover that the God who spoke to each of them individually has been telling the same story to all of them.

The spectator sport ends the moment the congregation stops coming empty.

You cannot mandate this. You cannot program it. You cannot produce it with better production values or a more carefully crafted sermon series. It grows from the Inner Room, one person at a time, as each member of the Body learns to come to the gathering not as a consumer but as a carrier — full of what God has given, ready to offer it to the rest.

But the congregation cannot do this alone. The room must want it too. The leadership must build space for it — resisting the impulse to fill every silence, leaving room in the gathering for what the Spirit has already placed in the people. A tightly programmed service has no place to put what you carry in. The architecture, the order of worship, the posture of the elders — all of it must signal the same thing the Inner Room already knows: you are not here to watch. You are here to bring.

This is what the rest of this series is about. Come full. And then let us talk about what kind of room is worthy of what you carry.

More in Part 2… next week.

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Most believers spend their prayer lives reaching upward toward a God who feels distant — praying harder, fasting longer, hoping to finally break through. But Ephesians 2:6 says you are already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. You are not fighting for a position. You are enforcing one.

In this episode, we visit Mount Carmel — where the prophets of Baal danced, shouted, and cut themselves trying to wake a god who never answered — and we ask the uncomfortable question: is that how we pray? Then we turn to Elijah, who simply spoke to a God who was already listening, already present, already inclined toward His servant. The difference was not volume or intensity. It was the nature of the God being addressed.

God is not distant. He is not waiting to be impressed. He made His home inside of you so that He would never have to be reached for again.

This is Episode 6 of the Kingdom Architecture Podcast. If you are new here, we recommend starting with Episode 1 — each episode builds directly on the one before it.

Also from The Furnace: The Furnace Podcast, our companion series on contemplative prayer, the Inner Room, and the interior life with God. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartRadio.

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Christianity without the props is not Christianity stripped bare and impoverished, a faith reduced to its minimum, limping along without its proper supports. It is Christianity returned to its native richness, the richness that was always interior, always personal, always unconfiscatable. The props, the buildings, the Bibles, the liturgies, the clergy, the gatherings, are not the enemy. Misplaced trust in them is. And the difference between those two things is everything.

Here is the truth that changes everything: you are the temple of the living God. Not the building down the street. Not the sanctuary with the stained glass and the oak pews. You. Your body is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and the Kingdom of God is not coming with observation; it is already within you (Luke 17:21). The Inner Room that Jesus describes in John 14 is not a metaphor for a quiet hour in the morning. It is a real place, a permanent place, a place that exists inside every believer regardless of circumstance, geography, or access to religious resources.

This is the unconfiscatable inheritance. No emperor can reach it. No dictator can burn it. No poverty can price you out of it. The persecuted believer in a North Korean labor camp, who has never held a Bible and has not seen another Christian in years, has the same Inner Room available to her as the seminary professor surrounded by his library. The martyrs of Rome went to their deaths singing not because they were especially brave but because they possessed something death could not touch. They had learned to live from the inside out. They had found the Inner Room—the Inner Temple not made by human hands. This is where it begins.

And yet we are not meant to live only alone. We are also a Body. Paul does not use that image casually; he means it structurally and literally. We are the hands and feet of Christ in the world, and hands and feet belong to a body, not scattered across the floor. When two or three gather in the name of Jesus, something real and distinct happens, not merely individuals in the same room, but a corporate expression of the temple of God. The gathered community, the shared table, the worship offered together, these are not optional accessories to the faith. They are the faith expressing itself in its fullness.

The props can serve this corporate reality beautifully. A building gives the Body a place to gather. A liturgy gives the Body a shared language. A Bible read aloud in community has fed the Church for two thousand years. None of these things are wrong. The question is only whether they are in their proper place, serving the Interior life, pointing toward Christ, facilitating the union that is the real substance of everything.

When the props are mistaken for that substance, something quietly goes wrong. And the sign that it has gone wrong is not always obvious, because it often looks like devotion.

Here is the test I find clarifying. Imagine the emperor makes his decree: Bibles confiscated, clergy imprisoned, gatherings forbidden. If your faith depends on those things, the emperor wins. But if the Interior is alive and real, if the Kingdom truly is within you, then everything the emperor cannot reach is still everything that matters. The props are gone and what remains is still the whole of Christianity, because what remains is Christ Himself, dwelling within.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It is the lived reality of the underground church in China, the persecuted believers in North Korea, the martyrs in every century who discovered that when everything external was stripped away, what they had on the inside was more than enough.

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The rhythm that makes all of this work, both the individual Interior life and the corporate gathering, is what I would call alone first, together second.

You go into your Inner Room. You sit with Christ. You listen. You let His heart become your heart and His word become your word. And then you come together with the Body, and here is the wonder of it. When each person has genuinely been in their Inner Room, hearing from God, they bring something real to the gathering. And God, it turns out, tends to say the same thing to all of us, even if in different words, different images, different fragments of the same truth.

Last week in our gathering, someone shared what they had been hearing from Jesus, something about the flowers of the field, how God clothes them in glory. Another person, who had been sitting in their own Inner Room all week, shared something different: the birds of the air, how God feeds them and they do not worry. Two people. Two separate encounters with Christ. Two fragments.

Together: one verse, whole and complete.

That is the Body functioning as it was designed. That is what happens when people come to the gathering already full rather than coming empty and hoping to be filled. The corporate experience becomes not a substitute for the personal one but an amplification of it, a chorus of voices that have each been listening alone, now finding that they have all been hearing the same song.

The props have their place. Use them. Love them. But know what they are for.

They are scaffolding, not the building. They are the banks of the river, not the water. They are the means by which the Interior life finds its corporate expression and the corporate Body is pointed back toward the Interior life of each of its members.

Christianity without the props is simply Christianity as it was always meant to be, rooted so deeply in the presence of Christ within that nothing from without can diminish it, and so fully alive in the gathered Body that when two or three come together in His name, He is there in their midst.

That is more than enough. It always has been.

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This logic is called a syllogism, and it dates back to ancient Greece. The idea is simple. The syllogism draws a conclusion from two premises that are assumed to be true. For example, humans are mortal, Aristotle is human, therefore Aristotle must be mortal. Easy enough. The logic generally holds as long as both premises are true. Should one or the other not be true, then the syllogism produces nonsense. For example, dogs have four legs, that animal has four legs, therefore that animal is a dog (meow). It is easy to see that the premises must be universally true for the logic game to work.

To apply this kind of logic to the Christian faith is disastrous. Christian truth is not ascertained by logic or thought or even empirical observation. Rather, it is by revelation that we know the truth of God, His Son, and His kingdom. When we reach for the tool kit of logic, we are in for troubled seas. The theology rising from such methodology is catastrophic.

Back to the coffee shop: what my peers have done, without realizing it, is collapse the Author into the book. They have taken the living Person—the one John describes in the opening of his Gospel as the Word who was with God and was God, the Word through whom all things were made—and flattened Him into a printed text. (If the concept of Jesus as the Logos is new to you, I explored it in depth here.) Jesus is not a document. He is a Person. And confusing those two things is not a small mistake. It borders on heresy.

Here is something worth sitting with: Jesus wrote nothing. Not one word. He left no manuscript, no scroll, no letter. The apostles left a record behind—a breathtaking, Spirit-carried, utterly indispensable record—but the One they were recording chose not to write a single line. The New Testament is the testimony of those who walked with Him, were transformed by Him, and were carried along by the Holy Spirit as they bore witness to what they had seen and heard. The Bible is the record of our history with God. It is the account of a living relationship, written by godly men and women as the Spirit moved them. It is sacred beyond measure, but it is a witness, not the One witnessed.

This matters more than it might seem at first.

