While the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday are complicated and none of the narratives that came out shortly after the story went viral are entirely accurate, the basic truth is that she would still be alive if anyone involved had chosen to de-escalate the situation.

Why it matters: The speed at which officials from President Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to Governor Waltz and Mayor Frey felt the need to get their version of events out to the public meant that many people made up their minds on what happened before all the details were known. However, the truth of the situation is that there is plenty of blame to go around, and unless people take the time to learn from those mistakes, it’s far too likely to happen again.

The backstory: What happened on Wednesday?

On Wednesday afternoon, three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers approached a vehicle blocking their way in a neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are conflicting reports about what happened next, but here’s what we know so far:

• Some witnesses claim that the officers told the driver—37-year-old Renee Nicole Good—to exit the vehicle, while others say they told her to leave. Audio from the recordings—at least three videos quickly went viral—seems to indicate that she may have received different instructions from the different officers. Whatever those instructions may have been, the result was tragic.
• Good put her car in reverse while agents attempted to open her door, then she turned the wheel and tried to drive away while a third officer was standing in front of her SUV. He had originally been on the opposite side of the vehicle from the other officers, but had begun to circle around as they approached.
• Whether Good was attempting to hit him or steer around him is difficult to tell from the video. Either way, the vehicle appears to make some contact with him—though not enough to knock him down—as he drew his gun and fired three times, killing Good.

The story quickly took over social media, and President Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz all released statements offering conflicting explanations within hours of the shooting.

Noem said the woman committed an act of “domestic terrorism” by disobeying the officers’ commands and then weaponized her SUV in an attempt to “run a law enforcement officer over.” President Trump echoed that understanding, saying Good was “a professional agitator” who “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” He then added, “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

Conversely, Frey claimed that “This was a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying,” before telling ICE, “We do not want you here. Your stated purpose for being in this City is to create some kind of safety, but you are doing exactly the opposite.” Walz said much the same, arguing that “We do not need any further help from the federal government,” before issuing a “warning order” to prepare the Minnesota National Guard for deployment in case the shooting resulted in riots.

So which version of the story should we believe?

The officer’s past

In the time since the shooting took place, the narrative around what occurred has started to change from the version both sides put out in its immediate aftermath. The video clearly shows that the claims saying the officer who shot Good was lucky to be alive and did so to defend “his fellow officers,” as described in the DHS’s official statement, are overstated at best.

It’s entirely possible—and, perhaps, even probable—that the officer who pulled the trigger did fear for his life in that moment. And given that he was involved in a similar incident six months ago, where his taser proved ineffective, and he was dragged roughly 100 yards while trying to make a similar stop, it’s understandable that he would be so quick to pull his gun on Wednesday.

Vice President Vance pointed to that event, saying, “You think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about someone ramming him with an automobile?”

But while the situations are similar, they are not the same, and the video clearly shows that his fellow officers were in no immediate danger by the time the car started to pull forward.

Good should still be alive

Ultimately, the officer’s actions may have been legal, but they also stemmed from a series of mistakes that had put him in that position to begin with. DHS officers are never supposed to stand in front of a vehicle or discharge their firearm at a moving vehicle unless they have “no other objectively reasonable means of defense.”

In both cases, Good’s death would have been avoided if the officer who shot her had taken the proper approach to the situation. That said, she would also be alive if she had simply heeded the officers’ warnings instead of attempting to drive away or had not chosen to interfere with ICE in the first place.

City leaders claim she was acting as “a legal observer” during a nearby ICE raid, though Noem stated that Good had been “stalking and impeding their work” by “blocking them in” and “shouting at them.” At this point, it’s difficult to know how much of Noem’s description is accurate, but Frey and Walz laying the blame entirely on the ICE officers also seems out of touch with the reality of the situation.

At the end of the day, this was a tragedy that could have been easily avoided if any of the principal actors had chosen a different approach. That’s not to say the blame should be assigned equally, but if anyone involved had been more interested in de-escalating the situation before it reached the point that a gun was drawn, then Good would still be alive. My prayer is that others heed that lesson before something like this happens again.

However, if I’m being honest, it’s a lesson I could stand to apply in my own life as well.

