Just In Case...

Do you have an app on your phone you haven’t opened in eleven months? You know it’s still there because the notifications keep showing up. And you also know you’re not going to delete it. Because what if. What if you need it someday. You’re not holding onto it because it works — you gave up on that a long time ago. You’re holding onto it because the next time might be different, because maybe this next one will finally be the right one.

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

The supplements you stopped taking eight months ago are still in the cabinet. The prayer journal you let go quiet sits on the desk, because moving it to the shelf feels like admitting something. The morning routine you were genuinely, actually consistent with for eighteen whole days back in January — that one’s still technically active in your system. Not canceled. Just… resting.

That’s not wisdom. It’s not discipline either, no matter how organized it looks on the outside. It’s fear. Low-grade, chronic, extremely well-managed fear. Fear that things might not go the way we want, so we keep the backup warm, just in case.

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

The Ancients Perfected This

Ephesus wasn’t some small town you passed through. When Paul walked into it in Acts 19, he was stepping into one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world. The Temple of Artemis stood there, one of the Seven Wonders, and it wasn’t a place people went to surrender anything. It was a place you went to transact. You brought an offering, you expected a return. That was the arrangement. Ephesus ran on magic, and it ran well.

The scrolls were real, by the way. 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 these, and I mean serious. This wasn’t an impulse buy. It was the productivity system of the ancient world. Maybe the last formula didn’t have quite the right name in it. Maybe the next one would. Power was always one scroll away, so you kept buying scrolls.

We’ve traded the scrolls for apps and algorithms and five-year plans, but underneath, the wanting hasn’t moved an inch. We still want leverage. Something we can manage and update and run whenever life starts slipping out of our hands. The technology changed. That’s about the only thing that did.

Here’s the danger, and it’s quieter than you’d think. It isn’t that we hate Jesus. It’s that we learn to use Him like a technique. Put His name on the system. Invoke it when needed. File it under spiritual practices, right there next to the meditation app and the gratitude journal, and never actually surrender to the one we keep invoking.

Who Are You?

The sons of Sceva thought they’d cracked the formula. There were seven of them — Jewish exorcists, already in the business of throwing around powerful names for a living. They’d watched Paul work. They’d seen what happened when he used the name of Jesus. So naturally, they tried it themselves.

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

Sit with that sentence for a second, because it should stop you cold. Not “the Jesus I know.” Not “the Jesus I belong to.” The Jesus that Paul preaches. They’d heard the testimonies. They’d watched the power move through somebody else’s mouth, and they drew what seemed like the obvious conclusion — the name itself was the mechanism. You could borrow it. You didn’t actually have to know the man to use his name.

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

Power without surrender. That’s the temptation, dressed up in whatever century you happen to live in. So ask yourself honestly — in what ways am I invoking the name of Jesus without actually surrendering to Him?

We invoke His name for social credibility, so the people in the room think well of us. We invoke it in arguments to settle the conversation, to be the one who gets to claim spiritual authority. We invoke it to manage our image, adjusting the presentation whenever the picture starts to slip. And sometimes, quietly, we invoke His name to avoid Him — we keep just enough Christianity in the weekly rotation that it never becomes urgent, never becomes personal. We name Jesus and call that a relationship, all while keeping everything we actually care about under our own management. We invoke His name when the prayer request needs to go up on the list, mostly hoping God will ratify the plan we already made without Him.

The bitterness we’re calling discernment. The lust filed under stress relief. The anxiety that’s learned to introduce itself as planning. The control we’ve rebranded as stewardship. The avoidance we’re marketing, even to ourselves, as rest.

We’re on every one of these lists. I’m not saying that to accuse you. I’m holding up a mirror, and honestly, I see myself in it too.

Some of us aren’t even bothering to invoke anymore. We’ve been standing in the hallway for years — orienting, preparing, getting ready for something, but never quite walking through the door. Waiting to feel more ready. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting until the doubt clears, or the circumstances settle, or the old feeling finally comes back.

But here’s the thing the gospel actually says. It isn’t, He is coming. It’s He is here. That doesn’t ask you to prepare for anything. It asks you to receive.

Exposure without grace, and we go looking for the exit. Exposure with grace is the long walk home — and I’ll be honest, it doesn’t always feel like grace while you’re walking it.

What They Burned

The name of Jesus was magnified through the sons of Sceva to the point that believers — and read that word again, believers — brought their magic books and scrolls and burned them in front of everyone. Acts 19:19.

The name of Jesus had become so esteemed that everything else simply lost its value. So they burned it. All of it.

Now, the call here isn’t “empty your hands so Jesus will love you.” That’s performance religion wearing a different costume. Same management project, just with more spiritual vocabulary attached to it.

Here’s the actual call. Because His hands were pierced for you, your hands can finally open. Not to earn Him. Because you already have Him. The believers in Ephesus who dragged their scrolls into the square hadn’t just heard a good moral argument for burning books. They’d encountered the living Jesus, and the scrolls simply could not survive that encounter. You cannot hold Jesus with one hand and keep the backup system warm in the other. Not because of some rule. Because there isn’t room.

The total value of what they burned came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. Something like ten million dollars in today’s terms. Costly surrender, and I don’t think we say that phrase carefully enough anymore.

That’s multiple lifetimes of ordinary wages, gone up in smoke. These weren’t cheap habit books picked up on a whim. People had saved for these. Built entire routines and, in some cases, entire lives around them. And they didn’t sell them. They burned them.

They didn’t sell them.

Think about why for a second. Selling is practical. Selling is what you do when you want to move on responsibly — you clear out the cabinet, you list it, somebody else benefits, and you feel tidy about the whole arrangement afterward. But you don’t sell something you’re actually trying to sever yourself from. Selling it means it just continues somewhere else, in somebody else’s hands, doing exactly what it was always doing. They burned them because some things can’t be repurposed. Some things simply have to die.

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

I think I know a little about that moment, honestly. When the thing you’ve been holding stops helping you and starts protecting you from something you actually need to face. When God starts pressing into the space you’ve been guarding for years, and you feel your own grip tighten in response. When you realize you’ve been holding on so long your hand has literally taken its shape. When the anxiety becomes the thing that let you feel like you still had some say in how it all turned out, and without it you’d have to actually trust someone else with the marriage, the job, the diagnosis — the thing you’ve been quietly managing on your own. When the morning routine becomes the thing you run to, instead of the God it was always supposed to point you toward.

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

So — what are you still keeping just in case Jesus isn’t enough? What do you reach for when fear hits, when the diagnosis comes back, when the marriage starts straining at the seams, when the plan falls apart on a Tuesday you didn’t see coming? What do you protect when God starts pressing into the places you’ve kept off the table? What’s still folded in the back pocket, warm and ready, just in case?

The bonfire was still burning.

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

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

That’s the ground underneath all of this. Surrender to God does not end in loss. He proved it already, once, for good. So when God asks you to open your hands, you’re not leaping into nothing. You’re stepping into ground Jesus already walked.

God will keep showing you Jesus until your hands open. That’s not a command, and it’s not a deadline. It’s just the living God, patient as ever, showing you what you already have in Him until the thing you’re holding finally loses its grip on you.

I keep thinking about those believers standing at the fire. The moment right before they let go of everything. That decision happening somewhere below the level of thought, in the part of you where you finally have to decide whether you actually believe what you’ve been saying you believe all along.

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