I watched Andrew Wommack preach on John chapter 1 yesterday. The part where the religious leaders corner John the Baptist and demand to know who he is. “Are you Elijah?” No. “Are you that prophet?” No. “Then who ARE you?”
I couldn’t stop taking notes. Not because I disagree with the high-level sentiment. I actually think Wommack is pointing at something real. But I think he’s pointing at it through a lens that requires you to believe first and experience later. And I think the mystical reading of the same stories flips that order entirely. It reframes identity in Christ as something you discover through presence, not something you claim through belief.
You don’t have to intellectually decide whether this is true. You can just live it. And when you live it, when you actually practice presence and feel your feelings and make the hard choices – every aspect of your life improves. Your relationships get more honest. Your body softens. Your ability to choose the hard thing and trust that God will work through it becomes the evidence.
In literal Christianity, you have to make an intellectual choice about whether what the preacher is saying is true. In mystical Christianity, belief isn’t the prerequisite. It’s the byproduct.
So here’s what I heard underneath the evangelical language. Something that maps onto the mystical reading of scripture in ways I don’t think Wommack would be comfortable with.
The question won’t leave me alone: Who are you in God?
Not who you are in your marriage. Not who you are in your job performance reviews. Not who you are in the collection of beliefs you’ve assembled to make sense of a world that often doesn’t make sense.
Who are you when all that noise stops and you’re just here, present with what actually is? That’s what identity in Christ actually means.
That’s the question John the Baptist was trying to answer. And it’s the question every one of us has to grapple with if we want to stop performing our lives and start living them.
The Voices That Demand Credentials
Here’s what I noticed watching Wommack’s sermon: The religious leaders weren’t asking John who he was out of curiosity. They were demanding credentials. “Prove you have the right to be here. Show us your authorization to speak. What makes you special?”
These voices aren’t just ancient history. They show up every time you step into something real.
They’re the part of your brain that whispers: “Who do you think you are? What gives you the right? Are you special? Are you chosen? Prove it.”
These voices arise every time you stop performing what others expect and start moving from your deepest knowing instead. They demand certificates you don’t have and can’t get through achievement.
John the Baptist faced them the way you have to face them. By knowing what he wasn’t. His identity in Christ wasn’t a title. It was a function.
“I’m not the Christ. I’m not Elijah. I’m not that prophet.”
But here’s what I think most people miss: John wasn’t diminishing himself. He was refusing to perform an identity he hadn’t earned.
The spiritual ego loves to claim identities it can’t actually hold. I see this everywhere. Someone watches a YouTube video that confirms what they already intellectually believe and suddenly they’re sending it to everyone, projecting their certainties onto others instead of sitting with each word to see if it’s actually true in their own body.
That’s not John the Baptist energy. That’s the very thing John was refusing to do.
John says: “I’m the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord.”
He knows his function without confusing himself with what he’s pointing toward.
John The Baptist as a Part of You
This is where mystical reading gets interesting.
John the Baptist isn’t just a historical figure from two thousand years ago. He’s the part of you that knows something needs to change. The inner voice that calls for a new way of living before you’re ready to actually live it.
He’s the knowing that this relationship isn’t working. That this job is slowly killing you. That the way you’ve been handling stress isn’t sustainable. That performing faith while avoiding the emotional content underneath it isn’t actually faith at all.
John is the awareness that change is needed. But he’s not the change itself. He’s the first step in discovering who you are in Christ.
That’s why John says “He must increase; I must decrease.” The voice that calls for transformation has to give way to the presence that embodies it.
John decreases as Christ increases. The part that knows you need to change steps back so the part that can actually transform can take over.
The Desert Is Where You Face What You Can’t Avoid
John preached in the wilderness because the desert is where you have to face what you’ve been running from.
In the city, you can stay busy. There’s always somewhere to go, someone to call, something to scroll. The noise covers the signal. The motion hides the emptiness.
But in the desert, it’s clear what you need.
Water. Truth. The thing you’ve been avoiding becomes the thing you have to face.
