Welcome to another Thursday UNFILTERED blog post, the only blog that warns its readers to always check your folders every Thursday. Especially that notorious “Promotions” folder in Gmail. The person who never checks their folders is a real Dorcas (Acts 9:36). Don’t be one.
Don’t take your heart medicine out. I’m speaking spiritually here, not politically or socially.
But first, those of you who are lead pastors, preachers, Bible teachers, and church planters, we are opening up registration for the 2026 Insurgence Experience (IXP) Mastermind. Unlike my other events and resources, the IXP is specifically for those who preach and/or teach regularly to an in-person audience (opposed to a virtual one).
IF THAT’S YOU, GO HERE TO LEARN WHAT IT IS AND APPLY. If not, pass that application page on to the pastors and teachers you personally know. I may not have another mastermind in 2027.
Now let me tell you about the day I became spiritually woke.
First, the term “woke” emerged in African American communities as slang for being alert to and aware of social injustice, particularly racial prejudice and discrimination.
It encouraged people to “wake up” to systemic inequalities and stay vigilant about civil rights issues.
Over time, the term came to cover other forms of discrimination, and it became politically charged.
Some use it positively to describe social consciousness and activism for marginalized groups. Others use it critically or dismissively to describe what they see as excessive political correctness, virtue signaling, or an overly narrow ideological perspective that they believe stifles open discussion.
For the latter, it’s political correctness on steroids.
It can be easily argued that diversity, equality, inclusiveness, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-ageism are all noble goals. But it’s the manipulation of these goals characterized by intolerant groupthink and ideological capture that many Jesus-followers object to.
Whether you agree with the positive or negative take on it is irrelevant to my point.
(In that connection, please don’t send me emails and links about political or social wokeness. That’s NOT the point of this article. I’m merely using this language as an analogy, a metaphor, an illustration.)
So here’s the story of how I became spiritually woke – when my eyes were opened to see like never before. When I spiritually “woke up,” so to speak.
The story was told in my book From Eternity to Here, and CBN re-published it.
Here it is:
Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God
The year was 1992. My life as a Christian changed forever.
All the sermons I heard since I was a child faded dead away. They were profoundly eclipsed by a higher vision. By God’s grace, I caught a wondrous glimpse into what Paul called “the eternal purpose” (Ephesians 3:11).
For the first time in my Christian life, I discovered that I was involved in something much larger and more glorious than I ever dreamed.
The Christian life was no longer merely about winning souls; helping the poor; learning theology; studying doctrine; mastering the Bible; deciphering eschatology; praying more; attending church services; praising and worshipping; doing spiritual warfare; exercising spiritual gifts; hearing God’s voice; imitating Jesus; and engaging in good works.
Nor was it about the other endless activities that I had been taught were the center of God’s will.
I discovered that all of the above had an end in view that went far beyond giving people a celestial fire-insurance policy, bringing in the last great harvest, or changing the world for Christ.
Being a Christian had taken on a completely new meaning. That meaning had to do with something bound up inside the beating heart of God.
The Christian life was no longer about me and what I could or should do. Neither was it primarily about others. The needs of human beings became secondary. A page had turned. Suddenly everything became about Him and His ultimate purpose. It all became about God’s ageless desire—a desire that is “from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36).
I stepped into a new world where I began to look through the eyes of God and see things from His vantage point rather than from my own. I discovered something of what it means to see the unseen.
This high-altitude view hit me so hard that it wiped everything else off the table. I began to see with eyes not physical, and I discovered that the intangibles are where reality lies.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:18, NASB)
Did I have it all figured out? Certainly not. Do I now have all the answers? Far from it. But a door had opened that put me on a new journey that I continue to travel this good day.
Before this “epiphany” I had read the Bible dozens of times. I had heard countless sermons and read scores of books and commentaries.
Yet despite all of it, I realized that I had genuinely missed the main point. I was blissfully ignorant of the central, all-consuming dream of God that tied everything together.
As a result of this realization, I pushed the reset button on my Christian life. I pressed the DELETE key and watched all my religious activities vanish into the electricity.
I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and rebooted my spiritual CPU.
What was so revolutionary? What exactly did I see? I had discovered the driving passion of God. And that passion gave birth to a divinely crafted purpose—a timeless purpose that had little to do with my individualistic efforts at being a good Christian or “going to heaven.”
I gradually discovered that the ageless purpose of God stretches from eternity to here, then from here to eternity. It is a purpose so brilliant that the mere glimpse of it can cause the human spirit to be blinded by incomparable glory.
A sighting of that purpose has the power to deliver us from all the things that do not matter; things that do not give life; things that divide and fracture the body of Christ into pieces.
The sighting of God’s all-governing purpose possesses the power to set us free from the “me-centered” gospel that’s so commonly dished out today.
In addition, I discovered that this purpose runs throughout the entire Bible like an unbroken thread, weaving all of its teachings together into one heart-stirring narrative.
That initial glimpse of the Lord’s ageless purpose has become an ever-expanding revelation within me. It has given my very existence on this earth new meaning and direction.
To put it another way, in beholding God’s central purpose, I found my own purpose. In touching His ultimate passion, I found my own passion. This eternal purpose burns in me to this very day.
What I will share in the pages that follow are three narratives, which woven together, tell the epic story of God’s ageless purpose. All three narratives are solidly grounded in Scripture. In fact, they embody the whole story of Scripture, streaming through it like a constant current.
The first is the story of a God who is an ageless romantic, driven by one consuming pursuit. The second is about a God who has sought since eternity to have a resting place, a habitation, a home. And the third reveals a God from another realm who visits planet earth to establish a heavenly colony that will give Him visible expression.
For most of us, life spins on with few breaks or transitions. This book is designed to help put on the brakes and navigate you through a terribly important question: What is my purpose and my passion? And how does it map to God’s?
From the book of Ephesians, we know that the triune God is chiefly occupied with the following:
- a house and a family for God the Father (Ephesians 2:19–22).
- a bride and a body for God the Son (Ephesians 5:25–32; 1:22–23; 2:15–16; 3:6).
Part 1 of this book is dedicated to presenting the bride.
Part 2 is dedicated to presenting the house.
Part 3 is dedicated to presenting the body and the family. Interestingly, all of these images are different aspects of one reality.
Taken together, they embody God’s grand mission in the earth.
This progression is also rooted in Scripture. And it is the heart of the biblical story, the metanarrative (overarching story) of holy writ. The Father obtains a bride for His Son by the Spirit.
He then builds a house in which He, the Son, and the bride dwell together in the Spirit. The Father, the Son, and the bride live in that house as an extended household and they have offspring by the Spirit. The offspring constitutes a family, a new humanity called “the body of Christ.”
My hope, therefore, is that as you read this book, new life will be breathed into these familiar terms. I pray that the Holy Spirit would fill them with their original beauty and awe to this end: that you would be given a dramatically new, if not a staggering, look at the ageless purpose that drives your God. For that purpose is the very reason why you exist.
End of excerpt.
If you’re new to my email list, the new book The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded (March 2025) takes the theme of God’s Eternal Purpose and traces it from the beginning of the biblical story all the way to its nail-biting end.
I invite you – and your friends — to join me and thousands of other Insurgents who have become woke to God’s Eternal Purpose.
Remember: Never forward these emails. You’ll get unsubscribed without your knowledge. Find the article on my blog and share it from there. All the articles can be found at frankviola.org
Until next Thursday.
Your brother in spiritual wokeness,
fv
A Deceptive Meme