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Rachel & Ian Carroll, 5185 Acuna Street, San Diego, CA (2026)

08/23/2026

Jeremiah 20:11 ESV

But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior;
therefore my persecutors will stumble;
they will not overcome me.
They will be greatly shamed,
for they will not succeed.
Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten.

08/19/2026

I have been thinking about the lens through which we see God, because our lens determines how we interpret almost everything He does. We can begin with sovereignty, holiness, or judgment, and all of those are absolutely true, but Jesus repeatedly invites us to begin somewhere deeply relational: Father. When He teaches us to pray, He tells us to say, “Our Father.” When He teaches us about provision, He points us toward a Father who already knows what we need. Jesus is giving us a lens through which to understand God.

Psalm 103 is remarkable when you read it that way. David tells himself to remember God's benefits: “You kissed my heart with forgiveness... You’ve healed me inside and out from every disease. You’ve rescued me from hell and saved my life. You’ve crowned me with love and mercy.” Then David brings the whole Psalm into focus: “The same way a loving father feels toward his children, that’s but a sample of your tender feelings toward us.” The forgiveness, healing, redemption, and mercy all flow from the same place. They reveal the heart of a good Father.

I wonder whether some of us have been taught to view Fatherhood through sovereignty when Jesus invites us to understand sovereignty through Fatherhood. That distinction matters when life hurts. If my foundational picture of God is mysterious power, I can eventually attribute almost anything to Him. Sickness can become His lesson, tragedy His plan, disappointment His mysterious will. Yet Jesus said that seeing Him was seeing the Father, and Jesus consistently moved toward suffering with compassion. He healed all who came to Him, delivered the oppressed, restored the broken, and through His demonstration of power to destroy the works of the devil, revealed what His Father was like.

Perhaps we need to stop allowing our disappointments to become our theology. Psalm 103 is David commanding his soul to remember what God has revealed about Himself even when experience gives him reasons to forget. That takes courage because sometimes believing in the goodness of God means refusing to make peace with circumstances that contradict His revealed nature.

I want the good Father to be my lens. I want to read His promises as the words of a Father, receive His correction as the love of a Father, and approach prayer believing I am speaking to a Father who loves showering His children with good gifts. Jesus has shown us what the Father is like. I think I'm going to believe Him.

Ian

08/18/2026

Faith does not come from thinking harder. Even encounters, wonderful as they can be, are not the source of faith. Paul is remarkably specific: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). The word Paul uses carries the sense of something spoken, something uttered. Faith grows as the living voice of God becomes heard, received, and then allowed to become the governing voice within us. There is something about hearing truth that reaches places our private thoughts often fail to reach.

Scripture repeatedly brings us back to words being spoken. God creates by speaking. Jesus speaks to storms, sickness, demons, dead bodies, and frightened disciples. The prophet Ezekiel was told to prophesy to dry bones, which has always fascinated me because God could certainly have raised the bones without Ezekiel's assistance. Instead, He tells the prophet, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.” God used a human voice to announce what He intended to do.

Perhaps we should recover that practice in our own lives. David famously spoke to his own soul: “Why are you cast down, O my soul?” He did not merely observe his emotional condition and accept its conclusions. He addressed himself and then told his soul what to do: “Hope in God.” There are moments when your soul needs to hear your spirit agreeing with God. There are mornings when your emotions have already formed an opinion about the day before you have finished your first cup of coffee, and allowing those emotions to have the final word is a terrible way to live. Your soul can be instructed. Your mind can be reminded. Your inner world can hear again what God has said until truth becomes louder than disappointment.

I think the same principle applies to our bodies. I am increasingly unwilling to let pain, weakness, age, exhaustion, or a doctor's report become the only voice speaking over my physical life. I can acknowledge what is happening without surrendering the conversation to it. Jesus taught His disciples to speak to mountains, and throughout the Gospels we repeatedly see Him addressing physical conditions with words. There is no virtue in pretending that symptoms do not exist, but there is great virtue in refusing to give them exclusive rights to describe the future. Speak the promises of God over your body. Remind your body that it belongs to God, that the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells within you, and that resurrection life is part of your inheritance. I would rather be accused of speaking too much life than spend my days rehearsing death.

