My name is Mike Mahaffey. I am from Mississippi, a man in my seventies with a high school education and more life behind me than most people would want to claim.
I spent the better part of my life in disagreement with what God required of me. Not ignorantly — I had been around church enough to know what was expected. I just could not produce it, no matter how many times I tried.
I gave my life to Christ at twenty years old. That experience was real. But knowing I was saved and knowing how to live like it were two entirely different things, and for decades I could not close that gap.
The gap cost me everything.
My family left. And when they did, something in me finally stopped arguing. I knew something was wrong with me at the root — not just behaviorally, but spiritually. I started going from church to church, denomination to denomination, asking to be baptized each time. I thought if I could just get it right, something would change. Most told me baptism again was unnecessary. A few told me I had been baptized wrong the first time and that was the problem. None of it touched what was actually broken.
Then a man came to my home one afternoon and opened the Bible with me — not to sell me on his denomination, but to show me something I had never been taught. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, he explained, was not salvation. It was not a second chance at getting saved or a correction of something done wrong. It was a gift that followed salvation — God’s provision for bringing more of the fullness of the Godhead into a believer’s life. He prayed for me before he left. I moved to another city the next day and never saw him again.
Weeks later, alone in prayer, I could not understand what was coming out of my own mouth.
I did not know what was happening. I went to a Pentecostal church mid-week and told the pastor what had been going on. He told me it was a good thing — that what I had was a prayer language, and that it was between me and the Holy Spirit. I was a Pentecostal man now, apparently, whether I had planned on it or not.
But the problem was not solved.
I was in church every time the doors opened. I was reading my Bible. I was praying in two languages. And very little was changing in who I actually was — what I thought, how I acted, what I kept doing. The answers I got from sincere, well-meaning believers were the same answers I had always gotten. Try harder. Pray more. Be around better people. Will power dressed up in church language.
Then I found Jimmy Swaggart on television.
I had heard him on the radio over the years and something in his preaching always reached something in my spirit. But on television I could actually find him. I started watching, and I was skeptical. He called himself Pentecostal, but what he kept preaching did not line up with what the Oneness and Holiness churches had taught me. Everything with him came back to the Cross. Every subject. Every answer. Every time.
I kept asking myself why he would not move on to something else.
He said many times — just keep coming back. So I did. I ordered the Expositor’s Study Bible to follow where his teaching was coming from. I bought his books. And slowly, the gospel Paul actually preached started coming off the page — not a version of it shaped by tradition or denomination, but the thing itself. Christ and Him crucified as the ongoing basis for everything, not just the entry point.
I am not a perfect man. But I am a different one. Sinful habits that owned me for decades have disappeared — and not one of them left because I overpowered it. They left because the more I understood what Christ accomplished at the Cross, and the more I placed my faith there, the more the Holy Spirit had room to work. The old Mike faded. What replaced him is someone I can actually live with.
I built this site because I know people.
I know believers who have been in church their whole lives and cannot change. Good people. Sincere people. People who have knelt at altars and been prayed over and gone home exactly the same. Some of them cannot stay out of prison, and they want to. Some of them just want to stop doing what they keep doing.
The answer they are not getting is the one this site is built around.
This is not a JSM site — Jimmy Swaggart Ministries is the messenger, not the message. The message is the one Paul preached. Christ and Him crucified is the only basis on which the Holy Spirit works to produce genuine, lasting change in a human being. Everything else is willpower with a Bible verse attached.
Inchristnow.com started as an extension of that writing. While my main site explores broader questions about faith and the Bible, I built this specific site to be a focused, daily anchor in the Word.
The goal here is simple: to look at the New Testament chapter by chapter, and verse by verse, always filtering it through the lens of what Christ accomplished at the Cross.
I am not a pastor. I am not a seminary graduate. I am not a teacher by training or title. I am a man in his seventies who spent most of his life being someone he was not proud of, who found the one thing that actually worked, and who cannot stop writing about it. If you are looking for deeper dives into specific questions about Christianity, you can visit my main site at mikemahaffey.net.