Make Up Your Mind

An Idea for Turning a Powerful Scripture into an Internet Video

Hi there! I hope you’re having a super good day. Are you good at imagining things? Can you, for example, get an idea about the furnishing of a room so that it comes alive and becomes a place with a purpose? Can you see it before actually dragging furniture into the space? I think we all have this ability, but some people use it more and so it becomes stronger with them. Anyway, we’re always trying to encourage people to release their creativity because creativity is worship. God is our Creator, and He invites us to create things with Him. In this video, I want to invite you into the process that is involved in making a video out of a scripture passage. Today I was reading Psalms 148, and it just read like a script. I could see it in my mind. Read it with me in this video, and I think you’ll see it also. Over the next few months, we want to convert this scripture into a powerful video that lays down the foundation of teaching behind the Old and New Testaments. I hope to have the liberty in the next year to build out some videos that can hopefully gain traction with young audiences online and teach them the big strokes of God’s message in a way that feels the most natural to them. So, without further ado, let’s open up the Bible to Psalms 148 and start envisioning what a video of those few verses might look like. Thanks for standing with us as we raise up a generation of content creators who put God’s words into artistic form so they can impact this digital generation. Every Blessing! Chuck and Sherry Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Make Up Your Mind

Hi friend! Sherry and I are back in Thailand, so I’m back in the studio, able to produce again. Thanks for your patience. Let’s dive in. There’s a scene at the very end of the Bible that has always amazed me. It’s my new favorite Bible verse, and you’ll find it in the last chapter of Revelation — God’s final word to the world. You’d expect something tender. Something like, “Please, my children, come back to me. I love you too much to let you go.” That’s not what happens. A glorious angel steps forward to deliver the closing message: “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still. He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. He who is righteous, let him be righteous still. He who is holy, let him be holy still.” No pleading. No last-minute persuasion campaign. Just… “Hey Humans, Make up your mind.” I’ve come to believe that whole speech is basically a command to decide who you’re going to be and get on with it. Vote already. If you want to be crooked, then lie, cheat, and abuse like a gangster. If you want to be lustful, then go roll in the filth. But if you’re going to follow Jesus — wake up, and do it with everything you’ve got. What strikes me about that passage is that it doesn’t seem to matter to God whether every single person chooses him. He gave us free will. What matters is that everybody votes. He wants us to pick a team. I’m picking Team Jesus. The either-or This is where I think a lot of churched people skip past too quickly. We think we settled it all when we prayed the sinner’s prayer one day so we wouldn’t have to go to hell. All of us need to intentionally make up our minds about Jesus. Either he is the Creator come in the flesh to save us, or he is not. Either he is the only door to God, or he is not. If he’s none of those things, then he’s just a man — a good teacher, maybe — but not someone you build a life around. But if he is that Savior, then he must also be Lord. If this is true, then we have to live like he’s actually the boss. The early church didn’t have a twelve-point statement of faith. They had one doctrine: Jesus is Lord. That was enough. Everything else fit inside that one conviction. Compare that to what a lot of us grew up with — stacks of doctrinal positions and denominational distinctives layered on top of each other. Somewhere underneath all of it, the actual Lordship of Jesus has often gotten buried instead of being the one thing holding everything else together. Lordship or nothing The core of the Gospel message is that Jesus offers to be our Lord. The choice to accept this offer belongs entirely to us from that point on. But he won’t lower his position to make it easier on us. It’s Lordship or nothing. That sounds like a hard sell, doesn’t it? Who actually wants a lifetime under the authority of a Supreme Lord? Our experience with power, in this life, is that power tends to end up unpleasant, even abusive. We chafe at the thought of someone else having the final say over us, and that’s a completely normal reaction. But Jesus isn’t like any human leader you’ve ever lived under. The people who actually live under his Lordship discover something that surprises them every time: his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. His authority strengthens and lifts you rather than crushing you. It releases your creativity. It ignites vision instead of shutting you down. This is not religion. Religion takes what you have and always demands more. What Jesus offers is the exact opposite — he’s offering to become your shield, your provider, your healer, your leader, forever. That’s an unbelievable offer, once you sit with it. My own conviction If Jesus is anything less than what he claims to be in the Gospels, I don’t want to follow him. I don’t need another moral teacher. I need a Savior. There’s no middle road. He’s either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. I spent my early years in the spiritual wilderness working through exactly what I believed about Jesus, and why. I looked at the alternatives. I sat with the doubts. And then I made up my mind. I believe him because of the life he actually lived — he refused to compromise to be popular, wealthy, or to avoid pain. I believe him because five hundred witnesses were willing to face persecution and death to testify that they had personally seen him alive again. But more than any of that, I believe Jesus because I’ve experienced him for myself for fifty years now. He healed my depression as a teenager. He’s answered specific prayers more times than I could count. That’s not theory. That’s my own history with him. Represent Jesus, not Christianity Sherry and I have spent over forty years living in Southeast Asia. We have not spent forty years representing Christianity. We represent Jesus — not our denomination, not a nonprofit. Just him. This Jesus thing has never been doctrine for us. It’s experience. So don’t follow a religion about Jesus, or a creed, or a particular church’s brand of him. Follow him. Know him. Whatever else you do this week — make up your mind about Jesus. Vote. If this question is stirring something in you, this is exactly where the book picks up. ReJesus Everything is built around one conviction: Jesus is the standard, and the Christianities we’ve inherited are just our attempts to represent him — some better than others. This piece you just read is the opening move of a much longer conversation in the book: making up your mind about who Jesus actually is, before we ever get to what’s broken in how the church has tried to follow him, and what it looks like to rebuild from here. It’s not a book about tearing anything down. It’s a letter to the next generation of leaders, written from fifty years of ministry across dozens of cultures, about how to put Jesus back at the center of a faith that’s drifted. If you’ve ever sensed that gap — between the Jesus you grew up believing in and the Jesus actually described in the Gospels — this book was written for you. ReJesus Everything [https://a.co/d/01wVCsST] is available now on Amazon. Grab a copy, and if you want to work through it with friends, there’s a free discussion guide on the website too. [https://a.co/d/01wVCsST] Click here to order. Please leave us a review on Amazon. It’s more powerful than you could know in causing the algorithm to show the book to other people. Thanks! Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

