Subscriber Update: Be of Good Cheer

Milestone after Milestone

Paul stands in the middle of accusation without flinching. The chamber is full of hostility. The air is political, religious, personal, and violent all at once. Men want him silenced, judged, struck, cornered. Yet he does not speak like a man trying to save a life he still possesses. He speaks like a man whose life is already surrendered.

That is part of the answer. Paul stood before hostile rooms because the world had already taken from him what it could take. Reputation; safety; belonging; comfort; approval; the hope of being understood by his own people. He had already lost the old life.

A man who has already died to the praise of men becomes very hard to intimidate.

But this alone does not explain his confidence.

A bitter man can also become fearless. A desperate man can become reckless. Paul is neither. His courage is not the courage of collapse. It is not numbness. It is not bravado. It is not the last defiance of a cornered animal. It is steadier than that.

It is Filial

Paul believes Jesus Christ has taken hold of him.

He believes that whatever men are doing around him, God is not improvising.

God is not watching from a distance.

God is for him.

So Paul can speak sharply to Ananias, perceive the fracture between Pharisee and Sadducee, endure the chaos that follows, and then, after the whole scene breaks open again into danger, receive the word that explains his backbone: “Be of good cheer, Paul.”

Not, “Paul, they are mistaken.” Not, “Paul, your pain is small.” Not, “Paul, this will get easier.” But: be of good cheer.

Christ does not first remove the conflict. He establishes you inside it.

Paul’s confidence comes not from odds, not from allies, not from visible momentum, not from public approval. His confidence comes from the Man standing nearer than the mob.

Jesus Christ does not say, in effect, “Try harder.” He says, “As you have testified of Me in Jerusalem, so must you bear witness also at Rome.”

Your suffering is not proof that God is against you. Your cannot be abandoned. The room full of enemies is a false judgement. Jesus Christ governs your path.

That kind of assurance makes a man difficult to terrify. Paul knows that he is not in the hands of the crowd in any final sense. He is not even finally in the hands of Rome. He is in the hands of Christ.

This is what gives Paul the courage to stop organizing his life around self-preservation. Having made peace with losing everything except Christ, fear lost its foothold. What could they threaten him with?

Shame? He bears the Name.

Pain? He has suffered before.

Death? To depart and be with Christ is gain.

Isolation? His Lord stood with him in the night.

The enemies surrounding him are real, but they are not ultimate.

We tend to think courage comes after the change. After support. After someone finally understands. Paul lives another order. Courage comes when a Christian knows whose he is. Cheer comes when Christ’s promise outweighs human hostility. Confidence comes when loss has already done its worst, and yet the Spirit of God remains.

Paul was not confident because he was naturally unshakable. He was confident because the resurrection had rearranged his reality. Because God was for him, then the many who were against him could rage, but they could not define him.

“Be of good cheer.” It is a command.

Follow the King

This week we crossed a real threshold: 100 paying subscribers on RevFisk.com.

That number does not include those of you who also support this work through Subscribestar and Patreon. Even so, the growth here has been especially striking, much of it coming in just the last five months. After years of labor to build support around my video work, it is deeply heartening to see so many of you leaning into the writing.

That matters to me because writing is not secondary to what I do. It is central. I do not despise the podcasts or the broader media work, but the written word remains closest to the core of my vocation. In a year marked by upheaval, pruning, and no small amount of trial, that clarity has only sharpened. Much has been shaken. Much has been tested. The question has not been theoretical: what is solid, and what remains when the shaking passes through?

Your support is part of that answer. It tells me that even as some would prefer an older, simpler version of me, there is still a real hunger for biblical discernment, for scriptural wisdom, and for a voice willing to pursue both without apology.

Wild Times

And this matters all the more because the age itself is not calming down. The world is full of quarrels. The economy keeps asking harder questions. Gold and silver have been swinging sharply in recent days, crypto remains split between panic and frenzy, and the South Pars gas field in Iran, one of the great energy anchors of the globe, has been caught up in the violence of the present war.

In that kind of moment, it would be easy to treat AI as one more threat, one more source of noise, one more mechanism for manipulation. Certainly AI carries real jeopardy. In the hands of the wicked, the vain, or the unwise, it can accelerate confusion, magnify deception, and reward imitation over truth. That danger is not imaginary.

But tools are still tools. And the tools now in our hands are becoming stronger by the month. What matters is who seizes them, and for what end. We have been here before. Early radio could carry nonsense, vanity, propaganda, and distraction. It could also carry preaching, teaching, song, and courage into places that older forms could not reach. AI has something of that same frontier quality. Those who take hold of it for the sake of Jesus Christ, for the sake of truth, for the sake of clear thinking and faithful witness, are going to find that it opens doors that would have seemed impossible only a short while ago.

A Musician’s Son

Yes, that is where this is going next.

You’ve seen me promoting Doxazomen, and maybe you’ve clicked on those Proverbs shanties by VD. But I finally got up the courage to pull out my old pile of poetry and hymn texts. I’ll just say… it’s coming. This single is the only taste you get until the debut album release some time in the next month or so.

Yes. I made it with the help of a computer and a “language model” called Suno. The preview hardly does it justice, and it’s the weakest song on the album so far.

So also, I made the following video with a tool called Notebook LM using a single document of code saved from my early Jonathan AI work:

Even though it’s from evil Google, NotebookLM will be hard to ignore, just as it is getting more difficult by the day to sleep on the ways computers, automation, and robotics are destabilizing and restructuring the workforce.

Reports around Meta this week pointed to the possibility of major layoffs tied to the immense cost and promised efficiencies of AI, a reminder that the people running the largest companies in the world are not bluffing when they say many familiar jobs are on the chopping block.

I felt a smaller but more immediate version of that reality myself while making phone calls for my day job with T&T sales, when I ran into my first two fully automated AI receptionists. These were not the old pre-recorded phone trees everyone has learned to endure. They were remarkable, able to understand my questions, respond intelligently, and route me to the right place inside the company with an ease that was frankly startling.

I am not calling this good in itself, and I do not pretend the consequences will be mild. I am saying the change is real, and it is already here.

While you still have access to the tools, it would be foolish not to learn them. More than that, using the tools to become better at what you already do may be one of the clearest ways left to prove your value where you are.

So no, I do not believe the answer is to let the age set the terms and then merely react to them. Better to build. Better to experiment. Better to learn the machinery before the machinery learns you. Better to use the tools in service of the Word than to spend all your energy complaining that the tools exist.

Here’s what one of you did with my old video content in just a few minutes on Notebook LM today:

You do not have to play somebody else’s game. In a moment like this, I am more convinced than ever that it is wiser to build your own table, speak in your own voice, and use every lawful instrument available to make the truth ring clearer.