Tag: Theology and Reflections

Deconstruction Led Me to a Deeper Orthodoxy and Faith

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment
A warmly lit study with a wooden desk and chair, an antique table lamp glowing on the desk, stacks of old books, and tall bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes lining the walls.

When Faith Stops Feeling Life-Giving

I once managed belief like a fragile museum piece, feeling the weight of maintaining it rather than living it. Before deconstruction, my faith felt exhausting. Not because I didn’t believe, but because the answers I had adopted stopped helping me live freely or flourish. Over time, they settled into a shallow kind of idea-ism, a way of thinking about faith that meant my spirituality, my questions, and even my own human experience had to be constantly filtered through categories that needed defending, maintaining, and keeping in order. Faith became something to manage rather than inhabit. Something to defend instead of embody.

Unresolved Theological Tension

Faith started to feel like something that needed constant attention instead of bringing rest. I carried a lot of unresolved tensions. The sharpest was the contradiction of a loving God who was also described as perpetually angry. It was difficult to reconcile the message of the cross as good news with explanations that felt wrong to me. I was told to trust Scripture, but only within rigid boundaries, which impacted how I viewed science and historical contexts. These tensions weren’t just ideas. They manifested in politics and in divided groups. Faith increasingly felt like an exercise in picking sides to stay ‘biblical.’ Underneath, I was sorting people: who was orthodox or heretical, faithful or compromised, who belonged and who didn’t. None of it felt life-giving. All of it carried weight, and over time, that weight became unbearable. Eventually, I didn’t just feel strained. I stopped altogether. I stopped engaging. I stopped trying to hold everything together, not out of rebellious spirit or a hard heart, but out of exhaustion.

Why I Stepped Away

It wasn’t some hidden sin I wanted to justify that led me to deconstruct. Rather, it was the heavy burden of traditional evangelism, a way of holding faith that was slowly hollowing me out rather than giving life. I needed distance. Not dramatically or all at once, but carefully. Slowly and surely, I removed myself from it. Stepping back didn’t feel brave. It felt disorienting. I wasn’t replacing one system with another. I was letting go of the constant explanations and seeing what was left.
At first, stepping back felt uncomfortable, but also freeing. Without my old ways of thinking, I didn’t know what to do next. My prayers changed. I stopped trying to say the right words and just sat with my feelings, embracing these moments as a form of silent prayer or centering. This contemplative posture allowed me to talk less at God and be more present. Faith didn’t come with easy answers anymore. There were no safe categories or certain words. The mystery I used to fear started to feel interesting instead of scary.

Deconstrucion Research

As I went through this, I noticed I wasn’t alone. Increasingly, I realized that deconstruction was happening everywhere. Research shows that about 42 percent of adults have questioned the faith they grew up with, and many still call themselves Christian. Barna’s research says about a third of practising Christians have seriously re-examined their inherited beliefs without leaving their faith. This shows that deconstruction isn’t simply about leaving Christianity. For many, it’s a personal reckoning inside the Church. Commentators such as Scot McKnight helped me understand this further. In Invisible Jesus, McKnight says that much of modern Christianity has replaced the real Jesus with other versions: a political Jesus, a nationalist Jesus, a moral enforcer, or a doctrinal gatekeeper. When people deconstruct, they’re often not rejecting Christ, but these distorted versions, hoping to find the real one.

Deconstruction as Reformation

Seen this way, deconstruction begins to look less like collapse and more like correction. Building on this, it almost ironically carries the marks of reform and renewal. Historically, movements that return people to the centre of faith are rarely neat or reassuring in the moment. They disrupt settled systems and force hard questions. Consider Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517, which challenged the practices of the Church and sparked the Protestant Reformation, a period of profound religious renewal born out of significant disruption. Today, deconstruction feels like that kind of moment. As Brian Zahnd has often said, the future Christian will likely be a mystic, not someone chasing spiritual novelty, but someone formed by presence rather than control, encounter rather than certainty, love in place of fear. Taken together, the data and lived experience tell the same story. Deconstruction is not about killing Christianity. For many, it is about clearing away what is brittle and broken, so that something more ancient, deeper, and more Christ-centred can emerge.

