continuation of chapter 1.1
This is where the tragedy deepens into a full-blown farce. The very thing he fights—the emotion—is just a faithful messenger, a postman delivering news of what he already believes. He treats the messenger as the enemy, beats him up, throws him into the street, while refusing to read the letter. “How dare you bring me this feeling of reluctance!” he cries, as the postman, now a bruised but still very present emotion, sighs and says, “Sir, I’m just doing my job. Take it up with the author.” The Apostle Paul once said, “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). Notice he didn’t say, “Beat the flesh-mind with a stick until it learns to behave.” He spoke of a whole new governing. But we prefer a hostile takeover of the post office. We’d rather wrestle the mailman to the ground and demand he bring us different letters while we refuse to change the address the letters are coming from.
And because his efforts to defeat the emotion always, always fail in the long run (for a wrong belief will never, ever yield a lasting right feeling), he becomes thoroughly exhausted. And from this exhaustion he draws a devastating conclusion, as if he has discovered some profound truth: “Righteousness itself is a burden. The spiritual life is nothing but a soul-crushing war against my own inner resistance. God is hard, and I am a failure.” That conclusion becomes a shiny new piece of false knowledge, producing even darker emotions, and the cycle tightens its grip, like a snake charmer who’s charmed himself. It’s a self-perpetuating carnival ride: you pay admission with your peace, the ride spins you until you’re nauseous, and when you vomit, the ride operator yells, “See! That’s proof you’re not holy enough! Here’s a mop, and by the way, the next spin starts in five minutes.” The ticket booth is your own false belief, and you keep buying the season pass.
But here is the most confusing and tragic knot of all: when sound knowledge is offered to him—when someone gently says, “My friend, your view of God is a bad caricature; the truth is that He is a Father who already, right now, delights in you, and righteous living is simply your natural, joyful response to that love, not a bribe to get it”—man often refuses it. Why? Because he has become so identified with his emotional struggle that he mistakes it for spiritual seriousness. He has been fighting the emotion for so long that he believes the fight itself is righteousness. He’s become a kind of spiritual hypochondriac who thinks his constant pain is proof of his sensitivity. To abandon the fight and accept a new view feels not like liberation, but like surrender, like letting go of his “conscientiousness.” He mistakes his spiritual exhaustion for piety. He rigidly refuses the very knowledge that would set him free, because he has confused the war against the symptom with the actual work. He now believes in his emotional exhaustion as proof of his devotion, like a man who thinks the noise the engine makes is what makes the car go. And if you suggest otherwise, he’ll quote Scripture to defend his misery: “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:27) becomes “I beat up my emotions daily and call it apostleship.” Paul was talking about self-control, not self-flagellation with a cat-o'-nine-tails made of guilt. But the misquoter stands there, whip in hand, proud of his welts, awaiting a martyr’s crown.
So the confusion is a multi-layered cake of bewilderment:
1. Wrong knowledge produces a painful emotion (the projector’s running a bad film).
2. Then man perceives the emotion as the primary problem (he tries to fix the screen).
3. He attacks the emotion instead of exchanging the knowledge (he starts scrubbing the screen with a wire brush).
4. When his attack fails, he blames himself or God, generating new false knowledge (“The projector hates me.”).
5. He then defends his struggle as righteous, rejecting any truth that would dismantle his agonizing framework (“Don’t you dare touch my wire brush! This is holy work!”).
He ends up fighting the very belief he has not changed, all the while thinking he is fighting the right opponent—his emotion. Yet the emotion, in its very making, is nothing but the living shape of what he believes. It is not the problem to be solved; it is the faithful echo of a false premise. The wisest man who ever lived put it this way: “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). The heart in Hebrew thought includes the mind, the inner knowing. Guard that. But we’ve turned “guard your heart” into “patrol your feelings like a prison warden and shoot any inmate who looks suspicious.” The original advice was about planting a good tree; we made it about beating up the bad fruit with a baseball bat.
Years ago, when I was a focus pastor at a campus, a young man came to me with a dilemma so perfectly tragicomical that it nearly stopped my watch. He wanted to overcome lust. His specific problem was that he could not withstand having an erection in front of a beautiful woman. He saw this natural, biological response not as a bodily event, but as a personal betrayal of cosmic proportions. He had, in his mind, already been enlisted in a war against the devil, and his own body was, apparently, a double agent. His proposed solutions were, shall we say, drastic. He was of a view either to have his penis cut off, or to remove the neural centers that generate a response that causes the erection—a sort of internal scorched-earth policy, all in order to satisfy God and escape sin. He was ready to amputate the messenger. Now, he was practically quoting Jesus, though he didn’t realize the irony: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matthew 5:30). But Jesus was using holy hyperbole to deal with sin radically, not handing out surgical consent forms. If you take that verse as a literal amputation manual, you’ll end up as a disembodied stump within a month, and still sinning—because last I checked, you can sin in your thoughts with no hands at all. The only thing worse than a lustful thought is a lustful thought in a body with no parts left to express it, just a torso with a dirty mind. That’s not holiness; that’s a medical oddity.
So I asked, with a straight face, “Well, while we’re at it, why not remove your eyes? Or maybe we could just hide you in a cave far, far away, where you can’t ever see a female again. We could airlift in supplies. You’d be completely, perfectly holy—and utterly alone, but hey, no more erections! You could start a new monastic order: the Order of the Perpetually Safe and Extremely Lone.” There was a pause, a flicker of a grin. It was funny, and at the same time desperately serious. He was battling the emotion, the feeling, the embarrassing ambush of his own body, with the only weapon he knew: violent control. He told me however much he had read scriptures, however many times he had fasted until his stomach gnawed at his backbone, nothing had changed. The projector kept showing the film. And in the end, he asked me to lay hands on him, that the authority and power of the Holy Spirit might do a miracle and change him instantly—as if the truth were a lightning bolt that would zap the wrong belief away without his understanding ever having to be involved. He wanted a magical solution to a physiological and theological confusion, a divine software patch downloaded through the ether. But the Holy Spirit is not a cosmic IT desk that reboots your hard drive while you remain blissfully unconscious of the update; the liberation, as Jesus said, comes through knowing the truth (John 8:32), and the truth is a new piece of knowledge that makes the whole absurd struggle evaporate like a mist in the morning sun. You don’t need a hand laid on your forehead; you need a truth laid in your understanding. But we prefer the drama of a fall under the power to the quiet dignity of a mind renewed.
