A Midwest childhood of open windows, no cellphones, and drinking from every water hose was the way I grew up. Then on a Tuesday twenty-five years ago the world changed. We lost an innocence and we suddenly needed a security we had never felt the need for before. In this episode, Bill Vanderbush names what is so hard to recover once it is lost, and draws the deeper parallel. Theosis was the early church’s ordinary way of life in union with Christ, slowly replaced by distance and separation until the power of the cross has been universally diminished in sermons today. This is a call to recover what was stolen, not by rebuilding an innocence we cannot get back, but by drinking again from the new covenant life God has never stopped offering.

A watching world already suspects that Jesus is a historical idea we inherited, a brand we defend, or a set of conclusions we police. Then they watch us fracture over the very questions we claim He died and rose to answer. Jesus prayed for our unity. But we have delivered the opposite. Our divisions are not just an embarrassment. They are evidence. If He is risen, then the most compelling apologetic we have left is not another perfectly airtight religious system. It is a people who actually take their cares to Him and then live as if what He says is enough.

We have spent generations blaming the commandments for a problem they were never designed to solve. The Law is not your enemy. Your independent self is. The Law is a perfect mirror. A mirror can show you that your face is dirty. A mirror cannot wash you.

When you try to establish your own righteousness, you are still living in the old administration. You are still treating the law as a path rather than a signpost. You are still saying, “If I just try harder, pray longer, perform better, God will finally be pleased.” But the Christic Covenant announces that the performance has already been rendered perfectly, once for all, by Another.

The Holy Spirit is taking us through a rehabilitation by healing broken and dysfunctional views of God. We must return again and again to the face of Jesus. Every doctrine, every system, every inherited picture of God must be held up to the light of the One who is the exact representation of the Father’s nature. If it cannot survive that light, it must be refined or released.

This is not a Psalm about God’s controlling surveillance. It is a Psalm about God’s intimate, relentless, affectionate knowing. It is the song of a person who has discovered that the One who formed him in the dark is the same One who walks with him in the light. The fact that God knows you is not a threat, it's the safest place in the universe.

Matthew tells us that from this point on, Jesus taught the crowds only in parables. He is not hiding truth from the hungry. He is protecting it from the hard hearted, and at the same time giving it in a form that only the humble can receive. Parables are not riddles for the clever. They are doors for the teachable. Which one are you?

The prophets of Baal show us what worship looks like when you believe god is distant. The New Covenant shows us what worship looks like when you know the living God has made His home within you. We do not harm ourselves to get His attention. His blood has already been shed for us. We do not scream to wake Him. He lives in us as the hope of glory.

Global movements built on consistent desperation were flowing from the headship of a person who was in compromise. And that profound compromise was masked as prophetic zeal and then projected shame onto an entire generation. And what was proclaimed as spiritual hunger suddenly became a cry of guilt disguised as spiritual depth. And that culture taught hundreds of thousands of young people that perpetual desperation equals health and surrender before God. And it was wrong.

Your salvation is not primarily in believing a set of propositions about what Jesus did on the cross. Your salvation is Christ Himself. The entire sweep of His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and the outpouring of the Spirit is the objective reality into which you have been brought into by sheer grace.