From Secret Knowledge to Embodied Love: Dismantling Gnosticism’s Grip on Modern Faith

What if the quiet crisis in modern Christianity isn’t doubt, but distraction—a version of faith that sounds right and changes little? We go straight at the subtle Gnosticism that still haunts church culture today: the lure of secret knowledge, the shrug toward the physical world, and the fantasy of escape. Then we lay it beside Paul’s charge in Romans 12 to offer our bodies as living worship and James’s blunt verdict that faith without works isn’t weak—it’s dead. The result is a practical roadmap for moving from belief to embodiment, from thoughts and prayers to presence and action.

Together, we unpack how transformation begins with a renewed mind and shows up in ordinary choices: honest work, patient relationships, quiet generosity, and courage when comfort beckons. We talk about resisting conformity to hustle culture’s metrics—money, output, image—and embracing a life that makes no sense apart from God. Along the way, we share concrete next steps: start small and specific, see everyday tasks as altars, draw near to pain instead of outsourcing compassion, and let grace be the source of your doing so burnout doesn’t win. The heartbeat is simple: worship is not a playlist or a Sunday hour; it’s how we live.

Anchored in the incarnation—love with skin on—we remember that Jesus didn’t send a concept; he showed up. Communion becomes more than a ritual; it’s our reminder that grace is tangible and our invitation to become tangible too. If you’re ready to move beyond privatized belief and let the gospel be visible through your hands and feet, this conversation will meet you where you are and nudge you forward. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s hungry for a lived faith, and leave a review telling us one small act you’ll take this week.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Gnosticism Still Matters
• 2:40 The Three Gnostic Ideas Unpacked
• 5:20 Modern Echoes: Belief Without Embodiment
• 10:56 Romans 12: Bodies As Living Worship
• 16:30 Resist Conformity, Embrace Transformation
• 20:45 A Life That Makes No Sense Without God
• 22:45 James 2: When Faith Is Dead

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Madison Church Online. I'm Stephen Feith, lead pastor. Glad you're joining us for this series as Kyle led us into. It's on Gnosticism. Lots to say about that this morning. But I want to begin by saying I believe in this room we all want a faith that matters, that's tangible, that's meaningful, that's engaging. You want a faith that transforms your life and not just your life, but like it shapes your relationships, your career, shows up in how you live every single day. I don't think anyone in this room would be here in this room if that wasn't true. I don't think any of you are looking to check off a box that you went to church on Sunday morning. I think we're a little bit beyond that era in which those things mattered. I think you're here today because you are seeking God, you're seeking community, and you want to make an impact in the city of Madison. And all of that is because of your faith. And that's why we're doing this series on Gnosticism, which honestly is probably a word that most of you had never heard of before the series, or you might have heard of agnosticism, which is not what we're talking about, but Gnosticism. And the reason that we've been doing this, and the reason I wanted to do this for a really long time, is because this is what, out of all of the situations and circumstances at the early church, that those first followers of Jesus, versus disciples and the apostles and those early church plans, the thing that almost killed them was not the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was oppressive and it was a difficult thing for them to get through. But when you read the history of the church and its evolution and the theology development, Gnosticism was the thing that almost put us out. And Gnosticism had three core beliefs. And the first one was that salvation came through a secret knowledge. And so it wasn't available or accessible to everyone, just someone's. And if you were lucky, that was you. And if you weren't lucky, well, it just sucks to suck. The physical world, it didn't matter. What this meant was you could do whatever you wanted to do. You're talking truly heinous, disgusting, terrible things that would hurt other people. But if you prayed and read your Bible, that was okay then. Because your soul was separate than your body. And faith was about escaping the world rather than engaging it. I want faith, so when I die, I don't go to hell. Okay. And the reason I've wanted to do this series, and I probably should have led with this on week one, but the reason I wanted to do this series is because I believe that Gnosticism still permeates. It exists within our faith right now. I would say most of what I see is it on social media with posts or like the famous influential pastors. A lot of the theology is very Gnostic informed or