The fruit of the Spirit can’t be manufactured. Galatians 5 shows us where it grows.

I heard a preacher say something recently that has stayed with me. The United Nations, he said, spends billions of dollars year after year, and the world only grows more chaotic. His diagnosis was simple: there is no fruit of the Spirit. No love. No patience. No self-control. No transformed hearts.

He is right. I want to say that clearly before I say anything else.

Picture a world thick with patience. Neighbors who are gentle with one another. Leaders who are not self-seeking. Rivals who choose kindness over revenge. The fruit of the Spirit really is the answer to the depravity and chaos we live in.

But that answer leaves the real question hanging in the air. The multimillion-dollar question is not what we need. It is how we get there.

The Right Answer, the Missing Power

Here is the danger. If we simply tell people that love, joy, and peace are the goal, and then send them off to try harder, we have turned the fruit of the Spirit into a self-improvement project. Lean in. Do your best. Be a little kinder this week than last.

It will never work.

Paul does not call these things the fruit of effort. He calls them the fruit of the Spirit. They grow out of a life that God himself is working in. This is where Reformed theology shines, because it refuses to flatter us. It says plainly: you cannot do this. But Christ, by his Spirit, can do it in you.

Paul knew the end of his own strength. “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25). And a few lines later: “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).

Set free. Not by trying. By being empowered.

So how exactly does the Holy Spirit do it? Galatians 5 tells us.

Walk by the Spirit

The famous list of the fruit sits in verse 22, but you have to read the whole chapter to understand it. The key is verse 16:

“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” (Galatians 5:16–17)

The ESV Study Bible puts it in a sentence I keep coming back to: “The only way to conquer the flesh is to yield to the Spirit.” The notes go on to explain that “walk by the Spirit” carries two ideas at once: direction and empowerment. We make our decisions according to the Spirit’s guidance, and we act in the power the Spirit supplies. And in Scripture, to “walk” describes not a single step but the pattern of a whole life.

Direction and power. We need both.

First, conviction. We have to be persuaded that the desires of the flesh are actually wrong, and only the Holy Spirit can do that in a human heart. Second, strength. Once we know something is wrong, where do we find the power to say no when the temptation arrives? That power, too, comes from the Spirit.

This is what walking by the Spirit means. Our will is not bypassed. It is persuaded and transformed by the Spirit through the Scriptures, until it becomes available to God.

Why You Cannot Out-Muscle the Flesh

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, “Fight the flesh, and you will produce the Spirit.” He says, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the flesh.”

That order matters. When we try to fight the desires of the flesh with the strength of the flesh, we have already joined the side we are fighting. Fallen human nature drifts toward its own desires automatically. Flesh cannot defeat flesh. Only the desires of the Spirit can stand against the desires of the flesh, because, as verse 17 says, these are opposed to each other.

This is why preaching that exposes the immorality of the world and calls people to bear good fruit, though it is correct, so often leaves them stranded. It hands them the truth without the grace. And grace is not only God’s kind disposition toward us. It is God’s own power in Christ Jesus, the grace that, as Paul tells Titus, trains us to renounce what is wrong and to live what is right (Titus 2:11–12).

Our Default Setting

Paul names the flesh with uncomfortable specificity:

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Galatians 5:19–21)

“The desires of the flesh” are not just bodily cravings. They are the whole range of ordinary desires of our fallen nature, from sensuality to rivalry, from idolatry to envy. These are our default settings. Left alone, they keep showing up and popping out.

The only way to weaken them, starve them, and finally put them to death is to walk by the Spirit.

The Spirit Goes on the Attack

Then Paul turns:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22–23)

The ESV Study Bible makes an observation here that I love. The Spirit does not fight sin only on defense. He also goes on offense, growing in Christians the very marks of godly character that we see in Jesus throughout the Gospels.

This is spiritual warfare. We are not merely bracing ourselves for the next assault from the enemy or from our own hearts. We are not meant to live in retreat. The Spirit advances, and he advances by making us more like Christ.

Look at what he produces. Love comes first, because it is the greatest, and because it most clearly reflects the character of God (1 Corinthians 13). Joy follows close behind: when we rejoice in God’s salvation, it shows our affections are resting in the right place (John 15:11). Peace is what grows when sinners are reconciled to God and are no longer his enemies, so that we can approach him with confidence and freedom (Romans 5:1–2; Hebrews 4:16). Patience means we have surrendered our own timetable, and our own ideas about how the world ought to run, to God’s plan. Kindness is goodness, generosity, and sympathy toward others, and it too mirrors God himself, whose kindness leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). Goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control complete the portrait. Put them together and you get a face. It is the face of Jesus.

Do you want that fruit in your life? I hope so, because nothing matters more. The gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit belong together, and I thank God for both. But you could cast out demons every day, lay hands on the sick every day, and lead people to Christ every day, and if this fruit is missing, Paul says you are a noisy gong. “If I have not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Keeping in Step

Paul brings the chapter to a point in verse 25: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.”

