Thirty-seven million churches exist in the world. Yet people's hearts grow colder. Why is this? If you have been hopping from church to church in search of believers who hear the word of God, who seek to apply its teachings, and who actively pursue holiness, my friend, you are not alone.
The prophet Amos prophesied of times such as these.
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north, even to the east. They shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it. In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst. Amos 8:11-13.
As did Jesus,
Sin will be rampant everywhere and the love of many will grow cold. Matthew 24:12.
A new creature
If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things are become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Verses like this give the impression that once one is saved, they will no longer contend with sinful thoughts, desires, and impulses. A very enticing premise to be sure. One underscored in the church of my childhood by an endless stream of souls ushered to the pulpit to regale us with testimonies of their spiritual transformation.
As a young adolescent, I was dumbfounded, astonished, and enraptured by the idea that God would forgive me if I asked, and spare me from going to hell. To top it off, the thought that Jesus would take up residence in my heart, immediately, drive out all evil, and grant me the power to live a holy and sinless life was incredibly alluring.
I quickly made my way down to the altar. Tears of unbridled joy and exaltation streamed down my face. There, I and others earnestly and penitently recited the sinner's prayer and invited Jesus to dwell in our hearts.
However, like snake oil, the spiritual elixir they were hawking did not bring about the miraculous metamorphosis I had expected. I not only continued to grapple with sinful thoughts, words, and deeds, but it also felt like things were steadily getting worse.
This begged the question, why haven't I morphed into this holy "new creature" everyone has been gushing about?
Brethren assured me that the Holy Spirit who would spawn my sanctification had indeed entered me when I confessed my sin and invited him. They said the fly in the proverbial ointment was that my flesh was still unredeemed, and it fights against that spirit.
I was advised to think of it like this. Two big dogs warring within me. The new creature, the "spirit dog", and the mangy old "flesh dog". Whichever one I fed the most would win the fight.
A caveat, I thought to myself. Great. The ball's back in my court. I must do something to feed the Holy Spirit inside me, and thereby empower him to keep me from thinking and behaving sinfully.
But wait, the reason I asked the Holy Spirit to come live inside me in the first place is that I cannot stop thinking sinful thoughts and engaging in sinful behavior. What gives?
Other believers don't seem to be experiencing any performance issues.
Although my expectations might have been childishly naive and unrealistic, they were based on the countless testimonies I had heard from believers who claimed to have been effectively set free from their tendency to sin.
Furthermore, none of these individuals ever admitted to still struggling with recurrent sin. And that silence, despite my youthful age, only served to reinforce those idealistic expectations.
All these saints ever seemed to do was proudly parade around, praising God in heaven for being made "whole" and singing boldly about going "marching in".
Oh, how desperately I longed to be filled with the Holy Spirit and numbered among them.
But for some distressingly unknown reason, it just didn't seem to be happening for me like it was for everyone else.
So the questions came, “Had I quenched the Holy Spirit? Was God not convinced that my desire was sincere? Was I not trying hard enough to change?”
As these thoughts and fears consumed me, I doubled down. I tried ever harder to prove to God that I was worthy of the supernatural empowerment I was invoking.
You never saw a kid so fixated. Yet, it was always one step forward, two steps back.
While the rest of the fleet reported nothing but blue skies and smooth sailing, my ship floundered perilously in iniquity's tempest.
And the more people stood up and testified about their sin-free "new life", the more I despised myself.
Was it a lack of worthiness or a lack of intestinal fortitude?
Gradually, insidiously, self-loathing and despair caused me to drift out into the sea of religious apathy.
Our cloud of witnesses
Have you been misled by the actors and their performances as well? Have they convinced you God's new creatures never stagger, stumble, or fall?
What about our great "cloud of witnesses" mentioned in the book of Hebrews: King David, whom God said was a man after his own heart, and the Apostle Paul, who penned 23% of the New Testament.
These are just a few members of this great cloud.
Though both knew God intimately, each continued to contend with thorns of the flesh. Paul did so even after a miraculous encounter with and conversion by the Spirit of our risen Lord and Savior.
In Psalm 31:9-13, a broken and contrite King David lamented that his strength was failing because of his iniquity.
Like cancer, his sins of the flesh were metastasizing.
They ate away at the endurance of the once-feared giant killer.
They diminished him in the eyes of his enemies and made him an embarrassment to his friends and to his nation.
And in Romans 7:15, the Apostle Paul confessed:
I do not understand my own actions. I am baffled and bewildered by them. I do not practice what I want to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate and yielding to my fallen nature.
If the prolific heroes of our faith struggled to bring their bodies into subjection to the spirit, how can so many believers today strut proudly about as if they have arrived?
Is our walk truly above reproach?
Or are we hiding behind a mask of false bravado, singing about our victory in Jesus while quietly, surreptitiously sweeping sin under the rug?
I did not arrive at these questions as a critic looking for flaws. I arrived as someone trying to survive the tension they created. If men like David and Paul could name their ongoing struggle without disqualifying their faith, then the problem was not that struggle existed—it was that we pretended it didn’t. And once I could no longer unsee that pretense, something shifted. I stopped wondering whether the disconnect was real and began asking why no one seemed willing to address it. That question did not make me angry. It made me restless.
