Pristine Grace, St. Louis, MO (2026)

06/01/2026

# Homesick for a Country I Have Never Seen

I have been homesick my whole life for a place I have never been.

I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because it took me decades to stop being ashamed of it. I have a wife I have loved since I was a teenager. I have a son. I have work I was made to do and music I get to make and a faith that holds me when nothing else will. And underneath all of it, every good thing the Lord ever handed me, there has always run a low ache that none of those things ever fully closed. Not because they failed me. They did not fail me. It is that they were never built to be the thing. They were only ever rumors of it.

For most of my life I thought that meant something was wrong with me. A man with that much to be grateful for, still aching underneath, starts to wonder if he is ungrateful, or broken, or simply impossible to satisfy. I tried to kill the ache with achievement. I tried to fill it with belonging. I tried to argue it away with theology. None of it worked, because I was treating a compass like a wound.

Then I read Hebrews eleven honestly, and it turned the whole thing over.

The chapter walks through the men and women of faith, and partway down it stops to tell you something about all of them at once. *"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth"* (Hebrews 11:13). Strangers. Pilgrims. They had the same ache I have. They never found a country here that held them. And here is the part that undid me. They did not treat it as a defect. They did not spend their lives trying to medicate it. They read it as a direction. *"But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city"* (Hebrews 11:16).

The ache was not a flaw in them. It was a compass. And the compass had an address.

I believe that ache was set in me on purpose, by the One who made me, the same way it was set in them. The whole creation carries it. Paul says the whole creation *"groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now"* and that we ourselves *"groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body"* (Romans 8:22-23). You are not the only thing that aches. The mountains ache. The oceans ache. The whole rendering groans for a country it has not reached yet. A fish does not resent the water. A man built for a home he has not arrived at will ache until he gets there, and that ache is mercy, because it is the thing that keeps him walking instead of settling for a roadside motel and calling it home.

Now let me tell you what kind of country it is, because this is where I part ways with the picture most people carry.

Most folks, when they say heaven, picture a thinning. Clouds. Harps. Disembodied spirits drifting in a fog, getting less and less solid until they dissolve into God like sugar in coffee. That is not the country the Bible promises. That is Plato in a choir robe, and the church has been singing it for centuries without checking it against the text. The country Scripture actually promises is more solid than this world, not less. Abraham *"looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God"* (Hebrews 11:10). Foundations. A city has streets and gates and walls and weight. John saw *"a new heaven and a new earth"* and *"the tabernacle of God"* come down to be *with men*, where *"God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes"* (Revelation 21:1-4). A new earth. A body raised. The redemption *of* the body, Paul said, not redemption *from* it.

And I do not believe that on a hunch. I believe it because it already happened once. When Christ came out of the tomb, He did not come out as a ghost or a glow. He came out with a body you could touch. He ate fish on the shore in front of His friends. He kept the wounds in His hands. He was more solid on Easter morning than He had been on Good Friday, not less. Paul calls Him *"the firstfruits of them that slept"* (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first sheaf of a harvest still coming in, the down payment on the whole new creation. And he says Christ *"shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body"* (Philippians 3:21). So the better country is not wishful architecture. It is guaranteed by an empty tomb and patterned on a risen body that still has scars. The country will be exactly as real as He was when He walked back out of death, because He is its first citizen, and we are fashioned after Him.

The God who made dirt and called it good is not ashamed of dirt. He is not drawing up plans to evaporate you out of the physical world He built. He is going to hand you the physical world at full resolution, with the curse pulled out of it like a splinter, and your own body raised more real than it has ever been. The better country is not less than this one. It is this one healed. That is why the homesickness is so specific, so embodied, so much like missing a real place. Because it is a real place. The longing fits the country because the same God authored both the longing and the home.

And here is the tenderest line in the whole passage, the one the camps almost never preach. *God is not ashamed to be called their God.* Look at who these people were. Strangers. Pilgrims. Men with no country and no standing, the ones the world would not keep. And the God of the entire universe is not ashamed to stitch His own name onto them and call Himself their God in front of everyone.

I know something about managing what people are allowed to see. I have done it my whole life, holding up a kind of glass between myself and the world, letting the right amount through and no more, keeping the rest of me back where it could not be used against me. The better country is the place where that glass comes all the way down. Where you are fully known, every last corner of you, and you are not ashamed, and no one uses it against you. That is not a new idea. It is the oldest one. In the garden, before any of this went wrong, the man and his wife were *"naked, and were not ashamed"* (Genesis 2:25). The country is the garden given back. The hiding is over. The curator is retired for good. And the only reason there is no shame left in that country is that Christ already bore it on the tree, *"who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame"* (Hebrews 12:2). He carried the shame out of the country so that not one ounce of it would be waiting there for you.

