We mess up. We pray. We ask for forgiveness with full sincerity in the moment and full intention to do better. Then we go back out into the world and make the exact same choice we just repented of. Then we come back... Then we ask again... Then we promise again... Then we do it again. And somehow, with a straight face and a genuine heart, we kneel down and ask Him to get us out of the same mess we walked ourselves back into for the fourth time this month.

If this were a human relationship, someone would have been called us toxic, and the other person would have walked away by now.

So what makes God stay? What is it about His nature that keeps Him turning back toward a humanity that has been breaking faith with Him since the garden? This is not a small question. It is actually one of the most theologically important questions a believer can sit with, because the answer does not just tell us something about God’s feelings toward us. It tells us something about who God fundamentally is.

‘For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ - Romans 8:38-39

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We Are the Cats

I have two cats. Inherited them when I married my wife and to be clear… the relationship has been complicated from the start.

No matter how well we feed them before bedtime, no matter how clearly we communicate the boundaries, no matter how many times they have experienced the consequences of getting caught, those cats will be back on the counter. They know they are wrong. I know they know they are wrong because the moment I stand up and move toward them, they are already airborne, hitting the floor running before I have taken a single step. The guilt is not the issue. The knowledge is not the issue. They simply cannot help returning to the thing they were told not to do.

I like those cats… I am also regularly furious at those cats. And somewhere in that tension, I find myself thinking about God.

Because are we not the cats in this story?

Did we not do exactly this in the garden? God gave humanity the entire expanse of Eden, every tree, every fruit, every pleasure the garden contained, with one boundary. One thing set apart. One command that was less a restriction than it was a test of whether we trusted the One who had given us everything else. And we went straight for it.

We have been going straight for it ever since. The fruit changes shape depending on the generation and the person, which is perhaps why Genesis never tells us what kind of fruit it actually was. Because the fruit is whatever we reach for when we decide our judgment is better than God’s. Fill in the blank yourself. You know what yours is.

The Uncomfortable Math

Here is the honest breakdown of where most of us actually are on any given day.

Roughly half of our daily decisions run on instinct, the automatic responses built into us as physical creatures navigating a physical world. Another portion runs on passion, desire, emotion, the things we want and feel and crave without always stopping to interrogate why. And somewhere in the remaining margin, we are genuinely, sincerely trying to follow the Word... sometimes… When it aligns conveniently with what we already wanted to do. When the cost is not too high. When following God’s way does not require us to give up something we were not ready to release.

Is this His bride? Is this what He is returning for?

We make decisions as though we are the gods of our own lives, operating on the same limited, flesh-bound intelligence as every other creature walking the earth, and then we are genuinely surprised when those decisions produce consequences. We are simple mammals attempting to be our own highest authority and wondering why it keeps going wrong.

And yet He stays.

His Grace Is the Only Explanation

The theological word for what God does in response to all of this is grace. But we have said that word so many times in church settings that it has started to lose its weight. Grace is not God looking the other way. Grace is not God grading us on a curve because He knows we are trying. Grace is the active, unearned, disproportionate, frankly unreasonable movement of God toward people who have given Him every justification to move away.

Paul writes in Romans 5 that while we were still sinners, while we were mid-mess, mid-rebellion, mid-fruit, Christ died for us. Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not after we demonstrated sufficient remorse. While we were still in it.

Lamentations 3:22-23 describes His mercies as new every morning. Not annually renewed. Not available on a limited basis after sufficient waiting periods… Every morning. The slate is not just wiped clean. It is replaced entirely with something fresh before you have even had a chance to ruin it again.

This is the disproportionate, unfair, one-sided love of God toward humanity. We cannot earn it. We cannot match it. We cannot fully comprehend it while we are still in this flesh.

The only reasonable response is to stop pretending we deserve it and start living like people who are genuinely undone by the fact that we keep receiving it anyway.

He keeps coming back for us because that is what He is. Not just what He feels. Not just what He chooses in a given moment. It is His nature. And His nature does not change because ours keeps failing.

That is the only explanation that holds.

Next Monday, we keep going deeper. If someone in your life needs to be reminded today that God has not turned His back on them, forward this before you do anything else.

Recent Essays:

Lawrence

Deeper Still

That is not an accusation. It is an observation about something that happens gradually and almost invisibly to believers at every stage of faith. The Bible moves from living encounter to familiar object. From the voice of God to a book we intend to get back to. And somewhere in that slow drift, our hunger for it quietly goes dormant without us even noticing it happened.

Hebrews 4:12 does not describe the Bible the way most of us treat it.

