People ask me sometimes what the name of this whole thing actually means. “In Christ is Reality” — is that a slogan? A nice turn of phrase? I want to tell you plainly: it’s not a slogan. It’s the most literal claim I know how to make about my own life, and I want to spend this piece explaining exactly what I mean by it, and then tell you about the thirty minutes that made it something I’d stake everything on rather than just something I believe.

What I Actually Mean When I Say It

Here’s the claim, as plainly as I can put it: if you are in Christ, then Christ — not your circumstances, not your feelings, not your failures, not the world’s read on 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, about what’s actually true of you, underneath whatever your circumstances happen to be saying today.

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 when 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, 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 even 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 now believes to be the deepest fact about his own existence — more fundamental than his history, his suffering, his reputation, or his fear.

That’s what I mean when I say in Christ is reality. I mean that 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, the story other people tell about you — all of that is real too, but it’s not final. It’s not the deepest layer. Christ is the deepest layer. And learning to actually live from that reality, rather than merely believing it exists somewhere above your actual life, has been the entire project of my own walk with God — and it’s the entire reason this ministry exists.

Theology That Has to Become Devotion, or It Isn’t Finished

I want to be honest about something: I could write that section above and leave it purely theological, and some of you would nod along and move on with your day, and I would have failed you. Because “in Christ is reality” was never meant to stay a doctrine you affirm. It’s meant to become the actual air you breathe — something you feel the weight of, not just something you can define correctly on a quiz. And for me, that shift — from believing it to actually being marked by it — happened in a very specific place, on a very specific day, and I want to tell you about it.

Thirty Minutes on Bonnie Brae Street

In 2022, I had 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, an ordinary amount of time, the length of a sitcom episode. But I need you to understand what those thirty minutes actually did to me, because I’ve never fully recovered from them, and I don’t want to.

I wasn’t there for a tour. I wasn’t collecting a story to tell later, though clearly I am telling it now. 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. Standing in that same space, something in me recognized that this — not achievement, not visibility, not even theological precision — was the actual engine of everything I claim to believe. The Spirit of God, 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 don’t know exactly how to describe what happened in me during those thirty minutes without either overstating it or underselling it, so let me just tell you the plain result: I left that house with a burning conviction that has not left me 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.

Why This Connects to Everything I’ve Just Told You About “Reality”

Here’s why I’m telling you both of these things in the same piece, rather than treating them as two separate topics. That house on Bonnie Brae Street is proof, to me, of exactly the claim I made in the first half of this piece — that Christ, present by His Spirit, is more real than the room you’re standing in. 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 reality of God’s presence became so undeniable inside it that history had to make room for what happened next.

That’s the whole claim of this ministry, compressed into one afternoon in Los Angeles: the presence of Christ, by His Spirit, is not a spiritual layer added on top of ordinary life. It is the deepest reality inside ordinary life, waiting to be recognized, contended for, and lived from — in a rented house in 1906, and in your actual living room this week.

What I’m Actually Asking of You

I’m not asking you to go find your own Bonnie Brae Street, though if God ever gives you that gift, take it. I’m asking you to let the same conviction that marked me in that house start marking your ordinary week: that Christ in you is not a nice add-on to your real life. He is your real life — hidden, sometimes quiet, occasionally overwhelming, but never less true than whatever your circumstances happen to be shouting today. That’s what I mean, every time I say it. In Christ is reality. I didn’t just come to believe that in a classroom. I came to know it in a small room in Los Angeles, and I’ve been trying to actually live inside that truth, with the Spirit given first place, ever since.