Advertise on podcast: Resurrection Church | A Home of the Prodigal

Christians live a life of awe because of the Goodness of God.

Ryan talks about cultivating the practices of lament, confession, and beholding.

Pastor Ryan takes us through Ezekiel 12 and 13.

Pastor Ryan leads us through Ezekiel 8.

GOD’S PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHAT BABYLON IS DOING TO THEM…BUT EZEKIEL DOES, AND THIS IS EXACTLY Ezekiel's problem. Israel isn't just living in Babylon. Babylon is growing INSIDE OF THEM. Babylon is slowly teaching them what is normal.  And once something becomes normal, you stop asking whether it's forming you. It happens slowly. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. One more scroll. One more outrage. One more comparison. One more evening where we are physically present with the people we love, but our minds are somewhere else. Being formed and shaped by Babylon doesn't have to look like addiction. It doesn't have to look like walking away from Jesus. It doesn't have to look like some massive moral collapse. It can be far more subtle. The enemy is perfectly content for you and me to attend church as long as Jesus isn't actually King. Go to church. Sing the songs. Listen to the sermon. Put the Bible verse on your wall. Just don't let Jesus rearrange your desires. Don't let Him control your money. Don't let Him touch your sexuality. Don't let Him determine your schedule. Don't let Him shape how you forgive. Don't let Him tell you who you are.

Exile doesn’t always look like addiction, a sex change, or some dramatic rejection of God. Sometimes exile is far more subtle. It can look like a respectable life. A good job. A nice family. A full calendar. Church every Sunday. The enemy is completely fine with you and me attending church—as long as Jesus is not actually King. As long as we sing about Him but do not surrender to Him. As long as we know the language of faith but remain shaped by the desires, fears, values, and habits of Babylon. Because exile is not merely living far from God geographically. It is learning to live as though God is distant—even while sitting in church every week. Babylon does not need to convince her to stop believing in Jesus. It only needs to keep her from falling in love with Him.

Every person is a witness. You may not think of yourself that way. You may not consider yourself an evangelist. You may not feel qualified to talk about Jesus. You may not know how to answer every theological question. But you are already bearing witness to something. Your life is telling a story about what you believe is ultimately real. The way you spend your time bears witness. The way you use your money bears witness. The way you speak about people bears witness. The way you respond when you are disappointed bears witness. The way you suffer bears witness. The way you forgive—or refuse to forgive—bears witness. Every life points somewhere. The question is not whether you are or not a witness….The question is, “What is my life witnessing to?”

A few years ago, I read an interview with a successful entrepreneur, is the PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Someone asked him, "What is the biggest difference between people who succeed and people who don't?" His answer surprised me. He said, "The people who accomplish the most are willing to look foolish longer than everyone else.” That sentence stayed with me. Because nobody wants to look foolish. We want certainty before obedience. We want guarantees before sacrifice. We want everyone to understand our decisions before we make them. But almost every meaningful decision in life requires stepping into something that doesn't yet make sense. You propose before you know how marriage will unfold. You have children before you know what they'll become. You plant a church before you know if anyone will come. Every beautiful life contains moments that looked ridiculous before they looked wise.

Every day we wake up to a world competing for our desire. Every ad, social feed, and marketing campaign tells us the same story: this product, experience, or lifestyle will finally make you happy, beautiful, or fulfilled. Advertising has changed. A century ago, ads focused on what a product did. Today, they sell an image, an identity, a promise. The product is almost beside the point. What matters is convincing us that it can satisfy our deepest longings. As Strahan Coleman puts it, "Manufactured desire sells the world now, not reality." And that's no accident. Our culture has intentionally shifted from meeting needs to creating wants. Human desire has become a commodity. We don't live in neutral territory. The wealthiest companies in history—and algorithms designed to exploit our attention—are constantly shaping what we love, pursue, and worship. Our God-given desires are captured, monetized, and redirected, discipling us to spend our money, attention, and affection on almost anything except what truly satisfies.

NO ONE TELLS YOU THIS WHEN YOU FIRST BEGIN FOLLOWING JESUS…If you walk with Jesus long enough—if you begin to take prayer seriously, if your relationship with Him becomes more than a Sunday habit and instead becomes the deepest priority of your life—you will almost certainly be led into seasons of silence and hiddenness. Not because God has abandoned you, but because He is forming you. We all imagine the spiritual life moving from one mountaintop to the next, from breakthrough to breakthrough, from answered prayer to answered prayer. But Jesus often leads His closest friends into places where there are no crowds, no applause, no obvious victories—only the quiet work of trust. The path of intimacy inevitably passes through hidden places. There, stripped of noise, recognition, and certainty, We begin to discover that God's greatest gift is not always what He places in our hands, but what He cultivates in our hearts: a holy dependence on His presence.

