Vine Abiders Podcast

The Death of My Wife, Connie | Faith, Cancer, Trials, and Endurance

In this personal podcast, I talk about the death of my wife, Connie, after her battle with a rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer. I share memories of Connie’s extraordinary life, our marriage, her faith, and the many lessons I learned through suffering, caregiving, cancer, prayer, and grief. I also discuss the realities of the cancer industry, the spiritual nature of trials, and the peace that can come through enduring hardship faithfully. C.E. White Books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/C.E.-White/author/B077V7FVPT [https://www.amazon.com/stores/C.E.-White/author/B077V7FVPT] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vineabiders.substack.com [https://vineabiders.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

White-Knuckling it VS the Power of the Holy Spirit As it Relates to Salvation

This was a impromptu podcast in response to a question I received. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vineabiders.substack.com [https://vineabiders.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Two Words You DON'T ACTUALLY Know: Gospel & Faith

There are two words that sit right at the center of everything Christians talk about. Two words you’ve heard a thousand times. Gospel. And faith. Every pastor assumes that everybody knows what these words mean. But what I want to suggest to you today is that most of us don’t really know what either of them means. And I don’t mean we’re fuzzy on the details. I mean we’ve gotten the definitions of these words completely wrong. I want to be clear. This is not some fringe idea. The scholars behind this reassessment, people like Drs. Matthew Bates, Scot McKnight, Nijay K. Gupta, N.T. Wright, are not radicals. They are working from the original Greek texts, from the historical context of the first century, and from church history. And they keep arriving at the same conclusions. This presentation will be in two parts. Part One: what the gospel actually is. And Part Two: what faith, that is the Greek word pistis, actually means in context. PART ONE: THE GOSPEL First, let’s talk about what the Gospel Is Not If you ask most Christians today to define the gospel, you’re likely going to get one of two answers. The first answer sounds something like this: we are all sinners. We’ve broken God’s law. And because God is holy and just, that sin has to be dealt with. The good news, the gospel, is that Jesus dealt with it for us. He died in our place. And now, if you believe that, if you put your faith in what he did, you are forgiven, you are right with God, and you have eternal life. Those are real things that Scripture more or less teaches. But the argument we’re going to make is that that’s not the gospel. Or at least, it’s not a complete definition of the gospel. And treating it as the whole thing produces real problems. The second common answer to what the gospel is is similar: that the gospel is specifically what happened at the cross, that Jesus died for our sins. Different traditions offer various theories about how his death paid for our sins, but they would say that understanding and believing that our sins were dealt with at the cross is the gospel. The fact that Jesus died for our sins is absolutely part of the gospel. We’re going to see that Paul explicitly includes it in his gospel presentations. But saying the gospel is essentially the story of how the cross dealt with our sin problem, taking that one piece and calling it the whole thing, that’s where we start to go wrong. Both reductions, justification by faith as the gospel, and atonement theory as the gospel, share the same underlying flaw: they make the rest of the ministry of Jesus theologically unnecessary. If justification by faith is the gospel, the four books we literally call the Gospels don’t contain the gospel. Everything Jesus said and did becomes background material. You could construct the entire gospel without ever opening Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. So if those things aren’t the gospel, what is? Start with the word itself. Euangelion, the Greek word we translate as gospel, means good news. Specifically though, it’s the kind of news that gets publicly proclaimed. And in the ancient Greco-Roman world, it had an even more specific meaning. It was the kind of announcement you made when a king won a battle. When a royal heir took the throne. When the political order of the realm fundamentally changed. It was a public proclamation so that the people of that realm would know that everything is different now, that they had a new king. However, in the Christian context I like to think of the gospel this way: you’re trying to convince someone that Jesus is their rightful king, and to do that, you often need to explain the story of Jesus’s royal career, his pre-existence with God in heaven, how he became a man, his fulfillment of these ancient prophecies about the coming king, his death for sins, his resurrection, his enthronement, and his coming return. The four books called the Gospels tell this story because the whole story matters when trying to convince someone that they have a king and that king is worthy of their devotion. For a first-century Jew, part of that case was genealogical. They already knew a king was coming. So you had to show them that Jesus came from the line of David, that he fulfilled what the prophets said, that he was the king that they had been waiting for. If you had to pick a single part of the gospel that best captured this idea, it might be the resurrection and enthronement, because that is when Jesus took his seat at God’s right hand on the throne prepared for him. This is why Hebrews can say Jesus endured the cross “for the joy set before him.” There was something waiting on the other side of his mission on earth. The throne was the prize. The suffering was the path to it. The resurrection and enthronement in heaven was the moment of transfer. Jesus moved from Son of God to Son-of-God-in-Power. And this idea is given prominent place in Romans 1:2-4, which is one of the most clear definitions of the gospel according to Paul: “This gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his Son who was a descendant of David with reference to the flesh, who was appointed the Son-of-God-in-power according to the Holy Spirit by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 1:2-4) Then there’s the passage in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul spends at least 25 verses explaining the Gospel. He says that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures (v. 3), that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day. Paul then goes on to describe at length how Jesus appeared to specific witnesses. After that, he explains why the resurrection matters for his readers, showing how it is connected to their own eternal life. Finally, in verses 