Every time God builds something that lasts, He starts underground.

Joseph in the prison. David in the cave. Jesus in thirty years of obscurity before three years of ministry. The depth of what He builds beneath the surface determines the weight of what He builds above it.

For a year, that is exactly what we have been doing at Awake Nations. Building underground. Forming a people before forming a platform. Praying. Discipling. Forming culture that nobody saw, because the foundation mattered more than the launch — and that kind of foundation is not laid in a week.

What we celebrate publicly was built privately. And now what God has been doing in secret is becoming visible.

This is not a church plant in the conventional sense. It is the public unveiling of a movement that we believe carries something the hour requires.

People are not rejecting Jesus. They are rejecting powerless religion. And in many cases it is not even rejection — they have simply never seen the authentic on display.

So we are going back. Back to Jesus in the Gospels. Back to the nascent Church in Acts. Back to a people who did not just believe a message, but carried a Presence. Who did not just attend gatherings, but shook cities. Who did not just talk about the Kingdom, but demonstrated it.

That is the Christianity the world has barely seen. And that is the Christianity we are being called to recover.

What we are building

Awake Nations is being built around five marks. These are not five values we pick and choose between. They are not five departments on an organisational chart. They are one integrated life — the life of a Church that actually resembles Jesus.

We are not pretending we can manufacture this. We are not naive enough to think that vision statements produce transformation, or that strategy alone builds a Church carrying the weight of heaven. What we are describing is beyond us. It always has been. So we stand here not boasting, but dependent. Open-handed. Asking God for the grace to become what only He can build.

One. The Lordship of Christ

“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” — Acts 2:36

This is the first apostolic sermon. Pentecost. The Spirit has just been poured out, three thousand are about to be saved, and the climax of Peter’s message is not “Jesus loves you” or “Jesus wants to help you.” It is this — God has made Jesus both Lord and Christ. Kyrios and Christos. Sovereign King and Anointed Messiah.

That single line shaped the entire identity of the early Church. They did not preach Jesus as a self-help guru or a personal life coach. They preached Him as enthroned. As ruling. As the one to whom every knee will bow. The response Peter calls for is not “invite Him into your heart.” It is repent. Turn around. Realign your entire life under the rule of the new King.

The early Church did not go to prison and to the lions because they confessed Jesus as Saviour. They died because they confessed Him as Lord, and Caesar was not. That confession was political, economic, social, and personal upheaval all at once. To say “Jesus is Lord” was to dethrone every other lord competing for the throne of your life.

This is where the modern Church has lost its edge. We have made Jesus a Saviour without making Him a Lord. We have offered people forgiveness without surrender. Heaven without obedience. A relationship without authority. And we have produced a generation of believers who have prayed a prayer but never bowed a knee.

Lordship is not a one-time decision. It is a daily yielding. It is the question every morning — Lord, what are You saying? Where are You going? What are You asking me to release? What are You asking me to obey? It is the willingness to do it even when it costs you, even when it is inconvenient, even when no one else is watching.

This kind of Church does not manufacture obedience through control or guilt or pressure. We have all seen that, and it produces nothing but wounded people. Real Lordship is built on trust. We obey because we trust His leadership. We trust His heart. We trust His timing. We trust that what He is asking us to release is never as valuable as what He is preparing us to receive.

Where Lordship is real, repentance is normal, not rare. Confession is not crisis management; it is a daily rhythm. Obedience is not reluctant compliance; it is joyful alignment with the rightful King.

This is the foundation of everything else we are building. Without it, every other mark loses its centre.

Two. A Dwelling Place for God

“In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” — Ephesians 2:22

This is one of the most staggering claims in the New Testament. Paul looks at this gathered company of redeemed believers — Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, broken and being healed — and he calls them a temple. Not a place where God visits. A place where God lives. A dwelling. A habitation. Stones being fitted together by the Spirit Himself into a sanctuary that houses the Glory.

That language is not metaphor. It is reality.

Under the Old Covenant, the Glory descended on a tent in the wilderness. Then on a temple in Jerusalem. Then it departed when the people drifted. But under the New Covenant, the Glory has come to rest somewhere new. Not a building. Not a mountain. Not a city. A people. Filled with His Spirit. Indwelt by Christ. Made together into the dwelling place of God on earth.

This changes everything about how we understand the Church. We are not gathering to invite God into a room. He already lives in us. We are not performing rituals to summon a Presence we hope might show up. The Presence of God has taken up permanent residence in His people. The question is never will God come. The question is whether we are awake to who already lives in us.

But here is the sober truth: a dwelling place can be honoured or it can be defiled. Paul warned the Corinthians, do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? And then he said, if anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. The temple is sacred. What lives there must be honoured. The way we live, the way we speak, the way we treat one another, the way we steward our bodies and our gatherings — all of it either honours the One who dwells in us or grieves Him.

This is why we cannot settle for symbolic Christianity. We are not a club that meets weekly to discuss spiritual things. We are a temple. Filled with Glory. Built together stone by stone by the Master Builder Himself, into something He intends to inhabit and to display through.

When the Church understands this, everything shifts. Worship stops being a warm-up and becomes the response of a temple to the One who fills it. Prayer stops being a routine and becomes the conversation of a people who are intimately indwelt. Holiness stops being a burden and becomes the natural posture of a sanctuary that knows what lives within it. Healing, deliverance, breakthrough — these are not visiting phenomena. They are the natural overflow of a dwelling place where the King has made His home.

This is what the world has barely seen. Not religion that talks about God, but a people in whom God lives. And when they walk into a workplace, a hospital, a marketplace, a city, they do not carry an idea. They carry a Presence. Because they are the place where He dwells.

Three. Formed in Christ

“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” — Galatians 4:19

Read that verse slowly. Paul did not say until you understand more theology. He did not say until you attend more meetings. He said until Christ is formed in you. Formation. Christ’s character, Christ’s mind, Christ’s love, Christ’s holiness, Christ’s wisdom — being shaped inside the believer until what comes out of them is recognisably Him.

That is the goal of Christian discipleship. Not information transfer. Transformation. Not data. Becoming.

And Paul uses the language of childbirth — labour pains. He is not describing a programme. He is describing travail. The kind of spiritual investment that grows people slowly and painfully into the likeness of Jesus. That is what real discipleship costs. And that is what the modern Church has almost entirely outsourced.

With all our sermons and podcasts and conferences and books, we have produced some of the most informed and least formed believers in history. People who can quote Scripture but cannot forgive. People who can debate doctrine but cannot disciple their own children. People who can lead a small group but cannot tell you what God has changed in their character in the last twelve months.

Information without formation produces hypocrites. Knowledge without transformation produces Pharisees. And Jesus reserved His sharpest words for exactly that kind of religion.

Formation happens slowly. It happens in relationship. It happens in accountability. It happens in long obedience in the same direction. It happens when truth meets life, and when life is exposed to truth in a community that will not let you stay where you are.

That is why we do not just teach at Awake Nations. We disciple. The Circle, our monthly discipleship gathering. The Inner Circle, our gender-specific accountability groups. Sent College, our theological training arm. These are not programmes. They are the ground in which formation happens. Where people are known. Where people are challenged. Where character is shaped over years, not events.

The fruit of formation is not a smarter believer. It is a believer who looks more like Jesus this year than they did last year. Whose marriage is healthier. Whose temper is more under the Spirit. Whose generosity has grown. Whose love has deepened. Whose holiness is more instinctive.

That is what we are giving ourselves to.

Four. Carrying His Kingdom

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” — Acts 1:8

Jesus did not leave us a mission statement. He left us the mission. And He did not give it to a special class of professional Christians. He gave it to everyone who carries His Spirit.

Every believer is a witness. Every believer is sent. Every believer carries the Kingdom into territory that has not yet seen it. Your workplace is mission territory. Your street is mission territory. Your school, your gym, your industry, your family line — all of it is ground the Kingdom is meant to advance into through you.

We have spent decades outsourcing the mission. We have sent it to missionaries. We have handed it to pastors. We have left it to the evangelism team. The result is a Church where most believers have never personally led someone to Jesus, and most cannot remember the last time they shared their faith outside a church building.

But the early Church was not like that. They did not have buildings, budgets, or platforms. They had the Holy Spirit and a sentness, and within a generation they had turned the Roman Empire upside down. They did not have an outreach event. They were the outreach. Every dinner table. Every marketplace. Every prison cell. Every conversation.

Carrying the Kingdom is not an event. It is a posture. It is seeing your daily life as deployment. It is recognising that wherever your feet go, you carry authority. You carry Presence. You carry good news. You carry healing. You carry the keys.

It also disrupts the way we use our resources. Generosity becomes a weapon. Money stops being something we hoard for our own comfort and starts being seed we sow into Kingdom ground. Time stops being something we spend on ourselves and becomes something we invest in eternity.

A people who live sent do not need to be guilted into evangelism. It flows out of who they are. Because once you really see the Kingdom, you cannot keep it to yourself.

This is why Awake Nations is not, and never will be, a movement for the Sunshine Coast alone. The mandate has always been the nations. We are equipping a people who are sent — into their workplaces, their cities, their nations, and the ends of the earth.

Five. Authentic Family

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” — John 13:35

This is the verse that should haunt us. Jesus did not say the world will recognise His disciples by their doctrine. By their music. By their buildings. By their political alignment. By their numerical growth. He said they will recognise us by love — the kind of love that exists between us.

Family is the apologetic of the gospel.

The early Church did not grow primarily because of preaching. It grew because the watching world looked at this strange new community and saw something they had never seen before. Slaves and masters at the same table. Jews and Gentiles eating together. Rich and poor sharing what they had. Widows cared for. Orphans adopted. Enemies forgiven. People dying for one another. The pagan world had no category for it, and they were drawn to it like moths to fire.

We have lost this. Most modern churches are not families. They are crowds. People come, they consume, they leave, and they are never truly known. Their struggles stay hidden. Their wounds stay buried. Their gifts stay dormant. They sit in rows for years next to people whose names they do not even know. And we have called this Church. It is not. It is a religious audience.

Authentic family is the cure. Family means people are known, not hidden. It means conflict is handled with honour, not gossip. It means shared lives beyond Sundays — eating together, praying together, raising kids in proximity to each other, weeping together, celebrating together, carrying each other through real seasons of joy and pain.

It also means accountability. Real family does not just affirm you. It corrects you. It calls you up. It refuses to let you stay stuck. It loves you too much to leave you where you are. That is why we have structured the Inner Circle the way we have — gender-separated, accountable, formative — because the kind of belonging Jesus calls us into is both safe and sharpening.