Here is a test I find clarifying. Imagine a dictator in the mold of Diocletian—or look at North Korea today, or the underground church in China. The emperor makes his decree: Bibles are confiscated and burned. Clergy are imprisoned. Churches are shuttered. Christian gatherings are forbidden.

If Christianity depends on the book, the clergy, and the building, then the faith dies when those things are removed. The emperor wins.

But Christianity has never actually worked that way—even if we have sometimes acted as though it did. For nearly two thousand years, the average believer could not read. Bibles were rare, housed in the hands of a few bishops or scholars. There was no printing press, no hotel nightstand copy, no pew Bible. And yet the Church spread. Martyrs went to their deaths singing. The faith multiplied under every empire that tried to crush it.

Why? Because what the martyrs possessed could not be confiscated. Jesus had told them plainly: The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). The apostle John had assured his readers that they had received an anointing from the Holy One and had no need that any man should teach them (1 John 2:27). Jesus Himself had said: Abide in Me—not study about Me, not accumulate correct doctrine about Me, but abide. The invitation was always interior. It was always relational. It was always to a Person.

Tertullian, writing in the third century, said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. That is not a statement about institutional resilience. It is a statement about what happens when people are so thoroughly abiding in Christ that death cannot threaten what they most deeply possess.

None of this is a case against the Bible. I love the Scriptures. I have given my life to what they contain and what they point toward. The proper place of Scripture is high and honored—but it is a specific place. Don’t praise the pointing finger and ignore the glorious light of the moon, since that misses the very point of the signpost. Don’t frame the love letter and worship it—go to the person it came from. And don’t worship the map; use it to find your way to the treasure buried in the field.

When the Bible becomes the destination rather than the direction, something has gone quietly wrong. Sadly, the sign that something has gone wrong is not always obvious, because it often looks like devotion and sounds like reverence. Making the scriptures the center is idolatry, because that is the place reserved for Christ. It is a substitution where the book replaces the Person, the text replaces the encounter, the propositions replace the Presence.

The Bible itself will not let this stand. From cover to cover, it is pointing somewhere. And where it points is not to itself.

And here is the thing that undoes every argument for making the faith primarily doctrinal or textual: a child does not need any of it to find Christ. Not a Bible, not a catechism, not a theology degree, not a refined eschatology. A child hears the Master saying, “Come to Me,” and she comes. This is the gospel in its purest form. The martyrs who could not read possessed the same Christ as the greatest theologian who ever lived. The persecuted believer in North Korea who has never held a Bible abides in the same Vine as the seminary professor with a library full of commentaries. The faith has never been as complicated as we have made it.

So what would your faith look like if the book were taken away tomorrow? Not weakened, not diminished—but taken. What remains? That answer is worth knowing. Because what remains when everything else is stripped away is what you actually have. And what God has always wanted to give you is not a book about Himself. It is Himself.

That is what the Bible is for.

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But there is something we may have missed. Many of these beloved songs—the ones lodged deepest in the memory of the church—are not simply beautiful expressions of devotion. They are testimony. They are dispatches from an interior country that most of their singers never thought to visit, written by men and women who had been there and were trying, in rhyme and melody, to tell us what they found.

The Inner Room changes the way we read them. Once you know there is a real place of fellowship within, a place where the redeemed spirit meets the risen Christ, face to face, in the Third Heaven, you begin to hear these songs differently. What sounded like poetry begins to sound like a map.

Let’s walk through some of these songs together and see what we find.

“I Come to the Garden Alone”

In the spring of 1912, C. Austin Miles sat in his darkroom in New Jersey, windowless, waiting for photographs to develop, and opened his Bible to John 20. He began to read about Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, and something opened. He later wrote that he felt himself transported into the scene: the garden, the morning, the risen Christ speaking a single word—Mary—and the recognition that followed. By the time he came back to himself, the hymn was essentially written. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.

Miles was not describing a physical place. He was describing what happened when a human spirit encountered the risen Christ in the interior place of meeting. The garden is Eden recovered. The dew is the freshness of His presence. The voice falling on the ear is not an audible sound in a New Jersey darkroom. It is the voice of the Spirit speaking to the spirit within. And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. This is face-to-face fellowship in the Inner Room: unhurried, personal, the joy of it so singular that, as Miles wrote, none other has ever known it, because it belongs to that soul alone, in that moment, with that Savior.

They sang it for generations and called it a lovely song. It was a testimony.

“Open the Eyes of My Heart”

Paul Baloche’s worship chorus is not a metaphor about wanting a better perspective on life. It is a threshold prayer. The eyes of the heart, Paul’s phrase in Ephesians 1:18, are the perceptive faculty of the human spirit, the capacity within us to see what is spiritually real. When we sing open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see You, we are asking for the Inner Room to open. We are asking to be oriented inward and upward, toward the One who already dwells within us. The prayer is not wishful. It is directional. It is asking for sight, interior and spiritual and real, to be granted so that we can behold what is already present and already true.

Every time a congregation has sung that song, they have been praying the right prayer. They just did not always know what door they were standing at.

“Blessed Assurance”

Fanny Crosby wrote from a particular vantage point. Blind from infancy, she had no outer sight, and so she developed inner sight with extraordinary depth. When she wrote visions of rapture now burst on my sight, she was not writing aspirationally. She was reporting. The word now is doing heavy theological lifting in that line. Not later. Not in glory. Now, in this life, in this body, available to this spirit.

Read the arc of the hymn slowly. The first verse establishes identity: heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, washed in His blood. This is who you are, tripartite, redeemed, indwelt. The second verse moves inward: visions of rapture now burst on my sight, angels descending, bring from above echoes of mercy, whispers of love. This is the Inner Room opening, interior vision, heavenly awareness, the senses of the spirit engaged and alive. The third verse arrives at rest: perfect submission, all is at rest, I in my Savior am happy and blest, watching and waiting, looking above, filled with His goodness, lost in His love. Lost. Not striving. Not performing. Resting in the place where the spirit has always belonged.

That arc, identity to vision to rest, is the arc of entering the Inner Room. Crosby had been there. She wrote it down in rhyme.

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“Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”

Helen Lemmel wrote this hymn in 1922 after a friend handed her a short tract with a single line that arrested her: “So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange dimness.” Lemmel later said that as she read it, the melody and words came to her almost simultaneously, as if they had already existed and were simply waiting to be received.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

This is not a call to think more positively. It is a call to behold. The language is the language of 2 Corinthians 3:18: we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed. The beholding is interior. The face is within. The dimming of earthly things is not disengagement from the world. It is the natural consequence of having found what is most real. When the spirit enters the Inner Room and looks full into His face, the noise of the outer life simply loses its grip. Not by effort. By light.

Lemmel received a line from a tract and found herself at the threshold of a vision. That is itself an Inner Room story.

A Cloud of Witnesses

These four are not alone. The hymn tradition is full of voices saying the same thing in different registers.

Cleland McAfee wrote in 1903: There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God. A place. Not a posture, not a mood, but a location. McAfee named it without perhaps fully knowing what he had named.

William Walford, in 1845, described a sweet hour of prayer that calls the soul away from the world of care, bidding it come to the Father’s presence. That calling away, that movement inward and upward, is the threshold crossing into the Inner Room every time.

Annie Hawks heard a tender voice in 1872 and wrote I need Thee every hour, no tender voice like Thine can peace afford. Miles heard a voice. Hawks heard a voice. Two hymn writers separated by forty years both testified to the same interior sound. We should take that seriously.

Fanny Crosby returned again in 1875, and she could not seem to stop writing from this place, with I am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice... let my soul look up with a steadfast hope, and my will be lost in Thine. The soul looking up from within. The will surrendered. This is the posture of Inner Room fellowship.

