Sunday, July 26, 2026• Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

We Cannot Live Without Help

Before we can say a single word of theology, our bodies already know the truth: we live only because life keeps arriving from outside of us. We breathe air we did not make. We take in what we did not create. Cut off from what surrounds us, we would not survive more than a few minutes. It is one of the most obvious facts about being human, and yet something in us resists it. We would rather be the source of our own security than the receiver of someone else's. Psalm 16 begins in exactly that tension. David writes as a man with nothing to offer and everything to need — and it is precisely there, empty-handed, that he prays the truest words a person can pray: “Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.”

In You I Take Refuge

To take refuge is to admit you are small and something else is large — that you are vulnerable and someone else is strong enough to hold you. David doesn't address a generic deity. He calls on the Lord by his personal, covenant name, and then answers with total submission: “You are my Lord. I have no good apart from you.” That's not resignation. It's relief. The saints, David says, are simply those who have stopped pretending otherwise — the excellent ones, not because of their own strength, but because they've placed themselves under the reign of the one who is actually strong. Every other source of identity ends in exhaustion. Only this one ends in rest.

An Inheritance We Did Not Earn

David goes on: “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup … the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” Inheritance is a strange kind of gift — you don't earn it, you don't work for it, you simply receive it because someone else has died. That is exactly the shape of grace. Christ's death is the reason the inheritance is ours at all. “Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). He was made to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). Every good thing we have in Christ traces back to that same trade. Nothing about our inheritance was manufactured by our own effort — it was purchased, then handed over.

A Heart Instructed in the Night

“I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.” Night, in Scripture, is often the hour of doubt and fear — the hour when the worries we managed to outrun all day catch up with us. And yet David says it's there, in the dark, that counsel comes, not from a heart left to its own devices, but from a heart submitted to God and filled with his word. “Keep them within your heart,” Proverbs says of God's words, “for they are life … and from it flow the springs of life.” A heart surrendered to God doesn't just survive the night. It becomes a source — something that overflows toward gladness rather than despair.

The Path of Life Is Full of Joy

David's confidence climbs to its highest point in the psalm's final lines — that God will not abandon him to the grave, that his very flesh will dwell secure. Centuries later, Peter stood up in Jerusalem and told the crowd that David wasn't only speaking about himself; he was prophesying about Jesus, whose body did not see corruption but rose from the dead (Acts 2). Whatever security and gladness David glimpsed by faith, Christ has secured in full.

PSALM 16:11
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Wherever you are on that path today — in the highs or in the very low lows — that is where Christ meets you. The author of Hebrews says Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him” (Hebrews 12:2). His joy wasn't the absence of suffering; it was full confidence in what waited on the other side of it. That same joy is offered to us, not as something we conjure, but as fruit of his Spirit at work in us. We didn't create this path. We only walk it — hand held, joy given, one day at a time.

We receive. We rejoice. We are held.

July 19, 2026 • Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

Nothing Holds Still

Sit in a room and it feels like you're not moving at all. But you're not still — you're on the surface of a planet spinning through space at nearly eight hundred miles an hour, carried along with everything else in it. Step outside that room and get on a bus, and the illusion breaks even faster: look at your own seat and nothing seems to move, but look out the window and the whole world streams by. Movement was always there. You just needed a different reference point to see it.

This is true of more than physics. It's true of us. We are never standing still — not physically, not spiritually, not morally. The question was never whether you're moving. It's what you're moving toward, and whose pace you're matching.

Planted, Not Drifting

In response to the question of movement, Scripture provides an image, not an argument. Before it tells us what to avoid, Psalm 1 tells us what to become — a tree, rooted, fed, unhurried.

Psalm 1
"Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish."

Notice the progression tucked into that first verse: walk, stand, sit. It's a picture of drift — how a person moves from simply passing through a crowd, to lingering in it, to finally taking a seat among it. Rootedness is the opposite of drift. A tree planted by water isn't swept along by whatever current happens to be strongest that week. It draws from a source that doesn't move, and because of that, it can stay green through seasons that would wither anything else.

A Blueprint, Not a Cage

It's tempting to hear "law" and picture restriction — rules handed down to keep us small. But that gets the order backward. God's law isn't a fence built to keep good things out; it's the blueprint for what it looks like to flourish as the people he made us to be. Think about what happens when a culture insists there is no fixed point at all — when everyone gets to define their own rules, answerable to no one but themselves. The end of that road isn't freedom. It's isolation. It's drifting. It's chasing your own tail with no one and nothing to measure against.

Psalm 1 pictures that drifting as chaff — the light, empty husk that separates from the wheat the moment wind gets under it. No roots, so nothing to hold it in place. The wheat, heavy with what actually matters, settles. The chaff blows wherever the air takes it. Being planted isn't about being rigid. It's about having something solid enough beneath you that you don't scatter the moment the wind picks up.