The same is true of the people around us. We live in a culture remarkably skilled at identifying what is wrong with people, and Christians can become equally skilled at disguising criticism as discernment. I wonder how many people would be different today if someone had consistently spoken courage into them before their weakness became their identity. Barnabas seems to have understood the extraordinary power of this. When everyone else remembered Saul's past, Barnabas saw something worth defending. When Paul later gave up on John Mark, Barnabas saw something worth recovering. The Church desperately needs people who can see what grace is producing in another person and have the courage to say it out loud.

I have never met anyone who was destroyed because too many people sincerely encouraged them to believe God. I have met plenty who were diminished by criticism, disappointment, silence, and the relentless rehearsal of everything that could go wrong. Encouragement is not flattery, because biblical encouragement has substance. It calls attention to what God has said and what God is doing, especially when someone is struggling to see either clearly. Sometimes the most prophetic thing you can do for another human being is remind them of what they already know but can no longer hear above the noise of their circumstances.

So speak. Speak to your soul when it becomes discouraged. Speak to your body when it begins announcing limitations. Speak courage into your family, your friends, your church, and the people God has entrusted to you. Fill the atmosphere around your life with words that agree with the character and promises of God. We have spent enough time rehearsing our fears and describing our mountains. Faith comes by hearing. You will believe what you speak. Maybe it is time to say something worth hearing.

Ian

08/17/2026

There are seasons when you look back over your life and begin to realize that God was doing far more than you understood at the time. Experiences that seemed disconnected start to form a pattern. Doors that opened taught you something, but so did the doors that slammed shut. Success developed capacities in you that you would need later, while disappointment exposed weaknesses that could not travel with you into the future. Even some of the things you would gladly remove from your story have become part of the wisdom, resilience, and compassion you now carry. I am increasingly convinced that, as my friend Paul Manwaring would say, He wastes nothing, and He gets you ready.

We tend to imagine preparation as the obviously spiritual parts of our journey. We think about the prophetic words, the moments of encounter, the mentors God sent, the books that changed our thinking and the opportunities that stretched us. Of course, those things matter, but preparation is rarely that tidy. Some of the most important preparation happens while you are simply trying to survive something you never would have chosen. You learn how to keep moving when people misunderstand you, how to make decisions without everyone agreeing with you, how to recover after failure and how to trust God when the evidence in front of you seems to contradict what He has spoken. Nobody signs up for those classes, yet some of the most important lessons of our lives are learned there.

Maybe it was the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (I love musicals), but Joseph's story has always fascinated me. The palace makes very little sense without the pit and the prison. We know the ending, so we can read the difficult chapters quickly, but Joseph had to live them one day at a time without knowing when the story would turn. Potiphar's house taught him how to manage another man's resources. Prison taught him how to function faithfully when his circumstances were profoundly unfair. He learned people, administration, responsibility and endurance long before Pharaoh ever handed him authority. By the time the opportunity arrived, Joseph had already become the kind of man who could carry it. The promotion looked sudden to everyone watching, but the preparation had taken years.

I wonder how often we ask God to remove the very circumstances He intends to redeem into something useful. I am careful with that language because I do not believe everything that happens to us was orchestrated by God. Poverty and sickness are from the pit of hell and must be dealt with accordingly. People make terrible choices. We make terrible choices. We live in a world where evil is real, disappointment hurts and some things should never have happened. Yet redemption means evil does not get the final word over what those experiences produce in us. God is extraordinarily good at taking material He did not author and building something beautiful from it. The scar can become wisdom. The failure can become learning. The years you thought were lost can become the very years that taught you how to carry what comes next.