Life comes first. Then the walk. Jesus told Nicodemus, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:5–6).

Flesh can only ever give birth to flesh. The Spirit who gave us new birth is the same Spirit we now keep pace with, step by step, day by day. From beginning to end, it is supernatural.

Where the Fruit Begins

So we can never tell people to produce the fruit of the Spirit by gritting their teeth and pressing in harder. It is fruit. It grows from walking by the Spirit, letting him direct our lives and empower our choices.

What does that look like on an ordinary day? Let me give you a picture of how I try to walk by the Spirit.

For me, it begins early in the morning, before anything else. The phone stays face down. The inbox stays closed. Before the day can make its demands, I sit with the Lord who loved me and gave himself for me, and we talk. Not in a stiff, scripted way, but in honest, organic conversation, the way you talk with someone you love.

I do this because Jesus did it. “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). If the Son of God began his days in the Father’s presence before the crowds found him, how much more do I need to?

This is not legalism. It is following Christ. And I have been deeply empowered by it. Half an hour or more, first thing, sets the pace for the rest of the day.

In that time, I place the calling of God and the work in front of me into his hands. I acknowledge again Christ’s calling on my life. Often I pray something very simple: O Lord, set me apart for the work you have called me to do.

And I confess, every morning, that I cannot do any of it in my own strength. Paul gave me the words for that long ago: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). When I pray that verse back to God, something shifts. I feel his power and his nearness.

I also pray through the Lord’s Prayer, slowly, making it my own. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I pray it over my wife and my kids, over my family, over the Bible study group in my office, over the people I love, over this city, and over our nation. His kingdom, his will, here, in these lives.

I have been stirred lately by what God is doing among young people in New York. Church of the City New York has seen thousands of Gen Z men and women come into its life, and they have set up hour-long lunchtime prayer gatherings every weekday, even inside places like Goldman Sachs and other major Manhattan firms. Prayer in the towers of finance. That is something.

It prompted me. This coming week, I am starting a thirty-minute prayer time with the Bible study group in my own office.

Set Apart

I say all this to make one point clear. Walking by the Spirit is not only asking God to make me more patient, more kind, more gentle, though those prayers matter deeply. It is also yielding to his call.

In Antioch, as the church was worshiping and fasting, “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them'” (Acts 13:2). To be set apart is to be dedicated. It is sanctification: a life handed over to God for his purposes. And a life set apart is exactly the soil where the fruit of the Spirit grows.

Notice, too, that the Spirit spoke. The church in Antioch heard the Holy Spirit’s direction in a gathering of worship, and that is the gifts of the Spirit at work. This is why I believe the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, prophecy included, go hand in hand. The fruit shapes who we are. The gifts equip what we are sent to do. A Spirit-filled life needs both.

To Change the World

The preacher was right. The world will not be fixed by billions of dollars. To change the world, we must first be changed, from the inside out, until the fruit of the Spirit begins to show in our love, our patience, our self-control.

But the fruit of the Spirit on its own is not the whole story. The same Spirit who grows fruit in us also gives gifts to us, power for the mission he has set us apart to do. That is where I want to go next time.

For now, it starts somewhere small. A dark morning. A quiet room. A person on their knees, saying, Lord, I cannot do this. Set me apart. Christ, live in me.

Then they stand up and take the first step.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined today’s fourth session of our Christ-Centered—Knowing Christ • Living in Christ • Experiencing Christ series. I appreciated your presence, thoughtful sharing, and willingness to explore God’s Word together.

Today’s message, “The Christ Who Understands” (Hebrews 4:14–16), brought us three wonderful encouragements:

Hold firmly to our faith: Jesus, our great High Priest, has entered heaven and represents us before the Father.
Bring our weaknesses to Him: Jesus experienced suffering and temptation, yet remained without sin. He understands our struggles, and we can come to Him honestly.
Approach God’s throne of grace: We do not have to wait until we have everything together. Through Christ, we are invited to receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
What an encouragement to know that the One who reigns in heaven also understands our struggles here on earth!

You can watch today’s teaching here:
The Christ Who Understands—Teaching Video⁠Attachment.png

Singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” together was another special part of our gathering. It blessed my heart, and I appreciated hearing how it encouraged others too. We hope to sing together again at our Tuesday prayer meeting and Thursday Bible exposition.

Next Thursday, October 8, we will continue with Session 5: “The Christ Who Humbled Himself for Us” (Philippians 2:5–8). We will explore why the eternal Son of God took the form of a servant and humbled Himself even to death on a cross. What does this reveal about His love for us—and how might knowing Him reshape the way we live and treat one another? I hope you will join us.

Our new Tuesday prayer meeting begins October 6 at 12:30 p.m. We will share a short passage from the Psalms and pray for one another’s needs. You are welcome to come, whether you would like to share a request or simply join us in prayer.

Thank you for helping us grow into a community that learns, sings, and prays together.

Warmly,
Al

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined yesterday’s Bible exposition. We had nine people participating—five remotely through Teams and four in the conference room. I am grateful for each of you and for the thoughtful attention, questions, and conversation.