And so the silent comedy continues: man remains locked in a war he was never meant to fight, swinging his sword at shadows while the unexamined lie sits enthroned within, calmly, peacefully, reproducing the chaos. Liberation never comes through battling feelings. It comes only when a man is willing to let a new, true piece of knowledge enter and dismantle the lie—and then, astonishingly, the feeling changes on its own, as naturally as a flower opening to the light. The flower doesn’t wrestle its petals apart with grunts and sweat; it simply quits hiding from the sun.
Now, just when you thought the absurdity was confined to our internal skirmishes, this same poison of misperception has infected our identities. We have created a grand, global drama of what might be called “hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.”
Look at how we are raised. A child born into a Muslim family is, from birth, taught that they are automatically on the righteous team, and that the other team—the Christian one, the Hindu one, all the others—are not just wrong, but constitute a kind of cosmic rebellion that must be fought. A child born into a Christian family inhales the same emotional posture in reverse. Narrow it further: an Anglican is a quiet, dignified rebel against the Catholic; the Catholic against the Anglican. And as the denominations multiply like rabbits, so do the silent, emotional wars. We are not born into truth; we are born into an emotional game of ancestral sports teams. It’s not Manchester United vs. Liverpool, it’s the Assembly of the Firstborn vs. The Remnant of the True Remnant, and both sides are convinced the other is going down in the end-time relegation playoffs. Paul had to beg the early church, “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you” (1 Corinthians 1:10). Already, some were saying “I follow Paul,” others “I follow Apollos.” Today it’s “I follow the pastor who preaches exactly thirty-seven minutes and frowns on drums” versus “I follow the guy with the fog machine and the motivational podcast.” The teams have multiplied, but the game is the same: spiritual paintball with real pain.
And such a child, let’s say a Catholic child, grows up secretly awaiting the day when the heavenly trumpets blast and the voice from the clouds, like the sound of a thousand megaphones, roars: “Woooooh! All Catholics, please proceed to Gate A—you are definitely the chosen people! The rest… could you please form an orderly queue, as you are now cosmic toast.” Then they will celebrate, not as someone finally meeting the Beloved, but as a successful rebel who backed the winning horse. And they will turn to their Anglican and Pentecostal friends in the line and say, with genuine, tragic sincerity, “Bro, it was nice knowing you. Remember, I told you, you were on the wrong code. But I’ll miss you. I’ll try to explain your case to Christ; maybe He can downgrade your eternal torment to a mild, lukewarm purgatory.” It sounds like a joke, but it’s the secret emotional undercurrent of a mind that has mistaken a team jersey for a transformed heart. And we haven’t even mentioned the Baptists, who are certain that heaven has an immersion baptismal at the gate and you’ll need a dry-cleaned robe to enter. The only real difference between us and a soccer hooligan is that he’ll fight you in the parking lot, while we’ll just write a strongly worded doctrinal statement explaining why your parking lot doesn’t exist.
So, the question is not whether we should fight other religions as rebels or not. That’s like arguing about which character in a movie is the real hero while the entire theater is on fire. The question is: when did we accept this confusion to begin with? When did we sign up for the spiritual war reenactment society? The Scriptures actually tell us that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). You’d think that would put an end to the team jerseys. But no, we immediately divided ourselves into the “One-in-Christ” denomination and the “Also-One-in-Christ-but-with-correct-eschatology” denomination. The church split is always pre-packaged in the very verse meant to heal it. That’s not a revival; that’s a sitcom.
In all this, humans are unable to realize one liberating fact: they are not fighting for wisdom. They are just fighting with their emotions, dressed up as soldiers. They are trapped in inherited, emotional feuds, mistaking cultural loyalties and religious brand names for the pursuit of the Divine. A change in understanding—a coming to know the truth of the matter—naturally alters a person’s response to this entire magnificent mass of confusion. You do not need to fight the emotion, whether it’s the hatred of holiness or the smug thrill of being on the “correct” team. You need to see that the whole game is being played on a board that doesn’t exist, propelled by a belief that was never true to begin with. And when you see that, you don’t have to fight to be free. You look around, have a deep cosmic chuckle, and realize you always were. You were the prisoner who spent years begging for freedom while clutching the key to your cell, insisting the key was a holy back-scratcher and you must suffer well.
And this brings us to the most delicious piece of the puzzle, the final twist in the cosmic comedy: there is, in truth, no real hatred for righteousness at all. How could there be? The man has never actually tasted it. He is like a fellow who marches into the kitchen, slaps together a meal of boiled anxiety and raw self-effort with a generous pinch of grim duty, arranges it on a plate, sits down at the dining table, and then—before even lifting the fork—explodes with indignation. “What is this dreadful stench? Who chose these ingredients? I despise the salt! Who is the chef around here, some kind of cosmic sadist?” And all the while, he is the one who did the shopping, the cooking, and the seasoning. He is complaining about his own recipe and calling it “God’s banquet.” Isaiah saw this coming: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare” (Isaiah 55:2). God is advertising a free, sumptuous feast, and we’re in the corner microwaving a shoe and calling it the “hard path of discipleship.” The shoe is leathery and tough to swallow, and we’re convinced that’s the cost of holiness—never realizing God’s been shouting from the dining room, “Put the shoe down! I have steak!”