Wommack pointed out that John didn’t go to Jerusalem where the crowds were. He went to the wilderness and let the people come to him. That’s how presence works. It doesn’t chase. It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t market itself.
It sits still and lets what needs to find it, find it.
The crowds that flocked to John weren’t just random seekers. In mystical reading, they represent all the internal voices and emotional energy you’ve been pushing down for years. The parts that catch a glimpse of presence and rush forward to be seen, acknowledged, transformed.
That’s why everyone goes to the wilderness. Presence is attractive. Not because it promises to fix you. Because it’s willing to see you exactly as you are.
What “Weakness” Actually Means
Wommack talks about becoming “weak” so God’s strength can flow through you. But “weak” doesn’t mean what most people think it does here.
Biblical weakness isn’t powerlessness. It’s emotional flexibility.
It’s being willing to feel every feeling fully instead of powering through with mental energy. It’s letting things in. Letting things move through you. A willingness to be vulnerable. Staying present with what’s actually happening instead of escaping into strategy and control.
Think about the difference between rigid and flexible. A rigid tree snaps in the storm. A flexible one bends with the wind and stays rooted.
Your real strength isn’t your ability to handle everything alone. Your willingness to be open to help, wherever it might come from, including a higher power. To stay open to what’s trying to move through you. To let presence flow through your human experience instead of trying to manufacture divine results through human effort.
This isn’t the weakness that collapses under pressure. It’s the emotional capacity that can hold whatever comes without breaking. And that capacity is closer to your real identity in Christ than any doctrine you could memorize.
What “Come to the End of Yourself” Actually Means
Wommack talks about coming to the end of yourself as if it’s a one-time spiritual event. You get humble, you surrender, and then God takes over forever.
I think it’s simpler and more ongoing than that.
Coming to the end of yourself is what happens every time you stop trying to think your way out of feeling something difficult. Every time you let yourself feel confused instead of pretending you have answers. Every time you say “I don’t know” when you actually don’t know.
It’s the end of your strategy to manage life through understanding and control. The recognition that your head can analyze everything and still miss the point entirely.
What’s funny is that literal Christianity, too often, is practiced as an addiction to control. A mechanism to never have to actually feel through your discomfort or uncertainty, because you can always just turn to the text and find a verse that settles the question for you. You never have to actually feel uncertainty or grapple with your faith, as long as there’s a YouTube video, book, or passage that temporarily soothes you until you need the next hit. Which, ironically, is the whole point of the text.
So coming to the end of yourself isn’t a dramatic spiritual collapse. It’s the quiet recognition that thinking harder isn’t helping anymore. That your next breakthrough isn’t going to come through more information. It’s going to come through presence with what’s actually here.
The Hubris Trap
Wommack tells the story of Moses assuming God would deliver Israel through his position and military might. Moses tried to do God’s will, but he was doing it through his own flesh.
The hubris trap catches everyone who’s had a glimpse of their calling.
You see what’s possible. You feel chosen. You understand that you’re here for something specific. Then you try to make it happen through the tools you already have. Through your talent, your connections, your understanding of how things work.
Moses got kicked out of Egypt and had to wander in the desert for 40 years, herding sheep in silence to train the hubris out of him. Not because God was punishing him, but because he needed to become someone who could see the burning bush and learn to quiet all the voices that show up in the wilderness. Which he would later need when he led all of Israel through the desert for 40 years, helping an entire nation integrate what he’d already faced alone.
Here’s what I think matters: The bush was already burning. God was already present. But Moses had to turn his head.
That’s the partnership. God provides the moment. We provide the attention.
Hubris makes us think we have to create the burning bush. Presence recognizes the bush is already burning. We just have to be still enough to notice it.
Christ as Pattern, Not Person
Here’s what I think Christ represents in mystical reading: The ability to be present and act from presence.
Not stillness as inaction. Presence as the ground everything else moves from. The eye of the hurricane. The center that holds while everything around it moves.
When I get silent with my soul and allow all the noise and compulsions to settle, there are moments when I touch the same pattern Jesus was demonstrating. Not because I’m special. Because presence is what we are when the static clears.
That’s not blasphemy. That’s the whole point.
