Every Station

My wife and I were sitting at dinner a few weeks ago and she mentioned that a friend of ours — a real estate agent — told her that a lot of the homes he's selling in Brentwood now are going to influencers.

One of them made really strange music. Had a massive following. Bought a house in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.

And my first thought, honestly, was: what do I need to do to get a following like that?

I dismissed it pretty quickly. I don't care enough to make that much content. But the thought was there. For a second, I wanted in.

Then something else landed.

We had just gotten back from Europe. We'd walked through palaces and cathedrals built for emperors and kings. Rooms designed to remind you, the moment you walked in, that the person who lived here was not like you. That God spoke to him. Not to you.

And sitting at that dinner table, I realized something was bothering me — not about the influencer buying the house, but about the through-line. The long arc from that emperor on his throne, all the way to a guy with a ring light and a million followers.

Because something has changed. Something fundamental. And I'm not sure we've stopped to think about what it means.

Part One: One Voice

For most of human history, the idea that any ordinary person could speak to a wide audience — could have influence — was not just unlikely. It was structurally impossible.

In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh was not just the ruler. He was considered a living god. The bridge between the divine and the human. He communicated with the gods through ritual and then conveyed their will to the people. His word carried divine weight because, as far as everyone was concerned, it was divine.

This wasn't unique to Egypt. The Japanese emperors were believed to descend directly from the goddess Amaterasu. Their line was considered an unbroken connection to the divine — the closest access to God that any human being could have.

The pattern repeated across civilizations. Rome. China. The Aztec empire. One person — or one dynasty — held the connection. Everyone else listened.

There was one transmitter. And millions of receivers.

Part Two: The Priests

As empires shifted and Christianity spread through the Western world, the structure changed — but the gatekeeping didn't.

The Roman Catholic Church became the institution through which people understood God. And for most ordinary people in medieval Europe, their access to scripture was almost entirely oral. The priest read the Latin gospel. Most people couldn't read at all — in any language. So the priest's paraphrase of the day's reading, delivered from the pulpit, was as close as most people ever got to the Word of God directly.

The Church maintained that its clergy were uniquely qualified to interpret scripture. You didn't read the Bible yourself. You heard what the Church said it meant.

This wasn't always a formal prohibition. It was often just reality. If you're illiterate, and the Bible exists only in Latin, and there are maybe a handful of handwritten copies in your entire region — the priest is your access point whether there's a rule about it or not.

One transmitter. Millions of receivers.

The structure held.

Part Three: The Door

On October 31, 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed — or possibly mailed — a list of 95 arguments to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

He was not trying to destroy the Church. He was trying to reform it. But what he set in motion was a complete restructuring of the relationship between ordinary people and God.

Luther had been reading Paul's letter to the Romans. And what he found there convinced him that every believer — through faith in Jesus Christ — had direct access to God. No human mediator required.

He called it the priesthood of all believers.

And here's the part worth sitting with: Luther didn't mean "I am my own priest" in the sense of spiritual individualism. He meant something more like — in the community of those who follow Christ, we are all priests to each other. The access was real. But it was still oriented outward. Toward God. Toward neighbor.

The printing press made all of this possible. Gutenberg's invention meant that the Bible could be printed in the common language of ordinary people. It could be distributed. It could be read. Literacy began to rise. The monopoly on interpretation began to crack.

The transmitters multiplied. Not to millions — but to thousands. And those thousands could now read God's Word for themselves.

Part Four: The Flood

Now it's 2026.

There are 5 billion people on the internet. Anyone with a phone can broadcast to the world. The barriers to entry are essentially zero. You don't need a printing press. You don't need a pulpit. You don't need a palace.

You need a phone and something to say — or something to show, or a song to sing, however strange it might be.

The gatekeepers are gone. The transmitters are everywhere.

And here's what I keep thinking about: every time access expanded in history, a theology came with it. A story about what the new access meant.

When the printing press broke open the Church's interpretive monopoly, the Reformation supplied the theology: every believer is a priest. Every person can come to God directly. The access points toward something beyond yourself.

When the internet broke open the media's distribution monopoly, the theology that arrived with it was different.

Everyone has a voice.

You are your own brand.

Build your audience.

Find your people.

The access points toward yourself.

Part Five: The Noise

I'm not saying influencers are evil. I'm not saying social media is the enemy.

What I'm saying is that there are now more stations broadcasting than at any point in human history. And you can tune into almost anything you want.

That guy with the strange music? He has a station. The fitness coach. The political commentator. The pastor with the ring light. The real estate agent selling homes to all of them.

Me, apparently.

You can plug into any of it. All of it. You can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you choose, for as long as you want, and there will always be more.

And in the middle of all of that noise — more noise than any generation of human beings has ever had to navigate — there is still one signal that has been there since before the pharaohs.

Before the priests.

Before the printing press.

Before the algorithm.

God's Spirit.

And the fruit of that Spirit — the evidence that you're tuned in — doesn't look like a following. It doesn't look like a Brentwood address. It looks like this:

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." — Galatians 5:22–23 (NIV 1984)

Close

The question isn't whether you have a platform.

The question is what station you're tuned into.

I know what it's like to be tuned into the wrong one. I was blind. And then, over twenty years ago, I heard a teaching from the stage at Remnant Fellowship Church that I have held onto ever since.

It was simple. If you love God, you will obey him. And if you don't, you can expect your life to be in shambles.

That was it. That was the thing that cracked it open for me.

And I can tell you — not as a theory, but as something I have lived — that tuning into God's station changes everything. Not perfectly. Not without the daily fight of choosing which rabbit hole to go down, which voice to let in, which station to leave on in the background. I face that same choice every single day.

But the teaching keeps pointing me back. Back to God. Back to loving him more. Back to putting his kingdom above my own. Back to loving others the way he first loved me.

I was blind. Now I see.

The noise isn't going away. The influencers are going to keep buying houses. The algorithm is going to keep rewarding whoever is loudest and most constant.

But God isn't competing for your attention the way everyone else is. He doesn't need to. His signal has been there since before the pharaohs, before the priests, before the printing press, before any of this.

The question — the only one that actually matters — is whether you want to receive it.

Every day, you choose.