Gnostic influenced. I mean, if you think about it, salvation comes through secret knowledge. You have to believe certain things about God. Well, what things? Well, let me tell you what things matter. And depending on what church or pastor you ask, it's going to be different. And in that way, it's kind of secretive. And you might be here today wondering am I believing the right things? Well, there's no secret knowledge. As Kyle talked about last week, this is about relationship, and the gospel is accessible and available to everyone. God is seeking you as you seek him. We see things like the physical world doesn't matter in our society. Well, as long as you go to church on Sunday and you sing the songs or you don't listen to that kind of music and you don't watch these kind of movies or whatever, and and and you take care of that, then it really doesn't matter like if you're greedy or not, or if you lie or you cheat at work or at school. Well, I prayed and I asked for forgiveness on check, it's fine, right? Because I'm taking care of my soul. We see it when faith gets boiled down to escaping this world. When we're talking or obsessed with the rapture, and I'm sure in the last few weeks you've seen all of the graphs, right? And we're still here today. And that ties into the Gnosticism, both secret knowledge and also like the only reason we're here is to like hunker down, hold down, and I hope I don't get left behind. All of these things are Gnostic, not Christ. And that's why we're doing the series. We still have the same mindset, though. It's the kind of Christianity that scrolls through sermons on YouTube or podcasts, but we don't serve anyone in real life. We don't talk about faith in real life. It's the kind of faith that loves to go deep, but never out. I can tell you everything about Revelation and all my theories. And there's guys, there's like five orthodox views of Revelation. Okay, so you're like one-fifth of the way there. Okay, so there's like all of these acceptable views of Revelation, and we're like, I got it, but then we never go out in the street and live like Jesus. It's a faith that thoughts and prayers about the problems that are going on or sharing the post, but I'm not gonna get my hands dirty. I'm not gonna bring it up when it challenges me, when it costs me. I'll go protest on a nice afternoon in Madison, but don't ask me to get arrested on a Thursday night. It's a soft faith. And if we're honest, I'm not picking on you. It's me too. We are all susceptible to doing this. It happens to every single one of us. We know the gospel in theory, or our version of it, our theology of the gospel, but that doesn't necessarily change how we treat people. We affirm our faith with our lips, and yet no one can tell any difference in us Monday through Friday when we go to work. We can sing the songs on Sunday and live something completely different on Monday. I think it's serious because as John Ortberg once said, the danger for us, for Christians, the danger for us is not that we'll renounce our faith. I think that's a lot of the fear, right? When we talk about deconstruction and people deconstructing their faith, they're like, what if we get to the end of it and we completely don't have faith at all? I don't know if that's the worst thing that can happen. I think as Oortberg points out, though the danger is that we'll become so distracted and so superficial that we settle for a mediocre version of our faith. A mediocre version of it. And that's, I think, the warning of Gnosticism is that we say we pray and I gotta pray a little bit better or a little bit deeper, or I read my Bible and I gotta do it a little bit more, a little bit longer. I go to church and I've gone 12 weeks in a row, but I'm gonna go for 13 now. And and and we have all of these things that we're trying to do, but it's mediocre. As Kyle talked about, do we know the God who has sought us out for relationship? This is what was going on 2,000 years ago. I know the Bible is uh filled with books that are very old, and you're wondering, is it relevant for you? But this is exactly why it's relevant. They were dealing with the same thing you and I deal with today. Paul confronts it in Rome, James confronts it in the scattered churches of the first century, and both remind us that a faith that is believed but not embodied isn't a real faith. Okay, faith that is believed but not embodied is not real. Paul pleads offer your bodies, not just your beliefs. And James warns us faith without works isn't weak, it's not shallow, it's dead. And because true discipleship isn't an escape plan for heaven, discipleship following Jesus is an embodied way of life here and now. Here and now. And so if you want to follow along with me, I'm gonna go to 1 Romans chapter 12. And by the time Paul gets to this point in Romans, and for you theology nerds, you know that this is kind of like the gospel according to Paul, and he's laying out a theology of sin and why humans need Jesus and what Jesus did. But he gets to this point at chapter 12, and he pivots and he says, therefore, therefore, and in other words, because of everything I've said to you, chapters 1 through 11, everything I've built up about Jesus and Adam and Israel has led to this pivot point right here. He says, This is how you respond to the gospel, this is how you ought to react to what I have just told you. And he says, give your bodies to God, because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. So there's the way to do it. And then he's gonna say, for those of you who are wondering, don't copy the behavior and customs of this world. Don't copy it. Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. What Paul says, a lot of what Paul says is countercultural. This is included in that. In Rome, when we were going to worship, it meant bringing something dead to the altar. Here is this animal I sacrificed to appease this God. Now, please don't be angry with me. But Paul flips that. We're not going to bring something dead to the altar anymore. You're going to bring yourself, your full life self. True worship isn't what happens at the temple when we're spilling blood. True worship isn't a single ritual, it's not a weekly ceremony, it's not just on Sunday from 11 to 12. True worship, Paul says, the kind of worship that we respond to God's grace, love, and forgiveness is offering our bodies, hands, feet, mind, every day, breathing, and all the things you do. It's giving it to God. And that includes every kind of body, strong or weak, young, aging, disabled, neurodiverse, male, female, or somewhere in between the categories the world tries to force. Everybody is sacred ground for God's glory. The diversity of our bodies is not an obstacle to worship, it's the very place worship begins. In Greek, the word Paul uses for body, it refers to the whole person, not just your physical form. When he refers to the body, he's talking mind, body, and spirit, all of you, the total self. He's not just saying, he's saying, don't just give God your beliefs, your theologies, your mind and your spirit. He's saying, give God all of you. Yes, your spirit, yes, your mind and your thoughts, but also your body, your work, your habits, your relationships, and your time. Worship is not about what we think. It's not even about how we feel. Worship, according to Paul, is about how we live. And Rome was constantly molding people into its own image. That was the whole point of being of the Roman Empire. You idolized honor, you idolized power, you idolized prestige. And Paul says, don't be conformed to that, instead, be transformed. And this is the same word that they write when talking about Jesus says transfiguration. Be transformed in a deep, spirit-led way that begins with the renewal of our minds and results in a life that reflects God's will. We live in the United States, but the US, our world, our culture is they try to shape us nonetheless. We're told our value comes from how busy we are or how much money we make or have saved, how much we consume. The message in our society that we're being conformed to is that more is better. And it's completely possible to say that we believe in Jesus. That we believe in Jesus. I check the box. Yes, that's that's the God I choose, while still living by the same values as everybody else, including those who say, no, that's not the God I choose. To talk about faith on Sunday, but to embody civilization around us, their patterns the rest of the week. But Paul is calling you and I to something better, a life that no longer makes sense apart from God. Let's focus on that for a second. What Paul is saying is to live a life that no longer makes sense apart from God. Stanley Hauerwass puts it: to be a Christian means to live in such a way that your life would not make sense if God did not exist. To live your life in such a way that just would not make sense if God did not exist. So that's kind of the first part. We're going to offer ourselves as a living worship. Now we're going to go to James chapter 2. James is the brother of Jesus. He's writing to churches that are dispersed all over the place, and he's confronting some different issues. But he begins in verse 14 saying, What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith, but don't show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? I mean, suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, and you say goodbye and have a good day, stay warm and eat well, but then you don't give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see, faith by itself isn't enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless. These churches that are reading this from James, they're small and they're struggling communities that are facing really bad poverty and a lot of pressure. For them, hunger and lack of clothing wasn't an abstract issue down the road at the shelter, those people elsewhere, but it was them. It would have been as James looks out at the churches, he sees it in the congregation. So when James describes, he says, you know, essentially you can imagine James up here saying this