Tag Archives: table

Head Held High

Maturity is not the nervous waiter routine some Christians keep pulling at the cosmic buffet—scraping together a few spiritual tips, hoping the Father will notice their effort and toss them a crumb. Nah. Maturity is you, the full-blown son, leaning back in the seat of adoption and letting the endless, jaw-dropping blessings roll in like waves that never quit. The Spirit is no vague vibe floating around; He is the insider, searching the deep things of God and shouting straight into your soul, “Hey kid, this feast is already yours—dig in!” (1 Corinthians 2:6-12). The gospel was predestined for your glory, not your groveling. Paul spells it out: we have received the Spirit who is from God so that we may understand what God has freely given us. Freely. No strings, no performance review, no cosmic rent due. Just pure, ridiculous generosity from the One whose unmerited favor supplies man—man does not supply God.

Picture the prodigal again, but this time do not stop the story where most do. The kid drags himself out of the pig pen, stench still clinging to his rags, ready to beg for servant status. “Father, I have sinned… treat me as one of your hired hands.” That is the low-faith script most believers keep rehearsing. But real maturity? That is when the Father’s Spirit pumps iron in your soul so you do not limp home begging scraps. You stand tall, eyes locked on the One who ran to meet you while you were still a long way off. He slides the signet ring onto your finger—full authority, baby. He drapes the best robe over your shoulders—righteousness that screams, “I belong here, and the blood of the Lamb made sure of it.” He buckles the sandals on your feet so you walk like royalty, not crawl like a hired hand. Then you march straight into the house, head high, grin wider than the banquet table, because you are not a guest. You are the son. You are the prince. The party is for you.

This is the heartbeat of the gospel. The Father does not negotiate a probation period. He does not say, “Earn the robe first.” He restores identity on the spot because that is what the contract always promised: I am your exceedingly great reward. You are the promises of God. The same love the Father has for Jesus, He pours out on His elect without measure. We are co-heirs with Christ, clean, righteous, empowered with the same Spirit of power and ministry that Jesus had through the baptism of the Spirit. All things are ours. The past and the future are ours. We judge the world and angels. We inherit the world. We boldly approach the throne of Almighty God as sons, princes of heaven, to ask and receive. Financial prosperity and healing belong to the same faith that receives forgiveness—because the gospel is total salvation or it is no gospel at all.

Some still tiptoe around like they owe the King rent. They treat maturity as a spiritual gym membership where they sweat out enough good works to qualify for blessings. It denies the unmerited favor of the gospel that supplies everything. It treats the cross like a down payment and your effort like the rest of the mortgage. Stop it. The Spirit who searches the deep things of God does not hand you a to-do list; He hands you the finished work and says, “Understand what has been freely given.” Faith is mental assent to God’s word, full stop. Emotions are not epistemology. Works are not grace. When you live by feelings or performance, you are being disobedient and irrational at the same time.

Look at the ring again. That signet is authority. The robe is righteousness. The sandals are the walk of a son who knows his Father is not keeping score. The fatted calf is already on the spit, and the Father is not waiting for you to earn the barbecue sauce. He is running toward you with arms wide, robe flapping, ring ready, because the gospel was predestined for your glory. Paul says the wisdom of God is hidden in a mystery, but God revealed it to us by His Spirit. The world’s wisest philosophers could not dream this up. Human wisdom never gets you there because its limits are bound by observation. Our measure are the promises of God, not empiricism. Only the Spirit who knows the mind of God can shout the good news into your heart: you are not a servant eating pig slop. You are the son.

This is where faith to move mountains becomes everyday reality, not a special-occasion trick. The same faith that receives healing receives prosperity, receives authority, receives joy that the world cannot manufacture. By faith you save yourself from double mindedness. By faith reality obeys you because the Sovereign God who upholds all things has placed His word in your mouth. You do not scrape together faith by human effort; you assent to what is already true. The promises are not waiting for your perfection—they are waiting for your confession. You are the promises of God. Test yourself: are you walking in your new identity? Do you approach the throne like a nervous waiter or like a prince who knows the King delights to give the kingdom? The answer is not in your feelings; it is faith in your confession.

