Following the Fire of Shavu’ot
There is a trail in Utah called Catherine’s Pass that my husband and I love to hike. It begins near the Alta Ski Area. At about 8,500 ft in elevation, the trailhead begins already high in the mountains.
The following essay is adapted from part one of a two part message series I recently shared at Friends Community Church. It has been revised here for readers beyond that setting, though the heart of the teaching remains the same.
There is a trail in Utah called Catherine’s Pass that my husband and I love to hike. It begins near the Alta Ski Area. At about 8,500 ft in elevation, the trailhead begins already high in the mountains. At first, the trail is mostly switchbacks and loose rock. Your lungs burn quickly in the elevation, and you cannot yet see where you are going. The mountain does not reveal itself all at once. You simply keep walking, trusting that if you remain on the trail long enough, eventually it will open into something beautiful.
And it does.
A bend in the path suddenly reveals a valley scattered with wildflowers. Meltwater streams through the rocks. Snow often still clings to the mountain in July.
A couple miles in, you crest a ridge into what I have always called Buttercup Valley, one of the most breathtaking places on the hike. Yellow wildflowers dot the valley floor. Indian paintbrush and lupine paint the slopes with color. Sometimes you see bighorn sheep or moose moving quietly in the distance. It’s a breathtaking part of the trail, and a needed meander through a meadow before the trail climbs again.
Eventually Catherine’s Pass opens before you, and suddenly the whole landscape stretches out in every direction.
But here’s the thing about hiking: someone could be dropped there by helicopter and still see the view. They would still witness the beauty of the mountains. But they’d miss the trail.
And the trail is the whole point.
They would miss the exhaustion of the climb, the anticipation around every bend, and the strange way suffering and beauty begin to intertwine after enough miles on the mountain. The trail changes your relationship to the summit.
Without the trail, you miss the story that makes the summit mean something.
I think this has happened for many Christians with Pentecost.
Most believers know Acts 2. We know about the rushing wind, the divided tongues of fire, the Spirit descending upon the disciples, and the proclamation of the gospel in many languages. It is one of the most dramatic scenes in the New Testament. But many of us encounter Acts 2 as though we were dropped there by helicopter. We arrive at the summit often without ever learning the trail that leads to it.
But Pentecost—Shavu’ot—is not merely an event in Acts. It is a trail of holy fire that climbs through Scripture. The story begins long before the disciples gather in Jerusalem.
Shavu’ot begin with a fire at a gate. The trail of Shavu’ot begins in Eden.
Eden
In the opening pages of Genesis, humanity lives openly in the presence of God. Heaven and earth overlap. The Spirit of God moves among humanity in the garden in the windy time of the day, and there is no barrier between divine holiness and human life. But one day, something fractures. The ruach shows up and realizes right away, something’s broken. The presence that once sustained humanity becomes dangerous to those no longer fit to dwell within it. Humanity is driven east of Eden, and at the entrance to the garden God places cherubim and a flaming sword turning in every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.
The fire at Eden is a holy boundary is being maintained. A broken humanity cannot simply casually reunite with God. And so the fire remains at the gate, guarding the way back into the presence of God.
It’s a loss.
From that moment onward, the biblical story begins asking a single question: How do we get back through the fire?
Sinai
For a long time, the answer to that question appears to be you don’t. You do not go back through the fire. You do not ascend the mountain of God.
For generations, humanity remains, wandering, east of Eden. The world continues spiraling outward into violence, exile, and death. Yet eventually God calls Abraham, raises up Israel, and rescues his people from Egypt through judgment and deliverance. Then he brings them into the wilderness, to the foot of a mountain wrapped in smoke and flame.
At Sinai, something astonishing happens: the fire comes down.
The imagery deliberately echoes Eden. Once again there is a holy mountain. Once again there are boundaries around sacred space. Once again humanity stands before the terrifying presence of God. But this time the story changes in an important way. At Eden, humanity is driven away from the mountain of God. At Sinai, God invites humanity toward it.
“Adonai said to Moses, “Go to the people, and sanctify them today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothing. 11 Be ready for the third day. For on the third day Adonai will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. 12 You are to set boundaries for the people all around, saying, ‘Be very careful not to go up onto the mountain, or touch the border of it....But when the shofar sounds, they may ascend the mountain.” Exodus 19:10-13
Notice that the people were to:
consecrate themselves, set themselves apart for something very special
count the days—today, tomorrow, be ready for the third day, and on the third day
prepare themselves
listen for the shofar sound… then ascend
At Sinai, God invites them to ascend through the fire. The God who once guarded the mountain now calls a people toward it.