Man has not had a single real taste of righteousness, because he has been far too busy force-feeding himself a meal he prepared with his own terrified hands. He never paused to consider that there might be a completely different dish, prepared by a completely different Chef, that would make his taste buds sing. He hasn’t even thought to ask, “Perhaps before I complain, I might find out what the right meal actually is.” Instead, he sits at the table, arms crossed, fuming at the aroma of his own boiling resentment, convinced that he hates the forty-course feast of the Divine because the bowl of cold gruel he made for himself tasted awful. The liberation comes not from learning to stomach the gruel with a forced smile, but from discovering that there was a glorious, free banquet prepared all along, and you, my friend, were invited the whole time. And when that truth lands, the complaint evaporates—not because you fought it, but because you finally got up from the table of your own miserable cooking and took a seat where the real food is. And the real food is Himself. “I am the bread of life,” He said. “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry” (John 6:35). That’s not a diet plan; that’s a person.
Now, let's be absolutely clear about this, because the joke is on all of us and it's simply too good to miss: the trouble isn't that you have a weak will or a rebellious heart. The hatred of righteousness—that queasy, squirming resistance to what is good and holy—is not some black moral stain on your character that ought to make you hang your head in shame and enroll in a twelve-step program for deplorable sinners. No, no. It is a symptom of a mistake in understanding. A kind of intellectual cramp. A mental charley horse. It's as though your mind has been sitting in an awkward position for too long and has gone completely numb, and now you're furious at the tingling sensation, calling it demonic, when all you really need to do is stand up and walk around a bit. The devil loves a charley horse that gets mistaken for a demonic attack, because it means you’ll spend the next hour rebuking your calf instead of just stretching.
But of course, we are human. And human beings, bless our dramatic little hearts, live this life swimming in the medium of emotion as fish swim in water. We wake, we feel, we react. An unpleasant emotion arises, and before you can say "existential crisis," we have named it, judged it, and declared holy war upon it. Quite naturally, we make the mistake of treating certain feelings as ghouls, as demons, as personal Satans lurking in the basement of the psyche, rubbing their hands together and plotting our spiritual downfall. We picture a little red imp with a pitchfork hiding behind our medulla oblongata, whispering, "Go on, feel resentful about holiness, it'll be fun." And then we spend the next three hours rebuking it. But a feeling is not a gremlin. It is simply a manifestation—a shadow on the wall, cast by whatever we happen to believe is true. And you don't defeat a shadow by punching the wall. You'll only break your knuckles and look rather silly. You’ll also have a dented wall and a very confused shadow, which will still be there, probably mocking you.
But I want you to notice something quite wonderful, something so obvious that it is almost completely invisible to us in our state of spiritual panic: your emotions, in whatever costume they decide to wear to the party—whether it's gloom, lust, irritation, or that very specific feeling of wanting to strangle the person who just said "just trust the process"—are not intruders. They are perfectly in order. They are, as it were, God-given messengers. And you wouldn't waste a single moment fighting your own nervous system for doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You don't shout at the echo for bouncing back when you call into a canyon. "Why, you impertinent echo! How dare you repeat my exact words back to me with a slight delay! I rebuke you in the name of acoustical propriety!" Absurd, isn't it? Yet here we are, spending our days in full-scale civil war against the very things that make us complete, blasting the echo with a shotgun and wondering why the canyon still talks back. The echo is just your own voice returning to you, and if you don’t like what you hear, the solution is not to silence the canyon; it’s to change the shout. “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). The man’s inner shout shapes his echo. If his thinking is sour, his emotions will smell like a pickle jar left open in the sun. You don’t ban pickles; you change the factory.
The only way to know where you actually stand in your understanding of this universe—what you really, secretly, deep-in-your-bones believe—is to take a good, honest look at your emotional state in any given moment. Your feelings are the painting, splashed across the canvas of your experience in vivid color. Your beliefs are the tiny, almost invisible signature at the bottom. If the painting is a chaotic swirl of dread, resentment, and spiritual indigestion, you don't fix it by throwing turpentine at the canvas. You find the painter and ask him what on earth he was thinking.
This is where the tragedy deepens into a full-blown farce. The very thing he fights—the emotion—is just a faithful messenger, a postman delivering news of what he already believes. He treats the messenger as the enemy, beats him up, throws him into the street, while refusing to read the letter. “How dare you bring me this feeling of reluctance!” he cries, as the postman, now a bruised but still very present emotion, sighs and says, “Sir, I’m just doing my job. Take it up with the author.” The Apostle Paul once said, “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). Notice he didn’t say, “Beat the flesh-mind with a stick until it learns to behave.” He spoke of a whole new governing. But we prefer a hostile takeover of the post office. We’d rather wrestle the mailman to the ground and demand he bring us different letters while we refuse to change the address the letters are coming from.
And because his efforts to defeat the emotion always, always fail in the long run (for a wrong belief will never, ever yield a lasting right feeling), he becomes thoroughly exhausted. And from this exhaustion he draws a devastating conclusion, as if he has discovered some profound truth: “Righteousness itself is a burden. The spiritual life is nothing but a soul-crushing war against my own inner resistance. God is hard, and I am a failure.” That conclusion becomes a shiny new piece of false knowledge, producing even darker emotions, and the cycle tightens its grip, like a snake charmer who’s charmed himself. It’s a self-perpetuating carnival ride: you pay admission with your peace, the ride spins you until you’re nauseous, and when you vomit, the ride operator yells, “See! That’s proof you’re not holy enough! Here’s a mop, and by the way, the next spin starts in five minutes.” The ticket booth is your own false belief, and you keep buying the season pass.