Deconstruction as Formation

When I stepped back, not everything disappeared. In fact, some things stayed, not because I fought to keep them, but because they were never tied to the frameworks I had let go of. Christ stayed. Not as a system to defend or a set of conclusions to maintain, but as the person I kept returning to. Even when I wasn’t sure what I believed, Jesus himself remained compelling. His way of being in the world. His closeness to those on the margins. His refusal to grasp for power. Whatever else shifted, I couldn’t shake him. Sometimes, in silent prayer, it felt like Jesus whispered, ‘I’m here with you.’ It was as if he was telling me, ‘It’s okay to ask questions, to seek understanding. I am with you in your doubts and your discoveries.’ Scripture stayed too. And in many ways, it became more profound. I never stopped loving the Bible. I’ve always been a Bible nerd. What changed wasn’t my affection for the text, but the way I read it. As I let go of the lenses I had adopted, Scripture stopped being something I approached primarily to extract answers or defend positions. It became sacramental. Life-giving. Formative.

Deconstruction and Orthodox

I came to recognise the Bible not as a puzzle to solve, but as a place to meet God. Reading it this way made me slow down. It shaped how I think and what I care about. It worked deep inside me, not just in arguments. The text didn’t always answer my questions, but it kept bringing me back to Christ and to living more like him. That didn’t weaken my faith. It made it stronger. Orthodoxy came back, but it felt different.

What I eventually realised was that orthodoxy really is about healthy boundaries. In its earliest expressions, orthodoxy existed to confront heresy and guard the heart of the Christian confession. The creeds and confessions were shaped in conflict because what was at stake was not abstract correctness, but the truth about God, Christ, and what it means to be human. That work mattered. It still does. What surprised me was discovering that those boundaries were never meant to suffocate faith. They were meant to protect life.

Reading the early Church Fathers made this clear. Figures like Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa were deeply orthodox and fiercely committed to doctrinal clarity, yet their theology was never anxious or thin. For Athanasius, orthodoxy mattered because if Christ is not truly God, then humanity is not truly healed. Doctrine was inseparable from salvation. Gregory of Nyssa, equally committed to the creedal faith, insisted that God always exceeds our concepts. Orthodoxy did not eliminate mystery. It required it. Doctrine named the centre, but it also opened the soul toward continual growth, desire, and transformation.

From there, the tradition opened rather than closed. I found this same orthodoxy expressed across several streams of the Church, in the earthy devotion of Celtic Christianity, in the depth and union spoken of by Catholic and Eastern mystics, and even in modern voices who continue to live this faith attentively and sincerely. Each tradition nurtures humility and compassion, drawing from the same well of Christ’s love and teachings. What united all of it was Christ, not as an idea to defend, but as a life to enter.

Deconstruction didn’t take me away from orthodoxy. It led me into a deeper kind of orthodoxy.

To Those Watching Other’s Deconstruct

That’s why I want to offer a word of caution to those watching others deconstruct: how we respond matters. Treating deconstruction as betrayal, danger, or moral failure does not protect faith. It reinforces the very wounds that made faith unlivable in the first place. If the goal is depth, maturity, and Christlikeness, then fear-driven responses are counter-formative. What deconstructing people need is love, not suspicion. Curiosity, not control. Space to ask honest questions without punishment. Orthodoxy was never meant to be enforced through fear. It was meant to form people into the likeness of Christ.


I didn’t lose my faith. I lost a version of it that could not carry life.
What remains now is not certainty, but commitment. Not answers I can deploy, but a way of living I am learning to inhabit. Christ abides at the centre again. Scripture is sacramental. Orthodoxy is formative. Mystery is no longer something I rush to resolve. For the first time in a long while, faith doesn’t require vigilance. It asks for faithfulness. Faith now feels like breathing, not balancing plates. It sustains me quietly, like a gentle rhythm that I can finally rest in. And that feels like something I can truly live with.

What I Enjoyed Writing This Year (And What It Did to My Faith)

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment
A minimalist photograph of a vintage black typewriter with a blank sheet of paper inserted, centred against a clean white background, evoking reflection, writing, and the quiet act of putting words to page.

The soft rustle of pages turning, the faint smell of ink on paper, and the gentle glow of a lamp late at night frame this reflection. In these quiet moments, I discovered that this year’s writing is not a “best of” list, but a meditation on how it revealed the quiet, patient ways faith grows when I linger with attention and presence. It is a confession of where my attention lingered, and what that lingering did to my faith.