I am closer to that country now than I have ever been. I have stood near its border with people I love as they walked up to the gate, and I have watched what the hope does to a dying face. The hope is not a wish I am working up the nerve to believe. It is the surest thing I own, because the One who built the country cannot lie, and He has already gone ahead to get the place ready. *"In my Father's house are many mansions,"* He said. *"I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also"* (John 14:2-3).

That last line is the whole thing. *That where I am, there ye may be also.* The country turns out to be a place and a Person at the same time. The address is a face. All the ache I spent years being ashamed of was never really for a location. It was for Him, and the country is just where He is, finally and forever, with the glass down and the shame gone and the body raised.

So if you carry that ache too, the one no marriage ever closed and no success ever filled and no camp on earth ever satisfied, stop trying to kill it, and stop being ashamed of it. It is not your defect. It is your compass. It was set in you by the God who built the country and is not ashamed to be called your God. The day is coming when the pilgrim lays the long road down, and the gate swings open, and the One who went ahead to prepare the place is standing right there in it.

I have never seen the country. But I have seen His face by faith, and that has turned out to be enough to walk on.

I am almost home.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan

05/29/2026

# The War After This One
# # Why the Coming Enemy Is Not the Atheist - and Why Only a Crucified, Risen, Particular Christ Can Meet Him

More and more lately I keep running across the same strange sermon. It does not come from a pulpit. It comes from a screen, in a calm voice over slow music, and it goes something like this. You are living in a kind of simulation. This world is only one side of reality, and the other side is bigger, and that is where you really live. God is real - but God is not a Person, God is *consciousness itself*, and you are a little piece of it. You have lived before and you will live again. Everything you do is measured and comes back around. And here is the punchline, always the same punchline. Your name, your face, your family - none of it is really you. When the body dies, almost all of you is forgotten. You are a mirage. Everything is an illusion.

And I want to tell you something about that sermon. It is going to win a lot of people. And it is going to be the great enemy of the faith long after you and I are in the ground.

For about three hundred years the church has been fighting the atheist. We built our whole defense around him. We argued that there is a God and not just atoms, that the universe was designed and not an accident, that mind cannot come from dead matter, that the tomb was really empty. Good arguments, every one of them. But here is the thing. That war is almost over, and the atheist is losing - and he is not losing to *us*. He is losing to the mystic. Plain old materialism cannot feed a soul, and people are walking away from it in droves. But they are not walking back to the church. They are walking into the fog.

So let's face it. The next great battle will not be over *whether* there is more than matter. The next enemy already believes that. He will nod along when you say the world is more than molecules. He will nod along when you say consciousness is the deepest thing there is. He agrees! And that is exactly what makes him so dangerous, because the lie he is selling looks, on the surface, like it is standing right next to the truth.

But it is not the truth. It is the oldest lie there is, wearing a brand new coat.

Look at what that calm voice actually takes away from you. It takes away the *Person*. God is not Someone who knows your name, He is a force, a field, a *something* with no face. It takes away your *body*, which it calls a prison and an illusion to escape. It takes away *you*, dissolving the very self God authored into a mist. And it takes away *grace* - because in that religion nobody saves you, you save yourself, climbing your way up through lifetime after lifetime, paying off your own account. No Person. No body. No self. No grace. And no Christ. Strip it all down and that is what is left.

And you do not answer a religion like that by dragging a man back to his microscope. You cannot win him back to materialism, and you should not try. You answer a face with a Face.

Because here is what I have, and what the fog does not have. God is not an *it*. God has a name. God has a face. God has hands, and there are holes in them.

*In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.* And then - oh, the wonder of it - *the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.* Not a spark hiding inside everybody. One Man. At one time. In one body, born to one mother, in one little town you can still find on a map. That is the scandal the mystic cannot stomach, and it is the very center of everything I believe. The infinite Mind that thinks the whole world into being did not stay a fog. He became particular.

And look at what this Man came to *do*, because the work is as offensive to the fog as the Person is. The mystic tells you to wake up and discover the god within. He tells you to climb. But the gospel does not say climb. The gospel says He came *down*. *He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.* He did not come to remind you that you are divine. He came to die in the place of people who are not. One Lamb. One sacrifice. One cross. And from that cross, three words that end the whole religion of self-salvation forever - *It is finished.* Not "keep climbing." Not "try again next life." *Finished.* That is grace, and grace is the one thing the fog has never had and can never counterfeit.