to a group, when he says, Don't ignore the brother or sister in need, he's talking to the people sitting there, well fed, fully clothed, sitting next to those who are starving and needing something to wear. James warns it's possible to claim that you have faith. I have faith, but never to embody it. But he asks a rhetorical question: what good is it? What good is it to check the box, to say that you believe the thing? He's kind of going to their Jewish ancestry, their tradition here, where mercy wasn't optional, mercy was covenantal. It was part of the deal. If you were gonna have a relationship with God, then you had to show mercy. Offering pious words without practical compassion wasn't just lazy. According to the old covenant, it was shameful. He paints a vivid picture. When someone says, stay warm, be filled, it sounds spiritual. And if you think about it, when you have passed someone on the street or when I've passed someone on the street, most of the time, a lot of the time, we avoid making eye contact. We walk faster. We cross the street. So James is already pointing out something that for a lot of us would be an improvement. You walk by someone, and instead of avoiding them, you say, God bless you today. Well, that would be an improvement for me. Okay. I don't know about you. It'd be an improvement for me. But James is saying, even that improvement, Stephen, or you, even that improvement, that's not good enough. It's empty. It's betrayal of the gospel, it's a denial of the Jesus that you claim to believe. This is a hard-hitting message. I mean, he's he's saying your faith without it is dead, not struggling, not weak, not immature, non-existent, dead. For the early church, that stripped away every single excuse that they would have had. Faith and actions weren't two categories of spiritual life. They were one of the same. And again, we may not see nakedness in our gatherings, but the needs around us today are just as real. The difference for us today is that it's easier to look away, you see, because the hunger isn't in front of us this morning. We live in a world that lets us outsource compassion. You're hungry. Let me tell you where you can get a meal. You need somewhere to eat. Let me show you where the shelter is. And look, systemic options help fight systemic problems. So don't mishear what I'm saying. My warning to us is how many of us double tap the post about injustice, but we never act for justice. We say, in more words, stay warm, be filled, and we have good intentions. I know you have good intentions, but then we don't follow through. And isn't that the problem, wouldn't you say, with modern Christianity? A lot of thoughts and prayers, a lot of sharing, but not enough actions. And James says it's that kind of faith, no matter how sincere it sounds, is lifeless. Not because God needs our works, God doesn't need your work, but because our faith does. So when you listen to Paul and you listen to James together, you can hear a single heartbeat. These two are not contradicting each other, they're not at odds with each other. Paul says worship is an embodied sacrifice. It's everything that I have, I offer to God, not just some sort of abstract belief. And James says faith without that, without that embodied worship, that action is dead. Unalive. Both confront the same danger. A faith that appears spiritual but never materializes in the real life. Together they remind us that without embodiment, faith is not worship. And without works, it is not alive. The believers wrote, the believers that they wrote to were small, pressured, and often poor. And that meant for them to listen to Paul or to listen to James meant a visible difference in their lives. Resisting the empire, breaking social barriers, caring for those in need. It was risky, it was costly, but as I reflect on it for us today, living in Madison, it does cost a lot less. I mean, you're not going to be persecuted for the post, you're not going to be persecuted for your faith like they were. Okay. But our comfort might cost us some comfort. Our danger today isn't necessarily oppression or being oppressed because of our faith, but distraction. We can believe without acting. You can worship without surrendering. You can call yourself a follower of Jesus without following him anywhere. And that's the challenge of our moment. It's to resist the drift to a privatized faith, compartmentalized belief system, and recover a faith that actually looks like Jesus is Lord of my life, visible in our relationships, active in our service, and present in our world. We have to move beyond belief to embodiment. Remember what Paul says? It starts there. It starts with belief, but for too many of us, it started there and it's ended there, and that's where we currently are. It's gotta get moving. People whose faith is lived, not just claimed. The invitation is simple, yes, but not easy. Simple, but not easy. So choose one place of your life this week where your belief in Jesus, what you claim to believe about God, comes into practice. Now let me