Perhaps that is why some of us need to stop despising our own history. We keep looking at the parts that seem embarrassing, insignificant or wasted and wondering why our journey could not have been cleaner. We compare ourselves with people whose path appears more direct and assume we somehow arrived late. Yet you carry things today precisely because your road was complicated. You know things you could not have learned from a book. You have survived enough success to know that applause is fickle, and enough disappointment to know that disappointment does not have to become your identity. You have discovered what matters, what lasts and what you are willing to fight for. That kind of formation cannot be rushed.

I believe many people are entering a season when the strange collection of experiences behind them is going to make considerably more sense. Things that seemed unrelated will suddenly become useful. Relationships, skills, failures, victories and hard-earned wisdom will converge around opportunities you could not have carried twenty years ago. You may have wanted the opportunity earlier, but an earlier version of you might have been crushed by the weight of the answer. Capacity has been growing quietly while you were wondering whether anything was happening.

So when I say you have been perfectly prepared for this season, I am not suggesting that everything that happened was perfect. I am saying that God is a magnificent Redeemer, and nothing surrendered to Him needs to remain meaningless. The good has given you confidence. The bad has given you wisdom. Even the ugly can become material in the hands of a God who refuses to surrender your future to your past.

There may be more glory ahead than you have allowed yourself to imagine. If that is true, perhaps the question is no longer whether you deserved a cleaner journey. Perhaps the better question is whether you are willing to bring the whole journey with you, redeemed, healed, matured and available for the purposes of God. The person standing at the edge of the next season has been formed through years you once thought were delaying you. You are carrying more than you know, and the season ahead may finally reveal what all that preparation was for.

Ian

08/14/2026

God has never needed optimal conditions in order to bless us.

There are statements in Scripture that are so audacious that I wonder whether we have really allowed ourselves to believe what they say. Psalm 1 contains one of them. The NET translates the final line of verse 3, “He causes all he does to succeed.” Other translations give us the familiar, “Whatever he does prospers.” I have been cogitating on that language because the Psalmist seems remarkably comfortable connecting a life rooted in God with tangible fruitfulness. The tree bears fruit, its leaves do not wither, and what this person puts his hands to prospers. There is an expectation running through the passage that a life deeply formed by God should actually produce something.

I think we are sometimes quicker to qualify statements like this than we are to believe them. Of course, Psalm 1 is not promising a life without adversity. The tree itself bears fruit “in its season,” which leaves plenty of room for waiting, pruning, perseverance, and seasons when very little appears to be happening. Scripture is full of people who experienced significant opposition while walking in God's purposes. Yet after making every necessary qualification, we still have to come back to what the text actually says: “He causes all he does to succeed.” I do not want my theology to become so sophisticated that I can explain a promise perfectly while expecting almost nothing from it.

Joseph gives us perhaps the clearest picture of what this can look like. Genesis 39 says, “The LORD was with Joseph, and he became a successful man.” A few verses later, Potiphar “saw that the LORD was with him and that the LORD caused all that he did to succeed in his hands.” That is an extraordinary description of a human life. God was with Joseph, and something happened to what was entrusted to him. His stewardship produced results. Eventually Genesis tells us that the Lord blessed Potiphar's household “for Joseph's sake,” including “all that he had, in the house and in the field.” The blessing resting upon Joseph created fruit for other people.

David carries remarkably similar language. First Samuel 18:14 says, “David had success in all his undertakings, for the LORD was with him.” Hezekiah is described in much the same way: “The LORD was with him; wherever he went, he succeeded” (2 Kings 18:7). Joshua is told to meditate upon God's instruction day and night and then receives the promise, “For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success” (Joshua 1:8). Psalm 90 turns the same desire into prayer: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands.” There is a pattern here worth paying attention to. God's presence, God's wisdom, and the work of human hands repeatedly come together in the language of fruitfulness and success.