And then comes the wall the fog can never climb over. He rose. And He did not rise as a ghost or a glow or a higher vibration. He rose in a *body*. He told them to handle Him and see, that a spirit has not flesh and bones as they saw Him have. He ate a piece of broiled fish on the shore in front of His friends. He kept the scars in His hands and His side, and He has them still. The whole religion of the fog is about *shedding* the body to melt back into the One. And the risen Christ just stands there - particular, physical, scarred, and a Man forever - and the lie simply cannot digest Him. He is the bone it chokes on. He is the rock in the river that the whole current breaks around.

Now I have to say something hard about the household of faith, and I say it because I love her. Much of the church is going to be terrible at this fight, and it is going to be her own fault. Because much of the church already half-believes the mystic's premise. She preaches a heaven of disembodied clouds and harps and floating souls, an escape from this nasty flesh into pure spirit. She treats the body like the cage and the soul like the prisoner waiting to get out. Brethren, that is not Christianity. That is Plato in a choir robe. And here is the trouble with it - a church that has spent centuries teaching you to despise your body will not have one leg to stand on when the mystic shows up and says, *good, now despise it all the way, you were never really here anyway.* She will have handed him half of his sermon and called it her own.

This is why I keep insisting on the floor I stand on. Everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God. The world is *real* - really real - because He is really thinking it. Your body is *good* because He authored it good and called it good and will raise it good. And the God whose thought you are is not an impersonal *it*, He is a Person - three Persons - who hold all things together in covenants of love. So when that calm voice says "all is consciousness," I do not flinch and I do not run for the microscope. I say *yes* - and the Consciousness has a name, and He was born in Bethlehem, and He went to a cross, and He is a Man on a throne this very minute. Tell me your fog can do that.

And let me leave you with one warning to carry forward, because the enemy is not stupid and he rarely knocks on the front door. He will not always come as a new religion with a new name. He will come wearing *our* words. He will talk about "Christ-consciousness." He will preach a "cosmic Christ" who is a state of mind and not a Man. He will speak of the "divine spark" in every person. Watch the joint, every time. If the Christ they hand you is a feeling, a frequency, a principle hiding inside you, and not a particular Man with a particular name who really died and really rose in a body that ate fish - then it is not Christ. It is the serpent preaching his very first sermon all over again. *Ye shall be as gods.* That is all it ever was.

So the war after this one will not be won with clever arguments about whether there is more than matter. By then everybody will believe that. It will be won the only way the war was ever won - by *Christ, and him crucified.* A real Person with a real name. A finished work that no man can add to. An empty tomb, and a body on the shore eating fish in the morning light. Cling to Him. He is not a mirage, and neither are you - He knew you by name before the foundation of the world, and He will know you by name, in the body, forever.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan

05/23/2026

# The Other False Gospel

Someone shared a post on Facebook recently that has been sitting with me, and I want to write about what I think it is actually doing. The post said, in essence, that no one can come to faith in Christ through a false gospel, because God cannot deny Himself. People can become religious, the post said. They can change their lifestyle. They can sing and pray and imagine themselves sure of grace. But faith, real faith, never comes to a soul through a lie.

The post was confident. It read like the killing blow of a long argument the writer had won. And as I sat with it, the trouble of it surfaced slowly. Because the post is itself a false gospel. And I am writing this in part because there was a long stretch of years when I would have nodded along with it, when I would have shared it on my own wall, when I would have set my face against anyone who tried to gently say the thing I am about to say now.

Let me grant immediately what is true in it. Real false gospels do not save anyone. Paul said it as plainly as a man can say a thing. *Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.* Galatians 1:8. A gospel that points to a different Christ is no gospel. A gospel that asks a sinner to climb is no gospel. A gospel that mingles works and grace is no gospel. The man who finds himself trusting a different Jesus has trusted nothing. And so far the post and I agree.

But the post does not actually mean by *false gospel* what Paul meant. The post means whatever does not match the writer's own framework precisely. And when you make that substitution, when you let *false gospel* shrink down to *not exactly my doctrinal articulation,* the whole argument flips into the very thing it claims to oppose.

Here is what I mean. Paul did not condemn imperfect understanding. Paul did not condemn brothers who held different views on baptism or eschatology or the order of the decrees. Paul condemned a gospel that pointed sinners to themselves instead of to Christ. He condemned the Judaizers because they added a condition to faith. *Believe in Christ and be circumcised.* The addition was the crime. Faith plus anything is no faith at all.