Family without Lordship becomes dysfunction. Family without Formation becomes a social club. But Family rooted in Christ is the most beautiful, most powerful, most evangelistically irresistible thing on earth.

One Integrated Life

These five marks are not a menu. They are not five departments. They are not five values you pick and choose between. They are one integrated life — the life of a Church that actually resembles Jesus.

Lordship without Presence becomes dry religion. Presence without Formation becomes unstable spirituality. Formation without Mission turns inward. Mission without Family burns people out. Family without Lordship becomes dysfunction.

You need all five. Woven together. Held in tension. Lived consistently. Not performed for a season, but cultivated for a lifetime.

The real question is not whether these matter. The real question is this: will we build around them, or just admire them?

Because if these become the culture — not just the language on a wall — you do not just get a healthy church. You get a people who carry authority. Host the Glory. Walk in maturity. Live sent. And actually love one another.

That is what the world is starving to see.

Set Apart for What’s Next

Before any of this becomes real, there is one more thing I have to say. And it is the heart of why we are standing here at this moment.

Have you ever noticed that God rarely moves suddenly without first calling people to prepare?

All through Scripture, before the breakthrough, there was consecration.

At Mount Sinai, before His Presence came down, God said “consecrate yourselves.”

Before crossing into the Promised Land, Joshua said “consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.”

When God established the priesthood, Aaron and his sons were consecrated. Because you cannot carry holy things casually.

And when the nation drifted, Joel cried out, “consecrate a fast.” Because consecration is not just preparation. It is also the pathway back.

Here is the pattern. Before encounter. Before breakthrough. Before calling — there is consecration.

This is not about rituals. It is about alignment.

Consecration today is choosing God over distraction. Purity over compromise. Presence over performance. Because you cannot step into what God has next while holding onto what He is asking you to release.

Consecration makes room. It clears space. It sharpens your hearing. And just like then, it positions you for what God is about to do.

So perhaps the real question is not where is God. Perhaps the question is — are we prepared for Him to move?

What God has been building underground for the last year is ready to come above ground. The foundation is laid. The people are being formed. The five marks are not just values. They are who we are becoming.

And we are not asking God to bless what we have built. We are consecrating what we have built so He can use it.

How the movement is taking shape

Awake Nations is expressed through several integrated streams.

Awake Nations Church is our local expression on the Sunshine Coast. Sunday gatherings, The Circle as our monthly discipleship gathering, and The Inner Circle as our gender-specific accountability groups. This is the laboratory where everything else is tested in real life.

Sent College is our theological training arm, registered in both Texas and Australia, offering pathways from Certificate of Ministry through to Master of Divinity. Sent College equips emerging and established leaders with rigorous biblical training shaped by Kingdom theology, apostolic and prophetic ministry, and the practice of formation. Cohorts run on the Sunshine Coast and online for students in the nations.

Awake Nations Global Network is a relational network of churches, ministries, and leaders across the nations who carry similar convictions. Not a denomination. Not a brand. A covenantal family of leaders sharing resources, accountability, and friendship across borders.

Awake Nations Publishing — through this Substack, our YouTube channel, and the books and curriculum we produce — puts language and resources into the hands of leaders building in their own contexts.

Who we are looking for

We are not looking for a crowd. We are looking for partners. The kind of people who do not need to be convinced that something needs to change, because they already feel it. The kind of leaders who are tired of noise and ready for substance. The kind of believers who would rather be formed than impressed.

Specifically, we are reaching out to four kinds of friends in this season.

Local believers on the Sunshine Coast and surrounding regions who are looking for a church family where presence, formation, and mission are taken seriously.

Pastors and church leaders, in Australia and internationally, who sense alignment with what we are building and want to explore relationship, partnership, or network membership.

Emerging leaders, ministers, and students who want serious theological training that is also alive in the Spirit, through Sent College.

Apostolic, prophetic, and intercessory friends in the nations who want to walk together with us in prayer, partnership, and mutual sending.

How to connect

If anything in this resonates, we would genuinely love to hear from you. Awake Nations is being built on relationship, not transaction, and the most important step is simply a conversation.

Local home base: Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia Sunday gatherings: Awake Nations Church The Circle:Monthly discipleship gathering, third Sunday Sent College: Theological training, Sunshine Coast and online Network enquiries: For pastors, leaders, and ministries in the nations

Whether you are local to the Sunshine Coast, anywhere in Australia, or in the nations, we welcome the conversation. Reply to this post, comment below, or reach out through our church and college contact pages.

We are not asking anyone to follow us. We are asking whether you would walk with us, in whatever way the Spirit leads, as together we give ourselves to what God is doing in this hour.

Awake Nations. This is what we are set apart for. This is what is next.

Glenn Bleakney is the Founder of Awake Nations Church on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, and the President of Sent College.

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The church in much of the Western world has drifted. We’ve traded the apostolic for the institutional, the prophetic for the professional, and the presence of God for polished production. We’ve built empires around personalities, handed discipleship over to programmes, and confused numerical growth with Kingdom advance. The fivefold ministry has been flattened; the saints have been spectated rather than equipped. And in too many places, the mission has been reduced to keeping people comfortable and the doors open.

But the cost of that drift is not abstract. It is measured in the faces of people who came to the church hungry and left empty. It is measured in the generations who walked away not because they rejected Jesus but because what they encountered in his name bore so little resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels that they could not reconcile the two. It is measured in believers who sat in pews for decades, never once equipped or released or called into anything beyond passive consumption. It is measured in leaders who burned out carrying a model that was never meant to rest on one person’s shoulders. The drift has a human cost; and that cost is one the Western church has largely refused to reckon with honestly.

These things are not in need of a gentle course correction. They represent a systemic departure from the New Testament pattern and they need to be torn down and rebuilt. I will say that loudly, repeatedly, and without apology from every platform I’m given.

But here’s where I part ways with a certain stream of reformers.

The moment someone begins throwing mud on the bride of Christ, I’m out. Reformation is not ridicule; correction is not contempt. There is a spirit that masquerades as prophetic boldness but is really just unresolved offence dressed in reformation language. I’ve seen it. It tears down without building; it diagnoses without love. It gathers an audience by stoking cynicism toward the very body Jesus died for.

That’s not reformation; that’s demolition dressed in doctrine.

To the church at Ephesus Jesus said something that should stop every reformer in their tracks. He commended them for their doctrinal precision, their intolerance of false teaching, their tireless labour, their refusal to compromise. By every external measure they were doing everything right. And then he said:

I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. — Revelation 2:4

Not that they had abandoned the truth. Not that they had softened their convictions. They had simply lost love. And Jesus called it a fall. He told them to repent.

This is worth sitting with. Ephesus was not a liberal church. It was not a compromised church. It was theologically rigorous, missionally active, and doctrinally sound. It had tested false apostles and found them wanting. It had endured hardship without growing weary. By the standards of most reformation discourse today, Ephesus would have been held up as a model. And yet Jesus looked at all of that and said: you have fallen. The absence of love was not a minor shortcoming to be noted and moved on from. It was a categorical failure that required repentance and a return to first works.

That is a sobering word for anyone who has built a platform on the failures of the church. You can be right about everything and still be in the condition Jesus is warning against. Doctrinal precision without love is not reformation; it is just a more sophisticated version of what Ephesus had become. And Jesus is no more impressed by it today than he was then.

It is entirely possible to be theologically correct about everything that is wrong with the church and still be in the same condition as Ephesus. Right about the diagnosis; wrong in the spirit. Accurate in the critique; absent in the love. That combination is not reformation. It is just Ephesus with a podcast.

The Spirit of the Reformer Matters

There is a type of Christian voice that has grown loud in our day. It speaks the language of reformation; it identifies real problems, names real failures, and calls for real change. So far, so good. But somewhere along the way the diagnosis curdles into contempt. The church is not just broken, she is beyond repair; the institution is not just flawed, it is the enemy. And the person speaking has subtly repositioned themselves outside the body, gathering an audience not around a vision of what the church could become but around a shared disdain for what she currently is.

That is not the spirit of a reformer; that is the spirit of a critic who has given up.

The apostle Paul is the most compelling example in all of Scripture of what it looks like to hold fierce prophetic critique and deep pastoral love in the same hand.

His letters to Corinth alone should settle the question. This was a church riddled with division, sexual immorality, doctrinal confusion, abuse of the Lord’s table, and a charismatic culture that had become more about self-display than edification. Paul named every one of those things without flinching. He did not soften the diagnosis to protect people’s feelings; he did not avoid the hard conversations to preserve his popularity. He said what needed to be said with surgical precision and apostolic authority.

And yet underneath every word of correction was a love that is almost overwhelming in its intensity. He called them his joy and his crown (Philippians 4:1). He wrote that out of much affliction and anguish of heart he wrote to them with many tears, not to cause them pain but to let them know the abundant love he had for them (2 Corinthians 2:4). He described the daily pressure on him of his anxiety for all the churches (2 Corinthians 11:28). He was not detached; he was not above them. He was broken for them.

That is the model. Not a critic who has built a platform on the failures of the church; a father who is in anguish over the gap between what his children are and what they are called to be, and who refuses to stop fighting for them.

In the twentieth century, a South African Pentecostal named David du Plessis did something that cost him almost everything in his own community. Rather than writing off the mainline denominations as dead and beyond hope, he walked into them. He sat with Catholics; he engaged with Lutherans and Anglicans and Presbyterians. He brought the fire of the Spirit into rooms that had not seen it in generations, and he did it not with contempt for what those traditions were but with love for what they could become.

His own Pentecostal community was not always kind about it. He was criticised for giving credibility to compromised institutions; he was accused of being naive at best and compromised at worst. He lost his ministerial credentials with the Assemblies of God for a period because of his ecumenical engagement.

He kept going anyway. Not because he was blind to the failures of the institutional church; he saw them clearly. But he carried a conviction that you cannot write off what Jesus has not written off, and that love for the broader body is not weakness. It is obedience.

He became known as Mr Pentecost. Not because he separated himself from the compromised and gathered the pure; but because he loved the whole church enough to bring her what she was missing.

That brokenness is entirely different from the cynicism that drives so much online reformation discourse today.

Brokenness builds. Cynicism burns.

New Movements Are Necessary. Contempt Is Not.

Let me say something that might surprise you given everything above. I believe new movements are necessary. I believe God raises up new wineskins because old ones sometimes cannot contain what the Spirit is doing. I have given my life to one. I make no apology for that.

The issue is never whether something new is needed. The issue is the spirit in which it is born.

