Dear friends and family,
Many of you know that I wrote a book called Created to Believe. For years, I have preached about faith, taught about believing, and challenged people to trust God for the impossible.
But lately, I have been discovering something that is stretching me all over again:
You can spend years believing in what God can do and still be awakened to a deeper revelation of who is already living inside you.
I keep coming back to Paul’s words in Colossians 1:27:
“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
I know that verse. I have quoted it. I have preached it.
But now I find myself wrestling with a different question:
Do I really live every day conscious that Christ is in me?
That is where this has become personal.
I have always loved the truth that God is with us. Emmanuel.
I have preached the confidence that God is for us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
But I feel the Lord awakening something deeper in me:
God is in us.
Not simply around me.
Not only helping me.
Not merely standing beside me.
Christ lives in me.
And if I truly believe that, then it has to change the way I see myself, the way I walk into adversity, and the way I respond when life becomes uncertain.
Paul wrote these words to believers who were not famous or influential by the world’s standards, yet he told them that the great mystery of God was alive within them. In God’s mind, there are no insignificant people and no insignificant places. Every life matters because Christ has taken up residence within His people.
And this is where I feel the Lord pressing me.
I have spent much of my life praying, “God, send Your glory.”
But lately I have been asking:
What if part of the awakening is realizing that His glory is already present in His people?
The world does not merely need more information about Jesus.
It needs to see Jesus revealed through us.
We live in a world consumed with money, influence, and outward success. But those things cannot transform a heart.
We do not need more gold.
We need more glory.
So maybe being created to believe is not only believing God for something.
Maybe it is awakening to Someone.
Christ in me.
Christ in you.
The hope of glory.
And the question I cannot escape is this:
What would happen if we really lived like we believed it?
From my heart to yours,
Mike