Looking back over my writing, I see a pattern I never planned. Certain themes kept circling back, like the sun lingering at the edge of morning. This single metaphor captures the persistence and gentle growth of my reflections, allowing the essence of faith’s slow, patient unfolding to shine through.

These are the pieces I enjoyed most. Not for their performance, but their honesty. In writing them, something in me grows.

Following the Winter Sun

Writing “Following the Winter Sun” slowed my pace in a way that theology rarely does. It made me honour the Southern Hemisphere, letting winter, darkness, and diminished light shape my imagination instead of borrowing someone else’s spirituality.

What I valued was resisting the pull of urgency, letting theology breathe with the seasons, and sensing God nearer to decline than to growth.

The winter sun does not conquer the darkness. It traces it faithfully.

That piece taught me faith does not always surge ahead. Sometimes it simply turns, just enough to catch whatever light is offered, without demanding more.

Faith and Mental Health: Part I (and 2)

This was among the most vulnerable things I wrote all year, and I could feel that vulnerability in every keystroke.

Here, I was unflinchingly honest, naming spiritual struggle as exhaustion, trauma, or simply a nervous system doing its best to survive.

Writing this clarified something essential for me:
God is not disappointed by wounded faith.

This piece loosened my hold on language that moralises suffering. It let me speak of faith not as pressure, but as permission—permission to heal, to name pain, to stop pretending obedience can skip over the inner world. It offered a holy act of self-compassion, bridging the gap between theology and psychological care. This is where the language of self-kindness finds its sacred place, encouraging readers to apply it to themselves and embrace their healing journey.

Why Christians Should Celebrate Halloween

I was surprised by how much joy I found in writing this one.

I reclaimed imagination from fear, pushing back against the idea that darkness is only dangerous. I reminded myself, and others, that Christianity knows resurrection and twilight both.

Writing about Halloween became a way to name something larger: the Church’s forgotten gift for sitting with death, mystery, and the in-between. We hurry toward light, rarely learning how to walk through dusk.

This piece reminded me that faith, stripped of imagination, grows anxious. Christ’s victory does not ask us to deny death, but to walk through it unafraid.

Healing Before Obedience

If any piece captured the heart of my year, it was this one.

I loved writing Healing Before Obedience because it finally named what I have seen quietly wound people for years: the belief that God wants compliance more than wholeness.

This was the piece where theology and pastoral concern fully met.

Writing it clarified my conviction: obedience without healing breeds distortion, not holiness. Jesus did not demand alignment first, but restored dignity. Transformation flows from love received, not pressure applied.

This post reframed discipleship for me, not as behaviour to be managed, but as the slow mending of a fragmented inner world in God’s presence.

Advent: Maybe Christ Is Waiting for Us

I loved writing this because it turned the usual script upside down.

Instead of us waiting anxiously for God, Advent became a season where God waits patiently for us—to notice, to arrive, to finally stop outrunning grace.

This piece wove the year together: slowness, attention, presence. God is not a void to be filled, but a presence waiting to be recognized. What if Christ has been waiting all along?

Writing it reminded me that Advent is not suspense, but hospitality.

And that Christ is not late.

What These Pieces Taught Me

Looking back, I see what I was really circling all year:

  • God is not in a hurry.
  • Healing is holy work.
  • Fear is not wisdom.
  • Imagination matters.
  • Faith matures through honesty, not performance.

I enjoyed writing these because they let me breathe, felt like careful truth-telling, and helped me resist the urge to hurry toward answers.

Writing did not tidy up my faith this year.
It made my faith gentler.

For the first time, that gentleness feels like real progress.

The Shack: A Reflection

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When William Paul Young wrote The Shack, he was not trying to explain why terrible things happen. He was writing his way through sorrow. Like Job, he sat among the ashes, surrounded by questions that would not rest. Out of that ache came a story. Not a sermon, but a parable about the God who meets us in our broken places.

The Silence of God

In the book of Job, the suffering man cries into the dark, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him.” Mackenzie, the father in The Shack, makes the same cry. He pleads for answers, for justice, for the God who seems to have turned away. And then, like Job, he receives not an explanation but an encounter.

The story reminds us that God does not stand outside pain, observing from a safe distance. God enters it. The cross is not a theory of evil but the place where God shares it. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) once wrote, “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.” When Christ took on our humanity, our confusion, our fear, our grief, He turned suffering into the place where healing begins.

