Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

The Question We Are Still Living

Easter was three weeks ago, but the question it raises doesn't expire with the season. How do we live in light of an empty tomb? What does ordinary life look like for people who believe that God broke into history, that death could not hold him, and that his Spirit is loose in the world? That is the journey this community has been on — not a tidy theological project, but a lived exploration of what it means to walk forward after resurrection.

The past few weeks have traced a path through Romans 7 and 8 — the tension between flesh and spirit, between what we can manage on our own and the "impossibility" that belongs only to God. Flesh is our own capacity. Spirit is something else entirely. And the invitation of Sunday's message was to stop treating those two things as separate tracks, as if the spiritual life runs parallel to ordinary life but rarely intersects it.

The Spirit Is Always Here

Here is something worth sitting with: God's Spirit does not need to be summoned. It is not waiting somewhere else for us to get quiet enough or spiritual enough to access it. The Spirit is present. The challenge is that we so often are not.

God's presence is not limited to Sunday mornings or prayer closets. It shows up in a dance studio, beside a cup of coffee on a Tuesday, in traffic on Wednesday afternoon. The Spirit is only ever — now. Not "now, if you have things together." Not "now, when your week has been better." Just now, where you are, as you are. The spiritual life is not a retreat from the world. It is an awareness of what's already present within it.

This Moment Is Your Spiritual Walk

What if the circumstances pressing in on you right now are not interruptions to your spiritual life — but the actual substance of it?

Ephesians 2:10
"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."

The good works are not heroic deeds we engineer. They are woven into the fabric of the ordinary — moments God has already prepared for us to participate in, with him and through him. The diagnosis that arrived this week. The relationship that is costing you something. The trial you did not see coming. These are not detours around your spiritual life. They are your spiritual walk. God meets us precisely there.

The Holy Spirit, Jesus promised in Mark 13, will speak through us when we are brought to trial and do not know what to say. Imagine that — not in spite of the hard moment, but through it, the Spirit moves. The moment is the vehicle.

Jesus at the Well and on the Road

Jesus modeled this with his whole life. In John 4, we find him tired — genuinely, physically worn out from the road. He sits down beside a well at noon and a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. What follows is one of the most transformative conversations in all of Scripture. And it happened because Jesus was simply present in an ordinary, exhausted moment. He did not manufacture a ministry opportunity. He met a person who was already there.

Then in Luke 10, a lawyer asks Jesus the defining question: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" He answers his own question correctly — love God with everything, love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27). But then he tries to narrow the field: "And who exactly is my neighbor?" Jesus does not answer with a principle. He tells a story.

A man beaten and left on the road. A priest who saw him and passed by. A Levite who did the same. And then a Samaritan — someone with every social reason to walk on — who stopped, drew near, and poured out his resources for a stranger. The spiritual life in that story is not abstract. It is oil and wine and a donkey and an inn. It is embodied. It is expensive. It happens on a road.

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

The Lord's Prayer is not an escape hatch out of the world. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" — that is a prayer asking God to land here, in the physical, messy, complicated terrain of ordinary life. Our relationship with God will be revealed in our relationship with others. That is not comfortable news. It is honest news.

Spiritual life is not ephemeral. It is not primarily an inner experience that occasionally surfaces in visible ways. It is embodied — it goes places, it does things, it opens its mouth, it stops on roads. And the good news is that we do not have to generate the power for this on our own. We are his workmanship. He is doing the works in us and through us. Our task is not heroic effort. Our task is presence.

The Spirit is not waiting for us to arrive somewhere more holy. It is already here, in whatever this week holds — in the next conversation, the next traffic jam, the next knock at the door. We do not need to conjure it. We need to show up to it.

He is present. He is always now.

April 19, 2026

What Does It Mean to Bear Witness?

The word “testimony” gets thrown around a lot in church circles. We’re told to share our testimony, to let our lives be a testimony — but what does that actually mean?

It turns out the answer is embedded in the word itself. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, “testimony” and “bearing witness” are drawn from the same root. A testimony is not simply a personal story — it is a legal, relational act of attesting to something true. It is what a witness does when they stand and say: I saw this. I know this. I can tell you what happened.

Jesus makes this exact connection just before His ascension, in Acts 1:8. We are post-resurrection people — living on the other side of the empty tomb, filled with the Holy Spirit — and we are called to bear witness to what that means. A testimony, then, is not just a story about us. It is evidence of Him.

Acts 1:8 — “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

A Miracle Wrapped in a Mountain Holler

This past Sunday, the church had the privilege of hearing from Luther Blakeley — a man whose life is a living testimony in every sense of that word.

Luther was born in 1945 in Harlan County, Kentucky — deep coal mining country, up in a place called Chevrolet Holler. As a small child, he was afflicted with rickets and Bright’s disease, a serious kidney condition. Things got bad enough that a doctor told his mother to take him home, keep him comfortable, and make peace with it. The prognosis also carried a grim prediction: Luther would never father children.

Down the hill from the family’s home lived a woman named Arley Green — deeply, quietly godly. When Luther’s mother called on her to pray, Arley asked first: “If the Lord is not willing to heal him, are you willing to let him go?”

