From Sons of God to Children of Light

Before You Read — A Word About What This Is

There is an older, longer version of this book, and I want to tell you honestly what happened to it, because the story is part of what I have to say.

The first version was a research paper. It did careful work — it traced how the earliest teachers of the Church answered a hard question, it lined up the sources, it proved its points. And it was right. I stand behind what it found. But when my wife read it, and when I read it back to myself, something was missing, and it took me a while to see what. It had the truth of our calling and none of the warmth of it. It explained the love of God the way you would explain a machine. And a book about the love of God that does not carry the love of God has already failed the only test that matters.

So I tore it down to its foundations and built this instead — and kept only the parts a person actually needs to walk the path, and let go of the rest.

Here is the path, said as plainly as I can say it. We have been given a calling so high it should make us tremble. Higher than the angels. And that calling is a school — a long apprenticeship in the very things God is, the things He can pour into a person: His mercy, His patience, His wisdom, His love. We have only just walked through the schoolhouse door. We are beginners, every one of us. And the whole of this book is about that school: what we are called to become, who teaches it, how far down the path we actually are, and the few who walked it far enough ahead of us to leave a map.

I am not going to argue with you here. I am going to show you something. There is a love older than the world, and it has a shape, and that shape is meant to come through you — through ordinary people, in ordinary days, and then, at the end of all things, through those same people made finally and fully what they were always meant to be. I want you to see it, and seeing it, to want it, and wanting it, to stay close enough to the One who is love that He can pour it through you.

I owe you the same honest word I have owed every reader of everything I have written. I cannot teach you this. A book cannot teach you this. Love is not information, and neither is the life I am about to describe. The only One who can pour the love of God through a person is God Himself, by His own Spirit, from the inside. All I can do is point. I am a man standing by a road, saying look — there it is — that is what you are for. The looking is yours. The becoming is His.

And I am not writing to you from the far end of the road. I am on it, same as you — slow, often dim, a mirror that catches the light and loses it and catches it again. If that is where you are too, then come. We will walk it together.

— Michael Winslow

The Empty Thrones

I have to begin with a sorrow, because the whole story turns on it.

Before there were people, God was not alone. He had made a great household of spirits — beings of fire and light, older than the mountains, present before the earth had a face. The book of Job lets us overhear God remembering it. Where were you, He asks, when I laid the earth's foundation, while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Picture it. The first morning of the physical world, and a whole choir of ancient beings singing because they could not help it, because what they were seeing was so beautiful that song was the only possible answer.

And to some of them God gave a trust. He divided the nations of the earth among them and said, in effect: govern these. Care for them as I would care for them. Defend the weak. Lift up the poor. Do justice. Be, to these people, a little like Me.

They did not.

There is a short, terrible psalm — the eighty-second — where God stands up in the middle of that council and brings the charge against them. How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted; rescue the weak and the needy. They had been handed the most God-like work there is — the lifting of the low, the defending of the helpless — and they had used their power for themselves and let the helpless fall. And so the sentence comes down, and it is the saddest thing in the whole council: I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you — nevertheless, you shall die like men.

You are gods. You shall die like men.

Hear what that leaves behind. Thrones with no one on them. A trust betrayed. Nations without their shepherds. The work of God in the world — the lifting, the defending, the loving of the unlovely — left undone by the ones who were supposed to do it.

The seats are empty.

Now. Keep that emptiness in your mind, because the rest of this book is about who God chose to fill it. And I will tell you now, so you are not in suspense, because the wonder is not in the surprise — the wonder is in the kind of thing God did.

He did not make new and better spirits. He did not promote the angels who had stayed faithful. He reached down into the dirt of a small planet, picked up the youngest and weakest beings in all His creation, breathed His own life into them, and said: these. These will fill the empty thrones. Not because of what they are. Because of what I am going to make them, and Who I am going to put inside them.

He chose us.

Now hear how high that calling is, because you should feel the weight of it before we go on. The seats that stand empty are not small seats. Scripture says the people of God will one day judge the world — and more than the world, that we will judge angels, the very beings who were old when the earth was young. We are being prepared for a governance higher than the ancient sons ever held, a place at the side of the Son of God on His own throne. That is the calling. It is so high that if you let it land on you all at once it should make you a little afraid.

But here is the thing that keeps the height from going to our heads, and you must hold onto it through every page that follows: we are only just beginning. The fallen sons of the council had everything — power, knowledge, ancient glory — and failed the one lesson that mattered. We have almost nothing, and we have only just enrolled. We are first-day students in a school whose subject is the very life of God. The calling is impossibly high, and we are impossibly new at it. Both of those are true at once, and holding them together — the high calling and the beginner's emptiness — is the whole secret of walking this path without falling off it the way the proud ones fell.

He Made You to Carry What He Is

Stay with the strangeness of it. The beings in that council were magnificent — ancient, powerful, blazing with borrowed glory. And when God went looking for the ones who would finally do the council's work rightly, He passed them over and bent down in the mud.

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in Our image, after Our likeness...'" — Genesis 1:26 (NET)

In Our image. He never said that about the angels. He said it about the thing He was making out of clay.

People spend a great deal of time asking what the image is. Is it that we can reason? That we can build? That we can tell right from wrong? Those answers are not wrong, but they are too small, and I think you already know they are too small. Look at the One whose image you bear. At the very bottom of Him, underneath the power and the wisdom and the holiness, there is this: God is love. He is love the way the sun is fire — not a thing He does, a thing He is. And so the truest part of His likeness in you is not your cleverness and not your strength. It is your capacity to love. You were built, before anything else, to carry love — because the One you came from is love, and a likeness is meant to look like the One it came from.