Seasons, Not Endings

A tree planted by water still loses its leaves. Scripture doesn't promise a life with no seasons of darkness — only a root system that survives them. Dropping leaves isn't the same thing as withering. It's part of how a tree matures, not a sign that something has gone wrong. God never promised an easy path; he promised a faithful one. There will be seasons of beauty and seasons that feel bare, and both are part of the same life, drawing from the same water.

Fruit That Spills Outward

Here's what's easy to miss about a rooted life: its fruit was never meant to stay put. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness — none of those are private, internal achievements. They're outward-focused by nature. They spill into rooms and light them up. Peace only means something in the middle of instability. Patience only means something when someone is testing yours. And when kindness shows up in you that you know didn't originate with you — when it's clearly coming from somewhere else — that's not a coincidence to shrug off. That's the root system doing exactly what it was planted to do.

So the honest question isn't whether you're moving. You already are, every day, whether you notice it or not. The real question is what's holding you in place while everything around you shifts — what you're planted by, and whether it's a source deep enough to keep your leaves green long after the wind picks up.

Stay planted. Let the water do the rest.

A shepherd calls the sheep by name. A hireling only manages the herd.

July 12, 2026

Mike Lyons, Guest Speaker  •  Kingdom Church Troy

A Man Who Could Finally See

He had been blind since birth, sitting at the edge of the road while life moved past him. Jesus and his disciples walked by, and the disciples wanted a theological explanation: whose sin caused this, his or his parents' (John 9)? Jesus brushed the question aside. This wasn't punishment. It was an occasion for God's work to be seen.

Then, without a word of explanation to the man himself, Jesus knelt, made mud, and pressed it onto his eyes. “Go wash,” he said. That's it. No sermon, no negotiation — just an instruction to obey before understanding arrived. The man went, washed, and came back seeing. He didn't slip away quietly. He ran through the streets shouting that he could see, pulling his whole neighborhood into the commotion.

It's worth sitting with how strange this is. The man didn't ask for a doctrine. He received mud, obedience, and then sight. Sometimes faith looks less like getting an answer and more like washing off what's covering our eyes and finding, only afterward, that we can see.

When the Keepers Become the Thieves

The healed man's joy ran straight into a wall of suspicion. The religious leaders pulled him in for questioning — not once, but twice — because a miracle had happened on the wrong day, performed by the wrong man. They didn't ask, “How wonderful, what happened to you?” They asked, “How can you prove this is legitimate?” A man who could finally see the world was met with people who could no longer see him.

It's in this context that Jesus says one of his sharpest lines. Not about outsiders, but the very people entrusted with guarding the flock:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

John 10:10

Read in context, the thief isn't a symbol for some distant evil. It's a description of what happens when the people meant to shepherd God's people instead start guarding a system. Elsewhere Jesus calls this same crowd blind guides, whitewashed tombs, hypocrites (Matthew 23) — language he never once used on the addicts, the outcasts, or the morally desperate. His hardest words were reserved for those who had traded shepherding for control.

The Difference Between a Shepherd and a Hireling

Jesus draws a second contrast in the same breath: the hireling versus the shepherd (John 10:11–13). A hireling shows up, does the job, and runs at the first sign of danger, because the sheep were never really his. A shepherd stays, because he knows every sheep by name, and they know his voice.

It's possible to run every program well, fill every seat, and still be a hireling at heart — managing people instead of knowing them. A leader can hit every goal on a job description and, looking back, realize he only really knew the names of the people who helped him hit those goals. That's not malice. It's just what happens when the mission quietly gets replaced by the agenda. The tragic part is that a hireling can look, from the outside, exactly like a shepherd — until the moment it costs something.

Known By Name

Here is the good news underneath all of this: Jesus is not a hireling. He does not manage you. He knows you — by name, not by category. If you've spent time around religious people who made you feel like a case file instead of a person, that was never the heart of the Shepherd. His harsh words were never for the ones who felt lost, ashamed, or unsure they belonged. Those words were reserved for the gatekeepers who forgot why the gate existed.

Maybe you're standing at that gate right now, unsure whether you're welcome. Maybe you've believed, somewhere along the way, that God's patience with you has limits the way a hireling's patience does. It doesn't. The Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep (John 10:11) is not counting the cost of knowing you.

Listen for His Voice

The healed man's story doesn't end with restored eyesight. It ends with him finding the one who healed him and worshiping him — face to face, no longer a bystander in his own story (John 9:35–38). That's the invitation this week. Not just to hear something true about the Shepherd, but to respond to him.

A sheep's only defense is its ability to recognize the shepherd's voice among all the others calling for its attention. That's not a skill sheep are born with — it's built through nearness, through staying close enough, long enough, to learn the sound of it. If no one in your life currently knows you, walks with you, or helps you listen for that voice, that's worth naming out loud to someone this week. Start plainly: ask someone you trust to sit with you over coffee and talk about where God might be speaking.