And so the question to put to the post is this. What has its writer added? When he says, *only those who hear the true gospel can be saved,* and when *the true gospel* turns out to mean *the gospel as I articulate it, framed by my emphases, distinct from my brothers who differ from me in some secondary point,* he has done the very thing Paul condemned. He has added a requirement to faith. Faith in Christ plus correct doctrinal articulation. Faith in Christ plus the right tribe. Faith in Christ plus knowing what he knows. And by his own argument, that is another gospel.

The thief on the cross had nothing. He had not read a book, he had not sat under a sermon, he had not parsed a confession of faith. He had a few hours and one preacher, and the preacher was Christ Himself dying beside him. *Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.* And the Lord said, *To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.* Luke 23:42-43. If the post's argument is right, the thief was lost. He did not have the articulation. He had only Christ. And one of these two will have to give.

The Ethiopian eu**ch was reading Isaiah and could not understand it. *How can I, except some man should guide me?* Acts 8:31. Philip ran up alongside him and *preached unto him Jesus.* The eu**ch believed and was baptized. He did not climb out of that chariot with a systematic theology. He had Christ. The Spirit had brought him to faith through one passage and one short conversation. A man wedded to the post's argument would have to say the eu**ch was not saved, because he had not yet learned the full articulation. He had only the Lamb.

Cornelius feared God before Peter ever arrived in his house, and the Spirit fell on his household *while Peter yet spake.* Acts 10:44. Sinners have been brought to faith through tracts the institution would not approve, through hymns whose theology is uneven, through sermons riddled with errors that nevertheless held Christ in the middle. The Author has been writing on the hearts of His own through every kind of imperfect vessel for two thousand years, and the man who tells you the Spirit cannot work through a less-than-perfect preacher is telling you the Spirit is bound. Which is itself a denial.

But the deepest trouble of the post is what it has actually put in the place of Christ. Read it again. It does not call sinners to look at the Lamb. It does not place a hand on a trembling soul and say *Christ for you, all of Christ, only Christ.* It does the opposite. It tells the trembling soul that her experience might be counterfeit, that her pastor might be a fraud, that her sense of grace might be a feeling produced by a lie. It places the assurance of the believer not on Christ Himself but on whether the believer has been sat under the right doctrine. The savior in the post is not Christ. The savior in the post is the right framework. *Be sure you sat under a true gospel preacher* is the gospel the post preaches. And that is not the gospel. That is a doctrinal credential being sold as faith.

Faith is empty hands. Faith is a poor sinner with nothing to bring, looking at Christ, trusting Christ, leaning her whole weight on Christ. Faith is the thief on the cross. Faith is the publican in the temple beating his breast and saying, *God be merciful to me a sinner.* Luke 18:13. Faith is not a doctrinal credential. Faith is not a tribal membership card. Faith is not the confidence that you have been sat under preachers who got every emphasis exactly right. And the gospel says so as clearly as it says anything. *To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.* Romans 4:5. Not his understanding. His faith.

So when a man stands up on Facebook and tells me that *God cannot bring faith through a lie,* I do not have to argue with the sentence. I can grant it as written. What I cannot grant is what he has hidden inside it. He has redefined *the true gospel* as *the gospel as I deliver it,* and he has redefined *false gospel* as *the gospel my brothers preach with one emphasis I do not share.* And by doing that, he has built another gospel of his own. Christ plus the right tribe. Christ plus the right vocabulary. Christ plus the assurance that you sat under the man with the cleanest framework on the internet.

That is a false gospel. And it is more dangerous than the ones he is pointing at, because it wears the costume of defending the truth while it is quietly stealing the assurance Christ alone gives.

The Lord saves. He saves whom He saves. He has saved sinners under preachers I would never showcase on this website. He has saved sinners under preachers whose theology I believe is bent. He has saved sinners through tracts the gatekeepers would burn. He has saved sinners in churches whose doctrinal statements are wrong on half the page, because *the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.* John 3:8. The roll the gatekeeper keeps is not the roll the Lamb opens. And the day will come when the gates the gatekeepers built will fall over with no one beside them, because the Shepherd was outside the gate the whole time, and He went where He pleased.

So if you have read a post like the one I read this week, and it has laid you low, hear me. Your assurance does not rest on whether the preacher you sat under had every emphasis right. Your assurance rests on Christ. Look at the Lamb. Trust the Lamb. Rest your whole weight on the Lamb. *Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.* John 6:37. He said it. He meant it. And no post written by a man with a hashtag and a certainty has the authority to take it back.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan

05/20/2026

Nobody Would Make That Up
*But they did!*

Last year I found out that people were saying I believed Christ was a sinner. I found it out the hardest way there is. A dear pastor friend of mine walked up to me at a public meeting and said it to my face. He did not ask me. He told me. "You believe Christ is a sinner." And I stood there and denied it to his face.

