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Just Passin' Through

Maybe you've heard the old gospel song, the one that says, "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin' through." Perhaps you sang it as a child in a little country church, never quite grasping the weight behind those simple words. But did you know that sentiment didn't begin with a hymn writer? It began with Jesus Himself.

 

In one of the most staggering claims anyone has ever made, Jesus said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."¹ Notice how He begins — truly, truly. That's not filler. That's Jesus underlining His own sentence, the way your mother used to say your first and middle name when she meant business. In Hebrew thought, this doubling carries the same weight as the great Shema — "Hear, O Israel"² — a summons demanding your full attention, not a passing glance.

And what does He want you to hear? Two requirements, plainly stated. First, you must hear His word — not merely let it pass through your ears the way music plays in an elevator, but let it land, let it lodge, let it do its work in you. Second, you must believe Him who sent Me. And here is where so many people miss it. Believing isn't nodding your head at a doctrine. It isn't checking a theological box. It is trusting your whole weight — your whole life, your whole eternity — to Jesus Christ.

Let me illustrate it for you.

In the summer of 1859, a Frenchman named Jean François Gravelet — better known by his stage name, Blondin — strung a tightrope across Niagara Falls and walked it, hundreds of feet above the roaring water.³ The crowds went wild. So Blondin, ever the showman, did it again — this time pushing a wheelbarrow across the wire. When he reached the other side, breathless, the people cheered. Blondin turned to them and asked, "Do you believe I could carry a person across in this wheelbarrow?"

"Yes!" the crowd shouted. "We believe! We believe!"

"Then," Blondin said, "who will get in the wheelbarrow?"

Silence.

Friend, that is the difference between head belief and heart belief. It is one thing to applaud a truth from the safety of the riverbank. It is something else entirely to climb into the wheelbarrow. Saving faith is not admiring Jesus from a distance. It is climbing in — placing your full weight, your full trust, your eternal destiny into His nail-scarred hands and saying, "Lord, I believe in what You have accomplished for me at the Cross. I put the full weight of my faith in You.  Take me across." That is what it means to hear and believe. And to everyone who does, Jesus makes an exclusive promise: eternal life, no judgment, and a passage already made — from death into life. If you have never gotten in the wheelbarrow, I invite you to do that before you finish reading this devotional.

Pressures and Persecution

Now, here is something the church doesn't always tell new believers, and I think it does them a disservice not to: being born again does not exempt you from trouble. If anything, it guarantees you'll meet it.

Jesus told His disciples plainly, "In this world you shall have tribulation."⁴ Notice He didn't say might have. He said shall. The Greek word behind "tribulation" is thlipsis, and it's a word that originally described the crushing weight applied to grapes in a winepress or grain under a millstone — literal, physical pressure.⁵ Jesus wasn't promising us a light drizzle of inconvenience. He was promising pressure — the kind that squeezes, that presses in from every side, that makes you wonder if you can take one more day of it.

You know this pressure, don't you? It's the pressure of a diagnosis you didn't see coming. The pressure of a marriage under strain. The pressure of a paycheck that never quite stretches far enough. The pressure of a wayward child, an aging parent, a career that's crumbling. Jesus never promised us a pressure-free life. He promised us Himself in the pressure.

And it doesn't stop with pressure — the Apostle Paul also promises persecution for those who follow Messiah faithfully. Paul put it about as plainly as Scripture ever puts anything: everyone who desires to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.⁶ Not might be. Not could possibly be, if the circumstances line up just wrong. Will be. It's a certainty, not a possibility.

Paul knew this from personal experience. As he made his way toward Jerusalem, knowing what likely awaited him, he told the Ephesian elders that in city after city, the Holy Spirit kept warning his heart to expect chains and hardship.⁷ Can you imagine that job description? "Congratulations on your calling — chains and affliction await you in every city." Most of us would have updated our résumé and looked for other employment. But Paul kept walking toward Jerusalem anyway, because he had already given his life to Someone greater than his own comfort.

But here is the glorious good news, beloved — pressure and persecution are never the last word.

Preserved

God does not merely allow us to go through trials. He preserves us through them.

Paul described his own catalog of afflictions this way: knocked down, but never knocked out.⁸ Read through his litany in Second Corinthians sometime — beaten, shipwrecked, stoned and left for dead, sleepless nights, hunger, danger from every direction imaginable.⁹ By any human calculation, Paul should have been finished a dozen times over. And yet, every single time, the Lord brought him through. Not around the trial — through it.

That's the pattern of Scripture, isn't it? Daniel didn't avoid the lions' den; he was preserved inside it. The three Hebrew young men didn't avoid the furnace; they were preserved in the fire, and the only thing that burned off them was the rope that bound them. Jesus told His disciples that they would tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing would injure them.¹⁰ That is not a promise of a trouble-free path. It is a promise of a protected traveler.