Now I have to give you a word, and I am going to be careful with it, because it is the hinge of this whole book.

There are things about God that He cannot give away. He cannot make you able to hold the universe together. He cannot make you everywhere at once, or all-knowing, or the source of your own existence. Those belong to Him alone, and a made thing can never have them. The old teachers had a name for these: the things God cannot share.

But there are other things — and these are the heart of it. His goodness. His mercy. His wisdom. His patience. His kindness. His love. These He can pour into a made and mortal child, and that child can carry them, can grow full of them, can begin to glow with them the way iron glows when you leave it long enough in a forge. The iron does not become fire. It never stops being iron. But leave it in the forge and it will take the fire's heat and the fire's light into itself until you can barely tell, looking at it, where the iron ends and the fire begins.

That is what you are for. Not to become God — that was the serpent's lie in the garden, and it leads only to death. To become so full of the love of God that it pours through you into a world that is starving for it. The thrones in the council stand empty because the ones who sat there would not let the love of God pour through them. You were made — you were chosen — to be the kind of being who will.

This is the whole thing. Everything else is detail. God is love, and He made you to carry His love into His world, now and forever. Receive that before you read another page. Let it be the ground you stand on.

And now you can see what the school is for. The things God can share — His mercy, His patience, His kindness, His wisdom, His love — these are not gifts He drops into you finished, the way you would hand a child a coin. They are more like a language, or a craft, or a way of moving, that has to be learned — learned slowly, by living it, by failing at it and being corrected and trying again, the way you learn anything that goes deep. That learning is the school. The curriculum is the communicable life of God. And the strange and wonderful thing — the thing no school on earth can offer — is that the Teacher does not stand at the front of the room handing out lessons from a distance. He moves in. He pours the very thing being taught into the student, and teaches it from the inside.

We will come, before the end, to how that learning actually goes — how slow it is, how it cannot be rushed, how the costly parts are not the school failing but the school working. For now, only hold this: you have been enrolled, by grace, in the highest school there is, and the subject is the love that God is, and you are only at the beginning of it, and that is exactly where you are supposed to be.

Come Into the Room

I could define for you what it looks like when the love of God pours through a person. But you do not come to know love by reading its description. You come to know it the way you come to know a person — by being in the room while they love.

So come into a few rooms with me. Watch the love move. We will name it afterward, if we need to name it at all.

Here is the first room. A man is walking a road, and he is half dead in a ditch beside it — beaten, robbed, left to die. Two respectable men pass him; they have somewhere to be. And then a third man comes, a foreigner, a man the dying man's people would have despised, and he stops. He kneels in the dust. He pours out his own oil and his own wine on the wounds. He puts the bleeding stranger on his own animal and walks beside him on foot. He pays, out of his own pocket, for the man's care, and promises to come back and pay whatever more it costs. Jesus told that story, and at the end of it He did not say now you understand mercy. He said, go and do likewise. That is the love. It stops. It kneels. It spends itself on a stranger who can never pay it back. When that love pours through a person, the world gets a Samaritan in a ditch.

Here is another room. A younger son has taken his father's money, spent it on nothing, shamed the family, and come crawling home with a rehearsed apology, hoping only to be taken on as a servant. And while he is still a long way off — still down the road, still rehearsing — the father sees him. And the father, an old man in robes, does the most undignified thing a man of his standing could do: he runs. He runs down the road and throws his arms around the boy and kisses him before the apology can even get out. He does not wait for the explanation. He does not extract the promise. He runs. That is the love. It does not wait at the door with its arms crossed. It runs to meet the one coming home. When that love pours through a person, the prodigal gets a father instead of a verdict.

Here is a harder room. It is evening, in a borrowed upstairs room, the night before everything. The Teacher gets up from the table, takes off His outer robe, ties a towel around His waist like the lowest slave in the house, kneels on the floor, and begins to wash His friends' filthy feet. He washes the feet of the man who, before the night is out, will sell Him for silver. He washes the feet of the man who will swear three times he never knew Him. He knows exactly what they are going to do, and He washes their feet anyway. That is the love. It kneels in front of the one who is about to betray it and serves him with its own hands. When that love pours through a person, the betrayer gets his feet washed.

And here is the last room, the one that holds up all the others. It is a hill outside the city, and the man who told the story of the Samaritan and the story of the running father, the man who washed the traitor's feet, is nailed to a cross and dying in the open air. He is being mocked. He could come down. And what comes out of His mouth, toward the men driving the nails, is this: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. That is the love. At the very bottom of everything it can lose, with nothing left to give, it gives forgiveness to the ones killing it. When that love pours all the way through a person, the executioner gets prayed for.

These are not different loves. They are the one love that God is, shown to you from different sides — the stranger lifted out of the ditch, the son met on the road, the traitor's feet washed clean, the killer forgiven. And here is the thing I most need you to see, the thing this whole book is built to show you: that is the love the empty thrones were waiting for. That is the love the fallen sons of the council would not let pour through them. The lifting of the low. The running toward the lost. The kneeling in front of the unworthy. The forgiving of the guilty. They had the power and would not do it. And God, having watched His council fail to love His world, decided to fill the empty seats with children of clay through whom that love would finally, actually, flow.

You. He decided on you.

The Ones Who Walked Ahead of Us

I told you we are beginners in this school, and that is true. But we are not the first students. And one of the kindest things God has done for us is that He let some who walked this path long ago leave us their notes — a map of the road, drawn by people who went far enough down it to mark where the cliffs are.

