Firm Foundation Focus

In this ‘In the Field’ episode from Poland, we confront what happens when self is exposed. Luke 18 shows us that self can justify, self can condemn, and self can stay at the centre in both success and failure. Bonhoeffer calls it a “wish dream,” and he warns that the one who clings to it “stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren.” When self refuses exposure, it bla...

In this ‘In the Field’ episode, I read an entry from Oswald Chambers that exposes something many believers have never questioned — how humility can actually be the voice of good self. We have been taught to admire the tax collector in Luke 18, to stay low, to stay conscious of our unworthiness, and to speak carefully about ourselves, and yet if that posture becomes your defining identity after you...

In this final Unfolded episode of Firm Foundation Lite, I stay with one thread from Monday’s session — the call to impossible living, and what it actually means to live by the life of Another. Many believers are still trying to live the Christian life from the same source that shaped life in Adam, unaware that self was never designed to carry this life. The frustration many feel is the exposure of...

In this final session of Firm Foundation Lite , we gather up everything that has been opened across these weeks and bring it into the question that eventually faces every believer: how do we actually live this life we have received. From the beginning this series has pulled us back to the Father’s original desire, away from a man-centred starting point, and into His intention for sons who share in...

In this Unfolded episode I return to something we opened up in Session 5, and I tell the story of being handed a book back in 2022 that dismantled my entire inner world, because it exposed just how self centred and me focused my Christianity had been, even while I was using all the right language and doing all the right things. Reading one chapter a day, walking the streets of a Polish city, I fou...

In today’s session the focus turns fully toward the Father, as we trace the gospel back to where it truly begins, with His Eternal Purpose before Adam, before the fall, and before human need. As the story is seen from Their perspective, the Cross comes into view as far more than a solution for our sins, because it addresses the source of life inherited in Adam and brings independence to its end, m...

In this fourth Thursday Unfolded episode, I come back to a question many of us have lived with for years: if the old man really is dead and we truly are the new man in Christ, then why does it still feel like there is such a war going on inside of us, and why do thoughts and impulses still show up that feel anything but new. Drawing from what we’ve already opened up together in previous sessions,...

I need the blood for forgiveness, what I have I have done, but I need the Cross to deliver me from who I am! In today’s session we open up the part of the gospel many of us were never shown, where the blood of Jesus deals with everything we have done, yet the Cross deals with the Sinner in Adam, the old man we inherited. This is where the freedom we have longed for begins to take shape, because Je...

In this third Thursday Unfolded episode, I come back to something I only mentioned briefly at the end of Session 3, and that is confession and communion. For many of us, communion has become a quiet moment at the end of a service, centred around personal introspection and whether we feel clean enough or confessed-up enough to take part. But when we look again at the Passover, and at what Jesus was...

In this third session of Firm Foundation Lite, we turn to what God Himself did in response to what was exposed through Adam. Having seen that the human problem runs deeper than behaviour, and that sin shows up both in what we do and in the power that shaped life in Adam, this session moves directly to the blood of Jesus and the purpose it was given to fulfil. The focus stays firmly on God’s action...

In this second Thursday Unfolded episode, I come back to one word from Session 2 that has stayed with me all week, and that word is source. Because from the very beginning, the question in the garden was always about where life would come from, and who we would be joined to. Two trees stood before humanity, representing two sources, two life systems, and two outcomes, and that same question still...

In this second session of Firm Foundation Lite, we turn our attention to what actually went wrong when humanity entered the story. Rather than beginning with behaviour, mistakes, or moral failure, this session takes us deeper, exposing the inherited condition Scripture presents — a change of source that took place in Adam, where separation from God became the governing reality of human life. As th...

In this first Unfolded episode, I come back to one of the images from Session 1 the picture of a rocket missing the moon because it began just one degree out and talk it through more personally, sharing how that illustration has stayed with me. Using that image, I talk about the phrase “I’m a sinner saved,” something I sang for years, and how believing statements like this keep us wildly off cours...

In this opening session of Firm Foundation Lite , we begin with the Father’s Eternal Purpose — not with sin, failure, or human need, but with what was in the heart of the Father before creation itself. This session establishes why starting points determine everything, and why a man-centred beginning inevitably reshapes the gospel into something it was never meant to be. As the teaching states plai...

This final episode of the New Things series brings us to the place where everything either shifts or stays the same. Many of us have tried to change our lives through resolve, promises, and renewed determination, only to discover that nothing at the root ever moves. What the Father brings His sons into is not a stronger will, but a different way of seeing. As the series closes, we return to the wo...

FOCUS REVISITED For the first time, I am re-releasing a previous episode from 3 May 2025, because I sense there is something strategic in the timing. I strongly encourage you to take some time to listen to this episode before we start the 'Firm Foundation Lite' series on Monday 5 January! *EXTENDED FEATURE EPISODE* Grab a drink, a notebook and a pen and get ready for a deep dive! The weak...

In today’s episode we stay with Isaiah 9:6 and move beyond “a child is born” and “a Son is given” to the next phrase in the same verse: “and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” Having followed the life of Jesus from birth through His hidden years and into His baptism, we now turn our attention to what this reveals about responsibility and maturity within the new humanity the Father is brin...

In today’s episode we return to Isaiah’s announcement that a child is born and a Son is given, and we follow how the Father begins His new humanity through the life of Jesus. From His birth, to His hidden years, to His baptism, we see that everything the Father wanted for His family was first placed in Him, the Firstborn Son who now shares His life with us. We look at the seed the Father planted i...

In today’s episode we look at the life that now flows from the new heart and the new spirit the Father has placed within us. Isaiah announced the new thing. Ezekiel showed how the Father would establish it. Now we begin to see how the new man actually lives — and why words like surrender, sacrifice, and obedience take on a completely different meaning when they emerge from the life of the Son rath...

In today’s episode we turn from Isaiah’s announcement of the new thing to Ezekiel’s revelation of how the Father brings it to pass. Ezekiel 36 shows that the Father Himself gives us a new heart and a new spirit and places His Spirit within us so that everything He desires now flows from within. Nothing rests on Adam or anything inherited from him, because the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit act t...

In today’s episode we open up Isaiah’s announcement of a new thing and discover that he was not talking about seasons or opportunities but an entirely new humanity. This is the people the Father always wanted, sons who share His life because they have been taken out of Adam and brought into Christ. We walk through the scriptures that have been shaping so many recent conversations here in Portsmout...

In this episode of Focus, Alex continues in Chapter 5 of Miles J. Stanford’s The Green Letters and looks at the hidden years of preparation through the life of Peter. From his confidence and collapse to his commission, we see how the Father’s process brings every son from self dependence to Christ dependence.  The breaking always comes before the building, and the collapse before the commission. T...

Alex shares from his personal reading of Miles J. Stanford’s The Green Letters , exploring how the Father Himself gives us our needs so that we might discover that only He can truly meet them.  Drawing from the chapter Preparation , Alex reflects on how every hunger, longing, and unmet place in our lives is an invitation from the Father to depend on Him and receive from His life. This episode is a...

In this first of two conversations with Dan Dunn, we open up what it really means to live from our oneness with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We revisit what the Father has been unfolding over these last two years, the difference between living from the outside in and the inside out, and how the life of the Godhead now moves through His people.  Together we explore the shift from personal tran...

In this final episode, Watchman Nee’s words ring clear: “God wants us to have no activity outside of Him.” Here the root of all defeat is exposed—self-reliance. The Father is not asking how good our work looks, but who is doing it. Sin is a living power that rules wherever self is active. Even the best deeds, when sourced in self, are dead works before Him. The call is simple: stop living from ind...