Crosby again, in 1890: He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock. The imagery is Exodus 33, Moses hidden in the cleft while the glory passes. The soul hidden in Christ, not merely protected by Him. Interior refuge. The Inner Room as shelter.

And Henry Lyte, in 1847, wrote a word he may not have known carried Greek freight: Abide with me. The word is menō in the New Testament, the same root as moné, the Inner Room of John 14. In my Father’s house are many moné. Lyte did not need to know the Greek. The Spirit knew. Every time a congregation has sung abide with me, they have been singing, without knowing it, moné with me, stay, dwell, make your home within.

What the Singers Knew

These men and women were not writing metaphors. They were writing maps. They had been somewhere, or were longing with a longing too specific for mere imagination, and they set it down in the only language available to them: melody and rhyme.

The Inner Room has always been there. The saints have always known. The tradition has always carried the testimony, Sunday after Sunday, generation after generation, in songs everyone could sing and almost no one stopped to take literally.

You can take them literally now.

The garden is real. The voice is real. The visions of rapture are available now. The place of quiet rest near to the heart of God is not a metaphor. It is an address. Your spirit knows the way.

Go there.

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

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Not less. Not less effectively. Nothing.

That is the proposition at the heart of this episode—and it is either the most liberating sentence in the New Testament, or the most alarming one, depending on whether we are actually abiding in the vine or simply working very hard at looking like we are.

In Episode 5 of The Furnace Podcast, we bring the first four episodes together around John 15. We have talked about the Inner Room, the three intelligences of spirit, soul, and body, the interior senses, and the language of dreams. All of it was foundation. This episode is about what the foundation is for.

Fruitfulness is not a function of effort. It is a function of connection.

And abiding—real abiding, the interior, sustained, deepening kind—is worth spending the rest of your life learning.

This is Episode 5 of The Furnace Podcast. If you are new here, we recommend starting with Episode 1 and working through the series in order.

Also available: the Kingdom Architecture Podcast, our companion series exploring the invisible realms, angelic ministry, and the architecture of the heavens. Find it on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora Radio, and iHeartRadio.

In Part 1 of this series, we established that Moses had been speaking face-to-face with the pre-incarnate Christ and that his request to see God’s glory was a request for something beyond what he had already experienced. In Part 2, we explored what Moses actually saw from the cleft in the rock: the scarred back of the fully glorified Christ, bearing the healed wounds of the Roman scourging as an eternal testimony to sacrificial love. Today, we bring this series to its conclusion by sitting with the deepest implication of this encounter: that glory and goodness are the same thing, and both are written in scars.

Moses asked for glory. God answered with goodness. Bible scholars have long noted that these two words seem to be used interchangeably in this passage, and most leave it at that. Yet the interchangeability is itself the revelation. God was not redirecting Moses’ request or offering him a lesser gift. He was answering it precisely. Glory is goodness. Goodness is glory. They are identical because the highest expression of God’s character is self-giving love, and self-giving love costs something. It cost everything. The scars on Christ’s back are not a footnote to the glory. They are the glory.

This reframes how we understand the character of God at the most fundamental level. We are accustomed to associating God’s glory with power, with majesty, with consuming fire and blinding light. These are real attributes of the living God, and Scripture bears witness to all of them. Yet when Moses asked to see the fullness of who God is, he was not shown a display of raw power. He was shown a scarred back. The omnipotent Creator of heaven and earth chose, as the definitive revelation of his own nature, to display the wounds he sustained in the act of redeeming his children. The thundering voice from Sinai, the pillar of fire, the parting of the Red Sea, all of these were genuine expressions of God’s power. Yet none of them were the answer to Moses’ question. The scars were the answer. Sacrificial love outranks every other attribute because it is the source from which all the others flow.

Consider what this meant for Moses personally. He had led a stiff-necked people through the wilderness for years. He had interceded for them when God’s anger burned against their rebellion. He had carried the burden of their complaints and their faithlessness on his own shoulders, and it had worn him down. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was asking from a place of deep need. He needed to know that God was still present, still good, still worth following into the unknown. The answer he received was not a fresh display of miracles or a renewed demonstration of divine authority. The answer was a wounded back that said, without a single word, “I know what it costs to love people who do not deserve it. I have borne it in my own flesh. I will bear it again. This is who I am.”

The passage in Exodus 34 records what happened next. When Moses descended from the cleft, God proclaimed his own name before him: “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6–7). Every word in that proclamation is a description of the scarred back Moses had just seen. Merciful. Gracious. Longsuffering. Abounding in goodness. Forgiving iniquity. These are not abstract theological categories. They are the character traits of a God who chose to keep his scars. They are the vocabulary of a love that refuses to erase the evidence of its own cost.

When Moses came down from the mountain, his face shone with a radiance so intense that the Israelites were afraid to come near him. He had to wear a veil. The glory that marked his face was not the residue of blinding light or divine fire. It was the afterglow of beholding sacrificial love in its purest form. Moses had seen the secret of the ages, and it had changed him at the cellular level. He had looked upon the back of a Savior whose suffering was already accomplished in the eternal realm, whose scars were already present on a glorified body that would not enter human history for another fourteen centuries, and the sheer weight of that revelation left its mark on his flesh.

Earlier in this series on All His Benefits, we explored how the prophet Isaiah declared, “by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Those stripes are the very scars Moses beheld. The healing that flows to us from the atonement is not separate from the glory Moses encountered in the cleft of the rock. It is the same reality viewed from a different angle. The stripes that heal us are the glory of God made visible in wounded flesh. Every benefit of Christ’s passion that we explored in that series flows from the same scarred back that Moses saw on the mountain. Forgiveness, healing, redemption, love and mercy, renewed strength: all of it pours from the wounds of a God who chose to bear marks so that we might be made whole.

This is the goodness of God. It is not safe. It is not tidy. It is not a theological abstraction suitable for classroom discussion. It is a back full of scars carried into eternity on purpose, displayed before the hosts of heaven as the crowning achievement of the Creator of all things. The God who holds galaxies in the palm of his hand considers his wounds to be his greatest glory. If that does not reshape the way we approach him in prayer, in worship, and in the quiet of the Inner Room, nothing will.

The same scarred Christ who passed before Moses in the cleft of the rock is the one who dwells within you through his Holy Spirit. He has not changed. His character has not shifted. His goodness has not diminished. The scars are still there, and they still speak. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). He is. The scars prove it.

This concludes The Goodness of God series.

About this series: These posts explored one of the most mysterious encounters in all of Scripture, the moment Moses beheld the glory of God from the cleft of the rock. Moses asked for glory. God showed him goodness. They turned out to be the same thing, written in the scars of a Savior who chose to keep them forever.

For the quantum architecture beneath this encounter, including how a man bound by linear time could behold a glorified body bearing wounds from a future event, visit the Arrow Song Blog’s series on The Timeless Wound.

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In our previous post, we established that Moses had been speaking face-to-face with the pre-incarnate Christ for a long time. That face was familiar to him. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was asking for something beyond what he had already experienced. God responded by promising to show Moses his goodness, warned him that no man could see his face and live, and placed him in the cleft of a rock where he would be permitted to see only God’s back. Something altogether different was about to be revealed.

So what did Moses see? The passage in Exodus does not describe the moment in detail. It tells us what God said he would do, and then in the following chapter we see Moses descend the mountain with a face so radiant that the Israelites were frightened. Whatever Moses beheld in that cleft, it marked him physically. The glory of what he saw lingered on his skin. To understand what passed before him, we need to let the rest of Scripture interpret the moment.

We begin with the scars. After the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples in a glorified body. He could walk through walls. He could appear and disappear at will. He could inhabit the earthly realm and the spiritual realm at the same time. This body had been raised from the dead by the power of God, fully restored and transformed. Yet the wounds remained. The holes in his hands and feet and side were still visible, still touchable. When Thomas doubted, Jesus invited him directly: “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing” (John 20:27).