“So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud shofar sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently.” Exodus 19:16-18
When the mountain begins to quake and burn, the people recoil in fear. They tremble at the thunder and stand at a distance, begging Moses to mediate instead. “Do not let God speak to us,” they say, “lest we die.”
And so they . . .
see the fire
count the days
hear the shofar
but they refuse to draw near to God. Moses alone enters the thick cloud. One man ascends the mountain while the people remain at a distance.
This occurs roughly fifty days after leaving Egypt. Fire descends from heaven. The covenant is cut, God forms a people, but they are not so sure they want to be formed. What is God to do with a people who he wants to be near, but are not sure they want to be near him?
The answer: he teaches them how to approach.
Tent
Alongside the tent in the wilderness, God gives Israel something remarkable: a sanctuary in time.
The appointed times of Leviticus 23 are not random holidays. They are holy meeting times—moedim—when God invites his people to enter into a sanctuary in time and be near him. They are rehearsals—sacred rhythms teaching Israel how to live within the story of redemption before its fullness arrives. Every feast becomes a kind of embodied prophecy. Shabbat, Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Shavu’ot, Trumpets, Day of Atonement, Sukkot—each one teaches Israel how to remember, anticipate, and move toward the presence of God and join him in what he is doing in the world.
At Shavu’ot, Israel is commanded to count seven weeks from Firstfruits. Fifty days. Then they are to bring before the Lord two great loaves of leavened bread made from the firstfruits of the wheat harvest.
The imagery here is extraordinary.
At Passover, leaven is removed from Israel’s homes as they remember deliverance from Egypt. Later, they will start a new culture of leaven, trusting it will become strong enough to raise the bread. And in the meantime, they count. They prepare. They eat the barley grain and trust that the choice grain—the wheat harvest—will soon come. Then, about two months later, it arrives. At Shavu’ot, fully baked, beautiful loaves of leavened, golden bread are lifted before God..
Jewish tradition holds that the bread was waved forward and backward, upward and downward, declaring that the God of Israel rules over all creation. Can you hear the echoes of Eden? At the gates of the garden, the flaming sword flashed in every direction guarding the way back into the presence of God. But now, bread from the thorny ground is lifted in every direction before him in worship.
The God who once guarded Eden with fire now invites humanity to approach the fire at the altar, at the door of the tent, waving the fruit of the earth itself before him.
Into this story, Jesus steps. “I am the bread of life!” He declares that even outside of Eden, the wheat still grows. Bread still rises and through these sacred rhythms, God teaches his people to recognize every firstfruit as a sign that exile will not last forever. That is what firstfruits are throughout Scripture: signs that more is coming.
The bread matters because it reminds us the harvest is real. Much more fruit is surely on the way.
Exile
The tabernacle eventually becomes a temple. The fiery glory of God fills his house. Jerusalem becomes the center of worship and sacrifice. But the human hear is still fractured. Violence, oppression, idolatry, and injustice continue poisoning the land until eventually the prophets begin warning that exile is coming once again.
Then the unthinkable happens. In Ezekiel’s vision, the glory of God rises from the temple and departs from Jerusalem. The divine fire leaves God’s house. The story circles painfully back the gate outside of Eden again. Once again humanity stands outside sacred space.
The people of God find themselves scattered, exiled, and the land that once provided the harvest of the firstfruits to be celebrated in the sancturary in time lies desolate and forsaken.
But the prophets refuse to despair.
Ezekiel promises that God will give his people a new heart and place his Spirit within them (Eze. 36:26-27). Isaiah declares that the Spirit of God will not depart forever (Is. 59:21). Joel envisions a day when the Spirit will be poured out lavishly upon all flesh (Joel 2:28-29). What starts in Israel will renew the whole world.
These promises are not abstract spirituality or private religious experiences. They are covenant promises. They are the restoration of the bride God married at Sinai, under that veil of thick cloud and fiery glory. The prophets foresee a day when the breath that moved through Eden will once again fill all creation with life.
The restoration of Israel becomes the beginning of something larger, where those among the nations streaming upward toward the mountain of God. Gentiles willingly ascending saying “Come on! Let’s go! Let’s ascend the mountain of God so that we can learn his instructions.”
Learning to Walk the Trail
We may wonder, when does this happen? When will God pour out his Spirit? When do we reach the summit of this trail?
Shavu’ot is a trail of holy fire moving steadily toward restoration. From Eden, to Sinai, to the tabernacle and temple, to the prophets longing for the Spirit to return, the fire keeps drawing near.
And all along the trail, there are signs of the harvest. Little glimpses. Firstfruits. Pockets of golden buttercups at the foot of the long grind to the summit we can’t yet see. Moments where creation seems to whisper:
There is more coming.
