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You are responsible forever for what you have tamed.
Normal people don’t chase lions.
God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.
God-given opportunities often come disguised as man-eating lions. And how we react when we encounter those lions will determine our destiny. We can cower in fear and run away from our greatest challenges. Or we can chase our God-ordained destiny by seizing the God-ordained opportunity.
Part of me has wanted to play it safe, but I’ve learned that taking no risks is the greatest risk of all.
two types of regret: regrets of action and regrets of inaction. A regret of action is “wishing you hadn’t done something.” In theological terms, it’s called a sin of commission. A regret of inaction is “wishing you had done something.” In theological terms, it’s a sin of omission.
I think God is more concerned about sins of omission—those things we could have and should have done. It’s holiness by multiplication. Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Those who simply run away from sin are half-Christians. Our calling is much higher than simply running away from what’s wrong. We’re called to chase lions.
“No guts, no glory.”
Lion chasers are always on the lookout for God-ordained opportunities.
Most of us applaud lion chasers from the sidelines. Good for them! We’re inspired by people who face their fears and chase their dreams. What we fail to realize is that they are no different from us.
I have a simple definition of success: Do the best you can with what you have where you are. In essence, success is making the most of every opportunity. Spiritual maturity is seeing and seizing God-ordained opportunities. Think of every opportunity as God’s gift to you. What you do with those opportunities is your gift to God. I’m absolutely convinced that our greatest regrets in life will be missed opportunities.
At the end of the day, success equals stewardship and stewardship equals success.
When you cross paths with the lion, are you going to run away like a scaredy-cat or are you going to grab life by the mane? Lion chasers grab life by the mane.
If you’re optimistic by nature, overcoming adversity will come more easily. If you tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, it will require more intentionality.
Unlearning fears and embracing uncertainty requires a counterintuitive approach to life.
Some skills, like calculating risks or seizing opportunities, are developmental and habitual. Almost like innate athletic ability or musical prowess, practice makes perfect. The more risks you take, the easier it becomes. Seizing opportunities becomes second nature. Defying odds and looking foolish will become default settings.
The principles in this book aren’t just a script out of Scripture. They can rewrite the story of your life. All you have to do is turn the page and begin a new chapter.
God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. But the right place often seems like the wrong place, and the right time often seems like the wrong time. • Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Our calling is much higher than simply running away from what’s wrong. We’re called to chase lions—to look for opportunities in our problems and obstacles, and take risks to reach for God’s best. • When we don’t have the guts to step out in faith and chase lions, then God is robbed of the glory that
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Facing fears? Reframing problems? Embracing uncertainty? Taking risks? Seizing opportunities? Looking foolish?
How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos. G.K. CHESTERTON
How did he even get close enough to grab it?
Benaiah did what lion chasers do. He defied the odds. He didn’t focus on his disadvantages. He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t try to avoid situations where the odds were against him. Lion chasers know God is bigger and more powerful than any problem they face in this world. They thrive in the toughest circumstances because they know that impossible odds set the stage for amazing miracles.
Maybe that is why God sometimes invites us to defy impossible odds. Maybe it is one way He can show us His omnipotence. Maybe God allows the odds to be stacked against us so He can reveal more of
“You have too many warriors with you. If I let all of you fight the Midianites, the Israelites will boast to me that they saved themselves by their own strength.”
the Israelites would have thanked God for lending them a hand, and God would have gotten partial credit. But that’s not what God wants or deserves. God wants and deserves full credit.
Too often our prayers revolve around asking God to reduce the odds in our lives. We want everything in our favor. But maybe God wants to stack the odds against us so we can experience a miracle of divine proportions. Maybe faith is trusting God no matter how impossible the odds are. Maybe our impossible situations are opportunities to experience a new dimension of God’s glory.
Faith gives us the dimensional freedom to overcome our human limitations by exiting space-time via prayer.
You know what the greatest tragedy in life is? It is someone whose god gets smaller and smaller with each passing day.
God wants you to get where God wants you to go more than you want to get where God wants you to
There is only one way to find out: Pray a ridiculous prayer!
God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him. God is great but because nothing is too small for Him either.
lion chasers aren’t afraid of doing something that seems ridiculous to others—because they know anything is possible with God. A request can never be too ridiculous when you’re asking the One who knows no limits.
Lion chasers thrive in the toughest circumstances because they know that impossible odds set the stage for amazing miracles. • The mistake most of us make when it comes to God is that we think He is four-dimensional. But God has no dimensional limits. • How you think of God will determine who you become. • God is always working behind the scenes, engineering our circumstances and setting us up for success. • The more we grow, the bigger God should get. And the bigger God gets, the smaller our lions become. • The reality is that nothing is too difficult for God.
The price of our vitality is the sum of our fears. DAVID WHYTE
Don’t let mental lions keep you from experiencing everything God has to offer. The greatest breakthroughs in your life will happen when you push through the fear. The defining moments will double as the scariest decisions. But you’ve got to face those fears and begin the process of unlearning them.
Almost like a hard drive with a computer virus, our minds have infected files. Irrational fears and misconceptions keep us from operating the way we were designed to. And if those fears and misconceptions aren’t uninstalled, they undermine everything we do.
Half of learning is learning. The other half of learning is unlearning. Unfortunately, unlearning is twice as hard as learning. It’s like missing your exit on the freeway. You have to drive to the next exit and then double back. Every mile you go in the wrong direction is really a two-mile error. Unlearning is twice as hard, and it often takes twice as long. It is harder to get old thoughts out of your mind than it is to get new thoughts into your mind.
“You have heard that it was said…” “But I tell you…” What was Jesus saying and doing? He was uninstalling Old Testament concepts and upgrading them with New Testament truths.
Half of spiritual growth is learning what we don’t know. The other half is unlearning what we do know. And it is the failure to unlearn irrational fears and misconceptions that keeps us from becoming who God wants us to be.
Faith is unlearning the senseless worries and misguided beliefs that keep us captive. It is far more complex than simply modifying behavior. Faith involves synaptogenesis. Faith is rewiring the human brain.
Unlearning requires more than just rewiring our brains. We have to use our new knowledge to face our fears—and conquer them.
What’s interesting is that psychiatrists posit that we’re born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. That means that every other fear is learned. And more important, that means that every other fear can be unlearned.
you can’t reason with irrational fears. I think most of us are shaped, for better or for worse, by a handful of experiences. Those defining experiences can plant a seed of confidence or a seed of doubt, a seed of hope or a seed of helplessness, a seed of faith or a seed of fear.
I knew the fear wouldn’t go away if he didn’t learn to face it. And I knew he would forfeit so much fun if I didn’t help him be brave.
Think of your fears as mental lions. If we don’t learn to chase those fears, they can keep us at bay for the rest of our lives.
First John 4:18 describes the end goal of our relationship with God: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.” The goal of love is fearlessness! As we grow in a love relationship with God, we unlearn the fears that paralyze us and neutralize us spiritually. That is the essence of faith.
Faith is the process of unlearning your irrational fears.
Lion chasers experience the same fears as everyone else.
lion chasers have learned to face those fears. They have unlearned the fear of uncertainty, the fear of risk, the fear of looking foolish, and the countless other fears that could hold them back. Their faith has been defragmented. They don’t necessarily know more than other people. But they have unlearned the fears that kept them captive. And they all did it the same way: by chasing their fears instead of running away from them. They exposed themselves to the very thing they were afraid of.
Lion chasers don’t hide from the things they fear. They chase lions into pits. They expose themselves to the sources of their terror because they know it is the only way to overcome them. Lion chasers have a high threshold for fear because they have built up fear immunity.