But here is the most confusing and tragic knot of all: when sound knowledge is offered to him—when someone gently says, “My friend, your view of God is a bad caricature; the truth is that He is a Father who already, right now, delights in you, and righteous living is simply your natural, joyful response to that love, not a bribe to get it”—man often refuses it. Why? Because he has become so identified with his emotional struggle that he mistakes it for spiritual seriousness. He has been fighting the emotion for so long that he believes the fight itself is righteousness. He’s become a kind of spiritual hypochondriac who thinks his constant pain is proof of his sensitivity. To abandon the fight and accept a new view feels not like liberation, but like surrender, like letting go of his “conscientiousness.” He mistakes his spiritual exhaustion for piety. He rigidly refuses the very knowledge that would set him free, because he has confused the war against the symptom with the actual work. He now believes in his emotional exhaustion as proof of his devotion, like a man who thinks the noise the engine makes is what makes the car go. And if you suggest otherwise, he’ll quote Scripture to defend his misery: “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:27) becomes “I beat up my emotions daily and call it apostleship.” Paul was talking about self-control, not self-flagellation with a cat-o'-nine-tails made of guilt. But the misquoter stands there, whip in hand, proud of his welts, awaiting a martyr’s crown.
So the confusion is a multi-layered cake of bewilderment:
1. Wrong knowledge produces a painful emotion (the projector’s running a bad film).
2. Then man perceives the emotion as the primary problem (he tries to fix the screen).
3. He attacks the emotion instead of exchanging the knowledge (he starts scrubbing the screen with a wire brush).
4. When his attack fails, he blames himself or God, generating new false knowledge (“The projector hates me.”).
5. He then defends his struggle as righteous, rejecting any truth that would dismantle his agonizing framework (“Don’t you dare touch my wire brush! This is holy work!”).
He ends up fighting the very belief he has not changed, all the while thinking he is fighting the right opponent—his emotion. Yet the emotion, in its very making, is nothing but the living shape of what he believes. It is not the problem to be solved; it is the faithful echo of a false premise. The wisest man who ever lived put it this way: “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). The heart in Hebrew thought includes the mind, the inner knowing. Guard that. But we’ve turned “guard your heart” into “patrol your feelings like a prison warden and shoot any inmate who looks suspicious.” The original advice was about planting a good tree; we made it about beating up the bad fruit with a baseball bat.
Years ago, when I was a focus pastor at a campus, a young man came to me with a dilemma so perfectly tragicomical that it nearly stopped my watch. He wanted to overcome lust. His specific problem was that he could not withstand having an erection in front of a beautiful woman. He saw this natural, biological response not as a bodily event, but as a personal betrayal of cosmic proportions. He had, in his mind, already been enlisted in a war against the devil, and his own body was, apparently, a double agent. His proposed solutions were, shall we say, drastic. He was of a view either to have his penis cut off, or to remove the neural centers that generate a response that causes the erection—a sort of internal scorched-earth policy, all in order to satisfy God and escape sin. He was ready to amputate the messenger. Now, he was practically quoting Jesus, though he didn’t realize the irony: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matthew 5:30). But Jesus was using holy hyperbole to deal with sin radically, not handing out surgical consent forms. If you take that verse as a literal amputation manual, you’ll end up as a disembodied stump within a month, and still sinning—because last I checked, you can sin in your thoughts with no hands at all. The only thing worse than a lustful thought is a lustful thought in a body with no parts left to express it, just a torso with a dirty mind. That’s not holiness; that’s a medical oddity.
So I asked, with a straight face, “Well, while we’re at it, why not remove your eyes? Or maybe we could just hide you in a cave far, far away, where you can’t ever see a female again. We could airlift in supplies. You’d be completely, perfectly holy—and utterly alone, but hey, no more erections! You could start a new monastic order: the Order of the Perpetually Safe and Extremely Lone.” There was a pause, a flicker of a grin. It was funny, and at the same time desperately serious. He was battling the emotion, the feeling, the embarrassing ambush of his own body, with the only weapon he knew: violent control. He told me however much he had read scriptures, however many times he had fasted until his stomach gnawed at his backbone, nothing had changed. The projector kept showing the film. And in the end, he asked me to lay hands on him, that the authority and power of the Holy Spirit might do a miracle and change him instantly—as if the truth were a lightning bolt that would zap the wrong belief away without his understanding ever having to be involved. He wanted a magical solution to a physiological and theological confusion, a divine software patch downloaded through the ether. But the Holy Spirit is not a cosmic IT desk that reboots your hard drive while you remain blissfully unconscious of the update; the liberation, as Jesus said, comes through knowing the truth (John 8:32), and the truth is a new piece of knowledge that makes the whole absurd struggle evaporate like a mist in the morning sun. You don’t need a hand laid on your forehead; you need a truth laid in your understanding. But we prefer the drama of a fall under the power to the quiet dignity of a mind renewed.
And so the silent comedy continues: man remains locked in a war he was never meant to fight, swinging his sword at shadows while the unexamined lie sits enthroned within, calmly, peacefully, reproducing the chaos. Liberation never comes through battling feelings. It comes only when a man is willing to let a new, true piece of knowledge enter and dismantle the lie—and then, astonishingly, the feeling changes on its own, as naturally as a flower opening to the light. The flower doesn’t wrestle its petals apart with grunts and sweat; it simply quits hiding from the sun.
Now, just when you thought the absurdity was confined to our internal skirmishes, this same poison of misperception has infected our identities. We have created a grand, global drama of what might be called “hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.”
Look at how we are raised. A child born into a Muslim family is, from birth, taught that they are automatically on the righteous team, and that the other team—the Christian one, the Hindu one, all the others—are not just wrong, but constitute a kind of cosmic rebellion that must be fought. A child born into a Christian family inhales the same emotional posture in reverse. Narrow it further: an Anglican is a quiet, dignified rebel against the Catholic; the Catholic against the Anglican. And as the denominations multiply like rabbits, so do the silent, emotional wars. We are not born into truth; we are born into an emotional game of ancestral sports teams. It’s not Manchester United vs. Liverpool, it’s the Assembly of the Firstborn vs. The Remnant of the True Remnant, and both sides are convinced the other is going down in the end-time relegation playoffs. Paul had to beg the early church, “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you” (1 Corinthians 1:10). Already, some were saying “I follow Paul,” others “I follow Apollos.” Today it’s “I follow the pastor who preaches exactly thirty-seven minutes and frowns on drums” versus “I follow the guy with the fog machine and the motivational podcast.” The teams have multiplied, but the game is the same: spiritual paintball with real pain.