Keep walking.
Stay on the trail.
The story is not over yet.
That’s what Shavu’ot is. It is a rehearsal of hope.
Shavu’ot is a trail of holy fire that awakens us to the firstfruits of a coming harvest.
Walking this trail strengthens our bodies, our souls. It’s training us how to follow the cloud by day, the fire by nigh—until the harvest yet to come arrives in full. We can continue to follow the fire into the New Testament. We’ll look at Acts 2, and keeping following the fire even from there. Because even Acts 2 isn’t the full harvest—it’s just the beginning of what God is doing for Israel and for the nations. And we are invited by God to join him in that work.
Until then, may we become a people who learn how to walk the trail, who learn how to count the days.
To lift the bread. To keep following the fire and practicing hope.
Because every Shabbat, every festival, every act of worship, every small movement toward the presence of God is training us for the kingdom and the world that is coming.
A world where:
the exile ends,
the tent is filled,
the mountain is ascended,
the gate of Eden is wide open,
and the Spirit of God fills the earth like breath in living lungs.
Until then—we must to learn to live as people of the firstfruits. People who are disciplined enough turn towards this story and ask God tohelp us follow the fire that fills his house and opens our eyes to all he is doing.
Hanging Beside a King
There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.
There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.
“But are they really saved?”
The person in question is almost always a loved one—a close friend or family member who perhaps has made some sort of profession of faith, or been recently baptized, or at least begun attending church regularly, but who has yet to show a life marked by change.
“She gave her life to Christ, but in the months since, there’s been little visible growth. She used to pray and go to church, but now she’s just drifting from God and I’m so worried!”
All of this comes tumbling out in Bible study or a home group. Tangled up in fear, hope, and panic-stricken confusion, someone listening reaches for the story that has soothed a thousand anxious hearts:
“Well, remember the thief on the cross.”
Relief floods the room. The thief. The last-minute miracle. The proof that faith can be simple and the reassurance that God doesn’t require too much of us, especially if the end is near.
No one in the room bothers to go look up the story and read it aloud. They don’t need to. They’ve memorized a one-liner that has stood the test of time: a common criminal, ignorant of God, ignorant of Scripture, ignorant of Jesus—who, in his final moments, whispers a simple “I believe” and slips quietly into paradise.
It’s a good story; gentle, merciful, and comforting to many a worried friend by someone who sincerely wants to help.
But it is almost certainly false.
Not a Clueless Convert
The thief on the cross comes to most Evangelicals as a man with a spiritually blank slate—a random sinner who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Praise God he heard the gospel and believed before he died!” we say.
Historically, that’s an unlikely scenario. Rome did not crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was typical for traitors, rebels, and insurrectionists—men who had become a problem for the empire. This sentence was a common one for Zealots, who raised much internal havoc in Israel in the days of Jesus. Whatever else this man was, he was not harmless. More importantly, he was not theologically illiterate.
Listen again to what he actually says:
“We are receiving the due reward of our deeds… but this man has done nothing wrong… Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:41-42
Those are loaded words coming from a man who is not grasping at straws in the dark.
· He believes Jesus is a king—and not the sort who merely reigns in hearts, but one whose rule can be entered.
· He believes Jesus will still receive a kingdom, even though he’s dying on the stake right next to him.
· He believes Jesus’ story does not end at death. This man has a category for understanding the impossibility of a life beyond the grave.
· And he believes Jesus has authority to include others in this future.
This is not the content of “simple faith.” This is eschatological, messianic faith.
This man is making a Jewish, hope-soaked confession at the worst possible moment to do so. And he can do this because he is not starting from nothing. The simple-minded thief we cherish actually seems to possess a robust set of expectations about God, kingship, and the future of the world. He already has a framework for these claims.
“Remember me” is Covenant Language
In the Scriptures, God “remembers” when he is about to act to keep his promises, rescue people, or restore order to his world. God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham. He remembers Israel in Egypt, the prayers of Hannah. To be remembered is to be delivered; to be gathered back into the story when redemption is finally on the brink of occurring.
What this man is really saying is something like: When God vindicates you and your kingdom finally comes, let me be counted as yours.
And notice where he wants to be remembered: in your kingdom.
He does not seem primarily concerned with his own salvation or his destination in the moments following his death. He’s concerned with belonging to a very real and specific future in this world—a kingdom associated with the reign of God finally setting the world right. This is a stubborn faith that says: God is not finished yet. Not with you. Not with Israel. Not with the world. And not with me.