There is a vast difference between a movement that emerges from a burden and a movement that emerges from bitterness. One is pulled forward by a vision of what the church could become; the other is pushed forward by disgust at what she currently is. Jesus noted in the parable of the wheat and tares that the two can look identical in the early stages of growth. The difference only becomes apparent as they mature. A burden and a bitterness can wear the same face in the beginning; the difference only becomes clear over time in the fruit they bear and the collateral damage they leave behind.

New movements born from genuine apostolic burden tend to honour what God has done in previous generations even while pressing beyond it. They plant without poisoning; they build without burning down what others have built. They carry a spirit of sonship toward the broader body even when they are doing something the broader body does not yet understand or recognise.

Movements born from bitterness do the opposite. They define themselves primarily by what they are against; their identity is constructed around the failures of the institutional church rather than the fullness of the Kingdom vision they are pursuing. And that root of bitterness, however justified it feels in the beginning, defiles everything it touches.

See to it that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled. — Hebrews 12:15

You can leave a church without despising her; you can plant something new without smashing what already exists. You can carry a reformation mandate without carrying an offence. The question is not whether you build something new. The question is what is in your heart when you do.

She Is Still the Bride

Step back from the institution for a moment. Step back from the arguments and the frustrations and the very real failures that have been named in this article. And look at what Jesus sees when he looks at the church.

He sees his bride.

Not the idealised, cleaned-up version of her. Not the triumphant, spotless version she will one day be at his return. This version. The version that exists right now in all her messiness and inconsistency and occasional embarrassment. The version that has made mistakes and failed people and built things that needed to be rebuilt. The version that has sometimes looked more like the world than the Kingdom.

He loves her anyway. Deeply, fiercely, unwaveringly. He gave everything for her. Not as a transaction but as an act of love so total that Paul reaches for the language of marriage to even begin to describe it. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). He is right now interceding for her at the right hand of the Father. He is sanctifying her; He is cleansing her; He is preparing her for the day when she will stand before him without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. He has not written her off. He has not decided she is too far gone. He has not given up on her, and neither will I.

If that is how Jesus sees the church then the question every reformer must answer is this: how dare we see her differently? How dare we speak of her with contempt when he speaks of her with love? How dare we gather audiences around our disdain for her when he gave his life for her?

You cannot claim to love the Head while despising the body; you cannot declare allegiance to the Father while treating His family as something to be discarded or sneered at. Paul understood that; Du Plessis understood that. The great cloud of witnesses who loved the church at great personal cost understood that. We need to recover it.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

It leaves us with a high and difficult calling. To see clearly without becoming cynical; to speak boldly without becoming cruel. To contend for change without losing love for the thing we are contending for.

Yes, I will push for change. I will name what needs to be named. I will contend for the apostolic, the prophetic, the fullness of what the Spirit is restoring in this hour. I will not soften the critique where critique is needed.

But I will do it on my knees. With tears if necessary. As someone who loves what Jesus loves.

Reform must be done in the right spirit or it isn’t reform at all. It’s just another wound on the body.

If you want to keep thinking through these things together, here is where that conversation continues. Subscribe to Awake Nations on Substack for reformation without cynicism, apostolic thinking rooted in love for the church, and content that takes both the Word and church history seriously. This is not a spectator space. It’s for those who are building.

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—a verse we often quote, but rarely fully grasp. This message explores Psalm 37:4 beyond surface-level faith, revealing that delighting in God isn’t transactional but transformational.

As you pursue Him, your desires begin to shift, your heart aligns with His, and favour grows in your life.

Real breakthrough doesn’t come from chasing promises, but from cultivating intimacy with Him.

If you’ve felt dry or distant, this is an invitation back—because delight isn’t just something you do, it’s something you become.

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We’ve quoted it. Framed it. Posted it. But have we truly understood it?

In this message, we go deeper into Psalm 37:4 and uncover what it really means to delight in God. This isn’t about a transactional faith or a “vending machine” Christianity. It’s about a transformed heart and a posture that attracts the favour of God.

Discover how:

• Delighting in God reshapes your desires

• Favor is something you can grow in

• God works in you to change your heart

• True breakthrough comes from pursuing Him, not just His promises

If you’ve felt dry, distracted, or distant—this message will call you back to the place of intimacy, where everything changes.

“Delight isn’t just something you do… it’s something you become.”

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In this teaching, Glenn Bleakney takes you back to first-century Israel to recover the lost world of rabbinic discipleship. You will learn about the three tiers of Jewish education, the meaning of a rabbi’s yoke, and the powerful blessing pronounced over a devoted disciple: may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.

Glenn argues that the contemporary church has confused content with formation, consumption with discipleship, and showing up with growing up. The answer is not more information. The answer is proximity.

Whether you are a pastor, a ministry leader, or a believer hungry to go deeper, this teaching will reframe what it means to follow Jesus and to reproduce that following in others.

Go and make talmidim. Be like Jesus. Let others follow in your dust.

So what is it?

In this episode, we go into Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones and rediscover what real revival looks like. You will hear why God initiates it, how we partner with Him, and why it often unfolds in stages.

We also talk about how God restores people, reshapes His church, and breathes fresh life into what has been dry for far too long.

This is an invitation to move beyond routine and step into something real.

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My fear is not that I fail. My fear is that I succeed at the wrong things.”

Alistair Begg

That stopped me cold the first time I heard it.

That’s not a warning for the half-hearted. That’s a warning for the driven.

The uncomfortable truth must be spoken: You can be busy for decades in ministry and never build what Jesus actually commissioned. You can accumulate years of experience, fill rooms, run programmes, grow platforms, and still be constructing something that has almost nothing to do with the Kingdom of Heaven.

We call it ministry experience. But experience doing what, exactly?

THE METRICS WE TRUST

We measure attendance. Giving. Social engagement. Events delivered. Years served.

None of those are wrong in themselves. But none of them are the metrics Jesus used either.

Jesus measured transformation. Disciples made. The poor hearing good news. Captives walking free. The least, the lost, and the last being found.

He didn’t commission us to build impressive organisations. He commissioned us to make disciples, people so formed in His likeness that they go and form others.

When those two things diverge, and they can quietly over years, we don’t always notice. Because the institution keeps growing even as the discipleship quietly hollows out.

SUCCEEDING AT THE WRONG THINGS

I’ve watched leaders, good people, sincere people, spend their most energetic years perfecting what Jesus never prioritised.

Polished Sunday productions that entertain but don’t transform. Structures that serve the organisation’s survival more than the Kingdom’s advance. Leadership cultures that gather people around a person rather than forming them around Jesus.

And the tragedy isn’t that they failed. The tragedy is that by most measures, they succeeded.

Full rooms. Loyal congregations. Respected names.

And yet... disciples? People sent out, empowered, multiplying? A community genuinely shaped by the Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission?

That’s where the silence gets uncomfortable.

WHAT JESUS MODELED AND COMMISSIONED

Jesus spent three years not running a synagogue. He poured himself into twelve people. Eating with them, travelling with them, correcting them, sending them, calling them back, and sending them again.

His primary methodology was presence and formation, not programming and performance.

He commissioned that same method. Go and make disciples. As the Father sent me, so I send you.

Not: build the most impressive ministry infrastructure your generation has seen.

We are called to build according to the pattern of Christ, according to heaven’s priorities, not the patterns of religious culture or institutional momentum. And that pattern has one centre of gravity: disciples formed in Christ, sent by the Spirit, making disciples who make disciples.

The question every leader needs to sit with honestly, prayerfully, without defensiveness, is simply this: are the things I’m most invested in building actually what Jesus commissioned? Not are they good things. Not are they working by conventional measures. But are they this thing? The thing He asked for?

EXPERIENCE IS ONLY AS VALUABLE AS WHAT YOU’RE PRACTISING

Ten thousand hours of the wrong thing doesn’t produce mastery of the right thing.

Decades of running ministry events doesn’t automatically mean you know how to make disciples. Years of preaching to a crowd doesn’t mean you’ve learned how to form a person.

The experience that matters is experience doing what Jesus did. Investing in people, sending people, trusting the Spirit to multiply through people.

Everything else is scaffolding. And scaffolding was never meant to become the building.

A BETTER FEAR

Let Begg’s words do their work in you.

Don’t fear obscurity. Don’t fear small numbers. Don’t fear slow growth.

Fear building something impressive that Jesus never asked for. Fear arriving at the end of a ministry lifetime with a monument to your effort and a shortage of disciples. Fear succeeding, wildly, at the wrong things.

Because the Kingdom advances through a very specific thing. People formed in Christ, sent by the Spirit, making disciples who make disciples.

That’s the commission. That’s the model. That’s the only metric that will matter when we give account.

Build that.

Glenn Bleakney
Senior Leader, Awake Nations, Australia
President, Sent College
Kingdom Architecture — apostolic reformation, discipleship, and Kingdom theology Watch Kingdom Community Television at Kingdomcommunity.tv/apps

We ask, “Do you know God?” when the more searching question is, “How do you know him?” The first question is binary. The second is a journey. And it is a journey most Christians begin but few follow to its depths, not because the path is hidden, but because they mistake the entrance for the destination.

The Scripture is honest about this. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” said God through Hosea (4:6). The word rendered knowledge there is the Hebrew da’at (דַּעַת). Not academic information. Intimate, experiential knowing. The same word appears in Genesis when Scripture says Adam knew his wife. It is relational to its core. What Hosea mourns is not ignorance of doctrine. It is a people who have religious activity without relational reality, who know about God but do not actually know him.

There are five levels of knowing God. Each is a grace. Each is real. But God is always calling us further in.

Level One: Knowing About God

This is where every genuine journey begins, and it is not to be despised. We hear sermons. We read Scripture. We take notes, collect truth, repeat back what we have received. We learn that God is Creator, all-powerful, wholly loving. This is the on-ramp, and every on-ramp serves a purpose.

Young Samuel is the picture here. He served in the temple. He ministered before the Lord. He was surrounded by the sacred: the lampstand, the ark, the morning prayers of Eli. And yet Scripture says with quiet precision, “Samuel did not yet know the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:7). The Hebrew is yada’ (יָדַע) again, that word of deep knowing, and Samuel did not yet have it. He was in proximity to all the right things, and still the living voice of God was unrecognised.

Cornelius is another portrait. Acts 10 describes him as devout, generous, prayerful, a man who feared God with all his household. He had the map. Yet he still needed the Gospel declared to him, still needed revelation to break through the shell of sincere religion. Information had done its job. It brought him to the door. Revelation would open it.