24-25, he connects the resurrection to Jesus’s reign in heaven, stating that Jesus must reign until all His enemies are put under His feet. And then there’s Paul’s gospel presentation in Philippians 2:5-11 which says: Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11) Paul’s highlights here include the pre-existence of Christ in divine form, his voluntary self-emptying and incarnation as a human being, his life of servanthood, his obedient death on the cross, his subsequent exaltation by God, and his universal lordship over all creation, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. Notice where the story ends in all three of those gospel messages. With Jesus as a ruling, authoritative king in heaven. That’s the climax. Not the cross. The throne. Different people will need to enter this story from a different angle. The guilt-ridden need to hear about the death that cleanses. The enslaved need to hear about the king who broke the powers. The skeptic needs the historical witnesses. The person drowning in meaninglessness needs to know history has a king and a destination. The entry point varies. But the destination is always the same: Jesus is the rightful king of the universe, not one option among many, but the actual Lord to whom every life is accountable. PART TWO: WHAT IS FAITH? But now that we know what the gospel actually is, we need to know how do we respond to it? And that brings us to Part Two of this presentation: what is the meaning of faith? We know that the correct response to hearing the gospel is faith. We have heard it all of our lives. The problem is, we have forgotten what that word means too, and it is causing significant problems. The Greek word pistis, which is often translated as “faith,” has been so stripped of its original meaning that what most Christians mean when they say “have faith” has very little to do with what Paul meant when he wrote the word pistis. Here’s how Matthew Bates, author of Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance, puts it: pistis, generally rendered as faith or belief, as it pertains to Christian salvation, quite simply has little correlation with faith and belief as these words are generally understood and used in contemporary Christian culture, and much to do with what we think of as “allegiance.” Now, an important clarification before we go any further. Nobody is arguing that pistis means allegiance in every single place it appears in the New Testament. The word has a genuine range of meaning, and most of those meanings are perfectly captured by our English words. When a leper comes to Jesus and says I believe you can heal me, that’s trust, that’s confidence, and “faith” is exactly the right translation. When Jesus says “your faith has made you well,” nobody needs to redefine anything. The argument is narrower than that. It’s specifically about the salvation passages, the texts where Paul and the other New Testament writers describe what it means to respond to the gospel, what puts you in right standing before God. In those passages, pistis means something far richer than what most modern Christians picture when they hear the word “believe.” As we saw, Matthew Bates, and many scholars agree with him, proposes that the best English translation of pistis in this context is allegiance. Here’s why that word fits. In political and royal contexts, and this is well established in the Greek literature of the New Testament era, pistis consistently carries the meaning of loyalty, fidelity, allegiance to a king or sovereign. The same word your New Testament translates as “faith” was the word Greek speakers naturally reached for when describing a subject’s sworn loyalty to his king. And here’s the thing about Paul: he is always talking about a king. Every single time Paul writes “Jesus Christ,” Christ is not a last name. It is a title. It means the Messiah, the Anointed One, the King. Paul is constantly speaking about the enthroned king when he uses pistis language. The gospel he proclaims climaxes with a coronation. Given that context, what is the most natural meaning of the required response? Not a private internal feeling of trust. Allegiance. Sworn loyalty to the one who has been installed on the throne. In Romans 1:5, Paul describes his entire mission as bringing about “the obedience of pistis” among the nations. Not obedience that follows pistis. Not obedience alongside pistis. The obedience of pistis. That construction only makes sense if pistis already contains loyal commitment within it. You would never say “the obedience of belief.” But “the obedience of allegiance” is completely natural, because allegiance by definition is the kind of thing that produces obedience. So the way to read some of the famous justification passages would be something like this: But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through the allegiance of Jesus the Christ for all who give allegiance. Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through the allegiance of Jesus the Christ, so we also have given allegiance to Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by the allegiance of the Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. (Gal. 2:16) Now, brothers and sisters, I bring to your attention the gospel that I gospeled to you, which you received, on which you stand, and through which also you are being saved, that is, if you hold fast to the word that I gospeled to you, unless you have given allegiance in vain. (1 Cor. 15:1-2) So what does this resolve? Quite a lot, as it turns out. One of the things that has fractured Christianity into so many competing traditions is that the New Testament seems to require different things for salvation depending on which passage you’re reading. And different traditions have built entire systems on one or two of those passages while quietly setting the others aside. John 3:16 emphasizes belief, while Acts 2:38 calls for repentance and baptism. In Luke 13:3, Jesus warns that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish, and in Romans 10:9, Paul teaches that one must confess with the mouth and believe in the heart. Furthermore, Matthew 24:13 speaks of enduring to the end in order to be saved, whereas James 2:24 states that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Pistis as allegiance holds all of it together. Because what does genuine allegiance to a king actually include? It obviously includes believing he is who he claims to be. But it also includes turning from your former life, that’s repentance. It includes public declaration of whose side you’re on, that’s confession. It includes following his specific instructions, one of which is baptism. It includes doing what he says, not just nodding along, that’s the works passages. And it includes staying loyal over time, that’s endurance. None of these are separate requirements bolted onto faith. They are all aspects of allegiance to a king. And this also makes sense of something that