This matters because fruitful labor did not begin with Moses. Before there was a Law, a tabernacle, or an Israel, God placed humanity in a garden and gave us something to do. We were created to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and govern it. Work belongs to the original blessing of creation. The curse brought frustration into our labor. The ground produced thorns and human effort became painful, resistant, and difficult.

That makes Isaiah's picture of restoration particularly compelling. Isaiah 65 describes people building houses and living in them, planting vineyards and eating their fruit. Then comes this wonderful promise: “My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain.” Think about what God considers worthy of inclusion in a picture of restoration. People build something and get to enjoy what they built. They plant something and live long enough to enjoy the harvest. Their effort has consequence. Their labor produces fruit rather than disappearing into futility.

The New Testament continues this expectation of fruitfulness. Paul prays that believers would live lives pleasing to the Lord, “bearing fruit in every good work” (Colossians 1:10). He tells the Corinthians to abound in the work of the Lord because their labor “is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Jesus tells His disciples that abiding in Him will result in “much fruit,” and then says that the Father is glorified when they bear much fruit. Fruitfulness is deeply woven into the New Covenant vision of life with God.

I think we sometimes make fruit so exclusively internal that we miss how practical the biblical language can be. Certainly the Spirit produces character in us, and nothing I accomplish externally can compensate for the absence of Christ being formed internally. But biblical fruitfulness does not end inside me. Fruit feeds people. Fruit reproduces. Fruit becomes something another person can experience. Joseph's fruitfulness saved nations from starvation. David built a kingdom. Solomon built a temple. Paul planted churches. Their relationship with God eventually produced something outside themselves.

Maybe we need to raise our expectations for what the presence and wisdom of God can produce through our lives.

If God has called you to build a business, I want it to flourish. If He has called you to plant a church, I want people to come and lives to change. If He has given you a book to write, I want people to read it. If you are building a ministry, raising children, leading an organization, developing a course, creating art or solving a problem, I want the work of your hands to bear fruit. I want God's wisdom to make you unusually good at what He has entrusted to you. I want people who work with you to be blessed because you are there. Joseph gives us permission to imagine a life in which God's blessing upon us becomes beneficial to everyone who comes within the reach of our lives.

None of this gives us permission to sit around waiting for God to make mediocre work successful. Psalm 1 describes someone who meditates upon God's instruction until it shapes the way he thinks. Joshua is told to meditate and then carefully do what God has said. Joseph had to administrate. David had to lead. God's blessing does not eliminate human agency. It empowers a person whose thinking, decisions, and actions are increasingly shaped by Him.

Perhaps that is why Psalm 1 says, “He causes all he does to succeed.” There has to be a 'does' before there can be a 'succeeds'. The blessed person is doing something. He is planting, building, leading, creating and taking responsibility. The source of his life is God, but the fruit appears through what he puts his hands to.

And I want to take Psalm 1 seriously enough to believe that a person deeply rooted in God can become like that tree beside the river, continually drawing life from a source beyond himself, bearing fruit in season and bringing the life of God into the work of his hands.

“He causes all he does to succeed.”

Ian

08/13/2026

The world does not need our tame prayers or our banal good wishes. People do not need Christians standing at a safe distance from the pain of the world, offering religious sympathy and hoping things somehow improve. They deserve a demonstration of the power and goodness of God today.

Jesus did not announce a Kingdom that was soft on darkness. He announced a Kingdom that came with power. The sick were healed. Demons expelled. Captives set free. People who had been pushed to the edges were restored. Wherever Jesus went, the Kingdom of God collided with whatever had been stealing, killing, oppressing, and destroying human beings, and the Kingdom won.

Somewhere along the way, we became far too comfortable explaining why we should expect less.

I want to go the other direction.

I want to pray prayers that require God to show up. I want to believe for things beyond what human effort can manufacture. I want a Christianity where the goodness of God becomes visible in actual lives, homes, cities, and impossible situations.

The world has heard enough of what Christians say we believe. Let's give them something to see.

