Part 2 of Notes on a sermon delivered at Peachtree Road (Independent) Baptist Church on 11/30/2025
“In my efforts of thanksgiving, when I’m offering praise to my God, does he feel something on the other end?”-Pastor Jay Reed
Approximately fifteen minutes—or by some clocks an eternity—after Froelke began speaking, he passed the baton back to Jay Reed. The man of the house began his portion of the sermon by immediately echoing the “stay planted” mandate, framing the act of seeking a different church as a direct threat to one’s marriage and children. By quoting Jack Hyles—”change is not an event, it’s a position”—Reed communicates that for Peachtree Road Baptist Church, progress and adaptation are not merely things to be avoided—they are moral departures from a fixed point of truth.
Translation: Movement is apostasy. Questions are disloyalty. And if you’re thinking about leaving, well, you’re basically filing for spiritual divorce and abandoning your children to the wolves. No pressure.
“Richly” and the Quiet Rewriting of Grace
Jay Reed’s primary contribution to this Thanksgiving service—ostensibly inspired by the concept of gratitude—was a pedantic deep dive into a single adverb: “richly.” He treated this word with the solemn intensity of a graduate seminar, despite yielding roughly the theological insight of a fortune cookie. The result was not interpretation, but inflation: a minor modifier subjected to prolonged scrutiny until it was forced to bear a weight the text itself never assigns it.
It’s the hermeneutical equivalent of staring at a single LEGO brick for forty-five minutes and calling it architecture.
The performance began with Colossians 3:16 and 1 Timothy 6:17, attempting to convert a simple descriptor into a theological weight-bearing pillar:
“Colossians chapter 3, let the word of God dwell in you richly in all wisdom. Verse 16, teaching admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord… What a beautiful word. The word richly for reference richly describes the measure of God’s great giving to us. Look at it. It says uh let the word of Christ dwell richly in you. And so you’re thinking, well, what exactly was the word richly mean? It’s used another place in scripture in 1 Timothy 6:17. Charge them that are rich in this world that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. Richly is the description of how God gives to you.” — Pastor Jay Reed
This is a classic Reed maneuver: taking a benign word and performing “close reading” to simulate academic rigor while systematically avoiding actual exegesis. He initially defines “richly” as the measure of God’s giving—a perfectly reasonable observation—but almost immediately abandons that frame, transitioning into the “how” of the congregant’s response. For Reed, “richly” is not a state of being or a description of divine abundance; it is quietly reengineered into a performance metric for the believer’s worship, work, and gratitude.
Watch the sleight of hand:
“If the word richly or fully invested, fully committed doesn’t coincide with how you are in the word or how you would describe your worship to God or your service for him, then richly uh should become the goal…. No one gets to heaven and thinks, ‘Man, I did too much.’… Let your word, your worship, and your work be rich. May richly be the adverb that describes those things.” — Pastor Jay Reed
And there it is. Richly ceases to describe what God gives and becomes shorthand for how completely the congregant must give back. Grace is acknowledged only long enough to be operationalized into labor. This isn’t just sloppy preaching; this is a rhetorical pivot. And it is either calculated or intuitive—I’m not sure which is worse.
What looks like a benign exhortation to gratitude reveals a consistent pattern in Reed’s preaching: semantic inflation used to manufacture authority in the absence of substance. Rather than engage the historical, linguistic, or theological context of the text, he isolates a word, drains it of its grammatical function, and redeploys it as a lever of obligation.
This trick reliably serves three purposes:
- Simulated Rigor
Lingering on a single word creates the illusion of depth. It signals intellectual seriousness, the equivalent of a TED Talk where someone says “let’s unpack that” and then never does. - The Pivot
Attention is redirected from God’s character (“who giveth us richly all things to enjoy”) to the believer’s performance. Richly becomes synonymous with “fully invested,” “fully committed,” and—functionally—never resting. God’s generosity becomes your job description. - The Never-Enough Trap
By asserting that “no one gets to heaven and thinks, ‘Man, I did too much,’” Reed removes any conceptual ceiling. There is no finish line, only escalation. Compliance is infinite by design. You can always do more. You should always do more. And if you’re not doing more, well, are you really grateful?
This is a carefully engineered system in which total control is reframed as spiritual abundance. For a theology that claims guaranteed salvation—one of the cornerstone doctrines of Baptist soteriology—the insinuation that one might still arrive in heaven having failed to do enough is not merely incoherent—it is spiritually coercive.
