Good morning, and hello friends.
A few pieces went out from me these past few weeks. You can find a few of them below. For everything in one place, my site holds the archive.
The Word in the Vineyard
When the Living Truth Arrives, and the Tenants Choose the Curse
The questions that has been buzzing like gnats around me in the summer heat these past few weeks, even months…“What’s next? Where will you go? What will you do?” have settled for a moment. In this stillness, a single word has been echoing, a word I thought I understood but am only now beginning to feel in the marrow of my faith.
Logos.
It’s a word we render as “Word.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. We read it, we nod, we move on. But I’ve been circling it, this capital-W Word. It is not a spoken sentence or a written command. It is the divine will and intention of Yahuah, Elohim. It is the active, creative, ordering principle of all that is. The Logos is what God means. It is His intent made manifest.
And Yahuah sent His Logos to us. Wrapped in flesh. Bearing the full weight of His divine will. He sent His Son.
This is the story that has been burning in me. It’s the story behind every story, the parable beneath every prophecy. It’s the story of the vineyard. And I think, perhaps, we have missed the terrifying, glorious point.
I. The Owner’s Heart
The parable is simple. Brutally so.
“Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country.” (Matthew 21:33, ESV)
See the Owner’s labor. He doesn’t just find a vineyard; He creates it. He plants. He fences. He digs. He builds. Every provision for abundance, for security, for productivity is His doing. The tenants inherit a finished system, a world already humming with potential. Their job is simple: tend what is His and return to Him the fruit in its season.
Yahua and Yahusha, what they mean to me. Read this 👇🏿👇🏿🙏🏿✝🕊
This is the covenant. This is the relationship. “I have done the work,” says Yahuah. “I have given you everything you need. Live according to my design, and there will be life, blessing, peace.” The terms are not hidden. They are proclaimed from mountains, written on stone, woven into the fabric of a world that sings of its Maker.
The Owner then goes to another country. He grants them agency. Stewardship. He gives them space to choose: will they be faithful tenants, or will they play at ownership?
For a long time, I read this as a story about ancient Israel. It is. But it is also about me. It is about you. The vineyard is your life. Your breath. Your gifts. Your time. This world. He planted it. He put a fence of laws and boundaries around it for our protection. He dug the winepress of consequence, action and reaction. He built the tower of His watchful care. Then He leased it to us. He went into the heavenlies, but He never abdicated ownership.
We are all tenants.
II. The Servants Sent
When the season for fruit drew near, the Owner sent His servants.
“When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.” (Matthew 21:34-35, ESV)
These servants are the prophets. They are the living reminders of the covenant, the embodied call to return, to give Yahuah what is His. They speak His Word, His Logos, into the vineyard. “Remember the Owner,” they cry. “Remember the terms of your lease. Your life, your abundance, is not your own. It is a gift, held in trust.”
And what do the tenants do? They beat them. Kill them. Stone them. They reject the message because to accept it is to acknowledge they are not owners. It is to surrender their illusion of control.
For centuries, this was the pattern. The Owner, in His patient, longsuffering mercy, sent more servants. The result was the same. The tenants grew violent in their defiance. The vineyard, designed for sweet wine, began to produce the bitter fruit of rebellion.
Why? Because the Logos, the Word of the Owner, is an inconvenience. It is a claim on their autonomy. It tells them the fruit is not theirs to hoard.
III. The Son: The Logos Made Flesh
Finally, the Owner makes a decisive move. He has one left to send: His beloved Son.
“They will respect my son,” he says. (Matthew 21:37)
He sends the Son, thinking, “Surely, they will see Him and remember. They will see my image in Him and yield.”
But the tenants see the Son and their thinking reveals the core disease of every human heart apart from grace: “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.” (Matthew 21:38)
They believe that by eliminating the Heir, the living representation of the Owner’s claim, the vineyard will become theirs. If they can destroy the living Word, the living Will, then they can be free of the claim altogether. The illusion of ownership will become reality.
This is not just a story about first-century Jews and Romans. This is the story of the Logos in every age.
Who is the Son? He is Yahusha the Messiah. But before He was Yahusha of Nazareth, He was the Word.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, ESV)
The prophets carried the message of the Word. The Son is the Message. He is the divine will and intention of Yahuah walking on two feet. He is the covenant made flesh. He is the living, breathing claim of God upon His vineyard.