In Session 3, “Christ in All the Scriptures,” we explored Luke 24:13–35 and the encounter between Jesus and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They knew the events surrounding Jesus’ death and had even heard the reports about the empty tomb, but they did not yet understand what God was doing. Then Jesus came alongside them and, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, showed them how the Scriptures ultimately pointed to him.

The Bible is more than a collection of moral teachings or principles telling us to work harder in our own strength. It is the unfolding revelation of God’s redemptive story centered in Jesus Christ—who he is, why he had to suffer, and how his death and resurrection accomplished the salvation we could never accomplish for ourselves. The cross was not an interruption of God’s plan; it was the fulfillment of God’s plan. My prayer is that we will not merely know more information about the Bible, but that we will encounter the living Christ through the Scriptures and experience our hearts coming alive to him.

If you missed the session or would like to hear it again, you can watch it here:

Watch “Christ in All the Scriptures” on YouTube⁠

Next Thursday, we will continue our CHRIST-CENTERED: Knowing Christ • Living in Christ • Experiencing Christ series with Session 4:

The Christ Who Understands — Hebrews 4:14–16

Many people believe that God is distant from their struggles or disappointed by their weaknesses. But Hebrews presents Jesus as our great High Priest who has entered heaven for us and who understands human weakness from the inside. He was tempted as we are, yet without sin. Because of Christ, we do not have to hide from God, pretend to be stronger than we are, or carry our burdens alone.

Hebrews gives us this remarkable invitation: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Christ does not merely know about our suffering from a distance. He entered our humanity, experienced temptation and suffering, and now welcomes us to come honestly and confidently before God.

How would your relationship with God change if you truly believed that Christ understands what you are facing? What if your weakness were not a reason to run away from God, but the very reason to draw nearer to his throne of grace?

I hope you will join us next Thursday as we consider the Christ who understands us, represents us before the Father, and gives mercy and grace precisely when we need them most. I will be praying for each of you throughout the week.

Grace and peace,
Al

Al Ngu.  September 11, 2026

Good morning.

This morning, we gather in a solemn moment to remember September 11 and all that this day represents for our city, our nation, and for so many families whose lives were forever changed. We remember with gratitude those who gave their lives, including Dick Morgan and the many men and women who served in the aftermath of that terrible day. We honor their courage and sacrifice, and we give thanks for those who continued to serve, even when the immediate crisis had passed and the consequences continued for years afterward.

But this morning, I want us not only to remember what happened, but to consider where we can find hope in the face of suffering and loss. Because when we stand in a place of remembrance like this, one question inevitably comes to us: Where do we turn when life is broken? Where do we find strength when we experience things that we cannot explain? And where can we find hope when the wounds of the past continue to affect the present?

The Bible does not give us a shallow answer to those questions. Scripture does not tell us to ignore suffering or simply move beyond it. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that it gives us permission to grieve. The book of Lamentations was written in the midst of tremendous devastation. Jeremiah looked honestly at suffering, loss, and destruction. Yet, right in the middle of his grief, he says, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

“This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” What a beautiful word for a morning like this. We remember, but our remembrance does not have to end in despair. We can acknowledge the darkness without believing that darkness has the final word. We can grieve what has been lost while still believing that God is faithful. His mercies are new every morning. His faithfulness has not ended.

And Psalm 46 gives us another beautiful promise: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” It doesn’t say that God’s people will never experience trouble. It says that when trouble comes, God is present. He is our refuge and our strength. And the Psalm goes on to say, “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved.”

That is a message that New York City needs to hear—not only on September 11, but every day. We have experienced tremendous suffering, but we have also witnessed extraordinary courage, compassion, and service. We have seen people run toward danger to save others. We have seen people serve their neighbors, care for strangers, and continue to carry burdens that many of us will never fully understand. We give thanks for that legacy of service, and we pray that it will continue in the generations ahead.

But ultimately, our hope is not in our own strength. Our hope is in God.

And for those of us who believe in Jesus Christ, that hope becomes even more personal.

Because Christianity does not tell us that God watches suffering from a distance. The Christian faith tells us that God came into our suffering.

Jesus Himself wept.

When Jesus stood before the tomb of His friend Lazarus, He knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew what He was going to do. And yet, when He saw Mary weeping and those around her grieving, the Bible simply says, “Jesus wept.”

That tells us something profound about the heart of God. Jesus does not stand far away from human grief. He enters into it. He knows what it means to lose someone. He knows what it means to weep. He knows what it means to experience suffering.

And Jesus did not merely witness suffering. He Himself experienced betrayal, violence, rejection, and death. He went to the cross. He entered into the deepest darkness that human beings can experience.

But death was not the final word.

Jesus Christ rose again.

And that is the heart of Christian hope. Our hope is not simply that things will eventually get better. Our hope is that Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death, and because He lives, death does not have the final word.

That is why the Christian can grieve and still have hope. We don’t have to choose between remembering and hoping. We can remember those we have lost, we can acknowledge the pain that remains, and at the same time we can look toward a future that is held by God.

