Mel is a friend and an atheist. When we occasionally get together, I sometimes invite him to listen to a sermon on my podcast that I think might resonate with him. One afternoon over lunch, I pointed him to a message about how Jesus saves us.
“Mark,” he said, “I have a great life. I don’t need saving.”
I asked him to explain.
“I haven’t killed anyone or cheated on my wife. I’m not a homeless bum or a drug addict. Those people might need saving, but I’m fine. I have everything I ever dreamed of: a beautiful wife and kids, a great job, a nice house, and a nice car. I’m projected for a promotion, and my investments are doing well, so I might even be able to retire early. I worked hard and earned all of this without a magician in the sky. So tell me: What do I need saving from?”
Knowing something of his past, I continued to probe.
“But Mel, things haven’t always been easy for you. Do you ever think about the deeper questions—why you’re so restless, why you can’t forgive your ex-wife, or whether you’ll know who you are once you’re no longer working fifty hours a week?”
“I try not to think about that kind of stuff,” he replied. “It doesn’t help.”
“And that,” I said, “is precisely the problem.”
Not because Mel is a bad person. He isn’t. He is a good person with a good life.
But the deepest problem in our lives is not always that we are bad people. It’s often that we are afraid to face the deepest truths about ourselves. Because we are afraid, we spend enormous energy staying busy, distracting ourselves, and telling ourselves that everything is fine.
In the opening chapters of Romans, the apostle Paul says this is where our trouble begins.
The Most Dangerous Lie We Tell Ourselves
At the center of this way of life is self-deception.
Self-deception is not merely lying to others. It is the story we learn to tell ourselves: I’m fine. I have everything under control. I don’t need help. I don’t need saving.
That’s what makes self-deception so powerful. If I can convince myself I am fine, I never have to face deeper truths or admit how much I need God.
We can think of this as living on the surface, living in such a way that we avoid the deepest truths about ourselves by relying on created things to give us what only God can give.
This does not mean ordinary life is bad. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying our families, careers, homes, hobbies, vacations, or possessions. These are good gifts. The problem arises when we use them to avoid the truth and expect them to provide our ultimate security, identity, value, happiness, or peace.
The problem is not that we enjoy these things. It’s that we depend on them to save us.
And the things we use to save ourselves eventually become the things that enslave us.
This is why, after announcing the gospel as “the power of God for salvation” in Romans 1:16, Paul devotes most of the next three chapters to describing what has gone wrong with humanity. Grace seems unnecessary to those who are convinced they are fine. Before we can understand why the gospel is good news, Paul must expose the self-deception that keeps us from recognizing how much we need it.
When Life Cracks Open
Most of the time, we keep the deeper questions beneath the surface. We have appointments to keep, bills to pay, people to care for, and work to finish. There is always another email, TV show, home project, social event, or notification demanding our attention.
But then something changes.
We lose someone we love. A relationship falls apart. Our children move away or make choices we cannot control. We retire and realize that the work that structured our days also gave us much of our identity. Our health begins to decline. A doctor delivers a serious diagnosis. The future we imagined no longer seems possible.
These experiences create cracks in the surface of life. Questions we have long avoided begin to rise from the depths:
Who am I—really?
Why am I so anxious, angry, or judgmental?
Why do I always need to be in control?
Why am I so unsatisfied?
Why is it so difficult for me to get close to people?
Sometimes relationships begin to unravel, and the questions become even more personal:
Am I enough? Why is my spouse so distant? Why are my children rejecting me? Why do friends and coworkers keep me at arm’s length emotionally? If I stopped producing and performing, would I still have value?
As parents decline, friends fall ill, and funeral announcements grow more frequent, another set of questions emerges:
How much time do I have left? What happens if I lose my health, my spouse, or my independence?
After spending decades building careers, raising families, accumulating experiences, and achieving goals, we may finally ask:
When my life is over, will any of this have really mattered? Are my best years behind me? How much of my life have I spent pursuing things that do not last?
These questions are painful, but they are not merely interruptions in life. They can also be invitations—opportunities to be honest with ourselves, see our lives in the light of truth, course-correct, and rediscover what gives human life lasting meaning, purpose, value, and joy.
The cracks reveal truths about ourselves that life on the surface keeps us from seeing.
What It Means to Go Deeper
Going deeper doesn’t mean endless introspection. It doesn’t mean becoming preoccupied with ourselves, analyzing every feeling, or turning ordinary uncertainty into a spiritual crisis.
It means being willing to confront reality—to see our lives in the light of God’s truth.
That requires honesty about who we are, what we fear, what we love, what we trust, and what we have been asking to save us. It also means examining the quality of our relationships, the sources of our identity, and the things we turn to for security and peace.
But wrestling with these deeper things can be frightening. If we confront the truth, we might discover failures too painful to face, problems too large to solve, and feelings too overwhelming to bear. Maybe we have wasted too much time we can’t get back. Maybe we have broken hearts we cannot mend. Maybe we are not as fine as we have told ourselves.
What if we go digging for treasure only to find we have dug our own grave?
The cracks reveal the truth, but the truth frightens us.