Spiritual application: Don’t be like David

While not every sin in my life is something I could see coming, far too many are the result of failing to heed the warning signs that the Holy Spirit threw in my way before I proceeded to step right over them. And I don’t think that problem is unique to me. Fortunately, God’s word has something to say on this subject.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his followers:

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better to lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. (Matthew 5:29–30)

This instruction was given originally in the context of combating lust, but the basic idea applies to sins of all kinds. The longer we allow sin to fester in our lives, the more the consequences of that sin will escalate and the harder it will be to stop.

While God is not calling us to literally maim ourselves—after all, even a blind or crippled person can be tempted—Jesus wanted to make sure we understood the importance of not letting sin linger. And lust is a perfect illustration of just how quickly sin can escalate from thought to action.

Take the story of David and Bathsheba, for example:

“It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2).

David’s sin was not noticing the woman; it was in persisting to look and dwelling on that beauty long after the first glance. Because he allowed that look to escalate into lust, he ended up taking her into his room, getting her pregnant, deceiving her husband, and then having the man carry his own death sentence back with him to the army David should have been leading.

Rarely are we able to see where our sins will lead if left unchecked. David did not plan on murdering an innocent man or essentially forcing himself on the beautiful woman he saw from his balcony. Yet, that’s precisely what happened because he attempted to manage his sin rather than stop it from escalating further.

While I hope your sins have not escalated to the precipice of sexual assault or murder, we all have areas of our lives where we’re especially prone to letting temptation fester.

So, take some time today to ask the Lord to help you identify any of those areas in your life. Then turn them over to him and take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that the temptation does not escalate into action.

God is ready to help. Are you ready to let him?

Latest from DM

Denison Forum: Who is Nick Fuentes, and why do you need to know?

First 15: Communion with God: Building Blocks for your Time with God

Christian Parenting: Navigating mental health with faith and community with Erin Kerry

Foundations: Trusting God from the seat of a chariot

God is good: “God’s mercy continues after the world burns”

It’s been just over a year since the first of the fires that eventually burned more than 37,000 acres and claimed thirty lives began to spread outside of Los Angeles. Yet, in that time, God has been moving in a powerful way. He has helped churches that have lost buildings and families who have lost homes learn that the church is more than just brick and mortar. As one pastor described, “God’s mercy continues after the world burns. That’s one lesson churches in Los Angeles learned this year.”

Kingdom impact:

While many of the churches lost to the fires will eventually be rebuilt, the opportunities to serve the communities of Los Angeles and to model what it means to trust God in the midst of tragedy will hopefully endure long after life has returned to some semblance of normal. Will you join me in praying that the churches in these neighborhoods will remain beacons of hope and stability for the communities in which God has placed them?

Christianity Today has more on the story.

Denison Forum

I closed yesterday’s Daily Article with Philip Yancey’s quote, “Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.” I had no idea at the time that his statement would be so relevant to his personal life.

I have followed Yancey’s work for years and consider him one of the most thoughtful and authentic writers in the evangelical world. It was therefore devastating to learn yesterday that he engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and is now retiring from writing and speaking.

In an emailed statement to Christianity Today, an outlet for which he has written for decades, he confessed the affair and added:

I am now focused on rebuilding trust and restoring my marriage of fifty-five years. Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry, I am therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media. Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to the words I have already written. I pray for God’s grace and forgiveness—as well as yours—and for healing in the lives of those I’ve wounded.

His prayer highlights one side of the Christian life, the “amazing grace” about which Yancey wrote so often. In The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Tim Keller famously wrote, “The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.”

But Yancey’s confession also points to a dangerous downside of evangelical faith as many understand it.

“The one secret of a holy life”

Think of history as an hourglass lying on its side. The story begins with the cosmos, expansive beyond our imagining and created by the God who pronounced it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). It narrows to the human race, then to one nation within that race, then to one surviving part of that nation, then to one teenage girl and her newborn Child.

When this Child grows to adulthood, the story begins to expand again: to twelve disciples, to 120 believers in an Upper Room, to three thousand baptized souls, to a movement that expanded to include Samaritans (Acts 8), Gentiles (Acts 10), the West as well as the East (Acts 16), and ultimately the “ends of the earth” (Acts 28). Today, this movement numbers more than two billion believers living in virtually every nation on earth. It is a movement fueled by the divine grace that forgives all we confess and saves our souls for eternity.

