Hope Blog

▶ 1:02:20

This message closed out a two-week micro series Matt and Mark Proeger had planned
together on purpose. Mark’s week had made the positive case — co-laboring with Jesus as joy and
honor rather than burdensome chore — and Matt wanted that framing locked in before he handed the
church four specific challenges. “God’s callings and requests of us are not intended to bring
about a burdensome drudgery and death,” he said. “Just the opposite.” Ask Paul, after the
shipwrecks and the stonings, whether he would do it again. Not one regret.

The frame: stubborn about grace

▶ 1:04:48

Salvation from death, eternal life, favor with God, the spirit of sonship — all of it by
believing the gospel, not the gospel plus our works and gifts. And yet, Matt pointed out, there
are believers who deep down think their tithes and long prayers are quietly purchasing something,
and others who think the same effort buys the baptism of the Spirit or miracles. It is nonsense,
and it never becomes beginner material we graduate from. “There’s no sense in which we’re going
to get to a point in our Christian walk where that becomes the boring easy stuff.”

▶ 1:07:08

The standing temptation is to re-read the Bible as a rulebook — don’t eat this, do wear that.
Jesus named that failure directly: “You
search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life… yet you refuse to
come to me.” Legalism can also arrive through the back door, and Matt called that version
what it is — passive aggression dressed as discipleship. If a culture repeats “a real believer
would do this particular thing” long enough, the church will pay lip service to grace while
believing something else entirely.

What God’s discipline is actually like

▶ 1:09:20

Matt conceded the instinctive flinch — some people’s reproof really is terrible, so the word
arrives carrying other people’s baggage. So he went looking for how Jesus actually handed out
assignments. Ten lepers are told “Go
and show yourselves to the priests,” and as they went, they were cleansed. No threat attached,
no probation. “That’s the filter some of us put on God’s disciplines,” Matt said, “where he’s just
waiting to roast you, and he’s always looking for an opportunity for you to fail. Every new request
is a new chance for him to push that button he’s really longing to push.”

On paper it reads as a command dropped on a man in the middle of a long sob story. In fact it
is the whole rescue in five words. Same with
Naaman
sent to the Jordan, and with
Peter
told “Come” — not a put-down but an invitation to stand on water beside Jesus. This is what
Ephesians
2:8–10 is doing when it puts “not a result of works” and “created in Christ Jesus for good
works” in the same breath: not a sin-forgiveness program, but a Father who wants his children
healthy.

▶ 1:15:30

He told his own version. A year or two back he was stuck in a compulsive news-and-politics
habit he did not even enjoy, had prayed about it, and was still doing it. A sister in Christ
brought him a prophetic word in the form of a challenge — “metaphorically speaking she took a
spiritual shotgun and just blew this thing off me.” He has been free of it since, with the hours
going to books and his kids. Then in prayer he sensed that it was not only for him.

1. Don’t intellectualize the faith

▶ 1:19:19

Hope is a room full of smart people, and Matt has no quarrel with that — “it’s fine to be a
nerd, I love it.” The quarrel is with a faith that lives only in the realm of ideas. No one is
closer to the kingdom for having a bigger brain, and searching the Scriptures without coming to
Jesus does nothing. “How can I obey you, Lord?” should not induce panic. It is, in his words, the
dynamic equivalent of asking what death and boredom you can trade in for wonder.

He is gentle and lowly in heart — not just on his good days, and not as a
bait-and-switch where the chores get loaded on later like a frog in a warming pot. Obeying human
masters is genuinely awful; we lay heavy burdens on each other without lifting a finger to help.
Jesus is not that. Where this bites is personal: ask him where your own boredom could become honor.
Matt got bored of reading books about healing and went with friends to pray for people instead —
not because God was short-staffed. “The Lord doesn’t need you out there. He’s not struggling. But
you can join him.”

2. We battle — but not against flesh and blood

▶ 1:23:32

Two ditches, and Matt marked both. One is the physicalist ditch — nothing exists beyond what
you can see. The other is the freak-out: your car wouldn’t start, so that’s a demon. He was
sharpest about the third error, the formula. “I have been told by people, say this prayer, it
works — it works better if you say it in Latin. Bro, this is not Hogwarts.” These are God’s
enemies before they are ours, and he is the victor.