has puzzled interpreters for centuries. If works are the enemy of faith, why does James say flatly in James 2:24, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone”? Now, Paul does contrast faith and works in many places, and he is right to do so. You cannot earn your way into the kingdom. You cannot bring circumcision, or moral achievement to that first moment and use it to purchase access to God. When Paul says we are saved by pistis and not by works, he means the door is open to anyone who will simply bend the knee to the new king. You don’t have to qualify first. You don’t have to clean yourself up first. Allegiance is the only entry requirement. But allegiance is not nothing. It is not a private feeling you have once and then move on. A subject who swears loyalty to his king and then ignores everything the king says hasn’t given allegiance. This is exactly what James is saying when he says: But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless? (James 2:18-20) James isn’t contradicting Paul. He is describing what real allegiance looks like from the outside: it produces works, it endures, it obeys. Pistis without works isn’t a weak allegiance. It isn’t allegiance at all. So the tension that has puzzled interpreters for centuries dissolves. Works cannot get you in, only allegiance can do that. But once you are in, allegiance requires works. The same word covers both realities, because that is what loyalty to a king has always meant. So what does this actually look like in practice? If you genuinely have pistis, if you have truly bent the knee to Jesus as your king, then the natural, obvious next move is to go find out what he wants. And here’s where the four Gospels come back in, because this is exactly what they’re for. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a list of impossible demands designed to show you how badly you need grace. It’s the law of the king. It’s what life in his kingdom looks like. This is what all the earliest Christians believed. When Jesus says love your enemies, turn the other cheek, don’t lust, forgive, he means it. He’s not winking at you. He’s telling you what he wants from his subjects. And if he’s your king, you go and do it. Not by white-knuckling it in your own strength, but through the Holy Spirit he gives you when you come to him. As Jesus himself said, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do the things that I say? The word Lord means master. If he’s your master, you do what he says. Now none of this means sinless perfection. Sanctification is a process. The picture is not that you bend the knee and immediately get everything right. The picture is that the king points to the next thing, and you work on it, and there is grace on the road while you do. Salvation is not a single moment but a journey. God is continuously at work in the believer, progressively transforming them from the inside out. The new birth is the beginning, not the destination. What follows is a life of growth, of the Holy Spirit working in you, of being conformed increasingly to the image of the king you’ve submitted to. That is the normal Christian life as the New Testament describes it. And here’s the good news that gets missed when people hear this framework for the first time: you have an advocate. First John 2 says: “if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” An advocate. Someone pleading your case before the Father. Not because you’ve earned it, but because you belong to him. But repentance comes before the refreshing, not after. Acts 3:19, repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. You must repent. People wait to feel ready. They want the desire to go away before they commit to stopping. But that’s backwards. You draw the line first. You give your allegiance, which includes the relinquishing of the sin that has you in bondage. And then the power to walk in the new direction is given. You can’t ask the king to take away the desire for something you haven’t surrendered to him yet. So here is the gospel, and here is the proper response to it. Jesus is the King of the Universe. He was promised, he came, he lived, he died for your sins, he was raised, and he was installed on the throne. He is reigning right now. And every knee will soon bow to him. The only question is whether yours bows now, willingly, or later, at the judgment. The proper response to that message is allegiance to this king. What that looks like, practically and concretely, is that you go read the Gospels. You find out what he says. You do it. Not by your own power, but through the Holy Spirit he gives you the moment he cleanses you with his blood and forgives every previous sin, every failure, everything, completely forgotten. And if you once knew this and walked away from it, if you’re in the pigsty right now, pointing to some moment in the past as your assurance while your life tells a different story, he’s got his hand out to you too. As long as you have breath in your lungs, that hand is there, but you don’t get unlimited chances. Come back now. Not to a prayer, not to a decision. Come back to the king. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vineabiders.substack.com [https://vineabiders.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Life Is a Test: Suffering and the Meaning of Life

There’s a kind of honesty that sounds cruel at first but turns out to be exactly what people need to hear. In 1914, Ernest Shackleton reportedly placed an advertisement in a London newspaper for his Antarctic expedition. The ad read something like this: Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. Whether the ad is apocryphal or not, the story endures because it captures something true about human nature — the brutal honesty of it didn’t drive people away. It drew them in. Something in us responds to a call that tells the truth about the cost, because when the stakes are real, the reward is real too. I want to make a similar case here. What I’m about to say might sound harsh — but I think it’s exactly what people need to hear. Life contains real tests. Your choices have real, eternal consequences. The suffering you’re going through right now is the very place where that test is being administered. And the outcome of that test is not just about whether you become a better person or whether God uses your pain for some greater good down the road. The outcome could be about heaven or hell. I genuinely believe that hard truth is actually more encouraging and steadying for the person lying in a hospital bed than anything they’ll typically hear from a Christian trying to explain their suffering. Not because it’s easy — it isn’t. But because it’s real. And people who are suffering don’t need comfortable half-answers. They need to know that what they’re going through actually matters, that there is a real enemy trying to use their pain against them, and that there is a real and eternal reward waiting for those who endure