For many evangelicals, this is how the story ends. Now we try our best to do our best and we confess our sins when we fail, all the while waiting for heaven and the day our struggle is done.

But God’s ultimate purpose is not just that all people might be forgiven and granted eternal life with him in heaven. It is that the flourishing and beauty with which God began our story might become our story once more.

To this end, he does not just pardon our sins—he remakes our very nature. When we are “born again” (John 3:3), we “become children of God” (John 1:12), a “new creation” as “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

As God’s recreated children, we are intended to demonstrate our Father’s spiritual “genetics.” His Spirit works to manifest his “fruit,” the character of Christ, in our character (Galatians 5:22–23). It’s not that we try harder to be more like Jesus—it is that Jesus makes us like himself.

This is not a new concept. “Theosis,” the belief that Christ is working to make us like himself, has been central to some theological worldviews for centuries. Oswald Chambers gave it full and practical expression when he asserted:

Sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation. The one secret of a holy life lies not in imitating Jesus but in letting his perfections manifest themselves in my physical body. . . .

Jesus gives me his patience, his love, his holiness, his faith, his purity, and his godliness. All these are manifested in and through every sanctified soul. Sanctification isn’t drawing the power to be holy from Jesus; it’s drawing his own holiness from him. It’s having the very same holiness that was manifested in him manifested in me.

“Make me love you as I ought to love”

I recently found a hymn by the Irish Anglican priest George Croly (1780–1860) that gave me new insight:

Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart,
wean it from sin, through all its pulses move.
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as you are,
and make me love you as I ought to love.

I had not thought about asking God to “make me love you as I ought to love.” Since our Father honors the free will with which he created us in his image, how can he “make me love” him or anyone else? But then I realized: if I exercise my free will to ask him to change my free will and my heart, he does not violate my freedom in answering my prayer.

Such a prayer is not only theologically permissible—it is spiritually essential. As Henri Nouwen warned, “Anyone who wants to fight his demons with his own weapons is a fool.”

But when we ask Jesus to change our hearts, he transforms us into our best selves as we fulfill his perfect will for our lives. This is because he now lives his life in and through ours (Galatians 2:20; Colossians 1:27) as we experience the risen Christ himself (1 John 1:1–4).

Our Father wants to be as real to us in this world as he will be in the next. This is the greatest need of the human heart: to experience personally the God who made us and made us for himself. Otherwise, “our hearts are restless until they rest in him,” as St. Augustine testified personally.

More than anything else, we want and need to know that God is real. And we learn that he is real when he becomes real in us.

“My heart an altar, and your love the flame”

If Philip Yancey can fall into sin that devastates his marriage and his ministry, so can I. So can you. Let’s therefore use his confession as a call to seek the moral and spiritual transformation only Christ can effect in our lives. Let’s take time even now to pray, “Make me love you as I ought to love.” And let’s do whatever the Spirit leads us to do as we partner with him in answering our prayer and manifesting the character of our Lord.

George Croly’s prayer continues:

Teach me to feel that you are always nigh;
teach me the struggles of the soul to bear,
to check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh;
teach me the patience of unceasing prayer.

Teach me to love you as your angels love,
one holy passion filling all my frame:
the fullness of the heaven-descended Dove;
my heart an altar, and your love the flame.

Is your heart his altar yet today?

Quote for the day:

“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures” —A. W. Tozer

Our latest website resources:

• Who is Nick Fuentes, and why do you need to know?
• Venezuela, 2026 culture predictions, Tim Walz & football playoffs
• How do Christians stay human in an age of AI, anxiety, and division?
• Transgender to transformed: an increasingly common story
• 10 resolutions every Christian can make

Denison Forum

I need to begin today with a confession.

Deadly clashes have erupted in Iran as demonstrations sparked by anger over the rising cost of living entered their second week. Unlike those in past years, these protests are seeking regime change and taking down regime symbols, posters, and statues.

At least 285 locations in ninety-two cities have witnessed protest gatherings. At this writing, more than two thousand citizens have been arrested, and at least thirty-four protesters have been killed. If Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s forces fail to quell dissent, he has reportedly made plans to flee to Moscow.

I am old enough to remember the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis vividly. I have written often about Iran’s horrific jihadist ideology and have called its leaders “the world’s most dangerous regime.” It would be in the best interest of Iran, Israel, the Middle East, and the world for them to fall and flee.