“Do
not be anxious about anything” is not naïveté; it is permission to stop scanning the bushes.
And there is one opponent no one overcomes: God
opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Walk humbly, take refuge, make your cares
known.

3. Giving

▶ 1:26:18

Matt admitted he was nervous about this one and did not want it to sound self-serving, then
gave the actual numbers. Over two years Hope lost three families and gained about ten — and giving
went backwards anyway. He does not know why; possibly inflation, possibly three congregational
meetings in a row where the finances looked strong. He does not check who gives, or how much, and
doubts Sharon, the business administrator, would tell him if he asked.

So Hope has been dipping into savings, deliberately, because the priority is as much ministry
as possible: Andy hired, Wes brought on full time, the Lighthouse redone. Anyone who wants to track
it can read the back of the bulletin — the paper one, this week with a bird on it. “My commitment
to you is that even if I have to take a second job, we’re going to keep preaching.”

▶ 1:29:12

Then the theology, carefully. We are not under the law, Torah included, so no one should carry
a legalistic burden about a particular number — though he noted the funny overcorrection of people
who will give nine percent or eleven, anything but ten. “You don’t even want to be legalistic in
your anti-legalism.” Nor can you build a rule from the New Testament: Jesus told one wealthy man
to sell
everything, but plainly did not say it to the wealthy women funding his ministry, or there
would have been no money bag for Judas to keep. Paul took money from churches, passed money to
other churches, and worked as a tentmaker
(Acts
18:3–5) — until Silas and Timothy arrived and he devoted himself exclusively to preaching.

The challenge, then, is not an amount but participation. When
the
widow put in two copper coins, Jesus did not call it a shame that it wasn’t more; he said she
gave more than everyone. What Matt does not want is a church quietly deciding to let the big
donors cover it — which disrespects the givers and the rest of us at the same time.

4. Investing in our fellowship

▶ 1:34:08

COVID left the church some strange habits, and the one Matt named is television church becoming
normal for whole families. He started by conceding the point the Bible does not make: it never says
“go to church,” and the phrase barely means anything anyway — he used to go to a mosque to meet
Muslims and pray for them.

That is not a duty to be discharged by showing up and checking a box to keep the Lord off your
back. It is how believers keep each other from drifting out of the faith. Which reframes the
familiar complaint — I dropped out of church and nobody called me. Matt’s concern is what
came three or four layers before that: who were you mentoring, who was mentoring you, where were
you serving? Not chores. God
places the lonely in families, and Jesus promised a hundredfold in houses, brothers, sisters,
mothers and children to anyone who left them for his sake
(Matthew
19:29).

▶ 1:38:16

Hope, he said flatly, is the kind of church that will move your sofa, collect you from the
airport at a terrible hour, watch your dog, and knock the sense back into you with an unexpected
prophetic word. He knows this by experience. “But if you’re not experiencing that, maybe it’s
because you’re not known yet — and that’s on all of us old-timers.” Being known takes bravery,
which is the whole reason for small groups and game nights and sandwiches. On mentoring he passed
along a board member’s correction: the younger among us are waiting for the older to take the
initiative, the way adults always did when we were children. Ask instead. There are wise people
here who see something in you and don’t want to presume. He floated speed dating for mentors, three
minutes a head, and cheerfully took ownership of the idea in case the room hated it.

Fellowship is something you can devote yourself to — and something you can avoid by arriving
late, leaving early, and talking to no one.

The part about the live stream

▶ 1:43:45

Use it if you are contagious, out of town, reviewing something, or curious about Christianity
and not ready to walk in — Matt remembered being terrified the first time he set foot in a mosque.
What it cannot do is fellowship for you. And here he turned the quality of Hope’s stream into the
problem: after an injury he skips the pain medication for a while, because pain tells him which
foot not to step on. “The quality of our stream is so good it might cover up with sweetness the
pain that we should be feeling.” The people that pain should be pointing to are the homebound, who
would be here if they could. His conscience is pricked about merely sending them a link. Andrea
Edwards has already come to him about assembling mobile ministry teams — because Frank cannot make
every pastoral visit, and Matt cannot call people he has never met.