And fear doesn’t leave us empty-handed. It drives us to search for something that will make us feel safe again.
How Fear Sends Us Back to the Surface
As noted above, living on the surface is not the same as living an ordinary life. We all have responsibilities, routines, and immediate concerns that demand our attention. We cannot spend every waking moment contemplating the meaning of life.
The problem begins when something cracks the surface, revealing a deeper truth, and we experience that truth only as a threat. Instead of receiving the moment as an invitation to become more honest, more whole, and more deeply connected to what matters, we retreat.
Because the truth frightens us, we retreat into surface life, with all its distractions and consolations. For some of us, it’s our career. We work harder, accomplish more, and measure our value by what we produce. Productivity gives us a temporary sense of control and significance. As long as we are needed, successful, or admired, we don’t have to ask who we are apart from our work.
For others, it’s our relationships. We look to a spouse, our children, a romantic partner, or others’ approval to assure us that we are loved and that our lives matter. Without realizing it, we begin to ask other people to carry the impossible burden of making us whole.
For others, it’s entertainment. We fill every quiet moment with screens, hobbies, trips, games, concerts, parties, or new experiences, so the deeper questions never have a chance to surface. There’s always something else to watch, buy, plan, or anticipate.
For others, it is politics. Faithful engagement in public life matters, especially when our neighbors are suffering or justice is at stake. But politics can become part of our surface life when a party, candidate, or ideology becomes our primary source of identity, belonging, certainty, and hope. We can become so focused on what is wrong with those on the other side that we never confront what is happening within our own hearts.
For some of us, it’s even religion. We stay busy at church, focus on defending our beliefs, or compare our behavior with others’ to feel superior. Religion can become yet another way to hide from God.
Career. Relationships. Entertainment. Politics. Religion. All of these can be good. But any of them can become part of surface life when we use them to avoid the truth or to ask them to give us what only God can give.
When Good Things Become False Saviors
The cracks reveal the truth. The truth frightens us. Fear drives us back to the surface, and self-deception helps us explain away whatever the cracks reveal.
We tell ourselves that nothing is really wrong. We just need another vacation, a little more money, a few more drinks, a new relationship, a better job, or something else to help us feel like ourselves again.
We keep finding new ways to say, “I’m fine.”
As we use created things to avoid the truth, our relationship with them shifts. We become increasingly attached to them because we rely on them to make us feel safe, happy, valuable, and whole. Yet the relief never lasts. So we work harder. We demand more from our relationships. We consume more entertainment. Yet the cracks keep appearing, and the deeper questions keep resurfacing.
Without realizing it, we begin using these surface-level things to save us—to save us from the questions that will not go away, from the truth about our lives and our world, and from challenges that threaten to exceed our personal resources.
Here, ordinary distractions become something more dangerous. We stop merely enjoying them and begin to depend on them. We ask created things to provide security, identity, happiness, and peace they were never meant to provide.
Our distractions have become false saviors.
And the things we use to save ourselves eventually become the things that enslave us.
Paul’s Diagnosis: Suppression, Exchange, Idolatry, Slavery
Paul gives theological language to what we’ve been describing. What I have called surface life, Paul calls “suppressing the truth” (Romans 1:18). We do not merely fail to recognize the truth; we actively resist what we do not want to see.
He goes on to say that when we are disconnected from reality, our thinking becomes futile. We claim to be wise while becoming foolish. We say, “I’m fine,” while increasingly unable to recognize how much trouble we are in.
Finally, he says that as we suppress the truth, we make a dangerous exchange. The word appears repeatedly in Romans 1. We exchange the glory of God for created things. We exchange the truth about God for a lie. We exchange worship of the Creator for worship of creation.
That word—exchange—is crucial.
Every human being entrusts their life to something. Every human being looks for identity, security, meaning, value, and hope. The only question is what we will entrust to carry that weight.
When we suppress the truth about God and ourselves, we do not stop looking for help. We redirect our trust. We exchange trust in the Creator for trust in something God created.
That exchange is what the Bible calls idolatry.
We can miss Paul’s point because we imagine idolatry is limited to bowing before golden calves or statues of other religions. But an idol is anything in the created world that receives the ultimate trust due to God. As we cling to our distractions and consolations, we begin to rely on them to make us happy, safe, secure, and whole. We start treating them as gods without even realizing it.
And if the Bible is clear about anything, it’s that idolatry leads to slavery. What begins as something we possess becomes something that possesses us. What begins as a way to feel better becomes something we cannot imagine living without.
We are no longer simply lost and unaware of it. We are slaves who believe we are free.
The Symptoms Are Not the Disease
As we disconnect from the truth, our lives become increasingly inauthentic. We begin to wonder whether we are living a lie, which can cause us to cling even more tightly to the things we use to distract and console ourselves. Our relationship with created goods becomes disordered, and this distorts our thoughts, desires, and behavior.
Paul describes this condition as marked by wickedness, greed, envy, deceit, malice, gossip, faithlessness, and other moral failures. The more distorted our lives become, the more easily we begin to see what is harmful as good and what is good as harmful.