I want you to meet a few of them, briefly, not because their names matter but because what they learned will keep you from falling the way the proud spirits fell.

There was a man named Irenaeus, who lived not long after the apostles, in a time when clever teachers were going around saying that the body was a prison and only a special few could become divine by escaping it. Irenaeus saw the danger and said the truest thing: God became what we are, so that He might make us what He is. Sit with that. The whole direction of it is downward first. God did not call us to climb up to Him. He came down to us — all the way down, into a real body, into the dirt and the dying — so that He could lift us by joining us where we are. The high calling does not start with our reaching up. It starts with His reaching down.

But Irenaeus saw the trap waiting in that beautiful truth, and he marked it for us plainly: we become by grace what Christ is by nature. Read those words slowly, because they are the railing on the cliff edge. By grace, not by nature. Christ is God by what He simply is, from forever. We are made godlike by gift — by what is poured into us, by Someone outside us reaching in. We never become the source. We never stop being the ones who received. Irenaeus said it another way too, and it is a comfort to every beginner: this is a growing up, not a changing of species. We do not become a different kind of thing. We become what we always were, finally matured — the way a child does not become some different kind of being when she grows, but becomes, at last, fully herself.

There was another, named Athanasius, who paid for this truth with years of exile. He gave the Church its boldest sentence: He was made man that we might be made God. And people have torn that sentence loose from him ever since and turned it into a lie — into the old garden lie that we can become gods ourselves. So hold what Athanasius actually meant, because it is the difference between the school and the fall. He did not mean we become God by nature, equal to the Maker. He meant we are brought, by grace, into God's own life — made to share in what He is, the way a cold iron bar, left long enough in a forge, comes to share in the fire. The iron glows. It radiates heat. You could almost mistake it for the fire itself. But the iron never becomes fire. It never stops being iron. It only takes the fire's heat and light into itself until the two can barely be told apart. That is what we are being made into — not fire, but iron full of fire. Not God, but a person so full of the life of God that His love pours through them as if it were their own. And it is not their own. It never will be. That is the whole safety of it.

And there was Augustine, who ran from God for half his life and then could not stop writing about Him, and who said the thing that keeps the high calling from ever turning into pride. You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, he prayed, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You. Notice — restless until they rest in Him. Not until they become Him. The whole ache of the human heart, the thing you have felt your whole life and maybe never had words for, is not a longing to be God. It is a longing to come home to Him, to rest in Him, to be filled by Him. The serpent in the garden took that holy longing and twisted it into you will be like God, and it has been the ruin of every proud spirit since. The fathers untwisted it. The longing is real. Its answer is not to climb onto the throne. Its answer is to rest in the arms of the One who sits on it, and let Him pour His life into you there.

That is the map, drawn by people who went ahead. The calling is high — higher than the angels. But the road up is the road down: God came down to us; we are lifted by grace, never by nature; we are made full of God without ever becoming God; and the deepest longing in us is answered not by ascending but by resting in Him and being filled. Keep that map in your pocket. It marks every cliff on the path we are about to walk.

Why It Cannot Be Done by Trying

Now I have to tell you something that will save you years of exhaustion if you will believe it.

You cannot do this by trying.

You have already discovered this, even if you have never said it out loud. You have decided, some morning, to be more patient — and by noon you were short with someone who did not deserve it. You have resolved to forgive someone, really forgive them, and found the resentment still sitting in your chest a week later like a stone you could not lift. You have tried to love a difficult person by sheer will, and managed, at best, a cold politeness that fooled no one, least of all you. The love I showed you in those rooms — the love that kneels and runs and washes feet and forgives its killers — you cannot squeeze that out of yourself by working harder. It is not in you to give. Not on your own.

And this is exactly where so many go wrong with the very truth this book is about. They hear that they are called to fill the council's empty thrones, that they will judge angels, that they carry the image of God — and they hear it as a promotion. They start to strive. They start to climb. They study the hidden things, they chase the spiritual ranks, they try to make themselves into the great beings they have been told they will become. And the striving produces exactly nothing, because the whole thing has been turned upside down.

Listen. There were people, long ago, who tried to climb. They built whole systems for it — secret names to learn, heavenly doors to pass through, passwords for each gate, a long ascent through the levels of heaven until you could stand, at last, in the council yourself. They wanted to arrive at the throne by climbing. And the terrible irony is that the thing they were straining up toward by ladders, God was, all along, willing to simply give — not to the climber, but to the child.

Because here is how it actually works. The love does not get summoned by your effort. It gets poured into you by Another.

"...God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." — Romans 5:5 (NET)

Read that slowly, because it is the most important sentence in this book. The love of God is not a standard you are asked to meet. It is a substance you are given to carry. God does not send you a letter describing how He loves and ask you to imitate it from a distance. He sends His own Spirit — the very love that has passed between the Father and the Son since before the first morning — and pours that love into you, where you live. So that the next time you manage to love someone you genuinely could not love on your own — the difficult parent, the cruel coworker, the one who wronged you and never said sorry — that was not you, scraping the bottom of your thin little barrel. That was His love, the love that was poured in, finding its way back out through you into the world.

This is why the climbers were so badly wrong, and why the children are so quietly right. You do not ascend to carry the love of God. You receive it. You do not earn your way up to the council's empty thrones. You are adopted, by grace, into the family of the One who sits above the council — and the family resemblance grows in you from the inside, by the Spirit, at His pace, in His way, whether you are watching it happen or not.