And such a child, let’s say a Catholic child, grows up secretly awaiting the day when the heavenly trumpets blast and the voice from the clouds, like the sound of a thousand megaphones, roars: “Woooooh! All Catholics, please proceed to Gate A—you are definitely the chosen people! The rest… could you please form an orderly queue, as you are now cosmic toast.” Then they will celebrate, not as someone finally meeting the Beloved, but as a successful rebel who backed the winning horse. And they will turn to their Anglican and Pentecostal friends in the line and say, with genuine, tragic sincerity, “Bro, it was nice knowing you. Remember, I told you, you were on the wrong code. But I’ll miss you. I’ll try to explain your case to Christ; maybe He can downgrade your eternal torment to a mild, lukewarm purgatory.” It sounds like a joke, but it’s the secret emotional undercurrent of a mind that has mistaken a team jersey for a transformed heart. And we haven’t even mentioned the Baptists, who are certain that heaven has an immersion baptismal at the gate and you’ll need a dry-cleaned robe to enter. The only real difference between us and a soccer hooligan is that he’ll fight you in the parking lot, while we’ll just write a strongly worded doctrinal statement explaining why your parking lot doesn’t exist.
So, the question is not whether we should fight other religions as rebels or not. That’s like arguing about which character in a movie is the real hero while the entire theater is on fire. The question is: when did we accept this confusion to begin with? When did we sign up for the spiritual war reenactment society? The Scriptures actually tell us that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). You’d think that would put an end to the team jerseys. But no, we immediately divided ourselves into the “One-in-Christ” denomination and the “Also-One-in-Christ-but-with-correct-eschatology” denomination. The church split is always pre-packaged in the very verse meant to heal it. That’s not a revival; that’s a sitcom.
In all this, humans are unable to realize one liberating fact: they are not fighting for wisdom. They are just fighting with their emotions, dressed up as soldiers. They are trapped in inherited, emotional feuds, mistaking cultural loyalties and religious brand names for the pursuit of the Divine. A change in understanding—a coming to know the truth of the matter—naturally alters a person’s response to this entire magnificent mass of confusion. You do not need to fight the emotion, whether it’s the hatred of holiness or the smug thrill of being on the “correct” team. You need to see that the whole game is being played on a board that doesn’t exist, propelled by a belief that was never true to begin with. And when you see that, you don’t have to fight to be free. You look around, have a deep cosmic chuckle, and realize you always were. You were the prisoner who spent years begging for freedom while clutching the key to your cell, insisting the key was a holy back-scratcher and you must suffer well.
And this brings us to the most delicious piece of the puzzle, the final twist in the cosmic comedy: there is, in truth, no real hatred for righteousness at all. How could there be? The man has never actually tasted it. He is like a fellow who marches into the kitchen, slaps together a meal of boiled anxiety and raw self-effort with a generous pinch of grim duty, arranges it on a plate, sits down at the dining table, and then—before even lifting the fork—explodes with indignation. “What is this dreadful stench? Who chose these ingredients? I despise the salt! Who is the chef around here, some kind of cosmic sadist?” And all the while, he is the one who did the shopping, the cooking, and the seasoning. He is complaining about his own recipe and calling it “God’s banquet.” Isaiah saw this coming: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare” (Isaiah 55:2). God is advertising a free, sumptuous feast, and we’re in the corner microwaving a shoe and calling it the “hard path of discipleship.” The shoe is leathery and tough to swallow, and we’re convinced that’s the cost of holiness—never realizing God’s been shouting from the dining room, “Put the shoe down! I have steak!”
Man has not had a single real taste of righteousness, because he has been far too busy force-feeding himself a meal he prepared with his own terrified hands. He never paused to consider that there might be a completely different dish, prepared by a completely different Chef, that would make his taste buds sing. He hasn’t even thought to ask, “Perhaps before I complain, I might find out what the right meal actually is.” Instead, he sits at the table, arms crossed, fuming at the aroma of his own boiling resentment, convinced that he hates the forty-course feast of the Divine because the bowl of cold gruel he made for himself tasted awful. The liberation comes not from learning to stomach the gruel with a forced smile, but from discovering that there was a glorious, free banquet prepared all along, and you, my friend, were invited the whole time. And when that truth lands, the complaint evaporates—not because you fought it, but because you finally got up from the table of your own miserable cooking and took a seat where the real food is. And the real food is Himself. “I am the bread of life,” He said. “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry” (John 6:35). That’s not a diet plan; that’s a person.
Now, let's be absolutely clear about this, because the joke is on all of us and it's simply too good to miss: the trouble isn't that you have a weak will or a rebellious heart. The hatred of righteousness—that queasy, squirming resistance to what is good and holy—is not some black moral stain on your character that ought to make you hang your head in shame and enroll in a twelve-step program for deplorable sinners. No, no. It is a symptom of a mistake in understanding. A kind of intellectual cramp. A mental charley horse. It's as though your mind has been sitting in an awkward position for too long and has gone completely numb, and now you're furious at the tingling sensation, calling it demonic, when all you really need to do is stand up and walk around a bit. The devil loves a charley horse that gets mistaken for a demonic attack, because it means you’ll spend the next hour rebuking your calf instead of just stretching.
But of course, we are human. And human beings, bless our dramatic little hearts, live this life swimming in the medium of emotion as fish swim in water. We wake, we feel, we react. An unpleasant emotion arises, and before you can say "existential crisis," we have named it, judged it, and declared holy war upon it. Quite naturally, we make the mistake of treating certain feelings as ghouls, as demons, as personal Satans lurking in the basement of the psyche, rubbing their hands together and plotting our spiritual downfall. We picture a little red imp with a pitchfork hiding behind our medulla oblongata, whispering, "Go on, feel resentful about holiness, it'll be fun." And then we spend the next three hours rebuking it. But a feeling is not a gremlin. It is simply a manifestation—a shadow on the wall, cast by whatever we happen to believe is true. And you don't defeat a shadow by punching the wall. You'll only break your knuckles and look rather silly. You’ll also have a dented wall and a very confused shadow, which will still be there, probably mocking you.
