"In Christ is Reality" isn't just a name I picked because it sounded good. It's how I'd actually describe my own life, if I had to be honest about it. I want to explain what I mean by that. Then I want to tell you about a season, and later a single afternoon, that made it real to me in a way it hadn't been before.

Here's what I mean..If you are in Christ, then Christ, not your circumstances, not your feelings, not your failures, and not the world's reading about your life, is the most real thing about you. Not the most comforting thing. Not the most inspiring thing. The most real thing. Paul writes, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). That's not devotional language meant to make you feel better on a hard day. It's an ontological claim, a claim about what actually exists. Think about the foundation of a house. You never see it. You walk on the floors, eat dinner, live your whole life up there, and never once look at the concrete underneath you. But if it wasn't there, none of it would be standing. The foundation doesn't need you to remember it. You could forget about it completely and it would still be holding everything up. That's the kind of claim this is. Not "it's true if you feel it enough." It's what's underneath everything else today, whether you thought about it or not.

Most of us live the opposite way around. We let our circumstances define what's real, and we let Christ be the thing we reach for once the "real" stuff gets too heavy. A comfort. A coping mechanism. A nice thought bolted onto a life whose actual substance is made of something else. I understand why. Circumstances are loud. They show up on your bank statement, in your body, in the way people treat you, and in the mirror. Christ, by comparison, can feel quiet. Abstract. Hard to locate on a hard Tuesday.

But Scripture keeps insisting the order runs the other way. "You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). Hidden. Meaning not always visible, not always felt, but no less real for being hidden. Paul goes further in Galatians: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (2:20). He's not describing a nice feeling he has about Jesus. He's describing what he has come to believe is the deepest fact of his own existence, more fundamental than his history, his suffering, his reputation, or his fear.

That's what I mean when I say it: in Christ is reality. Your union with Him isn't a spiritual accessory sitting on top of your real life. It is your real life. The truest thing about you, even on the days it's the hardest thing to feel. Everything else, your job, your body, your mistakes, your achievements, and the story other people tell about you..all of that is real too. But none of it is final. Christ is the deepest layer.

I could leave it there, purely theological, and some of you would nod along and move on with your day. I would have failed you if I did. That phrase was never meant to stay a doctrine you affirm on a Sunday and forget by Tuesday. It's meant to become the air you breathe without thinking about it. For me, that shift started in March of 2020, and it didn't start well.

I caught COVID in the first wave, and I caught it badly. It landed right on the heels of a season at church that had already worn me down through one trial after another. I think the virus just cracked open something that was already close to breaking. For a week, maybe two, I didn't pray. I didn't do anything you'd call godly. I just wanted to be done with church, with ministry, with all of it. Julie was right there next to me the whole time, watching me lie around moodily, half-watching Netflix, completely checked out. I was done.

Then near the end of that two week wilderness, a pastor I hadn't spoken to in years, Manu Cherian, a prophet, reached out. He told me he'd seen me in a dream, sitting next to him. That, to me, was mercy. That was grace, showing up uninvited. I wanted to pour my whole heart out to him, but before I could, he started prophesying, describing exactly what I'd been going through and then speaking over my future, twenty and thirty years out. It brought me to my knees. I was in tears, undone by the fact that God would come looking for me in a backslidden place like that, rather than waiting for me to clean myself up first.

Pastor Manu connected me with another pastor around my own age, Joshua Mathew. I still remember our first real conversation. In the past, whenever I'd talked to a leader my own age, a peer, I'd show up guarded, trying to posture like I had it all together, subtly flexing whatever spiritual maturity I could manage. Not this time. I let my guard down and let Joshua actually speak into my life, and we ended up just sitting with Isaiah 53 together. It was lockdown. Neither of us had anywhere to be. We stayed up the whole night talking about the suffering servant.