The danger of the information level is not that it is wrong, but that it is comfortable. It gives the feeling of progress without the cost of surrender. You can underline a verse without letting it underline you. You can study the fruit of the Spirit while remaining impatient with your family. You can admire the Sermon on the Mount and postpone forgiveness. Information keeps us busy enough to mistake busyness for intimacy.

Let the facts you know become the floor you stand on, not the ceiling you stop at.

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Most people want revival. Few are prepared for what it actually does.

We picture revival as a season of intense spiritual experience. People weeping at altars. Signs and wonders. Full rooms. And yes, revival does all of that. But it doesn’t stop there.

Real revival doesn’t just touch individuals. It rearranges the house.

The early church wasn’t just a collection of renewed people. It was a new kind of community altogether. A different social order. A different authority structure. A different understanding of what it meant to belong to God and to one another.

When the Spirit moves with genuine weight, He doesn’t just fill what already exists. He challenges the container.

That’s what reformation is.

Reformation is what revival looks like when it lands on the church itself. Not just the people in it, but the structures, the assumptions, the inherited forms that shape how we gather, how we lead, how we disciple, and what we think the church is even for.

You can have moments of revival that are real and still protect the old wineskin. People get touched. People get healed. People get filled. And then everyone goes back to the same attendance-based, programme-driven, consumer-shaped structure. Nothing changes. The structure absorbs the move and domesticates it.

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Every great move of God in history produced not just renewed believers but rethought communities. The first-century church. The 16th-century Reformation. The Wesleyan revival. Azusa Street. Each of them, in their own way, didn’t just restore individuals. They reshuffled what the church looked like on the ground.

This is what we have to hold onto right now.

If we want the fullness of what God is releasing, we have to let the revival do its complete work. Not just in our hearts. In our houses.

Pray for revival. But prepare for what it exposes.

Because when revival doesn’t become reformation, something stopped it short. The question isn’t whether God was moving. The question is what we refused to let Him touch.

The fire fell. But we protected the house.

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Share Awake Nations Ministries

In a world driven by data, strategy, and human insight, there’s a higher intelligence available—divine wisdom revealed through intimate communion with the Holy Spirit. This episode unpacks what it means to return to humanity’s original design: living in constant connection with God and leading from revelation, not just information.

Discover how to develop a “hearing heart,” access supernatural understanding, and discern what heaven is saying for every decision you face. This isn’t about intuition or guesswork—it’s about partnering with God in real time.

If you’re ready to lead your life, ministry, or organization with clarity that comes from above, this episode will shift everything.

This is your invitation into listening leadership.

Join the Kingdom Reformation Community. Subscribe today at KingdomReformation.org

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A rabbi walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He sees two men casting nets. He calls them. They drop everything and follow him. He walks further. He sees two more men in a boat with their father, mending nets. He calls them. They leave the boat, leave their father, and follow.

Four verses. Four men. A movement that would reshape the world.

We read it as a story about the power of Jesus’ call. And it is. But we have almost entirely lost the context that made that call scandalous to its original hearers. Theologically provocative. A direct and deliberate assault on the operating assumptions of the entire religious world.

To recover that context, we need to go back much further than the shore of Galilee. We need to go back to the schoolrooms and the dusty roads and the ancient formation system that produced these men and that had already rendered its verdict on them.

The Architecture of Jewish Formation

The discipleship system of first-century Judaism was one of the most rigorous and intentional educational architectures in the ancient world.¹ It operated across three distinct stages, each building on the last, each functioning as a filter that progressively reduced the pool of those considered capable of full rabbinic formation.

The first stage, Bet Sefer or House of the Book, began around age five and continued to approximately age ten. The curriculum was singular: the five books of Moses, committed to memory in their entirety. Not summarised, not thematically organised, not selectively highlighted. The entire Torah, word for word. The sages articulated the philosophy in Pirkei Avot 5:21: at five years old, Scripture; at ten, Mishnah; at thirteen, commandments; at fifteen, Talmud. The method was pure oral repetition. The teacher chanting. The students repeating. Again and again, until the text was not merely known but inhabited.²

The second stage, Bet Talmud or House of Learning, extended the curriculum to the full Tanakh and introduced the Oral Torah: the interpretive traditions, legal rulings, and theological reasoning that circulated between rabbinic schools and would eventually be codified as the Mishnah around 200 CE. Students in this stage were formed in the culture of machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven, in which rigorous theological disagreement was not a failure of devotion but an expression of it. A student who could not argue against his own position was not considered ready to hold it.³

At thirteen, the boy became bar mitzvah, son of the commandment, legally responsible before God and the community for his own covenant obedience. And at this point, most students went home. The system had completed its filtering work. The vast majority had been assessed, honoured, and firmly redirected: you are a good Jewish man, go and live faithfully in your father’s trade, that is enough.

Only the exceptional few would proceed to the third stage. These students would approach a recognised rabbi and formally request to become his talmid.⁴

The word is critical. Talmid in singular, talmidim in plural. It is the Hebrew word behind the Greek mathetes, universally translated in English as disciple. But disciple as we have domesticated it bears almost no resemblance to what talmid actually meant. A talmid was someone who had attached his entire life, his time, his relationships, his ambitions, his daily movement through the world, to a specific rabbi, with one explicit goal: to become like him.

The rabbi would examine the candidate rigorously. The examination was not primarily academic. The rabbi was probing for something harder to measure: does this young man have what it takes to become like me? Not to know what I know. To be what I am.

If the rabbi’s assessment was negative, the response was pastoral and final: go, learn a trade.

If the assessment was positive, two words in Hebrew carried the weight of destiny: Lech acharai. Come, follow me.

Those two words inaugurated a decade or more of total-life formation. The talmid travelled with his rabbi, ate with him, slept in proximity to him, watched him handle money and conflict and honour and grief and temptation. He listened to him pray. He observed how he treated the servant and the official, the desperate and the hostile, the repentant and the recalcitrant. The goal was personal transformation: the slow, total assimilation of the rabbi’s way of seeing and moving through the world.

The Mishnah captured this aspiration in Pirkei Avot 1:4: v’hevei mitabek b’afar ragleihem — **cover yourself in the dust of their feet.**⁵

In first-century Galilee, roads were unpaved and dry. A rabbi walking from one village to the next left a trail of dust in his wake. A talmid following closely enough, not at a comfortable intellectual distance, not walking alongside as a peer, but following in the posture of a learner, would be close enough that the rabbi’s sandals kicked dust onto him. Avak harav, the dust of the rabbi, was the visible, physical mark of discipleship. You were known by your dust.

The Hebrew verb mitabek is worth pausing on. It is the same root used in Genesis 32:24when Jacob wrestles (vayeavek) with the angel at the Jabbok. It carries connotations of ferocity, tenacity, total physical engagement. The instruction to mitabek in the dust of the rabbi’s feet is an instruction to pursue so relentlessly that the distinction between his road and yours collapses. You are not following from a respectful distance. You are so close that his movement through the world is leaving its mark on your body.

The traditional blessing spoken over promising young disciples crystallised the aspiration: may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. To pronounce this over a person was to say: may your following be so ferocious and so close that you bear the marks of your master on you.

This was the world. This was the system. And it had already rendered its verdict on the men by the lake.

The Verdict of the System

Peter and Andrew were fishermen. James and John were fishermen. This is not incidental biographical detail. It is the record of the system’s assessment.

These men had been through the formation pipeline. They had sat in Bet Sefer and memorised Torah alongside every other Jewish boy in their village. The best of them had gone on to Bet Talmud and wrestled with the full Hebrew scriptures and the traditions of the rabbis. And then, at some point around the time of bar mitzvah, when the system made its quiet determinations about who had what it takes, they had been redirected.

Not dishonourably. Not cruelly. The language of the tradition was pastoral and clear: go, learn a trade. Return to your father. Learn his work. Be a faithful Jewish man. That is enough.

And so they had. Peter apparently built something substantial. Luke’s account suggests he owned multiple boats and employed workers (Luke 5:3-7). These are not desperate men with nothing to lose. These are men who have constructed a life, made peace with their circumstances, and built something of genuine competence and value. They are not sitting at the edge of the lake nursing wounded ambition. They are casting nets. They are working.

The religious establishment of Jerusalem looked down on Galileans as a class. The region’s history, conquered by Assyria in 722 BC and repopulated with pagan nations, had given it the designation Galil HaGoyim: Galilee of the Gentiles (Isaiah 9:1, quoted by Matthew immediately before our passage in Matthew 4:15). Galileans were considered theologically compromised, educationally inferior, linguistically marked. When Nathanael heard that the Messiah might come from Nazareth, a village in Galilee, his response was not personal prejudice but culturally embedded assumption: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). And when Peter was identified in the high priest’s courtyard on the night of the arrest, it was not his face that gave him away. It was his accent: “Surely you also are one of them, for your speech betrays you” (Matthew 26:73).

These were the men. This was the place. This was the verdict the system had rendered: insufficient, redirected, not rabbi material.

The Four Reversals

Into that settled reality walks Jesus of Nazareth.

He does not go to Jerusalem. He does not present himself at the academies. He does not recruit from the families of priestly influence or the graduates of the finest rabbinic schools. He goes to the lake. And what he does there constitutes a total and systematic reversal of every operating assumption of the rabbinic discipleship system.

The first reversal: the direction of the call.

In the rabbinic system, the talmid approached the rabbi. The initiative lay with the student. He made the request, presented himself for examination, sought admission. Jesus reverses this entirely. He walks toward the fishermen. He initiates. He calls. The direction of movement has completely changed, and the theological implications of that reversal are enormous. Jesus is not a rabbi waiting to be found by the worthy. He is a rabbi who goes looking for the ones the system has already released.

The second reversal: the sequence of qualification.

In the normal process, qualification preceded the call. You demonstrated your worthiness through years of memorisation, interpretation, argumentation, and character formation, and only then, if the rabbi assessed you as genuinely promising, were you called. The call was the reward for demonstrated potential.

Jesus calls first. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). The transformation is promised as a consequence of following, not as a prerequisite for it. I will make you. The qualification is not what enables the call. The call is what produces the qualification. This is a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between grace and human capacity.

The third reversal: the criteria for selection.

The rabbinic system selected the best of the best, those who had survived every filter and been assessed as having what it takes. The pool from which Jesus recruits has been explicitly assessed by the system and found below the threshold. He goes to the men who had already been told they were not candidates.

