Category Archives: FaithWalkers

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Do You Make This Common Mistake in Your FaithWalk?

Why Waiting for Certainty Could Take a While

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I would prefer to know how life will turn out before I choose my next step. If you’re like me, it’s easy to make a common mistake in pursuit of a life that is pleasing to God.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be unpacking the process of knowing God’s will for your life in a series of posts on the topic. I get questions from readers all the time who are trying to figure out what God wants them to do next.

My free eBook What God Wants You to Do Next: 7 Questions to Discover God’s Best for Your Life has been downloaded by people all over the world, so I know trying to figure out God’s direction is a common experience no matter where you live. I’ve heard from new friends as close as Atlanta and as far away as New Guinea and Ghana asking for advice on how to tell the difference between what God wants and what I want.

Although there is more to unpack in answering this question–something I’ll be doing in a series of posts coming soon–we need to be careful not to make a common mistake when asking this question and others about finding our life direction.

We should not assume we can ever reach a place in this life where we are free from uncertainty about what God wants us to do next.

The Apostle Paul describes our journey as a faith-walk, not a sight-walk. It’s not a historical tour complete with gripping narration, bronze plaques, and souvenir shops. It is a dynamic journey into the unknown with the One who knows and sustains all things.

The Christian walk is not a documentary filmed after the fact. It is an ongoing process which requires us to depend on God for direction as it unfolds in real time. Someday we’ll have the luxury of hindsight, but not now.

We make a mistake if we expect the Christian walk to be anything other than an exercise in ever-increasing dependence on God. Not only is uncertainty not abnormal, it is the expected way of life for all who follow Christ. We live in tension between what is already accomplished and what is being accomplished, between what is and what is to come.

“Though the outward man is perishing, the inward man is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16) A metamorphosis is taking place within us. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the process may become uncomfortable at times. In fact, we should expect it.

Remember this: Faith itself is a temporary thing. “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12) One day faith will give way to sight, and all uncertainty will cease. Until then, the process is working something far greater within us, causing us to lean into our Savior for direction and guidance as we walk paths we’ve never known before.

By all means, seek clarity from God, but don’t let uncertainty stop you from moving forward. Get used to saying, I don’t know all the answers, but I’m taking the next step anyway. 

Embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to discover greater clarity about what matters most. And your story will become better for it. 

Embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to discover greater clarity about what matters most.

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SPECIAL: I’d love your input for the series of posts and additional resources I am preparing to help you discover what God wants you to do next. If you are not already an email subscriber, click here to do so now and be included in a brief survey I’ll send your way. Thanks!

Question: Do you sometimes make the mistake of thinking your uncertainty is weird or not normal for a Christ follower? How might your present uncertainty be an opportunity for you to grow closer to God? Share your thoughts by clicking here.

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How to Overcome Impossible Obstacles

Mountains You're Facing May Be Smaller than You Think

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One thing I’m still learning on my journey of faith is not to make assumptions about mountains, or obstacles and challenges I encounter along the way. For one thing, mountains are not always what they appear to be.

In the late 1800s, Half Dome was described as being “perfectly inaccessible.” Until someone blazed the trail and installed eye bolts into the granite. Now tourists regularly accomplish what was once considered an impossible feat.

When the Hebrews faced the Red Sea, they thought it an impassable barrier. It wasn’t. When we were homeless and without money, buying a house seemed impossible. Not so. [Get some encouragement and read more of our story in my new book A Story Worth Telling.]

Whatever challenges you may be facing today, rest assured that they only seem like mountains from your perspective. And perspectives can change.

A Story of Overcoming Mountains

My friend Daniel Buell was the co-founder of Cornerstone Christian Academy where I served for a dozen years before stepping out to answer God’s call to write as a Kingdom catalyst. He too faced a seemingly impossible task in the summer of 2000 when he agreed to lead the effort to launch and open a college-prep school for grades 7-12—in less than two months!

At the time, only eleven students were enrolled, I was the only teacher with a contract, and the school had not yet been charted by the state of Ohio. Anyone with any experience in education will tell you that these barriers Dan faced were insurmountable. Perhaps with an additional year—and a lot of money—the task could be done. Maybe.

But Dan persisted by faith, believing that God had called him to run toward the seemingly impossible to establish a vibrant Christian school for God’s glory. He built a dedicated team quickly and spent a lot of nights in the office, watching the sun come up on yet another stack of completed paperwork.

Nothing came easily. And that is often why choose to walk away from the challenge of a mountain. Overcoming them is never easy. But mountains make the ideal settings for the best stories to reveal the majesty of God.

Mountains make the ideal setting for the best stories to reveal the majesty of God.

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Incredibly, when the first bell rang, the school opened with full faculty, an enrollment of 131, and state-charter status in record time—an accomplishment that was nothing less than a bureaucratic miracle.

Today the school is thriving. It consistently enrolls around four hundred students annually in grades K-12 and sends graduates to the best colleges and universities throughout the nation. Where most saw impossibility, Dan saw something different: opportunity. Here’s his perspective: “A mountain is merely a change in the terrain you must travel, so keep hiking.”

And that’s the other funny thing about mountains. From God’s perspective, there are none.

You may have heard the expression that someone is “making a mountain out of a molehill,” making a big deal about something that is truly insignificant. We all too easily forget that God sees no mountains, only molehills.