We have no way of knowing this man’s ethnic background for certain, but it is very possible that he was Jewish, or at the very least, someone very familiar with the Jewish hope that was electrifying Israel in those years: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
The backdrop of his crucifixion is Passover in Jerusalem. In that setting, this man…
acknowledges Jesus’ innocence
rebukes the other criminal
publicly aligns himself with a condemned “messianic pretender”
and entrusts himself to Jesus’ future reign.
That is repentance in the deepest biblical sense: a total change of allegiance.
The Courage to Defect
As hard as it is for my worried friends to accept, this is not a story about a man who knows nothing about God or Jesus and stumbles his way to salvation at the last minute.
It is a story about a man who, at the very end of his life, chooses sides—sides he probably had at least some familiarity with long before his crucifixion.
It’s true: he does not have time to make restitution, join a crew of disciples, keep the Torah better, or fix his life.
But he does repent.
While everyone else is mocking or denying Jesus, he does something astonishing: he entrusts himself to a dying king of a not-yet-visible kingdom.
He publicly defects to Jesus’ side when Jesus looks least like a winner—and when he himself has no hope of Jesus fixing anything regarding his current circumstances.
I think, if he had lived, everything suggests that this new allegiance would have recalibrated his entire life.
Somewhere along the way, we turned this story into proof that biblical literacy and repentance don’t really matter. The thief is our evidence that simple faith is what counts most, and living righteously or having some understanding the Jesus we give our lives to doesn’t count much in the end.
“Just believe in Jesus,” we say—without asking what belief in Jesus means, what we think he’s asking of us, or what kind of kingdom we imagine he brings.
I don’t think the thief believed in a vague, generic savior ready to carry him off to heaven. It seems to me he believed in a dying Messiah, a rejected king, and an invisible kingdom that would—against all appearances—still come, in the very city where he was nailed to a stake on a hill.
His faith, it seems, was anchored in that hope.
Stealing from the Thief
The poor thief on the cross.
We have left him there, hanging beside a king, forever enthroning a story about simple faith instead of the identity of the man who died beside him.
We’re afraid of our own shortcomings, worried for the people we love who confess without real allegiance. We’re so desperate to avoid being held accountable to worshipping a God we know, we become thieves ourselves—guilty of stealing the testimony of a repentant rebel and recycling him into a clueless criminal who “got saved” at the last second by a kind king who asks almost nothing.
It’s a retelling that exposes something about the condition of our own hearts.
Maybe we are all just thieves, hanging beside a king on crosses of our own—looking at the crucified man next to us, and deciding what we want him to be.
I usually let these conversations run their course. I save my thoughts for another time, perhaps, when people are less panicked. I’ll try, as gently and honestly as I can, to recover what’s been lost. Maybe they’ll see.
In our doubts and questions, I think we are finally standing where the story has always placed us: at the place of the skull—sifting through the rubble of what we think we know, trying to see who the man in the middle really is.
And just hoping, like the thief, that he will look down from his throne one day and remember us.
The Light of Torah
Most Christians have never been told that the word Torah doesn't mean "law." It means instruction. Direction. The kind of teaching a father gives a child he loves — not to burden them, but to form them.
The words below belong to my friend Sergio DeSoto—a Jewish believer, and author and editor of SergioDesoto.com, an incredible blog dedicated to serious conversations about faith. Sergio carries a deep love for the Torah and a thoughtful, lived perspective on how it shapes his life as a follower of Yeshua. I asked him to speak directly to Christians about a question that has shaped so much of my own work: What is the Christian relationship to the Torah?
I have learned a great deal from Sergio, and I’m honored to share his words here. Read them with an open heart—and a willingness to see what you may have missed.
Most Christians have never been told that the word Torah doesn't mean "law."
It means instruction. Direction. The kind of teaching a father gives a child he loves — not to burden them, but to form them. When God gave Israel His Torah at Sinai, He wasn't handing down a penal code. He was giving a rescued people the shape of life with Him. Holiness. Justice. Worship. Covenant. The categories that hold everything else together.
But somewhere along the way, the church began treating Torah as the thing Jesus came to fix.
That is a serious mistake. And it has cost the church more than most believers realize.
What Yeshua Was Actually Confronting
Read the Gospels again — slowly, without the filter of what you were taught He was doing — and something becomes obvious. Yeshua never once rebuked obedience to God's commandments. Not once.
He rebuked hypocrisy. He confronted religious theater — leaders who loved the appearance of holiness but neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He went after systems that crushed ordinary people under the weight of man-made traditions while the leaders who built those systems exempted themselves.
When He clashed with the religious establishment, He did not say, "Stop obeying the Father." He said something far more dangerous:
You have abandoned the commandment of God and are holding to human tradition (Mark 7:8, paraphrased).