Heaven throws better parties than any pig-pen after-party ever could: the Father is not keeping score. And if He is keeping score it is keeping score on the righteous score sheet given to you through Jesus.  He is popping the champagne while you are still rehearsing your apology speech. Maturity looks like you receiving the ring, the robe, the sandals, and then throwing your head back and laughing with the joy that only sons know. You belong at this table.

Some will read this and feel a twitch of resistance—old religious programming whispering that you must earn the seat. That is the servant mentality trying to sneak back in through the side door. Kick it out. God’s Word is our theology, our doxology, and our apologetic. It attacks the central weakness of every defective view: the lie that man supplies God. We do not. He supplies us. The same unstoppable power that created the world out of nothing now creates fresh confidence in your heart on the occasion of His word, separate from anything you feel, observe or achieve. That is occasionalism at work in the life of faith—God directly causing the knowledge and the assent, every time.

So head held high, son. The Father is already running. The robe is draped. The ring is on. The banquet is served. Stop acting like you are still mucking out the pig pen when the banquet hall is calling your name. The Spirit has searched the deep things and handed you the menu: everything is yours in Christ. Understand what God has freely given you. Receive it. Confess it. Live it. The party is for you, and the Father is grinning wider than the table because His son is finally home—head held high, heart full, future exploding with glory.

This is maturity. This is the gospel. This is you.

The First Importance Of The Gospel

Some folks out there still treat 1 Corinthians 1:18 and 2:2 like a pair of spiritual brass knuckles, swinging them at anyone who dares point out that a lopsided “cross-centered” slogan has been twisted into an excuse for unbelief and disobedience. They read Paul’s words about the message of the cross being foolishness to the perishing and decide that any critique of a so-called cross-centered gospel must mean the critic is perishing too. They quote Paul’s resolve to know nothing among the Corinthians except Jesus Christ and him crucified, then act as if that single phrase cancels out the rest of the apostolic deposit. It doesn’t. It never did. The cross is glorious, but when the faithless use the doorway of the gospel to bludgeon gospel into a blood heap, they have become Satan’s little helpers.

Scripture never hands us a minimalist gospel; that’s the devil’s job. God’s revelation is the sole starting point for knowledge, and that revelation is a seamless, non-contradictory system. Paul did not preach a bare fact of crucifixion and then stop. The faithless love a bisected gospel because it reduces the one thing they can’t do, faith. They can’t believe Jesus and they will do all they can to make sure you follow them in their perversions. Paul preached the whole counsel that centers on Christ crucified precisely because that message, understood in its full biblical context, is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). To rip the phrase out of that context and wave it like a stop sign against systematic theology, apologetics, sovereign election, miraculous gifts, or the present authority of the risen Christ is not faithfulness; it is the very anti-intellectual distortion the apostle confronted. The same Paul who said he knew nothing but Christ and him crucified went on to write thirteen chapters of dense doctrine, ethics, and correction to those same Corinthians. He reasoned, disputed, and taught the entire worldview that flows from the cross and resurrection. Anything less is not the gospel Paul preached; it is a counterfeit that leaves people sick, defeated, and emotionally broken while boasting that “this is the power of the cross.” That is not power. That is unbelief dressed up in Calvary language.

Vincent Cheung nailed this exact abuse years ago, and his words still cut through the fog better than most modern pulpits ever will. In “The Proof of the Spirit” (December 26, 2008) he wrote:

“The entire chapter of 1 Corinthians 2 has been distorted by many anti-intellectual commentators. For example, Paul says in verse 2, ‘For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ … The statement … refers to the gospel’s contrast against non-Christian thinking, and not an anti-intellectual strategy of evangelism.”