This is not romanticism about the virtues of the common person. It is a theological statement about the operating principle of the kingdom, one that Paul would later articulate with precision: “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28, NKJV). Paul is not being abstractly philosophical here. He is describing what he has observed in the composition of Jesus’ talmidim. He has seen the reversal enacted.

The fourth reversal: the basis of confidence.

When a rabbi called a talmid, the implicit declaration was: I believe you can become like me. The rabbi’s confidence rested on the talmid’s demonstrated ability, his recall, his reasoning, his character as assessed through examination. The rabbi was making a bet on human potential.

Jesus’ confidence does not rest on Peter’s demonstrated ability. It rests on his own power to transform. The declaration, I believe you can become like Me, is grounded not in an assessment of Peter’s resources but in the inexhaustible sufficiency of Christ’s own presence in the talmid. This is not the rabbi betting on the student. This is the Rabbi betting on himself.

John 15:16 makes this permanent and explicit: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain.” The Greek verb exelexamen, I chose, is aorist, pointing to a specific completed act prior to any response from the disciples. The initiative, the choice, the appointment, all of it originated with Jesus before the fishermen had any opportunity to demonstrate worthiness.

The Theological Stakes

What is at stake in these four reversals is not merely an interesting historical observation about how Jesus differed from his contemporaries. What is at stake is the entire logic of the Gospel.

The rabbinic system was, in its deepest structure, a meritocracy of grace. It was generous. It educated every Jewish boy, not merely the wealthy. But its generosity had a threshold. Beyond that threshold, access depended on demonstrated capacity. You had to have what it took. The system honoured human potential and rewarded its development.

Jesus’ method of building his community of talmidim enacts a different economy entirely. Theologians have long recognised that the pattern of election in scripture consistently runs against human expectation: the younger chosen over the older, Jacob over Esau, David over his brothers, the unlikely over the expected, Gideon’s reduced army, the barren women who bear the promised children. The Galilean fishermen stand in this long line of divine reversals.⁶ But Jesus’ great reversal is not merely the latest instance of a recurring pattern. It is the pattern’s theological explanation. The reason God consistently chooses the insufficient is not that insufficiency is intrinsically virtuous. It is that the call of God is not premised on human sufficiency. The call creates what it requires. Follow me, and I will make you. The transformation is intrinsic to the invitation.

This has profound implications for how we understand the nature of Christian community and formation. If the church is a community built on the logic of Jesus’ reversal, on the principle that the call precedes and produces the qualification, then the church is structurally committed to including those the world and the religious system have assessed as insufficient. Not as an act of charity toward the unqualified, but as an act of theological fidelity to the method of the Rabbi who built his movement at a lake in Galilee with men the system had already released.

The dust on those fishermen was not the mark of their qualification. It was the mark of his grace.

The Reversal Reproduced

Jesus did not merely enact the Great Reversal for a specific group of first-century fishermen. He commissioned those fishermen to go and reproduce the reversal in others.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). Make talmidim. The Greek word is mathetes, the translation of talmid. Go and do what I did with you. Go and find the ones the system has released. Go and call the people who have been told they are not rabbi material. Go and cover them with dust.

Paul understood this as the governing logic of the church’s equipping ministry. In Ephesians 4:11-12 he describes the fivefold gifts, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, not as performers whose excellence constitutes the church’s ministry, but as equippers whose function is to activate the ministry latent in every member of the body. The Greek word he uses for equipping, katartismos, appears in the Gospels for mending torn fishing nets: restoring something broken to its full designed function.⁷ The fivefold ministry exists not to do the work for the body but to restore the body to full function, to activate in every member the specific grace the Spirit has deposited in them.

This is the Great Reversal reproduced at institutional scale. The religious world builds its ministry around the qualified few. The kingdom builds its ministry around the mobilisation of everyone, specifically including those the religious world has told to go and learn a trade.

The body matures as it is deployed. It is deployed as it matures. And the measure of that maturation is not doctrinal sophistication or platform reach but the reproduction of the talmid dynamic: the formation of people so thoroughly shaped by proximity to Jesus that they can turn around and cover others with dust.

What Are You Covered In?

I want to end with the question that the Great Reversal ultimately puts to every one of us.

Not: are you qualified? Not: have you been assessed as having what it takes? Not: does the system approve of you?

The question is simpler and more demanding than any of those.

What are you covered in?

The dust of the Rabbi is not a credential conferred by an institution. It is the natural consequence of proximity. You get it by following so closely, so consistently, so relentlessly, that the road Jesus is walking becomes your road and the way Jesus moves through the world begins to transfer to your own body and instincts and reflexes.

And the follow-on question that the Great Reversal makes inescapable: who are you covering with dust?

The fishermen at the lake were not the end of the story. They were the beginning of a chain. Talmidim who became rabbis. People covered in dust who turned around and covered others. A community of formation that reproduced itself across generations and across the world, not because the original members were qualified, but because the Rabbi who called them was sufficient for everything the call required.

He still is.

And he is still walking toward the lake. Still going to the dismissed regions. Still looking for the people the system has already redirected. Still saying two words to men and women who have made peace with a fishing life:

Lech acharai.

Come, follow me.

The dust is still available. The only question is how close you are willing to walk.

Notes

¹ For the most thorough treatment of the rabbinic educational system in its first-century context, see Shmuel Safrai, “Education and the Study of the Torah,” in The Jewish People in the First Century, vol. 2, ed. Shmuel Safrai and Menahem Stern (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1976), 945-970.

² The memorisation methodology of Bet Sefer is discussed in Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

³ The culture of rabbinic debate is preserved throughout the Mishnah and Talmud. The phrase machloket l’shem shamayim appears in Pirkei Avot 5:17, where it is contrasted with argument for the sake of personal victory.

⁴ The process of a student approaching a rabbi is discussed in Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1994). For the specific dynamics of the rabbi-student relationship in first-century Palestine, see Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).

⁵ Pirkei Avot 1:4 records the saying of Yose ben Yoezer of Zeredah. For a careful philological treatment of avak and its cognates, see Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Judaica Press, 1996), s.v. אבק.

⁶ The theological significance of divine election running counter to human expectation is developed in Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 450-491. For the New Testament development of this theme, see N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 774-801.

⁷ The word katartismos and its cognates are examined in Heinrich Schlier, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 475-476. The fishing net usage appears in Matthew 4:21, where the same root describes James and John mending their nets, making the Ephesians 4:12 usage particularly resonant given the Galilean fishing context.

Glenn Bleakney is the founder and president of Awake Nations (Sunshine Coast, Australia, and Dallas, Texas) and Sent College. He writes Kingdom Architecture on Substack, focusing on apostolic reformation, Kingdom theology, and multiplying discipleship. If this helped you, share it with someone rethinking discipleship in today’s church.

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There is a version of the church renewal conversation that goes like this:

Constantine corrupted the church. The institution is the problem. Get back to houses. Get back to the early church. Then everything will be different.

It sounds prophetic. It travels fast on social media. And it is, at nearly every point, a serious oversimplification — one doing real damage to a conversation the church genuinely needs to have.

Here is what needs to be said plainly: bad history makes bad ecclesiology. When the diagnosis is wrong, the prescription will be wrong. And when the prescription is wrong, the patient doesn’t get better — it just ends up in a different room with the same disease.

The Binary Is the Problem

The renewal conversation keeps getting framed as a forced choice: institution or organism, building or house, Constantine or authenticity, structure or Spirit.

These are false binaries. They feel decisive. But they short-circuit the harder thinking the church actually needs to do.

The early church did not choose between large corporate gatherings and intimate household communities. It held both together deliberately — because both served distinct purposes neither could fulfil alone. Acts 2:46 places believers simultaneously in the temple courts and in homes. That is not a tension waiting to be resolved. It is a model waiting to be understood.

The New Testament never identifies structure as the problem. When Paul addresses the disorders at Corinth he does not tell them to disband and meet in smaller groups. He writes two letters calling them to maturity, sound doctrine, and ordered common life. Not one of the seven churches in Revelation is rebuked for meeting in the wrong kind of room.

The problems the New Testament consistently identifies are theological and formational — unbelief, immaturity, false teaching, passivity. These do not yield to architectural solutions. Changing the venue does not change the culture. And it is culture, not structure, that determines the health of any community.

Getting the History Right

The Edict of Milan (313 AD) is routinely described as the moment Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. This is factually wrong — and it matters.

What Constantine and Licinius actually issued was a broad edict of religious toleration, extending legal protection to all religious communities and ordering the return of properties seized from Christians during the Diocletianic persecution. It was a moment of relief, not a declaration of supremacy.

Christianity did not become the state religion until Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD — sixty-seven years later, under an entirely different emperor. Collapsing two events separated by nearly seven decades into a single villain moment is not history. It is narrative construction.

More significantly — the church was already institutional long before Constantine arrived.

Rodney Stark’s demographic analysis in The Rise of Christianity estimates Christianity at five to six million people by Constantine’s reign. That scale does not emerge from scattered informal house networks. It requires sustained, structured, multigenerational organisation.

Ignatius of Antioch was writing about bishops, presbyters, and deacons as established realities around 110 AD — two centuries before Constantine. Cyprian of Carthage was administering a fully institutional church with property, finances, and formal disciplinary processes — and he died in 258 AD, more than fifty years before the Edict of Milan.

Constantine did not build the institutional church. He walked into one that was already there. What imperial patronage provided was resources, legitimacy, and a new set of pressures. That is a very different story — and the difference matters, because the myth locates the problem in the institution, when the actual evidence locates it somewhere else entirely.

The Golden Age That Wasn’t

Here is the question that should stop every “return to the early church” argument in its tracks: which early church, exactly?

The Corinthian church — meeting in homes — was factional, disorderly, and morally compromised. The Galatian churches were sliding into legalism within years of Paul’s founding visit. The Jerusalem church had serious internal conflict within years of Pentecost. The seven churches of Revelation range from genuine health to near-total failure — every one of them pre-dating Constantine by two centuries.

The New Testament is not a record of pristine primitive Christianity. It is a collection of crisis documents sent to communities that were struggling and being corrected. The golden age the declensionist narrative requires is extraordinarily difficult to locate the closer you look.

The idea that recovering a first-century structural model will recover first-century vitality assumes that structure was the reason the early church worked. That assumption does not survive serious engagement with the actual text.

The Real Crisis Was Never the Room

Ramsay MacMullen’s scholarship on the Christianisation of the Roman Empire identifies what actually went wrong in the post-Constantinian period — and it was not buildings or bishops.