And the Bible gives us a beautiful picture of that future at the very end of Revelation. It says that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.”

Think about that promise: God Himself will wipe away every tear.

The tears that have been shed in New York. The tears of families who lost loved ones. The tears of those who served and carried the consequences afterward. The tears that perhaps are still shed privately, years later. God sees them. God knows them. And Scripture tells us that there is coming a day when He will wipe away every tear, when death will be no more, when mourning and pain will finally come to an end.

That is our hope.

So this morning, we remember with gratitude. We honor with respect. We grieve with those who grieve. And we look forward with hope—not because we have forgotten the darkness, but because we believe the darkness will not have the final word.

There is a future for New York City. There is a future for our families and for the generations that will come after us. And ultimately, there is a future in the hands of a faithful God who has not forsaken us.

So as we leave this place today, may we carry with us not only the memory of those we honor, but also the hope that comes from knowing that God is our refuge and strength, that His mercies are new every morning, and that in Jesus Christ, death is not the end.

Jesus wept. Jesus suffered. Jesus died. But Jesus rose again.

And because He lives, there is hope.

May God comfort those who still grieve, strengthen those who continue to serve, bless the city of New York, and lead us into the future with courage, compassion, and hope.

Thank you.

Good morning.

This morning, we gather in a solemn moment to remember September 11 and all that this day represents for our city, our nation, and for so many families whose lives were forever changed. We remember with gratitude those who gave their lives, including Dick Morgan and the many men and women who served in the aftermath of that terrible day. We honor their courage and sacrifice, and we give thanks for those who continued to serve, even when the immediate crisis had passed and the consequences continued for years afterward.

But this morning, I want us not only to remember what happened, but to consider where we can find hope in the face of suffering and loss. Because when we stand in a place of remembrance like this, one question inevitably comes to us: Where do we turn when life is broken? Where do we find strength when we experience things that we cannot explain? And where can we find hope when the wounds of the past continue to affect the present?

The Bible does not give us a shallow answer to those questions. Scripture does not tell us to ignore suffering or simply move beyond it. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that it gives us permission to grieve. The book of Lamentations was written in the midst of tremendous devastation. Jeremiah looked honestly at suffering, loss, and destruction. Yet, right in the middle of his grief, he says, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

“This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” What a beautiful word for a morning like this. We remember, but our remembrance does not have to end in despair. We can acknowledge the darkness without believing that darkness has the final word. We can grieve what has been lost while still believing that God is faithful. His mercies are new every morning. His faithfulness has not ended.

And Psalm 46 gives us another beautiful promise: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” It doesn’t say that God’s people will never experience trouble. It says that when trouble comes, God is present. He is our refuge and our strength. And the Psalm goes on to say, “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved.”

That is a message that New York City needs to hear—not only on September 11, but every day. We have experienced tremendous suffering, but we have also witnessed extraordinary courage, compassion, and service. We have seen people run toward danger to save others. We have seen people serve their neighbors, care for strangers, and continue to carry burdens that many of us will never fully understand. We give thanks for that legacy of service, and we pray that it will continue in the generations ahead.

But ultimately, our hope is not in our own strength. Our hope is in God.

And for those of us who believe in Jesus Christ, that hope becomes even more personal.

Because Christianity does not tell us that God watches suffering from a distance. The Christian faith tells us that God came into our suffering.

Jesus Himself wept.

When Jesus stood before the tomb of His friend Lazarus, He knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew what He was going to do. And yet, when He saw Mary weeping and those around her grieving, the Bible simply says, “Jesus wept.”

That tells us something profound about the heart of God. Jesus does not stand far away from human grief. He enters into it. He knows what it means to lose someone. He knows what it means to weep. He knows what it means to experience suffering.

And Jesus did not merely witness suffering. He Himself experienced betrayal, violence, rejection, and death. He went to the cross. He entered into the deepest darkness that human beings can experience.

But death was not the final word.

Jesus Christ rose again.

And that is the heart of Christian hope. Our hope is not simply that things will eventually get better. Our hope is that Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death, and because He lives, death does not have the final word.

That is why the Christian can grieve and still have hope. We don’t have to choose between remembering and hoping. We can remember those we have lost, we can acknowledge the pain that remains, and at the same time we can look toward a future that is held by God.

And the Bible gives us a beautiful picture of that future at the very end of Revelation. It says that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.”

Think about that promise: God Himself will wipe away every tear.

The tears that have been shed in New York. The tears of families who lost loved ones. The tears of those who served and carried the consequences afterward. The tears that perhaps are still shed privately, years later. God sees them. God knows them. And Scripture tells us that there is coming a day when He will wipe away every tear, when death will be no more, when mourning and pain will finally come to an end.

That is our hope.

So this morning, we remember with gratitude. We honor with respect. We grieve with those who grieve. And we look forward with hope—not because we have forgotten the darkness, but because we believe the darkness will not have the final word.

