Let me tell you what this is and what it is not.
I am not writing as a pastor of your church. I am an elder at mine and I am not speaking for it. If you want to dismiss me, dismiss me. I am not your covering and I am not taking a shot at your pastor.
I am also not the one who can tell you where you stand. I cannot see your heart.
Neither can you. That is not an insult, it is a diagnosis God gave us: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). The organ you would use to evaluate yourself is the organ under investigation. Every man who has ever been badly wrong about his own soul was sincere at the time.
So I am not going to argue with you. Nothing I say has the power to reach the place we are talking about.
But something does.
"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)
And the next verse, which we quote far less: "And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account" (Hebrews 4:13).
That is the whole reason for this letter. I am not here to persuade you. I am here to put the sword in front of you and get out of the way. Read the verses. Not my paragraphs — the verses. If nothing happens, nothing happens. I have no ability to make anything happen.
The charge, in His words and not mine
Here is what I keep running into, and I would not say it if Scripture did not say it first and harder.
There are men who have been in church for decades who have never surrendered anything to Jesus they did not already want to give Him. Not the men outside. Us. The ones who serve and give and know the words and could find Philippians without the table of contents.
God said this to Ezekiel about people who loved his preaching:
"They come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it... And behold, you are to them like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it." (Ezekiel 33:31–32)
Read that again slowly. These are not people who skipped. They came. They sat. They listened. They enjoyed it. And God calls that a verdict, not a phase.
James says the same thing and gives us the picture:
"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." (James 1:22)
Deceiving yourselves. Then he describes a man who looks in a mirror, walks away, and immediately forgets what he looked like (James 1:23–24). That is not a memory problem. That is a man who can be shown himself and lose it before he reaches the parking lot.
And then Jesus, in the most frightening paragraph in the New Testament:
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven... On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'" (Matthew 7:21–23)
They do not offer excuses. They offer a résumé. Ministry, in His name, with results. These are not slackers — you would want them on your team.
And His answer is not you fell short. It is "I never knew you."
Paul says it flatly: "They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works" (Titus 1:16). John says it flatly: "Whoever says 'I know him' but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him" (1 John 2:4).
I did not write any of that. I could not soften it if I wanted to.
Where I have to be honest with you
I am not going to stand here and tell you I was once one of those men and now I am not. I do not know that, and I am not going to build a letter on a claim I cannot make.
What I can tell you is this. Paul describes a kind of man in the last days, and he puts two things back to back:
"lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power." (2 Timothy 3:4–5)
That was me. Not an unbeliever. Not a rebel. A man with the appearance of godliness who was denying its power.
I checked every box. I read. I prayed. I served. I gave. From the outside there was nothing to correct. But I was not walking in the power of God and I was not walking in step with the Holy Spirit. It was a hollow form. All the right shape, no substance inside it. And the reason was not some scandal — it was that my love for pleasure, for comfort, for the next thing I wanted, had quietly crowded out my love for God. The boxes were real. The power was absent.
Yes, Jesus died for my sin. I am not interested in relitigating whether a man can lose what he never earned. I think the question that actually matters is the one Jesus asked us to look at: where is the fruit?
And here is the part I most need you to hear.
Most men think success is fruit
We do. We look at a growing business, a decent marriage, kids who are not in trouble, a good name in town, a role at church — and we read all of it as evidence that God is pleased and everything is fine.
It is not fruit. Fruit is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22–23). Read that list again and notice that almost every item on it is interior and involuntary. You cannot perform patience at two in the morning. You cannot fake peace in a season of loss. That list is not a résumé — it is what comes out of a man when he is not managing his image.
My success was the very thing keeping me from seeing what was true. It anesthetized me. As long as the numbers were up and the room respected me, I had no reason to look underneath, and every reason not to. It took things being exposed — things I did not choose to have exposed — before I began to see what was actually in my heart.
That is what worries me most about the men reading this. The comfortable ones will not be moved by this letter, because comfort is exactly what has been keeping the question away.
Why you cannot spot this
Jesus explained why this is invisible from the outside.
In the parable of the sower, the seed among thorns is received. It comes up. It looks alive. It is indistinguishable from good soil for an entire season — and then "the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful" (Mark 4:19).
The thorny ground looks like the good ground until harvest. Your pastor cannot tell. Your wife cannot tell. Your small group cannot tell. You cannot tell. Only fruit, and only over time.
What is actually at stake
We think the risk is a worse destination. It is not.
Read Ezekiel 8 through 11 sometime. Before one wall of Jerusalem falls, the glory of God stands up and walks out of the temple — threshold, gate, over the city, gone — while the building is still standing and still full. The disaster is not the demolition. It is the departure. And at the very end of the book, when it is restored, the city is renamed for the only thing that ever made it worth anything: "The LORD Is There" (Ezekiel 48:35).