faithfully even unto death. But we need to build the case carefully. So let’s start at the beginning. Everything Downstream of One Conviction Before we get to suffering, we have to talk about the theological premise that makes all of this necessary. If once saved, always saved (OSAS) is true, then nothing in this post matters much. Whatever you do, however you behave in your suffering, the end is secured. But if OSAS isn’t true — if free will really matters and your choices genuinely have eternal consequences — then everything changes. Free will, when you actually believe in it, is a serious thing. It’s much more comfortable to believe it’s all going to work out no matter what you do. But if your choices really matter, then the question of what your suffering means stops being merely pastoral or philosophical. It becomes urgent. It becomes a matter of life and death. What the Bible Actually Says About Testing There are not one or two isolated verses about testing in the Bible. There is a consistent, pervasive, Old Testament-to-New Testament pattern of God explicitly testing people to see what they will do. The Old Testament Pattern Genesis 22:11–12 — When Abraham raised the knife over his son and the angel of the Lord stopped him, God’s own explanation for what had just happened was this: “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.” Deuteronomy 8:2 — Moses, looking back on forty years in the wilderness, gives us the interpretive key for that entire season of Israel’s history: “You shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.” The wilderness, in its totality, was a test. The explicit goal was to find out what was in their hearts — whether they would obey or not. And it’s worth pausing here to remember that many people failed that test catastrophically. The earth swallowed some of them. Others were destroyed. This was not a test with automatic grace for failure. The consequences were real. Deuteronomy 13:3 — On false prophets who might arise and perform signs: “You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” Judges 3:4 — On the pagan nations left in Canaan after the conquest: “They were for testing Israel, to find out if they would obey the commandments of the LORD, which He had commanded their fathers through Moses.” God left nations there — nations that would tempt Israel toward idolatry, toward compromise, toward sin — on purpose, as a test, to see what Israel would do. The surrounding culture is not an obstacle to the test. The surrounding culture is the test. Exodus 16:4 — Even the manna in the wilderness was a test: “Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether or not they will walk in My instruction.’” 2 Chronicles 32:31 — Of King Hezekiah: “Even in the matter of the envoys of the rulers of Babylon, who sent to him to inquire of the wonder that had happened in the land, God left him alone only to test him, that He might know all that was in his heart.” Jeremiah 17:10 — A summary statement from God Himself: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.” The Book of Job: The Test Laid Bare Job is the Old Testament’s most transparent window into why testing happens and what is actually at stake. We get to see the backstage conversation that usually remains hidden. Here is Job: blameless, upright, fearing God, turning away from evil. And Satan comes before the Lord with a charge. The charge is not that Job is a sinner. The charge is that Job’s righteousness is bought — that he serves God only because God blesses him. Take away the blessing, Satan says, and Job will curse God to his face. What is at stake in the book of Job? Exactly one thing: whether Job will sin. That’s it. Everything — the loss of his children, his wealth, his health, the horrific suffering of his body — is all organized around that single question. Will he sin? Will he curse God? And the answer, at the end, is: “In all this, Job did not sin.” Job passes. And I believe one of the reasons he passes — is that what God initially says about him is true, he has a genuine fear of God. He knows, in some form, that sin has real consequences in the afterlife. m The New Testament Raises the Stakes The New Testament picks up this testing theme and sharpens it.line. James 1:12: “Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.” This is an if-then statement with eternity on both sides. Once he has been approved — that approval is not guaranteed. The blessing is conditional on perseverance. The crown of life is what’s at stake. Luke 8:13 — Jesus himself, explaining the Parable of the Sower: “Those on the rocky soil are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no firm root; they believe for a while, and in time of temptation fall away.” Jesus is not describing unbelievers who never responded to the gospel. He is describing people who heard, who received the word with joy, who believed. These are people who had a genuine response to the message of the kingdom — and then, in time of temptation, fell away. 1 Thessalonians 3:4–5 — Paul writing to the Thessalonians about why he sent Timothy to check on them: “For indeed when we were with you, we kept telling you in advance that we were going to suffer affliction… For this reason, when I could endure it no longer, I also sent to find out about your faith, for fear that the tempter might have tempted you, and our labor would be in vain.” This passage is a remarkable window into how Paul actually thought about suffering and temptation. Notice what he was afraid of. Not that the Thessalonians had become discouraged. Not that they had lost hope or grown weary. He was afraid that the tempter had gotten to them — that Satan had used their suffering as an opportunity, and that their faith had not survived it. And notice what that would have meant: Paul’s labor would have been in vain. Not diminished. Not partially wasted. Vain. Revelation 2:10: “Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, so that you will be tested, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.” These are Christians. They are going to suffer. They are going to be tested. And the instruction is: be faithful until death. The implication of that instruction is clear — faithfulness is required, and its absence has consequences. The crown of life is not promised to those who simply endure passively. It is promised to those who are faithful in the endurance. The Two Typical Explanations Of Suffering — And What They Miss When Christians suffer, there are typically two explanations offered, both of them biblical, both of them true, and both of them incomplete. The first is Romans 8:28 — God is going to work this together for good. Something redemptive will come out of this. You don’t know what He’s doing, but He’s doing something. He’s going to use your cancer, your loss, your crisis, to accomplish something good in this world. The second is the refining explanation — suffering is the fire that purifies gold. It is producing something