So if you have been striving — if you have made the high calling of this book into one more weight on your back — put it down. The work is not yours. The pouring is His. Your part is something much smaller and much harder, and I will tell you what it is before the end. But it is not climbing. It was never climbing.

And this is where being a beginner is not a shame but a mercy. A student who thinks he has already arrived stops learning; he defends what he thinks he knows and the lessons stop reaching him. But a student who knows he has only just started stays soft, stays teachable, keeps his hands open. The climbers fell because they thought the school was a ladder and they were near the top. The children rise because they know the school has barely begun and they have everything still to learn. Stay a beginner. It is the safest thing you can be. The moment you think you have graduated from poverty of spirit is the moment you have left the only posture in which the love can keep being poured.

What the Old Sons Lacked, and the Young Sons Have

I want to set two pictures side by side, because the difference between them is the difference between a being who is full of light and a being who is empty.

The first picture is the council, before the fall. Imagine those ancient sons of God at the height of their glory — blazing, knowledgeable, powerful beyond anything you could picture, present at the founding of the world, given charge of the nations. By every measure you would think to use, they had more than you have. More years. More strength. More knowledge. They had watched four billion years of the earth's history. They had governed empires. Next to one of them you and I are a single breath, a flicker, a thing made yesterday out of dust.

And they fell. With all of it — all the power, all the knowledge, all the ancient glory — they fell, because the one thing they would not do was let the love of God pour through them to the weak and the poor and the helpless they had been given to care for. They had everything but the one thing that matters, and so the psalm could say of them, you shall die like men. Power without love dies. Knowledge without love dies. The grandest being in the cosmos, if the love of God does not flow through it, is — and Paul used exactly this word — nothing.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing." — 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 (NET)

The tongues of angels. All knowledge. All mysteries. Mountain-moving faith. And without love — nothing. That is the verdict on the fallen council, written into a letter to a quarreling church, true of the highest spirit and the lowest of us alike. Whatever you have, if the love does not flow through it, you have nothing.

Now the second picture. A frightened, ordinary person — let us be honest and say a person like you, like me — who has nothing the council had. No ancient power. No vast knowledge. No glory of their own. But the Spirit of God has been poured into them, and the love that the council would not carry is moving through them, in small and unspectacular ways. They forgive someone at a kitchen table. They sit with a friend in a grief they cannot fix. They tell the truth when a lie would have been easier and cheaper. They are kind to someone who can do nothing for them in return. Nobody is watching. There is no throne in sight. And yet — do you see it? — that is the council's work, finally being done. That is the lifting of the low and the defending of the weak and the loving of the unlovely that the ancient sons were given and refused. Being done now, in a kitchen, by a child of dust, because the love of God is pouring through.

Here is the whole astonishment of the gospel in one line: the beings who had everything but love were sentenced to die like men, and the beings who are nothing but dust, once love is poured into them, are raised to do the very work the great ones failed at. The last shall be first. The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. The children of dust the proud spirits looked down on become the ones through whom the love of God finally floods back into a starving world.

And not because of anything in us. Never that. Only because of what was poured in. The iron does not glow because iron is special. It glows because it has been held in the forge. Stay in the forge, child. That is nearly the whole of it.

The Cost in the Garden

I have to take you to a hard place now, because I would be lying to you if I let you think this love is only warm. It is not only warm. It costs. And if I send you out believing the love of God pours through people painlessly, like sunshine through a window, I will have set you up to break the first time it asks something real of you.

So come into the worst room of all.

It is night, in a garden, the same night as the towel and the basin. Jesus knows — knows more exactly than any person has ever known anything — what the next hours hold. The betrayal that is already on its way down the road. The whips. The nails. The slow dying in the open air. The hiding of His Father's face, which He has never once been without since before the world began. He knows all of it, in full, in advance.

And He does not want it.

I need you to see this, because people rush past it, and it is the whole heart of the matter. He falls on the ground. He prays.

"My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will." — Matthew 26:39 (NET)

Let this cup pass. He asked. Three times He asked the Father to find some other way. The dread was so heavy that His sweat fell to the ground like drops of blood. Do not let anyone tell you He walked to the cross serene and untouched. He was a man on the ground in the dark, begging for the cup to be taken from Him, because He could see in full what the love was going to cost.

And then — knowing all of it, wanting none of it — He said the words that hold the universe together. Not what I will, but what You will.

That is the love at its true depth. Not a feeling that carried Him pleasantly to the cross. A choice, made on the ground in the dark, against every desire of His own body, for the joy set before Him — and the joy set before Him was you, brought home. He drank the cup He begged to be spared, because the alternative was a world without you in it, and He would not have that.

Now hear why I have brought you here. The love that pours through the children of light is this love. The same grain runs through it. When the love of God moves through you toward a person who is hard to love, it will sometimes feel like the garden. It will ask you to stay when leaving would be easier. To forgive when the wound is still open. To keep loving someone who gives nothing back, through a long season with no visible return. To do the lowly, unseen, costly thing when no one would blame you for walking away. The love that pours through you is cross-shaped, because the One it comes from went to a cross to get to where you are standing.

There is a thing the gardener does to a vine that bears fruit. He does not leave it alone. He cuts it back — prunes it, takes the knife to the living wood — so that it will bear more. And it hurts. Both things are true at once: the cutting hurts, and the cutting is love. So when the love in you costs more than it returns, when the season is dry and the prayers seem to go nowhere and your obedience feels like dying a little — do not read that as proof that something has failed. More often it is the sign that the One who loves you most is doing His most careful work, growing in you the very love He poured in, pressing it into the shape of His Son.