This is a choice that deserves our full attention. Jesus is God. He spoke the cosmos into existence. Remaking his own skin, closing every wound without a trace, would have required less effort than breathing. He chose not to. The scars were not leftover damage that the resurrection failed to address. They were a deliberate decision by the risen Christ to carry the evidence of his sacrifice into his glorified body forever. The wounds healed. The scars remained. They are not weakness. They are glory.

When Christ ascended into heaven forty days later, he carried those scars with him. He passed through the heavenly realms and sat down at the right hand of the Father in the third heaven, in the very throne room of God. The scars went with him. Isaiah saw this throne room in a vision and described the Lord “high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). The glorified Christ, seated on his throne, still bears the marks of the cross. He chose to keep them because they are an eternal testimony to the Father’s love for his children. They are not a reminder of what Christ endured. They are the substance of his glory. The sacrifice is the glory. The wounds are the crown.

Now, return to the cleft in the rock. Moses is hidden there, shielded by God’s hand. The fully glorified Christ passes before him, and Moses is permitted to see his back. What Moses saw was a back loaded with scars. Not open wounds. Not fresh blood. Scars. Healed, raised, unmistakable. These were the marks of the Roman scourging, thirty-nine lashes from the cat-o-nine-tails, endured at the whipping post before the crucifixion. The prophet Isaiah, looking forward to this same suffering, wrote: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). The stripes Isaiah described are the very scars Moses beheld. They are the source of our healing, the evidence of our redemption, and the physical manifestation of the goodness of God.

This is why God answered Moses’ request the way he did. Moses asked for glory. God said, “I will show you my goodness.” They are the same thing. The highest expression of God’s glory is not blinding light or consuming fire or thundering power, though God possesses all of these. The highest expression of his glory is sacrificial love, and sacrificial love bears marks. The goodness of God is not an abstract attribute to be discussed in a theology class. It is a scarred back to be beheld. It is the evidence that God entered into human suffering willingly, bore the full weight of it in his own flesh, and chose to carry the proof of that suffering into eternity as his crowning glory.

When Moses came down from the mountain, his face was glowing. He had seen the secret of the ages. He had looked upon the scarred back of a Savior who would not arrive in human history for another fourteen centuries, yet whose sacrifice was so real, so complete, so embedded in the eternal nature of God, that the scars were already present on his glorified body outside the confines of time. Moses may not have understood every detail of what he saw that day, yet the weight of it transformed him. He wrote in the Torah, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear” (Deuteronomy 18:15). Moses knew. He had seen the Prophet’s back, and the scars told him everything he needed to know about the goodness of God.

Next: The Goodness of God, Part 3: Glory and Goodness Are the Same Thing

About this series: These posts explore one of the most mysterious encounters in all of Scripture, the moment Moses beheld the glory of God from the cleft of the rock. What he saw reveals the deepest truth about who God is and what his goodness looks like.

For those interested in how this encounter intersects with the physics of time and eternity, the Arrow Song Blog will be exploring the quantum architecture of this moment. How does a man bound by linear time behold a glorified body bearing wounds from a future event? The answer reshapes everything we think we know about time. Visit the Quantum section for more.

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Moses had an unusual relationship with God. The scriptures tell us that “the Lord would speak to Moses face-to-face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). This was not a general impression or an inner nudge. Moses was looking at someone and speaking with someone, and that someone was looking back and speaking in return. For those of us who long for deeper communion with God, this is a breathtaking detail. Moses had what we all want: direct, personal, conversational access to the living God.

Yet there is a problem hidden in this passage that most readers walk right past. The scriptures also tell us that God is Spirit (John 4:24), that he is invisible (Colossians 1:15), and that “no one has seen God at any time” (1 John 4:12). Paul described God as the one who “alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16). If God is invisible Spirit, then who was Moses looking at during these face-to-face conversations?

The answer lies in a concept the early Church Fathers understood well. They distinguished between a theophany, which is an appearance of God in non-corporeal form (such as the burning bush), and a Christophany, which is a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ in visible, often human form. When Abraham looked up from his tent and saw three men standing nearby, he bowed to them and served them a meal (Genesis 18:1–5). When Joshua encountered the commander of the army of the Lord, he fell on his face in worship, and the commander accepted it, something no angel would do (Joshua 5:13–15). When the three Hebrew men were thrown into the fiery furnace, a fourth figure appeared in the flames, and the king himself declared that this figure looked “like the Son of God” (Daniel 3:25). These were not appearances of the invisible Father. They were appearances of the second person of the Godhead, the pre-incarnate Christ, stepping into human history in visible form long before Bethlehem.

This is who Moses was speaking with face-to-face. The invisible Father did not suddenly acquire a body for these conversations. Christ, the eternal Son, appeared to Moses in a form that could be seen and heard and spoken with. This had been going on for some time. Moses knew this presence. He was accustomed to it. The face before him was familiar.

Then Moses made an extraordinary request. “Please, show me Your glory” (Exodus 33:18). This is a stunning moment in the narrative. Moses was already beholding the pre-incarnate Christ. He was already in face-to-face conversation with the second person of the Trinity. Whatever Moses was asking for, it was something beyond what he had already been experiencing. He wanted to see something more, something deeper, something he had not yet been shown.

God’s response is equally stunning, and it is often overlooked. Moses asked for glory, yet God answered with a different word. “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you” (Exodus 33:19). Then God added a warning: “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live” (Exodus 33:20). Now, Moses had been seeing this face for a long time without dying, so something different was about to happen. The face that Moses could not survive beholding was not the familiar face of the pre-incarnate Christ he already knew. It was the face of the fully glorified Christ, the risen and ascended King of Glory in the fullness of his radiance. Had Moses, still tainted by sin, looked upon that face directly, it would have killed him. Even Isaiah, when he beheld the Lord high and lifted up in the temple, cried out, “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).

So God made arrangements. He told Moses, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33:21–23). Moses would be hidden in the rock, shielded by God’s own hand, and permitted to see only what he could survive. He would see the back of the glorified Christ, not the face.

Moses was about to behold something that no human eye had ever seen, something that would cause his own face to glow with such radiance that the Israelites could not look at him when he came back down the mountain. What exactly did Moses see from that cleft in the rock? That is where we are headed next, and what he saw will reframe everything you thought you knew about the goodness of God.

Next: The Goodness of God, Part 2: The Scarred Back of God

About this series: These posts explore one of the most mysterious encounters in all of Scripture, the moment Moses beheld the glory of God from the cleft of the rock. What he saw reveals the deepest truth about who God is and what his goodness looks like.

For those interested in the quantum architecture beneath this story, the Arrow Song Blog will be exploring the physics of time and eternity as they relate to this encounter. Visit the Quantum section for more.

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In this episode, we take up that ancient thread. We explore what the Bible says about dreams and night visions, how to recognize the symbols God tends to use, and how to begin interpreting them with discernment rather than superstition. Two real-life stories—one strange and disorienting, one quietly devastating—show us how this actually works.

If you have ever woken up from a dream and wondered whether God was trying to tell you something, this episode is for you.

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

This is Episode 4 of The Furnace Podcast. If you are new here, we recommend starting with Episode 1 and working through the series in order — each episode builds on the one before it.

