Grounded Podcast with Chuck Quinley

Learn to be rock solid even if the world around you is not
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  • Christianity
  • Updated Semiweekly

Grounded is about forming resilient disciples of Jesus who stand firm while the world shakes. Drawing on 50 years of serious Bible study and a lifetime following Jesus across cultures, Dr. Chuck Quinley explores what the worldview, practices, commands, and mission of Jesus mean for the decade we're entering. No Christian self-help and no easy answers—just disciples learning to follow Jesus together, whatever comes next. www.quinley.com

  1. 13h ago

    Sherry’s Debut on Grounded

    Today we have a very rare opportunity to hear a really great talk from Sherry. She doesn’t usually speak in public, but today she decided to share her #1 life lesson with this year’s Fall students at Medialight. Although they and our staff are from Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, the Philippines, the USA, Korea and Thailand, this lesson is for everyone. She’s lived it, and this one lesson has helped her overcome so many difficulties and setbacks in life. Everyone who knows my wife knows her as a sparkling, upbeat cheerleader. Here’s her secret in this episode of Grounded. Every Blessing, Chuck Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

    Sherry’s Debut on Grounded

  2. Oct 12

    How do I find the will of God?

    Is God Hiding Your Future Behind Door Number Three When I was a kid, sometimes my mom and I would watch Let's Make a Deal Hosted by Monty Hall. This is the show where contestants chose between doors (or boxes/curtains) to win prizes. Carol Merrill was the original model who stood by the doors and displayed the prizes. You never knew if you were going to blindly choose a box that had the keys to a new car or choose what you thought was a luxury item in a large space, but when the curtain came back, it would turn out to be just a goat. There are moments when you would give almost anything for God to just tell you what to do. Two options sit in front of you. Both are reasonable. You’ve prayed. Maybe you’ve fasted. You’ve asked people you respect. You’ve read your Bible hoping something would jump off the page. You’re watching doors open and close, trying to decide whether that phone call yesterday meant something. And everyone seems to have a method. One friend says you’ll have peace. Another says God will open the door. Someone else simply says, “God told me.” That last one can sting. Because God doesn’t seem to talk to you like that. So you start to wonder whether something is wrong with you. Maybe you’re not close enough to him. Maybe you’re not spiritual enough to hear. And quietly, a career decision has become a referendum on your relationship with God. The belief powering the fear I want to ask a question. What would you have to believe about God for this much anxiety to make sense? The meticulous sovereignty approach Usually it goes something like this. God has a detailed plan for my life. Inside that plan is one correct choice for every important decision. God knows it. I don’t. My job is to discover what he has already decided. And if I miss the signal, I could end up out of his will, living Plan B. Then Plan C. God knows the will where I’m supposed to end up, which was chosen before I was even born, but He’s holding the cards really close to His chest. I’ve got to become really good at guessing so I can figure it out. That is an exhausting way to live. It turns the Christian life into signal detection. Open doors, closed doors, feelings, dreams, coincidences, verses. I’m not saying God never speaks. He does. I’m not saying the Holy Spirit doesn’t lead. He does. Prayer matters deeply. But I want to ask whether this is the picture of mature people that Jesus actually produced. What Jesus was building Watch how Jesus worked with his disciples. Yes, he gave commands. Follow me. Go here. Don’t do that. But look at the direction of their growth. He taught them. He let them watch him. He corrected their motives. He showed them how God thinks about money, power, enemies, forgiveness, and the poor. Then he sent them out to deal with real people in real situations, without him standing beside them making every call. Jesus wasn’t just handing out answers. He was forming judgment—discernment, wisdom. He ends the Sermon on the Mount talking about two builders. One builds on rock, one on sand. The difference is simple: one hears what Jesus says and actually does it in his life as a habit based on principle. We can spend enormous energy hunting for God’s specific will on things he hasn’t made clear (whether to be a plumber or a pilot), while walking right past what he has made very clear. Be honest. Forgive everyone for everything. Be generous. Keep your word even if it hurts you. Love your enemies and stop the cycle of resentment. Seek the kingdom first and above all. Most of God’s will isn’t hidden at all. And look at Jesus himself. Perfectly aligned with the Father, yet never passive. He doesn’t sit around waiting for a fleece, a confirmation, or a dream so he can know what to do. He chooses. He initiates. He crosses the lake, climbs the mountain, withdraws, rests. He isn’t frantic about falling out of the Father’s will. His alignment produces freedom to act. When a child is 4 years old, you have to tell them everything. What to wear. To put on their shoes before they leave the house. To look both ways before crossing the street. But if a 40-year-old stands pleading before you, saying, “Please, please tell me which shirt to wear today” we wouldn’t say that man is really close to his parents. We’d say there’s something wrong with him. Good parents don’t raise a forty-year-old who needs to be told which shirt to wear. They raise an adult who can carry responsibility. That’s what Jesus is doing with you. A different prayer So alongside “God, tell me what to do,” try praying this: Jesus, make me the kind of person who can be trusted to decide. Show me the fear driving me. The greed. The insecurity. The thing I want so badly I’m trying to get you to sign off on it even though I know it’s probably the wrong way. Then help me choose. Here’s a little help in making decisions. When you’re facing a decision, bring five questions to it: * Has Jesus already made something clear that applies here? * What does wisdom say, apart from fear and wishful thinking? * What do I actually want? Your desires aren’t infallible, but they aren’t automatically wrong either. As a person with agency and dominion over their own life, what do you want and need right now. What are you trying to accomplish? * What do a few wise people who know me and know Jesus see? * What does my reality reasonably allow? Money, family, health, timing, commitments. These things place helpful boundaries on our lives, and we can’t always move them. If you have a weighty family responsibility, you may have to scale down your ambitions a bit and do a little less than you might do if you were single and had no family. Pray. Listen. And if you’ve done all of that and God still hasn’t told you what to do, make a decision. Not carelessly. Freely. Then own it. You won’t get every one right. I haven’t. I don’t think the goal is getting to the end of your life, looking back, and saying, “I made every single decision perfectly.” We basically create ourselves and the story of our lives through the decisions that we make. So use your agency and make decisions. I don’t think Jesus is trying to make you good at guessing God’s will from a collection of dreams and conversations and coincidences. I think he’s trying to make you wise, loving, courageous, and free. Fully human. What if knowing God’s will is less about finding the right answer and more about becoming the right kind of person? Go deeper Following Jesus is the heart of my book ReJesus Everything: Jesus himself, reclaimed from everything built around him, and the God-given agency to own your faith and your life. If this episode stirred something in you, the book will take you further. You can find it here on Amazon. This week: What decision are you waiting for God to make for you? Let’s talk about it. Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

