244 The Only Constant

Faithful Obedience When Everything Else is Shifting Sand

May 19, 2026

Good morning and hello friends,

This one is for the family. For my sisters, my brothers, my aunts and uncles. For every friend of my mother’s who has passed through our door these last weeks, who has held our hands, who has shared a memory and a tear. If these words find you, please read them. They are born from this quiet house of grief, and they are the most important thing I can give you.

I am sitting at the same desk where, a week ago, I planned my mother’s burial. The flowers have wilted. The casserole dishes have been returned. The voices have softened, and the silence has returned, deeper and heavier than before. In this silence, my mind does not go to the eulogies or the hymns. It goes to the text messages. The well-meaning, beautiful, heartbreaking platitudes.

“She’s in a better place.”

“God needed another angel.”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

And I found myself nodding, grateful for the love, while a quiet voice inside me whispered: No. That’s not it. That’s not Him.

It’s not that these sentiments are malicious. They are the language of a culture that has fashioned a god in its own image, a god of vague benevolence, of cosmic comfort, of positive vibes. A god who would never disrupt, never command, never inspire a holy fear. A god who exists to make us feel better about our choices, not to call us to abandon them.

This is what is precious to us in modern Western culture: comfort, autonomy, self-expression, peace defined as the absence of conflict.

These things are almost never what is precious to God.

And so I write this for you, my family, my mother’s friends, and for every person who, in this moment of loss, might be peering into the abyss and wondering what is actually true. I write this as a self-proclaimed follower of the Messiah, the only begotten Son of the living God Most High. And I write it with a pressing conviction: we cannot know the God of all comfort if we refuse to know the God of the burning bush. We cannot understand the Savior if we amputate Him from the Lawgiver.

Who am I to say this? I am just some guy on the internet. I am not a scholar, a theologian, a teacher, or a pastor. I came to know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on the night of October 3rd, 2024. Before that, I was fluent in the language of the world. Now, I am a student…a desperate, grateful, often-confused student…of the Word. I write a couple of newsletters for Christians, about Christians, and about the things I see taking shape in this world. That’s my only credential: a transformed life.

If you are not a follower of Christ Jesus, if you have not surrendered your life to the will of the Father, tread lightly here. This is family business. This is about the narrow path.

I believe most of the reason Christians in our culture think of the God of the Old Testament as different from the God of the New Testament is because we have been taught to exclusively focus on Jesus while cultivating no fear of the Father.

We want the loving, accepting, gracious Jesus. We do not want the God who says, “I am against you, O Gog,” who commands armies to be wiped out, who strikes a man dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant with good intentions. We have created a theological divorce where the gentle Rabbi from Galilee seems disconnected from the pillar of fire and smoke. This is a fatal error.

The Scripture declares: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

One. Not two. Not a schizophrenic deity with a split personality. The God who spoke from Sinai is the God who spoke from the cross. The justice that demanded sacrifice is the love that provided it. You cannot have the salvation of the New without understanding the problem defined in the Old. You cannot cherish the Lamb if you ignore the altar upon which He was laid.

My faith, my daily walk, is not a static, twelve-step program. It is not a formula you can plug into a spreadsheet. If I were forced to associate one constant, one irreducible formula with this process of walking in faith, it would be this: faithful obedience to the will of the Father Most High.

Apart from that, there is nothing else I would feel comfortable declaring as a fixed, formulaic process. Not a prayer routine, not a Bible-reading plan, not a style of worship. Those are the how, but they are worthless without the why. And the why is always obedience. It is always surrender to His will, not my own.

So how do I, a flawed man in a Florida home filled with memory and loss, pursue this? How does this “faithful obedience” work itself out in the grit of daily life?

It begins with knowing Him. Not about Him. Knowing Him.

I read the Bible to understand my Father, the Most High. I read to learn what pleases Him, what offends Him, what He loves and what He hates. I read to understand His commandments, not as a list of archaic rules, but as the loving boundaries of a good Father for children who are prone to wander into traffic. I read the Old Testament to see His heart, His passion for justice, His fury at idolatry, His relentless pursuit of a covenant people. This is not a different God. This is the foundation of the relationship.

I read the Bible to learn by the example set by His Son. Jesus is how we learn to live in this world of flesh. He is the perfect portrait of what a human life submitted entirely to the Father’s will looks like. What did He do? He prayed constantly. He retreated to desolate places. He loved the unlovable and rebuked the religious. He obeyed, even to the point of death. I read to understand what the Son did that pleased the Father, so that I can, by the Spirit’s power, do it too. He is our model for faithful obedience.

And so, my practice flows from this relational knowing.

I pray without ceasing. It never ends. It is not a monologue before meals or bed. It is a running conversation throughout the day. It is whispering “Help” in the cemetery office. It is muttering “Thank you” for the bird at the window. It is crying “Why?” in the dark and learning to sit in the silence that follows. When God seems to go quiet in my life, I don’t turn on the television. I turn to Scripture. I meditate on it. I fast. I create space for His voice by removing the clutter of my own cravings and distractions.

I pursue obedience at all costs. This is where the rubber meets the road. A “fear of the Lord” is not a cowering terror of a cosmic bully. It is a profound, awe-filled reverence that recognizes He is God, and I am not. It is the understanding that His ways are higher, His thoughts are wiser, and His commands are for my ultimate good, even when they cut against my every desire. This fear is the beginning of wisdom because it is the prerequisite for true learning. You cannot be taught by someone you do not respect.