But I want you to notice something quite wonderful, something so obvious that it is almost completely invisible to us in our state of spiritual panic: your emotions, in whatever costume they decide to wear to the party—whether it's gloom, lust, irritation, or that very specific feeling of wanting to strangle the person who just said "just trust the process"—are not intruders. They are perfectly in order. They are, as it were, God-given messengers. And you wouldn't waste a single moment fighting your own nervous system for doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You don't shout at the echo for bouncing back when you call into a canyon. "Why, you impertinent echo! How dare you repeat my exact words back to me with a slight delay! I rebuke you in the name of acoustical propriety!" Absurd, isn't it? Yet here we are, spending our days in full-scale civil war against the very things that make us complete, blasting the echo with a shotgun and wondering why the canyon still talks back. The echo is just your own voice returning to you, and if you don’t like what you hear, the solution is not to silence the canyon; it’s to change the shout. “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). The man’s inner shout shapes his echo. If his thinking is sour, his emotions will smell like a pickle jar left open in the sun. You don’t ban pickles; you change the factory.
The only way to know where you actually stand in your understanding of this universe—what you really, secretly, deep-in-your-bones believe—is to take a good, honest look at your emotional state in any given moment. Your feelings are the painting, splashed across the canvas of your experience in vivid color. Your beliefs are the tiny, almost invisible signature at the bottom. If the painting is a chaotic swirl of dread, resentment, and spiritual indigestion, you don't fix it by throwing turpentine at the canvas. You find the painter and ask him what on earth he was thinking.
continuation of chapter 1.1
This is where the tragedy deepens into a full-blown farce. The very thing he fights—the emotion—is just a faithful messenger, a postman delivering news of what he already believes. He treats the messenger as the enemy, beats him up, throws him into the street, while refusing to read the letter. “How dare you bring me this feeling of reluctance!” he cries, as the postman, now a bruised but still very present emotion, sighs and says, “Sir, I’m just doing my job. Take it up with the author.” The Apostle Paul once said, “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). Notice he didn’t say, “Beat the flesh-mind with a stick until it learns to behave.” He spoke of a whole new governing. But we prefer a hostile takeover of the post office. We’d rather wrestle the mailman to the ground and demand he bring us different letters while we refuse to change the address the letters are coming from.
And because his efforts to defeat the emotion always, always fail in the long run (for a wrong belief will never, ever yield a lasting right feeling), he becomes thoroughly exhausted. And from this exhaustion he draws a devastating conclusion, as if he has discovered some profound truth: “Righteousness itself is a burden. The spiritual life is nothing but a soul-crushing war against my own inner resistance. God is hard, and I am a failure.” That conclusion becomes a shiny new piece of false knowledge, producing even darker emotions, and the cycle tightens its grip, like a snake charmer who’s charmed himself. It’s a self-perpetuating carnival ride: you pay admission with your peace, the ride spins you until you’re nauseous, and when you vomit, the ride operator yells, “See! That’s proof you’re not holy enough! Here’s a mop, and by the way, the next spin starts in five minutes.” The ticket booth is your own false belief, and you keep buying the season pass.
But here is the most confusing and tragic knot of all: when sound knowledge is offered to him—when someone gently says, “My friend, your view of God is a bad caricature; the truth is that He is a Father who already, right now, delights in you, and righteous living is simply your natural, joyful response to that love, not a bribe to get it”—man often refuses it. Why? Because he has become so identified with his emotional struggle that he mistakes it for spiritual seriousness. He has been fighting the emotion for so long that he believes the fight itself is righteousness. He’s become a kind of spiritual hypochondriac who thinks his constant pain is proof of his sensitivity. To abandon the fight and accept a new view feels not like liberation, but like surrender, like letting go of his “conscientiousness.” He mistakes his spiritual exhaustion for piety. He rigidly refuses the very knowledge that would set him free, because he has confused the war against the symptom with the actual work. He now believes in his emotional exhaustion as proof of his devotion, like a man who thinks the noise the engine makes is what makes the car go. And if you suggest otherwise, he’ll quote Scripture to defend his misery: “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:27) becomes “I beat up my emotions daily and call it apostleship.” Paul was talking about self-control, not self-flagellation with a cat-o'-nine-tails made of guilt. But the misquoter stands there, whip in hand, proud of his welts, awaiting a martyr’s crown.
So the confusion is a multi-layered cake of bewilderment:
1. Wrong knowledge produces a painful emotion (the projector’s running a bad film).
2. Then man perceives the emotion as the primary problem (he tries to fix the screen).
3. He attacks the emotion instead of exchanging the knowledge (he starts scrubbing the screen with a wire brush).
4. When his attack fails, he blames himself or God, generating new false knowledge (“The projector hates me.”).
5. He then defends his struggle as righteous, rejecting any truth that would dismantle his agonizing framework (“Don’t you dare touch my wire brush! This is holy work!”).
He ends up fighting the very belief he has not changed, all the while thinking he is fighting the right opponent—his emotion. Yet the emotion, in its very making, is nothing but the living shape of what he believes. It is not the problem to be solved; it is the faithful echo of a false premise. The wisest man who ever lived put it this way: “Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23). The heart in Hebrew thought includes the mind, the inner knowing. Guard that. But we’ve turned “guard your heart” into “patrol your feelings like a prison warden and shoot any inmate who looks suspicious.” The original advice was about planting a good tree; we made it about beating up the bad fruit with a baseball bat.