The children of light are not the ones for whom love is easy. They are the ones who have let the costly love keep flowing through them anyway, because they know Whose love it is, and where it is going.

This is the part of the school no one signs up for and everyone must take. The hard lessons are not the school failing. They are the school working. The Teacher is not careless with the knife. He knows exactly what He is growing in you, and the pruning that hurts is the same hand that planted you. When the love costs more than it returns, you are not failing the course. You are in the deepest part of it — the part where the iron is held longest in the forge, the part where you stop loving for what it gives back and start loving the way He loves, because His love has so filled you that it spills even where nothing returns. You did not know, when you enrolled, that the curriculum would cost this much. He knew. And He went first, all the way to a garden in the dark and a cross in the daylight, so that you would never be asked to go anywhere He has not already been.

Sons by Gift, Children by Walking

I want to give you two words now, and the difference between them is the difference between standing still and going somewhere.

The first word is son. The moment you belong to God — the moment His Spirit comes to live in you — you are a son. A daughter. A child of God, fully and immediately, with nothing left to earn. This is not a prize for the advanced. It is a gift at the door. The Spirit Himself, Paul says, bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God — and the witness comes out as a cry you did not manufacture: Abba, Father. That cry is the surest sign there is that you belong. It is not a technique. It is a child, in the dark, knowing whose house they are in. You are a son the instant you are His, and your sonship does not flicker when you fail, because it never rested on your performance in the first place. It rests on His Word, and His Word does not break.

But there is a second word, and it is the one this whole book has been walking toward. The second word is child of light. And that one is not only a gift you receive. It is a walk you take.

"For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober." — 1 Thessalonians 5:5–6 (NET)

Do you hear both halves? You are children of light — that is the gift, already true. So then let us keep awake — that is the walk, still to be taken. You are light, the moment you are His. You become a child of light, day by day, as you let that light actually move through you into the world — as you stay awake to it, walk in it, let it pour out of you in the small unglamorous choices that make up a life.

This is the difference between the empty thrones and the filled ones. The fallen sons of the council had the status. They were sons of God; the psalm calls them exactly that. What they never did was walk — never let the love of God actually flow through them to the people they were given. They kept the title and refused the life. And the title without the life is the saddest thing in the cosmos: you are gods; you shall die like men.

God is not after children who merely hold the title. He is after children who walk in the light — who take what they have been given and let it move, let it pour, let it cost them something, let it reach the ditch and the road and the borrowed upper room. You did nothing to become a son. That was pure gift. But there is something for you to do as a child of light, and it is this: stay where the love is flowing, and let it flow.

That is the walk. Not a climb. Not a striving. A walk — taken one ordinary day at a time, at His side, in His direction, letting the love that was poured in keep finding its way out. There was a man near the beginning of everything named Enoch, and the whole of his life fits in one short line: Enoch walked with God; then he was not, because God took him away. That is the entire biography. Not Enoch achieved great things. Not Enoch ascended to the council. He walked with God — beside Him, year after year, through whatever the years held — until one day the walking and the going home were the same thing. That is the life of a child of light. A walk, taken at His side, that simply keeps going.

Now — In the Kitchen, on the Road, at the Table

I do not want to leave this up in the heavens, because that is exactly the mistake the climbers made. The love of God does not pour through you in some spiritual realm above your actual life. It pours through you here, in the only life you have, on the unremarkable Tuesday you are actually living.

So let me bring it all the way down.

The Lord told us, through the prophet Micah, what He has always wanted — and notice it is not grand, and it is not far away.

"He has told you, O man, what is good, and what the LORD requires of you: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." — Micah 6:8 (NET)

Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly. That is the council's whole work, brought down to the size of a human life. The fallen sons were given the nations and would not do justice for the weak among them. You are given a far smaller territory — your home, your work, your handful of people, your few square feet of the world — and in that territory, the same work is yours, and the same love is poured in to do it.

What does it look like when the love of God pours through you? It looks like this.

It does not look like commanding angels. It looks like forgiving the person who wronged you and never apologized — letting God's mercy, the mercy poured into you, move out through you toward someone who has not earned it. That is the love of the running father, flowing through you.

It does not look like knowing all mysteries. It looks like sitting with a friend in a grief you cannot fix, and not leaving — letting God's nearness, the nearness that wept at a friend's grave, move out through you toward someone in the dark. That is the love of the One who wept, flowing through you.

It does not look like being honored. It looks like doing the lowly thing no one will thank you for — the unseen kindness, the quiet service, the towel and the basin in your own house — letting God's humility move out through you toward someone who can do nothing for you back. That is the love that knelt before the betrayer, flowing through you.

It does not look like seizing power. It looks like telling the truth when a lie would be easier and safer, and refusing to show partiality to the strong against the weak — letting God's justice, the justice the council abandoned, move out through you. That is the love that stooped to the ditch, flowing through you.

None of it is spectacular. None of it would make the news. And all of it, every quiet act of it, is the empty thrones being filled — is the work the great spirits failed at being done at last by children of dust, because the love of God is finally pouring through beings who will not block it. You will not feel cosmic while you do it. You will feel small, and tired, and ordinary. Do it anyway. The branch does not feel the sap moving; it only stays on the vine and bears the fruit. Stay on the vine. Let the love flow. That is the whole of the walk, today.