He said it again in “Remember Jesus Christ” (November 16, 2009):

 “Many people, especially those with an anti-intellectual bias, interpret this to mean that Paul did not preach an entire body of biblical doctrines, and that he was not interested in theology or in intellectual arguments, but that he only preached the ‘gospel.’ … such usage misrepresents what the New Testament means by ‘gospel.’ … although he uses ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ as an expression that embraced all that he preached to the Corinthians … this is only a representation (not even a summary) of what he preached, when what he preached was doctrinally much more extensive than the bare expression can convey in itself.”

And in “Theology of the Throne” (November 23, 2025) he drove the point home with surgical precision:

“If the cross becomes the sole reference point, Christianity risks degenerating into perpetual guilt and weakness, as if believers must linger forever at the site of sacrifice without grasping the triumph that followed. … We are not standing at the foot of the cross as if history had stopped there, nor are we waiting outside the empty tomb as if resurrection were the end. … A theology of the throne guards against distortions that arise from an incomplete focus.”

The same abuse shows up when people grab 1 Corinthians 15 and twist Paul’s phrase “of first importance” into another excuse to camp out at the doorway instead of walking through it. Paul opens that chapter by saying, “Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you… For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:1, 3-4). The atonement and the resurrection are indeed first in importance—the doorway, the entrance, the non-negotiable foundation that gets you inside the house of God’s. But the doorway is not the dining room. The doorway is not where you sit down at the table and feast with the King. You do not build your whole life in the foyer, staring at the hinges while the banquet hall echoes with joy and power and promises kept. Paul goes on in that same chapter to thunder about the bodily resurrection, the defeat of death, the sovereignty of Christ, and the certainty that “God may be all in all” (15:28). He is not handing us a slogan to linger at Calvary or the empty tomb forever; he is flinging wide the door so we can enter the gospel, which includes the present throne life, Spirit baptism, healing by faith, mountains moved, and every promise made good in Christ.

The Lord’s Supper itself proves the point with blunt apostolic logic. Jesus commanded, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25). If we were meant to stay perpetually cross-centered, locked in endless sin consciousness and weakness at the foot of the cross, then commanding a repeated supper that looks back while we press forward would make zero sense. The table presupposes we have already walked through the doorway. It calls us to remember the price paid so we can enjoy the victory won. It is a feast of triumph, not a funeral dirge. To treat the cross or the resurrection as the entire meal is to turn the Lord’s Supper into a self-flogging session that the apostle never authorized. That is not biblical piety; that is a unbelief that robs the gospel of its forward momentum and leaves believers spiritually malnourished in the foyer while the King waits at the head of the table.

Vincent Cheung saw this coming and warned against it with the same clarity he brought to the cross-centered slogan. The full gospel is never a truncated one; it is the doorway that opens onto the throne room. Anything that stops short of that full-orbed revelation—election, resurrection power today, miracle gifts, sovereign lordship over every thought and every sickness—is not protecting the gospel; it is shrinking it into something the faithless can do by human effort.

If you find yourself reaching for 1 Corinthians 2:2 or 15:3-4 every time someone says the atonement and resurrection are the entrance, not the whole house, stop. You are not defending the gospel; you are defending a half-gospel that leaves people sick, broke, and powerless while boasting that “this is the power of the cross and empty tomb.” And when they die before their time, their blood is stained on your hands. The real cross and resurrection say, “By His stripes you were healed” (1 Pet 2:24) and “All things are possible for the one who believes” (Mark 9:23). They fling open the door to the throne where we boldly approach and ask and receive. Anything that stops short of that is not the power of God; it is the power of unbelief sugar-coated with spiritual-sounding phrases.

The throne is where the story ends, not the cross or the tomb. Stop lingering at the doorway like it is the finish line. Get up, believe the full revelation, walk through, and sit down at the table with the King. That is where Jesus is. And that is the only way the cross and resurrection stay anything but empty in your life.