In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

by Mark Batterson

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The word change means “to reverse.” Jesus came to reverse the curse. And He accomplished that with His crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, but that is just the beginning. Jesus came to reverse the psychological and spiritual effects of aging. I love the way one NCCer put it right before her baptism a few years ago: “Now I’m the person I was as a child—always smiling and laughing.”

We internalize limits. We grow up and grow old. What is worse, we become small people with a small God. I think part of Neos is regaining the limitlessness of youth. Regaining the idea that we have been created by a limitless God to have limitless dreams and imaginations.

The word humble comes from the Greek word tapeinoo, which in its strongest form means “to humiliate.” No one is better at that than kids. Why? Because they don’t care what people think. They aren’t self-conscious yet.

Now think of spiritual maturity as a continuum. On one side is God-consciousness and on the other side is self-consciousness. To become like Christ is to become less self-conscious and more God-conscious.

The end result is the crucifixion of ungodly inhibitions that keep us from chasing lions.

Let me make an observation. When you get excited about God, don’t expect everybody to get excited about your excitement. Here’s why. When the Holy Spirit turns up the heat underneath you it disrupts the status quo. Some people will be inspired by what God is doing in your life. Others will be convicted. And they will mask their personal conviction by finding something to criticize. Nine times out of ten, criticism is a defense mechanism. We criticize in others what we don’t like about ourselves.

No one knew that better than Michal. After all, she was a “KK”—a king’s kid. She grew up in the palace. She knew the protocol. And I’m guessing that her father, Saul, was very kingly. In fact, I think Saul woke up with scratches on his face because he slept with his crown on his head. Saul was all about image. But David was all about substance.

He didn’t find his identity and security in his position as king of Israel. He found his identity and security in the God who anointed him king of Israel.

“I am willing to act like a fool in order to show my joy in the LORD. Yes, and I am willing to look even more foolish than this.”

Part of spiritual maturity is caring less and less about what people think about you and more and more about what God thinks about you. Part of taking God more seriously is taking yourself less seriously. The holiest and healthiest people in the world are those who laugh at themselves the most.

He was dancing before God. And I’m guessing God Himself got a good laugh that day.

worship is halal. It means “clamorously foolish.”

“Those who hear not the music think the dancer is mad.”

think David gives us a picture of pure worship. Worship is disrobing. It is taking off those things outside our relationship with Christ that we find our identity and security in. It is a reminder that our royal robes are like “filthy rags.” It’s not about what we can do for God. It’s about what God has done for us. And that understanding produces the greatest freedom in the world: having nothing to prove. Instead of trying to prove himself as the king of Israel, David was consumed with worshiping the King of kings.

You got civilized. When I read the

Pharisees. John the Baptist was uncivilized. Just look at his diet and dress. He ate locusts and wore camel hair. It sure seems like Jesus handpicked a dozen disciples who were totally undomesticated. And Jesus Himself was untamed.

this temple tantrum used to cause internal dissonance. It didn’t fit my flannelgraph caricature of who Jesus was. It seemed out of character. But I think we underestimate and underappreciate this side of Jesus. We tend to picture Jesus only as the meek Lamb of God. But on that day, there was holy fire in His eyes.

To be like Jesus is to be consumed with passion. The word enthusiasm comes from two Greek words, en and Theos, which together mean in God. The more we get into God, the more passionate we become.

You have to be willing to look foolish in the world’s eyes.

If you aren’t willing to look foolish, you’re foolish. In fact, faith requires a willingness to look foolish.

Maturity doesn’t equal c...

The way we grow up spiritually is by becoming more and more l...

Self-consciousness isn’t just a curse. It’s pa...

Part of spiritual maturity is caring less and less about what people think of you and more and more ...

Christ followers ought to be the most passionate people on the planet. To be like Jesus is t...

In 1963 Israeli archaeologists excavated Herod the Great’s fortress at Masada. As they carefully removed layers of history, they found the usual suspects—human remains and ancient artifacts. But the most curious find may have been a clay jar with seeds preserved inside it. Researchers at the University of Zurich, using radiocarbon dating, placed them between 155 BC and AD 64, so approximately two thousand years old. They also discovered that the seeds belonged to an extinct variety of the Judean date palm. Those seeds were stored at Bar-Ilan University in Israel for forty years. Then in 2005 three seeds were planted at Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arabah desert. Eight weeks later one of the seeds sprouted. It’s the oldest-known seed to be successfully germinated, so they named it the Methuselah tree, after the oldest man in the Bible. By 2008 that one seed had grown into a five-foot palm tree with a dozen leaves. And by 2015 it was a fully grown, pollen-producing palm tree.1 In the field of botany, there are two categories of seeds—orthodox and unorthodox. What sets an orthodox seed apart is its ability to survive. Unorthodox seeds can’t survive below ten degrees Celsius, but orthodox seeds can survive droughts, glaciers, and centuries, even twenty centuries, like Methuselah. God-ordained dreams are orthodox seeds. They have the ability to survive any and every circumstance, and they stand the test of time. Even when you die, your dreams do not. Long after you are gone, your dre...

God wants to anoint you to do what you do and to help you do it well. The anointing is what God can do for you that you cannot do for yourself. It gives you wisdom beyond knowledge, power beyond strength, and gifting beyond ability. The Holy Spirit doesn’t make you better than anybody else. He makes you better than yourself! He helps you become the best version of you! The Holy Spirit doesn’t want merely to fill you; He wants to stretch you. He wants to create new capacities within you by instilling new dreams, installing new gifts.

Tommy invited anyone who wanted a “multiplication anointing” to come to the altar. I was the first one there!