His mother said yes. And Arley prayed.

Within half an hour, Luther was on the floor playing with his brother as though nothing had ever been wrong. He went on to become a husband, a father of four, a grandfather — and a man who has been bearing witness to that moment ever since. The doctor was wrong. God was not.

Don’t Be a Sunday Morning Glory

When Luther’s family eventually moved to Ohio, he grew up watching the friends around him. Some of them showed up to church on Sunday mornings — guitars in hand, full of song, radiant with faith. But come Monday, and through the rest of the week, they weren’t so glorious.

Luther named them after the flower: Sunday morning glories. The morning glory blooms brilliantly in the early light and closes by afternoon. Beautiful — but brief. These friends were the same: church-bright on Sunday, gone by Monday.

He made a decision young: I will not be that. He didn’t want to be a hypocrite, didn’t want to bloom for an audience and wither in the ordinary. That conviction stayed with him for decades, shaping the kind of man and believer he became.

This is part of what it means to bear witness. A testimony is not just a story you tell — it’s a life you live. The most powerful evidence of God’s grace is consistency: faith that doesn’t fold when Sunday is over.

Let the Engine Pull the Train

Years later, a pastor named Charles Betts sat down with Luther to help him work through a sticking point in his faith. Luther wanted to believe — but he didn’t feel it the way he thought he should. He was waiting for a feeling that wasn’t coming.

The pastor drew a train on a piece of paper. Three cars: an engine, a coal tender, and a caboose.

“The engine,” he said, “is fact — the Word of God. The coal car is faith. And the caboose is your feelings.” Then he looked at Luther: “You have your cars in the wrong order. You’ve put feelings second, right behind the engine — and faith is trailing behind. Let’s move the feelings to where they belong. Let fact pull faith, and let feelings ride in the caboose, where the train can carry them along.”

That picture broke something open. On a Saturday afternoon not long after, Luther accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

It’s worth sitting with. So many of us wait to feel saved, feel certain, feel on fire — before we commit to acting on what we know to be true. But the Word of God doesn’t wait for our feelings to cooperate. Fact first. Faith in response. And feelings? They follow, pulled along by the momentum of a faith anchored in truth.

A Life That Bears Witness

Luther taught Sunday school for more than twenty years. He and his wife Joyce attended the same church for over four decades. And when COVID disrupted everything and a small group — including his granddaughter Aaliyah and her husband Nick — began gathering in a home, what would eventually become Kingdom Church, Luther and Joyce found their way there too.

One life. One moment of healing in a Kentucky coal camp. One train illustration that finally clicked. And decades of faithful witness to the God who showed up in a mountain holler and never stopped showing up.

That is what a testimony is. Not a polished performance. Not a perfect story with no rough edges. Just a life that bears witness — to what is true, to what God has done, to the Christ who is risen and reigning and still at work in the ordinary places of our lives.

You have a testimony too — whether you recognize it yet or not. The question is whether you’re willing to let fact be the engine: to anchor yourself in the truth of what God says about His Son, to respond with faith, and to let your feelings be carried along in the train. When you do, the witness your life becomes is more powerful than anything you could manufacture on your own.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Between Easter and Pentecost

We're in a strange and beautiful in-between. Easter was last week — the proclamation that the impossible happened, that death didn't get the last word. But we're not yet at Pentecost, that explosion of Spirit and fire that comes 50 days after Passover. And so we wait. We wonder. We ask the question: How do we live in light of the empty tomb?

It turns out, living in light of resurrection is less about adding things to our lives and more about losing things. Which might be why the first and most counterintuitive thing worth saying this week is this: hope is for losers. Not losers in the worthless sense — not people without value or dignity. But people who have come to the end of themselves, and discovered that's precisely where God meets them.

The Problem with "I"

Paul lays out the case in Romans 7, and it's almost comedic how honest he is. "I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." Read eleven verses and count the I's. There are somewhere between 22 and 25 — the point isn't the grammar, it's the diagnosis. We are obsessed with ourselves.

Paul calls this the flesh — and he means something broader than just the list of bad things we do. Flesh is autonomy. It's self-determination. It's the part of us that says I've got this, that manages its own preservation, seeks its own validation, and controls its own narrative. Flesh can even be religious. You can go to church, serve, tithe, do all the right things — and still be doing them entirely out of self.

Here's the bind: you can't fix flesh with more flesh. If you white-knuckle your way to better behavior, you've produced self-righteousness. If you stay laser-focused on the sin you're trying to stop, you're feeding it. As Paul puts it, "For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do" (Romans 8:3-4). The solution to flesh is not more willpower. It's surrender.

The Garden and the Graveyard

Paul makes a pivot in Romans 8 that's worth sitting with: "If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness" (Romans 8:10). Death and life, side by side. That death isn't a tragedy — it's a threshold. The graveyard of your ego is the soil where the Spirit grows.

