Just In Case...

Do you have an app on your phone that you have not opened in eleven months. You know this because the notifications are still appearing. And… you also know that you will not delete it. Because what if. What if you need it. You are not holding onto it because it works. You are holding onto it because the next time might be different. The possibility that the next one will be the right one. What if there is a moment six months from now when you remember the app and think, I am glad I kept that.

This is what we do. We keep things just in case.

Supplements you stopped taking eight months ago are still in your cabinet. A prayer journal you let go quiet sits on your desk because you feel guilty about moving it to the shelf. Morning routines you were genuinely consistent with for eighteen days in January (New Year’s resolutions) are technically still in your system. Active. Just... resting.

This is not wisdom. It is not discipline. It is fear. Low-grade, chronic, very well-organized fear. Fear that things might not work out like we want… so we keep the backup warm.

The people of Ephesus had already taken it to a professional level.

The Ancients Perfected This

Ephesus was not a small town. When Paul arrived in Acts 19, he was walking into one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world. The Temple of Artemis was there,  one of the Seven Wonders, but it was not a place you went to surrender. It was a place you went to transact. You brought an offering. You expected something back. That was the deal. And Ephesus ran on magic.

The magic scrolls were real. Historians have found them. Papyrus sheets covered in incantations, names of spirits, step-by-step instructions for bending outcomes in your favor. People paid serious money for them. These were not impulse purchases. These were the productivity systems of the ancient world. The last formula might not have had the right name. The next one might. Power was always one scroll away.

We have traded the magic scrolls for apps, algorithms, and planning... but the desire underneath has not changed. We still want something that gives us leverage. Something we can manage, update, and run when things feel out of control. The specific technology is different. But that is about all that is.

The danger is not that we hate Jesus. The danger is quieter and more familiar than that. It is that we learn to use Him like a technique. Put His name on our system. Invoke it when needed. File it under spiritual practices. And never quite surrender to the one we keep invoking.

Who Are You?

The sons of Sceva thought they had found the formula. There were seven of them, Jewish exorcists, already in the business of invoking powerful names. They had watched Paul. They had seen what happened when he used the name of Jesus. So they tried it.

"I command you by the Jesus that Paul preaches." – Acts 19:13

That sentence should stop us cold. Not "the Jesus I know." Not "the Jesus I belong to." The Jesus that Paul preaches. They had heard the testimonies. They had watched the power work through someone else. And they drew the obvious conclusion: the name was the mechanism. You could borrow it. You did not have to actually know Him to use it.

The spirit answered: "I know Jesus, and I recognize Paul, but who are you?" And then the man jumped on all seven of them, and they fled into the street, naked and bleeding. – Acts 19:15-16

The temptation is: power without surrender… In what ways am I invoking the name of Jesus without actually surrendering to Him?

We invoke His name for social credibility. So people in the room think well of us. We invoke His name in arguments, to settle the conversation, to be the one who has spiritual authority on his side. We invoke His name to manage our image, adjusted when the picture starts slipping. We invoke His name to avoid Him. We keep enough Christianity in the weekly rotation that it never becomes urgent. We name Jesus and call it a relationship while keeping everything we actually care about under our own management. We invoke His name when the prayer request needs to go up, when we want God to ratify what we already decided.

The bitterness we are calling discernment. Lust. Filed under stress relief. Anxiety that has learned to call itself planning. The control we are performing as stewardship. The avoidance we are marketing as rest.

We are on every list. This is not accusation. It is a mirror.

Some of us are not even invoking anymore. We have been in the hallway for years... orienting, preparing, getting ready for something we keep postponing going through the door.. Waiting to be more ready. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting until the doubt clears or the circumstances settle or the feeling comes back.

But the gospel is not He is coming. It is He is here. That does not ask for preparation. It asks for reception.

Exposure without grace and we look for an exit. Exposure with grace is the long walk home, and it does not always feel like grace getting there.

What They Burned

The name of Jesus became magnified through the Sons of Sceva. So much so that BELIEVERS (read that word again) brought their magic books, scrolls, etc. and burned them in front of everyone. – Acts 19:19. 

The name of Jesus became so esteemed that these other things lost their value. Burn them all.

The call here is not: empty your hands so Jesus will love you. That is performance religion in a different costume. Same management project. More spiritual vocabulary.

The call is this. Because His hands were pierced for you, your hands can finally open. Not to earn Him. Because you have Him. The believers in Ephesus who dragged their scrolls into the square had not just heard a moral argument for burning books. They had encountered the living Jesus, and the scrolls could not survive that. You cannot hold Jesus with one hand and keep the backup system warm with the other. Not because of a rule. Because there is not room.

The total value of what they burned was fifty thousand pieces of silver. ~$10 Million! Costly surrender.

That is multiple lifetimes of ordinary wages. These were not cheap habit books. These were serious investments. Things people had saved for. Things they had built their routines and their lives around. They did not sell the books. They burned them.

They did not sell them.

Think about why. Selling is practical. Selling is what you do when you want to move on responsibly. You clear out the cabinet, list it, someone else benefits, you feel tidy about the whole arrangement. But you do not sell something you are trying to sever from. Selling it means it continues. It goes into someone else's hands and keeps doing exactly what it was doing. They burned them because some things cannot be repurposed. Some things have to die.

What does it feel like to hold something you are about to burn?

I think I know something about that moment. When the thing you have been holding stops helping you and starts protecting you from something you actually need. When God starts pressing into the space you have been guarding, and you feel your grip tighten. When you realize that you have been holding this so long that your hand has taken its shape. When you realize the anxiety has become the thing that kept you feeling like you had some say in how it went, and without it, you would actually have to trust someone else with the marriage, the job, the diagnosis, the thing you have been managing. When the morning routine has become the thing you run to instead of the one it was supposed to point you toward.

Standing there with the scroll in your hands. Fire already going. Knowing what the moment is asking of you.

What are we still keeping just in case Jesus is not enough? What do we reach for when fear hits, when the diagnosis comes back, when the marriage starts straining, when the plan falls apart? What do we protect when God starts pressing into the places we have kept off the table? What is still folded in the back pocket, warm and ready, just in case?

The bonfire was still burning.

Before you can do this, you need to know that He did it first.

In the garden, Jesus held something He did not want to release. And He said... not my will. But yours. He went to the cross with open hands. Stripped of everything. Emptied. And the Father raised Him.

That is the ground underneath all of this. Surrender to God does not end in loss. He proved it. So when God asks you to open your hands, you are not leaping into nothing. You are stepping into what Jesus already walked.

God will show you Jesus until your hands open. Not a command. Not a deadline... just the living God, patient, showing you what you have in Him until the thing you are holding loses its grip on you.

I keep thinking about those believers standing at the fire. The moment before they let go. That decision happening somewhere below the level of thought, in the part of you where you have to decide whether you actually believe what you say you believe.

This article is drawn from the sixth sermon in the Acts: The Church Unleashed series at Red River Baptist Church, The Fire That Empties Your Hands, Acts 19:1-20