There is a future for New York City. There is a future for our families and for the generations that will come after us. And ultimately, there is a future in the hands of a faithful God who has not forsaken us.

So as we leave this place today, may we carry with us not only the memory of those we honor, but also the hope that comes from knowing that God is our refuge and strength, that His mercies are new every morning, and that in Jesus Christ, death is not the end.

Jesus wept. Jesus suffered. Jesus died. But Jesus rose again.

And because He lives, there is hope.

May God comfort those who still grieve, strengthen those who continue to serve, bless the city of New York, and lead us into the future with courage, compassion, and hope.

Thank you.

On Isaiah 40, and the God who does not grow tired of us

You know the silence I mean.

You have prayed the same prayer so many nights that the words have worn smooth, like a coin handled too long. You have asked, and asked, and the ceiling has not moved. Months of it. Maybe years. And somewhere underneath the prayer a quieter sentence starts to form, one you would never say out loud in church: He isn’t listening. My case has been set aside.

That is where Isaiah 40 begins. Not in triumph. In exile.

Israel is far from home. Babylon has taken the temple treasures, taken the sons, taken the future. Isaiah had seen it coming a chapter earlier and said it plainly — the days are coming when everything in your house will be carried off, and nothing will be left. It happened. And now the people sit in a foreign city, under foreign gods, and the God who had called them mine has, as far as they can feel, gone quiet.

I want to stay on Babylon for a second, because Babylon was never only a place.

In Scripture, Babylon becomes shorthand for everything in the world that is impressive to the eye and set against God underneath. Gleaming on the outside. Rotten at the root. And here is the part that makes my heart go small: you can be carried into Babylon without ever noticing the journey. You can take on its values, its doctrines, its whole way of wanting things, and call it home. I look at the world I live in — I look at this country I love — and I see how much of it is exactly that. Confident. Beautiful. Quietly opposed to God. And most of the people inside it have no idea they’ve been taken.

So this is who the word of comfort comes to. Not the strong. The captured. The tired.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.

Notice that He still says my people. After the exile. After the failure. Still mine.

And then Isaiah does something strange. To a people who feel forgotten, he preaches the sheer size of God. Who measured the oceans in the cup of his hand? Who has ever taught the Lord anything, shown Him a better way? The nations are one drop hanging off a bucket. Dust on a scale. He sits above the circle of the earth, and from up there we look like grasshoppers — all of us, the whole restless swarm of us. He brings out the stars one by one and calls each of the billions by name, and not one of them goes missing.

You would think that would only make a small, tired person feel smaller.

But watch where Isaiah is going. Right after the stars — right after establishing that God forgets nothing, not one distant burning thing in all that dark — he turns and looks straight at the exhausted heart and says back to it exactly what it has been whispering:

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?

There it is. The real thing. Not does God exist — the exiles believed He existed. The wound is quieter than that, and closer to the bone. My case, mine specifically, has been overlooked. He is real, and He is powerful, and He is not paying attention to me.

And I love that God does not scold the doubt. He answers it.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary.

Read that slowly if you are tired tonight. He does not grow weary. The One who has been waiting with you does not get drowsy on the late shift. He does not lose the thread of your prayer somewhere around month eight. And his understanding is unsearchable — which means that if the answer is taking longer than you can bear, it is not because He forgot. It is because He is working at a depth you cannot see the bottom of.

Then comes the promise, and it is not the promise I would have written.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Not the strong will win. The strong fall down. The young burn out. The promise is for the ones who have run all the way out of themselves and are still, somehow, waiting. The NIV says those who hope in the Lord — and it turns out hoping and waiting are the same verb, the same act, the same stubborn refusal to stop looking up.

Here is the whole thing, as plainly as I can say it. I don’t think most Christians doubt that God is mighty. We’ll sing that all day long. He hangs the stars and calls them by name — fine, we believe it. What we doubt, at two in the morning, is whether that God will bother to help us. This situation. This prayer. The one we’ve held up so long our arms have gone numb.

That is the exact doubt God reaches for in verse 27. And His answer is not you were wrong to hurt. His answer is: I am not hidden. I am not disregarding you. Wait.

So tonight, wait.

But hear the tense of the promise, because everything turns on it.

They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Shall. Will. Later. The soaring is in the future, and the future can be years away — years of kneeling, years of the same worn prayer. The renewed strength is a promise still out ahead of you.

And yet look back at where the chapter opened, because that is the present tense. Comfort, comfort my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Tell her that her hard service is completed, that her sin is paid for. Not will be. Is. Already. The exiles were still sitting in Babylon when God announced that their warfare was over. You may still be on your knees when He says the hard part of your waiting is finished. The soaring is coming. The comfort has already started.

That is how grace works while you wait. He gives power to the faint, and strength to the one who has none left — not by lifting the weakness off you, but by quietly rebuilding you underneath it, for a day you cannot yet see.

And that day comes. There is no image in all of Scripture more liberating for someone who has knelt so long their knees have gone numb than this one. Not crawling. Not limping. Not merely surviving. An eagle — thousands of feet up, wings open, riding the very wind that used to knock you flat. The God who never grows weary does not just get you back on your feet. He gives you the sky.