He is not managing you from a distance. He is calling you by name.

The Shepherd knows your name — and He is calling it even now.

July 5, 2026

Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder — Kingdom Church Troy

A Culture Uncomfortable with Being Human

We live in a culture that flinches at the idea of being human — weak, unfinished, ordinary. We optimize, curate, and augment, quietly convinced that perfection might finally save us. Our carefully arranged lives online are just another layer of anxiety: glossy on the surface, hollow underneath. We consume images of who we should be and wonder why we’re starving.

That word — should — never really leaves us. It drives a low hum of self-judgment that has nothing to do with grace. We are God’s workmanship, created for good works prepared in advance (Ephesians 2:10), but that is an invitation, not a demand we generate on our own. The moment should takes over, community starts to feel dangerous — because if anyone gets close enough to see behind the curated exterior, the whole thing might fall apart.

The numbers bear this out. In 1990, 75% of Americans said they had a best friend; today only 59% do. Nearly one in five now report no close social connections at all, and researchers say the health toll of loneliness now rivals that of heavy smoking. We have never been more “connected,” and never more alone. If there is a force in the world set against human flourishing, it doesn’t need to do much — it only needs to isolate us from one another.

The Prayers of Christ

Here is where the Psalms open up. When you read the Psalms, you are reading the prayers of Christ.

Jesus quoted no book of Scripture more often than the Psalms. He was raised on them — sung in the synagogue, prayed at the temple, woven into the emotional fabric of his life. He died with them on his lips: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22). That is not Jesus reciting an old song. That is Jesus living inside words that had already, centuries earlier, been living inside him.

The fourth-century theologian Augustine gave this idea a name: totus Christus, the “whole Christ.” Scripture describes the church as a body with Christ as its head (Ephesians 4:15–16) — one organism, not two separate things reaching for each other. Augustine saw the Psalms as proof: Christ prays them together with his body, the church. Head and body, one voice.

We see the same thing when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. He says, “Our Father” — not “my Father” — inviting us into his own relationship with God, together. And then it turns personal: “Forgive us our debts.” Christ has no debts of his own to be forgiven. And yet he prays this alongside us, because it is our prayer as much as his.

When the Psalms Turn Dark

Not every Psalm is comfortable. Some — the imprecatory Psalms — are raw curses, prayers for vengeance that can be hard to read as Scripture at all. Psalm 109 is one of the darkest: a cry for an enemy’s ruin, his children fatherless, his name blotted out. It is ugly. It is also honest — a real person, pressed past what they can bear, refusing to hide any of it from God.

Christ enters into this too. Not by wishing the same destruction on his enemies, but by sharing fully in the weight of injustice and rage that produced it. He doesn’t ask us to sanitize ourselves before we come to him. He takes the human cry for vindication and carries it all the way to the cross, where he absorbs the judgment himself rather than hand it to the people who deserve it.

2 Corinthians 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

There is no human darkness that Christ hasn’t entered.

The Secret Revealed

This is the secret the Psalms have been pointing to all along: Christ does not stand apart from us, watching from a safe distance. He is joined to us, praying our prayers, carrying our grief, absorbing what we could never survive on our own.

Colossians 1:26–27 “…the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

That’s it. That’s the whole secret. Not Christ somewhere else, waiting for us to arrive, but Christ in you.

An Invitation, Not a Should

None of this is a new performance to strive toward. It’s an invitation — always plural, always “us together” — to walk in step with a Spirit who has already entered every dark place we could name. Our words, our actions, our prayers become, in some real sense, his.

So this week: read the Psalms, even the hard ones. Let David’s words become your own, and remember they were Christ’s first. And if Christ has entered fully into the mess, maybe we can risk opening the door a little wider to each other too — trading the exterior we’ve built for the relationship it was always meant to protect us from needing.

Christ in you. The hope of glory.

June 28, 2026

Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

The Trouble With Being Human

We tend to talk about being human as if it’s a contradiction we have to solve. On one hand, people do remarkable things — feats of courage and creativity that leave us in awe. On the other hand, people can be devastating to each other and to themselves. So which is it? Are we meant to celebrate our humanity, or escape it?

Paul doesn’t let us split the difference that easily. Writing to the church in Philippi, he names something deeper than the awesome-or-awful split: a quiet confusion between the temporal and the eternal. We mistake the game for the whole of life, forgetting that when the game is over, it all goes back in the box. Some people, he writes, “walk as enemies of the cross of Christ… with minds set on earthly things” (Philippians 3:18–19). The danger isn’t ambition or appetite themselves. It’s mistaking either one for the point of being alive.

Belly Gods and Borrowed Glory

Paul singles out two things in particular: a belly that has become a god, and a glory that’s really just shame wearing a disguise. Strip away the church language and it sounds familiar. A belly god is appetite turned into ultimate authority — comfort, consumption, the relentless pursuit of “I want.” Glory in shame is what happens when we build our worth out of likes, credentials, and recognition — the applause of whatever room we’re standing in.