This obedience has a cost. It costs your reputation when you walk away from gossip. It costs your comfort when you give sacrificially. It costs your pride when you forgive the unforgivable. It cost my mother her son for two years as I cared for her, a cost I now treasure as the greatest investment of my life. Obedience is the currency of the Kingdom.

And in this walk, I have come to know the Persons I obey:

Yahuah – This is my Father in Heaven, the Most High, the ONLY true God. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The great I AM. The covenant-keeper. The holy, holy, holy One. He is my Father. Not a concept. Not a force. A Person. My Father.

Yahusha – The Messiah, the only begotten Son of Yahuah. The Word made flesh. The Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The one whose name means “Yahweh is Salvation.” He is my Savior, my Lord, my King, and my elder Brother. He is the narrow gate. He is the way, the truth, and the life.

This is not academic. This is the relational bedrock of everything. I obey Yahuah because He is my Father and His authority is loving and perfect. I follow Yahusha because He shows me how a beloved Son obeys a perfect Father, and He has paved the way for me to do the same.

Now, some of you may read this and think, This is heavy. This is a lot of law. Where is the grace?

My friend, this is grace. Grace is not permission to ignore the Father’s will. Grace is the power, bought by the Son’s blood, to obey it. Grace is the Spirit of God living inside of you, enabling you to do what you could never do on your own: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might.

What I see in our culture, and in many of our churches, is not grace. It is license. It is treating our eternal souls as if we are choosing an ice cream flavor at the parlor. Vanilla or chocolate? Sunday church or Sunday brunch? Honoring parents or ignoring them? Speaking life or sharing slander? Forgiving or holding a grudge? We treat these as matters of personal preference, insignificant choices in a spiritual smorgasbord.

We are playing a “religion” with our eternal souls.

The God of the Bible does not offer a choose-your-own-adventure spirituality. He offers a narrow path. He offers a yoke. He offers a cross. And He offers resurrection life on the other side of surrender.

This is why the Old Testament matters. It shows us the heart of the God who is, not the god we wish He was. It shows us His consistency. Let me show you something that has captivated me.

Look at Genesis 10. It’s a list of names, the “Table of Nations.” We often skim it. But here, we find the sons of Japheth: “Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.” And the sons of Javan: “Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.” (Genesis 10:2-4).

Now, flash forward to the prophets. Isaiah speaks of a time when God will gather all nations: “I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud… to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations.” (Isaiah 66:19).

And then Ezekiel: “Son of man, set your face toward Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him… Persia, Cush, and Put are with them… Gomer and all his hordes; Beth-togarmah from the uttermost parts of the north with all his hordes.” (Ezekiel 38:1-6).

These are not random, forgotten tribes. These are specific names, recorded in Genesis, referenced centuries later by the prophets as players in God’s grand narrative of judgment and redemption. This is not a God who changes His mind. This is a God who knows the end from the beginning, who works through generations and empires to accomplish His purposes. The God who named the nations in Genesis is the same God who prophesies about them in Ezekiel and Isaiah. He is the same God who, in Revelation, brings all this to its final culmination.

This consistency should anchor us. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His standards are consistent. His love is consistent. His justice is consistent.

Yet, we want to avoid the parts that make us uncomfortable. We want to skip from Genesis 3 to John 3, forgetting the 66 books in between that reveal His character. We forget that the same God who judged Miriam with leprosy for speaking against Moses (Numbers 12:1-2, 10) is the God who healed the leper and forgave the woman caught in adultery. His holiness demands justice; His love provides a way for mercy. You cannot understand the depth of the mercy without understanding the weight of the justice.

This is the God we serve. Not a mascot for our causes. Not a therapist for our anxieties. Not a divine endorser of our politics. He is the King. The potter. The Father. The Judge. The Savior.

So, to my family, to my mother’s friends, to all of you who have held us up these past weeks: I love you. Deeply. The food, the prayers, the presence, it has been manna in our wilderness.

And because I love you, I must point you past the platitudes, past the cultural god, to the real One. The One my mother, in her own quiet way, sought to serve. The One who holds her now, not because she was a good person (though she was), but because of the finished work of His Son, which she trusted in.

Your grief is real. Your loss is profound. In your quiet moments, when the world’s chatter fades, you will be left with the ultimate questions: What is true? What comes after? What really matters?

I am telling you what I have found to be true: Faithful obedience to the will of the Father Most High.

It is not a list of rules to earn love. It is the grateful, awe-filled response of a rescued child to a perfect Father. It is getting to know Him through His Word…all of it. It is learning to walk from His Son…every step. It is praying without ceasing. It is obeying at all costs.

This path is not easy. It will cost you. It will set you at odds with the world’s values. It will require you to fear God more than you fear man. But it is the only path that leads to life…real, abundant, eternal life. It is the only path that makes sense of both the beauty and the brutality of this world. It is the only path that ends at the feet of a God who is both just and the justifier.

My constant prayer for you, and for myself, is from the Psalms: “Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name.” (Psalm 86:11).

Let our hearts be united in this holy fear. Let our lives be a testament to this faithful obedience. Let us be known not just by the cross we carry, but by the path we walk, the narrow, difficult, glorious path of the Son.

That is all. And thank you for reading.

Walk in the light you’ve been given.

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