He did not mean that I had worded something poorly. He did not mean that I had pressed an old doctrine harder than he was comfortable with. He meant that I believed Christ was a sinner. That I had looked at the spotless Lamb of God, the One who knew no sin, and called Him corrupt. I have spent my whole believing life resting in nothing on this earth but the holiness of that Lamb. And a man I counted a friend had just looked me in the eye and told me I was against it.

I want to tell you what an accusation like that does, and why it works, because I have come to believe it works for the very reasons it was reached for. And I am not going to write this as a man who has only ever stood on the receiving end of such things. In my younger years I swung truth like a club. I was fast, faster than I will ever be proud of, to believe a damning thing about a man whose doctrine I disliked, and faster still to pass it along. So I am not describing a stranger's sin here. I am describing one I have held in my own hand.

Here is the thing about an accusation that horrifying. It is the easiest weapon there is.

The first thing a monstrous charge does is travel. A careful doctrinal disagreement does not travel, because it has to be explained, and explaining is slow, and most people will not sit still long enough to be walked through it. But "he thinks Christ was a sinner" needs no explanation at all. It lands in the stomach before it ever reaches the mind. The man who hears it has taken a side before a single fact has been checked. My own friend proved it. He had the man he was accusing standing right in front of him, and he did not ask him a single question. He delivered the verdict instead. Horror does not need a ticket. It rides for free.

The second thing it does is the cruel thing, and it is the reason for the title over this article. The horror of the charge makes people believe the accuser. They reason without knowing they are reasoning, and the reasoning runs like this: nobody would invent something that grotesque about a brother. Surely no one would simply make that up. And so the very monstrousness of the lie becomes the evidence for it. The bigger the accusation, the more it seems to vouch for itself. Nobody would make that up.

But they did.

That is the whole point of this article, and I want it sitting in plain sight. The thing everyone assumed was too horrible to be fabricated was fabricated. The reflex that says "no one would say a thing like that unless it were true" is simply wrong. And a man who understands that reflex, whether by cold design or by sheer instinct, has been handed a master key.

There is a third turn, and it closes the trap. The same horror that makes people believe the accuser makes them disbelieve the accused. When I say plainly that I have never believed Christ was a sinner, that I never have and never will, that denial sounds like exactly what a guilty heretic would say to slip the noose. The monstrousness that recruited them against me had already poisoned my defense before I opened my mouth. The charge was built, in effect, so that it could not be answered. It locks the door coming in, and it locks the door going out.

Then add the last thing, which is the worst thing. A weapon like this does not even need wicked people to carry it. It does not run on malice. It runs on reverence. The reason "Christ was a sinner" is so horrifying is that the holiness of Christ is precious, and it ought to be. So the men who spread the charge did not have to recruit anyone's hatred. They only had to trip a congregation's love for the holiness of the Lamb and aim it at a man. Some of the people who picked the accusation up and carried it were not being cruel. They were being reverent. Their reverence was the thing that got used. That is how a slander can travel through a hundred mouths and not one of those mouths ever feels like the mouth of a slanderer.

I have made my peace with something hard. You cannot out-argue a reflex. I could write the careful explanation a hundred times, and I have written it more than once, and it will still never run as fast as the horror ran. The explanation has to be read. The horror only has to be heard.

But I am not without comfort, and I will tell you exactly where it is.

When they came to destroy the Lord Jesus, they did not come with the truth. Matthew records it without flinching: "the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death." They *sought* it. They went looking for a lie, because the truth would not serve their purpose. And even then the false witnesses they found could not keep their stories straight. The holiest man who ever walked the earth, the only one against whom no honest charge could ever be laid, stood and was lied about all the way to His death.

So when a false thing is said about one of His people, He is not far off, and He is not unfamiliar with it. He knows the weapon. He felt it in His own trial. And He keeps a record that no whisper can edit. The accusers have their version, and it travels fast, and it may well outlive me. But it is not the version written down where it counts. "The Lord knoweth them that are his." He is not deceived by the size of a lie. He never was.

So if you are a believer and a monstrous thing has been said about you, hear this much and let it be enough. The reflex that made people believe it is not the voice of God. It is only a reflex. And the One whose verdict is the single verdict that finally stands was Himself the most lied-about man who ever lived. He will not be fooled. Wait on Him. Tell the truth plainly, as plainly as you can manage, and then leave the record in the hands of the only One who has ever kept it accurately.

Nobody would make that up. They did. And the God who was Himself falsely witnessed against knows the difference, and He always will.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan

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