What makes this so disorienting is that none of it is, by itself, evil. We were made to receive, and we’d rather possess. We were made dependent on God and each other, and we’d rather be self-sufficient. We were made to serve, and we’d rather be served. We were knit together in soft, vulnerable flesh, and we spend enormous energy covering that vulnerability up. We were made to flourish in community, and the moment things get hard, we scatter. None of this is a new flaw bolted onto our design — it’s a distortion of a design that was good to begin with.

Philippians 3:20–21 — “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”

Strangers Who Saw From Afar

That’s the hope Paul is pointing to — not an escape from being human, but a transformation of it. It’s the same hope the writer of Hebrews finds in the lives of Israel’s ancestors. Faith, Hebrews says, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) — not having the thing yet, but being so certain of it that you live differently because of it.

The patriarchs, the text says, died in faith, “having seen them and greeted them from afar,” acknowledging themselves as strangers and exiles on the earth, because they were seeking a better country, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:13–16). They could have turned back. They had a homeland behind them. But they kept walking toward something they couldn’t yet hold. Here’s the line worth sitting with: that heavenly city they were walking toward is a human city. Heaven isn’t the opposite of humanity — it’s humanity finally, fully at home.

The Privilege of Suffering

This is where Paul’s own story becomes instructive. He had every earthly credential available to a first-century Jew — pedigree, religious zeal, legal standing, social capital. And he calls all of it loss, even rubbish, compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ (Philippians 3:7–9). Not because credentials are inherently bad, but because none of them were ever going to be the foundation.

What he wants instead is almost startling: “that I may know him in the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11). Notice the order. Resurrection power doesn’t skip past suffering — it runs straight through it. To be human, in this account, is to suffer. That’s not a flaw to be optimized away. It’s a feature of a life joined to Christ, a privilege of walking the same road he walked.

Already on the Way Home

Maybe that’s an uncomfortable thing to preach. Would any of us sign up for a faith that promises suffering before it promises strength? But it’s a far more honest hope than the version we’re usually sold — the one where becoming a Christian means our weakness vanishes and we’re left with nothing but power. The real promise is stranger and better than that: we are citizens of another country, already on our way home, being transformed even now by the same power that raised Christ from the dead.

Strangers here. Citizens of heaven. Already on the way home.

June 21, 2026

Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy

A Mailbag Full of Hard Questions

Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth reads like an advice column. The Corinthians had written in with their disputes — about food, about marriage, about how a community made up of such different people was even supposed to live together. Read through chapters 8 through 11 and the questions feel scattered: meat sacrificed to idols, what a husband owes a wife, how to behave at the Lord’s table. On the surface, they have nothing to do with one another.

But underneath each of Paul’s responses runs the same single thread. He never settles a question by simply declaring who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead he keeps asking: how does this choice build up the body of Christ? Not “what am I allowed to do,” but “what does this do to the people around me?” That’s the lens for everything that follows.

Freedom That Looks Outward

The clearest test case is food sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 8). Some believers in Corinth had spent their whole lives walking past idol temples, and meat connected to that world still carried real weight for them. Others knew an idol was nothing at all and ate without a second thought. Paul doesn’t resolve the dispute by ruling one side correct. He says plainly that food itself “will not commend us to God” — eating it or refusing it leaves a person no better and no worse off in God’s eyes (1 Corinthians 8:8).

What matters isn’t the food. It’s what your freedom does to the person next to you. And your freedom has real power, either to build up or to tear down. It’s almost as if our freedom was never meant to terminate on the person holding it: It’s for the other.

The Shape of Christ’s Freedom

Paul doesn’t ask the Corinthians to do anything he hasn’t already done. “Though I am free from all,” he writes, “I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them” (1 Corinthians 9:19). This isn’t anxious people-pleasing. It’s a strong, settled freedom that chooses to be spent on someone else — Paul modeling the same shape of love he received from Christ. “Let no one seek his own good,” Paul writes a few verses later, “but the good of his neighbor” (1 Corinthians 10:24). Rules are easy to check off. Love that prefers the other, is not.

1 Corinthians 10:31–32 — “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.”

If you remember nothing else from Paul’s mailbag of hard questions, remember this. It’s his summary line, the one rule that actually covers every case: whatever you’re deciding, ask what brings God glory and what serves the people in the room with you.

Do I Extend What I’ve Received?

This is also why Paul’s last word in this section lands on the Lord’s Table. “On the night he was betrayed, he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me’” (1 Corinthians 11:23–24). The bread and the cup are ordinary elements — bread, juice, a wooden table — for an ordinary-looking God who lived an ordinary life among ordinary people. That’s not a flaw in the story. It’s the heart of it. Infinite freedom poured itself into the ordinary so the ordinary could carry it forward.

