The Oil

September 29, 2026

You don’t know the cost of the oil.

Those words have been sitting with me lately.

I keep coming back to them, and I think I am starting to understand why.

There are parts of our walk with Jesus that other people will never fully understand because they weren’t there for what it cost to get here.

They weren’t there for the prayers.

The wrestling.

The surrender.

The things we had to lay down.

The things we picked back up and had to lay down again.

They weren’t there when Jesus met us in places we don’t talk about anymore.

They just see the oil.

But they don’t always know what it cost.

Lately, I have been sitting in John, and I can’t stop thinking about the women Jesus meets there.

Especially the woman caught in adultery.

She is brought to Jesus in probably one of the most humiliating ways imaginable. Her sin is exposed. Everyone around her knows what she has done, and they are ready to condemn her for it.

Then there is Jesus.

Eventually, everyone else walks away.

And she is left standing there with Him.

The only One without sin.

The only One who actually could condemn her.

And He doesn’t.

“Neither do I condemn you.”

I think we like to stop there.

I know I have.

Because what a beautiful picture of grace.

But Jesus keeps speaking.

“Go, and from now on sin no more.”

I’ve been thinking about that part a lot.

Because the grace of Jesus doesn’t just cover us.

It calls us to walk differently.

Not because we have to earn what He just gave us.

Not because His love suddenly becomes dependent on how perfectly we behave.

But because how could we encounter a love like that and willingly keep walking toward the very things He came to free us from?

She walked into that moment carrying the weight of what she had done.

She walked away without condemnation.

But she also walked away with a new direction.

And I think there is something there that I desperately needed to understand.

Grace isn’t Jesus looking at the things destroying us and saying they don’t matter.

Grace is Jesus looking at us in the middle of them and saying,

I don’t condemn you.

Now come out of this.

There are things I have asked God to forgive me for while still keeping the door cracked open behind me.

Things I’ve surrendered and then reached back for.

Things I’ve known He was asking me to leave that I tried to justify carrying just a little longer.

I think, for a long time, I understood grace as something that made me feel better about where I had been.

Now I am starting to understand it as something that changes where I am willing to go.

And maybe that’s where the oil comes in.

Because when you really begin to understand the grace you have been given, surrender starts to look different.

Obedience starts to look different.

Worship starts to look different.

There is a line that has been living in my head:

“My whole life for Your glory, my whole world for You only, everything for the honor of Your name.”

My whole life.

Not just the easy parts.

Not just Sunday morning.

Not just the things I don’t mind giving up.

Everything.

I think that is what I want my response to grace to be.

Not perfection.

Not performance.

A life pointed differently because I met Jesus.

A life that says, If You called me out of it, I don’t want to keep running back to it.

A life that says, If it pulls me away from You, I don’t need it.

A life that says, You gave me grace I could never earn, so I want everything I have to bring You glory.

My whole life for Your glory.

There is another woman in John I keep thinking about too.

She came to a well carrying a water jar.

Jesus knew her story too.

He knew exactly where she had been and exactly what she had been looking to other people to satisfy.

And after encountering Him, she left her jar sitting there.

I love that little detail.

She came needing to fill something.

Then she met Jesus and left it behind.

Maybe there are some things you can only leave once you have found something better.

Maybe that’s what Jesus has been teaching me.

I don’t have to spend my life white-knuckling surrender, staring backward at everything I gave up for Him.

I get to look at Him and realize I found something better.

Someone better.

The jar can stay at the well.

The old life can stay behind me.

The things He has called me out of don’t have to keep receiving pieces of me just because they once did.

I can walk differently now.

Not because I suddenly have it all together.

I don’t.

But because I have encountered Jesus.

And I don’t want that encounter to leave me unchanged.

Maybe that’s what people don’t see when they see the oil being poured out.

They see what was given.

Jesus knows why.

He knows what it took to put it down.

He knows what it took to walk away.

He knows how many times I almost went back.

He knows every quiet yes that nobody else heard.

And maybe that’s why the oil is precious.

Not because surrender makes me worthy of Him.

But because He was worthy of it before I ever poured a single drop.

So this is where I find myself lately.

Wanting less of the life that keeps pulling me backward.

Wanting more of the One who keeps calling me forward.

Wanting my life to say thank You in ways my words never could.

My whole life for His glory.

My whole world for Him only.

Not because grace demanded that I pay it back.

But because grace changed me.

And when I think about the woman standing before Jesus in John, I wonder what those first few steps away from Him felt like.

She had been brought there expecting condemnation.

Instead, she walked away carrying grace.

And a new direction.

I think I’m learning to do the same.

To receive the grace.

To leave what He told me to leave.

And to keep walking.

Because maybe the greatest response I can give to the grace that saved my life

is to let it change the way I live it.