in you. Romans 5:3–4: “We also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope.” Both of these are real. Both are biblical. I’m not dismissing either of them. But here is the problem: both of them are almost entirely this-life-focused. God is going to use this for good — for someone, somewhere, in this world. Or: this is going to make you a better, more complete person in this life. The application is horizontal. But we need the third explanation — not to replace the other two, but to complete them. And it is this: this suffering is often a test of whether you will sin in the midst of that suffering or not, and the outcome of that test has eternal consequences. What Is Actually Being Tested Here is something that almost nobody in modern Christianity is talking about: when you are suffering, you are often being tempted to sin. Satan’s weapon of choice is suffering, because suffering is where we are most vulnerable — when everything is taken away, when the body is in pain, when the losses mount and the isolation deepens, that is when the temptations hit hardest. The first and most obvious temptation is bitterness toward God. It usually doesn't start with outright cursing — it starts with a question. Why is He doing this to me? What did I do to deserve this? Where is God in all of this? That spiral, if you follow it long enough, ends in the same place Job's wife ended up: cursing the God who allowed the suffering. Satan will push on this one with everything he has, because it's his easiest win. But when that doesn’t work, he changes tactics. He goes after unforgiveness. In any prolonged suffering event — a long illness, a financial collapse, a broken relationship — there are going to be micro-betrayals. Doctors who make mistakes. Friends who don’t show up. Family members who say the wrong thing. People who were supposed to help and didn’t. And Satan is going to use every single one of those as a wedge. Unforgiveness is not a minor matter in the New Testament. Jesus says it plainly, more than once, if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you. Satan will also come after you with sensuality, with anger, with the temptation to numb the pain in ways that lead to death. He is prowling around looking for whom he may devour, and suffering is his hunting ground. The Hard Truth Is the Encouraging Truth Now I want to come back to where we started. Because everything I’ve said so far might sound grim. Life is a test. Suffering is a temptation mechanism. Your choices matter. Hell is on the line. That sounds like bad news. But I want to argue that it is, in a profound and perhaps surprising way, the most encouraging thing a person in the midst of suffering can hear. The person who is dying of cancer, who has been told by everyone around them that God is going to work this together for good, who has been reassured that God loves them and has a plan — that person is still in pain. And the reassurance, as well-intentioned as it is, doesn’t reach them in the place where they most need to be reached. Because the suffering is not mostly about God’s plan for the world. The suffering is happening to them, now, in their body, in their life, today. But now tell that person the other thing. Tell them: what you do in this suffering matters. Your soul is on the line. Satan is coming for you right now, and he wants you to curse God, to hold on to unforgiveness, to give up. And if you fight him — if you endure faithfully — you will receive the crown of life. And not just the crown of life in some abstract doctrinal sense, but the real thing: an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, something no eye has seen and no ear has heard. Paul says it plainly in 2 Corinthians 4:17: “For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The Narrow Road and the Shape of This Age Let me say something about the bigger picture, because the testing framework isn’t just about individual suffering events. It’s about what this age — this whole period of human history — actually is. The earth, as originally intended, was not a test, or at least not in the way it is now. Something was disrupted when the enemy entered the picture and death entered the world through sin. What we are living in now — this broken, painful, morally charged existence — is not Plan A. It is the working out of a cosmic disruption, and God is, as He always does, working even that together for good. And the good He is working toward is this: He is choosing people. He is identifying, out of the whole of humanity, those who will pass through the narrow gate. Very few find it. Jesus is explicit about this: “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13–14) This is a choosing ground. That’s what this age is. The ones who pass through — who endure faithfully, who keep their allegiance to King Jesus — they are not just kingdom citizens. They are heirs. Paul says it: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. That is a designation beyond what any of us can fully comprehend. What comes next — what these heirs are being prepared for — is something about which the Bible says: “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9) Think about what eternity actually means. In eight hundred million years — in ten trillion years — the people who passed through this narrow road, who endured faithfully in this brief and brutal training ground, will still be alive, still be who they are, still be the ones who endured. This age — this whole age — will be looked back on as the early days. The mythical time when a cosmic rebellion happened and God, rather than simply undoing it, used it to call out a people for Himself. And not just any people — heirs. Sons and daughters. Those who passed through something the angels never faced: a free will gauntlet, a world filled with suffering and temptation and real consequences. There is reason to think that what comes out of this age is something greater than what existed before it — beings who are not merely created righteous, but proven righteous. Who chose God when they didn't have to. That may be precisely why Paul says we will judge angels. What Faithfully Enduring Through Suffering Actually Looks Like I want to be specific about what it means to endure faithfully, because it is not passive. It is not gritting your teeth and surviving. It is active warfare. When Satan comes at you and tells you to hate the person who wronged you: you love them instead. You forgive them. Not because it feels good — it won’t — but because you know what is at stake. When Satan comes at you and tells you to start drinking again, to give in to whatever the flesh is drawn toward in the darkness: you resist him. James 4:7: “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” That promise is real, and it is for people who are fighting, not coasting. The Gospel of the King and the Only Response That Makes Sense All of this leads back to the gospel — the actual gospel, not the reduced