Rooted in Him

04/06/2026

Why the World Hates the Real Christ

There is a Christ the world is willing to keep around and there is a Christ the world cannot tolerate, and the difference between the two is the difference between a religious symbol that costs nothing and the actual person who walked the earth, claimed exclusive authority over heaven and earth, and demanded that every human being submit to Him without negotiation. The Christ the world keeps around is a vague spiritual figure who blesses everyone, tolerates everything, asks nothing, and exists primarily to validate the moral choices people have already made. The Christ of Scripture is something entirely different. He is holy in a way that exposes our unholiness. He is sovereign in a way that strips us of our pretended autonomy. He is crucified in a way that names our sin as the reason He had to die. And He is returning in a way that places every human being under the judgment of the very One they have spent their lives ignoring or domesticating. That Christ is not the Christ the world finds acceptable. That Christ is the Christ the world crucified, and the world has not changed its mind about Him since.

Paul writes about this hostility in language that should be read carefully because it diagnoses the actual condition of every human heart before grace has intervened. "But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised" 1 Corinthians 2:14. Notice the words. He does not accept. They are foolishness to him. He cannot understand. The problem is not insufficient information or unclear presentation. The problem is that the things of the Spirit of God strike the natural mind as foolishness, and the natural mind lacks the spiritual faculty required to understand them rightly. The gospel is not rejected because it has been preached badly. It is rejected because the unregenerate heart is at war with the very content of the message, and no amount of repackaging can make the message acceptable to a heart that is fundamentally hostile to what the message actually says.

Why this hostility? Because Christ confronts every single thing the flesh loves and offers none of the things the flesh wants. He confronts our self righteousness by calling the morally accomplished spiritually bankrupt. "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 5:3. The kingdom belongs to those who recognise their poverty, not those who can point to their moral achievements. He confronts our self preservation by calling us to die to the very self we have been working our whole lives to protect. "If anyone wishes to come after Me he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me" Luke 9:23. He confronts our self sufficiency by telling us that apart from Him we can do nothing of any genuine spiritual value. "Apart from Me you can do nothing" John 15:5. He confronts our religious performance by declaring that even our best righteousness is contaminated by our own corruption. "All of us have become like one who is unclean and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment" Isaiah 64:6. He confronts the world itself by exposing what the world actually loves as evil. "This is the judgment that the Light has come into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the Light for their deeds were evil" John 3:19.

Every one of these confrontations strikes the natural heart as offensive, and the offence is not because Christ is being unkind. The offence is because Christ is being honest about a condition the natural heart has spent its entire existence trying not to see. He tells us what we actually are, and what we actually are is not what we have been telling ourselves we are, and the gap between His diagnosis and our self assessment produces the hostility that has marked the world's response to Him from the beginning. He has not changed. The hostility has not changed. And the contemporary attempts to make Him acceptable to the natural mind by softening His sayings or recasting His character are producing a Christ who is not the Christ of Scripture but a manageable substitute that allows the natural heart to continue rejecting Him while feeling good about its religious involvement.

The week of His crucifixion is the clearest demonstration of this in the gospels. On Sunday a crowd lined the road into Jerusalem with palm branches and shouted hosannas, declaring Him the Son of David who had come in the name of the Lord. Matthew 21:9. Five days later, a crowd in roughly the same city stood before Pilate and screamed for His crucifixion with a fury that did not soften even when Pilate offered them the chance to release Him. Matthew 27:22 and 23. What changed in five days? Nothing about Jesus changed. He had not become a different person between the palm branches and the trial. What changed was that the crowd that had welcomed Him as a political deliverer discovered He had no intention of being the deliverer they wanted, and the moment they realised the Christ they were getting was not the Christ they had constructed in their imaginations, the welcoming praise turned into murderous rage. The pattern is consistent across human history. Tolerated Christ is welcomed. Real Christ is crucified.

This is why salvation cannot be the product of human persuasion or improved evangelistic strategy. The problem is not at the level of intellect that better arguments could fix. The problem is at the level of the heart that nothing short of regeneration can address. Paul says it plainly. "There is none righteous not even one; there is none who understands there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside together they have become useless; there is none who does good there is not even one" Romans 3:10 to 12. None seeks. None understands. The universal condition of unregenerate humanity is hostility toward God dressed up in whatever religious or irreligious form happens to be culturally convenient. We do not naturally drift toward Christ. We drift away from Him constantly, and every drift is accompanied by elaborate explanations of why our drifting is actually progress or enlightenment or maturity or wisdom.

