By Russ Johnson
My youngest son Eli was three years old the first time we played hide and seek. He was terrible at it.
Every single time he hid in the same spot. My bed. Same blanket. Same wiggle of excitement visible from across the room.
So I told him.
Hey buddy — the point is to hide somewhere I can't find you. And stay very still. That's how you win.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he said:
I know, Daddy.
But I like it when you find me.
I've thought about that a lot since.
Because that's not a child who doesn't understand the game. That's a child who understands something about being found that most of us have spent our whole lives trying to unlearn.
The pressure to get life right does something to a person over time.
It teaches you to hide well. To find better spots. To stay very still and hope nobody notices the wiggle.
That’s because nobody told us the point of the game was to be found.
We were handed a different version.
One where God is out there somewhere. Holy and distant. Waiting on the other side of a gapyou need to get across.
And the gap had rules.
The right beliefs.
The right behavior.
Which means you learned to hide well.
Not from God.
For him.
Getting ready. Getting better. Getting closer to the version of yourself
that might finally be worth finding.
Except you never quite got there. Nobody does. Which should tell us something.
Maybe the problem isn't the gap. Maybe it's that we've misunderstood
the God we imagined waiting on the other side of it.
Because before there was a single commandment, there was God. Father, Son, and Spirit. Not a solitary being somewhere in the sky, waiting for someone to get close enough.
Relationship.
An eternal life of love and delight shared between Father, Son, and Spirit. What Christians eventually came to call the Trinity.
And from the beginning, God wanted us in on that life.
“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” (Gen. 1:26)
The story begins with God sharing his life with humanity. We just kept imagining him through the world we knew.
Distance.
Power.
Conditions.
So God did what only love could do. He showed us himself.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:1, 14)
In the person of Jesus, God came.
Which is why what Jesus kept saying about the kingdom of God lands the way it does — if you let it.
He told a short parable
that compared it to yeast.
“A woman took yeast and worked it into sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” (Matt 13:33)
Sixty pounds. That's not a home kitchen experiment. That's a professional baker with strong arms and something serious to feed.
And the point isn't the scale. It’s what yeast does once it's in the dough.
You can't separate it.
You can't pull it back out and measure it.
You can't point to the corner of the bowl
where the yeast ends
and the flour begins.
It becomes one with the dough. Inseparable. Indistinguishable.
And Jesus said: that's what the kingdom of God is actually like.
Not something you invite in. Not something you qualify for. Not something you build or bring or grow.
A presence and reign that is already here. (Mark 1:15)
Already rising.
Already doing what it does
whether you knew what to call it or not.
The person who never went to church. The one who walked away furious
and swore they'd never go back. The one sitting in the back of a funeral
wondering if any of this is real. The one who is absolutely convinced
God wants nothing to do with them.
They aren't outside the dough. There is no other batch. The yeast is already in it.
Jesus said it himself
when the Pharisees asked him
when the kingdom of God would come.
Not seekers with open hands. The Pharisees — the people who opposed Jesus, and ran the system, and decided who was in and who was out.
His answer stopped them cold.
"The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed… For in fact, the kingdom of God is in your midst."
(Luke 17:20-21)
At first glance, this verse doesn’t create a gasp for us. But that’s because these words don’t capture what Jesus said that day.
The Greek word Jesus used — entos — doesn't just mean nearby. It goes beyond something above and beside to something inside.
A guy named Paul knew this.
Standing in Athens — surrounded by philosophers and skeptics who had their own gods, and their own systems for sorting, and had never heard of Jesus — Paul pointed to the statue they had for “the unknown god,” and told them:
"He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:27-28)
Already.
Every one of you standing here
find your being… in him.
Paul was speaking from personal experience.
His own awakening — the one that stopped him mid-road, and changed everything — he never described as something he unlocked with the right prayer.
He described it like this:
God "was pleased to reveal his Son in me." (Gal 1:15-16)
Not to him.
In him.
What changed on that road wasn't God's location.
And once that string got pulled, everything he thought he knew started to unravel.
Because if Jesus was already in him before he believed — before the scales fell from his eyes, before he said a single correct thing about God — then the whole architecture of his religious life was built on bridging a gap that was never there.
Which is exactly what he says when he writes to the people in Ephesus.
He doesn't warn them that God is distant and some need to close the gap. He tells them some people are living "alienated from the life of God... in the futility of their thinking, darkened in their understanding."
(Eph 4:17-18)
And Paul has already told them
what makes that
alienated way of life
so damn strange.
There is “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” (Eph. 4:6)
All is doing a lot of work there.
Not over the right people. Through the right people. In the people who figured out how to get God there.
Over, through, and in all.
Which means the alienation Paul describes a few verses later isn't about God's location. It's about their perception.
He called it the: futility of their thinking. The same thinking many of us have been handed and never thought to question.
But God never moved.
The yeast was always in the dough.
Which means maybe Eli understood the game better than I did.
The question was never how to get found. It was whether we could see the One who had been with us all along.
And if that makes you wonder
what happens to sin,
or the law,
or faith,
or the cross—
amen.
None of them disappear.
But they begin to look very different when we begin with the God Jesus actually revealed.
Including what it means to know him.
So don’t fill in the blanks yet.
Keep going.