“We do accept you Jesus. Your blood is our cleansing; your righteousness is our clothing. We stand accepted in the Beloved, all of us who have believed in your holy name. Let your people enjoy that sweet peace which comes of being justified by faith; and if any reading this who have not believed, oh that they might put their trust in Christ! May faith be wrought in them. May they cheerfully and at once receive the great atonement and be saved by it. Amen” (Charles Spurgeon).

Lord, You are our only hope of salvation. We bring nothing to You but our sin, but You receive us by nothing but Your grace that You fully displayed in Christ through His sacrifice on the cross. We receive Your forgiveness and claim our right to be Your children only through Your promise.

We pray that tomorrow through the many churches and services that multitudes might call on You for salvation and forgiveness. We ask that You speak powerfully through Your ministers that they proclaim the gospel forcefully and clearly. Deliver Your people from their addictions and strongholds. Strengthen many marriages and families and call out many people to the ministry and the mission field.

May You be high and lifted up in every church and every service tomorrow. Be glorified above all, Lord. Amen.

I vaguely remember going to a concert when I was a student at Union University. I saw PFR with Jars of Clay as the opening act. I have no idea where the venue was, but I’m somewhat confident that the incident took place in 1995, give or take. I know this because that’s the year Jars of Clay released their major label debut.

Fast forward 32 years later to April 3, 2027 when I will be going to see PFR for the second time at the Cannery Hall in Nashville, Tennessee. To clarify, this is the first time I’ve ever seen them at the Cannery Hall, but the second time overall. Just in case anyone was confused.

I’ve learned that you can’t really go back. You can revisit the places and possibly run into some of the people, but it’s not the same. Places change. People change. I know I’ve changed. I can never put myself back into my 23 year old mind again. Then again, hopefully I’m a bit wiser for the 30ish years that have passed since then.

I’m hoping they’ll do some of the older tunes as well as the new ones. I’m just super excited that they’re back playing together again. They were one of my favorites back in the day. You know, the 1900s.

I also do hope it won’t be a super late night, because I’m not nearly the night owl that I used to be. I’m more of a mid-afternoon type owl, I guess. Maybe an early evening owl?

“Sometimes He calms the storm
With a whispered peace be still
He can settle any sea
But it doesn’t mean He will

Sometimes He holds us close
And lets the wind and waves go wild
Sometimes He calms the storm
And other times He calms His child” (Scott Krippayne)

Sometimes, peace isn’t the absence of storms but a blessed assurance within the storm that God is with you. To me, the ultimate picture of peace isn’t so much the calm sea but Jesus sleeping in the middle of a storm. And if He is with you, then you can be at peace, no matter how much the storms rage around you.

Sometimes, it’s good to come to God and not ask for anything. You can simply sit in silence, or you can say thanks. At this point in my life, I figured God already knows what I need, even if I don’t.

I’m not saying never to ask for anything ever, but it’s good every now and then to let God know you’re thankful. I’m sure the Bible has a few things to say about the benefits of giving thanks, but mostly it’s good to be grateful because God is good.

This is the perfect response to something that has been bugging me for a while. If we claim to be Christian and yet deny all the historic Christian doctrines, maybe we need to call ourselves something else. Remember, Jesus said it would be better to have a millstone hung around your neck and for you to be cast into the ocean than to lead a little one astray. May these words speak to you as they did to me:

“MY RESPONSE TO REV. FLOURISH KLINK’S CLAIMS THAT GOD IS TRANS AND JESUS “TRANSITIONED.”

I have deliberately taken some time again before responding to this because I don’t want to react merely because something sounds outrageous. But after reading Rev. Flourish Klink’s own published sermon, I honestly think we have reached a point where Christian theology is being stretched so far that eventually we will have to ask whether we are still talking about the Christianity of the apostles. Klink explicitly argues that God is non-binary and “trans,” that Mary assigned Jesus male at birth, and that Jesus was not merely transfigured in the resurrection but actually “transitioned.”

And respectfully, NO. I CANNOT FOLLOW THAT ARGUMENT.

Not because I hate transgender people. Not because I think God is a biological male. Not because I believe every question surrounding gender can be answered by shouting Bible verses at people.

I reject it because the argument collapses several completely different theological categories into one another and then asks us to call the resulting construction Christianity.

Yes, God transcends human biological categories.

Of course He does….

God is Spirit. God is Creator. He is not a biological organism whose divine identity depends upon chromosomes or reproductive anatomy. But from “God transcends biological sex” to “God is non-binary” to “God is trans” is not a logical necessity. That is an interpretive move.

And then the argument becomes even more problematic when it is applied to Jesus.

The claim is essentially that Mary saw Jesus and said, “Oh, look! A baby boy,” as though Mary was standing there making an uninformed gender assignment that heaven would later have to correct.

But Luke tells us something rather inconvenient for that theory.

The angel Gabriel said:

“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name JESUS.”
— Luke 1:31 NKJV

A SON.

And Matthew records Joseph being told:

“And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.”
— Matthew 1:21 NKJV

So no, Mary was not simply looking at a mysterious, genderless infant and imposing an erroneous identity upon Him.

THE INCARNATE SON WAS ACTUALLY PRESENT.