The Kingdom is advancing, and I want to be in the fight.

Ian

08/12/2026

Tolkien wrote a line in 'The Fellowship of the Ring' that has stayed with me: “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” There is something painfully true about that, and I think it applies to far more than ancient stories and forgotten kingdoms. I wonder how many things God has spoken over our lives have been lost simply because we stopped remembering them. We did not necessarily reject the word or decide that God had not spoken. Life happened. Years passed, disappointment accumulated, circumstances contradicted what we believed, and eventually something we once carried with enormous conviction quietly disappeared from the way we prayed and lived. Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.

I have a conviction that significant prophetic words should have witnesses. Scripture establishes the principle that a matter is confirmed by two or three witnesses, and I think there is wisdom in applying that principle to the things we believe God has spoken over our lives. I do not want to build my future around something I heard once, particularly when I desperately wanted to hear it. Desire has an extraordinary ability to sound like God if we are not careful. But when something has been spoken, tested, and independently confirmed, we have something much more substantial than wishful thinking. We have a witnessed promise, and a witnessed promise gives us something to contend for.

I see something of that pattern in the life of David. David was anointed as king three times, and each anointing seems to mark another stage in the establishment of what God had spoken over him. Samuel first anointed him while David was still the overlooked son who had been left with the sheep. Years later the men of Judah anointed him king over Judah, and eventually the elders of Israel anointed him king over the whole nation. What began with a word and oil in Bethlehem eventually became visible to everyone, but there were years between those moments. David had to live for years with a promise that had been witnessed by heaven while much of his earthly experience appeared to contradict it.

I think we sometimes imagine that receiving a promise should make the road toward fulfillment easier. David's experience suggests otherwise. The anointing did not immediately produce a throne. Saul was still king. David was still David. Before long, he was running for his life, living in caves and watching circumstances move in precisely the opposite direction from the word he had received. The great challenge during those years was not simply surviving Saul. David had to continue living as a man whose future had been spoken by God while his present circumstances offered very little evidence that the word would ever come to pass.

This is where contending becomes important to me. Contending for a promise is different from demanding that God fulfill every ambition I have ever had. I can manufacture desires and baptize them in spiritual language, which is precisely why witnesses matter. When a word has been tested and confirmed, I can bring that word before God with a different kind of confidence. I can say that I believe He spoke concerning this, that others witnessed what He said, and that I am refusing to allow the passing of time to erase something that should never have been forgotten.

Paul gives Timothy an extraordinary instruction along these lines. He reminds him of “the prophecies previously made concerning you” and tells him that “by them you may wage the good warfare.” Paul apparently believed prophetic words could become part of the substance of our warfare. Timothy was expected to remember what had been spoken and allow those words to shape how he fought. A prophetic word was never intended to become a journal note from an exciting conference twenty years ago. If God has genuinely spoken, His word gives us something around which faith can organize itself, something we can carry back into prayer when everything visible seems to disagree.

Perhaps one of the reasons Jesus speaks so strongly about continuing to ask, continuing to seek, and continuing to knock is that persistence is necessary when fulfillment takes longer than we expected. There comes a point when asking again can feel foolish. We have already prayed about it. We have already believed. We have already endured another year in which nothing seemed to change. Yet the question remains whether the absence of fulfillment has somehow acquired more authority than the promise itself. Contending means I refuse to let disappointment interpret God's word for me.

This becomes particularly important as we grow older because age gives us a great deal of evidence. We have seen prayers answered, but we have also lived through disappointments. We have believed things that did not happen in the way we expected, watched doors close that we were convinced would open, and carried promises through seasons when their fulfillment seemed increasingly unlikely. Memories can therefore become incredibly persuasive. If we are not careful, experience begins teaching us what is possible, and eventually yesterday becomes the boundary around tomorrow.