Somewhere in that conversation I realized the Christianity I'd been living up to that point had mostly been held together by me. I'd been a Christian since 2009, and I still didn't actually know Jesus the way Scripture reveals Him. What I felt that April was something close to what Martin Luther describes as the breakthrough of the gospel: not new information, but the actual weight of the gospel landing for the first time. I came to the Lord like a child, looking for Christ in pages I'd already read a hundred times. And as I started actually seeing Him there, my life started changing underneath me.

For hours at a time I'd just sit and cry in God's presence, catching the love of Jesus fresh, like I was encountering it for the first time. What undid me wasn't a new fact about God. It was realizing that this Christ, this beautiful, glorious Person, was already in me, and He wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't there to demand I change from the outside. He was there to change me from the inside, the way Calvin describes it: a Savior who saves us from within ourselves, not a slave master issuing orders from outside us. I kept getting changed, over and over, just by His love. The fact that He actually liked me. No striving required. Just Him. That was the first time I knew it instead of believed it: in Christ is reality.

Two years later, in 2022, I got the chance to stand inside a small, unassuming house on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. If that street name means nothing to you, here's why it means everything to me. In April of 1906, a handful of praying believers gathered in that house, ordinary people, nobody famous, nobody with a platform, and the Holy Spirit fell on them in a way that broke open into what became the Azusa Street Revival just days later. Historians call it the cradle of modern Pentecost. Before there was a mission on Azusa Street, before there were headlines calling it "wild scenes" or the birth of a global movement, there was a small house full of people who wanted more of God than the room could apparently hold.

I stood inside that house for thirty minutes. That's the whole of it, on paper. Half an hour. The length of a sitcom episode. Nothing dramatic happened while I stood there. No vision, no voice, nothing I could point to afterward and say, that's the moment it happened. What happened was quieter than that, and I think it's stayed with me precisely because it was quiet.

I wasn't there for a tour. I went there hungry, aware that whatever birthed a movement that has since touched hundreds of millions of lives across the globe didn't start with strategy, platform, or a five-year plan. It started with people in a small room who had nothing to offer God except their desperation and their availability, the same way I'd had nothing to offer two years earlier except a wrecked week and a phone call I didn't see coming. Standing in that same space, something in me recognized this as the real engine behind everything I actually believe. Not achievement. Not visibility. Not even theological precision. The Spirit of God is poured out on ordinary, hungry people in an ordinary room, at the initiative of a God who has always preferred the small and the overlooked as the setting for His biggest moves.

I left that house with a conviction I haven't been able to shake since: that God the Holy Spirit will have priority in my life and in whatever ministry He gives me. Not doctrine about the Spirit. Not correct pneumatology filed away for later reference. Priority. First place. The actual, functioning center of how I plan to live and lead, not a topic I'm prepared to discuss accurately if it comes up.

Nothing about that house was special by the world's measure. It wasn't a cathedral. It wasn't built for what happened there. It was just a house, occupied by ordinary people, until the presence of God became so undeniable inside it that history had to make room for what happened next. That's exactly what happened in a bedroom in 2020 too. Nobody was there to write it down but Julie and God.

I'm not asking you to go find your own Bonnie Brae Street. I'm not asking you to go looking for your own two week wilderness either, though if one finds you, don't waste it. I'm asking you to get hungry, the way I got hungry, for the same Spirit who met me in both places.

Christ in you is not a nice add-on to your real life. He is your real life. Hidden, some days. Quiet, most days. But never less true than whatever your circumstances happen to be shouting at you right now. And He is not content to just be believed in. He wants to be known.

That's what I mean when I say it. In Christ is reality.

So don't just agree with that and move on. Abide in Him. Enjoy Him. Let the same Spirit who undid me on a bedroom floor in 2020, and again in a small room in Los Angeles two years later, keep pressing you deeper into the knowledge of Christ who already lives in you. Not facts about Him. Him.

Give Him first place. Not because He'll leave if you don't. Because that's where the life actually is.