So keep waiting. The kneeling is not the last scene. Out ahead of you, above Babylon and the grasshoppers and the numbered stars, something with wide wings is riding the high wind — weightless, unhurried, unafraid. Not long ago it was face-down on the floor, praying a prayer that seemed to land nowhere. That is you, later. Wait for it.

What 2 Corinthians 3 Actually Says About Freedom, Hardened Hearts, and the Crisis of Our Generation

Al Ngu

Part One of Three

I. A Sermon That Troubled Me

Once I sat under a sermon drawn from 2 Corinthians 3:17 — “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” — connected to Galatians 5:1: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The preacher was earnest. The congregation was moved. And the message ranged across a familiar landscape of contemporary concerns: freedom from depression, from loneliness, from anxiety, from the gravitational pull of self-destructive habits. Real struggles. Real pain. And a real text.

But something did not sit right with me, and it took some time to name what it was. The sermon was not wrong to speak of freedom. The text does speak of freedom. But it had imported a meaning of freedom that the passage itself does not supply — and in doing so, it had bypassed the specific and more searching freedom that Paul actually has in mind. The freedom in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is not, in its first and controlling sense, freedom from depression or loneliness. It is freedom from something far more foundational, far more spiritually catastrophic, and far more precisely addressed by the new covenant: freedom from a hardened heart.

To miss this is not a minor exegetical slip. It changes the entire trajectory of what the gospel is being asked to do. A gospel that offers relief from circumstantial suffering without addressing the hardened heart that underlies it is a gospel that cannot sustain what it promises. It gives people something to feel without giving them something to become. And that, I will argue, is not the freedom the Spirit of God brings.

My burden in this article is pastoral and urgent. I am thinking specifically of people I know and love — young people and older ones alike — who once confessed Christ and now have walked away. Some have drifted quietly. Others have reconstructed a faith on their own terms, keeping a version of Jesus that never costs them anything. Others have deconstructed publicly and openly. I want to understand what is happening to them theologically. What does Scripture call this? Where does it come from? And is there any genuine hope for the heart that has gone to stone?

The answer begins in 2 Corinthians 3. And it is more searching, more specific, and more hopeful than most sermons on this text have led us to believe.

II. What the Passage Actually Says: The Veil and the Hardened Heart

Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians 3 begins with Moses descending from Sinai with the glory of God radiating from his face — a glory so intense that Israel could not bear to look at him, and he was compelled to veil his face (Exodus 34:29–35). Paul’s interpretive move is audacious: he takes this familiar story and reinterprets the veil not merely as a physical covering over Moses’ face, but as a symbol of something that persists into his own present day.

“But their minds were hardened,” he writes in verse 14, “for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted.” And then, more devastatingly: “Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts” (verse 15). The veil, in Paul’s rereading, is not over Moses’ face. It is over the heart of the reader.

And what does this veil produce? He names it in verse 14: hardness. The Greek word is pōrō — to petrify, to turn to stone, to make callous. The law of Moses, read without Christ and without the Spirit of the new covenant, does not soften the heart toward God. It petrifies it. Not because the law is defective — Paul insists elsewhere that the law is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:12). But because the law comes to a faculty that is broken. It commands what the unrenewed heart cannot do, and the result is not reformation but calcification. The heart that cannot obey grows harder in its inability. The veil thickens.

This is the specific bondage that verse 17 addresses. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Freedom from what? Freedom from this. Freedom from the veil over the heart. Freedom from the petrified, stone-cold, unresponsive inner life that hears the Word of God and remains unmoved — not because it lacks information, but because the very faculty of reception has been shut down. This is the deepest slavery a human being can experience — not the slavery of circumstance, but the slavery of a will turned to stone. And it is from this slavery, specifically and precisely, that the Spirit of the new covenant sets us free.

The old covenant could diagnose this condition. It could not cure it. But the prophets had already heard God announce that he intended something more. Jeremiah heard it: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel heard it in even more visceral terms: “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). The promise is not merely forensic. It is surgical. God reaches into the chest and replaces the stone with something that can beat, feel, and respond.

And in Luke 4:18, Jesus stands in the synagogue at Nazareth and announces that this promise has arrived in him: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim liberty to the captives.” The liberty he proclaims is precisely this liberty — not first the liberation of the prisoner from his cell, but the liberation of the captive heart from its own petrification. This is what the new covenant brings. This is what the cross purchased. And this is why freedom in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is such a weighty and specific word.

III. What Hardness Looks Like in Our Generation

The hardening of the heart is not a first-century Jewish problem. It is a perennial human condition, and it takes recognizable forms in every generation. In ours, it presents most acutely in three overlapping patterns.

The first is simple drift. A person who once read Scripture regularly, prayed with some intentionality, and gathered with the body of Christ begins to withdraw — slowly, almost imperceptibly. Nothing dramatic has happened. The Bible is read less frequently. Prayer becomes occasional and then absent. Worship becomes something attended rather than something inhabited. The heart has simply been starved of the beholding that keeps it soft, and it has begun, by degrees, to harden. This is the quiet pastoral emergency that rarely makes headlines but accounts for the majority of spiritual casualties in any congregation.

