Conversation with Kyle Worley

Yeah, I mean, I think I love that story and I love how you highlighted that your youth leader helped you go on this journey of being even more vulnerable and like understanding how really deep and wide and vast God's love is even in the middle of your story.

I wonder, like, what do you think is a big misconception that I think people have about that journey? Whenever you actually as a youth leader, like taking someone through that journey, like really discipleship and forming someone.

Yeah, I really I think I think I was under the impression that the Christian faith was all about how strong my belief in obedience was.

I really thought that a lot of it, even though I would have been able to say, oh, I was saved by grace, nothing I could have done.

I thought living the Christian life was really about how faithful I could be.

And gosh, God's word does call us to faithfulness.

It calls us to obedience and we want to pursue obedience.

But really, the foundation and the heights of the Christian life is not our faithfulness.

It's God's faithfulness.

This is the very idea of covenant love, that when we're faithless, God is still faithful and that God is faithful to bring to completion everything that he begins in you.

The beginning and the end of the Christian life is really rooted in God's faithfulness to keep his promises in Christ.

And he does keep those promises.

I thought that I had to do a great job of managing a Christian persona when really God's fundamental invitation for the beginning and all the way through the journey and the end of the Christian life is not kind of manufacturing an image of what it means to be a Christian, but receiving a fresh everyday God's never stopping love in Christ.

Right.

And a big turning point for me was I had been a Christian for a number of years.

This was really late high school, early college.

I began to study the book of Ephesians.

And the emphasis on Ephesians is not Christ and me.

The emphasis in Ephesians is that I'm in Christ.

That's what theologians call a union with Christ.

Right.

And this really changed the way that I thought about how God's relationship with me.

I really thought that prior to this, God's relationship with me was he'll be really proud of me if I do good things.

The foundation of my life with him is love, but my ongoing relationship with God is really just rooted in my obedience and my faithfulness.

God's word is really clear again and again and again that the foundation of the house that we've been given in Christ is the faithfulness and the promises of God.