The Human Face of God

What startled many readers of The Shack was how ordinary God seemed. The Father, called Papa, is a warm woman who laughs and bakes bread. The Spirit moves like a soft wind, full of life. Jesus is earthy, playful, and scarred.

For some, this felt irreverent. For others, it was freeing. It reminded us that the mystery of God is larger than our imagination, and that God is not afraid of being close. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202) once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” The divine shows up not in grand displays of power but in the tenderness of relationship.

For me, that image of God as a woman was strangely comforting. I have carried my own wounds around the word “father,” the kind of ache that makes intimacy with God feel complicated. Meeting God first in a motherly form would be a gentler introduction for my heart, an invitation to trust again before I could rediscover what “Father” might really mean. And that is all right.

God is not confined to any one image or gender. Scripture speaks of God as a mother who comforts her child, as a father who runs to embrace his son, as wisdom dancing at creation, as spirit breathing over the waters. God contains them all and yet exceeds them all. When God meets us, it is always in the way that heals us best.

And perhaps that is what The Shack captures so beautifully. God does not always have to relate to us in perfect theological categories. The God of the novel might not look exactly like the Trinitarian formulations of church history, but that does not make the encounter less true. Sometimes what is doctrinally perfect is not what is pastorally healing. Sometimes what is fact is not yet what is good for us.

God meets us where we are, not where we have managed to arrive theologically.

These kitchen scenes of cooking, laughing, and washing dishes are not incidental. They show us that heaven is not far away, and that holiness is not fragile. God is at home in our kitchens and our conversations, in the small things that hold the world together. Bread broken in love is never just bread. It becomes the body of grace in every act of forgiveness.

The Dance of Relationship

The story shows the Trinity not as an idea to explain but as a living dance of love. Mack finds himself in a circle of laughter, humility, and delight. Father, Son, and Spirit moving together. There is no hierarchy, no fear, only mutual joy.

This is what divine life looks like, communion that never ends. Mack’s healing does not come through answers but through being drawn into relationship. He learns to trust again. He learns that forgiveness is not demanded of him but offered to him. The Father holds his pain without rushing him. The Spirit guides him into honesty. Jesus walks beside him in the dirt, showing him that redemption is as simple and sacred as friendship.

The Trinity is not explained here. It is experienced. The story whispers that God’s power is not the power to control but the power to love without limit.

The Mystery of Shared Suffering

When Mack asks why God allowed his daughter to die, God does not give a reason. God grieves with him. The most daring moment in the book is when we see God cry. Those tears are not weakness. They are the heart of compassion.

In Christ, God takes our pain into Himself, and in doing so makes it holy. The tears of God in The Shack reflect the tears of Christ at Lazarus’ tomb, tears that do not remove death but transform it.

The story shifts our question from Why does God allow suffering? to Where is God in my suffering? And the answer, again and again, is Here.

The Shacks We Carry

Each of us has a shack, a place in our hearts that we have boarded up, a room where grief or guilt still lives. We avoid it. We build our lives around it. But this story invites us to step inside again, not alone but with God.

When we dare to enter that place, we may find what Mack finds, that the very ground of our pain can become the ground of God’s presence. The shack becomes a temple. It becomes a place of communion.

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) once wrote, “God became what we are, that He might make us what He is.” In other words, God steps fully into our humanity so that our humanity can be gathered into divine love. God meets Mack not to undo what happened, but to show him that nothing, not even the deepest wound, can separate him from love. What changes is not the past but the way it is carried, from isolation to belonging, from despair to trust.

An Invitation

Perhaps The Shack is not a story to be solved but a space to inhabit. It does not offer tidy explanations. It opens a room for encounter. It asks whether we are willing to meet God, not the idea of God, but the living presence who cooks, who laughs, who cries, who stays.

So maybe the question for us is this.
Where is our own shack?
Where is that place we have locked away because it hurts too much to enter?
And what if God is already there, waiting by the fire, patient as bread rising in the oven, whispering, “You were never meant to carry this alone”?

The heart of the story is not about understanding suffering but about discovering love. It is not about solving God but trusting God. Faith is not built on answers. It is built on presence.

And maybe that is the quiet truth of The Shack: that God is nearer than we ever dared to believe, nearer than our pain, nearer than our fear, nearer than our own breath.