Also from The Furnace: be sure to check out the Kingdom Architecture Podcast, our companion series exploring the invisible realms, angelic ministry, and the architecture of the heavens (also from Pastor Scot). Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

Thanks for reading The Furnace! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The conversation on the beach was not over. After the three questions and the three commands to feed his sheep, Jesus looked at Peter and spoke about his future. He said, “When you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18). The scripture tells us plainly that Jesus said this “to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.” The stretching out of the hands points to crucifixion, and this is exactly how the early Church recorded Peter’s martyrdom. Some ancient accounts even suggest that Peter felt unworthy to die in the same manner as his Lord and asked to be crucified upside down. There is not a great deal of support for this particular detail, yet it is interesting to consider all the same.

Think about what is happening here. Just moments earlier, Peter could not even claim agape love for Christ. He could only muster philos, a brotherly fondness. He was not yet the man who would lay down his life. He knew it, and Jesus knew it. Yet in the very next breath, Jesus told him that one day he would do precisely that. Peter would stretch out his hands on a Roman cross and die for the faith he could not yet fully embody. The love he lacked on the beach would one day grow into the very thing he had once so arrogantly claimed to possess.

This is a staggering act of trust on the part of Christ. He did not wait for Peter to arrive at agape before commissioning him. He did not say, “Come back when your love is stronger.” He did not bench Peter until he proved himself worthy of the assignment. Jesus took Peter exactly as he was, with his philos love and his shattered pride, and said, “Feed My sheep.” The calling remained. The mission did not change. Peter would grow into the fullness of his love for Christ over the years that followed, and the Holy Spirit would supply what Peter could not generate on his own. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit fell upon the Church, and Peter was suddenly a different man. From that point forward, he only did what he saw the Father doing, and it made all the difference in the world.

The very last thing Jesus said to Peter in this passage deserves our attention. When everything had been said and done, Jesus spoke two words: “Follow Me” (John 21:19). This command carries layers of meaning. Jesus had been speaking about sheep and shepherds, so “Follow Me” recalls the passage where Jesus says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:27–28). Jesus was reassuring Peter that he had not been disqualified by his failures. He was still a sheep of the Lord’s pasture. There is also a second reading here, since the command comes immediately after the prophecy about Peter’s death. “Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’” (John 21:19). The two phrases are separated by a single breath. Jesus was not changing subjects. He was putting the exclamation point at the end of the sentence. Peter would follow Christ all the way to the cross.

So what does this mean for us? It means our calling is not based on our abilities, our spiritual maturity, or the quality of our love on any given day. Peter was called to feed the Lord’s sheep, and it did not matter whether his love was up to the task. He was not yet ready to die for the Lord, yet his calling to shepherd the Church remained unchanged. If you are called, then Christ will equip you. It has never been about us. It has always been about Jesus and his glorious Church. If a person is called to serve as a shepherd, to feed the sheep, then he should do so from the situation he finds himself in, trusting that the same Holy Spirit who transformed Peter will do the transforming work in him as well.

Serve the Lord with gladness and without concern for your preparedness. The One who calls you is faithful, and he finishes what he starts.

This concludes the Peter Restored series.

About this series: Drawing from the Gospel of John, these posts explored one of the most powerful restoration stories in all of Scripture. Peter’s arrogance led to a devastating fall, but Christ met him on the beach with grace, honesty, and a commission that never wavered. Our calling is not based on our readiness. It is based on the faithfulness of the One who calls us.

Also at Arrow Song: A companion series is running in parallel at the Arrow Song Blog. The Quantum Sifting of Peter explores the same story through the lens of quantum architecture and the mechanics of the unseen realm. The two series are designed to be read together. You can find the full series here.

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After the resurrection, Peter and a handful of the disciples decided to go night fishing on the Sea of Tiberias. They climbed in their boat, pushed off from shore, and caught nothing at all. When the sun rose the next morning, a man stood on the beach, calling out to them, “Hey guys, did you catch any fish?” The man was Jesus, though the disciples did not recognize him right away. They called back, “No.” So the man told them to cast their net on the other side of the boat. They did as they were told, and the net was suddenly so full of fish they could not haul it in. John was the first to understand. “It is the Lord!” he said. When Peter heard this, he grabbed his cloak and jumped into the sea, heading straight for shore, leaving the others to deal with the fish. When everyone arrived, Jesus had breakfast waiting for them.

After the meal, Jesus pulled Peter aside to talk. To fully appreciate what happened next, we need to understand something about the Greek language. In English, we have just one word for love. You love your spouse, and you love popcorn. Context helps us understand the difference, of course, yet the word remains the same. In Greek, however, there are multiple words for the concept of love, and two of them are essential to this story.

The first is agape, which refers to the highest form of love. This is the kind of love God has for us. It is the kind of love that allows a person to lay down his life for the benefit of another. It is the love Christ demonstrated when he went to the cross. The second is philos, which is best translated as brotherly love or fondness. It is the kind of love we share for people near us, people we hold dear. It is warm and genuine, yet it does not carry the weight of sacrificial surrender.

With these two words in mind, listen carefully to how this conversation unfolds. Jesus opened with a pointed question: “Simon, son of Jonah, do you agape me more than these?” Remember what Peter had boasted just days before: “Even if everyone else denies you, I never will, even if it costs me my life.” That was an agape claim. Peter had declared himself willing to die for Christ, and Jesus was now circling back to that very declaration.

Peter’s response is striking. He said, “Yes, Lord; You know that I philos You.” He did not match the word. Jesus asked about sacrificial, die-for-you love, and Peter answered with brotherly fondness. The interesting thing is that Jesus did not rebuke him or call him out for the downgrade. He simply said, “Feed My lambs.”

Jesus asked a second time: “Simon, son of Jonah, do you agape Me?” Again, Peter responded, “Yes, Lord; You know that I philos You.” Again, no rebuke. Jesus said, “Tend My sheep.”

Then came the third question, and this is where things shifted. Jesus changed his word. He asked, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you philos Me?” The scripture tells us Peter was deeply grieved by this, and we can understand why. Jesus had come down to meet Peter on his own terms. It was as if Jesus were saying, “Forget the lofty claims. Do you even have brotherly affection for me?” Peter’s answer was raw and humble: “Lord, You know all things; You know that I philos You.” There was no more pretending. Peter was essentially saying, “I know what I boasted. I know I could not live up to it. I am not the man I claimed to be. I can only offer you what I actually have, and you, being God, already know this to be true.”

Jesus met Peter’s honesty with a simple command: “Feed My sheep.”

Three denials. Three questions. Three restorations. Jesus was not interrogating Peter to humiliate him. He was methodically undoing the damage, giving Peter the chance to replace each denial with a declaration, however imperfect that declaration might be. Christ was not looking for a perfected love. He was looking for an honest one. The arrogant boast had been stripped away, and in its place stood something far more useful to the Kingdom: a man who finally knew the limits of his own heart and was no longer pretending otherwise.

This is the grace of Christ at work. He does not wait for us to become worthy before he restores us. He meets us in our failure, asks us to be honest about where we stand, and then puts us back to work.

Next: Peter Restored, Part 3: The Commission

About this series: Drawing from the Gospel of John, these posts explore one of the most powerful restoration stories in all of Scripture. We are discovering what Christ’s grace looks like when it meets us at our lowest point.

Also at the Arrow Song blog: A companion series is running in parallel at the Arrow Song Blog. “The Quantum Sifting of Peter” explores the same story through the lens of quantum architecture and the mechanics of the unseen realm. The two series are designed to be read together. You can find the full series here.

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Peter followed Christ everywhere he went. For three whole years, he listened and watched as Israel’s Messiah taught and healed and performed miracles. He even saw Jesus call a man out of the grave. Peter learned about the Lord’s motivations, and he learned some of heaven’s biggest secrets. He even stayed the course when Jesus got strange in his teachings, saying things like, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). You have to admit, that must have sounded alarming to their Jewish audience. When nearly all of Jesus’ followers packed their bags and headed home, Christ turned to his twelve disciples and asked, “Do you also want to go away?” It was Peter who answered for the group, saying, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (John 6:67–69).