I don't know what pressure you are under this very moment as you read these words. But I know this: the same God who preserved Paul in shipwrecks and Daniel among lions is fully capable of preserving you in whatever furnace you're walking through right now. You may be just passin’ through, but you are not passing through alone, and you are certainly not passing through unguarded.

Presented Faultless

And after all is said and done — after the pressures have pressed and the persecutions have come and gone and the Lord has preserved us through every last one of them — Scripture gives us a promise so breathtaking that I have to slow down just to write it.

Jude closes his brief letter with one of the highest doxologies in the New Testament: to Him who is able to keep us from stumbling, and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.¹¹

Faultless. Let that word sit with you a moment. Not "mostly cleaned up." Not "graded on a curve." Faultless — without a single blemish, without a single accusation that can stick, standing in the presence of a holy God with nothing held against us. And notice who gets the credit in that verse. It isn't you. It isn't me. It is Him who is able. The One who saved you in the beginning is the same One who finishes the job at the end. Our part was climbing into the wheelbarrow (and that was a gift of grace too!). The rest — every bit of it, from that day to the day we stand faultless in glory — belongs to Jesus.

A Purpose — Until Then

So what do we do in the meantime — in the space between the wheelbarrow and the glory?

Jesus answered that question in a parable about a nobleman who left his servants with instructions: "Occupy till I come."¹²  That word "occupy" isn't about real estate. It's a business term, meaning to trade, to invest, to be about your Master's business until He returns.¹³ In other words, we are not meant to sit on the riverbank of history, arms folded, waiting for the rapture with nothing to show for the wait. We have work to do. We have a purpose.

How, then, do we occupy?

First, set an example. Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."¹⁴ Paul said it even more personally: "I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."¹⁵ Somewhere along your journey — at work, in your neighborhood, at the kitchen table — someone is watching to see whether the Jesus you talk about on Sunday shows up in you Monday morning. The lost need see Him.

Second, snatch some from the fire. Jude tells us to have mercy on those who doubt, and to save others, "pulling them out of the fire."¹⁶ That's urgent language — the language of a rescuer who doesn't have time to be polite about a burning building. Somebody around you is closer to the flames than you realize. Mercy means you go get them. It means you don't wait for a perfect opportunity; you make one.

The evangelist D. L. Moody learned that lesson at a cost he never got over. On the night of October 8, 1871, he stood before the largest congregation he had ever addressed in Chicago, preaching from Pilate's question, "What shall I do then with Jesus?" By his own account, he preached with everything God had given him — and then he closed the service by inviting the people to take the question home, think it over during the week, and return the following Sunday to decide what they would do with Jesus of Nazareth. As the closing hymn began, the singer never made it past the first verse. Fire bells were already sounding in the street outside. That was the night the Great Chicago Fire broke out, and by morning much of the city — including the very hall where Moody had just preached — lay in ashes. He never saw that congregation again. Decades later, still haunted by it, Moody said he would rather have his right hand cut off than ever again give an audience a week to decide what to do with Jesus.¹⁷ He had learned, at unbearable cost, exactly what Jude is telling us: mercy doesn't wait for next Sunday. Somebody around you is closer to the flames than you realize, and you may not get a second invitation to go get them.

Friend, we really are just passin' through. This world was never meant to be our final address — it's a hallway, not a home. But while we're here, pressed by trouble and, at times, persecuted for our faith, we are preserved by a faithful God, we are promised a faultless presentation before His throne, and we are given real purpose for every mile in between. So let your light shine. Reach into the fire for somebody who's still there. And keep walking toward home — because home is exactly where this journey ends.

Endnotes

  1. John 5:24
  2. Deuteronomy 6:4
  3. The account of Charles Blondin's 1859 crossing of Niagara Falls, and the popular "wheelbarrow" illustration drawn from it, is a widely told anecdote in preaching and devotional literature; specific dialogue varies by teller.
  4. John 16:33
  5. From the Greek thlipsis, commonly used of physical pressure (as in a winepress) and, by extension, of affliction or distress.
  6. 2 Timothy 3:12
  7. Acts 20:22-23
  8. 2 Corinthians 4:9
  9. 2 Corinthians 11:23-27
  10. Luke 10:19
  11. Jude 1:24-25
  12. Luke 19:13 (KJV)
  13. From the Greek pragmateuomai, "to conduct business, to trade."
  14. Matthew 5:16
  15. Galatians 2:20 (KJV)
  16. Jude 1:22-23
  17. D. L. Moody recounted this episode from October 8, 1871, on multiple later occasions, most notably in his 1893 retelling, "The Fire Sermon" (in Sermon Classics by Great Preachers, ed. Peter Gunther [Chicago: Moody Press, 1982], 7-18). See also William R. Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody (repr., Charleston: Nabu Press, 2014), 568; and Timothy Yap, "Dwight L. Moody, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the Creation of Urgency in Preaching," The Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society (September 2025): 97-118.