Paul warns that eating and drinking “without discerning the body” brings judgment (1 Corinthians 11:29) — and that phrase is worth sitting with. Discerning the body isn’t a test of theological precision. It’s the question of do I extend what I’ve received? The table holds out the self-emptying love of Christ; has that love shaped the way I treat the people around me?

Receiving Grace, Extending Grace

Every question Paul answers in this letter — about food, about marriage, about communion — comes back to the same gospel logic. We have received grace we didn’t earn and freedom we didn’t deserve. And now that freedom isn’t ours to hoard. It’s ours to spend on each other: at the table, in the ordinary meals and ordinary disagreements of ordinary life, all together now.

We’re not made for ourselves. We were made for one another.

June 14, 2026 Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

Movement, Not Arrival

Walking is having a moment. Have you noticed this? I saw one, I saw two. Now I see them all the time, people with these little weighted backpacks on, walking up and down our street. The latest fitness trend, it seems, is also our oldest. Walking by itself, one might argue, is monotonous, tedious, boring. But add a backpack, and you’ve suddenly supercharged the activity! Otherwise, we ain’t about that slow life; we like to go places and accomplish things — the faster the better. That’s our culture. And I would suggest, it’s a culture at odds with the Christian life. The Christian life is not a destination you arrive at. It's a walk. Our hunger for instant outcomes and fast-paced progress means we'd rather have a motorbike, a car, a rocket — anything that gets us to the finish line instantly. Eugene Peterson called discipleship "a long obedience in the same direction," and saw it as an antidote to a culture that wants everything right now. God doesn't so much produce instant outcomes as he crafts stories. He walks with people through all the messy development, weaving it together across years and decades and lifetimes. We are part of an unfolding story, not a completed one.

Bigger Than We Imagined

The gospel most of us first received went something like this: ask Jesus into your heart so you go to heaven when you die. And that's not wrong — it's beautiful even. But if that's where the story ends, it's astonishingly small. Private. Self-serving. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 that God, in Christ, was reconciling the world to himself — not just counting trespasses against individuals, but entrusting to the church the ministry of reconciliation: bringing together what sin has pulled apart. If the gospel is the gospel, it's always going to be bringing us together, not separating us. The community formed after Pentecost in Acts 2 is the picture: they devoted themselves to teaching and fellowship, broke bread in their homes, had all things in common, and moved through their days with glad and generous hearts. That's not a program. That's the Spirit doing what only the Spirit can do.

Rooted, Growing, Together

Ephesians 3 lays in our course — not as a point of arrival, but as direction. Paul prays that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, so that: …being rooted and grounded in love, you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. — Ephesians 3:17–19 Roots grow. Growth takes time. And notice: this comprehension happens with all the saints — never alone. The love of Christ has no edge, no boundary where it stops. Every time we think we've arrived at its limits, we discover we haven't. That's a lifelong walk, not a single moment.

Ephesians 5:1–2 "Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God."

Paul goes on to describe what being filled with the Spirit actually looks like: addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, giving thanks always and for everything, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:19–21). Notice the direction of all of it: outward. Nothing here is private or self-serving. The Spirit makes us creative — not so that our work lives under the bed, but so that it gets shared, offered, poured out. And submission — voluntarily laying aside your own rights to build up someone else — that's almost impossible. Which is exactly why it requires the Spirit. Love that merely makes us feel good is not the kind of love Paul is describing. The lyric to a Mumford and Sons song comes to mind: Does my love prefer the other? Or does my love just make me feel good? That's the test. That's the walk.

The Practice: This Week

Three small steps — a Monday-morning walk with the Spirit: Start with gratitude. Not as a private feeling, but as a posture that desires to overflow. Look for a way to share it with someone. Let it spill outward. Find a conflict. Look for someone whose will and yours are in tension — it probably won't be hard to find. Sit with it. Ask: could submission turn this conflict into a table where we could both sit? Conflict splits. The Spirit brings together. Could yielding be the step? Break bread. Reach out in real life. Share a meal, a coffee, a conversation with an actual person at an actual table. Not as a metaphor. Let the Spirit knit you together with someone this week.

We walk. And each step is a new possibility.

May 31, 2026 | Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy

We Don't Get Montages — We Get Mondays

There's something almost cruel about a great movie montage. In three minutes, Rocky goes from shambling mess to fist-pumping champion on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum. We see the struggle compressed, sped up, scored with music, and made to look like magic. And watching it, something in us says: yes. That's what it should feel like.

But that's not what it feels like. We don't get montages; we get Mondays. And honestly, we don't much like Monday. We are people who love mountaintops — the big events, the spectacular moments, the Instagram-worthy celebrations. And we visit them, genuinely. But we live Monday mornings: ordinary, routine, unremarkable.