When Christians Misunderstand the Gospel: Why “God Reigns” Is More Radical Than We Think

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment
A lone silhouetted figure runs along a distant mountain ridge beneath a vast twilight sky of deep blue and violet. Golden light breaks at the horizon, symbolising heaven and earth meeting in the reign of God. The atmosphere is quiet, cosmic, and filled with hope.

What if the greatest misunderstanding in modern Christianity is not about morality or politics but about the gospel itself? What if the good news we share is smaller than the one Jesus announced?

We often describe the gospel as a private story about forgiveness, heaven and personal salvation. Yet in Scripture the gospel is something far larger. It is the announcement that God reigns. It is not only about the state of our souls but about the state of the world. It is a claim about reality itself, a declaration that creation has a rightful King.

And that claim changes everything.

The Gospel as Royal Proclamation

In Hebrew, the word for good news is besorah, a royal announcement of victory (Isaiah 52). In Greek, it is euangelion, the public declaration that a king has triumphed (Mark 1).

Imagine an ancient city under siege. The people wait behind their walls, anxious for word from the battlefield. Then a runner appears on the hills, covered in dust, shouting between breaths, “Good news! Victory! The king has won!”

That was euangelion. It was not advice or philosophy but the kind of announcement that makes the world different because it is true.

When Isaiah writes, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’” (Isaiah 52:7), he is describing that runner. The heart of the gospel is that Yahweh has returned to rule His world.

Centuries later, Jesus begins His ministry with the same royal declaration: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). He is not inventing a new religion but announcing that Israel’s long-awaited hope has arrived. God’s reign is breaking in.

The Kingdom Woven into Creation

The story of God’s Kingdom does not begin with Jesus. It begins in Genesis, where the rhythm of creation beats with divine rule (Genesis 1-2).

In the first three days, God shapes the realms of creation: light and darkness, sky and sea, land and vegetation. In the next three, He fills those realms with rulers: the sun and moon, the birds and fish, the animals and humanity.

The story is one of order and relationship. God reigns by creating and sharing. His rule is not control but care. Humanity, made in His image (Genesis 1:26-28), is invited to share that reign and to reflect His goodness, justice and creativity into the world.

To rule, in the biblical sense, is not to dominate. It is to cultivate. It is to join God in the work of making the world flourish.

The Kingdom of God is not a future dream. It is the structure of reality itself. Heaven and earth were made to live together (Genesis 2:15). Sin fractures that harmony, but the mission of God is to bring it back, to restore what was lost and heal what was broken.

Jesus: The King in Person

When Jesus announces the Kingdom, He is not speaking about a distant future or an inner feeling. He is proclaiming a change of reality. Where He walks, heaven and earth meet. The sick are healed, the outcasts restored, and the powers of darkness pushed back (Luke 4:18-9; Matthew 12:28).

At the cross, the world’s false rulers do their worst. Yet in that act of humiliation, the true King is enthroned (John 19:19). Through resurrection, His victory is declared not over Rome but over the powers that hold all creation captive: sin, death and decay (1 Corinthians 15:25-26).

Paul’s hymn in Colossians captures it perfectly:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. In Him all things hold together. Through Him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (Colossians 1:15-20).

This is not private spirituality. It is cosmic renewal. Christ holds the whole story together. In Him, the Creator’s original dream of heaven and earth united is set in motion again.

The People of the King

The early Christians understood this far better than we often do. They did not treat faith as an escape plan but as a new citizenship (Philippians 3:20). They believed that the Spirit who raised Jesus now lived within them, calling them to live as citizens of a new world (Romans 8:11).

Every act of love and hospitality, every work of justice or reconciliation, was an echo of the good news. It was a small proclamation that “our God reigns” (Isaiah 52:7).

The Kingdom is not confined to heaven or to church gatherings (though, as I argue elsewhere, the church should be a slice of the new creation). It is wherever the reign of Christ shapes hearts and habits, homes and communities (Matthew 5-7). It is wherever people reflect His character in the ordinary and the everyday.

N. T. Wright once said that the church does not bring the Kingdom by force; it embodies it by faithfulness. That is the invitation: to embody the reign of the King.

The Kingdom Completed: New Creation

The story of Scripture ends where it began, but expanded and fulfilled. A garden becomes a city. Heaven and earth are reunited.