And I will tell you the strangest part. The more the love pours through you, the less you will feel like a great being and the more you will feel like a child who has nothing of their own — because you will know, with growing certainty, that none of the love was yours. It was all poured in. The people whom God is truly making into children of light do not grow prouder as they go. They grow emptier, lighter, more amazed, more sure that everything good in them came from somewhere else. That emptiness is not failure. It is the surest sign the real thing is happening. The proud spirit, climbing, fills with itself and falls. The poor-in-spirit child, abiding, empties out and shines.

And at the End — The Thrones Filled

Everything so far has been about now. But the love of God pouring through you now is only the first light of a morning that has not fully come. I have to show you the end of it, because the end is what the whole creation is waiting for — and waiting is exactly the word Scripture uses.

"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God." — Romans 8:19 (NET)

The word Paul uses there is the picture of someone craning their neck, straining forward, watching the road for someone they are longing to see. The whole creation — the groaning, broken, beautiful world — is standing on its toes, watching the road, waiting for the children of light to be revealed. Not waiting for its own end. Waiting for you. For the moment when the people in whom the love of God has been quietly pouring all their lives are finally, fully, unmistakably shown for what they are.

Here is what that day holds. The empty thrones of the council — the seats the ancient sons forfeited — will be filled. Not metaphorically. Scripture says it as plainly as it says anything: the Lord's people will judge the world. Do you not know that we will judge angels? The beings who were old when the earth was young, who sang at the foundations and then governed unjustly, will answer to the ones God made from dust and filled with His love. The last will be first, all the way up to the throne of the universe. Those who let the love of God pour through them in kitchens and at gravesides and on hard roads will be given, at the end, the very governance the great spirits failed to keep.

But — and you must hold onto this or you will misunderstand the whole thing — it is not a promotion you climbed to. It is a gift you received, the same gift, only now complete. You do not arrive at the throne by your achievement any more than you arrived at sonship by your effort. You are seated there because you were in Christ, who won it, and who invites you to sit where He sits.

"To the one who is victorious I will give the right to sit with Me on My throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with My Father on His throne." — Revelation 3:21 (NET)

With Me on My throne. Not your throne, earned by your striving. His throne, shared by His grace. The victory was His. The seat is His. You are there because He wanted you there, the way the running father wanted the prodigal at the table — not because you finally measured up, but because He loved.

And what will you actually be, on that day? You will be what you have been becoming all along, only with nothing left to dim it. The iron will have been in the forge so long that it is all light. The love that was poured into you and that you let flow, in your small and costly and unspectacular way, will be the whole substance of you — not occasionally, not when you remember to, but fully, freely, forever, the way it is in God Himself. You will love the way He loves, because His love will have so completely filled you that there is nothing left in you that resists it. The mirror that spun to face the wall in the garden will be turned fully back toward the Light, catching all of it, throwing all of it back. You will, at last, perfectly and forever, look like the One you came from.

That is what you are for. Not in the end instead of now — in the end because of now. The love pouring through you today, weak and intermittent as it feels, is the same love that will blaze through you on that day, complete. The kitchen and the throne are the same story. The towel and the crown are the same love. What begins in you now as a flicker ends in you then as a fire that fills the empty seats of heaven and helps God govern a healed and singing world in justice and mercy forever.

This is the graduation the whole school has been moving toward — though even that word is too small, because you never stop being the student and He never stops being the Teacher and the love never stops deepening. But there is a day when the long apprenticeship in the love of God comes to its flower. The iron that has been in the forge a lifetime is, on that day, all light. Everything you struggled to learn — mercy that did not come naturally, patience that cost you, love poured out where nothing came back — all of it, finally, is simply who you are, the way it has always simply been Who He is. The beginner becomes the thing the lessons were always making. And the high calling that should have made you tremble turns out to have been, all along, the most loving thing God could possibly have offered a child of dust: not a burden, but the slow, patient, costly gift of making you able to love the way He loves, forever.

The morning stars sang at the first creation because it was beautiful and they could not help it. On that day, the children of light — the children of dust the proud spirits looked down on, filled at last to overflowing with the love of God — will join that song. And this time it will not be only the angels singing over a world being made. It will be the redeemed, singing over a world being healed, by the love that poured through them to do it.

The Body That Light Will Wear

I told you in an earlier section about the iron in the forge — how it takes the fire's heat and light into itself until you can barely tell, looking at it, where the iron ends and the fire begins. I want to come back to that image now, because the end of the story is not just that you carry the love of God through you in this life. The end of the story is that the love, poured in long enough, changes the vessel.

Not into something other than what you are. Into what you were always meant to be.

Look at the risen Christ, because He is the prototype — the first one through, the firstfruits of what happens to everyone who is His. He was not a ghost. He ate fish in front of His friends to prove it. He told Thomas to put his hand in the wound. A spirit does not eat; a spirit cannot be touched. This was the same body that had been crucified, real and continuous, the same person raised and transformed.

And yet this same touchable, fish-eating body walked through a locked door. The room was sealed and He was simply there, inside it, without the door being opened. He could be touched and He could pass through walls. Not less embodied than He had been. More — flesh finally freed from every constraint that does not belong to it.

That is what waits for you. Not escape from your body. Your body, freed.

The teachers of the old Church looked at the risen Christ and at what Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15, and they named four things that will be true of the body in the resurrection. I will give you those four things in plain English, because the words they used were Latin and the plain English is more beautiful anyway.

First: it will not decay. The slow running-down that has been at work in your cells since the day you were born — finished. Done with disease, done with diminishment, done with the ache that greets you some mornings before you have even gotten out of bed. Not escaped. Healed, permanently, from the inside.