▶ 1:46:53

“If you’re isolated and you suffer from all the same things we do — loneliness, depression,
discouragement — please tell us. We want to hear from you.” The board’s email and his own are on
hope.org. His stated goal is measurable in its way: raise the average number of other Hopeites each
Hopeite actually knows. Pastoral care, hospitality, the prophetic voice, acts of service — all of
it is on purpose, all of it is the body.

And every bit of it, start to finish, stands on the blood of Jesus. Nobody purchases more of the
Holy Spirit by tithing again or by attending in person. “There’s this huge bounty in front of us,
and when God says a challenge like ‘hey, don’t hold back, eat of the feast’ — you’ll find that’s
the kind of chore you’re really glad to engage in.”

▶ 1:15:29

Mark opened by admitting he was carrying a sense of urgency into the morning, and that the service had already confirmed it before he stood up — the worship, and then person after person coming forward with the same message about running to God. He has followed Jesus for forty-five years, forty-one of them at Hope Chapel, in a seat he could still point to.

The family who ate in their room

▶ 1:18:03

The title comes from a single verse: “For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building” (1 Corinthians 3:9).

Then the story. A poor European family saves for years to buy passage to America, and every evening while the other passengers go down to the dining room, they stay in their cabin eating the meager rations they packed. The night before landfall the father dresses the family in their best and takes them to dinner, money in hand. The captain looks confused. Meals were included in the price of the ticket.

“A lot of Christians come to Christ, they experience salvation, and they think that’s it,” Mark said. “They think that’s the end, and it’s just the beginning.” The rest of the message was an argument that there is far more included in what God did in Jesus than the rescue.

Faith, works, and which one comes first

▶ 1:21:09

Centuries of theologians have argued over faith and works, and Mark cut it short: Paul says salvation comes by faith, and James says he will show you his faith by his works — not to earn anything, but as the result of it. He described a Muslim friend in Africa, a devout man whose son had memorized much of the Quran, who was horrified by the idea. In that framework you stand before God, your works are weighed, and you hope the good outweighs the bad — and even then several other things have to go right. Salvation stays uncertain. “That’s not the faith that we were invited into in Christ.”

His test for the difference is ordinary love: if you know someone loves you, you do not serve them to earn it. The serving comes out of the love.

You are the light of the world

▶ 1:23:59

He had the room turn and say it to a neighbor, then named the discomfort: Jesus also says “I am the light of the world.” Both are true, and the second is why the first is. It is not meant to inflate anyone. It is meant to humble you — that he would say it at all. Mark had written the thought down at the memorial of a good man, Cotton H., after hearing his brother put the two verses side by side.

A quick tour of people who worked with God

▶ 1:28:44

Noah believed God and built a boat for years, and humanity survived. Abram was called out of Haran to a land he had not seen, and believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Daniel kept doing the right thing under one empire after another and ended up in the lions’ den — and Mark noted, honestly, that we do not know whether those lions were docile or growling all night. We only know he came out unharmed.

Then the question the crowd put to Jesus, and the answer that reframes the whole argument:

That only sounds like a contradiction. “When you believe, you’re willing to build a boat that takes you years and years to build in order to save humanity. When you believe, you’re willing to leave your family and go to a land that the Lord is going to show you.” Belief is the work that walks. Which led to a question worth sitting with: what if our lives are measured by how many different ways we believed God?

▶ 1:31:13

Elijah calling down fire is one of the wildest acts of faith in scripture — one man against the prophets of a god the whole culture had accepted. And then:

Scripture does not present him as an unreachable standard. It says he was like us.

Gideon in the winepress

▶ 1:33:11

Israel had been so thoroughly beaten down by Midian that they were living in caves and mountain dens, and their crops were stripped bare each harvest (Judges 6:1–6). When they finally cried out, God sent an unnamed prophet — Mark pointed out he had never noticed the omission before — who did nothing but rehearse their history back to them: I brought you up from Egypt, I delivered you, I gave you their land, and you have not obeyed my voice (Judges 6:7–10). The emphasis falls entirely on what God did.