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Living… Active… Piercing... Discerning. These are not the words you use to describe a book that sits on a nightstand collecting dust between Sundays. These are the words you use to describe something that is still moving, still speaking, still cutting through everything we use to protect ourselves from being known completely.

The Word is not a record of what God said. It is what God is saying... Present tense… Continuous. Directed at you specifically, in whatever room you are sitting in right now.

The Sparring Partner

I was seven or eight years old the first time I understood what it meant to be genuinely hungry for the Word. My sparring partner was my grandmother, a Jehovah’s Witness with decades of Scripture knowledge and a willingness to debate theology across a kitchen table with a child until 3 a.m. who had more questions than sense. We were worlds apart in age, experience, and doctrine. But we shared one thing completely… Neither of us was willing to stay on the surface.

I have carried her with me ever since. Not her theology… but her function. When I encounter a new concept or receive a revelation in the Word, I debate it against her in my mind. I use her as a mental sparring partner to stress-test what I am receiving. Could this be wrong? Is the Bible teaching this from an angle I cannot currently see? What would she say that would force me to go deeper rather than settle for what is comfortable?

She became, without knowing it, part of my executive board for approaching the weightiness of Scripture. The Holy Spirit as guide. My grandmother as the voice that refuses to let me get lazy. My own drive for truth as the engine underneath both.

I am also still, in the spirit, trying to save her. That motivation has never left me either.

The Question Underneath the Question

Here is what I want to ask you directly. What is actually driving your hunger for the Word right now? Or more honestly, is anything driving it at all?

Because there is a version of faith that loves God genuinely but has lost the appetite for Scripture. You know He is real. You believe the Gospel. But the weight of daily life, the trials, the exhaustion, the sheer accumulated pressure of existing in a broken world, has made opening the Bible feel like one more task on a list that is already too long. You intend to get to it. You just keep not getting to it.

Psalm 42:1 describes something entirely different.

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.”

Panting... That is not casual interest. That is the desperation of a living thing that knows it will not survive without what it is looking for. Psalm 119:20 goes further:

“My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times.” Consumed… at all times.

How do we get there? How do we move from intending to read, to being unable to not read?

He Is Already Right Next to You

Here is the reframe that changed something for me and I think it might change something for you.

We romanticize the idea of walking beside Jesus in first century Galilee… (or at least I do…) Hearing His voice directly. Asking Him questions face to face. Watching Him heal someone and then sitting with Him afterward to ask what it meant. We tell ourselves that if we had been there, we would have been different. More devoted... More hungry… More consistent.

But the Word that spoke the universe into existence, the same Word that became flesh and walked those roads and spoke those parables and absorbed that cross, is sitting right next to you right now. On your nightstand. In your glove compartment. On the device you are reading this on. He has not gone anywhere. He has not gone silent. He is as present and as accessible as He has ever been. All we have to do is read.

The path of discovery is the gem… not the destination you are trying to reach. Every question that keeps you up at night, every concept you cannot let go of until it makes sense, every moment where the Word opens up a layer you have never seen before... that is the living, active, piercing Word doing exactly what Hebrews 4:12 says it does.

Find your grandmother… Find your sparring partner... Find the question that will not leave you alone at 2 a.m... Find your thirst.

Then open the Book that has been waiting beside you the whole time.

Next Monday, we continue going deeper. If someone in your life has lost their hunger for the Word, forward this to them today. Sometimes, the right words at the right moment are all it takes to rekindle something that never fully went out.

Recent Essays:

The Son: We Have Been Reading Right Past Him - 6/22/26

Lawrence

Deeper Still

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That is not a metaphor. That is not an exaggeration for effect. It is one of the most practically important truths Scripture gives us about the inner life of a human being, and most of us have never slowed down long enough to actually reckon with it.

We assume our thoughts are our own because they feel familiar. They arrive in our own voice, in our own mental language, shaped by our own experiences and memories. So we claim them... We act on them. We sometimes feel guilty about them, as though the mere presence of a dark or destructive thought is evidence of something broken in our character. But the Bible draws a line that our culture rarely does, a clear, deliberate line between two entirely different sources of thought operating inside every human being simultaneously.

Two Sources, One Mind

Scripture teaches that man’s inner life flows from two distinct origins. The first is the God-given spirit, the part of us that was made for communion with God, that recognizes truth, that longs for what is holy and eternal. The second is the flesh, the sin nature inherited from Adam’s fall, which did not disappear at conversion but continues to operate alongside the spirit in a constant, grinding opposition.