The second is the backsliding pattern — a moral failure or a season of deliberate sin that, rather than driving a person to repentance, drives them to theological reconstruction. Because the heart cannot simultaneously pursue sin and submit to the God who forbids it, it begins to quietly renegotiate its theology. Passages that were once received as authoritative begin to feel culturally conditioned or misinterpreted. The Jesus who commands becomes the Jesus who affirms. The cross that demands death to self becomes a symbol of self-actualization. This is not intellectual honesty. It is the hardened heart generating the theology that the hardened heart requires.

The third is the deconstruction movement in its more ideologically driven form. Here the hardening presents as sophistication. The person does not abandon religion — they refine it. They read widely, cite scholars, express compassion for the marginalized, and position themselves as having grown beyond the naive faith of their upbringing. But the Scripture passages they select, the interpretations they favor, and the Jesus they construct have one consistent feature: they never demand anything the reconstructed heart is unwilling to give.

Paul had a name for all three patterns. He called it the veil remaining over the heart. The person may be reading the text — perhaps reading it seriously and at great length — but the veil is there. The glory of Christ in the Word does not penetrate. The text is processed but not received. The words are analyzed but not inhabited. And the result, in every case, is a heart that grows progressively harder toward the actual Christ of the actual Scripture.

This is one of the most urgent fronts of spiritual warfare in our age. Not because the attacks are new, but because the cultural conditions have made them uniquely pervasive and unusually difficult to name. When the hardening presents as enlightenment, when petrification wears the face of intellectual maturity, it is very hard to call it what it is. But we must.

IV. The Mechanism of Transformation: Beholding the Glory of Christ

How does the Spirit soften what has been hardened? This is the question the passage moves toward answering. And Paul answers it in the verse immediately following his declaration of freedom — 2 Corinthians 3:18:

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

This verse contains the mechanism. Let us work through it carefully.

The key verb is katoptrizomenoi — beholding as in a mirror. It is a rare word, appearing nowhere else in the New Testament, derived from the Greek word for mirror. It carries a double sense: gazing into a reflective surface and, in that gazing, reflecting back what you see. The ESV renders it “beholding”; the NIV renders it “contemplating.” Both are right, and the tension between them is theologically productive: the believer gazes upon the glory of Christ, and in gazing, begins to mirror it. Beholding comes first. Reflecting follows as its necessary consequence.

The verb is in the present tense — indicating continuous, ongoing action. Transformation is not the result of a single powerful encounter, one mountaintop experience, one revival night. It is the cumulative fruit of sustained, habitual, returning attention to the glory of Christ. You become what you consistently behold.

The word translated “are being transformed” is metamorphoumetha — from the same root as our English word metamorphosis, and the same word used for Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountain in Matthew 17:2. Paul is not describing a gradual self-improvement program. He is describing a structural remaking of the person, as radical as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. And it is a passive verb. You are not transforming yourself. You are being transformed — by the Spirit, acting upon you, using the beholding as the instrument through which he does his work. The believer contributes the gaze. The Spirit produces the change.

The phrase “from glory to glory” — apo doxes eis doxan — signals progressive, cumulative, unceasing growth. A Semitic expression of intensification, comparable to Psalm 84:7’s “from strength to strength.” And crucially: unlike Moses’ glory, which faded because it was external and borrowed, the glory the Spirit produces in the new covenant believer increases. Its source is not a temporary encounter but the permanent indwelling of the Spirit of Christ himself.

What does beholding actually look like in practice? Paul himself answers this in the next chapter: the glory of God is seen “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6), mediated through the gospel — which is the Scripture. Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1:14). When you gaze into the written Word, you are gazing into the incarnate Word. They are not two different objects. Scripture is the Spirit-given lens through which the risen Christ becomes visible to the unveiled heart.

And so the three great instruments of beholding are these. First, the daily meditation of the Holy Scripture — not the casual reading of a verse for emotional reassurance, but the sustained, submissive, returning immersion in the whole counsel of God. Psalm 1 describes the blessed man as one who meditates on the law day and night, and the Hebrew word for meditate is hagah — to mutter, to murmur, to turn a thing over repeatedly in the mind the way a cow works its cud. The text is not consumed and moved past. It is inhabited. And in that inhabiting, the glory of Christ embedded in every page begins to do its work upon the heart.

Second, prayer — which is not merely the recitation of requests but an increasingly intimate conversation with the living person of Christ. If Scripture is gazing at Christ, prayer is speaking to him. The beholding becomes a relationship. And in that sustained relational encounter, the Spirit works the same transforming alchemy: you become, gradually and sometimes imperceptibly, more like the one you spend the most time with.