So here's the question: what if that's exactly where God wants to show up?

What Happened After Pentecost

Last week was Pentecost Sunday — wind filling the upper room, tongues of fire resting on the disciples, 3,000 souls added to the church in a single day (Acts 2:1–41). That's the mountaintop. Spectacular, unrepeatable, God-sized drama.

But Acts 2 doesn't end there. It ends with the Monday mornings that followed. Luke, as if anticipating the question — okay, but what does this look like now? — closes the chapter with a kind of montage of ordinary faithfulness:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
— Acts 2:42–47 (ESV)

Notice what Luke records here — and what he doesn't. There were wonders and signs happening, he says. And then he moves right past them. They're a footnote. What Luke lingers over is this: people gathered around tables, breaking bread, sharing hearts, sharing needs, sharing possessions. The ordinary texture of a community being knit together by the Spirit.

The Miracle You Weren't Looking For

Consider this: maybe the real miracle of Pentecost isn't the pyrotechnics. Maybe it isn't the auto-translation, as astonishing as that was. Maybe the real miracle of Pentecost is spirit-led devotion — people being drawn to one another, to the Word, to the table, to prayer, day after ordinary day.

A gift, by definition, meets you where you are. You don't climb a ladder to reach it. You don't perform your way to it. It arrives. And the promise of Acts 2:38 is exactly this: repent, be baptized, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Not a reward. A gift. Which means the Spirit isn't waiting for us at the top of some spiritual mountain we have yet to scale. The Spirit is here, in the Monday morning.

We look for miracles in the wrong places. We look for the spectacular. But maybe the miracle is the particular — the laughter around a table, a burden shared with someone who actually needed to hear it, a small act of generosity that cost more than it looked like.

Elijah and the Still Small Voice

The same pattern plays out in 1 Kings 19. Elijah has just come off the most dramatic mountaintop of his life — and now he's under a broom tree in the wilderness, exhausted and asking God to take his life: "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life" (1 Kings 19:4).

God's response is not a sermon. It's a cake baked on coals and a jar of water. Basic. Physical. Enough for right now. And then the angel comes back a second time: "Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you." God meets the need before he addresses the theology.

Eventually Elijah makes it to Horeb — the mountain of God, the place you go when you want to find the divine. He's expecting what you expect at Horeb: fire, earthquake, a strong wind tearing the mountains apart. The spectacular. But God wasn't in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. God came in a still small voice — and asked the most disorienting question imaginable: "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

And God sends him back down. Back to the valley. Back to the people. Back to Elisha, to the work, to the ordinary ministry he'd been called to. The mountaintop was never the destination.

Where Are You Going This Week?

Where are you going this week? Who are you going to see? Who are you going to eat with? The Spirit's power doesn't flow through the conduit of our agenda. It flows where God chooses — and God, it turns out, keeps choosing the ordinary. The table. The conversation. The neighbor. The Monday morning.

That's where He dwells. Among the people.

May 24, 2026 Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

The Power Behind the Walls

Think about the first thing you did this morning. Maybe you flipped a light switch. Grabbed your phone. Shuffled toward the coffee maker. Every one of those ordinary actions draws on the same invisible infrastructure — an unseen power running behind the drywall of your home, threading through everything you rely on. You don’t think about it. You don’t have to. It’s just there. Until it isn’t. When the power goes out, suddenly you can’t stop thinking about it. You realize your entire life had been resting on something you’d stopped noticing. There’s something deeply familiar in that image when you hold it next to the Holy Spirit. We are surrounded by the presence of the living God. And we have grown comfortable. We’ve swapped reverence for familiarity. We treat what Scripture calls a consuming fire more like a household pet — warm, convenient, on our terms. This Pentecost Sunday, we were invited to look more carefully at what we’re actually dealing with.

Three Ways We Get It Wrong

A thread woven through 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel exposes a pattern — charm, trophy, and cart — three ways God’s people tend to mishandle his presence. First, the charm. When the Israelites were losing to the Philistines, they didn’t pray — they grabbed the ark. “Let’s bring it out,” they reasoned, “and God will have to support us.” They weren’t seeking God; they were weaponizing him. They turned the epicenter of divine power into a lucky rabbit’s foot, a tool for their agenda. And… it didn’t work. God’s power, it turns out, does not flow through the conduit of our agenda. Second, the trophy. When the Philistines captured the ark and placed it beside their god Dagon, they discovered what happens when you try to make the God of the universe share a shelf. By morning, Dagon was face-down on the ground. By the next morning, Dagon’s head and hands had been cut off. You cannot domesticate an all-consuming fire. You cannot fit the Creator of the universe into your existing lifestyle without him shattering everything else in the room. Third, the cart. When David went to bring the ark home, he copied the Philistines — loading it onto an ox-cart rather than following God’s clear instructions. The oxen stumbled. A man named Uzzah reached out to steady the ark and was struck dead. It feels harsh. But Uzzah had forgotten what he was dealing with. He approached the holiness of God on his own terms — uninsulated, as it were — and the current was too much. We bypass God’s instructions for relationship, and then we wonder why we get burned.