  3. Oct 12

    The Surprising Power of Knowing Where to Draw the Line--Even in an Age That Hates Boundaries

    Boundaries have never been more unpopular. This is the age where they want to erase the line between male and female, a mother and the baby inside of her, parents and children. Drawing a line invites hostility these days. So yes, it’s unpopular, but there’s a bigger and more important issue at hand. Can anything we create actually survive without boundaries? Start a marriage, and immediately there are boundaries around it. Start a business, and you need a budget, a mission, and a clear distinction between company money and personal money. Start a nonprofit, and eventually you have to learn to say, “That’s a worthy cause, but it isn’t what we do.” Write a song, and it has a beginning and an ending. Take a photograph, and it has a frame. Plant a garden, and eventually you discover why people build fences. Whenever we create something valuable, we soon face a question: How do we protect this thing so it can survive long enough to become what it was created to be? And that’s when we notice something on the first page of the Bible. God creates. We give him a lot of glory for the things that he creates, from sun, moon, and stars to the tears of a baby, but we seldom think about perhaps his greatest gift to creation, and that is structure—Boundaries. God enters into a swirl of chaos in order to bring life out of all that mess, and He does it by drawing lines. Creation Begins With Distinction Genesis 1 describes the primordial earth as tohu va-vohu—usually translated “formless and void.” It means that the thing has no boundary, no structure like just an endless oozing goo, and because it has no boundary, it also has no meaning, identity or purpose. Something with potential is there: darkness, water, the deep. But it isn’t yet in an ordered, inhabitable state. Then God speaks. “Let there be light.” Notice what happens next: “God separated the light from the darkness.” The Hebrew verb is badal—to separate, divide, distinguish. God creates light, then establishes a distinction. Light is not darkness. Darkness is not light. This is this. That is that. And the pattern continues. Waters above and waters below. Sea and dry land. Plants and animals according to their kinds. Day and night. Seasons and years. Eventually, male and female. Creation produces distinct things with distinct identities. Distinct things need identifying names and labels. Sun, moon, God, human, male and female. And once something has an identity, that identity becomes something worth protecting. The Sea Needs a Shore The sea gives us a beautiful picture of this. Genesis begins with water everywhere. But God doesn’t destroy the water. He gives it limits. Job 38 pictures God saying to the sea: “Thus far shall you come, and no farther.” And once the water is bounded, dry land appears. Now plants can grow. Animals can live. Humans can build and cultivate. The boundary doesn’t destroy the sea or the land. It allows both to exist with their distinctiveness intact. Our Body Has a Boundary Your own body works this way. All of our bodies have a lot going on. We have lungs, heart, and large and small intestines, but around all of it is our skin. Your skin is a boundary. Without it, you’d puddle up and die. But your skin doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the world. You touch through it. Feel through it. It is your interface by which you can engage other created things in the world. A healthy boundary allows you to interact with something else without ceasing to be yourself versus entering the membrane of another and being absorbed. That’s a very different way to think about boundaries. Most people just think of them as restrictions. Gray Goo There’s an old thought experiment from nanotechnology called the “grey goo” problem. Imagine microscopic self-replicating machines that consume the material around them to make more copies of themselves. Eventually everything gets converted into more of the same thing. Trees. Animals. Buildings. Ecosystems. All dissolved as building material for a spreading nanobot grey goo until there is nothing else in the world. Whether that scenario is technologically realistic isn’t the point. (And I really, really hope not.) But it’s a clear illustration of why boundaries are so important in creation. Distinction in Diversity Look at a rainforest. Trees, insects, birds, fungi, water, soil, predators, prey—thousands