It was the collapse of the catechumenate — the rigorous, multi-year process through which converts were formed in doctrine, practice, and community life before receiving baptism. When Christian identity became socially advantageous, the depth of formation thinned. Augustine’s congregations were full of people who were Christian in name, Roman in practice, and barely formed in either doctrine or discipleship.

That is a formation crisis. And it maps with uncomfortable precision onto what is being rightly diagnosed in contemporary Western Christianity today — the passivity, the consumerism, the gap between attendance and genuine discipleship.

But here is the truth that needs to be stated clearly: moving people from a church building into a living room does not solve a formation crisis. It relocates it.

A house church without serious investment in doctrine, discipleship, and genuine participation is simply a smaller gathering with the same cultural problems and fewer resources to address them. The informality changes. The aesthetic changes. The fundamental culture — passive, consumer-oriented, formation-light — remains exactly what it was.

The Church Doesn’t Need a Better Room. It Needs a Better Culture.

The hunger for a more authentic, participatory, formation-centred church is legitimate and urgent. The Western church has real problems that deserve real responses.

But bad history makes bad ecclesiology. When the Constantine myth serves as the foundation, the ecclesiology built on it will consistently mislocate the problem — in institutions, in buildings, in structures — and consistently underdevelop the actual solution, which is formation.

The early church was not vital because it lacked institutions or met in homes. It was formative because it took seriously the work of making disciples rather than merely making converts. The apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, prayer. Acts 2:42 is not a description of a structural arrangement. It is a description of a formational culture.

That culture is not the property of any particular century, structure, or room size. It is available right now, in whatever form your community takes.

The church doesn’t need a better room. It needs a better culture.

You can dismantle the institution, scatter the congregation into living rooms across the city — and if the work of genuine formation has not been done, you will have traded one expression of the same problem for another.

That is not renewal. It is relocation dressed up as reformation.

This is Part One. Part Two will examine what a genuine culture of formation actually looks like, what it costs, and what it produces.

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A Word Before We Begin

Welcome to Edition 4 of our seven-part series on apostolic transition.

In Edition 1, we examined the foundational shift from pastoral maintenance to Kingdom pioneering — the recognition that the Church was never designed to be a holding facility but a launching pad. The dominant mode of much of Western Christianity has been maintenance: keeping the gathered community stable, cared for, and content. But the New Testament knows nothing of a Church turned inward on itself. The apostolic call is not to tend an institution but to pioneer a Kingdom, and that requires a fundamentally different kind of leadership with a fundamentally different set of instincts.

In Edition 2, we recovered the Gospel of the Kingdom itself. Much of what passes for “the gospel” in contemporary Christianity is a truncated message — a rescue narrative focused almost entirely on individual salvation and eternal destiny, with little to say about the present reign of Christ over all things. But Jesus did not preach the gospel of personal forgiveness in isolation. He preached the gospel of the Kingdom — the announcement that God’s rule had broken into history in his own person, and that everything was now subject to that reign. A truncated gospel produces truncated disciples: people who have been saved out of the world but have no framework for being sent back into it.

In Edition 3, we turned that message into mission — confronting the most deeply embedded assumption in the modern church: that success is measured by how many people show up rather than how many people are sent out. We traced the shift from an attendance-oriented ecclesiology to a disciple-making mission, recovering the radical implications of the Great Commission’s central verb — mathēteusate, make disciples — and the breathtaking scope of its object: panta ta ethnē, all nations. We argued that a disciple is not made for the church. A disciple is made in the church and sent to the world.

Now in Edition 4 we press further into the logic of that mission. If the Great Commission calls us to make disciples of all nations, and if the method Jesus modelled was not scalable but reproducible, then the question that presses upon us is this: how does the mission actually multiply? How does a single community, a single leader, a single act of faithful disciple-making become something that touches cities, regions, and nations?

Apostolic Multiplication: From Addition to Exponential Kingdom Advance

The Numbers That Change Everything

There is a way of looking at the mathematics of mission that makes the inadequacy of our current approach impossible to ignore.

Consider two scenarios. In the first, one hundred thousand churches each lead one new person to Christ every week. By any standard of modern church growth strategy, this is extraordinary faithfulness — a hundred thousand congregations each winning a person weekly, week after week, year after year. Yet run the numbers forward and a sobering reality emerges: at that rate, it would take over a thousand years to reach the world’s current population.

In the second scenario, a single disciple leads one person to faith and spends a year bringing that person into genuine spiritual maturity. The following year, both of them do the same — one each, one year of formation each. This doubling process continues. No megachurch. No mass evangelism events. No professional ministry apparatus. Just one disciple forming one disciple, year after year, the chain reproducing itself. At that rate, the present world population can be reached in fewer than thirty-four years.

The contrast is not between faithfulness and unfaithfulness. One hundred thousand churches leading one person to Christ every week represents enormous faithfulness. The contrast is between two fundamentally different understandings of how mission works — between addition and multiplication. And the mathematics of the Kingdom are unambiguous about which one Jesus commissioned.

This is not a theoretical observation. It is the pattern the early Church actually lived. Beginning with one hundred and twenty people in an upper room in Jerusalem, the movement grew to somewhere between five and six million believers within three centuries — growing at roughly forty percent per decade — and it did so without imperial favour, without professional clergy in the modern sense, without training institutions or purpose-built facilities. It grew because it multiplied. And it multiplied because multiplication was embedded in its culture from the beginning.

The same pattern has repeated itself in the modern era. The underground church in China, operating without buildings, without seminary-trained leaders, and under active government persecution, has expanded at rates that mirror the early Church precisely because it has been forced back onto the only growth mechanism the early Church knew: organic, relational, Spirit-empowered discipleship reproduction. When the institutional scaffolding is removed, what remains is either a genuine multiplication culture or nothing at all.

The question is not whether multiplication works. History has answered that. The question is whether we are willing to build the kind of culture that makes it possible.

What the New Testament Actually Shows Us

The book of Acts gives us three distinct phases of Kingdom growth, and they build on each other in a sequence that is theologically intentional rather than historically accidental.

The first phase is addition. Thousands believed on the day of Pentecost. The Lord added to their number daily. Great multitudes were added as the community in Jerusalem grew and the word spread. Addition is real, addition is celebrated in the New Testament, and there is nothing wrong with it. A community that is reaching people and seeing them come to faith is a community participating in something genuinely good.

But addition alone is not the commission. The second phase the New Testament describes is multiplication — disciples multiplying, not merely accumulating. The word the text uses matters: not added but multiplied. This is a different dynamic, a different organism. When disciples are multiplying, the growth is no longer dependent on a central hub of gifted leaders doing ministry to a passive congregation. It is distributed, relational, and self-sustaining in ways that addition never is.

The third phase is church planting — communities reproducing communities, the gospel carried not just to individuals but into new geographical and cultural territories through the planting of new Kingdom outposts. By Acts 9:31, churches are growing and multiplying across entire regions. This is not the result of a carefully managed expansion strategy. It is the organic consequence of a multiplying disciple-making culture encountering the power of the Spirit in new places.

What is striking when you trace Paul’s development across his missionary career is that he did not begin with this understanding fully formed. His early approach leaned more heavily toward the addition model — planting, preaching, building a congregation. It was only after decades of apostolic labour, and particularly in his communication to Timothy, that he crystallised the principle of multiplication in its most concentrated form: what you have received from me, entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others also. Four generations in a single sentence. Paul’s mature missiological vision was not a congregation. It was a movement — and movements are made of chains of reproduction, not centralised hubs of excellence.

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In this transformative Resurrection message, Glenn Bleakney unpacks the Kingdom-altering significance of Jesus’ final declaration on the cross: “It is finished” — Tetelestai (John 19:30). Far from being the end of the story, these words mark the fulfillment of prophecy, the satisfaction of divine justice, and the launching of a new creation reality.

Drawing from the rich biblical imagery behind Tetelestai—a term used in the marketplace, the temple, the courtroom, the military, and even by artists—this message reveals how the Cross was not merely a moment of death, but the moment when all of heaven’s purposes converged in victory.

Through Christ’s finished work:

• Intimacy is restored — the veil was torn, and access to the Father is now open (Hebrews 10:19-22).

• Identity is reclaimed — we are adopted as sons and daughters, heirs with Christ (Romans 8:16-17).

• Influence is reactivated — Jesus’ resurrection reestablishes the believer’s authority to represent His Kingdom on earth (Matthew 28:18-20; Acts 1:8).

From Eden lost to Eden regained, this sermon proclaims that the Cross is not just about salvation from sin but restoration to divine purpose. The resurrection of Jesus was not the conclusion of redemption—it was the commencement of Kingdom restoration.

You weren’t just saved—you were sent. The tomb is empty, the Spirit is poured out, and the revolution continues.

Live like “It is finished”… but also like “It has just begun.”

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A Jewish boy began his education at around age five, memorising the Torah under a local teacher. By ten he was working through the oral tradition. The sharp ones, the ones who showed exceptional promise, were invited to continue. The rest went home to learn the family trade. By the time a boy was thirteen or fourteen, most had already been filtered out.

The rabbi was everything in this world. He was not just a teacher of information — he was a living embodiment of Torah. To become his talmid was the highest aspiration a young man could hold. But the rabbi did not take just anyone. He watched. He tested. He questioned. He was looking for students who had what it took to become like him — to carry his interpretation of Torah forward into the next generation.

When a rabbi chose you, he said: Come, follow me. I believe you can become like me.

When he didn’t choose you, the message was just as clear: You’re not good enough. Go home.

Most went home.

Then Jesus shows up on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

He doesn’t walk into the rabbinical schools. He doesn’t recruit from the top of the class. He finds fishermen. Working men. Men who had already been passed over by every rabbi worth following. They were not in school anymore. They were in boats, doing what boys did when the system had told them they didn’t make the cut.

And Jesus looks at them and says: Follow me.

That moment is more radical than we usually let ourselves feel. These were not the best candidates. They were not the most theologically trained. By every measurable standard of their culture, they were the least likely to carry anything significant into the world.

Jesus chose them anyway.

He didn’t choose them because they were impressive. He chose them because God had a plan for their lives that no rabbi’s filter could see. He looked at Peter and saw a rock. He looked at rough, uneducated fishermen and saw the men who would turn the world upside down. He invested in them. He poured himself into them. He ate with them, travelled with them, argued with them, challenged them, restored them when they failed. He believed in them when they didn’t believe in themselves.

The key was not their qualification. The key was his investment.

He was not looking for polished students. He was looking for yielded ones. And what he poured into the yielded, God transformed.

Nothing has changed.