This all sounds good and right. Peter had walked the walk and was now talking the talk. There was, however, an arrogance in Peter that he had yet to wrangle with, and it was about to surface in spectacular fashion.

Right after Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples, they journeyed together to the Mount of Olives to pray. It was there that Jesus told them something they would not want to hear. He said, “All of you will be made to stumble because of Me this night, for it is written: ‘I will strike the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered’” (Matthew 26:31). Jesus was quoting from the prophet Zechariah, who had written these very words centuries before. Prophecy or not, Peter did not like this pronouncement at all. This is where his arrogance began to get the best of him.

Notice that Jesus also said, “After I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee.” Peter missed this entirely because the word “stumble” was still bouncing around inside his brain. Jesus had just predicted his own resurrection, and Peter blew right past it. On at least two prior occasions, Jesus had told the disciples in very specific language that he was going to die (Matthew 17:22–23; 16:21–28). The Book of Mark recounts one of these moments in vivid detail: “The Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles; and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit on Him, and kill Him. The third day He will rise again” (Mark 10:33–34). James and John even pulled Jesus aside privately moments later to ask for seats of honor in his coming kingdom. Jesus had just said he would soon die, and all they wanted to do was pick out curtains. The disciples simply could not absorb what was coming, which appears to be exactly the way the Father planned it.

So when Jesus told Peter that the group would stumble, Peter made it personal. “Even if all are made to stumble because of You, I will never be made to stumble.” Since Peter made it personal, Jesus returned the favor: “Assuredly, I say to you that this night, before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” Peter doubled down: “Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You!” Let us hear the full weight of what Peter was claiming. He was saying, in effect, “Even if everybody else in this group turns their back on you, I never will, even if it costs me my life, because I am better than all the rest.”

What happened next is well known. Peter followed Jesus as far as the Temple courtyard. A servant girl recognized him and asked if he had been with Jesus. Peter brushed it aside: “I do not know what you are saying” (Matthew 26:70). A second girl pointed out his connection to Jesus. Peter shouted with an oath, “I do not know the Man!” (Matthew 26:71). Then a whole crowd confronted him, saying, “Surely you are one of them, for your speech betrays you.” Peter began to curse and swear, insisting once more, “I do not know the Man!” (Matthew 26:74). It was at that very moment a rooster crowed, and Peter remembered the word of Jesus. The scripture says simply that he “went out and wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75).

Not only did Peter deny the Lord three times, exactly as predicted, he did it with language unfit for a man who had walked so closely with the Messiah. So much for his bold claim of fidelity. Peter was a broken man who had lost his way. Over the next day, he watched from a distance as Jesus was beaten, mocked, and crucified. Everything he had hoped for was gone. We should remember that the Holy Spirit had not yet been given, so Peter was operating without the insight and revelation that come from God’s indwelling presence. His unregenerated mind was simply unable to grasp the Father’s plan. The weight of his failure must have been crushing.

Yet the story does not end here. On the far side of this devastation, a risen Christ was already preparing breakfast on a beach, waiting to ask Peter a question that would change everything.

Next: Peter Restored, Part 2: The Question

About this series: Drawing from the Gospel of John, these posts explore one of the most powerful restoration stories in all of Scripture. We are discovering what Christ’s grace looks like when it meets us at our lowest point.

Also at the Arrow Song Blog: If you want to explore the spiritual mechanics beneath this same story — the prophetic blueprint, the adversarial petition, and what Peter’s boast triggered in the unseen realm — a companion series is running in parallel at the Arrow Song Blog. “The Quantum Sifting of Peter” looks at the same events through the lens of quantum architecture. The two series are designed to be read together. Part 1 is here.

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The final piece in Psalm 103 declares that your youth will be “renewed like the eagle’s,” and it too is an amazing benefit of Christ’s passion for all who let God’s glory rest upon their lives. There are actually two promises being made here. The obvious promise is straightforward: God is promising that when you are old, you will be made to perform as if you were young once more. The prophet Isaiah tells us that God “gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” The reference to eagles is clearly made in both passages, which is really exciting. The implied promise in this verse is that you will grow old. This echoes the promise made in Deuteronomy:

“You shall walk in all the way which the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which you will possess.”

Think about it. You can’t be strong in your old age if you don’t grow old in the first place.

We shouldn’t stand in judgment over those who are weak or infirm. We don’t know their walk with God, and we shouldn’t judge their lives. We should also not accept such evidence as God’s purpose and plan for our lives. The scriptures tell us that God is on our side, that he wants to renew our strength, especially when we are old. What a great blessing God has promised us. Instead of slowing down and retiring, God wants to ramp up your energy and health so you can work for the Kingdom (and for your family, friends, churches, and community) all the way up to your final day. Instead of sleeping your days away in an old folks’ home, praying for death to come and take you, you can renew your strength in God and be a strong and productive member of your community. Can you imagine the power and goodness that could flow from your life when you combine the vigor of youth with the wisdom and insight that comes from a seasoned life? You have a second career waiting for you that will be more glorious and productive than the first. The psalmist said this about the matter:

“The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon: planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him.’”

What a great benefit Christ’s passion provides for us. Live with boldness, expecting the goodness of God to overtake you, even in your senior years.

To better understand this promise, we need to look into the lives of three biblical characters: Noah, Samson, and Daniel. You are familiar with the story of Noah and the ark. Noah was well over 500 years old when God commanded him to build the ark. Though we know people lived longer in this antediluvian age, they still grew old eventually. 500 years may have been the new seventy, he was still too old to build a massive boat without power tools or cranes. Though the scriptures do not explicitly say it, tradition has long held that God renewed Noah’s strength in order to accomplish this gargantuan task. Indeed, Noah is one of the best examples of a righteous man who found supernatural strength in his old age to accomplish important things for God. I think it is also important to point out that when God calls us to a task, he also provides the resources to get it done. God is faithful.

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The story of Samson’s life should also be familiar to you. Samson’s birth was foretold by an angel who visited his mother and father. He said that Samson would be “a Nazirite to God from the womb; and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.” As Samson comes of age, he begins waging a one-man war against the Philistines, who ruled over the Jews during this age. The scriptures describe Samson’s amazing strength and cunning. At one point, he rips the city gates off their hinges—huge doors made of wood and iron—and carries them both on his shoulders up a hill for all to see. On another occasion, Samson battles a thousand Philistine soldiers and kills them all using nothing but the jawbone of a donkey. Such feats of strength are not natural. No man is so naturally endowed that he could accomplish such things. His strength was supernatural.

Later in the story, Samson tells Delilah the secret to his supernatural strength:

“No razor has ever come upon my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If I am shaven, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man.”

There was nothing special about Samson’s hair. His hair was simply a sign of the covenant his parents had made with God at the time of his birth, and Samson had honored this covenant once he was of age. As long as the covenant was honored, the supernatural strength God had granted Samson remained.

As you might suspect, Samson’s girlfriend was not very faithful to him. She tricked him into telling her his secret about the source of his strength, and then she arranged for his head to be shaved. The Philistines then came and discovered that he was as weak as any man, so they took him away, gouged out his eyes, and imprisoned him. The point I want to make here is that his strength was supernatural, and it went away in an hour’s time. He didn’t forget to work out, he didn’t grow soft over time, and he didn’t pull a muscle or throw his back out. One moment he was mighty; the next, he was weak.

At the end of the story, Samson repents of his poor behavior and asks God to give him his strength back for one final moment. Here’s his prayer:

“O Lord God, remember me, I pray! Strengthen me, I pray, just this once, O God, that I may with one blow take vengeance on the Philistines for my two eyes!”