Catch that. The problem was not that people were following God's instruction. The problem was that religious leaders had buried God's instruction under layers of their own authority — and then called the whole pile sacred.
Yeshua did not come to liberate people from God's word. He came to expose those who had made God's word unrecognizable.
The Uncomfortable Paradox
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for a lot of sincere believers.
What many Christians now dismiss as outdated or irrelevant — the Torah, the commandments, the covenant framework of the Hebrew Scriptures — is exactly what Yeshua upheld, lived inside, and taught from. He kept Shabbat. He observed the feasts. He taught from Moses and the Prophets. He quoted Deuteronomy to the adversary in the wilderness.
He did not treat Torah as a rough draft that needed correcting. He treated it as His Father's voice — and He walked in it perfectly.
So when the church says Torah is finished, they are not following Yeshua's example. They are contradicting it. Not out of malice, usually. Out of inheritance. Generations of teaching have framed Torah as the failed first attempt and grace as the real answer, as though God needed two tries to get it right.
But that framing does not come from Scripture. It comes from centuries of theology that slowly — and sometimes deliberately — severed Jesus from His Jewish world.
My Own Turning Point
I used to think the same way.
When I heard the word "law," my mind went straight to bondage. Old covenant. Something heavy that Jesus lifted. I had inherited an entire story where Torah was the problem and the cross was the solution to Torah. Grace meant freedom from God's instructions, and obedience sounded suspiciously like earning something you were supposed to receive for free.
Then I stopped reading the Bible as a religion book and started reading it as covenant history. Not a collection of spiritual principles organized by topic. Not a devotional resource. A record of God binding Himself to a people, speaking to them in real time, forming them through instruction, warning them through prophets, and relentlessly holding the door open for return.
That single shift changed everything. I stopped asking, "What does my tradition say this means?" and started asking, "What did this mean to the people who first received it?" And the moment I asked that question honestly, the categories I had inherited started collapsing.
Torah was not bondage. It was the marriage covenant between God and His people. The "New Covenant" in Jeremiah 31 was not a replacement — it was a promise to write the same Torah on their hearts. Paul was not arguing against obedience — he was arguing against the idea that Gentiles had to become ethnically Jewish to enter the covenant. The entire story was one story, and I had been reading it as two.
The lights didn't go off. They came on.
What Gets Lost
When Yeshua is disconnected from Torah, the church doesn't just lose a theological category. It loses the ability to understand its own Scriptures.
"Kingdom of God" loses its covenant texture — it becomes a vague spiritual destination instead of the reign of Israel's promised King. "Lamb of God" becomes a metaphor instead of the fulfillment of a sacrificial system that God Himself designed. "Repentance" gets reduced to feeling sorry instead of what the Hebrew concept actually means: return — covenantal turning back to the God you walked away from.
And "grace" — the word Christians love most — gets pitted against obedience, as though God's kindness and God's instruction are enemies. That split is completely foreign to the biblical world. Torah is grace. It was the gift of a faithful God to a people He had already rescued. He didn't give them instructions to earn His love. He gave them instructions because He loved them. Deuteronomy 6 is not a contract. It is a father telling His children how to stay close.
Even the New Testament becomes harder to read honestly. Paul gets cast as anti-Torah — the apostle who finally set people free from all those rules. But Paul kept the feasts. Paul took a Nazirite vow in Acts 21. Paul told Timothy that all Scripture — which at that point meant the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible — is God-breathed and useful for instruction. He was not dismantling Torah. He was arguing that Gentiles enter the covenant through Messiah, not through ethnic conversion. That is a radically different claim than "Torah is over."
When you strip all of that away, you don't get a cleaner gospel. You get a Christ who floats above His own story — still beloved, still quoted, but severed from the world that gave His words their meaning.
A Word About What This Feels Like
I need to say this plainly, because it rarely gets said in Christian spaces.
Torah was not a burden inflicted on Israel. It was a gift entrusted to them. When Christians speak of it as bondage, as failure, as something expired — it lands hard on those of us for whom this is not abstract theology. It is our story. Our covenant. The revelation God entrusted to our fathers.
It can feel like the church wants the Jewish Messiah but not the Jewish story that gave Him context. It can sound — even when no one intends it — like contempt dressed in theological language.
I am not saying this to guilt anyone. I am saying it because if the body of Messiah is going to mature, it has to reckon with this. You cannot claim to honor the root while dismissing what the root produced. Romans 11 is not a footnote. It is a warning: do not be arrogant toward the branches. The Gentile church was grafted into Israel's olive tree — not planted in its own garden.
Read Again — But Read Honestly
I am not asking anyone to become Jewish. I am not asking anyone to abandon their church or torch their theology overnight.
I am asking something simpler and harder: read again.