The distance between you and Christ isn’t moral distance. It’s the distance between your reactive state and your present state. Your identity in Christ isn’t something you earn. It’s something that emerges when you stop performing. Between the you that gets triggered by every email and the you that can sit with whatever comes without making it mean something about your worth.
These are moments, not a permanent state. Nobody stays in that centered place all the time. But the moments exist. And the more you dwell there, the more it becomes your natural baseline.
Sin as Unconscious Reactivity
If Christ is presence, then what scripture calls “sin” is what happens when unconscious emotional energy runs the show instead of presence.
Sin isn’t rule-breaking. It’s reactivity. The knee-jerk decisions made from unprocessed feelings. The choices that come from fear instead of love, from scarcity instead of abundance, from wounds instead of clarity.
When your inner Adam is functioning properly, he creates a container for your emotional energy. (I wrote more about this in the Adam and Eve framework for emotional sobriety.) You feel the anger, name it, hold space for it to process. Then you choose what to do from presence instead of from the feeling.
When that system breaks down, the emotional energy acts (Eve) before it’s been contained. That’s what scripture calls flesh. Not your physical body, but the unconscious patterns that make your choices for you.
Repentance isn’t intellectual apology. It’s feeling all your unconscious emotions until they no longer run you. Until who you are in Christ is clearer than who you are in your reactivity. Until you can feel angry without being anger. Feel afraid without being fear.
The Contradiction That Reveals Everything
Here’s where the mystical reading gets fascinating: John the Baptist says he’s not Elijah. But Jesus says he is.
Both are telling the truth.
When the religious leaders ask “Are you Elijah?” John says no because he doesn’t have the full revelation of who he is yet. He knows his function (prepare the way) but not his cosmic identity.
Jesus later says “If you can receive it, this is Elijah who was to come.” Different perspective, deeper truth.
This isn’t about reincarnation. It’s about integration.
When you move into presence, you don’t compartmentalize the parts of yourself you used to be. You integrate them. The John in you prepares the way for the Christ in you. But the John doesn’t disappear. He becomes part of the wholeness.
The part of you that knows change is needed eventually recognizes itself as the energy that’s been calling for that change all along. But this only becomes clear from the perspective of integration, not from the middle of the process.
While you’re still becoming, you can only see your current function. Once you’ve touched the larger pattern, you can see how everything was always working together.
Inner Change Happens Fast When You’re Ready
Wommack mentioned that John the Baptist “turned a nation toward God in six months.” In literal reading, that sounds impossible. How does one man in the desert impact an entire nation so quickly?
In mystical reading, the “nation” John turned isn’t out there. It’s in you.
Your inner nation – all the tribes and voices and competing loyalties inside you – can align remarkably fast when you’re willing to feel what you’ve been avoiding.
I’ve seen people make changes in months that seemed impossible for years. Not because they tried harder. Because they finally stopped running from what their body had been trying to tell them.
But your calling won’t be what you think it is. And if you go with your mind’s idea of what God wants for you, you’ll end up in the desert like Moses. Like I did.
I broke up with my partner once because I thought I needed someone who thought like me. I was convinced we weren’t spiritually compatible. But once I’d left the relationship, I realized I wasn’t looking for intellectual alignment at all. I was looking for emotional presence. And my partner – the one I’d just walked away from – had that better than I ever did. She ended up teaching me about connecting into my body and being present with my pain without having to make it mean something. And then graciously took me back into her life once I stopped projecting all my intellectual garbage onto her. Once I stopped needing her to believe exactly like I did. Now we’re more in love than ever.
I left working for Google many years ago thinking I was “doing what God put on my heart.” Only to realize years later that what God was really putting on my heart was to feel my big feelings and learn how to have a hard conversation with my boss about my role and how I could be of better service. But I was spiritually and emotionally immature. So I ripped the cord, left the org, and wandered in my own desert for years before I realized that what God was showing me in every part of my life that followed was that I had to become the type of person who could choose to have hard conversations with angry or powerful people. That’s what my 40 years in the desert was about. All the experiences I attracted were training me to become someone who could engage with and hold space for big feelings and hard conversations. Which is what every leader must do.