The Obed-Edom Option

David, terrified, handed the ark off to a Gentile named Obed-Edom. And here is what happened: for three months, Obed-Edom and his entire household were blessed. Why? He didn’t try to use the ark to win a war. He didn’t force it onto a shelf beside his other valuables. He didn’t cart it around for a parade. He simply opened his home. He welcomed the presence. He gave it space. He gave it reverence. One word covers all of that: submission. And that submission became the source of life itself.

Pentecost and the Inflection Point

The disciples in the upper room were doing exactly what Obed-Edom had done — waiting, praying, submitting to whatever God was going to do, whenever he chose to do it. They had no agenda, no timeline. They had simply made room. And then Pentecost happened.

Acts 2:1–4 — “When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

Pentecost is an inflection point — not just a historical event but a reshaping of everything. The same power that once dwelled behind the layered walls of the temple, the same holiness that toppled idols and struck down those who approached carelessly, now rests on ordinary people in an upper room. Christ has broken down the dividing walls (Ephesians 2:14). His sacrifice made us fit to carry what could not before be carried. We are now, Paul says, being built together as a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:22). That same power lives in you.

Living in Light of the Empty Tomb

The question worth sitting with this week: What would God do through a people wholly submitted to him? God doesn’t share shelf space. His grace will topple the other things we’ve placed at the center — not as punishment, but as the inevitable consequence of welcoming a consuming fire into your home. He desires relationship, and his grace has given us a way to have it. But it requires submission, not merely acknowledgment. The empty tomb is the conduit. The Spirit flows through it. When we stop trying to run the current through our own plans and agendas — when we simply make room, the way Obed-Edom did — we find blessing in place of burn-out. How do we live in light of the empty tomb? One open door at a time.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

May 10, 2026 Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder  •  Kingdom Church Troy

The Water That Unsettles

There is something about deep water that earns a particular kind of respect—almost reverence, maybe fear. You know the feeling. You're swimming in a lake or an ocean, looking down, and there is nothing. Just black, cold abyss beneath you. Your mind conjures shadows. You can feel the temperature drop by degrees as you kick your feet lower. You are very small; the water is very large. And this sensation of vulnerability and mystery is not accidental. Water has always been theologically loaded—the chaos before creation, the floodwaters of judgment, the Red Sea that stood between slavery and a promised land. Scripture treats water with a seriousness that we've perhaps lost. And that is exactly what baptism recovers.

An Ancient Rite

Before Christian baptism, there was mikvah. In Jewish practice, mikvah is a full-body immersion in water—ancient in origin, and firmly embedded in first-century Jewish life by the time of Jesus. It was used for ritual purification and, most significantly, for conversion. A Gentile entering the covenant people of God would go down into the water and come up transformed—no longer outside the community, but inside it. The principle at the heart of mikvah is simple and profound: the person who goes into the water is not the same person who comes out. Something has changed. Something has ended. Something new has begun. This is the world John the Baptist steps into. John didn't invent baptism—mikvah already existed. But he did something audacious with it. He radicalized it. As Mark 1:4 tells us, John appeared "baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." He connected a familiar ritual to something only God could do: forgive. In doing so, John announced that the moment the whole of Torah had been pointing toward was arriving.

The Death Behind You

In the years following John’s baptism in the Jordan, when Christ followers carried the pratice into the growing church, it was connected to new and staggering meaning. Paul writes in Romans 6 with the directness of someone who doesn't want you to miss it:

"Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life."— Romans 6:3–4

Baptism is not a religious formality. It is not a graduation ceremony or a public performance of sincerity. It is a death announcement—and a resurrection announcement, all in one. Going under the water, you are buried with Christ. Coming up from the water, you participate in his resurrection. Here is the breathtaking implication: for the believer, your death is already behind you. The worst thing that will ever happen to you has, in a profound and spiritual sense, already occurred. You died with Christ. Which means that everything ahead—every difficulty, every failure, every moment when you are brought low—is on the other side of resurrection. Death no longer has the final word over you, because you have already died.

Grace That Takes Shape

All of this rests on something prior to your response—something prior to your decision, your sincerity, your ability to follow through. It rests on grace. Paul says it plainly in Romans 5:8: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Not when we had gotten our lives in order. Not when we were spiritually presentable. While we were far off, God moved toward us. Ephesians 2 puts it in language almost too good to absorb: "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved." Dead. And made alive. Repentance, then, is not the performance of moral correction. It is not a checklist of behaviors improved. It is something more total: giving God the steering wheel. It is the death of self-rule, of the insistence that you know best. Acts 2:38 records Peter calling the crowd to "repent and be baptized … in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." Turn, go under, come up new. Grace is not a transaction. It is not a business deal. It is something that takes shape—that incarnates—in a life genuinely surrendered to Christ.