This means the gospel must be preached without apology and without modification. Every attempt to soften the offence of Christ by removing the parts of His message that produce the offence is an attempt to bring people to a Christ who does not exist, and the false Christ produced by such efforts cannot save anyone because He is not the Christ who actually died and rose again. Paul understood this and refused to do it. "For we preach Christ crucified to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness but to those who are the called both Jews and Greeks Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" 1 Corinthians 1:23 and 24. The same message produced two different responses. The unregenerate found it offensive or foolish. The called found it the power and wisdom of God. The message itself was not adjusted to produce a better reception. The message was preached faithfully, and the response of the hearers revealed whether God was at work in them or whether they remained in the natural condition that rejects the real Christ in favour of any acceptable substitute.

The rich young ruler is one of the most instructive examples in the gospels. He came to Jesus with apparent sincerity, asking what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus walked him through the commandments, and the man claimed to have kept all of them from his youth. Then Mark records something remarkable. "Looking at him Jesus felt a love for him and said to him one thing you lack; go and sell all you possess and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow Me. But at these words he was saddened and he went away grieving for he was one who owned much property" Mark 10:21 and 22. Jesus loved him. And Jesus refused to give him terms he could accept. The man walked away grieving not because the message was unclear but because the message was unwanted. He had come to Jesus willing to do something to earn life. He left when Jesus offered the only terms on which life could actually be received. The lordship of Christ over everything he owned was the offence, and the offence was too great for him to accept.

This same pattern played out at the end of John 6 when Jesus delivered the hard teaching about His flesh being true food and His blood being true drink. The crowd that had followed Him for the miracles and the free bread heard the demand for genuine spiritual participation in His person and they could not bear it. "Therefore many of His disciples when they heard this said this is a difficult statement; who can listen to it?" John 6:60. And the text continues. "As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore" John 6:66. Many. Not a few. Many. The crowd that had been following the popular Jesus melted away the moment the popular Jesus revealed Himself to be the demanding Jesus, and Jesus did nothing to call them back. He let them go because He was not willing to be a different Christ than the one He actually was, even at the cost of His audience.

This is the test. You can gather a crowd around a tolerated Christ. You can fill seats and build platforms and produce religious enthusiasm around a Christ who does not threaten anyone. But preach the real Christ, the crucified one who demands repentance and full surrender, and the crowds will scatter. The remnant who remains will be those whom the Father has drawn, those whose hearts have been opened, those for whom the gospel has become the power and wisdom of God rather than foolishness and stumbling block. "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him" John 6:44. The drawing is the Father's work. The coming is the response of the drawn. And without that drawing no one comes, regardless of how skilfully the gospel has been presented or how appealingly the message has been packaged.

This should shape how we evangelise and how we expect the gospel to be received. We do not soften the message to gain a hearing. We do not adjust the content to fit cultural sensibilities. We preach Christ crucified, the real one, the demanding one, the holy and sovereign one who calls every human being to repentance and faith on terms He alone has the right to set. And we trust the God who saves to do His work through the faithful preaching of the actual message rather than the manageable substitute. The Christ who saves is the Christ who scandalises, and removing the scandal does not produce more conversions. It produces more false converts who think they have come to Christ when they have actually come to a Christ of their own construction who cannot save anyone because He does not exist.

So do not be shocked when the world mocks the gospel. Do not be discouraged when the real Christ produces the response He has always produced from those who refuse to receive Him. Do not soften the message to make it easier to swallow. Do not dilute the offence to make it culturally acceptable. The truth is not designed to entertain the flesh. It is designed to expose and condemn the flesh so that grace can raise a new creation in the place where the old creation has been brought to its end. The real Christ was never meant to be palatable to the natural man. He was meant to be worshipped by the regenerate one, and the difference between those two responses is the difference that the Spirit alone produces in souls He has chosen to bring out of darkness into the marvellous light of the one who is the only Saviour any human being has ever needed and the only Saviour any human being will ever find.