Paul describes this tension without softening it in Romans 8. The mind set on the flesh, he writes, is hostile to God. Not indifferent. Not occasionally distracted... Hostile. It does not submit to God’s law and frankly cannot. It is not designed to. The flesh thinks thoughts that serve the flesh, and those thoughts feel completely natural because they arrive through the same mental infrastructure we use for everything else.

This is what makes the flesh so effective as an adversary. It does not announce itself. It does not arrive with a warning label. It slips thoughts into our stream of consciousness so seamlessly that we assume we authored them. We have even given this phenomenon a casual, almost affectionate nickname... the monkey brain. As if restless, self-serving, destructive thought patterns are simply a quirk of human neurology rather than what Paul would call the mind of the flesh making its presence known.

Higher Than Our Highest

Isaiah 55 adds a dimension to this that should give us pause. God declares through the prophet that His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. The distance between them is not slight. It’s the vast distance between snail and eagle… sheep and lion… earth and the heavens... It’s immeasurable.

Which means that when the flesh is generating thoughts and calling them intuition, when it is producing feelings and calling them instinct, when it is creating urges and calling them desire... none of that is operating anywhere near the plane of what God actually intends for us. The flesh is not just unhelpful. It is pulling in the precise opposite direction of God’s purpose, and doing so quietly, from the inside.

Three Snares Worth Naming

The flesh tends to work through three specific channels, and recognizing them is the beginning of not being controlled by them.

The first is a thought that steers you away from your true, God-given intentions. A sudden doubt. A critical judgment that hardens into bitterness. A justification for something you already know is wrong, arriving just when you need a reason to proceed.

The second is a feeling that, left unchecked, leads you away from God rather than toward Him. Anger that becomes resentment. Sadness that slides into despair. Desire that detaches from wisdom. Feelings are real, but they are not always truthful, and the flesh is skilled at using them as a steering mechanism.

The third is an urge, a craving or impulse that pulls you from the Word and the life it calls you to. Something that feels urgent and necessary in the moment but leaves you further from God once it is satisfied.

None of these snares are unique to you. Every human being who has ever lived has navigated this same interior battlefield.

The Only Way Through

God is not surprised by any of this. He knew what Adam’s fall would introduce into the nature of every human being born afterward. And He did not leave us to manage it alone through willpower or moral effort.

The path through is the renewed mind. Paul writes in Romans 12 that transformation comes not through trying harder but through the renewing of the mind by the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, alive and active inside every believer, has the power to progressively rewire how we think, what we desire, and how we respond to what the flesh puts in front of us.

There is an old story about two wolves living inside every person, constantly at war. One is good. One is destructive. The grandson asks which one wins. The grandfather answers simply: the one you feed.

Starve the flesh... Feed the spirit. Not as a motivational slogan, but as a daily, deliberate, Spirit-empowered practice.

The thoughts will keep coming. The question is whether you have learned to ask whose they are before you decide what to do with them.

On Wednesday, we go deeper into this topic by diving into the scriptures with a devotional. We’ll let biblical teachings help us deal with this monkey brain and ever determined wolf whose goal is to devour us. Don’t be scared of the passenger that hides in the wake… deal with him. Take solace in now being aware of the enemy that was shielding itself in darkness, and attacking when no one was looking… the tables have turned.

2-Part Devotional for Series:

Recent Essays:

The Son - 6/22/26

Thanks for reading!

Lawrence

Deeper Still

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

John 8:58

Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” - ESV

Exodus 3:14

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” - ESV

Welcome to Fridays at Deeper Still.

This week we have been sitting inside the title “The Son” and asking what it actually means when God uses it to introduce Jesus to the world. Monday opened the full argument. Wednesday went deep into Hebrews 1:3 and the Greek word charakter. Today we close the week inside one of the most explosive moments in the entire Gospel of John. Five words that nearly got Jesus stoned in the middle of a public street. We are going to look at exactly why.

Devotional Thought:

In John 8:58, Jesus is in the middle of a heated public exchange with a crowd of religious leaders who are questioning His identity, His authority, and His claims about Abraham. The conversation has been building in tension for several verses. Then Jesus says something that does not just end the argument. It detonates it.

“Before Abraham was, I am.”

To a modern reader this can sound like a slightly unusual grammatical construction. Before Abraham was born, Jesus existed. Okay... A claim to preexistence. Significant, but perhaps not immediately explosive on its own.

But to every Jewish listener standing in that crowd, what Jesus just said was not a claim to preexistence. It was something far more specific and far more confrontational.

