Advertise on podcast: Restoration Church: Teachings

What does it really mean to follow Jesus when life feels out of control? In John 21:15-19, Jesus reinstates Peter after his three denials and then speaks a haunting word about the future: when you are older, you will stretch out your hands and be led where you do not want to go. Far from being just a prediction about Peter's death, this passage opens up a profound truth about the spiritual life itself. There is an active dimension to our faith, the disciplines, the practices, the intentional pursuit of God, and there is a passive dimension, the seasons, the suffering, the circumstances we did not choose and cannot control. Both are forming us. The challenge is to stop seeing the difficult seasons of life as obstacles to our spiritual growth and start recognizing them as the very terrain where God is doing some of his deepest work in us. Whether we are in a season of busyness, loss, waiting, or uncertainty, the question is not why is this happening, but what is God forming in me through this?

Contrary to the American belief that you author your own life, you will be led - though by whom and to where is yours to determine. Moreover, you will be led where you do not want to go. In this teaching, we map the life of faith through Hagberg and Guelich's six stages, from first recognizing God to finally becoming love. The hinge is the Wall: an unavoidable pain that stalls most people, where spirituality and psychology have to heal together and the only way out is through. Come out the other side, and you're free to become a person who is loved and loves as God loves.

The goal of the whole spiritual journey is love and only Jesus made self-giving, even enemy-embracing love the very point of being human, defined it by his own death, and rooted it in the character of God. Yet love isn't a feeling we fall into but a direction we grow in: Bernard of Clairvaux traced four stages, from loving ourselves for our own sake all the way to loving even ourselves, our neighbor, and our enemy for God's sake. It's not a ladder we climb by effort but an upward spiral we're drawn along by grace where every step forward is a step in the direction of love.

Genesis opens with a God who gives. Genesis 3 breaks it: Eve saw, found it good, and took — a verb chain that runs from Eve to Cain to Lamech until Genesis 6:2 replays it word for word in Hebrew. Taking is distrust. We don't doubt God is real; we doubt that what he wants for us is our deepest happiness. So we seize the timing (too slow), the process (too painful), and the outcome (not what we pictured). We want a God who runs like a factory — formulaic, foreseeable, familiar. But God deals in vineyards, not factories. For the weak, not the strong. And God is grieved, not angry.

Genesis 5 refuses to be skipped: framed as humanity, history, and hope, the genealogy opens not with death but with dignity by restating that even after the fall, every name on the list still bears the image of God. And because every name in it inherited a story and had to decide what to do with it, the text turns on us: what lives in our bones — the people, places, patterns, and pathologies that shaped us — and will we pass on what we haven't processed, or bring it to Jesus and tell a better one?