God grants him his prayer, and his supernatural strength returns to him one last time. He then surprises the Philistines who had gathered in the temple to mock him. The scriptures tell us that “Samson took hold of the two middle pillars which supported the temple, and he braced himself against them, one on his right and the other on his left. Then Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ He pushed with all his might, and the temple fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So the dead that he killed at his death were more than he had killed in his life.” No man can turn his strength on and off like this. It has nothing to do with muscle tone or training or physical prowess. This kind of strength comes from God.

For our next example, we jump into the Book of Daniel. The Jewish nation was in exile for their disobedience to God. Daniel and some of his friends found themselves in Babylon. They had been enlisted into the training school for the King’s court. It was here that they would learn the language and ways of their new government, and they were chosen because they were “without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace.” The King wanted these guys to excel in their training so they could properly serve his court in years to come, so he “assigned them a daily amount of food and wine” from his own table.

Daniel was a devout Jew and had no intention of eating the food from the King’s table, which was considered unclean by Jewish law. Daniel saw a showdown coming, so he called upon the wisdom of God and made a plea to the Captain of the Guard, who was responsible for feeding the new students. The Captain was reluctant. If Daniel’s health suffered, the Captain would lose his head. Daniel asked him for a trial run, suggesting that they be fed nothing but beans and water for ten days. At the end of the ten days, the Guard should then compare their health, strength, and appearance to those who had eaten the King’s food. If they looked meager, they would then agree to eat the King’s food and drink the King’s wine; however, if they were healthy and strong, the Guard should continue feeding them beans and water. This sounded reasonable to the guard, so he agreed to test them for ten days.

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After the ten-day period, the Captain came and inspected the troops. Sure enough, Daniel and his friends “looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So, the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.” This is such a great passage of scripture. Some people have read this and immediately described it in natural terms. “Ah,” they said to themselves, “vegetables must be good for us since Daniel ate them and grew healthier than everyone else who ate meat from the King’s table.” In doing so, they launched a vegetarian movement in the modern church, which was surely to their detriment and the detriment of the Church. They forgot about Peter’s rooftop vision, where the Lord told Peter to “kill and eat” the whole list of unclean animals.

Let me explain my point of view. This is a supernatural event. Daniel wasn’t stronger and healthier than all the others because of the great nutritional value of vegetables. He was healthier because God gave the supernatural increase. This flowed out of their choice to honor God by avoiding unclean food. How do I know this to be true? Because the other two stories of salvation recounted in the book of Daniel are supernatural, as are all the prophetic events in this book.

The first story is about Daniel in the lions’ den. You know that story. Daniel chose to honor God by praying during the regular times, something that his enemies made illegal. They came and arrested him, charged him, and sentenced him to death in the lions’ den. When the King called down into the pit the following morning, he was relieved to hear that Daniel was still alive. Daniel responded by saying:

“My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight. Nor have I ever done any wrong before you, Your Majesty.”

The King had Daniel lifted up from the lions’ den and rejoiced that he still lived. The King then commanded the guards to throw “the men who had falsely accused Daniel into the lions’ den, along with their wives and children. Before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones.” This can only be read as a supernatural salvation. The lions were obviously hungry since they immediately attacked the men and their wives and children. More importantly, Daniel’s own testimony tells us that “God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions.”

The second story is about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The King had ordered everyone to bow down and worship the image he had erected, but these three Hebrews refused, preferring death to defilement. They would only worship the one true God. So, the King had a furnace built, and he “ordered the furnace heated seven times more than it was usually heated.” He had them bound with ropes and then ordered his guards to throw them into the furnace to die. The fire was so hot, the guards that threw them into the furnace died from exposure to the heat. The scriptures then tell us that the King was amazed to see four people walking around inside the furnace—unbound. The ropes had immediately burned away, but their clothes remained. So, the King called out to the three Hebrews: “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out, and come here!” When they came out, they were untouched by the fire. Their hair was not singed, their cloaks were not burned, and they didn’t even smell of smoke. What an amazing supernatural salvation. The King then said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him, and set aside the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God.” The fourth figure in the fire didn’t come out; he simply disappeared. The text calls him an angel, and rightfully so. It was probably the same angel that came to Daniel in the lions’ den. Some would suggest that this was a Christology—Jesus before His incarnation.

I think it is clear that Daniel’s request to eat only beans is a supernatural story, just like the other two. In plain language, Daniel asked the Captain of the Guard to feed them beans, which was the least likely thing to make them strong and healthy, and he trusted God with the results. As you know from the story, God came through for them. Had the other students in their cohort eaten beans, they would have wasted away and been in poor health. In short, it wasn’t the food they ate. It was their God that honored them with supernatural health and strength and vitality.

Before you misunderstand me, I want to clarify the importance of good lifestyle choices. I am not suggesting that you should tempt God by eating greasy burgers and fries seven days a week. On the contrary, I want you to participate with God in being healthy. You should eat right, exercise, and get the proper rest, which includes taking Sundays off as you honor the Lord on his Sabbath day. God has created our bodies as part of the natural order, and they function best when they are treated with care. Even as you make these proper lifestyle choices, put your faith in God to bring you health, strength, and vitality.

I want you to stay focused on the supernatural quality of this strength. Noah was strong in his fifth century because of the grace of God on his life, which was related to his calling to build the ark. Samson was strong beyond reason because of the calling on his life, which had to do with throwing off the Philistine governors that ruled the Jews during this age. Daniel and friends were strong and healthy despite their poor diet because God honored their choices. These benefits belong to Christians who host the presence of God in their lives. You should expect these benefits, and you should seek them out, asking the Father for grace to receive them. There is so much more to the Christian life than just fire insurance for your own eternal soul. The goodness of God is pursuing you in many avenues. Receive it, enjoy it, and share it with those around you.

This concludes the All His Benefits series.

About this series: Drawing from Psalm 103, these posts explored the rich benefits Christ’s passion has secured for his people. Forgiveness opens the door to healing, love and mercy crown our lives with shalom, and supernatural strength renews us even in old age. These are not extras for super-Christians—they are the normal inheritance of everyone who walks in fellowship with God in the Inner Room.

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In the next passage, Psalm 103 declares that it is God who “redeems your life from destruction” and “crowns you with steadfast love and mercy” and “satisfies you with good as long as you live.” These three benefits of Christ’s passion are interconnected. First, we need to understand the keyword in the first promise, which is “redeems.” The word “redeem” is used in modern English to describe the use of coupons in the marketplace. You redeem a coupon at the cash register for a small discount on the purchase price, which is far from its original use. In simplest terms, the word “redeem” means to buy something back.

In ancient cultures, when a businessman fell on hard times and could not pay his debts, he was brought before a magistrate, who would then arbitrate the claims. In many cases, the businessman would be required to settle his debt with household slaves if he had any. He could not give his debtor money, so giving him a slave provided the injured party with an ongoing cash flow that would eventually make up for the loss. If the businessman didn’t own slaves, the court would order his children or wife (or both) into servitude until the debt had been fully recovered.

Let’s assume this businessman in the ancient world finally got his business going again and had a growing savings account. He would then attempt to buy back his wife and children from the man who had won them as slaves in the court settlement. The courts would be involved in this matter, and the request was seldom denied. After all, the banker is less interested in enslaving the trader’s family and more interested in recovering his investment with interest. This act of buying someone back who was sold into slavery, which was a legal proceeding, was called redemption. The father “redeemed” his children from a life of slavery. The husband “redeemed” his wife from forced servitude. In short, he bought his family back from the one who had legally enslaved them.

If business was really bad, the court would order the businessman himself to also serve as a slave. This was usually seen as a permanent rupture for the family since there was no one left behind to run the business. Without the business, there was no cash flow, and without cash flow, there was no hope that the family could be redeemed. It would truly take the intervention of an outsider to break the chains of bondage that their financial obligations had brought upon them.