And this is where our Christology matters.

Jesus Christ is not God wearing a temporary human costume.

THE WORD BECAME FLESH.

John 1:14 says:

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The eternal Son genuinely entered human existence. He was born of a woman. He was circumcised. He lived as a Jewish man. He died bodily. He rose bodily.

And then we are told that because the disciples initially struggled to recognize the risen Jesus, perhaps Jesus had transitioned into His “true self.”

I genuinely had to ask myself:

WHERE DID WE GET THAT FROM?

The Bible tells us they did not immediately recognize Him.

It does NOT tell us that He had transitioned.

In fact, when Thomas encountered the resurrected Christ, Jesus invited him to examine the very wounds of His crucifixion:

“Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side.”
— John 20:27 NKJV

And Luke records Jesus saying:

“Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.”
— Luke 24:39 NKJV

“IT IS I MYSELF.”

That is the opposite direction from the argument being made.

The resurrection does not reveal that Jesus finally became somebody He had not been before.

THE RESURRECTION REVEALS THAT THE SAME JESUS WHO DIED IS THE JESUS WHO ROSE.

His body was glorified.

His body was transformed.

But there is no apostolic teaching that Jesus’ resurrection involved a gender transition.

And this is where I think we have to be brutally honest with ourselves as Christians:

YOU CANNOT TAKE A QUESTION THE BIBLE DOES NOT ANSWER, INSERT YOUR OWN INTERPRETATION INTO THE SILENCE, AND THEN MAKE THAT INTERPRETATION A TEST OF WHETHER SOMEBODY BELIEVES IN THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.

That is an extraordinary theological burden to place on people.

Because Klink’s argument ultimately says that if you deny that God is trans, you are denying the divinity of Jesus.

No.

The divinity of Jesus is not established by whether Jesus can be fitted into a modern theory of gender identity.

The divinity of Jesus is established by the apostolic witness.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — John 1:1.

“And the Word became flesh.” — John 1:14.

“For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” — Colossians 2:9.

That is Christology.

And honestly, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the tendency to take every contemporary cultural category and baptize it with Christian vocabulary.

Suddenly everything must be found in Jesus.

Jesus is being reconstructed according to whatever ideological question is currently dominating society.

And at some point I have to ask:

ARE WE DISCOVERING JESUS IN SCRIPTURE, OR ARE WE USING JESUS TO VALIDATE WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO BELIEVE?

Because those are two very different things.

I can treat transgender people with dignity without believing Jesus was transgender.

I can reject cruelty without rewriting the incarnation.

I can believe that every human being possesses dignity because they are made in God’s image without turning God into a human gender category.

COMPASSION DOES NOT REQUIRE CHRISTOLOGICAL REVISION.

And please, let’s stop confusing disagreement with hatred.

I don’t have to despise someone to tell them, “I think your interpretation of Jesus is wrong.”

Paul was willing to confront theological error. The Bereans were commended for examining even Paul’s teaching against Scripture (Acts 17:11). John told believers to test the spirits (1 John 4:1).

CHRISTIAN LOVE DOES NOT REQUIRE INTELLECTUAL SURRENDER.

My final concern is this:

If the Church can take a modern category, place it upon God, reinterpret the incarnation through it, reinterpret the resurrection through it, and then declare that anyone who disagrees is denying Christ’s divinity, what exactly becomes the boundary of Christian doctrine?

At some point, we have to return to the ancient question:

WHO IS JESUS?

And my answer is not complicated.

He is the eternal Son of God.

He became flesh.

He was born of a woman.

He lived among us.

He died for our sins.

He rose bodily from the grave.

He ascended to the Father.

He is Lord.

I DON’T NEED TO REINVENT JESUS TO MAKE HIM RELEVANT TO 2026.

I need to know the Jesus whom Scripture reveals.

Because if we change Jesus enough to make Him acceptable to every generation, eventually we may discover that the Jesus we are defending is no longer the Jesus who saved us.

Penned by a burdened one” (Apostle Lawrence Ngano).

One thing I’ve learned over my lifetime is that 99% of what I stay up late worrying about never comes to pass. Those dreaded worst case scenarios almost never happen. Usually, the reality is way less scary than my imagination and fears make it out to be.

But even in the unlikely event that worst case scenario comes to pass. God is still with you, and God is still good. Even if all else forsakes you, God never will. Even if the circumstances seem hopeless and dire, God is still able to work them into good.

Remember the cross. It was the foreordained plan from eternity past, but it was also God’s worst case scenario — losing His only Son. To sacrifice Him willingly for us who were not even His friends at the time is unthinkable. Why would He do that?

It was love that led Jesus to the cross. Love that took on the wrath of God for sin that led Him to take our punishment and give us His life. That was our passport to eternal life to come and life abundant here and now.

But it is a reminder that God is with us through the worst we can go through because He took the worst part upon Himself in our place. Nothing we go through can compare to Calvary and the agony of the crucifixion and all that lead up to it. Jesus as God suffered infinitely in a finite amount of time in our place, so that we could know infinite joy.

Remember that whenever you’re imagination takes you to a worst case scenario. Even if the worst imaginable happens, God is still with you and for you and working for your good.