of different organisms interacting while remaining distinct. The bee can have a relationship with the flower precisely because the bee isn’t the flower. Grey goo moves the other direction. Difference disappears. Everything becomes everything else: Parent-child, sacred-secular, man and woman—all one thing on a sliding scale. This is not the message of the Bible. Genesis 1 recognizes increasing distinction, complexity, relationship and life. The God of Creation makes differences matter. We don’t need a world where everyone wears gray flannel and speaks Esperanto. Spices must remain distinct. Cultures and their languages are beautiful. The variety of creation is its beautiful strength. But this strength disappears without boundaries. If you mix all the paint together, you just get gray. Learning to Distinguish This idea of Badal continues into Israel’s holiness code. Leviticus tells the priests: “You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean.” There’s that idea again: badal. Distinguish. Everything isn’t interchangeable. Every desire doesn’t need to be acted upon. Every relationship doesn’t have the same boundaries. Every opportunity isn’t your assignment. Every dollar isn’t yours to spend however you please. Everything does not belong to you. Your neighbor’s cattle are not your cattle. Maturity requires learning to distinguish. What about Jesus? Jesus challenged plenty of human boundaries. He touched lepers, ate with people others rejected and crossed social lines that religious people defended. But Jesus himself wasn’t boundaryless. He withdrew from crowds. He went away to pray. He slept. He chose twelve. He didn’t heal every sick person in the Roman Empire or personally visit every village. He knew who he was, whose he was, and what his Father had given him to do. And that meant there were thousands of good things he didn’t do. In your personal life Maybe some of the limitations we experience in life aren’t defects. Maybe the boundaries in your life are like the banks of the river. A river without banks is not a better, freer river. A river without boundaries is a flood—a force of destruction. So Here’s a practical question I think each of us should be asking right now so that this Bible teaching can have fruit in our lives: Where have the distinctions disappeared in your life? Where do you need to reestablish stronger lines? Maybe work and home have become one continuous stream. You’re at dinner but answering messages. You’re “resting” but checking email. Maybe every need you hear about feels like your responsibility. Has a lack of boundaries limited your creativity? Maybe you have twenty creative ideas and twelve unfinished projects because you can’t bring yourself to choose just one, since that means limiting yourself from following other possibilities. Maybe what you need isn’t greater intensity. Maybe you don’t need to work harder. Maybe what you need to do is badal. You need to discern and divide and recognize the different categories things go into. This is work time. This is rest time. This is mine to carry. That isn’t. This belongs inside my marriage. That doesn’t. This is enough. My line stops here. Think about one thing God has entrusted to you that matters enough for you to protect. It might be your marriage, family, calling, creative work, business, ministry, relationship with God. Then ask: What boundary does this precious thing need in order to survive and become fruitful? * Maybe it’s a relationship with one of your children or grandchildren. Maybe this relationship needs a boundary of time set aside to nurture it. * Maybe you need financial boundaries: ways you will and will not spend or invest your money. * Maybe you need to create creative space, a literal space with a literal budget of time, just for you to exercise more creativity. If you want to be a writer, you need a writer’s desk, and you need a time of day that is your writing time. You need to close off all other distractions and do the thing that belongs inside that boundary space. If you want your life to thrive draw those lines, friend! Not because you’re afraid of what’s outside the lines, but because you love what’s growing inside it and you want it to flourish, be fruitful and multiply. A boundary isn’t simply where something ends. It’s what allows precious things to keep existing at all. Stay Grounded! Chuck Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

