My Story
Welcome to My New Creation Life
There are moments in a person’s life when something is planted so deeply within them that it refuses to go away. Not a passing thought, not an emotional experience, but a seed. A calling. A vision that grows quietly beneath the surface until the time comes for it to emerge.
For me, that moment began in 1993.
I had a dream that I did not fully understand at the time. It wasn’t something I could explain or immediately step into, but I knew it was from the Lord. Over the years, that dream stayed with me. Through seasons of struggle, growth, failure, restoration, and transformation, it continued to develop, gaining clarity, depth, and direction.
Now, over 30 years later, what was once a seed is becoming a mission.
My Story
My life has not been shaped in classrooms alone, but in real places with real people facing real struggles. Much of what I understand today about grace, identity, restoration, and the transforming power of the gospel was learned with an open Bible in one hand and my life deeply involved with people in the other.
For seven years, I was part of an inner-city church and one-year men’s discipleship program in one of the most dangerous parts of Baltimore. Many called it the armpit of the city. During those years, I had the privilege of spending hour upon hour, week after week, living life alongside men who had come from addiction, homelessness, incarceration, broken families, and the streets. It was unlike any church environment I had experienced before. In many ways, it felt as though the book of Acts had come alive around us.
We really did meet continually. We gathered at church, in homes, around tables, on the streets, and wherever ministry took us. We prayed together, studied Scripture together, ate together, served together, evangelized together, and carried one another through some incredibly difficult seasons. We experienced something of what Acts describes when the early believers met daily in the temple and from house to house. It was a different kind of place, and it became a training ground where I learned that ministry was not primarily something you did from a platform. Ministry was something you lived.
It was there that I learned to serve.
During those years, I also served in prison ministry and participated in weekly street evangelism in some extraordinarily difficult inner-city neighborhoods where gangs, addiction, violence, and hopelessness were part of everyday life. I learned to walk into places where many people would rather not go and to sit with people whom much of society had already written off.
One night while evangelizing, I was even stabbed. Yet experiences like that only deepened something that had already begun taking root within me: following Christ could never simply be about protecting my comfort. I had become convinced that it would be better to lay down my life for Christ than compromise His call to go into the highways, byways, and streets with the good news.
I remember walking straight toward a gang who were mocking me from across the street and preaching to them anyway, not with condemnation, but about the unwavering love of God. The fearlessness God had given me in that moment shocked them, and they actually began asking me questions about the Bible. Those streets became part of my education. They taught me courage, compassion, perseverance, and something else I would understand much more deeply in the years ahead: behind some of the hardest exteriors are people desperately searching for an answer to the question, “Who am I?”
Eventually, my family and I moved to Florida, and another chapter of that education began.
After moving to Florida, I continued serving people in crisis through ministry support work, eventually spending more than 5,000 hours sitting face-to-face with men navigating addiction, shame, broken relationships, homelessness, incarceration, failure, and profound hopelessness. But what I encountered there was not unique. I had already seen it on the streets of Baltimore, in prison ministry, in discipleship programs, in neighborhoods, churches, and countless conversations with people from very different walks of life.
The surroundings changed and the city was different, but the struggles were remarkably the same.
Whether I was talking with someone sleeping on a city street, a man behind prison walls, someone battling addiction, or a person sitting across from me in an office, I kept encountering people who had come to define themselves by what they had done, what had happened to them, or what others had called them.
These were never statistics to me. They were people with names, histories, families, dreams, regrets, wounds, and stories. And over thousands of hours of listening to those stories, I began recognizing something that would profoundly shape my understanding of ministry.
The deepest problem was not simply what people were doing.
It was who they believed they were.
I met people who had been called addicts for so long that addiction had become an identity. Others saw themselves primarily as criminals, failures, deadbeat fathers, homeless people, disappointments, unwanted, broken, or simply the sum total of their worst decisions. They weren’t merely struggling with destructive behaviors. They were living from a story about themselves that told them, This is who I am. This is who I have always been. And this is probably who I will always be.
And I discovered that hopelessness is not confined to the streets, prisons, or shelters. You can change the neighborhood, the clothing, the income, or the circumstances and still find people carrying false identities that quietly govern how they see themselves and how they live.
Sometimes, tragically, even religious language had reinforced that hopelessness.