Years ago, when I was a focus pastor at a campus, a young man came to me with a dilemma so perfectly tragicomical that it nearly stopped my watch. He wanted to overcome lust. His specific problem was that he could not withstand having an erection in front of a beautiful woman. He saw this natural, biological response not as a bodily event, but as a personal betrayal of cosmic proportions. He had, in his mind, already been enlisted in a war against the devil, and his own body was, apparently, a double agent. His proposed solutions were, shall we say, drastic. He was of a view either to have his penis cut off, or to remove the neural centers that generate a response that causes the erection—a sort of internal scorched-earth policy, all in order to satisfy God and escape sin. He was ready to amputate the messenger. Now, he was practically quoting Jesus, though he didn’t realize the irony: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matthew 5:30). But Jesus was using holy hyperbole to deal with sin radically, not handing out surgical consent forms. If you take that verse as a literal amputation manual, you’ll end up as a disembodied stump within a month, and still sinning—because last I checked, you can sin in your thoughts with no hands at all. The only thing worse than a lustful thought is a lustful thought in a body with no parts left to express it, just a torso with a dirty mind. That’s not holiness; that’s a medical oddity.
So I asked, with a straight face, “Well, while we’re at it, why not remove your eyes? Or maybe we could just hide you in a cave far, far away, where you can’t ever see a female again. We could airlift in supplies. You’d be completely, perfectly holy—and utterly alone, but hey, no more erections! You could start a new monastic order: the Order of the Perpetually Safe and Extremely Lone.” There was a pause, a flicker of a grin. It was funny, and at the same time desperately serious. He was battling the emotion, the feeling, the embarrassing ambush of his own body, with the only weapon he knew: violent control. He told me however much he had read scriptures, however many times he had fasted until his stomach gnawed at his backbone, nothing had changed. The projector kept showing the film. And in the end, he asked me to lay hands on him, that the authority and power of the Holy Spirit might do a miracle and change him instantly—as if the truth were a lightning bolt that would zap the wrong belief away without his understanding ever having to be involved. He wanted a magical solution to a physiological and theological confusion, a divine software patch downloaded through the ether. But the Holy Spirit is not a cosmic IT desk that reboots your hard drive while you remain blissfully unconscious of the update; the liberation, as Jesus said, comes through knowing the truth (John 8:32), and the truth is a new piece of knowledge that makes the whole absurd struggle evaporate like a mist in the morning sun. You don’t need a hand laid on your forehead; you need a truth laid in your understanding. But we prefer the drama of a fall under the power to the quiet dignity of a mind renewed.
And so the silent comedy continues: man remains locked in a war he was never meant to fight, swinging his sword at shadows while the unexamined lie sits enthroned within, calmly, peacefully, reproducing the chaos. Liberation never comes through battling feelings. It comes only when a man is willing to let a new, true piece of knowledge enter and dismantle the lie—and then, astonishingly, the feeling changes on its own, as naturally as a flower opening to the light. The flower doesn’t wrestle its petals apart with grunts and sweat; it simply quits hiding from the sun.
Now, just when you thought the absurdity was confined to our internal skirmishes, this same poison of misperception has infected our identities. We have created a grand, global drama of what might be called “hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.”
Look at how we are raised. A child born into a Muslim family is, from birth, taught that they are automatically on the righteous team, and that the other team—the Christian one, the Hindu one, all the others—are not just wrong, but constitute a kind of cosmic rebellion that must be fought. A child born into a Christian family inhales the same emotional posture in reverse. Narrow it further: an Anglican is a quiet, dignified rebel against the Catholic; the Catholic against the Anglican. And as the denominations multiply like rabbits, so do the silent, emotional wars. We are not born into truth; we are born into an emotional game of ancestral sports teams. It’s not Manchester United vs. Liverpool, it’s the Assembly of the Firstborn vs. The Remnant of the True Remnant, and both sides are convinced the other is going down in the end-time relegation playoffs. Paul had to beg the early church, “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you” (1 Corinthians 1:10). Already, some were saying “I follow Paul,” others “I follow Apollos.” Today it’s “I follow the pastor who preaches exactly thirty-seven minutes and frowns on drums” versus “I follow the guy with the fog machine and the motivational podcast.” The teams have multiplied, but the game is the same: spiritual paintball with real pain.
And such a child, let’s say a Catholic child, grows up secretly awaiting the day when the heavenly trumpets blast and the voice from the clouds, like the sound of a thousand megaphones, roars: “Woooooh! All Catholics, please proceed to Gate A—you are definitely the chosen people! The rest… could you please form an orderly queue, as you are now cosmic toast.” Then they will celebrate, not as someone finally meeting the Beloved, but as a successful rebel who backed the winning horse. And they will turn to their Anglican and Pentecostal friends in the line and say, with genuine, tragic sincerity, “Bro, it was nice knowing you. Remember, I told you, you were on the wrong code. But I’ll miss you. I’ll try to explain your case to Christ; maybe He can downgrade your eternal torment to a mild, lukewarm purgatory.” It sounds like a joke, but it’s the secret emotional undercurrent of a mind that has mistaken a team jersey for a transformed heart. And we haven’t even mentioned the Baptists, who are certain that heaven has an immersion baptismal at the gate and you’ll need a dry-cleaned robe to enter. The only real difference between us and a soccer hooligan is that he’ll fight you in the parking lot, while we’ll just write a strongly worded doctrinal statement explaining why your parking lot doesn’t exist.
So, the question is not whether we should fight other religions as rebels or not. That’s like arguing about which character in a movie is the real hero while the entire theater is on fire. The question is: when did we accept this confusion to begin with? When did we sign up for the spiritual war reenactment society? The Scriptures actually tell us that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). You’d think that would put an end to the team jerseys. But no, we immediately divided ourselves into the “One-in-Christ” denomination and the “Also-One-in-Christ-but-with-correct-eschatology” denomination. The church split is always pre-packaged in the very verse meant to heal it. That’s not a revival; that’s a sitcom.
