Somebody sends you the clip. Ninety seconds, subtitles burned in, the good part of the sermon with the music swelling underneath. You watch it. It is genuinely good. You send it to three other people.
Sunday you are in the room. The preaching is strong. Something in your chest moves. Not fake, not manufactured, actually moves. You mean it when you tell him afterward that it was powerful.
Then you go home. And by Wednesday you could not tell anyone what it was about.
I want to show you something, because I do not think this is a modern problem and I do not think it is a small one.
Twenty-six hundred years ago God told a prophet that his own people were talking about him. They stood around in the doorways of their houses and said to each other, come on, let's go hear what he's got this week. And they came. They filled the room. They sat down in front of him the way God's people sit down. They heard every single word.
And they did not do one of them.
Then God says the line I have not been able to put down. He tells Ezekiel that to them, he is a singer of love songs. A good voice. Plays well. They enjoy him.1
That is the indictment. Not that they skipped. Not that they were hostile. They showed up, they paid attention, and they liked it. Their mouths were full of devotion and their hearts were running after something else entirely, and the preaching had become the thing they consumed instead of the thing they obeyed.
I have been that man. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this at somebody else. I have had seasons where my intake was enormous and my obedience was nothing. Sermons in the truck. Podcasts at the gym. Books I could quote. And a heart that had not handed over one new inch of ground in a year.
That is the thing about this particular failure. It does not feel like failure. It feels like growth.
The land was never the land
Here is what I missed about Ezekiel for a long time.
We read it as a book about judgment. A nation loses its country. But watch where the catastrophe actually happens. In chapters eight through eleven, before a single wall comes down, the glory of God gets up and leaves the temple. It moves to the threshold. Then to the gate. Then out over the city and away.2
The disaster is not the demolition. The disaster is the departure. Everything after that is just the paperwork.
And then follow the book all the way to the end. Forty-eight chapters later the glory comes back, and the very last line names the city. Not for its walls or its king or its borders. The city gets named after the only thing that ever made it worth anything. The LORD Is There.3
So what was the promised land actually promising?
Not acreage. Not security. Not a good life in a good place. The land mattered because He was in it. Take him out and it is dirt with a fence around it. That is the whole point of the story, and Israel missed it for centuries. They fought for the property and lost the Presence, and by the time they noticed, he was already over the eastern hills.
Now hold that next to the men in chapter thirty-three, standing in the rubble of the country they just lost, arguing that they should get it back. Their reasoning is almost funny. Abraham was one guy and God gave him the whole land. Look how many of us there are. Obviously it is ours.4
Inheritance by headcount. Inheritance by association. We are connected to the promise, therefore the promise is ours, and the fact that our lives look nothing like the God who made it is a separate conversation.
If you want to know what that sounds like in English, it sounds like this. I prayed a prayer when I was nine. My family has always believed. I am at church most weeks. I give. I know the words to the songs. I would never do the really bad things.
Every one of those is true, and not one of them is him.
I never knew you
Jesus takes this exact nerve and presses on it, and it is the most frightening paragraph in the New Testament. Not because of what it says about the wicked, but because of who is in it.
He describes people who arrive on the last day fully confident. And here is the detail I had never noticed until recently. They do not offer excuses. They do not say we are sorry, we tried, we hoped you would overlook it.
They offer a résumé.
We prophesied in your name. We drove out demons in your name. We did mighty works in your name. Ministry. Fruit, apparently. Results you could put in a report.
These are not irreligious people. These are the productive ones. If you had a church, you would want them in it. They would lead something, and they would be good at it.
And the verdict is not that they did not do enough. It is not that they fell short of the standard. If it were, the résumé would be the right defense and the only question would be whether it was long enough.
The verdict is, I never knew you.5
Not a performance ruling. A relational one. All the activity was real and none of it was the thing, because the thing was never activity. The thing was knowing him.
Now put Paul next to that, because he holds up the same kind of résumé and does the opposite with it. He lists his credentials. Bloodline, tribe, sect, zeal, blameless under the law. It is an impressive document and he is not being falsely modest about it. Then he throws the whole thing in the garbage.
His stated reason is four words long. That I may know him.6
Two men, two résumés. One offers his to get in. The other burns his to get to the Person. Same paper, opposite direction, and the difference between them is the entire Christian faith.
What we are actually asking for
I think the cleanest place to find out which man you are is your prayers. Not the public ones. The ones in the truck.
Go back over what you have actually asked God for in the last month.
The job. The diagnosis to come back clean. The kid to straighten out. The deal to close. The pain to stop. The person to change. My list looks like that more often than I would like to admit, and I do not think any of it is wrong to ask for. Scripture tells us plainly to bring our requests, all of them, and the promise attached is peace.7
But run the tally anyway. How much of what you asked for was him?
My daughter Aribella sent me a text while I was in the middle of thinking all this through, and she had no idea what I had been working on. She was just telling me what God had been showing her. She wrote that when she pours out her heart and prays boldly about something, she worries about it less afterward. Not because the situation changed, but because she knows her Father knows about it. Then she said this.
"Yes, God is a God who already knows when we sit down and when we stand up, but there is something about us acknowledging He knows that cultivates our trust and dependence on Him. Because trust isn't one sided."
Trust is not one sided. She got to the center of it in five words while I was circling it with a legal pad.