Gardens are messy. A garden with weeds is still a garden. Pulling weeds is part of the program. Failure is part of the program. But weed-pulling doesn't make a garden — the Author of creation does. The question isn't whether we'll keep failing; it's whether we'll let our shame over failure be primarily an injury to ego. Because if it is, we're still in flesh. But if we can receive failure as grace already at work — as the Spirit already in motion, drawing us back — that's something different entirely.

"The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."
— Romans 8:26

Surrender Is Not Defeat

The word that unlocks Romans 8 is one we don't love: submission. Or its close cousin, surrender. "The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law" (Romans 8:7). To submit is to stop insisting on your own version of reality. To surrender is to stop fighting for control.

C.S. Lewis put it this way: "Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you already had it." That's faith. Not certainty. Not having it all figured out. Faith is beginning to run even as a bad runner — because the only way to become a runner is to start running badly. Faith is acting as if what God says is true is actually true, even before you feel it.

And here's what waits on the other side of surrender — not defeat, but being held. Paul lists every force that threatens us: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, danger. Then announces that in all of them, "we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Romans 8:37). Conquerors take and do and wield. More than conquerors? We receive what we don't deserve. Through him who loved us.

Blessed Are the Losers

Paul closes the argument in Romans 12 with a call to "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God" — and calls this your spiritual worship (Romans 12:1). Not your effort. Not your achievement. Your availability. Lying down on the altar and staying there.

Of course, the problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar. And that's the thing: crawling back up isn't failure. It's worship. Again and again and again, not because we're earning anything, but because that's what it looks like to stay available to a God who raises the dead.

Jesus called these people blessed: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matthew 5:3-6). Every single one of them sounds like a loser. And Jesus says theirs is the kingdom.

So don't try to win. Because hope — real, durable, eternal hope — is for the losers.

The Death of Every Possibility

Before we can talk about resurrection, we have to talk about Friday.

Good Friday — and it's worth pausing on that name, because for the disciples, there was nothing good about it. It was the day every last human possibility died. For three years, these men and women had followed Jesus. They watched him heal the sick and raise the dead. They had grown deeply confident that something extraordinary was breaking into the world, and they had poured that confidence into a future.

A political future: Jesus as Messiah-King, setting up God's rule on earth as in heaven. But then the moment of reckoning came, and the chief priests — the very religious leaders of Israel — declared to Pilate, "We have no king but Caesar," and handed him over to be crucified (John 19:15–16). A religious future: maybe the disciples would be the ones to walk alongside Jesus, building something new. Instead, they scattered. Peter denied him three times. The inner circle fell apart. All human possibility — political, relational, spiritual — gone.

"We Had Hoped..."

In Luke 24, two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem. They've given up. On the road to Emmaus, they pour out their grief to a stranger in three devastating words: "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel" (v. 21). Past tense. Hope died with him. It's over — until it isn't.

The Thing That Does Not Happen

Here's something worth sitting with this Easter: resurrection is not a rare event. It's not something that happens infrequently, like a solar eclipse or a hundred-year flood. Resurrection is a thing that simply does not happen. The dead stay dead. That's not pessimism — it's physics, biology, and every human experience stacked together. The rule book is clear.

And then, at early dawn on the first day of the week, the women arrive at the tomb with their burial spices — and find the stone rolled away and the body gone (Luke 24:1–3). The impossible is not an obstacle for this God. It's precisely what Paul means in Romans 4 when he describes God as the one who "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" (v. 17). Resurrection? Not a thing that happens. This God? Not a problem.

Perplexed, Awe-Struck, Amazed

When the women hear the angel's announcement — "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen" (Luke 24:5–6) — Luke uses one word to describe them: perplexed. Puzzled. Baffled. Bewildered. They have crossed over into territory where the rule book simply doesn't apply anymore.

And then there's Peter — being Peter. He ran to the tomb, stooped down, looked in, saw the linen cloths lying there, and went home marveling (v. 12). He was amazed. He was astonished. He was awed. I wonder if we could use a little more of that.

The Life We're Invited Into

Here's where Easter becomes deeply personal. If the resurrection is an eruption of God's power into the world, then the life of a believer should be an ongoing echo of that eruption. In Romans 8:11, Paul makes an astonishing claim: the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you — and that Spirit desires to give life to your mortal body, right here, right now. Not just someday at the final resurrection, but today.

This is why a Christianity primarily focused on following rules, living a comfortable moral life, and securing a personal spot in heaven falls so flat. The good news is not a self-improvement program. The good news starts with the death of all human possibility — and then the eruption of God's. Jesus made this unforgettably clear to a rich young man who had kept every commandment and still felt the emptiness. When the disciples heard Jesus' answer and asked in astonishment, "Who then can be saved?" — he looked them in the eye and said:

Matthew 19:26 — "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

The Exchange

Not about cleaning up your life, checking more boxes, or becoming a better version of yourself. It's about placing yourself at the foot of the cross and making a trade: your limits for his limitlessness, your careful control for his scandalous grace.

That same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead desires to transform us — to raise us up, to do work in and through us that we could never do on our own. The question Easter asks us every year is the same: Will we keep managing the possible on our own — or will we open our hands and receive what only God can do?

Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder · Kingdom Church Troy · April 6, 2026