In all this, humans are unable to realize one liberating fact: they are not fighting for wisdom. They are just fighting with their emotions, dressed up as soldiers. They are trapped in inherited, emotional feuds, mistaking cultural loyalties and religious brand names for the pursuit of the Divine. A change in understanding—a coming to know the truth of the matter—naturally alters a person’s response to this entire magnificent mass of confusion. You do not need to fight the emotion, whether it’s the hatred of holiness or the smug thrill of being on the “correct” team. You need to see that the whole game is being played on a board that doesn’t exist, propelled by a belief that was never true to begin with. And when you see that, you don’t have to fight to be free. You look around, have a deep cosmic chuckle, and realize you always were. You were the prisoner who spent years begging for freedom while clutching the key to your cell, insisting the key was a holy back-scratcher and you must suffer well.
And this brings us to the most delicious piece of the puzzle, the final twist in the cosmic comedy: there is, in truth, no real hatred for righteousness at all. How could there be? The man has never actually tasted it. He is like a fellow who marches into the kitchen, slaps together a meal of boiled anxiety and raw self-effort with a generous pinch of grim duty, arranges it on a plate, sits down at the dining table, and then—before even lifting the fork—explodes with indignation. “What is this dreadful stench? Who chose these ingredients? I despise the salt! Who is the chef around here, some kind of cosmic sadist?” And all the while, he is the one who did the shopping, the cooking, and the seasoning. He is complaining about his own recipe and calling it “God’s banquet.” Isaiah saw this coming: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare” (Isaiah 55:2). God is advertising a free, sumptuous feast, and we’re in the corner microwaving a shoe and calling it the “hard path of discipleship.” The shoe is leathery and tough to swallow, and we’re convinced that’s the cost of holiness—never realizing God’s been shouting from the dining room, “Put the shoe down! I have steak!”
Man has not had a single real taste of righteousness, because he has been far too busy force-feeding himself a meal he prepared with his own terrified hands. He never paused to consider that there might be a completely different dish, prepared by a completely different Chef, that would make his taste buds sing. He hasn’t even thought to ask, “Perhaps before I complain, I might find out what the right meal actually is.” Instead, he sits at the table, arms crossed, fuming at the aroma of his own boiling resentment, convinced that he hates the forty-course feast of the Divine because the bowl of cold gruel he made for himself tasted awful. The liberation comes not from learning to stomach the gruel with a forced smile, but from discovering that there was a glorious, free banquet prepared all along, and you, my friend, were invited the whole time. And when that truth lands, the complaint evaporates—not because you fought it, but because you finally got up from the table of your own miserable cooking and took a seat where the real food is. And the real food is Himself. “I am the bread of life,” He said. “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry” (John 6:35). That’s not a diet plan; that’s a person.
Now, let's be absolutely clear about this, because the joke is on all of us and it's simply too good to miss: the trouble isn't that you have a weak will or a rebellious heart. The hatred of righteousness—that queasy, squirming resistance to what is good and holy—is not some black moral stain on your character that ought to make you hang your head in shame and enroll in a twelve-step program for deplorable sinners. No, no. It is a symptom of a mistake in understanding. A kind of intellectual cramp. A mental charley horse. It's as though your mind has been sitting in an awkward position for too long and has gone completely numb, and now you're furious at the tingling sensation, calling it demonic, when all you really need to do is stand up and walk around a bit. The devil loves a charley horse that gets mistaken for a demonic attack, because it means you’ll spend the next hour rebuking your calf instead of just stretching.
But of course, we are human. And human beings, bless our dramatic little hearts, live this life swimming in the medium of emotion as fish swim in water. We wake, we feel, we react. An unpleasant emotion arises, and before you can say "existential crisis," we have named it, judged it, and declared holy war upon it. Quite naturally, we make the mistake of treating certain feelings as ghouls, as demons, as personal Satans lurking in the basement of the psyche, rubbing their hands together and plotting our spiritual downfall. We picture a little red imp with a pitchfork hiding behind our medulla oblongata, whispering, "Go on, feel resentful about holiness, it'll be fun." And then we spend the next three hours rebuking it. But a feeling is not a gremlin. It is simply a manifestation—a shadow on the wall, cast by whatever we happen to believe is true. And you don't defeat a shadow by punching the wall. You'll only break your knuckles and look rather silly. You’ll also have a dented wall and a very confused shadow, which will still be there, probably mocking you.
But I want you to notice something quite wonderful, something so obvious that it is almost completely invisible to us in our state of spiritual panic: your emotions, in whatever costume they decide to wear to the party—whether it's gloom, lust, irritation, or that very specific feeling of wanting to strangle the person who just said "just trust the process"—are not intruders. They are perfectly in order. They are, as it were, God-given messengers. And you wouldn't waste a single moment fighting your own nervous system for doing exactly what it's supposed to do. You don't shout at the echo for bouncing back when you call into a canyon. "Why, you impertinent echo! How dare you repeat my exact words back to me with a slight delay! I rebuke you in the name of acoustical propriety!" Absurd, isn't it? Yet here we are, spending our days in full-scale civil war against the very things that make us complete, blasting the echo with a shotgun and wondering why the canyon still talks back. The echo is just your own voice returning to you, and if you don’t like what you hear, the solution is not to silence the canyon; it’s to change the shout. “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). The man’s inner shout shapes his echo. If his thinking is sour, his emotions will smell like a pickle jar left open in the sun. You don’t ban pickles; you change the factory.
The only way to know where you actually stand in your understanding of this universe—what you really, secretly, deep-in-your-bones believe—is to take a good, honest look at your emotional state in any given moment. Your feelings are the painting, splashed across the canvas of your experience in vivid color. Your beliefs are the tiny, almost invisible signature at the bottom. If the painting is a chaotic swirl of dread, resentment, and spiritual indigestion, you don't fix it by throwing turpentine at the canvas. You find the painter and ask him what on earth he was thinking.
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