Ask God for a mountain
Published: Mon, 07/21/25
Updated: Mon, 07/21/25
Sessions Include:Lesson #1 Lesson #2 Lesson #3 Lesson #4 Lesson #5 Lesson #6 Lesson #7 Lesson #8 Lesson #9 Lesson #10 Lesson #11 Lesson #12 Lesson #13 Lesson #14 Lesson #15 Lesson #16 Lesson #17 Lesson #18 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #19 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #20 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #20 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #21 The Me I Want to Be / Lesson #22
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We sometimes yearn for a problem-free life, but that would be death by boredom. It is in working to solve problems and overcome challenges that we become the person God wants us to be. Every problem is an invitation from the Spirit, and when we say yes, we are in the flow. So don’t ask for comfort. Don’t ask for ease. Don’t ask for manageability. Ask to be given a burden for a challenge bigger than yourself — one that can make a difference in the world, one that will require the best you have to give it and then leave some space for God besides. Ask for a task that will keep you learning and growing and uncomfortable and hungry. There can be no learning without novelty. There can be no novelty without risk. We cannot grow unless there has been a challenge to what is familiar and comfortable. The Spirit leads us into adventure. The Spirit leads us into a dangerous world. To ask for the Spirit is to ask for risk. A friend of our family decided to change his name. Actually, he was leaving his first and last name alone, but he wanted to add a middle name: Danger. Seriously! (This is a true story—I have seen the paperwork.) He felt he had always been a compliant, middle-of-the-road, play-it-safe kind of person, and he wanted to do something to stake out a new identity. It requires a lot of legal work to get your name changed, and this friend had to go to court multiple times. On the day of his final court appearance he was last on the docket. One of the cases before him involved two parties suing each other, who got so aggressive they had to be escorted out of the courtroom. Everything finally went according to plan, and the judge granted my friend’s request. As he was walking out the door, however, the bailiff stopped him. “Be careful. Those two men who got kicked out have started fighting in the parking lot. It’s dangerous out there.” My friend knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he showed the bailiff his paperwork. “It’s okay,” he said. “Danger is my middle name.” The Spirit wants to make you a dangerous person. The Spirit wants to make you threatening to all the forces of injustice and apathy and complacency that keep our world from flourishing. The Spirit wants to make you dangerously noncompliant in a broken world. Ask God for a mountain.
Finding Your ChallengeCaleb was one of twelve scouts sent to explore the Promised Land when Israel had left Egypt. When the scouts returned, ten of them said that the assignment was impossible and they should return to slavery in Egypt. Only Caleb and Joshua trusted God and said, “We can certainly do it.” Because of Israel’s unbelief, Caleb had to spend forty years of his life wandering through the wilderness. By the time the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, he was eighty years old. Then another five years passed beyond that before the various tribes of Israel were assigned land to occupy. As Caleb described it years later,
If you have a negative attitude and a small faith when you are forty, there is a good chance you will not have a negative attitude and a small faith when you are eighty-five, because there’s a good chance you won’t ever make it to eighty-five. Psychologist Martin Seligman studied several hundred people in a religious community and divided them into quartiles from most to least optimistic and faith-filled. He found that 90 percent of the most optimistic, faith-filled people were still alive at the age of eighty-five. But only 34 percent of the most negative, pessimistic people made it to that age. Another study, the largest of its kind, tracked over 2,000 adults over the age of sixty-five in the southwestern United States. Optimistic people—faith-filled people—had better health habits, lower blood pressure, and feistier immune systems and were half as likely to die in the next year as negative people. If you have a positive attitude, you are likely to live a decade longer than people with a negative attitude. Are you happy to hear that? If not, you could be in serious trouble. Twelve spies went out, but only Joshua and Caleb had faith. We can do it! they said. Let’s go do it. The other ten, however, said, It cannot be done. Let’s go back and be slaves in Egypt. Forty-five years later, Caleb was as feisty as ever. Want to guess what happened to the other ten by then? They were all dead. None of them made it to Caleb’s age. Faith is an amazing life-giver. John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 12–13.If you would like to explore this new study, it is available on Amazon, as well as part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking Why Study Books?My church recently transitioned to using books as curriculum in our Sunday School. The reason is simple. My life has been profoundly influenced by the reading of books. I don’t think my life has ever been changed by any curriculum piece I have ever read. Ever. I have actually surveyed a number of groups I have taught over the years, asking: Has your life ever been changed by any curriculum? The most common response is for people to laugh out loud. Our first study was the Bless book by Dave and Jon Ferguson. It is a great study on relational lifestyle evangelism. About half-way through the the study, we did a survey to help determine what we would study next. No one wanted to go back to the curriculum. Not. One. Person. The #1 choice for what to study next was a tie:
We will be studying these two books over the next year and a half or so. Here is what Amazon says about Ortberg’s book: The Me I Want to Be will help you discover spiritual vitality like never before as you learn to "live in the flow of the spirit." Why does spiritual growth seem so difficult? God's vision for your life is not just that you are saved by grace, but that you also learn to live by grace, flourishing with the Spirit flowing through you. And this book will show how God's perfect vision for you starts with a powerful promise: All those who trust in God "will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8). Pastor and best-selling author John Ortberg first helps gauge your spiritual health and measure the gap between where you are now and where God intends you to be. Then he provides detailed tasks and exercises to help you live in the flow of the Spirit, circumventing real-world barriers - pain and sorrow, temptations, self-doubt, sin - to flourish even in a dark and broken world. As you start living in the flow, you will feel:
God invites you to join him in crafting an abundant and joy-filled life. The Me I Want to Be shows you how to graciously accept his invitation. I have just completed a new, 22-week study of John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be that we will be using in my church. (I had previously done a 7-week study.) I have always thought that using books as a curriculum would be a good idea, and I have written a lot of book studies over the years. One of the things that actually using books as curriculum caused me to realize has to do with cost. By writing a study on every chapter of this book, instead of my previous study that had a lesson for every section, the cost drops to below what we were paying for curriculum. Better curriculum. Cheaper cost. Win. Win.
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