What's at stake in global Christianity?

Hi! I hope you’re having a wonderful day. I wanted to share with you this interview which was released this week on the Medialight Substack page. It’s a conversation I had with Ross about where the next generation finds themselves in relationship with the church and the Bible and Christianity globally. One of the concepts we talk about is the need to re-establish the central authority of Jesus and not treat Him just as one voice among many. The Medialight team came up with this diagram, which I share with you now. Because I know Ross so well, I really think the conversation between us is special, and I hope you will check it out. The book is available now on Amazon. Every Blessing!Chuck Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

It's Here!

Hey! I have exciting news, the book is finally live! ReJesus Everything is available on Amazon worldwide! We have a Kindle version already up, and we will produce an audiobook within a month or so. This has been a passion project for many years. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been writing this book all my life because I have been thinking the thoughts that I was finally able to release along the journey of ministry that Sherry and I have been in these 45 years. There were so many battles involved in bringing this book to its launch day. There were struggles with artists, struggles with the layout designer, and struggles with Amazon over technical parts of the physical construction of the book. Anyway, we expected some resistance anytime we create a new thing, but this one truly took so much grit to bring across the finish line, so please celebrate with us! The past two years have largely revolved around this project, and now it’s completed. In this video, I talk about what’s inside the book so I won’t go into details on that here. What I am hoping is that this book will become fuel for discussion in local churches and ministries. We are producing a companion leader’s guide for free that can be downloaded from the book’s website. In this guide, we lay out six to eight sessions that a church can have to create a safe discussion where church leaders and young people can process the dissonance many young people feel between the Jesus of the Bible and the organized version of Christianity around them. Like the book, the majority of this discussion centers around rebuilding our current version of Christianity with Jesus, His words, and the example of His life at the center. A whole generation of Christian young people are avoiding any idea of serving in church ministry, even though they love Jesus. They just look at current forms of church and say, “That’s not for me.” We’re missing so much buy-in from this generation, and those of us who are mature in the Lord have to put some energy into making certain the baton relay continues. Over the last two thousand years, if even one generation had failed to pass the baton to the next generation, the Christian movement would have stopped. I don’t want to see things break down in our generation. Sherry and I are spending much energy trying to help this generation pick up the ministry and create their own new version of things so that the powerful Gospel of Jesus continues forward. We believe this book can be an important resource for the global church, and I want to thank you for supporting us up to this point. Thank you for opening my emails and for participating in this podcast. You have allowed me to work out my thoughts and bring them to a place where they could be published. Sherry and I are so grateful for this. Can We Ask Two Things Please? 1. Give the book a try. Here’s the Link to Purchase on Amazon [https://a.co/d/00QUR4VV] 2. Write a 3 sentence review and give the appropriate numbers of stars in your rating. If we could get 50 people to buy the book and give it a review, it will trigger an algorithm on Amazon where the book gets promoted to new viewers. This is the great chance for a breakout, but it needs to happen in the first two weeks, so please buy the book today and give us a review. We will be so grateful to you for that. Thanks again! Chuck and Sherry Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

What do you do when God feels completely silent? (and two other great questions)

