Poiēma — workmanship — is where we get the English word “poem.” It appears only twice in the New Testament: here, and in Romans 1:20 where it describes creation itself. Paul reaches for the word an artisan would use for his finest, most intentional work. And then: proētoimasen — prepared in advance. The good works weren’t waiting for you to figure them out. They were prepared before you arrived at them. You are not an accident. Your purpose was not an afterthought. You are God’s crafted work, saved not by works but absolutely for them.
Tag Archives: identity in Christ
Verse & Vision | June 24, 2026
Poiēma — workmanship — is where we get the English word “poem.” It appears only twice in the New Testament: here, and in Romans 1:20 where it describes creation itself. Paul reaches for the word an artisan would use for his finest, most intentional work. And then: proētoimasen — prepared in advance. The good works weren’t waiting for you to figure them out. They were prepared before you arrived at them. You are not an accident. Your purpose was not an afterthought. You are God’s crafted work, saved not by works but absolutely for them.
Unhooked: What God Is Actually Doing When He Teaches You to Let Go | The Author’s Perspective
There is a particular kind of tired that doesn’t come from overwork. It is the exhaustion of holding on to something God has already released from His hand. What we typically call attachment, when it becomes disordered, is not love at all. It is fear wearing love’s clothing, and God, in His mercy, does not preserve the versions of us built on fear. He dismantles them. If you are in that season, this post is for you.
The Freedom Series | Bound No More: The Path to Freedom
You have done the hard work of recognition. You have named the patterns, traced the roots, sat with the uncomfortable truth that something in you has been bound.
But knowing is not freedom.
Knowledge of bondage, without movement toward liberation, can itself become a subtle trap — one where understanding becomes a substitute for transformation.
This is the final post in the series, and it carries the weight of everything that came before it. We have diagnosed. We have defined. We have mapped the terrain.
Now we turn toward the door.
Verse & Vision | June 9, 2026
The eighth beatitude closes the same way the first one opened: theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Present tense. Not reward waiting at the end, but belonging already settled at the beginning. What comes between — mourning, meekness, hunger, mercy, purity, peacemaking, and now, being actively pursued for all of it — is lived inside that belonging, not outside it, trying to earn it. Jesus uses a hunting word here: diōkō, to chase down with intent. He is not describing social friction. He is describing what happens when the world decides it does not want what you’re becoming. And He calls it blessed.
Dear Christians… | To The Ones Hell Tries to Break Early: The Weight You Were Born to Carry
The warfare was real. The weight is real. But neither is evidence of abandonment – they are evidence of assignment. If your life has felt like a war zone from the beginning, consider the possibility that heaven marked you before hell ever moved against you.
Verse & Vision | May 23, 2026
There is a version of self-sacrifice that looks like the cross but isn’t. It gives and gives and gives, not from the overflow of a full and grounded soul, but from the hollow place of someone who has confused loving others with losing themselves.
Today’s passage does not call us to that. It calls us to something harder and more clarifying: the mindset of Christ, who emptied himself with full intention, for a defined purpose, in submission to the Father’s will – not in compliance with someone else’s desire for him.
Being true to yourself, in the way God means it, is not selfishness. It means honoring the soul God placed in you, protecting the purpose he put you here for, and refusing to sacrifice what is sacred on the altar of someone else’s comfort or convenience.
Self-surrender to God first, and then, from that grounded place, genuine love for others that actually does them good.