Third, worship — private and communal. In worship, the beholding becomes embodied and affective. The heart does not merely observe the glory of Christ; it responds to it, is moved by it, is broken open by it. The “we all” of verse 18 is a plural. Transformation is not merely an individual project. The community of worshippers, gathered around Word and sacrament and prayer, creates conditions in which the Spirit can ignite in a congregation what may be only a flicker in an individual.

And here is the upgrade the new covenant brings over everything that came before: under the old covenant, these same practices — reading the law, prayer, worship — could be performed with a veil over the heart. The Israelites sang the Psalms and heard the Torah and offered the sacrifices, and still the hardness persisted. The glory was there, embedded in the text, but inaccessible — like sunlight behind a thick curtain. Under the new covenant, the Spirit has removed the curtain. The same Scripture now radiates with Christ. The same prayer now reaches the Father through the Son. The same worship is offered in Spirit and in truth. Same practices. Entirely different encounter.

V. Why So Many Are Still Not Free

If the veil has been removed permanently — if the Spirit now dwells within every believer, making the glory of Christ accessible through Scripture, prayer, and worship — why does the church still contain so many people whose hearts appear functionally hard? Why does deconstruction continue? Why does backsliding persist?

The answer is not that the new covenant has failed. The answer is that the removal of the veil is not the same as the sustained direction of the gaze. The door has been opened. But many believers are standing with their backs to it.

Regeneration gives the heart a new capacity to behold. But the flesh, the old nature, remains and wars against the Spirit (Galatians 5:17) — and it does not war alone. What we call distraction is rarely a neutral phenomenon. It is the surface symptom of something more sinister operating beneath it: the active, coordinated work of the enemy whose primary weapon, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 4:4, is deception. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers — and his strategy against believers is the same, only subtler. He does not need to re-hang the veil that Christ has removed. He simply needs to turn the face away from what the veil’s removal makes possible.

This turning is never a single clean movement. It is a process — overlapping, cumulative, and mutually reinforcing. The demonic works through deception, planting doubts about the goodness of God, the reliability of Scripture, the coherence of faith. The flesh cooperates eagerly, finding in those doubts a permission structure for the desires it has never stopped wanting. The heart, shaped by both, begins to experience a creeping disillusionment — not a sudden collapse of faith but a slow cooling, a gradual withdrawal of trust, a progressive loss of appetite for the things of God. And the carnal mind, which Paul says in Romans 8:7 is hostile to God by nature, provides the rationalization that makes the whole drift feel like growth rather than departure.

These forces do not operate in sequence. They operate simultaneously, each one amplifying the others. The deception makes the flesh bolder. The flesh makes the heart more susceptible to deception. The disillusionment makes both feel reasonable. And woven through all of it is the noise of contemporary life — the curated digital worlds, the endless horizontal stimulation, the thousand small redirections of attention — which are not the cause of the hardening but the medium through which the other forces most effectively do their work. The enemy has never had a more efficient delivery system for spiritual numbness than the one we carry in our pockets.

The result is a heart that is not beholding Christ. And a heart that is not beholding Christ is a heart that is not being transformed. And a heart that is not being transformed is a heart that is becoming harder — not by dramatic apostasy, but by the quiet, daily compounding of a gaze that has been turned away.

This produces a downward spiral: no beholding produces no transformation, which weakens the desire to behold, which produces less transformation, which hardens the heart further. The Christian who once read Scripture with hunger finds the Bible growing dry. Prayer feels like speaking to the ceiling. Worship becomes performance. And at some point, the gap between what the professed faith demands and what the hardened heart can sustain becomes unbearable — and deconstruction presents itself as the intellectually honest exit.

There is also a genuine paradox at work that honest pastoral observation cannot avoid. The hardened heart does not want to read Scripture. But Scripture is what softens the hardened heart. The heart that avoids the Word grows harder. The harder it grows, the less it wants the Word. This is not merely a theoretical spiral. It is the bondage of the will that Paul describes in Romans 7 and that Augustine recognized in himself centuries later: the man who wants to do good cannot. The problem is not information deficit. It is a captivity of the wanting itself.

This paradox raises a question that this article cannot fully answer but refuses to leave hanging: if the hardened heart cannot soften itself, and if the beholding that softens it requires a willingness the hardened heart does not possess — who breaks the cycle? How does anyone get out? And what can those of us who love the deconstructed, the backslidden, and the drifting actually do?

That is the question the second part of this essay takes up. But before we get there, sit for a moment with the weight of what Paul has diagnosed. The veil is real. The hardness is real. The spiral is real. And the people caught in it are not primarily intellectual skeptics who need better arguments. They are people with hearts of stone who need the one thing no human being can give them — and that the new covenant promises God will.

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This is Part One of a two-part essay. Part Two — “Preaching to Dry Bones” — takes up the theological and pastoral response: the doctrine of regeneration, and what those who love the hardened-hearted can actually do.

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Al Ngu (MDiv) is a pastor and church planter in New York City, where he leads Hearts Burn NYC, a faith community gathering in Union Square Park. He writes at the intersection of biblical theology, pastoral concern, and the life of the Spirit for a generation in crisis.