Read the Bible as one story — not two Testaments in tension, but one covenant unfolding. Read Torah not as the thing Jesus replaced, but as the foundation He built on. Read the apostles not as founders of a new religion, but as Jewish witnesses to the fulfillment of promises that were Jewish from the beginning. Stop assuming Torah is the villain. Stop calling legalism what God called instruction. Let the text challenge the system you inherited, and see whether the roots have something to say that your tradition trained you not to hear.
Because if the Torah was good enough for Yeshua to live by, to teach from, and to die fulfilling — then maybe the question is not why some of us take it seriously. Maybe the question is why so many were taught not to.
The Torah was never the darkness. In many ways, it is the lamp most Christians were taught not to look at.
When you read Scripture as covenant history instead of inherited religion, the lights do not go off.
They come on.
Selah.
When you hear the word "Torah," what is your first instinct — and who taught you to react that way? If Yeshua lived inside Torah and never spoke against it, what does it mean that His church treats it as obsolete? What would change in your faith if you stopped reading the Bible as two books and started reading it as one?
Shalom v'shalvah. Your brother in the Way,
Sergio
I’m grateful for voices like Sergio’s in this conversation. If his words have resonated with you as deeply as they have with me, you explore more of his work and support what he’s building here: www.sergiodesoto.com.
Copyright © Sergio DeSoto. All rights reserved. You are welcome to share this essay freely with proper attribution. Do not reproduce, alter, or monetize without written permission.
A Small Beginning
Even the smallest beginnings belong to God. What starts unseen can become sacred—because even invisible work can be an offering.
Even the smallest beginnings belong to God. What an encouraging truth.
When I first started writing, I didn’t have a goal. I only knew that I loved the process of searching, asking questions, and writing out words that helped me make sense of things I didn’t yet understand. Most of what I wrote never made it past my hard drive. It was invisible work. But over time, that small start became sacred. I had no idea I’d eventually write a book.
Most of God’s work begins that way: hidden, unrushed, and often unnoticed. Seeds take time to grow. Roots form long before fruit appears. And sometimes, what looks like silence and waiting is only the sound of something taking shape beneath the surface.
Learning to See in the Small
Writing is one of the ways God has taught me to see. For a long time, I studied and wrote without an audience. I trusted that insight would lead to something more concrete—maybe a clear teaching role that would emerge in a traditional place. But now I see that the small moments took me in a different direction.
I expected God to call me to something, but looking back, I see he called me out. I took what seemed like a sharp turn from the main current—the river split, and there was a small tributary. A slower pace, meandering its quiet way to what looked like nowhere in particular. Yet on those narrow banks, God met me. And he was faithful to bring me along.
He kept telling me his story—again and again—until I finally slowed down enough to listen. Somewhere out there in the wild frontier, he pointed toward a mountain barely visible on the horizon and said, “Follow the tributary. Keep walking.”
So many times, I looked around—alone. No one ahead. Sometimes, no one behind. And I felt impossibly small.
But I’ve learned that small doesn’t mean insignificant. Faithfulness often looks like repetition—returning to the same page, the same desk, the same story that still has more to say. The labor of study and writing has become, for me, a kind of prayer. Some days it’s worship. Other days, it’s wrestling. But always, it’s an act of trust that what God began out on that little stream—out there on the frontier—he will finish.
Gratitude for the Process
Writing my first book has made me deeply grateful—not only for what has been written, but for what the process itself has done in me.
For the patience it has required.
For the courage it’s summoned.
For the humility it has forged.
For the way it’s taught me to depend on God’s vision instead of my own.
I’m thankful, too, for the people who have walked beside me in these early steps—the ones who read drafts, offered encouragement, and reminded me that obedience matters more than outcomes. What began as a solitary journey into the unknown has, over time, gathered a few loyal companions—fellow travelers who can see that same distant mountain peak and are willing to keep walking toward it too.
Thanksgiving and the Worship of Remembering
As we approach the season of Thanksgiving, I find myself reflecting on how often Scripture calls us to remember. Israel was told to remember the manna, the wilderness, the deliverance, the covenant, the bread and the cup—all the places where God had already been faithful.
Gratitude, at its core, is memory turned into worship.
Looking back now, I can trace the small beginnings that led here: the first time I opened my Bible with a small group waiting for me to lead; the first time I dared to write something honest; the first time I admitted, “I think I’m reading this wrong.” None of those moments felt extraordinary, but together they’ve become the path that brought me here.
I don’t know where this next chapter will lead. I never do. I only know that the words keep coming—never when I expect them, never how I imagine them—but they always come. The Spirit brings them and lays them before me: persistent, unceasing, waiting for me to write them down.