Go Deep

Deep water unsettles us because it is real. It has depth we cannot see and power we cannot control. Baptism is the same. It is not a shallow moment. It is an invitation to stop doggy-paddling on the surface and go all the way down—trusting that on the other side of death there is resurrection. If you haven't been baptized, consider what holds you back. The call is clear. The water is waiting. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead has set his love on you. Your death is already behind you. Walk in newness of life.

May 3, 2026

Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy

The Journey from Easter to Pentecost

Fifty days. That is the distance between Easter Sunday and Pentecost. And in those fifty days, the disciples were not waiting idly — they were learning how to live in the wake of the impossible. The empty tomb had shattered every expectation. Jesus was risen. And now, that resurrection life was pressing itself into the ordinary rhythms of their existence, asking a question that still reaches us today: How do we live in light of this?

Four weeks out from Easter, a month into what the church calendar calls the Great Fifty Days, the disciples had walked with a risen Christ, followed his direction back to Galilee, and stood on a hillside as he gave them what we’ve come to call the Great Commission. Matthew’s Gospel closes with it — a mic drop of a paragraph, full of going and teaching and baptizing. But as central as that commission is, Jesus’s final words in Acts 1 may be even more foundational.

As the disciples gathered with him one last time, he didn’t simply command them. He promised them: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” Not should be. Not ought to be. Will be. This isn’t a to-do list. It’s a declaration of what the Spirit is about to do.

A Rabbi and His Yoke

To understand what Jesus meant, we have to understand the world he was speaking into. In first-century Judaism, a serious student of Torah would seek out a rabbi — not just to learn his teachings, but to inhabit his way of life. This was called taking on the rabbi’s yoke: an all-encompassing way of living, thinking, and being. The goal wasn’t information transfer. The goal was likeness.

The devoted student followed the rabbi so closely — literally walking in his footsteps on dusty roads — that the rabbinical writings record a striking image: “Sit in the dust of their feet and drink their words with thirst.” The student was covered in the rabbi’s dust. Formation happened through sustained proximity. You learned to handle conflict by watching the rabbi handle conflict. You learned to pray by hearing him pray. You didn’t attend a curriculum. You shared his life.

Jesus used this language directly:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

— Matthew 11:28–30

But Jesus’s yoke is unlike any other rabbi’s. The other rabbis waited for the best students to find them. Jesus went out and called people — fishermen at their nets, a tax collector at his booth, a zealot no one would trust. The ones who had been passed over, sent home, told they weren’t good enough. These are his disciples. And what that means for us is profound: the rabbi who called the unlikely is now commissioning those same unlikely disciples to call unlikely disciples everywhere.

More Than an App — Surrender and Trust

There is a temptation to relate to discipleship the way we relate to an app. We download it, put it on the dock, engage with it when useful, and remain at the center of the whole operation. I’ll take this part of Jesus’s teaching; I’ll pass on that one. I am directing this thing. I’ll let you know how it goes.

But that is not a yoke. That is self-rule dressed in spiritual clothes.

To take on Jesus’s yoke means something was genuinely risked. Something was left behind — your own rightness, your own will, your own way. Trust, real trust, requires this. There is no shortcut around surrender. Three words form the backbone of discipleship: presence, relationship, trust. These are not steps in a program. They are the texture of a living relationship with a living God — the same presence and trust we see in Jesus’s own prayer life: not my will, but yours.

The Witness That Overflows

Here is something worth sitting with: the word witness in Acts 1:8 is not the fourth item on a list. It is the overflow of the first three. When presence, relationship, and trust take root in your life, witness is not something you have to manufacture. People notice. The one covered in the rabbi’s dust does not have to announce it.

A witness is someone who has lived through something real. And you cannot extend what you haven’t received. You cannot bear witness in isolation, on the couch, alone in your head. Which is why the sermon ended with a declaration that cut clean and clear: You can draw near to Christ on your own — and you should. But you cannot become Christlike on your own.

Formation requires friction. It requires the real, messy, grace-demanding work of community. You cannot learn patience without people who test it. You cannot practice preferring others without others present to prefer. The fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness — is almost entirely relational fruit. It only grows in the soil of relationship.

Called into Community

At the heart of God’s eternal nature is what one theologian describes as “a communion of love, delight, and self-giving.” Discipleship isn’t a program we sign up for. It is being called into the very thing we are made for, because we are made for relationship — with God and with one another.

We are fifty days out from the empty tomb. The Spirit is coming. He is forming us, together, in the likeness of the one we follow. And as we go — into our families, our neighborhoods, our ordinary Tuesday afternoons — we go not as people who have mastered a curriculum, but as people who have been with him. Covered, as it were, in his dust.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

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