The Perfecting Church

The Israelites yearned for a King that would bring them peace from their oppressors. God desires to bring us a peace that surpasses our imagination, but it requires that we surrender to His will and purposes for our lives.

In Matthew 8, Jesus steps onto the shore and confronts the darkness that has terrorized a region, restoring two men who’d been stripped of dignity, identity and peace. The men are set free, but the community asks Him to leave, because the deliverance disrupts their comfort. This passage reminds us that surrender isn’t just about inviting Jesus into our lives—it’s about allowing Him to disrupt everything that keeps us bound.

What do you do when your boat starts shaking? Do you trust your own personal experience? Your expertise? Do you try to just hold on and “white knuckle” your way through life? What if there was a better way to live when your world was rocked? That’s what Jesus wants us to know as we follow him—even when he takes us places we have never been.

Following Jesus is not about our convenience, comfort, self-advancement or even self-improvement. Following Jesus is radical, risky and life-altering. When Jesus says, “follow me” we often hear it in the key of our own theme music — anticipating the outcomes, status, success and results we want. But Jesus flips the script with two encounters in Matthew 8, exposing the true cost of discipleship — sacrificial surrender and reordered surrender — revealing the Kingdom of Heaven is an all in or not at all endeavor. Half faith and conditional faith have no place with a God who asks for it all. His Kingdom over everything. 

Since the fall in Genesis, humanity has been born into brokenness. So we search for a “fix” in people, places, and things. Surrender calls us to stop giving ourselves to substitutes and fully yield to Jesus, the only true remedy for our brokenness.

Most of us don’t struggle with believing Jesus has power. We struggle with giving up our power. We pray — but we still build contingency plans. We call Him Lord but we still try to negotiate our terms. Control feels safe. Surrender feels foolish. But the Kingdom of Heaven does not advance through our power — it advances through our surrender. And in Matthew 8, Jesus meets a man who understands something many church-going people miss — surrender means living under His authority more than loving our authority. Surrender makes outsiders insiders. 

We’re living in days where vision is blurred, compassion is thin and fear-filled, divisiveness passes for wisdom. The darkness of our times isn’t only moral — it’s perceptual. We are losing the ability to see one another as God does. But glory was never meant to remain on the mountain or in the sanctuary — it was meant to move through the streets. Matthew 8 shows us what happens when a surrendered life carries the glory of God into broken places. What happens when the holiness of heaven walks among the gross darkness of the earth.

God’s glory is more than moments we remember—it’s also encounters that keep returning to form us. Each time His holy presence meets us at the edge of our ordinary lives, it exposes what we’ve settled for and reorients us toward who He truly is. Glory doesn’t merely confront us; it consecrates us—shaping a people set apart for God’s purposes. And every genuine encounter with His glory sends us back into the world, not changed and commissioned to carry His holiness into everyday places.

Glory is one of the most familiar words in our faith and one of the most misunderstood. We imagine glory as something distant, displayed through power or spectacle. But glory is not just something to admire; it is something we encounter— drawing us near and working within.There was a time when God’s glory stood outside of us, revealing truth and exposing what was broken. That glory was real, but it wasn’t the final word. The glory of God has moved closer. What once confronted us from the outside now meets us on the inside, reshaping our hearts and renewing our lives. The glory we are invited into is not a moment to watch, but His holy presence to remain within. We’re not only rescued by His glory; we’re formed by it and made more and more like Him — from glory to glory.

A people of holiness, formed for and from Himself, has been God’s idea all along. Eons before men made plans for the building of nations, the heart of God imagined not just a person or a family, but a people—a nation-- who would bear His image and His likeness, living in ways that demonstrate His great Love, great care, and great Glory in all of His creation. The Church is that people and our shared eternal and divine assignment is to be holy.