▶ 1:36:34

Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding from raiders. Mark noted that most theologians read “the angel of the Lord” here as a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ — and if so, there is no one in the universe who could say that sentence with more authority. Gideon’s reply was not exactly faith: if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened, and where are the wonders our fathers told us about (Judges 6:13)? He believed what God had done. He did not believe God would do it now.

“I believe you can, but will you?”

▶ 1:37:57

Here Mark moved his own story forward from the end of the message, because it was Gideon’s line. He and Cessie were praying about something good and well outside their budget. One morning he sensed the question: do you believe I can provide that money? His answer was Gideon’s — yes, I believe you can, but will you? Do I matter enough?

He grew up without a father, and his mother taught the children a promise she repeated for years: God is a husband to the husbandless and a father to the fatherless. Early on she told people about their needs; then she became convinced she should stop asking and simply trust God, and instead let her children in on what happened. An electric bill of about sixty-three dollars was days from cutting the power off — no credit card, no fallback — and a cashier’s check for sixty-five arrived in the mail from someone who never identified themselves. “That might be the best thing my mom did as a mother,” he said. She also made a point of telling people afterward who had provided.

So the week he asked his question, the answers came in a run: a guest at the RV park he runs paid him eighty dollars to walk a dog; a man he had consulted for years earlier called about land in Brenham and paid three hundred seventy-five for a look; someone he drives to Dallas for medical care handed him two hundred for sixty-five dollars of gas. It has not stopped since November, he keeps a spreadsheet, and it cannot be explained as budget slack because the budget is spoken for. He also said plainly, twice, that nothing given to him by anyone in the room would be counted toward it.

“Go in this might of yours”

▶ 1:44:49

What jumped out at Mark was that God did not correct the phrase. He said this might of yours — not because the might originates anywhere but God, but because God has genuinely given Gideon something, and gives us gifts, inclinations and abilities we do not have to pretend away. He cited Bill Johnson’s correction of a prayer he had prayed himself: “Lord, none of me and all of you.” It sounds humble. But why not all of you working through all of me? “We set up these weird false binaries that are just silly.”

When God commissioned Gideon, Gideon turned back to his doubts about himself — who am I, my clan is the weakest. Mark could match him: son of a single mother, poor family. “That doesn’t interest God.” And selling yourself short is not modesty; it is trusting the lies you tell yourself over what God says about you.

▶ 1:48:39

Which cashes out on Monday. You can go to work tomorrow and, maybe for the first time in years, do that work to the glory of God rather than filing Sunday and work in separate drawers. And you are free to pursue the dreams God has actually put in you. When Mark and his family moved to Africa, someone asked whether he just wanted an adventure. He wrestled with it and concluded: yes — and that is how God made him. Doing the thing you enjoy, by his power and for him, is allowed.

He also warned this is not a call to manufacture something heroic. It is the works “which God prepared beforehand.” Some dreams may need laying down; some abilities need growing into; we are all works in progress. And the one we follow into it is not a hired hand — “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11–15). The one who died for you is the one who empowers what he has laid on your heart.

Gideon does go on to strike Midian — with an army God deliberately whittled down to three hundred, so that the glory would be unmistakable, and so those men would spend the rest of their lives saying I was one of the three hundred.

The food you don’t know about

▶ 1:52:33

Mark’s picture of what this feels like was small on purpose. At nineteen, rollerblading home from UT with no money and no financial aid left, a contact lens blew out of his eye. He was annoyed at God about it. Then, getting replacements, he fell into a long conversation with the doctor about Jesus and walked out thinking he would gladly have paid a couple hundred dollars for that conversation. “Those curveballs that seem unfair — maybe God’s got something just right around the corner.”

His closing instruction was as plain as it gets: someone far more important than you wants to meet with you tomorrow, so schedule the time. Then an old-fashioned altar call, done from the seats — hands raised by everyone who wanted to walk this out at a deeper level, himself included — and prayer teams at the front afterward.

