LIGHTHOUSE DAILY UPDATE – Sunday 30 of November 2025..
By Paul S. Waugh, Chris Nash and Shaun Cooper..
Good evening to you all,
We begin this week by sharing Paul’s latest article, The Disease of Sin: When Missing the Mark Becomes a Medicine, a deeply clarifying and cutting piece on the true nature of sin — not merely as behaviour, but as a condition of the human heart.
Read it here: https://paulswaugh.com/the-disease-of-sin-when-missing-the-mark-becomes-a-medicine/
This article lays vital groundwork for what’s coming. Though The Sum of All Problems has not yet been published, the second of its primary problems will focus on imperfection and sin — a theme Paul begins unfolding in today’s piece. All of this is building toward a fuller understanding of human fallenness, responsibility, and the root causes of suffering. If you’d like a reminder of what’s ahead, you can visit the holding page at:
🔗 https://thesumofallproblems.com/
Additionally, this coming week we’ll be sharing Paul’s teaching on Separation and Diabolical Pride — a crucial follow-on to today’s message and an essential part of understanding how sin fractures us from God, from truth, and from one another.
We had hoped to release the first instalment of Paul’s Open Letters to God last week. However, Paul has not been well enough to record the audio accompaniment. He hopes to do so in the coming days, and we will share it with you as soon as it’s ready.
More to come shortly.
In truth and in Christ,
Paul Waugh, Chris Nash and Shaun Cooper
| About us.. We are a group of dedicated Christians who run a secular human growth and research organisation called Lighthouse Global since 4 November 2004 only and undeniably made possible by God’s love and Grace. |
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Hi everyone,
As we’ve all reflected today, Paulie’s article on sin has landed with a weight and a mercy that feels perfectly timed for where we each are in our journeys. We’re seeing—together and individually—how deeply the distinction between wilful sin and conditioned sin speaks into our lives. It’s helping us understand not only our failures, but the reasons behind them; not only where we’ve rebelled, but where we’ve been wounded, shaped, conditioned, and blinded by survival, trauma, and years of unconscious patterns.
We are realising, as a collective, that much of what we’ve carried has been hidden even from ourselves. We have been resisting our brokenness for years—through denial, ignorance, pride, striving, or coping mechanisms. Many of us are seeing how our attempts at self-reliance or perfectionism have prevented and damaged our relationship with God, or how unhealed wounds and addictions have kept us from knowing ourselves at all. For many of us, the weight of sin has been unbearable at times because we saw the sin but not the cause, the action but not the illness beneath it. Today has shifted something in that.
We feel overwhelmingly grateful that this article didn’t just expose sin—it illuminated it in a way that was compassionate, grounded, scriptural, psychologically insightful, and deeply human. It has given us frameworks, language, and distinctions that help us look at ourselves with truth and with mercy. For some of us, it’s the first time we’ve been able to start discerning when we are choosing sin wilfully and when we are acting out of old trauma, compulsion, or conditioned responses we haven’t yet healed. For others, it’s helping us see how much inner work remains—how much repression, avoidance, survival strategy, and self-blindness is still shaping our behaviour.
We’re also seeing how essential stillness, presence with God, and humility are—not running away from the pain but sitting with it, asking God what He is teaching us, allowing Him to reveal what we’ve been too frightened, too conditioned, or too proud to see. Some of us took time in nature today, others seeing through scriptures, and even the “coincidences” around C.S. Lewis and his writings felt like God’s reminders that He is near, guiding us, and preparing us for what is ahead.
We’re realising as a group how incredibly important it is—spiritually, psychologically, and practically—to write down our problems, to ask empowered questions, to build a Problem and Question Compendium, and to approach our lives with clarity, discernment, and truth. This process is strengthening us, giving us courage, bringing us closer to God, and helping us see our condition—and the systems around us—with increasing clarity and accuracy.
We’re also seeing just how damaged, conditioned, and broken we are… and paradoxically, that acceptance is creating more compassion, more humility, more humanity, and more closeness to God. The more we accept the truth of our condition, the more the warmth of Christ begins to reach places in us that have been numb, hardened, or hidden for years.
We are increasingly in the forge, undergoing healing, rebuilding, facing our addictions, recognising long-standing trauma, and learning to depend fully on Christ. It’s painful, confusing, and exposing—but it’s also deeply hopeful. Some of us have had breakthroughs even tonight. Others are finding comfort in scripture, or seeing how God is weaving signs, warnings, encouragements, and confirmations into our daily experiences. We are collectively sensing that God is moving—through the teachings, through our trials, through our unity, through this season of Advent, and through every moment of stillness where He meets us in truth.