The Pageantry of Piety
That restlessness eventually pushed me beyond the answers the church kept offering.
I had not stopped believing Scripture.
I had stopped believing the explanations that surrounded it.
Church after church, the language remained the same. Confidence was abundant. The vocabulary of victory was fluent. Transformation was spoken of as assumed. Yet everywhere I went, the same quiet contradiction followed me: people sounded whole, but lived fractured. Testimonies spoke of arrival. Lives spoke of management.
I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t bitter.
I was disenchanted.
Something essential was missing, and no one seemed willing—or able—to name it. When questions surfaced, they were softened with patience-talk or redirected toward time. Sanctification is a process. God is still working. We’ll never be perfect this side of heaven. Each phrase carried a measure of truth, but none explained why Scripture spoke with such clarity while our lives bore so little resemblance to it.
If the early church we read about was marked by repentance, power, and visible transformation, and the modern church was not, then either Scripture had been misunderstood—or something had been lost.
I became convinced it was the latter.
And so, gradually, I stopped asking the church to explain the problem and turned my full attention to Scripture itself. Not in rebellion. Not in pride. But because I could no longer pretend the answers I was being given were sufficient.
The Missing Explanation
As I searched the Scriptures, a pattern began to take shape—one that seemed both obvious and overlooked.
Light and darkness were repeatedly contrasted. Exposure preceded healing. Truth preceded freedom. Confession preceded cleansing. Fellowship followed honesty, not the other way around. The problem, I reasoned, was not that God had changed, but that we had learned to hide more effectively.
The Scriptures seemed to support the logic I was building.
Jesus said:
“Light has come into the world, but people love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Those who do evil avoid the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light. So it may be plainly seen that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” (John 3:19–21)
John spoke of fellowship and cleansing in the light:
“If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7)
And James appeared to spell out cause and effect:
“Confess your sins to one another. Pray for one another so that you may be healed… the prayer of a righteous person is powerful.” (James 5:16)
I read these passages as a sequence:
- I confess (especially the habitual sins).
- The righteous pray (the “effectual fervent” kind).
- God cleanses—because He must honor His Word.
At the time, I became convinced that what the church lacked was not teaching, but courage. I believed our refusal to openly acknowledge habitual sin—paired with our participation in the pageantry of piety—amounted to little more than religious vanity. The smiles were practiced. The language was fluent. But the honesty felt absent.
It seemed self-evident that most of us harbored some bastion of habitual sin we either refused to name or were unwilling to confront. And so I reasoned that the problem was not grace, but pride: the pride that hides behind respectable faith while quietly guarding darkness.
I started searching for what I thought must exist: a church “safe” enough to confess in—safe enough to be honest without being crushed. I hopped from congregation to congregation, telling myself, not here… not here either.
A “safe” church proved almost impossible to find. So I adjusted the logic. I told myself the presence of the righteous and the pretenders—what Scripture calls the wheat and the tares—explained it. After all, hadn’t Jesus said they were to remain together until the harvest?
The former would pray, the latter would scorn, and the shame I’d endure would become the deterrent. In my mind, the gauntlet of ridicule was part of the cure. Surely I was on to something, the scriptures just kept piecing together to support my hypothesis.
The Scriptures were true.
The way I tethered them was not.
Without realizing it, I had turned promises into a process, confession into a lever, and humility into a measurable act.
When the Logic No Longer Works
Despite the revisions I made to my confessional cleansing theory, the result never changed. No church ever offered a place where confession could actually occur. The structures that once invited it were gone. There were no altar calls like those of my youth, no open invitations to testify before God and one another—only services designed to conclude on time and disperse quietly.
So I went public—not by raising my voice, but by building a place where confession could no longer be managed. This site became that place.
I wrote.
Reflections.
Testimonies.
Confessions.
The confessions I shared not only filled the site with content, but opened my life up to scrutiny on a grand scale.
Scripture had already told me what should happen when sin was brought into the open.
I expected ridicule.
I expected shame.
And most importantly, I expected prayer and deliverance.
What I received was nothing.
So I assumed the problem was not the method—but the depth.
I rewrote what I had written. Then rewrote it again. With each successive revision, my confessions became less guarded and more transparent. Still, no amount of candor provoked the moral outrage, pity, and prayer I believed were necessary to be “healed.”
And then—something happened that I was not trying to make happen.
The Spirit of God met me inside my own confession and showed me the path the early church walked—the way I had been missing all along. In that moment, I was not given a technique or an explanation. I was given an invitation:
The story of that invitation became the longest piece on this site, because it had to be. It is not here to entertain or persuade. It is here because it was the turning point for me—the place where striving finally gave way to deliverance.
So I extend the same invitation to you.
If you are tired of managing sin, tired of pretending wholeness, and tired of explanations that never quite reach the wound—step into Step Into the Light and Live. Read it, or listen to it, with a humble and contrite heart. If you do, I trust the same Spirit who met me there will meet you as well.