The phrase “I am” in Greek is ego eimi. In the context of Jewish Scripture and theology it carried one specific, unmistakable reference point. Exodus 3:14. When Moses stands before the burning bush and asks God for His name, God responds: “I AM WHO I AM.” The Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in the Septuagint, the translation used ego eimi… I am.

This was not a generic phrase. It was the divine name. The personal, self-defining name of God Himself, spoken to Moses from the burning bush. Every person in that crowd knew exactly what they were hearing the moment the words left Jesus’s mouth.

He was not saying He existed before Abraham. He was saying He is the same ‘I AM’ that spoke to Moses. The same one who parted the Red Sea. The same one whose presence filled the tabernacle. The same one whose name was considered so sacred that devout Jews would not even speak it aloud.

And He said it in the middle of a public street in Jerusalem.

This is why they immediately picked up stones. They were not confused about what He meant. They understood precisely what He was claiming and responded to it as blasphemy. The claim was either the most offensive lie ever spoken in that city or the most staggering truth. There was no comfortable middle ground available to them and there is none available to us either.

The title “The Son” is not a soft, domesticated word. It sits inside a lineage that runs directly from the burning bush to a street in Jerusalem to the cross. The same “I AM” that Moses could not look at directly chose to speak our language, walk our roads, and absorb our death.

That is who we are praying to. That is who we are singing to on Sunday morning. Not a teacher. Not a guide. The “I AM” in human form.

Daily Action Step: Read Exodus 3:13-14 and then John 8:58 back to back without stopping. Sit in the silence between them. Then write down one way that understanding Jesus as the “I AM” rather than simply a preexistent being changes how you approach Him in prayer this weekend.

Closing Thoughts:

Before Abraham was, I am.

Five words that have been reordering lives for two thousand years. Let them do their work in yours this weekend.

That closes our first full week of Deeper Still. Monday’s essay opened the argument. Wednesday went inside the charakter of Hebrews 1:3. Today we stood in that street in Jerusalem and heard what the crowd heard.

Next Monday, a brand new essay drops and a new theological thread begins. If this week added something real to your understanding of who Jesus is, share Deeper Still with one person before Sunday. That single forward is how this community grows.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for going deeper.

Recent Essay:

The Son: We Have Been Reading Right Past Him - June 22, 2026

The Son P1 - The Exact Imprint - June 24, 2026

See you Monday.

Lawrence

Deeper Still

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“'He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” - ESV

Welcome to Wednesdays at Deeper Still.

Monday’s essay asked whether we have truly been hearing the title “The Son” or just saying it. Today we go straight into one specific verse that Monday identified but did not have room to fully open up. One phrase inside Hebrews 1:3 has been sitting in plain sight for two thousand years and most of us have read past it every single time. Today we stop and look at it until it opens. Take your time with this one.

There is a word in Hebrews 1:3… “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” Most English translations render this as “exact imprint” or “express image,” and it is doing far more work than it appears to be doing on the surface.

The Greek word is charakter. It is where we get our modern English word “character,” but in the ancient world it carried a far more precise and physical meaning. A charakter was the impression left behind by a seal or a die pressed into wax or metal. It was used specifically in the context of coin minting, the mark stamped into a coin that reproduced the image of the original with perfect, unalterable precision. Not an interpretation of the original. Not an artist’s rendering. A direct, exact transfer of the original image into a new medium.

The writer of Hebrews chooses this word deliberately to describe what Jesus is in relation to the Father.

Think about what that actually means. When a coin bears the charakter of a king, it carries the king’s full authority wherever it travels. It does not represent the king. It bears him. His face, his name, his weight, his legitimacy, all of it transferred into the coin completely and exactly. To receive the coin is to receive what the king has authorized. To reject the coin is to reject the king himself.

Jesus is the charakter of God’s nature. Not a representation. Not a likeness. The exact, direct, unalterable impression of who God is, transferred into human form with perfect precision. When Philip says “show us the Father,” he is standing in front of the answer without knowing it. The charakter is already there. It has been there the entire time.

This is why John 14:9 lands so specifically. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is not pointing Philip toward something beyond Himself. He is telling Philip that the transfer is already complete. The impression has already been made. There is nothing further to look for because there is nothing missing from what is standing right in front of him.

The question the writer of Hebrews is pressing into us is not whether Jesus resembles God. It is whether we understand that resemblance is far too weak a word for what is actually happening here.