We all feel immense gratitude—for Paulie, for the wisdom and mastery of communication that God has given him, for the patience and guidance he continues to show while still recovering, and for the way his teachings hold together theology, psychology, scripture, and lived experience in a way that changes us at the root. We are also grateful for one another: for the collective reflections, the honesty, the shared suffering, the insights, the walks, the prayers, and the journey we’re on together.
We pray for strength, for regeneration, for clearer eyes, for deeper humility, and for Christ’s healing to reach into the most hidden parts of us. We pray for everyone preparing for court, and for all of us who are going through private, internal battles of our own. We trust that God is using all of this—our pain, our conditioning, our efforts, our failures, our breakthroughs—to draw us closer to Him.
God bless us all. x x x
Understanding sin, separation and diabolical pride, as opposed to healthy pride and how all these terms and words all relate to each other is enlightening and helps put so much into perspective.
I pray for your full recovery Paulie!
This is a gift, a real understanding of the nature of our sin, which places us in a position far better equipped to deal with the problems we are, and the problems that arise from the ones we create. I am a step closer to knowing how to love myself properly, and in doing so, to love others and God more effectively. What you have shared here is a gem that will undo much of the misery that both Christians and non-Christians experience. The caveat, however, is that this requires skill and action to implement, and that is where support comes in through mentoring and coaching. So us just feeling good about this meaningful and purposeful distinction will lead to fruitlessness if we don’t take action.
What a week ahead this is going to be! Paul’s article on the disease of sin, has made a huge impact on me and all of us so we look forward to starting to learn and understand about separation and diabolical pride this week too!
Thank you for this update. I pray that Paul’s health improves—not just for the continuation of his letters, but for this work at large, as it feels like a monumental and incredibly significant time. God’s timing, to be exact.
I’m really looking forward to reading tomorrow’s article on separation and diabolical pride—such essential truths that we all needed to learn growing up, and that we can now help teach the next generation.
God bless Paul and all of us on this journey. In His name, Amen. 🙏 x x
It’s an incredibly powerful article explaining sin in a way that is both compassionate and insightful. All I was taught by parents and church was “sin is a bad thing”. My understanding hadn’t developed that in subsequent years and decades. From what I see, many in the church and outside, do not have much more than this childish view.
I’ve asked numerous Christians “What is sin?” and many struggle to answer the question. The same applies to the meaning of the word “passion”.
I’m grateful through my time at Lighthouse that I’ve been learning to question and think in ways that I really ought to have learnt growing up.
Excited about what’s to come and what our research will do to help the Body of Christ and anyone who’s genuinely seeking truth.
This is such a powerful article. I always associated sin with guilt without ever truly understanding what sin actually means. “We are all sinners” simply means we fall short of perfection, that we are not perfect. I can now see how understanding the roots of that imperfection helps us apply the right medicine, and how sin so often arises from inner pain, suffering, and disease. That is such a powerful realisation, thank you!
I’m very much looking forward to Paul’s piece on Separation and Diabolical Pride.
Wow… Paul, thank you so much. Mr Lewis, thank you, and literally above all, Jesus Christ thank you for your saving grace. I welled up so much reading this – the timing of having this is incredible. I was not expecting to receive this and I’m so grateful I have. This week has brought to light a lot of my sin and challenge and I have been yearning to understand and as M Scott Peck says, to truly ‘enter’ into self examination in ways I never have before – only possible with God’s Holy Spirit. So there’s a lot here to hear and accept for me personally, and also to have much, much more compassion toward others too. What I see on the surface is only a glimpse and doesn’t show me the underlying trauma and hurt. As I read earlier this week; “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye”.
Matthew 7:5 LSB
Thanks to our Lord for His mercy and grace. God bless you Paul, heal well, in every way.
Such a powerful and well-needed update. The Disease of Sin, phew, what a read.
Thank you for writing and sharing this with us all.
I look forward to the coming week and what it has to offer us all.
God bless us all
Thank you Paul for this article and your wisdom building on CS. Lewis. I’m learning that sin is far greater than just whether something is “bad” and how deep the challenges of our condition as humans that have fallen from Grace goes.