John’s vision in Revelation captures it:

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth… and I heard a voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals’” (Revelation 21:1–3).

This is not an escape from the world, but rather its healing. The good news is not that we leave creation, but that God enters into it and restores it (Romans 8:19–21).

Every tear will be wiped away. Every injustice will be answered. The scars of the old world will become the beauty of the new (Revelation 21:4–5). The reign of God will fill everything.

Living Under His Reign

If the gospel is the announcement that God reigns, then discipleship is the art of living as if that reign were already true (Matthew 6:10). Repentance means realigning with reality, turning from our small empires to join the life of the King.

Faith is allegiance. It is trust that God’s rule is good and that life under His care is freedom, not bondage (John 8:36).

Every prayer, every meal, every act of mercy or courage is a way of saying again, “Your God reigns” (Isaiah 52:7).

The gospel is not good advice. It is good news.

And that news is this: heaven has begun to come down to earth. The reign of God is arriving quietly, patiently, beautifully, until all things are made new.

Not Drenched, But Drawn: Rethinking Baptism in the Spirit

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“The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

—Romans 8:16

They told us to wait for the wind.

To pray until the fire fell.

To tarry until we were baptised again—

not in water, but in power.

And so we did.

We begged for signs.

For the sudden tongue,

the holy heat,

the trembling proof that God had come close.

But God had already come close.

The Language That Divides

The phrase “baptism in the Spirit” has become a boundary line—between the anointed and the merely saved, between the spiritually alive and the doctrinally dull. But Scripture speaks differently. It does not cast the Spirit as a second experience but as the seal of the first.

In 1 Corinthians 12:13, Paul writes:

“For in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body.”

Not some. Not a chosen few. All. The Spirit is not a delayed second act. He is the very breath we inhale at new birth. The theology of “Spirit baptism” as a dramatic post-conversion event, often used to signal deeper intimacy or greater power, too easily fractures the body of Christ. It creates a hierarchy of holiness, a performance of spirituality, an upper room without a cross. But Pentecost was never a formula. It was the fulfilment of an ancient promise—God with us, within us, among us.

The Spirit as Union, Not Upgrade

Jesus breathes on His disciples in John 20 and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

No rushing wind.
No thunder.
Just breath.

No spectacle—only substance.
This is not emotional hype,
not a dopamine rush mistaken for doxology.
It is Genesis again: the Spirit hovering,
and then entering—God breathing into dust,
and dust waking to communion.

It is Ezekiel’s valley, bones strewn like broken hope,
and the Word, like a prophet’s cry, calling sinews and skin back to purpose—
but only breath makes them truly live.
Not machinery of religion. Not memory of tradition.
Only breathe.
Only Spirit.

This is no theatrical power (though it can sometimes happen, like in Acts 2).
No divine electricity waiting for a better switch.
The Spirit is not the upgrade to your faith.
He is its origin and its goal—
The bond that binds us into the Triune life.

To receive the Spirit is not to perform
but to participate.
To be drawn into the perichoresis—
that dance of Father, Son, and Spirit,
where love has no beginning and union knows no end.

The Spirit is not a badge you earn, not a second tier for the elite.

He is the down payment of our inheritance (Eph 1:13–14), the seal of our adoption (Rom 8:15), the whisper that dares call God Abba.

He is not the sensation of holiness,
But the substance of it.
Not proof of ecstasy,
but the presence of intimacy.

“He who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.”
—1 Corinthians 6:17

This is the deepest baptism—
not of water, fire, or even tongues or trembling limbs.
But of union.
Of soul sealed to Spirit.
Of a humanity lifted into the life of God.

Participation in the Triune Life

To be filled with the Spirit is not to overflow with noise,

But to abide in silence, thick with love.

To be caught up in the life of the Trinity.

The early church spoke of theosis—

that we become by grace what Christ is by nature.

“That you may become partakers of the divine nature.”

—2 Peter 1:4

Not a Second Baptism—A First Love

We are not waiting for the Spirit.

We are awakening to Him.

Not tarrying for power,

But turning to Presence.

The language of “Spirit baptism” has too often led us to look for a moment,

a manifestation,

a miracle.

But the Spirit is not a showman.

He is the Spirit of adoption.

He teaches us to cry, “Abba.”

To know God not in performance.

But in participation.

Not in a fire that consumes

But in flame that communes.