Six hundred years later, Jesus writes to a church: "You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead" (Revelation 3:1). And to another one, He says something we quote constantly and almost always aim at the wrong audience:
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock." (Revelation 3:20)
He is not outside a sinner's heart in that verse. He is outside a church, asking to be let in, and nobody inside has noticed He is not there.
That is what you are risking. Not a worse address. Him.
What I am asking you to do
Paul gives the command, so I do not have to invent one:
"Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves." (2 Corinthians 13:5)
Not someday. This week. In this order, because each one costs more than the last.
One. Alone, tonight. Go back over what you have actually asked God for in the last month. The job. The diagnosis. The kid. The deal. The pain to stop. None of that is wrong to ask — Scripture tells us to bring every request (Philippians 4:6). But run the tally. How much of what you asked for was Him? If God shows up in your prayers almost entirely as the one who delivers what you want, that is not a relationship. That is an account.
Two. With one man, this week. Name one sin. Not a category — a Tuesday. I have asked men to name one thing and watched them hand me an entire genre. I struggle with anger. I have not been the husband I should be. That is a press release, not a confession. "Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy" (Proverbs 28:13). Confess and forsake — both. Then change the actual thing. The account, the phone, the call you have been dodging, the apology with no if anywhere in the sentence.
Three. In a room, soon. Get somewhere a brother can ask you a question you cannot answer with vocabulary. "Exhort one another every day... that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:13). Every good thing at church is optional, which means the men who need it most are never in the room. Be the exception on purpose.
How you will know whether any of it took
Here is the test, and it is not the one we usually use.
I have never been comfortable measuring a man's response by whether he came forward at the end of a service. Walking an aisle is not wrong and God has met men in them. But a moment is exactly what a man can produce without being changed. You can be genuinely moved on Sunday and be completely unaltered by Tuesday.
If the Word of God actually convicted you and gave you life, you will not be able to contain it.
Jeremiah tried to quit speaking and could not — he said it became a fire shut up in his bones, and he wore himself out trying to hold it in (Jeremiah 20:9). Peter and John were formally ordered to stop talking and answered that they "cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). Not will not. Cannot.
So watch yourself this week. Not Sunday — Wednesday. In the truck, at work, at your own dinner table. Are you talking about the living God? Not about a sermon, and not about whoever preached it. About what God is doing in you right now — what He said, what He is correcting, where He is not letting you off.
That is the response. God told His people to keep His words on their hearts and then talk about them in the most ordinary hours of a normal week — at home, on the road, lying down, getting up (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). The week was always where this lived.
So before Wednesday, tell one person what God has said to you and what you are going to do about it. That is different from naming your sin to a brother. That is overflow.
If you get to Sunday and realize you never once brought Him up, do not panic and do not perform. Just be honest about what that means and take it to Him.
The part that is not up to you
Now hear the rest, because none of those three things can save you and I will not let you think they can.
You cannot manufacture a new heart. God does not offer to help you renovate the old one:
"And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26)
He gives it. Nobody births himself. This is not a ladder and you are not earning your way in. You are being asked to stop pretending you are already in, so that the only One who can give you a heart can give you one — and He is not reluctant. He came, He bled, He paid it in full, and He is standing at the door.
The prize was never the fixed marriage or the healed body or the kid who came home. Ask Him for those. But the prize is the Father, and the staggering thing is that He can be known — not known about, known.
So do not take my word for it
Do not take my word for any of this. I told you at the start I have no power here.
Take His. And then pray this, out loud, tonight, and mean it enough to wait for the answer:
"Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!" (Psalm 139:23–24)
If that prayer frightens you, that fear may be the most hopeful thing about you tonight. The men I am most worried about will read this whole letter and feel nothing at all. They will think of someone else it applies to.
And then tomorrow, and the day after
I want to be clear about where this ends, because I do not think it ends.
I do not expect to graduate from this. I have accepted that I am going to spend the rest of my life holding the posture that my heart cannot be trusted — that left to myself, I will serve myself. So every morning I submit to the Lord and ask for His Spirit to lead me, because I have proven I will not do it on my own.
And I ask two questions. I would give them to you.
Do I really believe Jesus has done everything to save me?
Am I really willing to go and do what He has called me to?
You do not graduate from those. You do not answer them once at nine years old and file the paperwork. If you are actually walking with God, you live inside those two questions — every morning, for the rest of your life.
He is not hiding. Most of us have simply never once asked Him for Himself.
Ask Him.
— Josh Menold
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.