The Kingdom still moves through unlikely people. Walk into any church where the Spirit is genuinely at work and you will find them — people who don’t look like leadership material by any natural measure. People with complicated histories. People who came late to faith. People who carry wounds that should have disqualified them. People the system passed over, the culture ignored, the institutions never noticed.

And yet.

Paul said it plainly to the church at Corinth: Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. (1 Corinthians 1:26)

God has always had a habit of choosing the people the world overlooked. Not because weakness is a virtue in itself, but because the unlikely make it obvious that the power belongs to God and not to the person carrying it. The least likely candidate, transformed and sent, becomes the clearest evidence that something supernatural is at work.

This is the heart of apostolic discipleship. It is not identifying the most naturally gifted and investing in them. It is finding the ones God has already marked and pouring into them until what God sees in them becomes visible to everyone else.

Jesus did not discover great men. He made them.

That is the model. That is the mandate. And the least likely people in your world right now may be exactly who he is pointing to.

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In this conversation, Glenn Bleakney sits down with Peyton Jones—author of the bestselling book Discipology—to uncover the gap between discipleship and disciple-making, and why so many believers are full of knowledge but lacking transformation.

Jesus didn’t build crowds.
He made disciples who turned the world upside down.

So what is Discipology?

It’s a return to the way of Jesus—His rhythms, His strategy, His mission lived out through everyday people.

In this interview, you’ll discover:
• The critical difference between discipleship and disciple-making
• The 3 rhythms of Jesus: time, teaching, and tactics
• Why most churches aren’t seeing real multiplication
• How to move from attending to activating
• What it actually looks like to make disciples

If we recover this, everything changes.
Because the only wrong way to make disciples… is not to.

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There’s a moment every church leader knows. The vision is clear, the calling is real, but the path forward is anything but obvious. Where do you even begin? What deserves your attention first? What gets built now and what can wait?

I’ve identified eight priorities that separate thriving movements from well-intentioned gatherings that slowly lose their fire.

But before we get to strategy, we need to settle something foundational.

Kingdom culture begins with a King.

Everything we build, every structure we erect, every vision we cast must flow from one reality: Jesus is Lord. A title with weight. A claim with consequences. The one who holds “all things together” (Colossians 1:17), in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19), and who must have “the preeminence in everything” (Colossians 1:18).

That word, preeminence, is the Greek prōteuōn. First place. Supreme rank. The one from whom all authority flows and to whom all things return.

Paul’s vision of Jesus in Colossians 1 is staggering. He is the image of the invisible God (v.15). The firstborn over all creation (v.15). The one through whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, rulers, authorities (v.16). Before all things, sustaining all things, heading all things. And then: “that in everything he might be preeminent” (v.18).

This is the Jesus we are building around. The sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, who has been given “all authority”(Matthew 28:18), before whom “every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Philippians 2:10), and who is even now seated “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21).

A Kingdom community is one that has submitted every other thing: structure, culture, mission, money, leadership, ambition, to His Lordship. That’s the foundation. Build on anything else and you’re building on sand (Matthew 7:26), no matter how impressive it looks.

1. Cultivate a Christ-Centred Community

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” — Luke 9:23 (ESV)

“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” — Philippians 1:21 (ESV)

Kingdom culture doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be intentionally built and consistently protected, because every community drifts, and it always drifts in the same direction: toward the preferences of the loudest people rather than the priorities of the King.

The practical question isn’t theological. It’s diagnostic. Look at your calendar, your budget, your Sunday gathering, your leadership meetings. What do they actually reveal about who is Lord here?

Jesus was unambiguous about the cost of following Him. “Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me.” This is the posture of a Christ-centred community, one where self is dethroned and Christ is enthroned, in confession and in practice. Where the cross shapes how leaders lead, how members relate, how conflict gets resolved, and how decisions get made.

Paul lived this out. For him, Christ was the atmosphere he breathed, the logic that ordered his existence, the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That kind of radical Christocentrism is what distinguishes a Kingdom community from a religious gathering.

A Christ-centred community is one where Jesus is the life of the gathering, where Paul’s confession, for me to live is Christ, is a community value lived out, not framed on a wall.

Ask yourself:

• Is Jesus first in our decisions and finances, or only in our language?

• Does the way we lead, resolve conflict, and make decisions actually reflect His Lordship?

• Would a newcomer encounter Jesus here, or a well-run religious organisation?

Practical moves: Run a regular “Lordship audit” of your programs, asking the harder question: is Jesus actually Lord of this? Develop leaders around the cross-shaped values of the Kingdom: humility, sacrifice, servanthood, generosity. Build a consistent rhythm of corporate worship and prayer that nothing else bumps.

2. Build a Kingdom Culture

“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” — Matthew 6:33 (ESV)

“The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” — Romans 14:17 (ESV)

Christ-centred community is the root. Kingdom culture is the fruit.

Jesus came preaching one message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). The Kingdom was His central theme, His governing reality, the lens through which He interpreted everything. He taught His disciples to pray for it, seek it first, and give their lives to its advance.

The Kingdom of God is the rule and reign of God breaking into human history through Jesus Christ. Where the King is present, the Kingdom is present. And where the Kingdom is present, everything changes. The blind see. The captives are freed. The poor hear good news (Luke 4:18). Death itself is defeated.

When a community genuinely submits to the reign of Jesus, a distinct culture begins to form. There is no competition for glory, because all glory belongs to Him. There is no grasping for position, because the greatest among us is the servant of all (Mark 10:43). There is no fear of sacrifice, because the cross is our daily posture.

Kingdom culture is marked by righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, the lived atmosphere of the community. It’s generous where the world is acquisitive. It’s honouring where the world is self-promoting. It’s other-centred where consumer culture is relentlessly self-serving. It looks, in short, like the Sermon on the Mount lived out in community (Matthew 5–7).

This culture doesn’t maintain itself. It requires leadership that models it, structures that reinforce it, and a willingness to name and correct drift when it happens.

Ask yourself:

• What does the atmosphere of our community actually communicate to someone walking in for the first time?

• Where is worldly culture shaping us more than Kingdom culture?

• Are our leaders modelling Kingdom values, or just managing an organisation?

Practical moves: Identify the two or three Kingdom values most at risk of drift in your context and build deliberate practices around them. Preach and teach on Kingdom culture regularly. Create feedback mechanisms so leaders hear honestly how the culture is being experienced.

3. Create Authentic Community

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” — Acts 2:42 (ESV)

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” — John 13:35 (ESV)

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” — Hebrews 10:24–25 (ESV)

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When did you last feel the fire?

I’m talking about that white-hot hunger that gets you out of bed at three in the morning because you simply have to be alone with God. The kind that drives you to the altar every time the doors open, not because you have to but because you know there’s more of Jesus and you want every last drop of it.

I remember when I first got saved. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, Glenn, I’ve got so much I want to show you. And I went deep. I was up at 3am praying for three hours before work. I’d come home after a twelve-hour shift and pray and read the Word again. I read the Bible six times in my first year as a believer. I was so hungry I couldn’t help myself. Any time the church doors were open, I was there. Any time there was an altar call, I responded. I was on my face, prostrate before God.

People would say to me, “Glenn, you’re already saved. You don’t have to run to the altar every time there’s an invitation.”

And I’d say, “I know I’m saved. But I know there’s more of Jesus, and I want all that he has for me.”

That was the fire.

And then Jesus speaks to a church that once had it.

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The Ephesian Church: A Revival-Born Community

The letter to Ephesus in Revelation 2 is addressed to one of the most significant churches in the ancient world. Ephesus was the capital city of Asia Minor, a cosmopolitan hub of approximately 250,000 people, and it housed the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Planting a church there and seeing it thrive was nothing short of miraculous.

Acts 19 records what happened when Paul arrived. God worked miracles of an unusual kind through his hands — the sick were healed, demons cast out, the power of God moving with such force that so many people turned to Christ they gathered up all their books of sorcery and idolatry and burned them publicly. The value of what was destroyed came to 50,000 drachma, a day’s wage each. In today’s economy, that is roughly $7.5 million worth of occult material burned in the fire.

This church was forged in white-hot revival.

On top of that, the Ephesians had received the most profound theological teaching from no one less than the Apostle Paul himself. Scholars widely consider the book of Ephesians to be Paul’s finest theological treatise, the back-end constitution of the church. Seated with Christ in heavenly places. Adopted into the family of God. Blessed with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:3 NLT). The fivefold ministry. The mystery of the church as Christ’s bride. These believers had been drenched in revelation.

And now, thirty years later, Jesus comes to them.

He commends them. Genuinely. In Revelation 2:2-3 he says, “I know all the things you do. I have seen your hard work and your patient endurance. I know you don’t tolerate evil people. You have examined the claims of those who say they are apostles but are not. You have discovered they are liars. You have patiently suffered for me without quitting.” In the original Greek, “hard work” is kopos, meaning exhausting, backbreaking labour. These people had worked tirelessly in a hostile pagan city. They had maintained moral clarity, doctrinal integrity, and endurance under suffering.

Every church in the world would want this said about them.

But then comes the indictment.

I Have This Against You

“But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first.” Revelation 2:4 (NLT)

In the Greek, the phrase “I have this complaint against you” is a legal term. It was used in courtrooms to formally indict someone. Jesus is saying: you stand before the courtroom of heaven, and you are guilty.

The charge lands with the force of surprise. This is a church that has endured persecution, maintained sound doctrine, and served sacrificially for decades. And the single indictment Jesus brings against them is this: you have abandoned your first love.

The word translated “don’t love” carries the root aphiēmi in the Greek, meaning to let go, to release, to forsake. It is the same word used in Matthew 4:20 when the disciples “left their nets at once and followed him” (NLT). The tragic irony is that the same radical, leave-everything commitment they once made to follow him, they had now made in reverse. They had walked away. Slowly. Quietly. Without even realising it.

The tragedy is not rebellion. It is drift.

They had light without fire. Knowledge without zeal. They laboured without love.

The Dynamics of Drift

Jesus doesn’t say they rejected him. He says they fell from him. The word is piptō, to fall from a height, like fruit falling from a tree or a sparrow falling to the ground. It is not a dramatic leap off a cliff. It is a gradual loosening of grip until gravity takes over.

In Hebrews 2:1 the warning is framed in precisely these terms: “So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it.” (NLT) You don’t have to steer away from God to lose him. You only have to stop paddling. The current does the rest.

The principle in 1 John 2:15 frames all of this: “Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.” (NLT) People rarely leave God with a declaration. What happens is far more subtle. It is the principle of displacement. You fill a bathtub to the brim, then you sit in it, and water spills over the edge. Something is displacing what was once there. Not suddenly. Incrementally. Slowly, a bit more flesh. Slowly, a bit more carnality. Slowly, other things begin to fill the space that was once occupied entirely by Jesus. Devotion becomes routine. Hunger becomes habit.

