Let me tell you something I’m a little embarrassed to admit.
In the summer of 2025, God stopped me cold. Not with a burning bush or an audible voice. Just a quiet, uncomfortable truth I couldn’t shake.
I had spent years giving everything I had to the church. The energy, the late nights, the early mornings, the emotional bandwidth, the creativity — all of it. And I had convinced myself this was faithfulness. This was what it looked like to love God.
But here’s what the Lord showed me: I wasn’t married to Him. I was married to the work. And the people who actually had my last name — Betsy, Noel, Eden — they were getting dated. They were getting whatever was left after everything else got the best of me.
My life was upside down. And not in a good way.
Here’s what made it so easy to miss — I was doing Kingdom work. Preaching the Gospel. Planting a church. Helping people find Jesus. How do you tell someone their upside down life is a problem when it looks like ministry?
Because Empire is sneaky like that.
Empire is the invisible operating system most of us have been running on our whole lives without knowing it. It’s the kingdom of earn your place. The kingdom of what have you done for me lately. Think of a pyramid — whoever sits on top has the most power, and that power is built on the backs of the people below. You measure success by how many people are working for you. You stay on top by performing.
You can live by Empire’s rules inside a church building.
You can serve, volunteer, give — and still be operating by Empire’s logic. How do you know? Because when nobody notices, you get bitter. Because when too much is asked, you get resentful. Because you’re not serving from love — you’re serving to be loved.
That’s what I was doing. I had bought the lie that says I do things for God so He will love me. That is a slave mentality. And it was quietly killing me.
Jesus saw this coming.
In Matthew 20, He pulls His disciples aside and says — paraphrasing — You know how the world operates. Rulers lord it over people. The powerful demand more from those below them.
Then He says four words that change everything:
“Not so with you.”
That’s not a suggestion. That’s an identity statement. You are children of a different Kingdom. Children of the Kingdom do not operate by the world’s definition of success.
Then He flips the whole system upside down. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first must become a slave — just like the Son of Man, who didn’t come to be served but to serve, and give His life as a ransom for many.
Instead of asking how many people can I get below me, the Kingdom question is how many people can I push above me? How many can I serve, help discover their gifts, lift into who God made them to be? That is the shape of Kingdom life. That is what Jesus modeled with everything He did.
And it is completely, uncomfortably upside down.
I don’t serve God to earn His love anymore. I serve because I am loved — fully, completely, without condition — by a God who proved it by becoming the servant of all.
That changes everything. And over the next several weeks, that’s exactly what we’re going to unpack together.
Whose voice are you going to believe? Which kingdom are you going to serve?
Let’s find out.
Take five minutes this week and ask yourself honestly: Am I serving from love or serving to be loved? You don’t have to have the answer figured out. Just sit with the question. Journal it. Pray it. That’s where this starts.
If this hit you, there’s a good chance it’ll hit someone you love too. Send it to them — a text, an email, share it on your feed. The Upside Down series is just getting started and it’s better when we go through it together.
— Corey