Had I just felt my feelings in the moment and had the hard conversation, maybe I would have found a deeper level of satisfaction in my work on the same team. Or maybe the outcome would have been the same. But there would have been fewer tag-along lessons that rhymed in the same way, showing up again and again in different jobs and different relationships, until I was finally willing to integrate them.
This isn’t about impulsive decisions. It’s about what happens when you align with presence instead of fighting it. Change that seemed impossible becomes inevitable. Not because you forced it, but because you stopped resisting what wanted to emerge.
The Body Keeps Score When Faith Becomes Performance
Here’s what I think both Wommack and most Christians miss: You can say “I believe in Jesus” every day while your jaw clenches every time your spouse walks into the room.
You can pray for healing while your body is literally screaming what you won’t let yourself feel.
You can send sermons to people you love while being unable to receive honest feedback without getting defensive.
The gap between intellectual belief and embodied presence isn’t hypocrisy. It’s human. But it’s also optional.
Your body is keeping score. It knows the difference between faith and performance. Between surrender and spiritual bypassing. Between trusting God and performing trust while your stomach stays clenched.
Real faith shows up in your nervous system. Your identity in Christ isn’t intellectual. It’s somatic. You can feel the difference between believing something about God and actually resting in God’s presence. Between hoping things will work out and knowing they already are.
The first one happens in your head. The second one happens in your chest, your shoulders, your breath.
Why Needing Agreement Isn’t Faith
I used to need my partner to think like me. I was so convinced that intellectual alignment was the foundation of a relationship that I ended one over it. And then I realized – sitting alone in the aftermath of my own certainty – that what I was actually looking for had nothing to do with agreement. I was looking for presence. And the person I’d walked away from had more of it than I did.
I see the same pattern everywhere. In relationships. In churches. In spiritual communities. People who can’t rest in what they believe unless everyone around them believes it too.
That’s not faith. That’s a belief system that needs external scaffolding to stay upright.
Real faith doesn’t need protection. It doesn’t need agreement. It can sit with questions because it’s not built on answers. It’s built on presence. And presence can hold uncertainty without needing to resolve it.
The person who can’t share something meaningful without needing you to respond with enthusiasm? They’re asking you to carry the weight of their own unprocessed doubt.
The person who rests in actual faith? They can share what they’ve found and let you take it or leave it. No attachment to the outcome because their peace doesn’t depend on your validation.
What Presence Actually Is
Presence is not something you achieve. It’s something you stop interrupting.
Presence means you’re here instead of running away inside your head or body. That’s it. When you’re present, you can feel what’s happening without trying to fix it, explain it, or escape it.
Imagine a child who falls and scrapes their knee. Presence is not telling them “you’re fine.” Presence is not explaining why they should have been more careful. Presence is kneeling down, looking at them, and staying until they stop shaking.
That’s what you do for yourself when you’re present. You stay with what’s actually happening.
Presence is not thinking about your feelings. It’s not controlling your behavior. It’s not trying to be spiritual. It’s not meditating perfectly.
Presence is staying with what is already happening.
It also clears the channel. When you get out of your own way, the connection that was always there becomes obvious. Not because being present earns you something, but because presence is the state where reception happens.
And here’s what matters for everything else in this essay: you can’t think your way into transformation. But you can be present with what’s actually happening. And that presence is where transformation lives.
The Performance of Faith vs. The Experience of Faith
I’ve spent time around people who can quote scripture for hours and still can’t sit with their own feelings for five minutes. (This is something I keep coming back to on this blog.)
They know every doctrine. They can defend every theological position. They attend every service. And their body language looks like someone waiting for bad news.
That’s not faith. That’s the performance of faith.
Real faith shows up differently. It shows up as the capacity to feel whatever’s there without making it mean God has abandoned you. The ability to sit with uncertainty without needing to resolve it immediately. The willingness to let your heart break when your heart needs to break, trusting that presence can hold the breaking.
The person performing faith needs everyone to believe what they believe because doubt would collapse the whole system. The person experiencing faith can sit with doubters, questioners, even atheists because their foundation isn’t built on agreement.