If we can remember God’s perspective as we answer his call to live a story worth telling, we can patiently be still and watch him work, like Moses, even while we keep moving forward–even running toward–the mountains we encounter and overcome by faith.

Question: What mountains are you facing now that seem impossible to you? How might your perspective change if you could see them as opportunities for God’s glory to be revealed? Share your thoughts by clicking here.

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The One Thing Every FaithWalker Must Do

And Why Each of Us Easily Qualifies to Do It

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Every Christian wants to one day hear the words, “Well, Done!”  Each FaithWalker wants to do great things for God. But most of us think we just don’t have what it takes to qualify for the Faith Hall of Fame.

We’ve all got stories we tell ourselves about why we don’t belong on the field with those “Major League Christians” we meet in the pages of Scripture. [See my post The Myth of the Minor League Christian.] It’s as if we think we must be perfect in order to qualify for walking by faith.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Thank God!

In fact, do you know the one thing every FaithWalker in Scripture seems to have had in common? Failure.

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The Myth of the Minor League Christian

Are You in the Game or Tailgating in the Parking Lot?

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When I first stepped out by faith to pursue God’s call to write, I heard many people say, “That calling is not for everyone,” as if the call to follow Christ on a faith adventure were reserved only for the Christian elite—not the rest of us who should “bloom where we’re planted” in the Christian minor leagues.

You can discover more of my story and the resistance I encountered in my book A Story Worth Telling. But the idea that there are two classes of Christ followers—the Major and Minor Leagues of Christianity—is not new.

The Apostle Paul addressed this urge to create an upper class of Christians when he said, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:5-6) The Church unintentionally reinforced this thinking with the idea of sainthood, setting up icons to commemorate ordinary Christians doing what God had called them to do. And for many centuries, everyone knew the best Christians, those most serious about following Christ, secluded themselves in monasteries. The major league faith took place behind those walls, while the rest of the rabble settled for being minor league disciples.

Jesus says: Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend—it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehensions, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do.

Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours. Thus Abraham went forth from his father and not knowing whither he went. He trusted himself to my knowledge, and cared not for his own, and thus took the right road and came to his journey’s end.

Behold that is the way of the cross. You cannot find it yourself, so you must let me lead you as though you were a blind man. Wherefore it is not you, no man, no living creature, but I myself, who instruct you by my Word and Spirit in the way you should go.

Not the work which you choose, not the suffering you devise, but the road which is clean contrary to all that you choose or contrive or desire—that is the road you must take. To that I call you and in that you must be my disciple.

Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend—it must transcend all comprehension. ~Martin Luther

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Martin Luther
Bonhoeffer -- The Cost of Discipleship
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Do You Have What It Takes to Be A Hero?

5 Key Questions to Identify Your Core Beliefs

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Sacrifice. It’s not a popular word. It never has been and probably never will be. But to those who desire an authentic life, the kind of life that produces a story worth telling, sacrifice must become a way of life. Faith is the stuff heroes are made of.

This past weekend in America, we celebrated Memorial Day. We set aside a day to remember the fallen, those brave men and woman who served in our Armed Forces and gave their last measure of full devotion — but why did they do it?

I would suggest most did it because of what they believed to be true, most definitely in spite of what they saw, sensed, or felt. For readers of my new book A Story Worth Telling, that explanation should sound familiar — it is the very definition of faith.

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5 Common Responses to a Faith Challenge

Which Way Do You Choose When the Going Gets Tough?

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It’s been said that when the going gets tough the tough get going. But let’s face it: it’s easy to say we believe until we face a faith challenge.

Only when we face a challenge do we discover what our faith is made of. Only then do we realize that growing our faith will take some work.

It might help to think of our faith challenge as a growth curve. When we first begin to step out by faith and test both ourselves and God, we’ll meet resistance.

Resistance doesn’t mean right or wrong, it just means we’re moving in a new direction. Easy doesn’t mean we have God’s green light. In fact, if we’re trying to grow our faith in response to a faith challenge, we should expect it to be difficult at first, especially early in the curve.

When I first started on the path to becoming a professional writer, nothing was easy. I mean nothing.

We often contrast ‘believers’ to ‘nonbelievers,’ but that can be misleading. Everyone believes something, in the sense that they must assume some principle as fundamentally true. Atheist often fail to recognize that they are in the same boat as everyone else. A common mantra of atheist websites goes like this: ‘Atheism is not a belief. Atheism is merely a lack of belief in God or gods.’

But it is impossible to think without some starting point. If you do not start with God, you must start somewhere else. You must propose something else as the ultimate, eternal, uncreated reality that is the cause and source of everything else.

The important question is not which starting points are religious or secular, but which claims stand up to testing.

Nancy Pearcey
Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes
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7 Ways to Distinguish between Fear and Faith

Are You Sure You Know the Difference?

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I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen fear keep someone from walking by faith. I’d be rich. Unless I had to pay someone else for all the times I let fear send me into hiding.

Along my journey to live a story worth telling, I have developed what I can only describe as a sensitivity to faith opportunities. Having confronted my own faithless demons, I seem to more easily recognize the symptoms of faithlessness in others. Here are a few popular and telling expressions:

  • We can’t afford to do that.
  • We don’t have time to do that.
  • That sounds risky.
  • What if it doesn’t work out?
  • There’s only so much to go around.

But when you learn to walk by faith — to do what you believe to be true, often in spite of what you see, sense, or feel — your perspective changes. Now when I hear something may be risky, my ears perk up.