But self-deception keeps looking for evidence that we are fine.
Instead of examining the deeper condition of our hearts, we focus on Paul’s list of immoral acts. The list gives us people to compare ourselves with. We point to someone whose failures are more visible and say, “I have never done that,” or “I rarely do that, so I must be okay.”
But the behaviors Paul lists are symptoms, not the disease itself.
The deeper disease is a life disconnected from truth, placing ultimate trust in created things while insisting, “I’m fine.” Some people exhibit many of the symptoms Paul describes, while others show only a few. Some even appear asymptomatic, meaning they’ve never experienced what we would call a major moral failure.
Yet Paul says the deeper condition is universal. We have all become trapped in a way of life that separates us from the truth, distorts our trust, and leaves us dependent on things that cannot save us. Many of us—especially those who have lived relatively good lives—remain unaware of this condition because self-deception has convinced us that being better behaved than others means we do not need grace.
But regardless of how it manifests as immorality, the underlying condition is universal. We are all, in Paul’s words, “under the power of sin” (Romans 3:9). We have all “fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
Being better behaved than someone else does not mean we are free, whole, or without need of grace.
Stepping back, we can see the movement.
The cracks reveal the truth.
The truth frightens us.
Fear drives us back to the surface.
We exchange trust in God for trust in created things.
Created things become false saviors.
False saviors become masters.
And this brings us back to the question we started with: Why do I need saving? Why do I need God?
Even when we are honest about our needs, many things can help us understand ourselves and live healthier lives, such as good friends or therapy. These are gifts, and we should receive them as such. But eventually, everyone encounters realities that exceed our ability to manage them: suffering we cannot fix, losses we cannot reverse, guilt we cannot undo, questions we cannot finally answer, and ultimately, death itself.
Sooner or later, all of us encounter something that outstrips our personal resources. When that happens, the question of God becomes more than a religious question. It becomes a deeply human question.
Maybe the problem isn’t that we haven’t tried hard enough. Maybe it’s that we are asking ourselves—and the things around us—to do something we were never capable of. Maybe we really do need saving.
From “I’m Fine” to “God Is”
Again, this is what Paul calls being under the power of sin, and the movement toward freedom can be expressed in three simple statements.
We start with:
I’m fine.
That’s often the voice of self-deception: I have everything under control. I don’t need help or saving. As long as I keep saying, “I’m fine,” I remain trapped on the surface, placing my trust in things that cannot save me.
But grace gives us the courage to speak a second truth:
I’m not fine.
I need help. I need grace. I need a power greater than myself to free me from the things I have asked to save me.
That may sound like bad news, but it’s actually the beginning of freedom. As long as I insist I’m fine, I remain trapped. When grace enables me to tell the truth, the prison door begins to open.
This is where repentance begins. Repentance is not beating ourselves up or rehearsing all we have done wrong. It’s allowing grace to make us honest. It is allowing God to reverse the exchange—turning away from the created things we have asked to save us and placing our trust in the God who can.
But the gospel does not leave us with “I’m not fine.” If it did, we would be left in shame, anxiety, and despair. The gospel leads us to a third, greater confession:
God is.
God is present. God is faithful. God is love. God already knows everything we fear facing, and God still loves us.
I may not be well, but God is still God—and God’s grace is greater than anything I am afraid to face.
This is grace: God’s loving, transformative presence and power meeting us in the truth and leading us into freedom.
“I’m fine” is self-deception.
“I’m not fine” is truth.
“God is” is hope.
At the Deepest Place, God Is
John Wesley encouraged the early Methodists to ask one another a probing question:
How is it with your soul?
Not the life you show on the surface. Not the version of yourself you present to others. How is it with your soul?
Where are the cracks showing up? What questions have you been avoiding? What have you been asking to provide peace, security, value, or joy that it cannot deliver?
You do not have to solve everything today, nor even fully understand it. The invitation is simply to stop saying, “I’m fine,” long enough to tell God the truth.
Most of us spend our lives afraid that if we leave the surface and dive into the depths, we will drown. We fear that the truth about our failures, relationships, regrets, and fears will be more than we can bear. So we keep swimming on the surface, clinging to whatever makes us feel safe.
But the gospel says something astonishing.
The depths are not where God abandons us. They are where we discover God has been with us all along.
The place we feared would destroy us is where truth and grace meet.
At the deepest place, God is.
God is present.
God is love.
And God is waiting to lead us into freedom.
We have been afraid of the very place where grace is waiting to meet us.
Continue the Journey
📖 What Christians Do: Living Like Jesus in a Divided World
What if Christianity were known less by what Christians argue about and more by how we live?
My new book, What Christians Do, explores six practices rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus that can help us become people of greater humility, compassion, courage, justice, and love—especially in a divided world.
Coming October 6, 2026 from Abingdon Press.
✉️ Get My Free 5-Day Devotional
Want to go deeper? Subscribe to receive my free 5-Day Devotional, along with future articles and reflections on faith, spiritual formation, and learning to live more like Jesus.
Subscribe & Get the Free Devotional
Pastor Mark Reynolds 