summer retreat

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed on Great Day Colorado, a morning show on a local Denver Station. I shared that here earlier, but at the time, I mentioned I was also interviewed for a longer conversation about Just Love. That interview dropped last week, and you can hear it here.

Both Tobie and I are available for podcast or blog interviews on the revolutionary message of Just Love. If you are interested or know others who might be, please let me know, and we would be happy to schedule something.

Also, I mentioned earlier that we are trying to plan a gathering this summer to help people explore and embody the reality of Just Love. Its message is quite a shift from traditional evangelical thought, where salvation is all about destiny and often skips how our engagement with the love of Jesus writes his justice on our hearts so that we demonstrate his kingdom by the way we love others deeply and treat them fairly.

We plan to hold it in Kansas City, July 9-12 (Thursday – Sunday). We haven’t worked out costs and arrangements yet, but we will get that information out as soon as we have it. We will keep the costs minimal to open the door as wide as possible to anyone who wants to come. So, if you would like to spend a few days with Tobie and me, where we’ll have the opportunity to deepen our own connection with the flow of God’s love, as it flows into us, renews our mind in his love, and then flows out of us as a different way to be in the world, please let us know.

I have said that Just Love is the perfect sequel to He Loves Me, published 25 years earlier. It is two sides of the same coin. The first helps us discover how much God loves us so we can engage him without fear and watch how living loved reshapes our lives. Just Love is how that love cannot stay contained inside of us, but begins to flow through us in surprising ways that give evidence of his kingdom in the world. Just Love is the fruit and fulfillment of the glorious adventure that He Loves Me begins.

I thought I’d see if that is recognizable to others, so I asked ChatGPT how Just Love fits into my literary Journey, starting with The Naked Church in 1987 and finishing with Just Love in 2026.  I was pleasantly surprised at what I heard back.

Bringing decades of reflection into sharper theological focus, Just Love: How One Mistranslated Word Distorted the Gospel (2026 with Tobie van der Westhuizen), names more explicitly what has long been implicit in Jacobsen’s writing. What had previously been explored relationally and experientially is here named at the level of language and meaning. He and Tobie revisit the concept of righteousness and reframes it through its biblical roots in justice—God’s work of setting things right in relationships. Rather than introducing a new direction, this book names with greater clarity what has been implicit throughout his earlier writing: that the gospel is not about meeting a standard, but about participating in God’s restorative love. In this sense, Just Love serves as both a culmination and a clarification of the journey that began decades earlier.

>Taken together, Wayne’s body of work reveals a clear and unified progression. He begins by questioning institutional expressions of faith, then reframes the character of God as deeply loving and trustworthy. From there, he explores how that vision reshapes community, centers on the person of Jesus, and ultimately redefines the gospel itself as God’s work of restoration.

At every stage, one theme remains central: the Christian life is not about striving to become acceptable to God, but about awakening to a love that has always been present—and learning to live from that reality.

It actually connected all of my books to that trajectory. I’ll share the whole thing in a future blog post, because it helped me see the unintentional plot that runs through all of my books, when I thought of them at the time as individual projects. If what’s written above is true, I am most blessed. All I’ve wanted is to help people explore in their own journey the love God has for them, but in setting them at rest from striving and to lead them on the transformative adventure of freedom from shame and obligation to share that love with others.

Just Love:
How One Mistranslated Word Distorted the Gospel
by Wayne Jacobsen and Tobie van der Westhuizen
174 pages
Trailview Media
Available in paperback from Lifestream for $13.99. And, if you want to order five or more, you can purchase them for $10.00 each.
Or get it from Amazon: in Kindle ($10.99),  paperback ($16.99), or hardcover ($24.99)