But while I believe I have reacted to this news with the right analysis, I have done so in the wrong spirit. The same has been true with regard to recent events in Venezuela.

Let me explain.

The alliance of transcendence and immanence

Religions across human history have focused on transcendence or imminence, but not both. To the Greeks and Romans, the gods lived atop Mt. Olympus and used humans for their personal, often nefarious ends. To Muslims, Allah is remote and removed from the human condition. To Hindus and Buddhists, by contrast, there is no personal Ultimate Being; the focus is on personal enlightenment and oneness with reality. The mystery religions of the Greco-Roman world similarly centered on rites and rituals intended to lead to personal empowerment.

Then came the prophetic declaration fulfilled by the birth of Christ: “‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23, fulfilling Isaiah 7:14). This transcendent God who was with us became immanently one of us.

In one sense, his earthly life could not have been more lowly:

• He was born to a peasant teenage girl and adopted by a peasant carpenter father.
• His birth was attended by field hands so ritually unclean that they could not attend synagogue or temple services.
• He grew up in a town so obscure that it is not mentioned even once in the Old Testament.
• He was baptized among sinners.
• He experienced temptation, hunger, thirst, weariness, and pain.
• He lived in a friend’s home because he had “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58).
• He died a criminal’s death between condemned prisoners.
• He was buried in a borrowed tomb.

In another sense, however, his life could not have been more exalted:

• His birth was celebrated by angels.
• His baptism was marked by the Spirit’s descent and the Father’s affirmation (Matthew 3:16–17).
• He regularly demonstrated divine omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence.
• His death was marked by “darkness over all the land,” the rending of the temple curtain, a violent earthquake, and the opening of tombs (Matthew 27:45–53).
• His burial led to his glorious resurrection and ascension to heaven.

Across his ministry, he interacted with every dimension of the cultural spectrum:

• He befriended tax collectors and “sinners” (cf. Matthew 9:11).
• He touched lepers and healed demoniacs.
• He engaged with Gentiles, Samaritans, and Jews.
• He ministered to a Roman centurion, taught a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, and witnessed to the highest officials in the country.

Now he continues his earthly ministry as he prays for us (Romans 8:34) while his Spirit dwells within us (1 Corinthians 3:16) and empowers us as the “body of Christ” in the world today (1 Corinthians 12:27).

No other religion in history has conceived of such an astounding combination of immanence and transcendence—all of it for us.

“Sons of your Father in heaven”

Now there is no temptation we cannot trust to our Savior, knowing that he has been “tempted as we are” and will empower our victory over our common enemy (Hebrews 4:15). There is no problem we cannot bring to him, knowing that we can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” where we will “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (v. 16).

And there is no soul on earth with whom we should not stand in compassion and solidarity.

Jesus loves even Ali Khamenei and Nicolás Maduro. Our Savior would have died just for them. The more they and others like them reject God’s word and will, the more they need our intercession, witness, and ministry. And the more we pay forward the grace we have received, the more we give our broken world what it can find nowhere else.

Jesus assured us that when we “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” we demonstrate that we are “sons of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45). Then, though we live “in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation,” we “shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Philippians 2:15–16).

“The goal of a materialistic Utopia”

By contrast, our broken culture can claim neither divine transcendence nor immanence. Secular society has no God who is for us, much less a God who lives in us and works through us.

George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier describes socialists in a way that is just as true of secularists today: “With their eyes glued to economic facts, [they] have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia.”

You and I know better. We know that a “materialistic Utopia” is a contradiction in terms. We know that man not only has a soul but is a soul. We know that God’s love can change any heart in this world for the next.

But we also know that such love has to be incarnated to be believed, first in Christ and now in “Christ in you” (Colossians 1:27).

You may not have the chance to be the presence of Christ to world leaders, though you can and should pray for them to follow Jesus. But you can demonstrate the grace of Christ today to someone you are tempted to reject but called to love.

Philip Yancey noted,

“Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.”

So should we.

Quote for the day:

“‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” —John Newton

Our latest website resources:

• How do Christians stay human in an age of AI, anxiety, and division?
• Transgender to transformed: an increasingly common story
• 10 resolutions every Christian can make
• How to practice biblical self-care
• What does the Bible say about spiritual health?

Denison Forum