She had also heard a pastor say that prayer does not change God's awareness, it changes our awareness of God. That is exactly right. He already knows. The asking was never for his information. The asking is the relationship.
And I want to name what happened there, because it matters more than the point she made.
I had been chewing on this for days. The thing that broke it open did not come from my study or my notes. It came from my daughter, in a text, that started with an insult only my kids are allowed to use.
Sometimes God speaks to you because you left a channel open.
Not the channel where you consume the polished thing from the person with the platform. The other one. Where you are genuinely listening to what God is teaching the people around you. Your wife. Your kid. The guy in your small group who is not a gifted communicator and says one sentence that takes the top of your head off. That is a completely different posture than forwarding a clip, and you can tell them apart by one question. Am I receiving this, or am I just consuming it?
Which, if you go back to Ezekiel, is the whole problem. Those people had the best channel available in the ancient world. An actual prophet. God's actual words. And they turned him into music. The input was never the issue. The posture was.
So keep the channels open. And be careful which ones you have quietly closed, because a man who will listen to a famous preacher and not to his own daughter has told on himself.
The flies
That same morning Aribella had been reading Psalm 23, and one line caught her that I have read a hundred times without stopping. You anoint my head with oil.8
She had come across an explanation of what that was. Shepherds oiled their sheep's heads against flies. Insects that were not deadly, but that swarmed and pestered until the animal was agitated, restless, distracted, unable to settle down. The oil did not kill the flies. It kept the sheep from being driven out of its mind by them.
Here is what she did with it.
"I couldn't help but think about how often the 'flies' in my own life aren't the big hardships — they're the little frustrations, the distractions, and the things that quietly steal my peace if I let them."
And then the part I would want every man reading this to sit with. She wrote that the Shepherd's daily anointing is a picture of the Spirit giving us the attitude of Christ, so we can meet those small irritations with his peace instead of our flesh. Not so God removes every fly. So our hearts are not consumed by them.
Most of us are not being taken out by catastrophes. We are being eaten alive by flies.
The traffic. The tone in the text. The kid who did not do the one thing. The coworker who got the credit. None of it is fatal and all of it is corrosive. And if you want an honest read on whether Christ is actually on the throne of your heart, do not examine how you handle a crisis. You can rise to a crisis, and everyone is watching anyway. Examine how you handle a minor inconvenience when nobody is looking. Nobody performs their reaction to a small irritation.
That is the daily oil. And you do not get it by consuming more. You get it from the Shepherd, every morning, because you asked him for himself.
What turning actually looks like
Paul makes a distinction I cannot get away from. There are two kinds of sorrow and only one of them changes anything.
Worldly sorrow is regret. It is being genuinely upset about the consequences. About getting caught, about what it cost you, about how it looks. It feels terrible and it produces nothing. Paul says it leads to death, and I think he means it burns hot and leaves you exactly where you were.
Godly sorrow is grief over the sin itself, and it moves.
And Paul does not leave it abstract. He tells the Corinthians to look at what their sorrow actually produced. Earnestness. Eagerness to clear it up. Indignation. Alarm. Longing. Zeal. A readiness to make it right. That is a list you can hold your own heart against. If your sorrow produced a bad weekend and nothing else, it was the other kind.9
So what do you actually do?
Two things, and Proverbs puts them side by side. Whoever conceals his sins will not prosper. Whoever confesses and forsakes them finds mercy. Confess and forsake. Both. Confession without forsaking is narration. Forsaking without confession is self-improvement.10
Confess it specifically. Not the category. I have asked men to name one sin and watched them hand me an entire genre. I struggle with anger. I have not been the husband I should be. That is not confession, that is a press release. Name the moment. Name what you did on Tuesday. If you cannot get more specific than a category, you have not seen it yet, and God is not fooled by the summary.
Then forsake it. Change the actual thing. Kill the account. Hand over the phone. Make the call you have been avoiding. Apologize to the person by name for the specific thing, without the word "if" anywhere in the sentence. Repentance that costs nothing is a feeling. Zacchaeus did not weep. He wrote checks.11
And here is the guard, because I have written about this before and I do not want to hand anyone a ladder. None of that manufactures a new heart. You cannot soften your own heart into a new one. The new heart is a gift and no one births himself.12 This is not how you earn it. This is what a heart God has already touched does when it finally sees clearly. The doing is the evidence, not the payment.
The prize
So here is where I have landed, and I would rather say it as an invitation than a warning, because the warning only works if you can see what is on the other side of it.
The prize is not the result.
The prize is not the marriage getting fixed, though I hope it does. Not the job, the healing, the kid coming home, the business turning. Those are good and you should ask for them and God is not annoyed that you did.
The prize is the Father.
He is what the land was for. He is what the temple was for. He is what the résumé cannot buy and what all that activity was pointing at the entire time. And the staggering thing, the thing that makes this good news instead of a rebuke, is that he can actually be known. Not known about. Known. That was the whole point of the cross. Not primarily to get you out of something, but to get you to Someone.
Men do not walk away from the flesh because somebody made the flesh sound bad. We have all heard that sermon and we all went home and did it again. We walk away when we finally see there is a Person on the other side of it, and that he is better.
So do not just consume this one either. That would be a fitting way to prove the point.
Ask him for something this week. Then, before you get up, ask him for himself and mean it.
See what happens.