About the Author

Few words spoken by Jesus are more frightening to me except, perhaps, the ones that come immediately before them:

“I never knew you.”

Imagine believing that everything is right between you and Jesus. Imagine calling Him Lord. Imagine pointing to everything you’ve done in His name, perhaps even extraordinary things, only to discover that somewhere along the way you confused doing things for Him with knowing Him and being known by Him.

That is precisely the possibility Jesus confronts in Matthew 7:21–23. The people before Him call Him “Lord, Lord.” They point to prophecy, deliverance, and mighty works performed in His name. But Jesus identifies something catastrophically absent beneath all that religious activity: RELATIONSHIP

And strangely enough, I find something profoundly hopeful inside that terrifying warning.

Because it tells us what Jesus values.

He isn’t looking for actors who can convincingly play the part of Christians. He isn’t impressed merely because something has His name attached to it. He wants something immeasurably more personal:

He wants us to know Him, to be known by Him, and to live as people being transformed by that relationship.

That is why I write.

Not because I have mastered that relationship. Not because I believe I have all the answers; I know that I do not. And certainly not because I want you to know my name.

I write because I desperately want us, you and I together, to hear what Jesus was saying before religious activity, religious appearance, and a sense of religious accomplishment shift our attention away from Him and drown out His invitation.

Jesus made it clear that religiosity and relationship are not the same thing. Yet it is an often-overlooked truth that has brought both passion and purpose to my writing.

If anything I write helps someone move beyond merely doing things in Jesus’ name toward genuinely knowing Him—loving Him, trusting Him, obeying Him, and increasingly becoming the person that a close relationship with Him produces—then you already know the most important thing there is to know about this author.