It’s grace with an asterisk. Salvation is free, but acceptance costs everything.
An “International” Buffet of Second-Hand Embarrassment (with a Sprinkling of Heresy)
Next, Reed attempted to bridge the gap between his “groundbreaking” message on gratitude and a broader sense of “worldliness” through a series of linguistic anecdotes. The result was a disjointed narrative where the references failed to connect logically to the biblical text, to each other, or to reality. It was less “illustration” and more verbal mood board assembled by someone who just discovered the existence of language learning apps.
Reed began by mentioning his daughter’s interactions with a “Duolingo boyfriend” named “Little Heinrich,” noting that German is taught at Peachtree Road Baptist Academy—the unaccredited K–12 “school” Reed operates out of the church’s adjacent building.
“My daughter is in speaking German every night to her Duolingo boyfriend. Little Heinrich is on the other end hearing her words of German. We teach German at our school. It’s starting to feel a little bit weird.” – Pastor Jay Reed
The anecdote functions purely as prop. It treats foreign culture as a punchline meant to signal a cosmopolitan awareness that Reed clearly does not possess. “Look, we’re international! We have German! And apps! And… vague discomfort with both!”
He then invokes the Spanish idiom mi casa es su casa as a governing metaphor for divine generosity:
“The truth is here. What is mine is yours. Mi casa es su casa. God gives us, look in the verse, all things…There was nothing that was off limits…Even his son was not off limits….But the Bible says he freely giveth us all things. Mi casa is what informs that word richly.” – Pastor Jay Reed
If the logical connection between Colossians 3:16 and a casual hospitality phrase escapes you, that is not a failure of attention. Even granting generous intent, the analogy collapses immediately. Mi casa es su casa describes a horizontal relationship between social equals—”make yourself at home, help yourself to the fridge.” Applying it to the Creator–creature relationship does not clarify divine generosity—it erases theological distinction.
Is God our hospitable neighbor? Our gracious roommate? Are we equals casually sharing real estate? This is not profound; it’s confused. And confusing hospitality with grace is not just bad theology. It’s category error.
Then comes the oil. Oh, the oil.
“And it’s interesting that the Holy Spirit is typified by oil. When a man was chosen to be a king, when a man was chosen to be a prophet, he was anointed with oil…If there’s friction in your home, you might need an oil change. You may need fresh oil. There’s friction in the church, you know what? We need more oil.” — Pastor Jay Reed
This is not an illustration so much as live-streamed neural activity. We’re getting a real-time tour of Reed’s synaptic misfires: Holy Spirit → oil → anointing → lubrication → friction → cars → relationships. It’s like watching someone play theological Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except Kevin Bacon is Jiffy Lube.
Symbol, metaphor, and automotive maintenance collide without synthesis. No argument is made. No connection is established. The audience is expected to supply coherence out of reverence, or sheer exhaustion. This is one of many examples suggesting that Reed might benefit from spending a bit more time in the preparation phase of his sermoning. You know, the part where you ask yourself, “Does this make sense?” or “Should I perhaps write this down first?” It is, after all, his job.
But Reed’s linguistic tourism is just getting started. Next stop: Italy, where “richly” is given a culinary makeover:
“When you say how does God give, he gives richly…The root word of richly is of course the word rich. Okay, that means abundant, overflowing, or of supreme quality. Here’s my second foreign phrase to help you. Mama mia…Now, in English, we would say, ‘Wow,’ or ‘That’s amazing’ or ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’ But the Italians, they say, ‘Mama mia.’ My daughter and son-in-law went to Italy last year…Boy, they came back with all those Italian phrases. They came back with Parmesan cheese…Listen, go to Milan if you want clothes, but go to Bologna if you want food…” — Pastor Jay Reed
I assure you I am not editing these quotes to remove context. This is the context. We have officially left the sermon and entered a timeshare presentation for a trip to Tuscany.
“Mama mia. That means incredible. Is there another word to describe God’s giving that more fully encompasses that than incredible? Maybe we would say amazing, wonderful. When we talked about richly in the sense of scope, we say God gives us all things. That’s quantity. But now we’re talking about the quality of what God gives. It’s not just that God gave us all things. It’s that what he did give us was perfect.” — Pastor Jay Reed
Reed uses these phrases as aesthetic padding—auditory décor designed to keep the audience engaged while he steers the ship toward a dangerous theological conclusion. The audience laughs because laughter is the only response left when meaning has fully evacuated the pulpit. We’re all trapped in a runaway train of multicultural non-sequiturs, and the only way to survive is to chuckle.