Second: it will be free in matter the way the risen Christ was free in a locked room. No longer a weight that blocks and is blocked. Moving through the physical world with a freedom your present body has never known.

Third: it will move at the speed of your willing. No more negotiation with gravity and fatigue. Where you intend, you go.

Fourth — and this is the one this whole book has been walking toward — it will shine. Not with light borrowed from outside. With light that comes up from within, the way the sun shines from its own burning. Three of His friends saw the preview on a mountain — His face blazing like the sun, His clothes dazzling white, the glory that had been inside Him all along breaking through the surface for a moment before the veil came back down. That is the preview. The resurrection is when the veil comes down permanently, not just for a moment, for every child of light who stayed on the vine.

The shining is not your own. Hold that, or the whole thing goes wrong. The iron glows because it is in the forge, not because iron is luminous by nature. The child of light shines because the Spirit of the God who is Light has been poured in, and dwelt there, and done His patient work long enough that the glory within finally breaks through the outside. It is still His light. It will always be His light. The glow is the indwelling, made permanent and visible. Take the branch off the vine and it does not shine. It withers. The shining is abiding, carried into forever.

John saw this and wrote it simply: When He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. The likeness is caused by the seeing. The glorified body shines because it finally beholds the One who is Light without any veil between them — and the beholding completes what the Spirit began. Daniel saw it coming from a great distance: those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens. Jesus named it plainly: the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

The shining is the knowing, made visible in a body that can finally hold it all.

The Road That Gets You There

Now I have to tell you something about the road to all of that, because if I leave it out I will have sent you toward the throne by the wrong path, and the wrong path is the oldest error in the story.

The road does not go around the garden. It goes through it.

You remember what happened in the garden the night before the cross. He fell on the ground and prayed — not serenely, not composed, but with His face in the dirt and His sweat falling like blood. Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. He did not want it. He was not pretending when He said that. He was a man on the ground in the dark, begging for another way, because He could see in full what the next hours held.

And then: Not what I will, but what You will.

That is the road. Not the kneeling alone — that would only be suffering. The surrender in the kneeling. The not my will spoken by a person who meant it, in a garden where no one but the angels heard it, for the joy set before Him that was you, brought home. He drank the cup He begged to have taken, and the cross was the result, and the empty tomb was the answer, and the throne was the destination the whole road had been moving toward from the beginning.

And the road He walked is the road He is making His co-heirs walk. Not around the garden. Through it.

Paul will not let you separate the glory from the suffering. He writes them in the same breath: co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory. He joins them with an if that is not a threat but a description. The path to the throne runs through Gethsemane because the King who occupies that throne got there by Gethsemane, and He is forming His children in His own shape.

This is why the charge the old sons of the council were given — defend the weak, maintain the rights of the poor, rescue the needy — was always going to cost the one who carried it faithfully. The fallen ones would not pay the cost. They ruled from above, at no expense to themselves, and their costless rule became cruelty. The Son of God ruled from below, at infinite expense, and His costly rule became the cross that splits history in two.

And the children of light being prepared for the empty thrones are being prepared the same way. Not by studying the council. By doing, now, in the small and ordinary territory they have been given, what the council refused to do: defending the weak when it costs them, telling the truth when a lie would be cheaper, loving the unlovely at real expense, carrying the suffering of those around them without dropping it when it gets heavy. Every one of those small acts is training. Not for a distant future. For the regency already underway — already, now, in the kitchen, on the road, at the table — being practiced by people who do not know yet how much they are being formed.

You will not feel cosmic while you do it. The Son of God in the garden did not feel triumphant. He felt afraid, and He did it anyway, because the love was stronger than the fear.

That is the road. Walk it humbly, and the throne will arrive as gift at the end of it. You cannot strive toward the throne. You can only receive it. But the receiving happens to the ones who have been shaped, on the road, into the kind of being who can be trusted with it — and that shaping looks like a garden, not a coronation.

The proud sons fell because they would not stoop. The children of dust rise because they have learned, slowly, in the ordinary daylight, what it is to kneel.

The One Thing Asked of You

I told you at the beginning that your part in all this is something small and something hard, and that it is not climbing. Now, at the end, I will tell you plainly what it is.

Stay close. Let the love flow. That is all.

The whole of it comes down to one picture Jesus gave His friends on the last night, and I will give it to you the way He gave it to them.

"I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in Me — and I in him — bears much fruit, because apart from Me you can accomplish nothing." — John 15:5 (NET)

A branch does not strain to make grapes. It does not study fruitfulness or climb toward it or work itself into exhaustion trying to produce. It does one thing: it stays on the vine. It remains. And the life of the vine flows up through it, and the fruit comes — not by the branch's effort, but by the branch's connection. Pull the branch off the vine and lay it on the ground and tell it to try harder, and it will produce nothing but dead wood. Leave it on the vine, and it cannot help but bear.

You are the branch. The love of God is the life flowing up from the vine. The fruit — the mercy, the justice, the kindness, the forgiveness, all of it — is the love of God made visible in the world through you. And your one task, the only thing finally asked of you, is to remain. To stay connected. To keep returning to Him when you have drifted. To not, in the end, let go.

You will fail at the loving, often. The branch does not have to be a perfect branch. It only has to stay on the vine. When you have been short and cold and selfish — and you will be — the answer is not to strive harder. It is to come back. To remain. To put yourself again where the love can flow into you and out through you. The Christian life is not a climb you might fall off of. It is a connection you keep returning to. Not the absence of failure — Peter failed badly and became the rock. Not the absence of doubt — Thomas doubted and was met. The walk of a child of light is simply this: the refusal to permanently let go. The branch that bends in the storm but does not break away from the vine.