He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence

03/06/2026

"While many people fear that the current moral crisis will someday lead to God's judgment, I believe we're far past that. What we see happening now is God's judgment. Romans 1 indicates that divine judgment involves three stages. First there's a sexual revolution, followed by a homosexual revolution, and finally an abandonment to a reprobate mind. Ultimately, the culture's way of thinking is so corrupt, there is no way back to truth and goodness. We see the reprobate mind in full bloom in the government, corporations, education, the media, and the popular culture. As a result, Christians are feeling pressures we've never before experienced and facing mockery and abuse simply because of what we believe. Our gospel, our values, our priorities, our doctrine—our entire lives—are comprehensively and irreversibly at odds with the world. And as challenging as the situation is, it can and will get worse. I've commented several times that I believe the hostility toward Christians in the West will give way to full-blown persecution. A decade ago, many Christians would have laughed at such a suggestion. No one is laughing now."

— John MacArthur

30/05/2026

“Contentment is rooted in knowing God is sufficient.”
- Voddie Baucham

27/05/2026

What Rejoicing Actually Means

A reader wrote to me asking about the biblical command to rejoice always. She wanted to know whether this means we are supposed to be constantly laughing, constantly enthusiastic, constantly displaying outward signs of cheerfulness regardless of what we are actually experiencing inside. The question is a good one because the contemporary church has frequently confused rejoicing with a kind of performed positivity that has very little to do with what Scripture is actually commanding, and the gap between what believers think they are supposed to feel and what they actually feel produces a great deal of guilt and confusion that the biblical command never intended to produce.

Let me address the question directly. Rejoice always does not mean laugh always. It does not mean appear enthusiastic always. It does not mean smile through suffering as if the suffering were not real. It does not mean suppress legitimate grief, sorrow, fear, or pain in favour of a manufactured cheerfulness that the Bible never asks for. If that were what the command meant, then Paul himself would have failed the command repeatedly, because Paul described himself in 2 Corinthians 1:8 as despairing even of life under the pressure of his afflictions, and Paul is the very man who wrote the command to rejoice always.

The clearest passage on this is 1 Thessalonians 5:16 to 18. "Rejoice always pray without ceasing in everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Three commands sit together in this passage and they belong together. Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in everything. All three describe a settled orientation of the heart toward God rather than a continuous emotional state. Just as pray without ceasing does not mean we are uttering words to God every second of every day, rejoice always does not mean we are emotionally elated every second of every day. The continuous nature of the command refers to the underlying disposition rather than the surface emotional expression.

The Greek word translated rejoice is chairo, and the noun form chara means joy. The biblical concept of joy is not identical to the contemporary concept of happiness. Happiness in modern usage usually refers to a pleasant emotional state that depends on favourable circumstances. Joy in the biblical sense is a deep settled satisfaction in God that does not depend on circumstances and that can coexist with sorrow, grief, and even tears. Paul describes himself in 2 Corinthians 6:10 as "sorrowful yet always rejoicing." Both at once. Genuine sorrow and genuine rejoicing simultaneously present in the same life. This would be impossible if joy were merely a synonym for happiness. It is entirely possible if joy is a deep settled disposition that does not require the absence of sorrow to be present.

Jesus is the clearest model of what this looks like in practice. He is described as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief in Isaiah 53:3. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus in John 11:35. He sweated drops of blood in Gethsemane and asked for the cup to pass from Him in Luke 22:44. He cried from the cross asking why the Father had forsaken Him in Matthew 27:46. None of this looks like constant enthusiasm or perpetual laughter. And yet Jesus is also the one whose joy was set before Him as He endured the cross in Hebrews 12:2. "Who for the joy set before Him endured the cross despising the shame and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." The joy was real. The cross was real. The endurance of the cross was animated by the joy that lay beyond it. Both realities present at the same time in the same life. The deepest sorrow ever experienced by any human being was carried by the one whose joy was anchored in something greater than the sorrow.

This is the framework for understanding the biblical command to rejoice always. Joy is not the absence of sorrow. Joy is the deeper reality underneath the sorrow that gives the sorrow its proper proportion and prevents it from becoming despair. The Christian who grieves a death grieves genuinely. The grief is real and it should be felt and expressed. But underneath the grief is a settled hope in the resurrection and a settled trust in the God who is sovereign over even death. Paul says this directly in 1 Thessalonians 4:13. "We do not want you to be uninformed brethren about those who are asleep so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope." The believer grieves. The grief is permitted and even expected. The grief is just different from the grief of those who have no hope, because joy underneath the grief keeps the grief from collapsing into despair.