Welcome back to the Grounded Podcast! I hope you are having an incredible week. Sherry and I are out of the country for the next few weeks on an assignment that is part ministry and part Sabbath for the two of us. We run pretty hard on the schedule, some days having six meetings back-to-back, and it’s just important to balance that with some good time of restoration. What’s coming up? Today we get three great questions: * Is it okay to question things you were taught growing up in church? * What do you do when God feels completely silent? * How do you maintain personal faith when you’ve seen so much hypocrisy in the church? * Bonus: and I talk a bit about how God brings revelation to us through others. I wanted to highlight the second question because it’s something I have experienced myself, so I can really sympathize with others who are going through it. Life Can Wear You Out We all get worn out, sometimes. The most important things in life need sustained effort on our part. It even seems that the more important something is, the harder it is to do because it gets resisted by the darkness. I mean, nobody stumbles into a great lifetime marriage or launching a bunch of happy, healthy, solid kids. Or building a God-honoring business that balances making profits with being a blessing to people. These things are so resisted in the world that we have to push harder in our efforts to achieve them. We Meet a Tired Man Sherry and I just returned from the Pastors Coalition meeting in Tennessee this past weekend. This is a group of excellent pastors who want to go the extra mile and not only run a healthy church but also influence that church to do something powerful in global missions and humanitarian work around the world. In this group, there was one notable leader, a man I truly admire. A year ago, I felt compelled to drive to his city and have a meeting with him although I did not know why. When I called to set it up, he didn’t seem too excited about the prospect of me coming to have a talk with him. After I got there it was a little awkward but eventually we got to an amazing fish house, where we ate a lot of shrimp and ended up having a long talk about dryness and the need to take a sabbath rest. The essence of our conversation was that maybe he wasn’t really burned out, nor was he finished in his calling. He was just tired and exhausted, and he needed to let things idle for a year. At this week’s meeting, he told me that our conversation probably saved his ministry, because he was, in fact, resisting meeting with me out of the secret knowledge that he was about to leave it all behind. His wife said, “We were depleted, but our ground was depleted too. We needed to let the land rest.” Putting Things into Sabbath Mode He quietly put everything in this big dynamic church into maintenance mode without announcing it to anyone. Every time someone had a great idea, he said, “That’s a great idea. Write it up and email it to me!” but he never did anything new the whole year. He slowed the busy-ness of his church and focused on health in the church. Sabbath year. Just let the land rest. He spent more time on his personal health, and he and his wife logged a lot of missing hours together and renewed their strength and rebuilt themselves on the inside for twelve whole months. The core leaders from the church got a rest too as things got simplified for a whole year. The end of the story is that they’re both revived and the church with them. This year they’re actually going to start eight micro churches under other leaders. This will have minimal drain on them or the church but will ignite eight new people in their circle to do something visionary with God in a house group or small-sized church setting. That’s usually the fruit of truly unplugging for a season. Maybe you need that, and if you do, I hope you will not argue yourself out of it, but just start pulling plugs out and making space in your calendar for a season of doing nothing. But that’s not even what this episode is about That part is for free, folks! What I talk about in the video is something totally different. It’s about the reality of a place called the wilderness—a dry, arid, vacant place you end up somehow wandering into even as you faithfully follow Jesus. You don’t intend to go there. It just happens. Things get quiet and you sense that you’re just alone in a desert place, and no matter how loud you cry out to God, you don’t hear anything in response. Maybe this lasts a week or a month. I felt nothing. It lasted for three years. Journeying Through a Spiritual Desert In Manila, I preached each week, and we had great harvest. Typically, 25 people every Sunday came to Christ over an 8-10-year period. For a long while, I could sing. I could pray. But inside I just felt silence. (I talk more about it in the video.) Thank God, the thing about all deserts is that they don’t go on forever. I got out of mine eventually, so I can fully understand what this experience feels like to other people and can assure you that it is not a permanent state. Actually, this phenomenon is well recorded in Christian history. Many of the people considered spiritual heroes in Christian history report a season in their life where a similar thing took place. So if you’re in that condition right now, please take heart. Yes, it’s a time to ask God if you’ve done something to cause it, and if you have, you need to fix it, but it’s also very possible that you didn’t do a thing. It’s just a process, and somehow we need it—for reasons we can clearly see and for some reasons that we may not understand in this lifetime. Life with Jesus is so amazing, whether it’s in a desert or on a mountaintop. As long as he’s there, it’s a precious experience. I think one of the main things Jesus came to teach us was how to be fully human—how to live a life that is fully engaged with God and others in this physical world. I want to taste my food, feel the wind on my face, and enjoy every slobbery kiss from babies. Sherry and I love our days, and we pray God will help you to love yours also. ReJesus Everything! Love, Chuck and Sherry Grounded Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe [https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]