▶ 1:12:13

Matt opened on a cold Austin Sunday with a question he said had bothered him since the day he got saved: did I get all my sins forgiven up until that day, and then what? He described the feeling exactly — you go to a website, read a few paragraphs, and hit the prompt asking for two dollars a month to read the rest. “So Jesus is like, all right, I’ll get you going, you’re forgiven till today.” Some kind of pay wall scheme the Lord is working on.

The questions people actually carry

▶ 1:12:46

He told about a family who asked him to talk to a relative going around telling everyone he had not sinned since his conversion. Matt’s first instinct was to ask the man’s wife — except the man was single and lived alone, so the whole account was self-reporting. And then the obvious question: what do we do with all the verses in the New Testament about confessing sins?

The opposite worry is more common. You have walked with Christ thirty or forty years and you feel scummy and crummy. Do you have to become a Christian again? Should you get re-baptized? Matt’s answer is no — you were baptized into Christ. But he took the anxiety seriously, because underneath it is the sense that the initial trial run did not work out and now you are climbing back.

Reading Galatians straight through

▶ 1:15:33

Rather than build an outline, Matt ran the drumbeat of the letter itself, and recommended reading the whole thing in one sitting — fifteen minutes silently, twenty-five out loud, about the length of one chapter of a Brandon Sanderson novel.

Gospel simply means good news. So why the fighting words? Because there is no other salvation, and when the subject is life or death with people you love, you get combative. Paul planted this church; he had relational capital to spend, and he spent it. Some things he will not compromise on even slightly, even for the sake of the relationship.

Titus, Peter, and what “works of the law” meant

▶ 1:17:25

Titus was Greek and was not compelled to be circumcised, despite pressure — and Matt drew attention to the words Paul chose for the people applying it (Galatians 2:3–5): false brothers, who slipped in to spy out our freedom, so that they might bring us into slavery. Paul would not yield for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved.

Then Antioch, where Peter ate with the Gentiles until certain men arrived and he drew back. Barnabas was carried along with him. Matt noted how hard a confrontation with friends is, and that you save it for something that matters — Paul was not smoothing things over, he was stirring the pot on purpose (Galatians 2:11–14). What made it hypocrisy was asking of others exactly what they themselves had just been freed from.

Keeping track of what “works of the law” has meant so far in the letter: circumcision, kosher eating habits, and generally living like a Jew. The common thread is a behavior focus — a zeroing in on what we are doing and not doing.

If there were a way to earn it, he would have told us

▶ 1:19:18

Matt walked through Galatians 2:19–21 — crucified with Christ, no longer I who live — and stopped on the last line: if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. He set that against the logic of the sacrificial system, where the life of the creature is in the blood. Drain the blood and the animal is dead; it gave its life. Jesus shed his blood and gave us his life. If justification, forgiveness, grace and relationship with the Father were available by doing things, God would have given us the instructions. Jesus did die, and it was not for nothing — so there is no stairway.

The one question, asked five ways

▶ 1:21:03

Matt admitted he does not have the guts to preach like that. But he pressed on the detail most readers skate past, in Galatians 3:5: does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Not the initial goosebumps and the confession of sin — the whole ongoing supply. Did you think of Galatians as this Pentecostal a book?

He pushed further into Galatians 3:10: everyone who relies on works of the law is under a curse, because the law demands all of it, not the parts we enjoy. “We don’t just dip our toe in the water when it feels good with some religious zealotry. It always feels good to be hardcore, because it’s a way of being better than other people — and that always feels great.”

The promise came first, and the law could not annul it

▶ 1:22:57

Paul’s human example: nobody annuls or amends a ratified covenant. The promise to Abraham and his offspring — singular, meaning Christ — was ratified 430 years before the law arrived, so the law cannot void it (Galatians 3:15–18). The law is not contrary to the promise; it was the guardian holding everything under sin until faith came, and now that faith has come we are sons of God through faith, baptized into Christ (Galatians 3:21–27).

