10 The Cost of a System With No Substance

If a person carried a chest full of uranium, you might not notice anything at first.

But over time, everyone close to them would feel the effects. You can’t hide from high radioactivity for very long.

How much more is that true if GOD Himself lives inside a person, or a joined Life of Believers together?

But the System, even if updated with fun stuff, like exciting pogo stick Tigger dancing and enthusiasm during Jesus songs, still needs daily reality behind it and around it. For some the campus life or retreats or “services” are camp, but IRL it cheugy—the high won’t last. The fun stuff is dank, but touch some grass. It’s got to be fortified with Life in the GOAT, the Substance of Hebrews 3:12-14/Acts 2:36-47 in the Ecosystem that He brought with Him from Heaven. Ultimately, it will be all about the daily Life of Jesus in His Body: the Priesthood, the Gifts, the Light, the Love. Daily. “Walk in the Light together as He is in the Light. THEN we will have true relationship, fellowship with one another. And the Blood of Christ will cleanse us from all sin.”

Everything else has produced a Christianity that leaves almost no trace. Even the roving tent meeting evangelists in the 1700s to the 1900s, who left bars and pubs and redlight districts empty of patrons after they passed through town for a “Revival,” returned a year later to find nothing left of their efforts. The Truths were real. But the effects of Truth left to the unbiblical System of “Christian sabbath” attendance-based religion demolished what could have been a vibrant on-fire Jesus-Life expression for decades and generations, like Acts 2:42-47.

After the System there remains little actual, testable, observable Life. There is little sustainable:

Why System Suffocates Life

Because a System built for ritual and safety, control and convenience, cannot produce substance. “A little leaven leavens the whole batch,” hidden or ignored darkness in “fellowship” is judged by God, and its influences spread rapidly to “all,” says the Lord.

Attendance and clergy-based Systems cannot possibly comprehend the difference in the Spirit between a weak, growing, living Life in Jesus, versus a well-studied, world-loving, unconverted poser. They probably don’t want to know, because that would throw metal nuts and bolts into the gears of the cool system they’ve organized. And they may not even know themselves that they are Spirit-less. Are they any more or less than anyone else they know? How would they know? The working assumption is always, “Anything anyone has is imaginary if I don’t have it.”

Dealing with things unlike Jesus rather than maybe having a sermon about some of it, is not a convenient thing to do in the System. So, it’s better to ignore what Jesus said about it. One “mega-pastor” told me, “I see where the Scripture says what you’re saying, but we’d get sued and lose attendance if we didn’t ignore that stuff.”

A weekly weakly attendance model cannot and will not produce daily faithfulness, and it cannot cultivate growing Spirit-Life.

Why not? Because GOD was clear in Hebrews 3:12-14 and elsewhere that without a daily priesthood, “hardening” happens (so we don’t “feel” separation anymore), and “deceived” happens (so we blame and accuse and even name call to evade responsibility). “Get the log out of your own eye. The Holy Spirit will tell me anything I need to know, not you.”

Hardened and deceived is what God said happens if “iron sharpening iron” and “faithful are the wounds of a friend” are not part of our daily lives, organically.

Lunches, trips, errands, stop-bys, shopping, walks, sports, circling up—anything and everything. And “the world will see the Love” in the crew out in public. Clearly, how they dress and talk and laugh, and their obvious powerful relationships are striking to the observer that these are “in the world—but not of the world.”

A clergy-led model cannot produce priesthood. Even if there is a clever format of “engagement,” everyone still knows who is pulling the strings. And this diminishes everyone, including the clergy-dude. He may well be surrounded by Jesus Gifts and Life in Christ greater than his own, but he’ll never find that out in the System.

A building-centered model cannot produce “daily in public and from house to house,” relational, spontaneous, gifted, growing daily ecosystem Life.

A scheduled-service model cannot produce “don’t consider what to say or how to say it,” “when revelation comes to the second one, let the first one SIT DOWN,” power and love in the Spirit.

A compartmentalized religious habit cannot produce a 24/7 Kingdom. This hides the need and opportunity of the Kingdom very effectively.

The Cost of System?

A Christianity that looks full… but the cup is empty.

A wax museum Jesus where the eyes don’t move.

An AI-generated faith that blinks wrong.

And Gen Z sees it.

The System has a cost.

Not in money…

but in souls.

We have lost millions to the world—not because Jesus is weak, but because the System is.

And now, finally, a generation is standing up and saying:

“If this isn’t the real Jesus, we’re done pretending.”

They’re right.

And Jesus approves.