The Scriptures laid out His arrival with meticulous clarity. He was not a surprise.
He was the Servant in whom Yahuah’s soul delights, upon whom His Spirit rests (Isaiah 42:1).
He was the covenant for the people, a light for the nations (Isaiah 42:6).
He was the righteous Branch from David, who would execute justice and righteousness (Jeremiah 23:5).
He was the one anointed to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted (Isaiah 61:1).
He was the prophet like Moses, to whom they must listen, who would speak only the words Yahuah put in His mouth (Deuteronomy 18:15-18).
He was the one like a son of man, given dominion and an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13-14).
Yahuah sent His Son, bearing His divine will and walking with His full authority, because His will was the will of His Father.
“So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.’” (John 5:19, ESV)
“For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak.” (John 12:49, ESV)
“My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.” (John 7:16, ESV)
Yahusha’s every word, every deed, every silent prayer, every touch of healing, was the Logos in action. He was the Owner’s will, incarnate, walking through His own vineyard. He was the living, breathing “This is what I meant.” He was the embodiment of the original design for the vineyard: love, obedience, perfect submission to the Father’s purpose.
He was the true Tenant, showing us how to live in the vineyard as it was meant to be.
IV. The Rejection: Killing the Word
And what did the tenants do?
They took him out of the vineyard and killed him.
They scorned Him. They scoffed. They tortured, humiliated, and murdered Him. Just as the parable foretold.
We look back now, with the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight and eighty-plus books of compiled Scripture, and we ask the rhetorical question: How could they not see? How could they not recognize their Messiah?
We judge them. We cluck our tongues at the chief priests and the Pharisees. We marvel at their blindness.
But I do not judge them. Not anymore.
These things had to happen this way. Not only so that prophecy would be fulfilled, though it was. Not only to provide the spotless Lamb for the sacrifice, though He was.
I believe they happened this way because it was the one means for Yahuah to harvest the Jobs among His creation.
Think of Job. He was tested, refined in the fire of suffering, not because he was wicked, but because he was righteous. His faith was proven genuine, not in comfort, but in calamity. His story is not about why bad things happen to good people; it’s about how true faith survives when every visible reason for faith is stripped away.
The rejection and killing of the Son…the living Logos, was the ultimate test, the final sieve. It separated those who loved the idea of God from those who loved God Himself. It revealed who served the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and who served the god of their own tradition, their own power, their own vineyard.
When the perfect Will of God stood before them, speaking truth, offering life, demanding nothing but their acknowledged dependence, they could not tolerate it. They had to destroy it. Because to accept Him was to die to themselves. It was to admit they were tenants.
Their violent “No” was the necessary backdrop against which every feeble, faithful “Yes” would shine.
The remnant, the seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal, the ones who remained faithful, obedient servants to the end they saw. Perhaps not all at once, not without doubt and fear, but they saw. They were the ones who, when the Heir was cast out and killed, mourned. They were the ones who, after the resurrection, believed. They were the ones who finally understood: the vineyard was never theirs. Their hope was never in their tenure, but in the mercy of the Owner and the faithfulness of the Son.
The Kingdom was taken from the wicked tenants and given to “a people producing its fruits” (Matthew 21:43). That people is not defined by ethnicity, but by faith. By their recognition of the Son and their willingness to give the Father His fruit.
V. The Remnant and the Narrow Path
This brings me to the haunting, sobering math of grace.
We are told that today, roughly 33% of the world’s population…about 2.4 billion people self-identifies as Christian. Is this the remnant? Is one, third of humanity the “few” who find the narrow gate?
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7:13-14, ESV)
A third of the planet is not “few.” A third of the planet is a multitude. The remnant, by its very definition, is a surviving fraction. A small group preserved after judgment.
I am coming to a painful, personal realization: the remnant is much, much smaller than 33%. The 2.4 billion includes every denomination, every cultural Christian, every person who checks a box on a form. It includes those who love the benefits of the vineyard, the sense of community, the moral framework, the cultural identity, but who have never bowed the knee to the Heir. Who have never surrendered their claim to the inheritance.
The remnant are those who, like Job, love Yahuah for who He is, not for what He gives. They are the ones who treat the Son, Yahusha, “with praise, honor, glory and gratitude, because He endured what He did so that we would have a template, an example of how we ought to walk in alignment with the divine will and intention of the Father.”
