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Recap

God is not:

• An old man “upstairs”
• A harsh unloving boss
• A cosmic sheriff - police of the universe
• Clueless, old-fashioned grandfather
• Distant demanding parent

God is, as we learned last week, our Father.

God uses this personal, relational title on purpose - He is a personal and relational God!

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Intro

• God in a box
  • We tend to put God in a box. We limit what he can do and who he is. We create imaginary boundaries for God. But, God is too big for our limitations.
  • Often the reason we put God in a box is out of fear of losing control. As long as we can “control” God we can “control” how much we surrender to him and how much we let him into our lives.
  • God cannot be bound! What we need to do is realize this and allow God to be God!

• God wants us to be with Him in constant relationship with him
  • Last series (”You are here”) we asked the question, “Where does God want you to be?”. One answer to that question is that God wants us to be in relationship with Him.

• This involves getting to know God for who He truly is
  • In any relationship, if we want to go deep we have come to know the other person for who they really are, not just who we think they are. That is the goal of this series - to come to know God for who He really is.

Our prayer scripture for this series: Ephesians 1:17

“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.”

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Our Goal: renewed hunger

The goal of this series is to see ourselves as we truly are, identify the areas that may be hard, rocky, or thorny, and start working with God’s help ( Philippians 2:13 ) to make it good soil. I want us to come out of this series with a renewed hunger and a revived sense of our need for growth! God wants to transform us from one degree to another and make us more like Jesus!

Becoming Aware - Poor in Spirit

This first step of evaluation and examination is important and vital to our spiritual growth because before we can grow deeper we need to become aware of our need (spiritual poverty), aware of our true state of being - we are naturally inclined to lie to ourself about how we truly are (self-deception).

Larry Crabb calls this step recognizing our “journeying reality” - the truth about where we are in our life of following Jesus. Remember, God meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be.
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Intro / Recap from last week

How are you?

This phrase has become a standard greeting in today’s world. We typically respond with a “fine”, “good”, “Ok, how are you?”. These answers are obviously just surface responses.

The question we want to ask over the next few weeks here at Quest is “How are you?” But we want to go deeper than just “fine” and “good”. We want to take a deeper look at our life with Jesus and be honest with ourselves.

This is part of the rhythm of spiritual growth. We move from a place of self deception where we lie to ourselves about the condition of our souls to a place where we are honest about the true state of affairs in our life - a place where we acknowledge our need for God’s redemption.

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Where are YOU?

• The first thing to do before you can move forward is to determine where you are right now.
• Where is your “red dot”?
• If our goal is to be transformed from the inside out to be more like Jesus, where are you in the process?
• God always meets us “where we are” - right now - the greatest moment is now, because that is where God is.
• God meets us where we are, not where we pretend to be

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