version. The gospel is not primarily “Jesus died so your sins are forgiven.” That is part of it. But the full announcement is: Jesus Christ is the King of the universe. He has been raised from the dead and enthroned. He reigns. And the appropriate response to that announcement is allegiance — bending the knee, pledging your loyalty to him as King. And if he is your King, then the next thing you do is ask what he wants. You open Matthew. You read the Sermon on the Mount. You hear what the King says about how to live, and you do it, because he is your King and that is what allegiance means. The end of the Sermon on the Mount says it plainly: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell — and great was its fall.” (Matthew 7:24–27) The floods are coming. The winds are coming. Suffering is coming. And the only question is whether you’ve built on the rock of obedience to the King or the sand of believing that it doesn’t really matter what you do. It matters. It matters enormously. And the good news — the genuinely good news — is that you are not alone in the fight. The King knows you are being tested. He has passed through his own test and emerged victorious. He has sent his Spirit as a deposit and a help. He does not want you to perish. He is testing you because he loves you and because he is choosing you, and his deepest desire is that you pass. A Word on Failing Tests — and God’s Patience I want to make sure I’m not being misunderstood here, because this is important. When I say that these tests are pass-fail and that hell is on the line, I am not saying that if you fail a test, that’s it — you’re done, you’re going to hell. That is not how this usually works. God does not want anyone to perish. That isn’t a platitude — it’s a theological conviction that shapes everything about how He deals with us. He is patient. He is long-suffering. And because of that, He keeps sending tests. He keeps giving opportunities. He is, in a very real sense, rooting for you to pass. Think about Israel in the wilderness. They failed constantly. They failed spectacularly. And God kept working with them, kept pursuing them, kept offering another chance. The tests didn’t stop after the first failure, or the fifth, or the fiftieth. But here’s the other side of that: there are only so many years in your life. There are only so many opportunities. A life is a finite thing, and eventually the tests stop This is why the urgency matters. Not because one failure condemns you, but because patterns form, and habits harden, and the person who keeps failing the same test — who keeps choosing sin when the pressure comes — is moving in a direction. And that direction has a destination. The good news is that you can change direction at any point. The door is open. But it will not be open forever. So if you have been failing your tests — if suffering has made you bitter, if you have been holding onto unforgiveness, if you have been running toward sin instead of away from it — this is not a eulogy. This is a warning with an invitation attached. God is still testing you because He still wants you to pass. The fact that you are still here, still reading this, is itself evidence of His patience. Don’t waste it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vineabiders.substack.com [https://vineabiders.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What Is Faith, Really? Why the Greek Word Pistis Changes Everything

A deep dive into the gospel, allegiance, and why understanding one Greek word resolves some of the New Testament’s most perplexing tensions. Most of us think we know what faith is. You believe something. Maybe you trust it. It happens in your head, it’s invisible, and according to a lot of modern Christianity, that’s basically the whole thing — have the right belief in the right moment, and you’re in. But what if the word we translate as “faith” in the New Testament carries a far richer, more demanding, and ultimately more liberating meaning than that? This post is inspired by two scholars who have done substantial work on this question: Matthew Bates, author of Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance, and Scot McKnight, author of The King Jesus Gospel. Their thesis — and I think it’s compelling — is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood both what the gospel is and what faith means. And getting both of those things wrong has enormous consequences for how we live as Christians. First Things First: What Is the Gospel? Before we can talk about faith as a response to the gospel, we have to be clear on what the gospel actually is. Because there’s a good chance your picture of it is incomplete. Both Bates and McKnight argue — and I think the early church would agree — that the gospel is the objective facts concerning the entire career of Jesus as Messiah. That includes: * His pre-existence (he was with God in the beginning) * His incarnation * His death for sins * His burial * His resurrection * His post-resurrection appearances * His enthronement at the right hand of the Father * The sending of the Holy Spirit * His future return This is why the four books are called Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — the whole story matters. Paul lays this out explicitly in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.” And in Romans 1:1-4: “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord.” The gospel, in this framing, is the story of how Jesus became the Christ — the Anointed One, the Messiah, the King. If you think about it from the perspective of a first-century Jew, the whole point was convincing them that this man, Jesus, is the promised King. That’s why Matthew’s Gospel opens with a genealogy tracing Jesus back to David. It’s legal evidence for the throne. You’re not just announcing a theology — you’re announcing a coronation. Yes, “he died for our sins” is in there. But notice what Paul does and doesn’t say in 1 Corinthians 15. He says Jesus died for our sins. He does not explain the mechanism of how that death accomplishes forgiveness — no atonement theory is named. What he does do is spend considerable time establishing the resurrection, the appearances, and the reality of the risen Christ. The death is one part of a larger royal story. You could say it’s roughly one-tenth of the total picture. The gospel, then, is everything that convinces you that Jesus is the rightful King of the Universe — the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to whom all power and authority in heaven and earth have been given. So What Does It Mean to Have “Faith” in That King? Here’s where things get really interesting — and where a single Greek word becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for the entire New Testament. The Greek word translated as “faith” or “believe” throughout the New Testament is πίστις (pistis). Its verbal form is πιστεύω (pisteuo). In modern English, we typically render these as “believe” or “trust” — mental states, things that happen inside your head. You assent to a proposition. You trust that something is true. That’s it. But Matthew Bates argues — with considerable historical and linguistic evidence — that in its first-century context, especially when used in relation to kings and kingdoms, pistis carried a much richer meaning: faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, allegiance. Not a one-time mental event, but an active, ongoing state of being a faithful subject. Bates puts it this way: pistis is better understood not as “faith” in the passive, intellectual sense, but as allegiance — the kind of sworn loyalty a subject owes to a king. The Evidence: Josephus and the Language of Kings One of the most illuminating pieces of evidence Bates presents comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in Greek roughly contemporaneously with the New Testament authors. In his autobiography, Josephus recounts a moment where he commands a rebel leader to “repent and believe in me” — using the very same Greek root (pistis). The context makes clear that Josephus is not asking for a religious conversion or a change of mental propositions. He is commanding the rebel to turn away from his current course of action and become a loyal, obedient subject of Josephus as his military commander. The “belief” in question was a public declaration of loyalty expressed through obedience. That is what pistis meant in the real-world context of rulers and subjects. When a king announced his reign, the required pistis from his subjects wasn’t merely believing that he was king. It was pledging allegiance to him and demonstrating that allegiance through obedience. Bates also points to passages like Romans 1:5 and Romans 16:26, which use the phrase “the obedience of faith” (hypakoē pisteōs). This isn’t faith plus obedience as two separate things. It’s the obedience that flows from allegiance — the obedience that is inherent to what faithfulness means. How This Resolves the New Testament’s “Contradictions” This is the part I find most exciting, because it resolves what looks like a hopeless tangle of competing salvation requirements in the New Testament. Let me walk through it. The “free grace” camp points to John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” And they say: all you have to do is believe. One mental act. Done. But then the Church of Christ tradition points to Acts 2:38: “Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” And they say: you must be baptized. It’s right there. And then there’s Luke 13:3, where Jesus says: “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” So now we need repentance. And Romans 10:9: “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” So now we need public confession too. And Matthew 24:13: “But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.” Endurance to the end. And James 2:24: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Works. Explicitly not faith alone. And Romans 2:13: “for it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified.” Doers, not hearers. So which is it? Believe? Repent? Be baptized? Confess publicly? Endure to the end? Do works? The answer is: all of them, and they’re all the same thing. When you understand pistis as allegiance, all of these passages snap into a unified picture. Bending the knee to Jesus as King — genuinely, not just intellectually — necessarily implies: * Repentance (metanoia — literally “a change of mind/direction”): You turn 180 degrees away from your previous lord (yourself, sin, the world) and toward Jesus as your Lord. Repentance toward God simply means you’ve decided that He is now your King. * Baptism: If you’ve just declared Jesus your Lord and he says “get baptized,” you get baptized. That’s what allegiance means. You do what the king says. * Public confession: Pledging allegiance to a king was always a public act. You don’t whisper it privately. You declare it. * Endurance: Allegiance is not a one-time event. A knight who pledged fealty to a king and then switched sides two years later wasn’t a faithful subject — he was a traitor. Enduring to the end is what faithfulness looks like over a lifetime. * Works: If you call someone your Lord but never do anything he says, you don’t actually think he’s your Lord. Jesus makes this point with devastating clarity in Luke 6:46: “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” James is making the exact same point: works aren’t an addition to faith; they’re the evidence of it. Faith without works is dead because faithfulness without action isn’t faithfulness at all. The Luther Problem At this point, you might be wondering: why haven’t we always understood it this way? The answer involves one towering historical figure: Martin Luther. Luther’s great contribution to Western Christianity — the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide) — was forged in polemical reaction to a corrupt Catholic system of indulgences and purchased merit. And in many ways, he was right to push back on that system. But in doing so, he overcorrected in a way that has shaped Protestant Christianity to this day. Luther essentially taught that when Jesus gave his commands — love your enemies, sell what you have, keep my commandments — he was using them to show us how impossible obedience is, so that we’d give up on works altogether and rest in grace alone. It’s as if Jesus was winking at us when he said “do this” — what he really meant was “you can’t do this, so stop trying.” Luther went so far as to say that even teaching that Jesus’s commandments need to be obeyed is itself a sin. His theology systematically disarmed the church from taking Jesus’s own words seriously as instructions for living. This is not a small thing. If the King issues commands, and you tell people the King was winking when he gave them, you’ve fundamentally undermined the entire concept of allegiance. You’ve made the kingdom a fiction. The deeper issue is free will. Luther followed Augustine (as an Augustinian monk), and Augustine taught that human beings don’t have genuine free will — a position that led directly to the doctrines of total depravity and unconditional election as systematized later by Calvin. If you don’t have free will, you can’t bend the knee on your own. God has to save you first, and then you can have faith. Salvation precedes faith, rather than faith being the moment of allegiance that initiates salvation. This is why Calvinist and Reformed traditions tend to react so strongly against the allegiance framework: it requires free will. It requires that you can actually hear the gospel, decide that Jesus is Lord, and give your allegiance to him. The Reformed tradition says that’s structurally impossible without prior regeneration. It’s also why “once saved, always saved” (or perseverance of the saints in its more technical form) feels necessary in that framework. If your salvation was entirely God’s unilateral act, it can’t