The Psalms are full of this dynamic and reading them honestly will reshape any believer's understanding of what biblical rejoicing actually looks like. David groans, weeps, complains, asks God why He has forsaken him, describes himself as a worm and not a man, and in the same psalms returns to praise and trust and rejoicing in God. Psalm 22 begins with the cry of forsakenness that Christ Himself would quote from the cross, and ends with the praise of God in the great assembly. Same psalm. Same author. The journey from desolation to praise within the same writing is the journey every honest believer takes repeatedly in their walk with God. The rejoicing does not require the desolation to be absent. The rejoicing emerges through and beyond the desolation as the believer's grip on God reasserts itself against the circumstances that were pressing in.

So what does it actually mean to rejoice always in practice? It means cultivating a settled disposition toward God that is grounded in who He is and what He has done rather than in what your circumstances feel like in any given moment. It means returning to the Lord again and again throughout the day, in good moments and hard ones, and finding in Him the source of joy that nothing in your circumstances can give and nothing in your circumstances can take away. It means refusing to let circumstances become the final arbiter of your inner life because circumstances change constantly and would produce a chaotic emotional existence if they were given that authority. It means anchoring your joy in unchanging realities about God rather than in changing realities about your situation.

What are these unchanging realities? God is sovereign. He has saved you in Christ. He has sealed you with the Spirit. He has prepared an inheritance for you that nothing in this world can take away. Your sins have been forgiven. Your future is secure. You are loved with an everlasting love. Your present suffering, however severe, is producing for you an eternal weight of glory that will be revealed when this life is over. 2 Corinthians 4:17. Every one of these realities is true regardless of how you feel right now, and every one of them is ground for joy that does not depend on circumstances. The believer who has been formed to return to these realities in every season will find that the joy is there even when the feelings are not, and the feelings often follow when the underlying disposition has been correctly oriented.

This also means we need to distinguish between joy and the performance of joy. The contemporary church has often produced a culture in which believers feel pressure to appear happy at all times in order to be seen as genuinely spiritual. This pressure is unbiblical and produces hypocrisy in the very people it is trying to help. Romans 12:15 says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." Both responses are commanded. Weeping with those who weep is not a failure of joy. It is the genuine compassion that flows from a heart anchored in God who is the source of both the joy and the legitimate grief. A believer who cannot weep when others are weeping is not exhibiting greater spiritual maturity. They are exhibiting a kind of emotional disconnection that is no part of what Scripture commands.

The friend who has just lost their spouse does not need someone telling them to rejoice always with a smile pasted on their face. They need someone who can sit with them in their grief, weep with them, hold their hand, pray with them, and remind them gently of the realities that ground their hope in the moments when they are ready to hear those reminders. The reminding is not the suppression of grief. It is the slow reorientation of the soul toward the God who alone can carry it through the grief and produce joy on the other side. The grief is real. The journey to joy is real. The expectation that the grief should be skipped or shortened by the application of cheerful sounding Bible verses is a misreading of how God actually works in His people through suffering.

Now to the second part of the reader's question about whether rejoicing means appearing always enthusiastic. The answer is no. Enthusiasm is a personality trait. Some believers are naturally enthusiastic and others are naturally more reserved. The command to rejoice does not require personality transformation. It does not require introverts to become extroverts or thoughtful people to become exuberant. It works in the context of who each person actually is and produces in them the genuine joy that is appropriate to their disposition. A naturally reserved believer will rejoice in ways that look reserved. A naturally exuberant believer will rejoice in ways that look exuberant. Both can be obeying the same command genuinely, and the surface expressions can look very different while the underlying disposition is the same.

This also protects us from the manipulative atmospheres that contemporary worship culture sometimes manufactures. Loud music, bright lights, repeated emotional builds, and pressure to demonstrate enthusiasm are not biblical signs of rejoicing. They are manufactured experiences that produce manufactured responses, and the believer who feels nothing in such environments is not failing to rejoice. They may be sensing the artificial nature of what is being produced and responding honestly to it. Genuine biblical joy is often quiet, often deep, often expressed in tears as readily as in laughter, and rarely matches the choreographed enthusiasm of contemporary worship culture.