But wait. We’re not done. There’s one more stop on this theological disaster tour:
“Here’s our last little foreign phrase. Bon Appétit. Enjoy. I hope you like this… When God got done giving to me, all I could say is, ‘Lord, I enjoyed that. That was amazing.’ It’s like he gives it to us and he says, ‘Bon appetit, enjoy it.’’ – Pastor Jay Reed
The French phrase does not mean what Reed claims it means—but the linguistic error is not the problem. The theological implication is. Bon appétit does not signify gratitude; it signifies appetite. It is not something you say in response to receiving; it’s something you say in anticipation of consuming. And in Reed’s construction, grace is no longer complete when it is given. It is complete only when it is felt.
And here we arrive at the precipice.
The God Who Waits to Feel You
This is the point where the discipline of charity must end. Reed’s final move was to transform the Creator into a needy audience and the believer into a performer whose job is to deliver emotional content:
“God, did you feel that? Because if you didn’t, I need to try harder.” — Pastor Jay Reed
Let me be exceptionally clear: This line exposes the operating logic of Reed’s theology, and it is heretical.
The subject of the sentence is no longer God; it is human performance. God is reduced to a receptor—a being whose satisfaction depends on whether the worshiper generated sufficient emotional intensity. The worshiper is no longer responding to God; he is managing God, adjusting output and increasing effort until the deity registers sensation. Here, emotional intensity is no longer a byproduct of faith; it is the condition of divine approval.
“God, deliver us from dry-eyed dead Christianity where we do what we’re supposed to do, but we feel nothing. This world will steal your emotional person, it will you get into the wrong kind of music, you get into the wrong kind of imagery, you get into the the wrong fascination and the wrong hobbies, they will steal that depth of emotion that God gave you.”— Pastor Jay Reed
Reed concludes this performative loop by suggesting that God is the one consuming our gratitude—that God, like a critic at a restaurant, is waiting to see if the dish is to His liking:
“Hey, you need to feel something in your connection with God. And more specifically, he needs to feel something from you. The kind of rich gratitude is the kind that when you’re done, God says, “I enjoyed that.” — Pastor Jay Reed
This is not Christianity. This is inversion.
The omnipotent God of Scripture—who lacks nothing, who is complete in Himself, who is not served by human hands as though He needed anything (Acts 17:25)—has been replaced with a god who must be emotionally stimulated in order to be pleased. Worship becomes management. Effort becomes escalation. The believer is trapped in a feedback loop of try harder, feel more, perform better.
This matters. Not because the French is wrong (though it is). Not because the Duolingo boyfriend is weird (though it is). But because the direction of worship has been reversed.
God is no longer the Object of devotion; He is the Audience. And not even a particularly satisfied one—He’s the kind of audience who needs you to “bring it,” who’s waiting to see if you can “deliver,” who may or may not “feel something” depending on how much effort you put into your performance.
A God who waits to “feel” us, who requires our emotional exertion in order to be satisfied, is not the God of the Bible. He is a god rendered passive and contingent. He is a god who can be disappointed. A god who can be underwhelmed. A god who depends on you to complete the transaction.
There is no other way to say it: This is biblical heresy.
And frankly? It’s exhausting. Because if God needs to feel something from you, then you never get to rest. You never get to simply be loved. You’re always auditioning. Always performing. Always wondering if it was enough—if you were enough.
That’s not the gospel. That’s a hustle. And it’s a hustle with eternal stakes and no finish line.
So when Jay Reed asked, “In my efforts of thanksgiving, when I’m offering praise to my God, does he feel something on the other end?”—the answer, Pastor Reed, is this:
No. Because He doesn’t need to.
He is complete. Eternal. Self-sufficient. He does not wait for your performance to validate His existence or satiate His needs. He does not grade your worship on a curve. He does not require emotional stimulation to remain pleased with you.
That’s the whole point of grace.
But I suppose that’s a hard sell when you’ve built an entire ministry on making people feel like they’re never doing enough.
Note: This analysis represents the author’s subjective interpretation of the sermon delivered on the date mentioned above. For further details, please see my full [Legal Disclaimer]