Daily Action Step: Find a coin and hold it. Look at the image pressed into it. Sit with the fact that the image is not painted on or attached to the surface. It is pressed into the material itself, inseparable from it. Now read Hebrews 1:3 again with that picture in your hand. Write one sentence about what changes in how you understand who Jesus is.

The charakter. One word. Two thousand years of readers passing over it on the way to the next verse.

That is what these Wednesday devotionals exist to do. Slow down long enough to let the Word open up in ways a single reading never allows.

Friday we close the week inside a passage that answers one of the quietest and most unsettling questions the title “The Son” raises. If Jesus and the Father are truly one, what does that mean for the way we have been praying, worshipping, and relating to God our entire lives?

Do not miss it. And if today added something to your understanding, forward this to one person in your life who is hungry to go deeper in the Word.

Recent Essay:

The Son: We Have Been Reading Right Past Him - June 22, 2026

2-DAY DEVOTIONAL SERIES - Part 2:

See you Friday.

Lawrence

Deeper Still

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That is the problem. The title was never meant to fit there.

What We Bring to the Word

When we hear the word “son,” we bring our entire human experience to it. A child. A family resemblance. A biological relationship between a parent and their offspring. It is a relational word, warm and domestic, and there is nothing wrong with that meaning on its own. But when God reaches into human language and selects that word to introduce Jesus to the world, He is not using it the way we use it at a family dinner. He is compressing something infinite into the most accessible container human language can offer, and then inviting us to press past the container until we find what is actually inside.

Hebrews 1 opens with one of the most carefully constructed theological statements in the entire New Testament. God, who throughout history spoke in fragments through the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us through His Son. The writer does not stop there. He immediately tells us who this Son is. The appointed heir of all things. The one through whom God created the world. The radiance of God’s glory. The exact imprint of His nature. The one who upholds the entire universe by the word of His power.

This is not a description of a subordinate figure. This is a description of God Himself, expressed and embodied in a form humanity could receive.

The Pattern God Uses

This is not the first time God has wrapped an infinite truth inside a simple, almost plain statement and waited to see if we would go deeper.

When Moses stood before the burning bush and asked God for His name, God did not offer something elaborate. He said, “I AM WHO I AM.” Five words. Absolute. Self-defining. So simple on the surface that a child could repeat it, and so vast beneath the surface that theologians have never reached the bottom of it. The simplicity was never the limitation… It was the signal.

Jesus operates the same way. In John 8:58, standing before a hostile crowd demanding to know who He thought He was, He did not deliver a theological defense. He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The same divine name. Spoken in the first person. In the middle of a public street. Plain enough for anyone to hear, and deep enough to split the room between those who worshipped and those who picked up stones.

“I and the Father are one.” - John 10:30.

God consistently compresses the largest truths into the clearest language. The title “The Son” is no different.

What the Title Is Actually Saying

Here is what we miss when we read past it.

A son, by nature, carries the full identity of his father into the world. He is not a copy. He is not a lesser version. He is the father’s nature expressed forward into a new form we can now witness. When Colossians 1:15 calls Jesus the image of the invisible God, it is using precise language. The Greek word carries the idea of a perfect impression, the way a seal pressed into wax leaves behind an exact replica of the original. Not similar. Exact.

When Jesus tells Philip in John 14:9 that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father, He is not being poetic. He is being precise. Everything the Father is, in character, in power, in nature, is present and embodied in The Son. Colossians 2:9 removes any remaining room for a lesser interpretation: in Jesus, the entire fullness of deity dwells bodily. Not a portion. Not a delegation. The fullness.

So “The Son” does not mean created. It does not mean second. It does not mean subordinate.

It means that God, whose unfiltered presence causes mountains to melt and the earth itself to flee (Revelation 20:11), chose to give us a form of Himself we could survive. A form we could walk beside, ask questions of, and be changed by. Not God reduced. God translated, into the only medium our broken humanity could receive without being undone.

The Invitation

The limitation has never been the words. God has always been extraordinarily clear. The limitation has been our willingness to press past the familiar surface of what we think we already know and go deeper into what the words are actually carrying.

“The Son” is not a soft title. It is not a warm, domesticated word meant to make Jesus feel approachable and manageable. It is the most precise, most accessible, most carefully chosen language God could find for a truth that human vocabulary was never fully built to contain.

We have been reading right past it.

It is time to stop and look again.

Next Monday: We go deeper into the nature of the mind, the flesh, and the unseen war happening inside every believer. If someone in your life needs to go deeper in the Word, forward this to them today.

2-Part Devotional for Series:

Lawrence

Deeper Still

Deeper Still is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.