Many had heard some version of the message that even after coming to Christ they were still, at their core, “poor old sinners,” destined to sin in thought, word, and deed every day, probably within the first few minutes after getting out of bed. Certainly, Christians still stumble, grow, learn, and need the renewing of their minds. But I began asking a different question: Is failure really the identity the New Testament gives to someone who has been made new in Christ?
Because if I continually tell a man that sin is fundamentally who he is, why should I be surprised when he continues living from that identity?
But I began watching something remarkable happen when the message changed.
Instead of merely telling men what they needed to stop doing, I began showing them who Scripture said they had become in Christ. We talked about the old man being crucified with Christ. We talked about being a new creation. We talked about righteousness, sonship, union with Christ, freedom from condemnation, and the reality that their past might explain where they had been, but it did not have the authority or power to write their next chapter.
And I watched men begin to hope again.
I saw the gospel’s new-creation message turn people from darkness toward light, not merely by producing temporary behavioral changes, but by changing the place from which they saw themselves and therefore the place from which they lived.
Out of that same hunger, the Bible studies we started began to grow. What started small eventually became four one-hour Bible studies every week, with attendance growing from around seven people to as many as forty men and women gathering faithfully. Something was happening. People who had once struggled to believe their lives could be different were opening their Bibles and discovering that Christ had given them an entirely different identity.
Hope was returning because identity was changing.
Those rooms became another classroom for me.
Week after week, I watched people sit forward in their chairs as Scriptures they may have read many times suddenly came alive. I watched men who had defined themselves by their worst moments begin to imagine a different future. I watched women carrying years of shame begin to understand that shame was not their inheritance in Christ.
Over time, I became convinced of something I could never have learned from theological study alone:
When people begin to see who they truly are in Christ, they begin to live differently because they finally believe they are different.
The issue was not simply what people were doing.
The issue was who they believed they were.
And until identity changes, lasting transformation is incredibly difficult.
My Training
My training has come through more than thirty years of immersion in Scripture, not as a detached academic pursuit, but from a relentless hunger to understand what God has actually accomplished through Jesus Christ.
I have tried to live as a Berean, willing to search the Scriptures again and again to see whether the things I have been taught are actually so. That journey has required me at times to reconsider ideas I once held strongly, ask uncomfortable questions, and allow Scripture itself to challenge traditions and assumptions I had carried for years.
But my training has never been Scripture separated from life, and to me, that distinction is vital.
My classroom has also been the inner-city streets, prison ministry, discipleship houses, church gatherings, late-night conversations with struggling men, and offices where someone sat across from me believing his life was finished. It has included more than 400 hours of leading Bible studies over a two-year period and thousands of hours simply listening to people tell me where they came from, what they had done, what had been done to them, and why they had come to believe there was little hope left for their future.
And then I had the privilege of opening the Scriptures with them and saying, in effect, “But look at what God says about you now.”
That became one of the greatest schools of ministry I could ever have attended.
My understanding has been shaped by a deep commitment to the finished work of Christ, a Christ-centered reading of Scripture, Old Covenant fulfillment, new-creation theology, and a life of learning to listen, trust, abide, and walk with God. But it has also been shaped by witnessing what happens when those truths move from the pages of a Bible into the heart of a person who had almost given up hope.
Along the way, I also began to recognize another kind of false identity, one that could actually be reinforced by the very religious language intended to produce humility. I saw what happened when people were continually taught to think of themselves primarily as “poor old sinners,” as though the old man in Adam were still very much alive and remained their truest identity. Instead of producing freedom, that message could create a bondage in the mind and conscience, keeping people rehearsing a kind of “woe is me” Christianity that sounded humble but continually reminded them of who they used to be rather than awakening them to who they had become in Christ.
I began to see that there is a tremendous difference between humility and condemnation. True humility agrees with God, even when what God says about us seems almost too wonderful to believe. If Scripture says the old man was crucified with Christ, that we have become new creations, that we are His workmanship, that we have been made righteous in Him, and that Christ Himself is now our life, then continually identifying ourselves by the man who died is not greater humility. The renewing of the mind begins when we dare to believe that what Christ accomplished is actually true.
This became more than theology to me. I watched the difference play out in people’s lives. When someone believed that sin, failure, addiction, or the old man in Adam remained his fundamental identity, his conscience often remained chained to the very person he was desperately trying not to be. But when people began seeing themselves through Christ and understanding that their old history did not have the final word over their identity, something changed.