And I’m starting to believe that small beginnings matter. Not because they’re perfect or promising, but because they’re real. Because they remind us that God delights in beginning things—families, promises, and sometimes, even words.
So I give thanks for small beginnings—for honest starts, and for the quiet faith that keeps us at the desk when no one’s watching, that keeps us walking toward that distant mountain when no one else seems to care.
It’s out there—in the ambling tributary, far from the main current—that grace grows unseen.
And somehow, out here in the wilderness, I can feel it now: he is bringing back the force of the single river.
“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin...”
On the Hard Parts
Small groups sometimes skip the hard parts of Scripture, but they’re where God forms us. Learn why we avoid them—and how reading the whole Bible, together, changes everything.
Our small group is about to finish the final book of the Torah: Deuteronomy. Two years, five biblical books, countless Sunday afternoons gathered around coffee and Bibles spread across the living room. The hum is familiar now—pens click, pages turns, sometimes a late arrival slips in with an apology. Someone opens in prayer, and we settle into another conversation about faith, obedience, and what it means to love God with all our heart.
It’s been good. Stretching. Holy, even. That’s what the hard parts of the Bible do.
In many years of leading groups now, I’ve noticed how rare it is to actually spend long periods of time in places like this—in the thick of laws, genealogies, and strange stories that don’t resolve neatly. Most of us like to drift into the same comfortable corners of Scripture. No one says, “Let’s skip Habakkuk.” But we do.
We skim the tricky stuff; treat the prophets like awkward relatives at a reunion—best acknowledged from a distance.
And when we do, we miss something sacred.
Why We Avoid the Hard Parts
We avoid the hard parts of Scripture for many reasons.
Emotional Avoidance—Hard passages tend to stir up things we’d rather not face. They challenge our tidy categories of “good God, good life.” Sometimes, we’re not avoiding the text—we’re avoiding the emotions it awakens (or fails to awaken). Many of us have come to the Bible expecting it to be a self-help manual and for God to play the role of our therapist. We struggle with the passages that either don’t appear to do those things or do them too well. We like God’s mercy but struggle with his judgment. So when Scripture steps outside the lines of our expectations, it’s hard to know how to respond. “This is in the Bible?” we realize, embarrassed.
Cultural Conditioning—We live in a world that prizes positivity, productivity, and relevance. Within evangelical culture especially, spiritual growth is often measured by how encouraged we feel after an encounter with the Bible—not by how challenged we are. When a passage doesn’t yield a quick “life application,” we move on. We expect Scripture to inspire us, not to unsettle us. We prefer a verse that fits into an Instagram square to a story that forces us to rethink our own worldview. The hard parts require endurance—slow reading and learning to sit in tension without resolution, sometimes for a very long time. Most of us have never been trained for that kind of spiritual stamina. And sometimes, we’re simply too exhausted. After a long week, we crave encouragement, not confrontation.
Fear of Getting It Wrong—Many believers fear they’re not equipped to interpret difficult texts. We’re embarrassed by that. The Bible can feel inaccessible. It’s easy to feel intimidated by how little we think we understand. So we don’t even try. Especially in small groups, we also fear those passages might stir up disagreement or silence. So leaders often default to the verses that make everyone nod. But those fears are actually an advantage. We can bring dumb questions, admit our disbelief, and step forward into conversations with the hearts and minds we have, not the ones we’re suppose to have. Its in those moments where the light bulbs flicker on and shine brightest.
If we’re honest, we avoid the hard parts because they’re disorienting. It’s not that they’re impossible to understand—it’s that they’re unfamiliar. We avoid them for reasons that sound reasonable enough, but when we finally engage them, we find ourselves pulled into a story that isn’t centered on us. To truly understand it, we have to give more of ourselves than we often want to. Books like Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Romans confront us with truths that stretch far beyond our culture and lifetime.
But avoidance comes with a cost.
The Cost of Avoidance
When we skip the hard parts of Scripture, we end up with a God made in our own image.
The Bible was never meant to be read in fragments—ten minutes over coffee, a verse for the day, a quote for encouragement. It wasn’t written in a vacuum or designed to fit neatly into our study guides, devotionals, or theology handbooks. Yet that’s often how we approach it. The hard parts resist those models.
And so, in avoiding them, we lose our grip on the story’s sweep. Ironically, the very truths we claim to cherish are found most clearly in the places we neglect. The key to unlocking the story of Scripture is not in the Gospels or Psalms—it’s in the unopened books, waiting to be found by those willing to linger there.