They are the ones who understand that the Logos is not a doctrine to be debated, but a life to be lived. A will to be obeyed.
So, how do we become part of that remnant? Not how do we identify as part of it, but how do we become it?
The answer is in the parable. It’s in the example of the Son.
1. Recognize the Heir. We must see Yahusha for who He truly is: not just a wise teacher, not just a moral example, but the living Logos of God. The exact representation of the Father’s will. The rightful Owner of the vineyard of our lives. This starts with a personal relationship, not a religious affiliation. “Do you know me?” He asks. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” (John 8:19).
2. Give Up the Illusion of Ownership. This is the daily death. We must crucify the tenant’s mentality that says, “This is my life, my time, my money, my plan.” We must say, daily, “I am a steward. This vineyard belongs to You. What fruit do You want from it today?” This is the prayer that answers every anxious “What’s next?” with “I will go where and when the Father asks.”
3. Guard the Gateways. How can we hear the Shepherd’s voice if our souls are flooded with the world’s noise? The Logos speaks in a “still, small voice.” We must guard what enters our eyes and ears. We must create the quiet space to be still and know that He is God. The enemy is also spiritual, and his primary tactic is not to make us wicked, but to make us distracted. Too busy to listen, too preoccupied to obey.
4. Obey in the Small Things. The Logos did not come with a thunderclap of radical demands for everyone. He started with small obediences. “Follow me.” “Give her a drink.” “Go show yourself to the priest.” Our boot camp with the Holy Spirit often begins here, in the seemingly insignificant nudges. The call to be kind when we want to be sharp. The urge to pray for a stranger. The discipline of turning off the screen and picking up the Word. These small “yeses” train our ears to hear and our wills to align.
5. Forgive as We Have Been Forgiven. The unforgiving servant is the ultimate wicked tenant. He accepts the master’s forgiveness of an unimaginable debt but then claims the right to exact payment on a petty debt owed to him. Holding onto grievances is a declaration of ownership. It says, “This justice is mine to administer.” To forgive is to acknowledge, “I am a tenant who has been forgiven much. I have no right to withhold what I have freely received.”
6. Seek the Fruit, Not the Inheritance. The wicked tenants wanted the inheritance, the vineyard itself, the stuff, the security, the autonomy. The faithful tenant seeks only to produce the fruit the Owner desires: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Our goal is not to own the field, but to please the Farmer.
VI. The Vineyard After the Storm
The parable ends with a question and an answer. Yahusha asks the chief priests, “When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
They reply, correctly, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.” (Matthew 21:40-41)
They pronounced their own judgment.
The Kingdom was taken from them and given to a people producing its fruits.
Where does that leave us? Here, today, in our own lives filled with questions and distractions?
We are the “other tenants.” We have been given the vineyard after the storm of rejection. The Heir was killed, but He will return. The Owner has entrusted His vineyard to a new generation of stewards. Us.
Our test is the same. The Logos is still here, it is in you and me. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and His Spirit now dwells within us. The divine will and intention of Yahuah is not a distant concept; it is a living being, the Holy Spirit, His Helper to guide us into all truth.
Every day, the Owner sends His Spirit to collect His fruit. Every day, we have a choice: do we beat, ignore, or kill the prompting? Or do we recognize the Heir in it and yield?
When the Spirit nudges you to forgive, that is the Logos asking for His fruit of peace.
When He prompts you to turn off the noise and pray, that is the Logos asking for His fruit of faithfulness.
When He convicts you of a long-held sin, that is the Logos asking for His fruit of repentance.
When He places a stranger in your path, that is the Logos asking for His fruit of kindness.
The remnant is not those who can recite doctrine. It is those whose lives are yielded to the will of the Father Most High, Yahuah. Those who, like the Son, can say, “I do nothing on my own authority… I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” (John 8:28-29).
The gate is narrow. The way is hard. Those who find it are few. But it is found not in a theological head-count, but in a surrendered heart. It is found in the quiet, daily, often unseen choice to be a faithful tenant in a world of wicked ones.
So today, as the world grinds back to its empire-building, as the questions about your future buzz around your head, remember:
You are a tenant. The Son is the Heir. The Logos is the rule of the house.
Your only job is to recognize Him when He comes, and to give the Father His fruit.
The rest is just noise.
Walk in that truth today, friends.
That is all, and thank you for reading.
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