Who am I

The warehouse room was quiet, except for the low hum of the fluorescent lights overhead and the distant sound of rain against the corrugated tin roof.

Lucas sat at his workbench, staring down at a handwritten chart he’d compiled over months of study. Beside it lay an open Bible, its pages worn at the edges. Opposite him, Matthias sat quietly, scraping the clean edge of a wooden wedge with his pocketknife, letting the shavings fall onto the floor.

Lucas rubbed his forehead, letting out a heavy, tired breath.

"Matthias," Lucas said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Who am I?"

Matthias paused, the knife resting on the wood, and looked up. "What do you mean, Lucas?"

"Look at this," Lucas said, gesturing toward his open desk. "I call myself a Christian. I’ve worn that label my whole life. But look at how I actually live—how we as a culture live. We claim to follow Christ, but we don't live anywhere near the way Yeshua actually walked."

He stood up, pacing the narrow aisle between the shelving units.

"We talk about holiness, but we put whatever we want into our bodies just because it tastes good—ignoring every clean food instruction in the Scriptures, consuming things crawling with parasites and bacteria just to satisfy a craving. We take blatant pagan holidays, paint a thin coat of pious paint over them, and call them 'Christianized.' We celebrate the twenty-fifth of December as His birthday when every thread of history and Scripture shows He was born in the fall, during the Feast of Tabernacles. We celebrate Easter—a day rooted in ancient fertility rites—while the true followers of the Messiah were commanded to keep Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread."

Lucas stopped, leaning his hands on the edge of the wooden crate, his knuckles white.

"Why do I claim to be a follower of the Messiah," Lucas asked, his eyes locked onto Matthias, "and yet participate in the most lawless religion on the face of the earth?"

Matthias closed his pocketknife with a soft snap and set it down. He didn't offer a quick, comfortable cliché. He simply let the weight of the realization sit in the room for a long moment.

"You ask who you are, Lucas," Matthias said gently, his voice firm and grounded. "Right now, you are a man standing at the threshold of honest repentance—Teshuvah. You are realizing that the word 'Christian' in modern culture has been stripped of its original definition. It has become a broad label for a system that traded the commandments of God for the traditions of men."

Matthias reached over, tapping the open page of the Gospels.

"The Apostle John didn't leave room for a hybrid walk. He wrote clearly: 'He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.' Yeshua didn't eat unclean food. He didn't observe pagan solstice festivals. He kept the Sabbath, He honored the Father’s feast days, and He walked in total Torah obedience. If the shepherd walked one way, and the flock is walking in the exact opposite direction, then the flock isn't following the shepherd—they're following a crowd."

Lucas sat back down, looking at the contrast between the Scriptures and his daily routine. "So how did we get here? How did an entire religious system drift so far from the actual life of the One they claim to worship?"

"Because compromise is comfortable, Lucas," Matthias replied. "It’s easy to blend in with the culture. It takes no courage to eat what everyone else eats, celebrate what everyone else celebrates, and sit on the fence where no one challenges you. A lawless faith demands nothing from your flesh. It allows people to keep the name of the Messiah while discarding His authority."

Matthias leaned forward, looking Lucas squarely in the eye.

"You asked why you claimed it. You claimed it because it was what you were taught. But you aren't blind to it anymore. The moment you see the gap between man's traditions and the Creator's truth, you are no longer a passive spectator—you are at a crossroad."

Lucas looked back down at the manuscript on his desk, then at the stark text of Matthew 12:30.

"So where do I go from here?" Lucas asked quietly.

"You stop building on the tradition, and you start building on the Truth," Matthias said. "You align your diet, your days, your worship, and your walk with the Messiah Himself. You stop asking what is popular or traditional, and you start asking what is written. You don't just clear your own life of the compromise—you take the uncompromised Word, put it into a clear, permanent format, and share it with anyone willing to listen."

Lucas took a deep breath. The weight of the compromise was heavy, but the clarity that came with the truth was light. He reached for his pen, crossed out the traditions of men on his outline, and wrote a single line at the top of the page:

To walk as He walked.