Hope returned.
This is why confession became so important to me. The Greek word homologeō carries the idea of saying the same thing, agreeing with, or acknowledging. True confession is not merely rehearsing everything that is wrong with us; it is learning to come into agreement with God and say the same thing He says about who we are in Christ. And as that agreement began replacing the old narrative, I watched people begin living from an entirely new starting point.
That is where new-creation truth became intensely practical for me. Identity was not merely something to teach. I was watching people live out of whatever identity they truly believed.
From that school of God, my first book, From Adam to Christ: A Biblical Journey into the New Creation, was born.
That book was not simply the product of theological study. Behind its pages were decades of ministry and thousands of conversations. I had seen with my own eyes what happens when someone stops seeing himself primarily through Adam, failure, addiction, shame, condemnation, or his past and begins seeing himself through Christ and the reality of the new creation.
Today, I am working on my third book, and after more than thirty years of walking with Christ, abiding in His Word, studying, questioning, learning, and trying to remain a Berean, I still feel like God is opening my eyes.
And increasingly, I believe the Church desperately needs to rediscover this message.
We do not need another generation of believers convinced that their failures are more powerful at defining them than Christ’s finished work. We need men and women who understand that Christianity is not an endless attempt to become what God might someday make them.
It is learning to live from what God has already made them in Christ.
That is the message I have watched restore hope in shelters, discipleship programs, Bible studies, prisons, homes, and streets.
And after more than thirty years, I am more convinced of it than ever:
Identity changes everything.
The Turning Point
There was a time when I saw Scripture through a very different lens.
I held tightly to traditional frameworks and would have quickly labeled views like the ones I now teach as wrong, even heretical. But I continued to ask questions. I stayed open. I searched the Scriptures more deeply.
Over time, I began noticing that some of the assumptions I had inherited did not always fit comfortably with what I was seeing in the text. Questions about identity, covenant, fulfillment, the finished work of Christ, and what it truly means to be a new creation began pressing me beyond the boundaries of the theological framework I had known. Instead of asking Scripture to fit what I already believed, I increasingly found myself willing to let Scripture challenge what I believed.
That process did not happen overnight. It came through years of study, prayer, wrestling with difficult passages, reconsidering long-held assumptions, and returning again and again to Christ as the center of the story. And the more I searched, the more I began to see a beautiful consistency running through Scripture: what God accomplished in Christ was far greater, more complete, and more present than I had understood.
And in that process, something shifted.
What I discovered was not a new gospel, but a clearer one.
A gospel not centered on striving, distance, and uncertainty, but on union, identity, and completion in Christ.
The Message
At the heart of everything I teach is one foundational truth:
You are not trying to become something in Christ.
You have been made something in Christ.
This changes everything.
This message moves us:
From striving to resting
From distance to union
From performance to identity
From fear to assurance
From trying to live for God… to living from Him
The Mission
My mission is simple, but it carries eternal weight:
To help people see who they are in Christ, so they can live from that reality.
I believe this is one of the most important conversations of our time. Because when the Church begins to understand and live from new-creation identity, everything changes. Not just individual lives, but families, communities, and the world.
At the root of so much confusion, striving, and instability in the Church today is one central issue: identity.
As Patrick Sookhdeo writes in The Death of Western Christianity: Drinking from the Poisoned Wells of the Cultural Revolution, “the root problem in the church is a crisis of identity.” He argues that the Western Church must rediscover who it truly is if it is to reclaim what has been lost.
This is why everything we do flows from this one focus: helping people awaken to their identity in Christ, not as a concept, but as a living reality.
My Invitation
If you’ve ever felt like there must be more…
If you’ve wrestled with identity, purpose, or your place with God…
If you’ve grown tired of striving and are ready to discover what it means to live from Christ instead of merely trying to live for Him…
You’re in the right place.
This is an invitation, not to try harder, but to see clearer.
Because everything changes when you realize:
Christ is not just your Savior.
He is your life.
Repairers of the Breach
This ministry exists to call people into spiritual wholeness.
To bridge what has been broken.
To restore what has been lost.
To strengthen what God has planted.
This is not about building a following.
It is about awakening a people.