be undone. But if salvation is covenantal allegiance — if it’s a real relationship involving real loyalty — then the possibility of breaking that covenant, of ceasing to be faithful, is built in. And the New Testament is absolutely full of that possibility. You can be cut off (Romans 11:22). You can be spit out (Revelation 3:16). You can begin to grow and then wither (the parable of the soils in Matthew 13). You can be a branch that fails to abide and is gathered and burned (John 15:6). Jesus says in John 15:1-6: “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit... If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.” A Personal Note: Scales Falling from Eyes This framework didn’t come to me through intellectual argument. It came through a crisis. I had what I genuinely believe was a real salvation experience years ago. Then I learned about “once saved, always saved,” and — I won’t sugarcoat this — I went back to my sins for about ten years. I believed I was safe because I believed I had been saved, and I believed that couldn’t be undone. I had a theological permission slip for continuing in the very thing I needed to be freed from. What broke the cycle wasn’t a Bible study or a debate about OSAS. It was an overwhelming conviction — I believe from the Holy Spirit — that I needed to stop drinking alcohol or I was going to hell. Not “it might not be ideal.” Not “consider whether this aligns with your values.” I was going to hell. And I couldn’t shake it. So I quit. For good. And the morning after I did, I had the same experience I remembered from my original conversion — that same freedom, that same supernatural change of heart. It was like waking up. My wife Connie had the same experience. We’ve talked about it. It was as if we both had scales over our eyes — we knew all the passages about losing salvation, we’d read them dozens of times, but somehow couldn’t see them. And then, suddenly, we could. Not because someone showed them to us for the first time. They were already there. The scales just fell. I believe that’s what spiritual blindness looks like. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:4: “in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” I think one of the ways we keep ourselves blind is by refusing to repent, because we know — somewhere deep down — that genuine allegiance to Jesus would require giving up the thing we love more than him. And so we find a theology that makes that unnecessary. What Repentance Actually Does This connects to one of the most practically important things I want to say: repentance comes before the refreshing. Acts 3:19 puts it plainly: “Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” The sequence matters. The freedom from sinful desire — the supernatural change of appetite that people call sanctification — does not come and then enable repentance. It comes after repentance. You turn first, and then the power to walk in the new direction is given. This is crucial because a lot of people are waiting to feel ready to repent before they repent. They want the desire to sin to lessen before they commit to stopping. But it works the other way around. You commit to stopping — you draw the line — and then the burden lifts. Start with the biggest one. Not the minor sins, not the gray areas. Start with the sin that has its hooks in you so deeply that you’d almost be willing to go to hell for it. That’s the one the allegiance decision actually costs you. And that’s the one that, when you give it up, opens the door. Jesus says in Luke 9:62: “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” Don’t start unless you’re willing to go all the way on that one. But when you do — when you make that decision with your whole will — you will find, as I did, that it’s not the burden people think it is. Assurance Without OSAS One thing I want to address directly: if this framework is true, does it mean you can never have assurance of salvation? Are you always white-knuckling it, terrified you might fall? No. And this is important. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 13:5: “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you — unless indeed you fail the test?” Assurance comes not from a one-time event in the past — “I said a prayer in 1997” — but from being able to look at your present life and honestly say: yes, I am in the faith. The Holy Spirit is here. I am on the narrow road. I am His subject. I am doing what He says. There is grace for my failures, there is ongoing work to be done, but I am genuinely His. That kind of assurance is actually more secure, not less. It doesn’t depend on correctly remembering a prayer. It depends on a living relationship with a living King. David Bercot tells a story that I find helpful. When he was in college, he got a question right on a test but was marked wrong. He went to the professor, who admitted the answer key was wrong — but said he wasn’t going to change the grade because it would require changing everyone else’s too. Bercot protested. The professor looked at him and said: “Don’t sweat it, Bercot. You’re going to pass the class.” That’s kind of how sanctification works. I’m not going to get every answer right. There are sins I’m still working on, areas where I’m not yet where I need to be. But I can examine myself and know: I’m in the faith. I’m on the road. And there is plenty of grace on this road for those who are genuinely walking it. The King doesn’t present 50 failing grades all at once. He tends to point to the next big thing when you’re ready for it. That’s what sanctification looks like — not perfection, but progress under a patient King who is actually invested in your growth. The Bottom Line The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is the King of the Universe — the Messiah, the risen Lord, to whom all power and authority in heaven and earth have been given, and who is coming to judge the world. Faith — pistis — is the appropriate response to that announcement: allegiance. Bending the knee. Agreeing that he is your King and that what he says goes. Not just once, not just in your head, but as an ongoing state of faithful obedience. Repentance is what that looks like at the moment of entry — a 180-degree reorientation of your life toward a new Lord. Baptism, confession, endurance, and works are all simply what genuine allegiance looks like from different angles. And the gospel, understood this way, is not a burden. It’s the most liberating announcement in the history of the world: the King of Kings is standing with his arm outstretched, asking if you’ll follow him. Not just acknowledge him. Follow him. And he promises — through his blood, through the gift of his Spirit — to actually change you from the inside out so that you can. As long as you have breath, that offer is open. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit vineabiders.substack.com [https://vineabiders.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]