"Healing begins where hiding ends" How does Jesus invite us to come out of the shadows of life and into the light where He is? Confession. "We become whole when we are fully known." -Curt Thompson

The Age of Attention There is a strange paradox about our moment in history. We have more information about God than any generation. Millions of sermons online. Bible apps in our pockets. Podcasts. Books. YouTube channels. Social media theologians. Never has knowledge been more accessible. And yet—Never has awe, wonder, inspiration felt more absent. The fallout of postmoderism is not merely that people doubt truth—it is that we have lost the capacity for wonder. The world has become flattened. Everything is analyzed, deconstructed, explained, and reduced to its component parts. We know more information than any generation in history, yet we often experience less awe. We can explain a sunset through atmospheric physics, map the neural pathways of love, and measure the age of distant galaxies, but explanation is not the same as amazement. Knowledge has increased, but wonder has diminished. This has deeply affected our life with God. We have facts about God but rarely stand before Him in holy astonishment. We scroll past beauty. We dissect God rather than adore Him. And in a distracted culture, the battle for your soul is largely a battle for your attention. When Jesus teaches us to pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…”He is not merely teaching us to say nice things about God. He is teaching us how to reorder our attention, which will reorder our loves. Because what we worship shapes what we become.

Matthew 6:9: “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven…’”  This is stunning. Because Jesus is teaching ordinary people how to relate to God. And He intentionally begins with intimacy. In first-century Judaism, God was holy, revered, majestic, and transcendent. And He is. But Jesus introduces something astonishing: closeness. The word Jesus uses carries familial intimacy. This is relational nearness. Jesus is saying: Prayer begins by remembering who you belong to. Before requests. Before confession. Before intercession. Belonging. Ruth Haley Barton writes, “The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy.” Many of us have souls that have learned to hide. Prayer becomes the place where the soul slowly comes out of hiding in the presence of a safe Father. You belong first. Prayer is that place where true “belonging” begins.

There is a kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. You know what I mean. You can take the vacation. Turn your phone off. Sleep for eight full hours. Go to therapy. Get healthier. Get organized. And still feel hollow somewhere beneath the surface. Because not all exhaustion is physical, some exhaustion is spiritual.  Some exhaustion comes from living disconnected from the presence of God while trying to survive on noise, productivity, stimulation, and distraction. We are constantly consuming: podcasts, reels, news, opinions, entertainment, outrage, information. We fill our schedules, our minds, and our bellies…And yet many of us are starving internally. Not because we are bad people. Definitely not because we do not love Jesus. But because we have forgotten how to be with Him.  Prayer was not an accessory in the life of Jesus. Prayer was the center. One of the fascinating things in the Gospels is how often Jesus disappears. Again and again: He withdraws. He leaves crowds. He wakes early. He goes to lonely places. He prays through the night. Jesus Himself built His life around communion with the Father. And if Jesus needed silence…If Jesus needed solitude…If Jesus needed prayer…How much more do we?

We come into the world through our five senses. We learn by touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell. Then, as we grow older, we are formed into another layer of reality: logic, theory, philosophy, systems, information, and mental frameworks. We are taught to explain things. Categorize things. Control things. We learn to trust what can be measured, studied, and articulated. Then we form spiritual things, and we form “spiritual things” into concepts: theology, doctrine, apologetics, systems, denominations, frameworks, podcasts, debates, positions. Again, none of those things is bad. Some are deeply necessary. But something subtle can happen. We can begin mistaking explanation for encounter. It's like having the ability to describe the ocean beautifully…while never stepping into the water. This is one of the great dangers of modern Christianity: we become informed about God while remaining distant from Him. The Scriptures never present God as merely an idea to study. Moses does not merely learn about fire. He stands before a burning bush. Israel does not merely hear theories about deliverance. They walk through the sea. The disciples do not merely study love. They eat with Love Himself. And often, that awakening begins with disruption. With detachment. With unlearning. We think formation is about adding more information. More books. More sermons. More theology. But I am experiencing that the way of Jesus is less about learning something brand new…and more about unlearning everything false.