One is a house of cards. One is bedrock. One is an identity in Christ built on consensus. The other is built on presence.
And here’s what I think matters most: the person experiencing faith doesn’t need you to believe it for it to work. They can just live it, and let the results speak. The person performing faith needs you to agree because without your agreement, the whole thing wobbles.
You can tell the difference by watching someone’s body language when their beliefs are questioned. Does their jaw clench? Do their shoulders rise? Does their voice get tight?
The body doesn’t lie. It knows the difference between faith and religious performance.
What Happens When You Stop Needing to Be Right
There’s a moment in everyone’s spiritual journey when you realize you don’t need others to validate your experience for it to remain true.
You can let your mom think you’re going to hell. You can let your kids roll their eyes at your prayers. You can let your spouse think your meditation practice is weird new-age nonsense.
Their opinion doesn’t change what you’ve experienced. Their disagreement doesn’t diminish what you know to be true.
This isn’t about being isolated or self-righteous. It’s about finding your foundation in source instead of in consensus.
When you know who you are in God, you don’t need others to mirror it back to you. You can share what you’ve found without attachment to whether they receive it. You can love without conditions because your love isn’t dependent on being loved back in the same way.
That’s freedom. That’s what John the Baptist was modeling. He didn’t need the Pharisees to understand him. He didn’t need the crowds to validate him. He knew his function and he fulfilled it.
The Process Is Already Happening
Wommack talks about finding your calling as if it’s this massive search for God’s hidden plan for your life.
I think it’s simpler than that.
Your calling is probably already obvious to everyone except you. It’s what people naturally ask your help with. It’s the conversations you find yourself having over and over. It’s what flows easily through you when you’re not trying to be someone else.
And your calling may not be a spectacle. Your calling might be to be wholly present with the people you work with in the call center. Or to show up for friends who are sad and sit with them without needing them to explain or know anything other than that you’re there. Little things are often bigger callings than big ones.
The crowds that came to John in the desert weren’t looking for entertainment. They were looking for someone to name what they already felt. Someone to say out loud what their bodies already knew: the old way isn’t working anymore.
God doesn’t usually announce your calling through supernatural encounters (though those happen, and I have quite a bit to say on whether supernatural events are actually God or dead Christian spirits with something to prove overcloaking, but I’ll save that for another post). More often, God puts what you need to know on your heart as felt knowing. A gut sense. A body certainty. Something you can’t explain but can’t ignore.
The satisfaction Wommack describes – being exactly where God wants you at the exact moment – comes from trusting that knowing enough to act on it.
The Part Everyone Misses
Here’s what both Wommack and most Christians miss: John the Baptist isn’t separate from Christ. He’s part of the same transformation.
In mystical reading, John and Jesus represent stages of the same process. John is the awareness that something needs to change. Jesus is the embodiment of that change.
You don’t graduate from John to Jesus and leave John behind. You integrate both. The part that calls for transformation (John) and the part that embodies it (Christ).
The voice in the wilderness doesn’t disappear when Christ emerges. It becomes part of what Christ is. The willingness to call things what they are (John’s gift) integrated with the capacity to love what is without needing it to change (Christ’s gift).
That’s what the mystics understood. Every part of your inner drama needs to be felt, seen, and integrated. Not judged, rejected, or left behind.
The goal isn’t to become Christ by eliminating everything else. It’s to become Christ by including everything else.
Who Are You in God?
You’re the awareness that notices everything without being trapped by anything.
You’re the presence that can feel your fear without being your fear. That can acknowledge your shame without being your shame. That can witness your rage without being consumed by it.
You’re the stillness that all the other voices arise from and return to.
Not the thoughts. Not the emotions. Not the stories about why things are happening. The one who experiences all of it without being defined by any of it.
That’s who you are in God. That’s your identity in Christ. The space where it all happens. The witness that remains when everything else passes away.
And if you’ve never experienced that stillness? If presence feels like a concept instead of a lived reality?
That’s okay. The path is always the same.
