Greetings

Welcome to MikeHillebrecht.com

Where Grace Is Not a Doctrine — It’s a Discovery

 

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You Were Never Who They Said You Were.

Somewhere along the way, you were handed a story about yourself.

Maybe it came from a pulpit. Maybe from a parent. Maybe from the relentless inner voice that counts your failures before you’ve finished your morning coffee.

The story goes like this: You are broken. You need fixing. If you try hard enough, believe correctly enough, confess thoroughly enough — maybe then, you’ll be acceptable.

Mike Hillebrecht has spent decades dismantling that story.

Not with cleverness. Not with theological gymnastics. But with the one thing that story cannot survive:

The truth that grace was never about fixing you — because you were never as broken as they said.

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Who Is Mike Hillebrecht?

Mike Hillebrecht is a theologian, teacher, author, and the founder of Charis Academy — a learning community built on the conviction that grace is not a religious transaction but the very ground of human existence.

For over thirty years, Mike has walked with people in the wreckage of religion-gone-wrong — people who left the church disillusioned, people still inside it but suffocating, people who never found a faith worth keeping. His message is not a softer version of what they already heard. It is a fundamentally different starting point:

You are not a sinner trying to become a saint. You are a beloved son or daughter who has forgotten who you are.

Mike’s work spans eight published books, a comprehensive 12-month online grace study, and a growing library of resources designed to awaken people to the grace that has always held them — whether they knew it or not.

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Start Here: The 12-Month Grace Study

*The Most Comprehensive Exploration of Grace Available Online*

What would happen if you spent an entire year reading the Bible through the lens of grace — not as a theological position to defend, but as a living reality to inhabit?

That is exactly what the 12-Month Grace Study is designed to do.

Month by month. Week by week. Day by day.

Each daily lesson takes you deeper into the texts the church has often used to shame, exclude, and control — and shows you something scandalously different on the other side of the veil.

The Journey So Far:

Month 1: The Veil – Waking up to what has always been true

This month introduces the concept of “The Veil” – the illusion of separation that blinds us to our true identity and union with the Divine.

Using The Matrix as a cultural bridge, we’ll explore how religious systems, shame, and transactional thinking keep us asleep to the Grace that’s always been our reality.

Month 2: The Three Crosses – Solidarity, Not Exceptionalism

What if everything you’ve been told about the cross is a lie?

Not the cross itself—that was brutally real. But the story we’ve wrapped around it. The theology of exception. The narrative that says Jesus’ cross was different, special, uniquely divine in a way that separates him from the rest of suffering humanity.

Month 3: Dismantling the Romans Road

Paul’s masterwork — and the most misread document in Christian history.

Romans is not a courtroom indictment of human sinfulness. It is a liberation manifesto. Month 3 walks you through Paul’s diatribe rhetoric, his leveling of the playing field, and his real thesis: grace met humanity while still ungodly, still enemies, still sinners — and never withdrew.

Month 4: Passover vs. Yom Kippur

The Cross Re-Examined

For centuries, the church has read Jesus’ death through the lens of Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement, the scapegoat ritual, the blood sacrifice for sin. We’ve been taught that Jesus died to satisfy God’s wrath, to pay the penalty, to absorb the punishment we deserved.

But here’s the problem: Jesus didn’t die on Yom Kippur. He died at Passover.

 

New content added monthly. Return each month for the next chapter of the journey.

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The Books

Mike’s eight published works form a complete library of grace theology — each one approaching the same magnificent reality from a different angle. Whether you are new to this conversation or have been walking in grace theology for years, there is a book here that will meet you where you are.

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There’s Only Grace

The book that started everything for thousands of readers.

Have you ever truly perceived grace — not as doctrine, not as churchspeak, but as the living reality that holds the universe together?

There’s Only Grace is Mike’s foundational text. Drawing on the Greek charis, the relational nature of the Trinity, and decades of pastoral experience, Mike dismantles the transactional gospel and replaces it with something far more ancient, far more scandalous, and far more true.

If you read only one book, start here.

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Grace for Shame

For everyone who has ever felt that God was disappointed in them.