Our avoidance of these texts has bred spiritual shallowness, biblical illiteracy, and costly forgetfulness. It’s possible to attend a Bible study faithfully for years, to memorize verses and fill in workbook blanks, yet never find the thread that connects the garden to the eternal throne. Worse still, it’s possible to do all this and never realize the part God has written for you within that story.
In skipping the hard parts, I fear we’ve so often forfeited what it means to become true disciples of Jesus.
Because the hard parts are not there to confuse us. They’re there to reveal God. Every law, lament, and obscure oracle is a window into the heart of a God who refuses to abandon his plan. He invites us into his story—one that is far bigger and more demanding than the version we often settle for.
Why We Need to Wrestle Together
But when a small group dares to tackle the hard parts of Scripture together, something beautiful happens. We learn to depend on one another—and on the Spirit—in new ways. No one person has the easy answers. We grow side by side. Everyone is discipled, and everyone is discipling.
This is how the early believers learned. They didn’t gather around curated lists of “most encouraging passages for modern life.” They opened the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—the same Scriptures Jesus used to explain himself. Every community had its Torah-guide, its elders—those “able to teach,” who helped the rest discern the wisdom of the oldest books and apply it to their sphere.
Studying Scripture in community guards us from arrogance and isolation. It reminds us that no one “owns” the truth; we discover it together as a diverse people learning to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, into the image of the Messiah.
Our mission as small groups is to disciple one another in how to enter Scripture on its own terms. Our goal is fluency and growth—to ask how the Bible uses its own language, patterns, and designs to reveal truth, and how those truths challenge our assumptions. Learning to situate the Bible within its own worldview is difficult work, but it can be done.
And the simplest, least-used tool for it?
Repetition.
Reading and rereading entire books—again and again.
The Bible is meditation literature. It’s meant to be reread, pondered, and wrestled with together. Later passages illuminate the earlier ones; earlier stories give shape to what follows. The goal isn’t to revise original meaning but to listen more carefully to it—to enter into the divine conversation already unfolding, and stay there long enough to be changed by it.
A Way Back into the Hard Parts
The best way to venture into deeper waters is to start small—but start. And start near the beginning. In the first Bible study I ever led, we began with Genesis 1.
Choose a short, “hard” passage and sit with it.
Don’t rush to explain it. Read it aloud. Ask what others notice. Wait through the awkward silence; let it do its work. Push one another to find something—anything—that stands out. Ask what this passage says in its own story, to its original audience, before asking what it means for you.
Embrace confusion as an act of worship.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. The best Bible studies are the ones where someone says, “I don’t know what I’m missing here, but I want to find out.” That first Genesis study I led didn’t use a guide or workbook. We simply showed up having read a few chapters and talked about what we saw. I didn’t have all the answers (I still don’t!)—and that made everyone else feel free to learn alongside me.
Use good tools, but don’t outsource.
Commentaries and study guides are helpful. Still, read the actual Bible. Learn to use a concordance—and then teach others how to do the same. Let Scripture interpret itself. Train your eyes to look for patterns, repetitions, echoes. Ask, “Where have I heard this before?” and “What does this remind me of elsewhere in the Bible?”
Keep the bigger picture in view.
Every hard passage belongs to a larger story. It’s easy to zoom in so closely on a verse that we lose sight of the arc it lives within. Try reversing that. Ask how the larger story—the structure of the book, the covenantal thread, the themes, the author—shapes the meaning of the smaller part. What bigger picture is at stake?
Pray Psalm 1—and then live it.
Blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night. Make that your aim: not just to gain knowledge, but to marinate in the earliest books of the Bible until they reshape how you see the world. Anyone who’s studied with me knows that I’m never not studying Genesis. The stories of the Torah are the most underestimated and least utilized tools for understanding the rest of Scripture. Every syllable of the Bible echoes back to those early books. Even when you’re knee-deep in Romans, remember Genesis. Remember Exodus. Remember Leviticus. These are the words that gave every later word its meaning.
When Small Groups Become Holy Ground
When small groups read the hard parts, the atmosphere changes. The words come alive in new ways. The discussion begins to shift. It takes time; returning to the same grass and mowing over it in different ways. But in those moments, the living room turns into holy ground.
We begin to see Scripture not as a collection of stories to inspire or fix us, but as one breathtaking reality that includes us. We discover that God’s hardest words are his most loving, meant to purify our hearts and prepare us for an eternity in his presence. But if we want to know him, we must be willing to open the whole book.
When we study the hard parts, we learn to live the hard parts. We find courage for obedience, clarity in confusion, and hope that outlasts circumstance.
So gather your people. Open the Scriptures.
Turn the pages that intimidate you.
Ask the hard questions.
And when you do, expect the Spirit to show up. Because the same God who spoke from the mountain still speaks from the pages—and he has not changed.