After the break, the room was different. The air was thinner, the exhaustion deeper. Stewart returned not with a gentle prod, but with a roar. “WANNA HEAR ANOTHER IDIOT TALK!!??!!” he screamed, and the room, confused, answered with a mix of “NO” and “YES.” He was talking about himself, about the “idiot talk” of his own recent past, when he’d argued that sinlessness was impossible.
Now, the message was the opposite. “We can and must lead a sin-free life!” he bellowed, his voice cracking with intensity. “HOW IS JESUS CHRIST GLORIFIED THROUGH US BY CONTINUING IN SIN?” He answered his own question: “He’s not.” He hammered the point home, his logic a relentless, terrifying machine. “A COMPLETELY SINLESS LIFE is available to you. DON’T LIE AND SAY IT ISN’T. YOU’RE LYING IF YOU SAY IT ISN’T!”
The lie, he explained, was a defense mechanism. To say you couldn’t stop sinning was to justify the flesh, to avoid the terrifying conclusion: “I must surrender or face that I am choosing Hell.” He dismantled their comfort with surgical precision. Hope was the enemy. Not hope in Christ, but the “vague hope” of success in this life, the secret desire to build something for yourself. That hope, he declared, was “of the devil.”
He painted his new worldview in stark, absolute categories. There was no “weekend abiding,” no “striving toward” an ideal. “This is not just some ideal that we’re STRIVING TOWARD!” he sneered, mocking their past complacency. He redefined their entire history. All those years of dealing with “sin in Christians”? A mistake. “There is no such thing,” he stated flatly. “These are sheep. Someday they may be disciples. they may be Christians. but they’re not now.”
He was rewriting the Bible before their eyes, and his interpretations were the only ones that mattered. He found proof everywhere. He took verses they had read a hundred times and gave them a new, brutal meaning. “As He was in this world so ARE WE!” he proclaimed from 1 John. “He has no sin. Er go what must we be?” The room mumbled the answer: “Have no sin.”
He knew what they would call him. “You will hear many from now on call me conceited,” he predicted. “But you know better.” He was positioning himself as a persecuted prophet, whose arrogance was actually a righteous confidence in the truth.
The system he was building was a rigid hierarchy of being: sheep, disciple, friend, saint. And at the very top, alone for now, was Stewart. He was the proof of concept. He had executed all hope in this life. He was living on borrowed time. He had died, and therefore he was free.
He even addressed their failed attempts at application, like Paul’s suggestion to just have a “life of close to Jesus.” “And what happened?” Stewart asked, mocking their old, soft ways. “Blah blah.” The problem, he diagnosed, was that they had been operating with two hopes, two lives. “The fact that we still have a vague hope in this life is proof that we have never been born anew.”
Slowly, he wore them down. Chuck, the voice of doubt, finally broke. “I’m starting to see the whole bill of goods,” he admitted. It was a small crack, but it was all Stewart needed. He was winning.
He offered them a new way to judge themselves, not by a checklist of sins, but by a single, piercing question: “Is there any hope in this life?” If the answer was yes, you were damned. It was a test of the heart, of the secret motivations he claimed to see so clearly.
He tied it all together—mind, hope, love, and self. Self and love were mortal enemies. “I wanna” was the mantra of the damned. He was consecrating himself, he said, to be the “best example I can be of a non-phoney but loud mouthed christian that… never sinning.” He would bear with their failings, just as Jesus had borne with his for twenty-five years, but he would not surrender to the liars.
He ended with a final, chilling declaration. “There is and will be no longer anywhere to hide. You can lie but you can’t hide. This is the one and only true gospel.” The room sat in stunned silence. He had taken their world, their faith, and their very identities, shattered them into a million pieces, and then handed them back a single, razor-sharp shard of glass and called it truth. And in their exhausted, desperate state, they were trying to figure out how to hold it without bleeding to death.