Let’s return to that line in Psalm 103 and drop in our new definition to see how it lights up the promise. Instead of saying it is God who “redeems your life from destruction,” let’s say it is God who “buys back your life from destruction.” We have reason to rejoice that Christ’s blood has paid the price for our sin. We have been bought back from the kingdom of darkness when sin had ensnared our souls. This reference to redemption goes beyond our salvation experience. This is where it gets good.

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In an earlier post, I suggested that you should expect to live in divine health. I told you that you would be better served to believe the promises of God’s Word than to believe the reality of sickness and poor health that surrounds you. Despite this expectation, it would be biblically wrong to suggest that everything will always go well with you your entire life just because you are a Christian. Jesus told us, “You will have suffering in this world.” Jesus also said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Here, Jesus is very clear in suggesting that we will have enemies who are intent upon harming us (persecution). He also told us to rise above the persecution and hatred by loving our enemies and praying for them, which befits the sons of the Father. This kind of response is generated by the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It is literally the Fruit of the Spirit that the Apostle Paul talked about in Galatians:

“love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

Jesus is also suggesting that the natural dangers of the planet impact people in general, not just evil people. So, if a storm floods your basement, you shouldn’t trouble yourself about the matter because these things happen to all of us, and God is fully aware of our needs and our frailty.

What a command. Did God really just tell us that we must be perfect like he is? Considering our sinful nature, that seems like a really tall order. How does that fit in with the Apostle’s command concerning sin? In his first epistle, John wrote, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” If we were perfect like God is perfect, we would have no sin. John tells us this is not possible. To make matters worse, some translations render this phrase as “you must be holy, as your heavenly Father is holy.”

What’s the answer? The concept here of being perfect is not about living without sin. Rather, it is about shalom. You recognize this Hebrew word, don’t you? In simplest terms, shalom means “peace.” Shalom is a concept that means things are as they should be, as God designed them to be. This is a reference to perfection. This calls up imagery from the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve, God, and all of creation lived together in harmony. This is shalom. Cornelius Plantinga gives us this definition:

“In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

I really like his use of the word “flourishing.” When we are told to be perfect in the same way that God is perfect, it’s all about human flourishing, just like Adam and Eve flourished in the Garden. This also implies a number of things beyond mere well-being and productivity. This great salvation that Jesus purchased for us with his blood includes justice and righteousness and community. Christ wants us to be whole and complete. He wants us to be connected to his Church. He wants us to thrive in body and mind. As you might imagine, the power to flourish in such a rich manner does not come from us. It comes from the Holy Spirit who lives inside us. If we live in sin, we grieve the Holy Spirit, and our ability to flourish is lost. There can be no shalom apart from God’s indwelling presence in our lives.

The Old Testament recounts an interesting story about King David and the Ark of the Covenant. Moses received a command from God during Israel’s forty-year journey through the wilderness to build a Tent of Tabernacle where God would meet with Israel. They crafted dozens of specially designed artifacts for use in the Tabernacle, to include the Ark, which was the holiest object of them all. The lid to this box-like artifact was called the mercy seat, and God’s presence was manifested there. The tablets of stone upon which God wrote the ten commandments were kept inside this box, as was Aaron’s rod that budded and a golden pot of manna.

Many generations after Moses, King David decided to move the Ark of the Covenant from its historical location to Jerusalem. David had erected a Tent of Tabernacle there to house the Ark, and he planned to have worship in the Tabernacle every hour of every day. All he needed was the Ark to make it complete. So, they assembled a team of priests and went to fetch the Ark from the house of Abinadab in the city of Baalah. They set the Ark upon a new cart and set out in a parade of sorts with David and his followers dancing before the Ark as it traveled. This is where the story gets interesting. Somewhere along the way, “the oxen stumbled,” and it appeared that the Ark might fall off the cart. So, Uzzah, one of the sons of Abinadab, reached up and touched the Ark, supposedly to steady it. The scriptures tell us that God’s anger burned against Uzzah for his “irreverent act,” and that God then “struck him down, and he died there beside the ark of God.”

David grew afraid after seeing the Lord’s anger. He realized that he had acted impulsively. Just to be clear, the Ark had apparently never been moved in this fashion. The original instructions about moving the Ark included four men carrying the Ark by inserting two poles through rings attached to the body of the Ark. There was no mention of a cart and oxen. So, David was apparently on thin ice with some of his choices here. Had they transported the Ark with the two poles, there would have been no stumbling oxen.

What did David decide to do? He was already halfway home, so turning around didn’t sound like a good idea, and bringing this “death machine” into the city was really quite frightening to David. The King decided he would just leave it where it was. More specifically, there was a house nearby, which belonged to Obed-Edom the Gittite. So, David, using his authority as King, commanded Obed-Edom to keep the Ark of the Covenant in his house. Once the Ark was securely deposited in the living room of this unsuspecting citizen, David and his team returned to Jerusalem to nurse their wounds and consider their actions.

What’s really amazing about this story is that Obed-Edom was not a Jew. He was a Philistine, a Gentile. David dropped off the Ark of the Covenant—the holiest artifact in all of history—at a Gentile’s home. What happened? Did they all die? Did a curse come upon the house and destroy them all? Just the opposite. After three months, David received word that Obed-Edom’s entire household (people, livestock, gardens, finances, and investments) was thriving. The scriptures tell us, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the Ark of God.” As you can imagine, this made David quite jealous. So, David returned to claim the Ark of the Covenant and bring it up to the City of David, where it was placed in the Tent of Tabernacle.

Can you see the parallel I am making here? When you are perfect as the Lord is perfect, when you are living according to the Spirit, when you are experiencing shalom as the Lord would have you to do, then his presence resides in your life as the Ark resided in the home of Obed-Edom. His presence will bring a blessing to your life, to your household, even to all you possess and all you choose to do. This is the river of life that flows out of your innermost parts, and it flows to everyone who interacts with you. Your friends and family should be blessed by this flow. Your neighbors should be blessed by this flow. Your employer or your business should be blessed by this flow. Stoke the fire so that it glows even hotter, and your whole neighborhood, even your whole city, will be blessed by the presence of God in your life.

We see a similar blessing upon the Jewish patriarch, Joseph. He was sold into slavery and sent to Egypt. There, he served an Egyptian master named Potiphar. Despite slavery, God blessed everything that Joseph touched. Just imagine. Potiphar gave ten servants control of ten small gardens. Joseph’s garden grows more vegetables than all the other gardens combined. Or imagine this scenario: Potiphar gives Joseph a small amount of money to invest. Four weeks later, Joseph’s investment is worth far more than what he started with. This is the kind of blessing that rested on Joseph’s life. Indeed, the scriptures tell us that Potiphar saw what was happening and thus chose to put his entire household in Joseph’s care. By doing so, Potiphar became one of the richest men in Egypt. The presence of God on Joseph became a river of life for the household he served. If you read the passages in Genesis about Joseph, you will see that this happened several more times. When he was thrown into prison, the warden saw what was happening and put Joseph in charge of the prison. The result? Prison reform of the highest magnitude. When Joseph was released from prison, he became the second-highest official in the land, second only to Pharaoh. The result? The nation was saved from a terrible famine because Joseph was in charge of preparing for it. This is the power of God’s glory when it resides upon a person, a family, a community, or a nation. This is what it means to be crowned “with steadfast love and mercy.” This is how God pours out his love and mercy to satisfy you “with good as long as you live.”

Next: All His Benefits, Part 4 - The Benefit of Renewed Strength

About this series: Drawing from Psalm 103, these posts explore the rich benefits Christ’s passion has secured for his people. We’re discovering what belongs to us in the Inner Room.

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