Which makes the turn back so strange: “Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Galatians 4:9). Matt was careful with the next line about observing days and months and seasons and years (Galatians 4:10) — Paul is not angry that you celebrate Christmas or throw parties. What is deadly is leaning on how proud we are that we do them.

The picture he kept returning to: you lay a foundation of Christ and Christ alone, and then from that point on you start keeping track of everything you do, because obviously that is what God likes — “Jesus got me to level zero, but really I’m going to build the edifice.” The false brothers in Galatians 4:17 make much of you so that you will make much of them. Pride leads us into this.

Freedom, and a Father who is eager

▶ 1:23:58

Here Matt named where the fear actually comes from: not knowing God’s character. We assume he was gracious enough to get us going but is now irritated that we are still weak and vulnerable. Against that he set Luke 12:32 — “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” He wants us free. He wants to be our God and to dwell in our midst.

And then the warning in Galatians 5:2–4: accept circumcision and you are obligated to keep the whole law. Rely on part of it and you must rely on all of it. That applies to a great deal more than circumcision.

The X-Men problem

▶ 1:27:09

This is where the message got specific and funny and uncomfortable. Matt described the ministries built like pyramid schemes — the starter-pack Jesus thing is fine, but if you want to go next level, do I have a commemorative coin for you and a prayer cloth. A book on a good morning routine, another on a good evening routine, and if you do both there is probably more Spirit in your life.

He recounted a famous preacher’s teaching on prayer as a walk through the tabernacle: pray a little and you are in the outer courts, stay focused half an hour and you are on the front steps, quit thinking about your shopping list and you are finally in the sanctuary — and if you get distracted you start all the way back outside. The room was hanging on it. Matt’s point was that the appetite is universal, not the preacher’s alone. How spiritual do you feel after reading your Bible every morning for a week? After a real fast, not the candy kind? After leading someone to Christ — “you’re basically one of the X-Men. There’s the regular Christians, but then there’s the elite X-Men. They meet in private.”

He named the mirage plainly: the me-five-years-from-now who is levitating and glowing, always one miracle away.

Jesus Christ is your prayer life

▶ 1:29:48

“Jesus Christ is your forty-day fast. Jesus Christ is your perfect unbroken prayer life,” Matt said. “Jesus Christ is our VIP access to the Father, period.” Trusting in his sacrifice is what it means to continue on in the Spirit rather than be perfected by the flesh.

He made it concrete with what he does when he lays hands on the sick. He does not audit his prayer life or count the minutes, does not tally the chapters read that week or check whether the tithe landed on exactly ten percent. He remembers that Jesus’ prayer life is very good, and that as high priest in heaven it is an unbroken chain. That is why praying in his name means something more than a signal that we are finished talking — we pray from a place of favor with the Father because of Jesus, and we never advance past that.

The counterfeit is available in bulk, he warned — hundreds of hours of it online, and it feels great in the moment. “But it’ll leave you hung over and wasted. You’ll feel like, again, I’m back at ground level. Yeah, because you didn’t go anywhere, buddy.” The good news is that at ground level zero you were already at the finish line in Christ Jesus.

Paul’s own summary closes it: neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but a new creation, and the only boast left is the cross (Galatians 6:12–15).

Paul could have boasted about apostleship, ancestry, fruitful ministry, fame. “You’re probably not going to get a rap sheet as impressive as Paul, and his only boast is in Jesus. Let’s take a hint.”

Praying for it, for free

▶ 1:34:35

At a sister’s suggestion during worship, Matt had the church stand and pray — for healing, for heart ministry, for the dropping of the dead weight of religious nonsense, and to cut down every ladder to heaven. He asked God to supply the Spirit, work miracles, justify and forgive, and he insisted the congregation stand on the blood of Jesus while asking. Forgiveness, the warmth of relationship, physical healing, prophetic encouragement — “all of it at no cost to you, because of the grace of Jesus Christ. Not because you were such a good boy this week.” Earlier in the service Mandy had made the same point from Acts 4:12: there is salvation in no one else. Heart Ministry teams were available afterward.