How do you know if you’ve drifted? Here are four warning signs, what I call the dashboard of drift.

First: sin no longer alarms you. Your conscience barely stirs at private compromise. Hebrews 3:13 warns us to “warn each other every day, while it is still ‘today,’ so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.”(NLT) The danger of sin is both its consequence and its anaesthetic. It desensitises you to your own condition.

Second: you’ve lost your wonder. Familiarity has made the extraordinary ordinary. You feel nothing. You expect nothing. Consider the seraphim in Isaiah 6:3, who call out to one another day and night, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies! The whole earth is filled with his glory!” (NLT) They have never grown used to him. But we can. And when we do, we stop being moved by the cross, we stop weeping at the blood, we stop staggering at the love of a God who would die for us.

Third: other things satisfy more. Your first reflex in stress or boredom, is it your phone? Is it a drink? Is it the approval of others? When we are spiritually healthy, our first instinct under pressure is to run to the presence of God. When we’ve drifted, we reach for substitutes. They provide counterfeit peace. They are a replacement for the shalom of the Lord. Romans 12:11 puts the standard plainly: “Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.” (NLT) The Greek word translated “enthusiastically” is zeontes, meaning boiling, seething with heat. White-hot passion. That is what Jesus is calling us back to.

Fourth: lowered expectations. Your faith has been downgraded from living encounter to mere doctrinal position. “I believe God heals.” Yes. But is there wholehearted, urgent faith? Are you expecting God to move? Hebrews 11:6 says: “It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.” (NLT) This is the burning, seeking, expectant faith of someone who knows God is both real and close — and who comes to him accordingly.

The Ephesian Context: What Was at Stake

We cannot miss the historical weight of this letter. When the book of Revelation was written, most scholars placing it during the reign of Domitian rather than Nero, Christians across the Roman Empire were facing systematic persecution. Nero’s terror had been concentrated in Rome. Domitian’s extended across every province. These believers were being thrown to the lions. They were dying for the name of Jesus.

And yet Jesus says: I still have this against you.

Suffering does not immunise us from drift. The Ephesians had endured martyrdom-level pressure and they still lost their first love. Outward faithfulness and inward fire are not the same thing. You can be doctrinally sound, morally upright, sacrificially committed, and still have quietly let go of the love that makes all of it matter.

It also tells us something about what Jesus considers most essential. Of all the things he could have brought as a charge, he brings this: you have abandoned your first love.

The Greek word prōton, translated “first,” carries a beautiful double meaning. It can mean first in time, the love they had when they initially came to Christ. It can also mean first in rank, the supreme and preeminent love. It is the same word in Matthew 6:33: “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.”(NLT) Jesus is saying both things at once: return to the love you had when you began, and ensure that love remains above everything else. He must be the hub, the governing centre. As Paul writes in Romans 11:36: “For everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory.” (NLT) Everything flows from him. Everything returns to him.

The Lampstand Warning

The stakes could not be higher.

“Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don’t repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches.” Revelation 2:5 (NLT)

The lampstand, the menorah, represents the presence of God and the witness of God among his people. To lose it is to lose divine purpose and anointing. And here is the terrifying reality: you can lose the lampstand while the building is still standing. The machinery of religion continues running long after the Spirit has quietly departed.

This is what Jesus diagnoses in the church of Laodicea. In Revelation 3:20 he says, “Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.” (NLT) We have often read this as an evangelistic text, Jesus knocking at the door of an individual heart. But read it again in context. He is standing at the door of a church, asking to be let back in. Religious, routine gatherings where Jesus is no longer present. He is outside. Looking in.

There is a famous painting of this scene by the Victorian artist Holman Hunt. After it was completed, someone approached Hunt and pointed out what seemed like a mistake: the door has no handle on the outside.

Hunt replied: “I didn’t forget. The door has to be opened from inside.”

What a picture of the church that has everything, the programs, the preaching, the worship production, the community, but has slowly and subtly closed the door from the inside. C.S. Lewis called it “glorious condescension,” that the Lord of the church would stoop to ask permission to enter his own house.

Churches built horizontally on community. Churches built on performance. Churches that gather around teaching and preaching but not the lordship of Jesus. It is his church. He shed his blood for his bride. He will not share the throne with our comfort or our compromise.

The Surrender Test

This is where it gets personal.

Jesus calls the Ephesians and he calls us to ask ourselves a hard question: Is there a room in your life where your fist is still closed?

Let me name a few of those rooms.

Relationships. You know it is ungodly. You know it is toxic. You are justifying it, explaining it away. But God knows. And in many ways it is not just holding you back, it is wounding you. Paul was unequivocal in 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Don’t be fooled by those who say such things, for ‘bad company corrupts good character.’” (NLT) And God said to Jeremiah in chapter 15:19, “Let them turn to you, but you must not turn to them.” (NLT) We are called to reach into darkness, not to be shaped by it.

Unforgiveness. This is a wall where bitterness lives. Unforgiveness does not hurt the person who wronged you. It poisons the one who carries it. It blocks the full lordship of Christ. Hebrews 12:15 warns us to “watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.” (NLT) Let it go. Forgive. Release it. It is not worth what it is costing you.

Secret sin. The private habits that contradict the public presentation. God sees it all. He is not here to condemn you, but we are living in a time when what has been hidden is being brought into the light. God is merciful. He gives time and space for repentance. Revelation 2:21 says he gave space to repent, using the word chronos for time. But the window is not unlimited. He is preparing a church that is “a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish”(Ephesians 5:27 NLT). Proverbs 28:13 says it plainly: “People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.” (NLT)

Ambition and self-will. Your plans, your agenda, your future, held with a closed fist and presented to God as a rubber stamp request: “Bless this, Lord.” This is the test of Abraham on Mount Moriah. God did not want Isaac dead. He wanted to know whether Abraham valued the gift more than the Giver. As Hebrews 11:17 and 19 tell us, Abraham “offered Isaac as a sacrifice... Abraham reasoned that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again.” (NLT) He trusted the Giver more than the gift. Will you lay the son of promise on the altar? Will you let go of the thing you have built your identity around?

Money. Withholding is not a financial decision. It is a lordship declaration. Jesus said in Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.” (NLT) He was stating an ontological impossibility — two absolutes cannot both be absolute. Proverbs 3:9-10 says, “Honour the Lord with your wealth and with the best part of everything you produce. Then he will fill your barns with grain, and your vats will overflow with good wine.” (NLT) Partial obedience is disobedience.

The question is simple. What is in the locked room? What is the thing you have told God he cannot touch? Because he is not asking for some of you. He is asking for all of you. He demands it. He requires it. He deserves it. He is Lord of all.

And here is what my pastor told me as a young man, just come to faith, terrified of full surrender:

“Glenn, there is nothing you surrender to God that he won’t replace with something better.”

The Pathway of Return: Remember, Repent, Repeat

The grace of this passage is stunning. Alongside the warning, Jesus gives a pathway. Three steps. Simple. Urgent. Transforming.

Remember. “Look how far you have fallen!” (Revelation 2:5 NLT) Look back. Reflect. Recall how good it was when you burned with first love. When you prayed. When you wept. When every altar call was a fresh surrender. When you couldn’t get enough of the Word.

We have overcorrected on the idea of forgetting the former things. Yes, Isaiah 43:18 says “forget all that — it is nothing compared to what I am going to do” (NLT), but that verse speaks of God doing a brand new work of deliverance, not an excuse to forget what his presence once felt like. Throughout the whole of Scripture God calls his people to remember far more often than he tells them to forget. The prodigal son in Luke 15:17 “came to his senses” (NLT) when he remembered how good it was in his father’s house. That remembrance was what turned his feet for home.

Don’t be afraid to remember the fire. Let it make you hungry again.

Repent. The Greek word metanoeō means a sharp, immediate turn. Change how you think. Change what you believe. Change direction. Repentance is not primarily a feeling. It is a decision, followed by action. It is the sharp turn away from the current that has been carrying you downstream, back toward the source.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis just two months before Germany surrendered, having refused to compromise his faith or his ethics under the Third Reich, wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about the danger of cheap grace. We cannot assume that the grace of God will cover what we are unwilling to bring into the light. Grace doesn’t licence sin. It liberates us from it. As Proverbs 28:13 puts it: “People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.” (NLT)

Repeat. The Greek phrase here is prōta erga, the first works. Return to the first activities of your first love. Your prayer time, not the perfunctory kind but the desperate, hungry, lingering kind. Unashamed witness. Open-handed generosity. Loving people. Whatever marked the early days of your walk with Jesus. Do those things again. And trust that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is alive in you. As Romans 8:11 promises: “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.” (NLT)

The Promise: Paradise

To the one who overcomes, Jesus makes an extraordinary promise.

“To everyone who is victorious I will give fruit from the tree of life in the paradise of God.” Revelation 2:7 (NLT)

The word paradeisos, paradise, is a Persian loan word that entered the Greek language. It refers to a walled garden, a protected and cultivated place of beauty, intimacy, and abundance. Jesus is invoking Eden. The curse fully reversed. The unhindered, unmediated, face-to-face fellowship with God that Adam and Eve knew in Genesis 3, walking with him in the cool of the day, permanently restored.

This is what repentance and return open up. The original design. What God always intended for human beings: the voice in the garden, the presence, the security, the provision, the face-to-face belonging.

You can have this again.

He’s Still Walking Among the Lampstands

Jesus introduces himself to Ephesus in Revelation 2:1 as the one who “holds the seven stars in his right hand” and who “walks among the seven gold lampstands.” (NLT) He is walking among his people. Present. Close. Attentive. Moving through the midst of every congregation, every gathering, every life — looking, longing, calling.

He wants you. All of you. Every room. Your production, your orthodoxy, your endurance — all of it finds its meaning only when it flows from a heart that is wholly his.

“Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches.” Revelation 2:7 (NLT)

The pathway is simple.

Remember. Repent. Repeat.

The fire is not gone. It is waiting to be rekindled.

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Glenn Bleakney is the Senior Leader of Awake Nations on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Learn more at AwakeAus.comand AwakeNations.org.

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When Pastor Sherman Dumas became a father, he faced a deep question: how do you give what you never received? Having grown up without a father, he chose to break the cycle—not repeat it.

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Whether you’re healing from your past or building your future, this message will help you lead your family with intention and hope.