Shame is not a spiritual motivator. It is a spiritual prison. And the church — despite its best intentions — has often been the warden.

Grace for Shame traces the anatomy of religious shame, exposes the theological systems that produce it, and charts a way out — not through more effort, but through the devastating realization that God has never been disappointed in you. Not once.

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My Grace to You

What if grace is a verb?

Grace (charis) is one of the most used — and least understood — words in the New Testament. In My Grace to You, Mike traces charis through 3,000 years of Greek history, from Homer and the Trojan War to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Paul’s breathtaking benediction in 2 Corinthians 13:14.

The discovery: grace is not a noun describing a theological concept. Grace is God actively moving toward you. Always. Without condition.

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Chesed: Beyond the Veil of Mercy

The Hebrew word that rewrites everything you thought you knew about God’s love.

The Old Testament’s most important word for God’s love is chesed — and it has been consistently mistranslated as “mercy.” But chesed is not mercy. Chesed is covenant faithfulness — the commitment of a covenant partner who will not let go, no matter what.

When you understand chesed, the God of the Old Testament stops being the angry deity waiting to punish and becomes the relentless Lover who tears the veil from top to bottom to reach you.

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Stumbling Towards the Desire of Grace

Why do you want what you want — and what does grace have to do with it?

Drawing on the groundbreaking work of René Girard and the science of mirror neurons, Stumbling Towards the Desire of Grace asks a question most of us have never considered: What if the desires that drive your life were never originally yours?

We are mimetic creatures — we desire what we see others desiring. And the tenth commandment, the most overlooked of all, turns out to be the key to understanding human desire, envy, violence, and the grace that interrupts the cycle.

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Your Life Is a Freaking Mess

No tummy rubbing. No twelve steps. No Mary Poppins.

Sometimes grace needs to be delivered without a bow on it.

Your Life Is a Freaking Mess is Mike’s most direct, most personal book — a no-nonsense conversation with people who are tired of religious platitudes and ready for something that actually works. Drawing from his own experience of crisis, loss, and the kind of grace that shows up in the worst moments, Mike offers not a program but a presence.

For people who have tried everything else.

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The Forbidden Sermons

What would happen if someone said what the church has always been afraid to hear?

Told as narrative fiction, The Forbidden Sermons follows Leon — an outsider invited to preach in churches across America — as he delivers the sermon no one on the inside has been willing to give.

The Tree of Knowledge. The wrong kind of death. The scale that is killing the church. Leon says it all — and the result is a story that will unsettle, provoke, and ultimately free you.

The Father’s love is not on a scale. It never was. That is the forbidden sermon.

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Coming Soon: New Resources

 

The library is growing. Here is what is on the horizon:

 

Months 5-12 of the Grace Study — New monthly content added regularly. Subscribe to be notified when the next month drops.

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What People Are Discovering

“I have been in church my entire life and no one ever told me this. I feel like I have been handed something I did not know I was missing.”

“Mike’s books cost me my religion — and gave me back my faith. I am more grateful than I can say.”

“The 12-Month Grace Study is the most challenging and liberating thing I have done in years. I keep coming back because every week I find something that rewrites what I thought I knew.”

“I bought There’s Only Grace on a whim and read it in one sitting. I have not been the same since.”

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Begin the Journey

You did not land here by accident.

Something in you has been hungry for a grace that is bigger than what you have been offered — a grace that does not keep score, does not withdraw when you fail, does not require you to be fixed before it holds you.

That grace exists. It has always existed. And it has been holding you longer than you know.

Mike Hillebrecht’s books, the 12-Month Grace Study, and the growing library of resources at Charis Academy are all pointing to the same place:

You are beloved. You always have been. It is time to live like it.

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Have a great time while you’re visiting and come back often.

Thanks

Here is a little more information about what kind of writings can be found on this site.

If your beliefs today are the same as they were last year, five years ago, or even ten years ago, you are not growing spiritually. You are merely a bench warmer in a divine game. Get up and bust through your comfortable biases and discover the truth of who you truly are.

Grace is not on its way to you. Grace has always been here.

www.mikehillebrecht.com | www.charisacademy.com