Category — Quest

In Luke 5:11, Luke tells us about one of Jesus’ first encounters with Peter, James and John. After hearing Jesus teach and seeing him miraculously fill their nets with fish, these fishermen “left everything and followed him.” Now think back to the initial occasion when you decided to follow Jesus Christ. What was going on in your life? In what ways did Christ change your life?

I first surrendered my life to Christ as a four-year-old child and grew up in a Christian home. But when I was 19 I realized my Christian life was stale. I was focused on me and my performance for God. At that time I attended Bible college, but had to leave after a semester for lack of funds. Even at Bible college I was running with the wrong crowd. I knew and said all the right things, but my relationship with God was shallow. I was a phony. [Read more →]

This action has everything to do with trusting God. Consider the following parable and let God speak to you through it.

For 40 years God led Israel through the barren wilderness of the Middle East. In spite of their repeated grumblings and rebellion, God continued to love, lead and provide for his people. Even when they were unfaithful to him, he remained faithful to them. In all those years, God sustained this massive company of people by miraculously providing them with manna. Manna was a food substance like bread that God caused to appear on the ground each morning. The people of Israel gathered manna as their staple food through all those years. [Read more →]

You may have noticed that in this chapter and in the previous three we’ve been talking a lot about life change. God does want to transform us to become more like his Son. But let’s not make the mistake of pursuing life change in place of pursuing Jesus Christ. Our focus must be on Jesus Christ. Our goal is deeper relationship with him. Life change is what results from our relationship with him. As we draw near to him, we cannot remain unchanged! (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Many of us have confused our relationship with Christ with lifestyle by a moral or biblical code. The older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) made this mistake. He thought his father merely wanted obedience, when his father really wanted his love. (His love would’ve resulted in his obedience too.) [Read more →]

God gives us the power to choose to follow him and be changed by him. But there are a couple more stifling misconceptions that prevent us from experiencing the radical life change that he wants to bring about in us. We all fail spiritually, but have you ever caught yourself saying something like the following? “I experience spiritual failure because I lack the strength, knowledge, support, environment, opportunity, etc. to succeed.” I know I have! But we’ve got to be very careful about this kind of thinking.

The idea that someone or something else is responsible for our failure is deadly and will kill our spiritual growth! Our culture has become so blame oriented that we don’t even recognize how often we blame others or something else for our own shortcomings. In the Quest book I refer to this as a victim mentality. There is a cardinal principle that prevails when it comes to seeing oneself as a victim. Simply put, a victim never wins—never! A victim will always find themselves powerless under the control of someone or something else. [Read more →]

A third misconception of the paradigm, God gives us the power to choose, argues God won’t use me to do his work until I get my own issues worked out. As with all the stifling misconceptions, this one also contains an element of truth. God wants us to serve him with “clean hands and a pure heart.” All too often, however, we use our own past failures or shortcomings as an excuse for inactivity.

The liberating truth here is that God uses growing people, not perfect ones. The trajectory of my life is aimed at victory! Think of some of the people in the New Testament whose personal life issues were not yet worked out and yet God used them to represent him to others. There was the man whom Jesus healed from demons wanted to go with him, but Jesus told him, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you.” (Mark 5:19) [Read more →]

God asks us to take an active role in our spiritual transformation. But many Christians feel defeated. A common misconception voiced among defeated Christians is I can’t work up transforming faith. I have to let God change my life. This misconception revolves around misunderstandings of both faith and how God transforms us.

In Luke 17:1-10, Jesus was teaching his disciples. Among other things, he instructed them, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” The disciples responded to this statement in a way that demonstrates this stifling misconception. They said to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” (Luke 17:3-5) [Read more →]

This third paradigm, God gives us the power to choose, has to do with the way God transforms us spiritually. We are not passive bystanders when it comes to our becoming more like Christ. God asks us to take an active role in our transformation.

A common misconception that strips us of responsibility and hinders our spiritual growth claims, I’m just a sinner saved by grace, so I can’t expect to win all the time. As I’ve stated before, this misconception contains some truth to make it sound appealing and right. [Read more →]

God’s passion is for our spiritual transformation, but viewing our salvation as merely an event that occurred at a point in time is a misconception that stifles our transformation. The apostle Paul draws attention to this danger in 1 Corinthians 10. In that passage he challenges us to remember the fact that all of the children of Israel whom Moses led out of Egypt enjoyed a common experience. They all experienced God’s deliverance (salvation) from Egypt; God’s leading through the pillar of cloud; and God’s miraculous rescue by taking them through the Red Sea on dry ground.

In fact, Paul says, “all of them were baptized as followers of Moses. All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the same spiritual water. For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ.” Then Paul cautions us, “Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. These things happened as a warning to us.” (1 Corinthians 10:2-6 NLT) [Read more →]

God’s passion is for our spiritual transformation. But another couple of misconceptions stifle our growth in him. These misconceptions protest: I shouldn’t question God, but merely have the faith to obey. And, God’s will is so hard to figure out. I can never be certain of what God wants.

While these two stifling misconceptions are common, they both have their roots in a false understanding of God. Both misconceptions perceive God as impersonal and uninvolved in our lives. They see him as too busy to be bothered with our puny issues; too exalted to care. Such a view is a dangerous lie from the evil one! [Read more →]

Quest paradigm two: God’s passion is for our spiritual transformation! Another stifling misconception that derails God’s transforming work in us contends that holiness is too much to ask of me. Only God is holy.

A few days ago, I heard the testimony of a man who recently surrendered his life to Christ. He had prayed “the salvation prayer” as a child, but confessed that somewhere along the line he had adopted this misconception. He figured if he couldn’t be holy anyway, he might as well live as he pleased. As a result he had lived a horribly sinful life of self-indulgence and self-centeredness. He’s now greatly ashamed of the forty years he squandered. [Read more →]