say this with care because James is not telling you today to do more for God. Okay, that's how this Bible verse gets kind of exploited and used and abused. James is inviting you to live from what God has already done in you. It's not do more, do more, do more. It's look what God's already done in you. Just live that out. For some of us, that means stepping out and putting our faith into motion. That's where we're at. It's time to give my faith some legs and some hands. For others, it means letting uh letting our doing slow down long enough to let the spirit renew us. For a lot of us, we're so busy that we we can't really open ourselves up to God and what he's saying. And that's why we feel burned out. It's not because we're not doing good things, it's not because we don't have the right faith, it's not because we don't love God and it's not because we're not trying, it's because we're not slowing down to say, God, what is it that I need to change up? Because works born from grace do not, or I'm sorry, works born from grace brings life. When your works come from grace, it brings life. But when you work to prove something, your life will be drained. And for a lot of us who are drained or burned out or some kind of way worse, can we consider today to rest in God's grace? It starts small, perhaps with just your presence. James's audience, they saw hunger firsthand. For us, we see loneliness, we see exhaustion, and we see quiet grief. It's easy to tell someone, I will pray for you, maybe even go a little bit further and pray with them, right there on the spot, but still not have to show up and walk with them. And perhaps that walk will take weeks, months, or years. What if your first act of faith this week was to simply be present with someone you know is suffering, to sit with them in their pain, to visit someone who is alone, and to listen without offering solution or trying to fix. For others, maybe it's we need to start treating small acts as acts of worship. We see areas of our life as insignificant, but we're told by Paul to offer everything, even the insignificant things, as acts of worship. So ordinary faithfulness is sacred. Perhaps you care for a child this week. You show patience at work to somebody who really gets under your skin. You serve your neighbor without them asking. Have you considered that those are all acts of worship or acts of not worship? You can go in the other direction. Ask yourself, where can I serve in a small but meaningful way this week that might seem mundane, but God considers holy. For some of us, it's to make a sacrificial choice that makes the gospel visible. Both Paul and James point us to costly action. To follow Jesus is to let our faith make us uncomfortable. And maybe that means giving your time or your resources that you would rather keep. Perhaps it means forgiving someone who absolutely does not deserve to be forgiven. Maybe it means reconciling what's been broken. That is the path of discipleship faith, the kind of faith that moves us from words, from Gnosticism to presence, from convenience to surrender, from belief to embodiment. The call isn't today for you to do everything. The call is to do something, to do something, to take one step toward a faith that looks more like Jesus, visible, tangible, and alive. We started this series out by talking about John's words in chapter one that the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That's the incarnation. God didn't send someone else to get the job done. He didn't send ideas or theories. God physically came into this world. Jesus touched the untouchable, he washed dirty feet, and he broke bread with sinners. He also carried a cross. It shows that faith isn't abstract. His love wasn't a theory, that God was embodied, and so was his love. That's the model of discipleship for us to follow at Madison Church. Not earning grace, but living in the same grace that took on flesh for you and me. And that's what we remember as we come to the communion table. Communion isn't just a ritual that we do every week at Madison Church, it's a reminder that God's love became tangible for you and me. And so when we take the bread and we take the cup, we remember that his body was broken and his blood poured out for you and me. Not theoretically, but really. So when you come to the table today, slow down and don't rush. Remember that Jesus gave his body for you, and now he invites you to give your body back to him, to offer your whole self as an act of worship. Because when you do that, something inside of you changes. You begin to experience God's actual presence, not just an idea of God. Your faith becomes alive, your heart begins to soften, your mind renews, and you start to see purpose and peace in places that today feel ordinary or empty. You begin to live the life that Jesus promised, a life to its fullest. So let's go and offer ourselves as worship. Let belief become action, let faith take shape in our hands, in our feet. Let the gospel be visible through us. And as we do, may the world see Jesus alive.