So here is the whole of it, said the way I would say it to you if we were sitting at one table with the evening coming on.

There was a council, and it failed, and the thrones stand empty. And God, who is love, looked at His emptied council and His starving world and did not make new spirits to fix it. He bent down into the dust and made you, and breathed His life into you, and poured His own love into your heart by His Spirit — the very love that runs between the Father and the Son — so that the love the great ones would not carry could finally pour through a child of clay into a world dying for it. He asks you to do nothing grand. He asks you to stay close to Him and let it flow. And when you do — when you forgive at the kitchen table, when you sit in the grief, when you tell the costly truth, when you kneel with the towel — you are not merely being kind. You are filling the empty thrones. You are doing the council's abandoned work. You are becoming, one ordinary day at a time, the thing the whole creation is craning its neck to see.

And one day He will finish what He has begun. The flicker will become the fire. The branch heavy with fruit will be revealed for what it always was. And the children of dust, full at last of the love of God, will sit with the Son on His throne and help Him govern a healed world in the love that poured through them to get there.

There is a word for what abiding in the vine gives you, and it is the most important word in the book. Jesus spoke it the night He gave His friends the vine image, and it is the sentence that holds up everything — the walk now, the shining body then, the throne at the end:

"Now this is eternal life — that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

Eternal life is not what begins after death. It is the knowing that begins right now, at the vine, in poverty of spirit, in the small daily walk. The glorified body does not receive a different kind of life from the life already given at the vine. It receives the same knowing, made permanent and visible — the same knowing the branch already has, finally unhindered. The shining body is the abiding disciple with the veil lifted. The tree and the fruit are continuous. What you receive now when you remain in Him is what the resurrection will make complete.

So do not imagine that the throne and the shining body and the filled council seats are somewhere far off, a different story from the one you are living today. They are this story, grown to its fullness. The kitchen is the training ground for the throne. The forgiveness at the table is the governance the council refused. The branch that stays on the vine becomes, in the end, the child of light in aevum who shines because the vine's life has finally filled every part of what they are.

That is what you are. That is what you are for. Now, and at the end of all things.

And we are only just beginning. That is not a discouragement. It is the gentlest thing I know to tell you. You do not have to have arrived. You do not have to love perfectly yet, or understand all of it, or be anything other than a first-day student with your hands open and your heart turned toward the Teacher. There was a word spoken to me once, at a moment I did not expect it, in the middle of ordinary work — you are finally starting to get it. Not you have arrived. Not now you understand. You are starting. That is a word for a person still on the road, and it is the truest word I can leave you with, because it is as much for you as it was for me. We are starting to get it. That is all any of us are doing. And it is enough — more than enough — because the One teaching us is not in a hurry, and He is not going to stop.

Stay close. Let it flow. We have only just begun, and that is exactly where He wants us.

A Closing Word

I will not pretend I wrote this from above you. I am a branch like you — connected, then drifting, then returning, dim more often than bright, learning the same lesson over and over because I keep forgetting it. Whatever in these pages was warm, it was not from me. I have had to chase kindness my whole life and fall short of it and chase it again, and God is plainly not finished with me. I write to you from the same road, still walking it, still slow.

And I will tell you the same true thing I have told you at the start of everything I write, because it does not change and it is the realest thing I know: this book cannot pour the love of God through you. Only God can do that, by His Spirit, from the inside. All these pages have done is point. The looking was yours. The becoming is His. If anything here did any good, it was only because the One who is love was already at work in you, and these words happened to be standing nearby when He did His work.

To Him be all of it.

A Word About Where This Came From

The Scriptures. Every verse here comes from the NET Bible, set apart from my own words on purpose, so you always know which is which — His word carries a weight mine never will. NET Bible® copyright ©1996–2017 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. Used throughout with gratitude.

The older book, and what became of it. The careful, proving work behind this one is The Sons of God, Volume VII of the Battle of Civilizations series. There was also a longer first version of this book — a research study that traced the high calling through the early Church Fathers in full, with all the sources laid out and every point argued. That study still exists, and if you want the whole scaffolding — the long historical work, the careful proofs, every claim defended at length — it is there for you. But this book is what that study was always trying to become: the room those proofs were meant to open into. I kept from the research only what a person actually needs to walk the path, and let the rest go.

The ones who walked ahead. I am not the first to walk around inside this truth, and the few I named in these pages were chosen because their notes keep a beginner from falling. Irenaeus, who taught that God became what we are to make us what He is — by grace, never by nature — and that this is a growing up, not a changing of kind. Athanasius, who paid in exile for the boldest sentence the Church ever spoke about our calling, and who never once meant by it that we become God ourselves. Augustine, who knew our hearts stay restless until they rest in God, and not until they become Him. Julian of Norwich, who turned the love of God over for decades and came back always to the same answer: love was His meaning. All of these have been in the public hands for centuries, and I am grateful to stand, a beginner, in their company.

And the One who actually does the teaching. I said it at the start and I will say it once more, because it is the truest thing in the book: I cannot pour the love of God through you, and neither can these pages. Only He can, by His own love poured into you by His Spirit, from the inside. If anything here helped, it was only because He was already at work in you, and these words happened to be near.

Michlaude Discipleship Project All of it is free. None of it is mine to sell. For the glory of God alone.

Soli Deo Gloria