The deepest source of joy is communion with God Himself. The Psalmist says, "In Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever" Psalm 16:11. The joy is in His presence. The pleasures are at His right hand. The believer who learns to commune with God in prayer, in the Word, in genuine relationship with the people of God, in obedience to His commands, will find joy welling up in them that they did not manufacture and that does not depend on their circumstances. This is the joy that the Spirit produces in those who walk with Him. Galatians 5:22 lists it as fruit, which means it grows organically in the life that is yielded to the Spirit rather than being produced by direct effort to feel joyful.

So rejoice always. But understand what the command is asking for. It is not asking for constant laughter or perpetual enthusiasm. It is asking for a settled orientation of your heart toward the God who is the source of all genuine joy, an orientation that allows joy to coexist with sorrow when sorrow is present and that produces in you the kind of deep settled satisfaction in God that nothing in your circumstances can take away. Grieve when grief is called for. Weep when weeping is called for. Be honest about your feelings with God. And return to Him over and over as the source of the joy that He alone can give and that is present underneath every other emotion you experience in your walk with Him.

The God who commands the rejoicing is also the God who provides it. He does not ask of us what He does not give us. The joy of the Lord is our strength, Nehemiah 8:10, and the same Lord whose joy is our strength is the one who is producing that joy in us through His Spirit even when we are not aware of it. May He continue to produce it in you, even in the seasons when feeling joyful is the furthest thing from your honest experience, and may you discover that the joy underneath is more real and more sustaining than any surface emotion could ever be.

He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence

23/05/2026

“The healthy Christian is one who has a sense of God’s presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God’s word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it.” -J. I. Packer

20/05/2026

“Remove far from me vanity and lies.”

— Pro 30:8

“O my God, be not far from me.”

— Psa 38:21


Here we have two great lessons-what to deprecate and what to supplicate. The happiest state of a Christian is the holiest state. As there is the most heat nearest to the sun, so there is the most happiness nearest to Christ. No Christian enjoys comfort when his eyes are fixed on vanity-he finds no satisfaction unless his soul is quickened in the ways of God. The world may win happiness elsewhere, but he cannot. I do not blame ungodly men for rushing to their pleasures. Why should I? Let them have their fill. That is all they have to enjoy. A converted wife who despaired of her husband was always very kind to him, for she said, “I fear that this is the only world in which he will be happy, and therefore I have made up my mind to make him as happy as I can in it.” Christians must seek their delights in a higher sphere than the insipid frivolities or sinful enjoyments of the world. Vain pursuits are dangerous to renewed souls. We have heard of a philosopher who, while he looked up to the stars, fell into a pit; but how deeply do they fall who look down. Their fall is fatal. No Christian is safe when his soul is slothful, and his God is far from him. Every Christian is always safe as to the great matter of his standing in Christ, but he is not safe as regards his experience in holiness, and communion with Jesus in this life. Satan does not often attack a Christian who is living near to God. It is when the Christian departs from his God, becomes spiritually starved, and endeavours to feed on vanities, that the devil discovers his vantage hour. He may sometimes stand foot to foot with the child of God who is active in his Master's service, but the battle is generally short: he who slips as he goes down into the Valley of Humiliation, every time he takes a false step invites Apollyon to assail him. O for grace to walk humbly with our God!

—C. H. Spurgeon

18/05/2026

"Whether it’s in your role as a husband, wife, or parent, you will struggle and fail from time to time.

Moreover, your spouse and your children will fail you.

None of us are perfect, and none of us will perfectly execute the roles and responsibilities God has given us within our families.

In those moments of failure and disappointment, be thankful that you serve a gracious God, and that His grace is sufficient to overcome your shortcomings.

You might not have the strength, the wisdom, or the patience for every situation, but by His grace, He will grant you everything you need.

In fact, His grace is the reason you enjoy any success at all as a spouse or a parent.

And when you fail in those roles, His grace can overcome your failure, or enable you to endure whatever consequences may result.

As Christian husbands, wives, and parents, we need to rest in God’s unfailing grace, and look to Him for strength and restoration when we fall short of His plan."

—John MacArthur

17/05/2026