Feel what’s actually there. Let presence be with you in the feeling. Glimpse what’s possible when the feeling doesn’t have to run the show anymore. Dwell in that glimpse until it becomes your new baseline.
That’s the three-part journey every biblical hero takes. It’s the journey you’re on right now.
The Honest Part
I should be honest. I’m not writing this from some mountaintop of permanent presence. I’m writing it from the middle.
I don’t do everything I know I should do. Some of the choices I know God has put on my heart are hard and scary and I stall on them. I compromise with the future. I stair-step into things, integrating little choices at a time.
I think that’s how it actually works for most people.
You start out mostly unconscious. Maybe 100% of your actions aren’t aligned, or they’re accidentally aligned. Then you start feeling more. You gain awareness of your own choices and behavior. You’re not fully conscious of your patterns yet, but you can see them now. And you’re still not choosing the things you actually want to choose or know you should.
So you compromise. You say: I can choose this thing that makes money, and that’ll make me feel more secure while I write and work on what actually matters. You straddle what feels comfortable and a stretch zone of new things you can try and integrate.
And slowly the percentages shift. Maybe you’re 80% obligation and 20% living from passion and flow and presence. Then it’s 50/50. Then 20/80.
But the more present you become, the more the percentages stop mattering. What matters isn’t what you’re doing. It’s who you’re being. You realize you can be present in any situation and show up to what you’re capable of showing up to in each moment.
And as you become more emotionally capable, the choices that used to seem impossible just… aren’t that hard anymore. Your identity in Christ grows not through study but through emotional capacity. Not because you got tougher. Because when you feel your big feelings, you grow emotional capacity. And that capacity makes it easier to step into uncertainty. Easier to soften on the doomsday stories you’ve been telling yourself about what will happen if you actually choose what’s on your heart.
Until one day you’re just living it. The choices God put on your heart are the choices you’re making. And those ripple out as a deep satisfaction in the service you’re offering, and a kind of magnetic attraction where people want to be around you and are eager to learn what you know.
Because what you know is what God put on your heart. And you finally stopped arguing with it.
That’s the journey. Not a single dramatic moment of surrender, but a gradual shift from performing to being. From obligation to presence. From willpower to emotional capacity.
And I’m still in the middle of it. Most of us are.
The Burning Bush Is Already Burning
Moses wandered the desert for 40 years before he saw the bush. But the bush was already burning. It didn’t start burning when Moses was ready. It was burning the whole time. He just had to become someone willing to turn his head and look.
John the Baptist touched something real enough to change the inner landscape of everyone who encountered him. He didn’t need the complete revelation to start transforming everything around him.
Moses didn’t need to understand the whole plan either. He just needed to turn and look. And then take off his shoes. And then say yes to what was already on fire in front of him.
Neither do you.
Who are you in God? You’re exactly who you need to be for what’s in front of you right now.
The burning bush is already burning. It’s been burning your whole life. You just have to turn your head.
And when you do? When you finally stop running from the question and start dwelling in the presence that’s been there all along?
The crowds that have been waiting in your inner wilderness – all the parts of you that have been ignored, silenced, performing instead of being – finally get to come home.
The healing you’ve been praying for is already inside you, waiting for you to stop asking God to do it and start letting God do it through you.
You don’t have to believe any of this intellectually for it to work. That’s the whole point. You can just try it. Sit with what’s actually there. Feel what you’ve been avoiding. Make the hard choice you already know you need to make. And watch what happens.
If your life gets better – if your relationships get more honest, if your body starts to soften, if you find yourself able to choose hard things and trust God will meet you in them – then the belief takes care of itself.
You’re not waiting for permission to become who God made you to be. Your identity in Christ isn’t waiting for you to figure it out. It’s waiting for you to feel your way into it.
You’re waiting for the courage to feel what you’ve been avoiding long enough that presence can emerge from underneath it all.
Stop waiting.
Turn your head.
The bush is burning.
Jon Ray writes about identity in Christ, mystical readings of scripture, and using AI as a tool for self-discovery. Start with the first book of his Mystical Bible series for free: Christian Mysticism. Or listen on YouTube.