As I think about prayer, I wonder whether some of us need to go back and recover things we allowed ourselves to forget. Pull out the old journals. Find the prophetic words. Remember the promises that came through people who knew nothing about what someone else had already spoken. Look again at the things that were witnessed and confirmed, and ask whether disappointment quietly persuaded you to stop contending for something God never told you to abandon.

Tolkien's words haunt me because loss can happen through something as ordinary as forgetting. “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” I do not want to reach the end of my life and discover that I surrendered promises simply because they took longer than I expected. I want to be an old man who dreams dreams, carrying witnessed promises into the presence of God and continuing to ask, seek, and knock. Some things are worth remembering because some promises are worth contending for.

Ian

08/11/2026

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08/11/2026

I wrote recently about getting older and why I think the Church needs to recover a biblical appreciation for age. We live in a culture obsessed with youth, and some of that thinking has inevitably found its way into the Church. We can begin to assume that our most useful years are behind us, that energy belongs to the young while wisdom belongs to those who are slowly moving toward the sidelines. Yet Scripture gives us a very different picture. When Joel describes the outpouring of the Spirit, he says that sons and daughters will prophesy, young men will see visions, and old men will dream dreams. I find that last phrase increasingly important because God gives old men something wonderfully future-oriented to do. He tells them to dream.

As we grow older, one of the great dangers is that we begin to live according to our memories rather than our dreams. Memories are important, of course, and I am grateful for mine. They contain stories of the faithfulness of God, lessons learned through experience, people I have loved, places I have been, and moments I would gladly live again if I could. But memories also contain disappointment. If you have lived for any length of time, you have accumulated prayers that seemed unanswered, relationships that did not turn out as you hoped, opportunities you missed, mistakes you made, and things you genuinely believed God for that never happened. Eventually, enough life has happened to provide you with plenty of evidence for why something might go wrong.

That is where I think dreaming becomes incredibly important. Dreams force us to face forward. They require us to imagine that our experience of God is not limited to what we have already experienced, and that our greatest contribution does not necessarily belong to some previous season of our lives. There is something wonderfully defiant about an older person who still dreams because they know enough about disappointment to have become cynical, yet they continue to believe that possibility remains. Perhaps that is part of the work of the Holy Spirit in us as we age. He refuses to allow our history to become the boundary of our expectation.

Psalm 92 says something similar when it describes the righteous flourishing like a palm tree. The Psalmist says that those who are planted in the house of the Lord “shall still bear fruit in old age.” I love the assumption behind those words. Scripture expects fruitfulness to continue. Age may change the kind of fruit we produce and the way we produce it, but there is no biblical expectation that we spend the latter part of our lives simply telling everyone what God did thirty years ago. Apparently old palm trees can still bear fruit, and apparently old men are still supposed to have dreams.

I think this matters enormously when we talk about prayer, which is where I am going tonight as I begin my series on prayer. Prayer is fundamentally an act of facing the future. We pray because we believe something can happen that has not happened yet. We bring situations before God because we believe tomorrow does not have to be a repetition of yesterday. Prayer makes very little sense if our memories have already been given the authority to determine what is possible. Somewhere in prayer we have to recover the ability to imagine a future that our disappointments would never have predicted.

Maybe one of the disciplines of getting older, then, is learning how to honor our memories without allowing them to govern our expectations. I have enough memories now to know that life can hurt. I have been disappointed enough to know that everything I believe for will not necessarily happen in the way I imagine. But I also have enough history with God to know that I have repeatedly underestimated what He could do. My memories should give me wisdom, but my dreams should continue giving me somewhere to go.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life becoming an expert on what happened yesterday. I want to remain interested in tomorrow. I want to keep praying prayers whose answers require a future, believing for things I have not yet seen, and allowing the Holy Spirit to enlarge my imagination beyond the boundaries created by disappointment. If Joel is right, growing older in the Kingdom should never mean that we stop dreaming. And if Psalm 92 is right, some of our fruit may still be waiting for us in seasons we have not reached yet.

Ian

Rachel & Ian Carroll

08/23/2026

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