  4. Sep 8

    Where I'm going with Grounded in the next year

    I saw a video once where someone said, “You have consumed enough already.” That really struck me hard because I am very much a media person. He said confidently from the Lord that if I never consumed another book, movie, or song, I have seen more in my lifetime than any previous generation. I don’t need to consume any more. It doesn’t help me grow. It just piles more learning on top of old learning. A lot of which we were never actually going to put into practice anyway. What will change you, however, is creating. It’s kind of amazing God math. One of those “Give, and it will be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” kind of things. In real world math, it should say, “TAKE, and you will have more.” But in God’s way, if you create something new with Him, you’ll end up richer than if you consume. No one learns more than a teacher. It has certainly been true in my life concerning the Bible. No one learns more than the teacher, and I thank God for giving me the opportunity to serve in the role of teacher for so many years. Most of the things I have learned have come because I was living inside that position, and I had to create presentations of Bible thought blocks every week as a pastor and seminary leader for 20 years. So now I find myself a pastor without a church for the last 18 years. Thankfully, I have had Medialight. I’m the primary teacher there, but we have many others, and that’s been one of our major goals, creating more teachers. Online is a New Space for Ministry I’ve been doing face-to-face ministry for almost 50 years, but only three years ago did I start treating the online world as a real place that deserves my best effort. That’s when. I started making online content weekly, whether I had time or not. I’m embarrassed to look at my earliest efforts. It’s always like that. You learn by doing, and it’s the only way to learn, so you just have to push through those early stages to learn the workflow and production systems of a TV station, basically. In the last year, I have increased my flow, an episode a week plus a book, and we’re just now in September. It’s been a very demanding load, and it’s starting to feel like about 50% of my ministry. The online space allows you to reach people in different time zones when it’s convenient for them, and I think it has so much to offer beyond just being marketing for people to attend the Sunday service. I want to say how much I thank the people who support us personally through the emergemissions.org website and also as subscribers here on Substack. We are servants of the church, and we have always done our best to put our efforts where we feel they will be the most fruitful and appropriately spent. The online space is one of those places. The time to learn how to use it was made available to us because of the sponsorship of faithful friends, and again, I am so very grateful. Thanks for freeing me so I could create for the Lord. I want to explore the fruitfulness of the 24/7 decentralized online environment, and also I want to share my journey with the next generation of creators and help launch dozens of new voices online. We really need effective, skilled gospel communicators online to combat the flood of antichrist values and pure-out news lies that flood through our phones into our minds every day. Half of what we read is probably not even true or has been done just to create a news story. It’s really crazy. Becoming a public person is scary. Becoming a public person is a very powerful thing. It’s scary, but it yields a harvest of personal development. I would encourage everyone to do it, even if all you do is think seriously and make five-sentence Facebook posts designed to encourage other people. Just stop mindlessly consuming and try to add something of value to the net. Anyway, each week I have really poured my life into careful study of the Bible, and I have done my best to bring credible research to you. ReJesus everything is sort of my manifesto. This year I want to adjust down a little from being a Bible scholar type creator (there are a lot of those already in all our lives) and tune my attention to the real purpose for this platform: Grounded is about forming resilient disciples of Jesus who stand firm while the world shakes. I want to explore what the worldview, practices, commands, and mission of Jesus mean for all of us in the decade we’re entering. I want to try to turn this into an opportunity for a true gathering online of young disciples, and that our discussions can become part of their formation, not just information. The next ten years will be the wildest ride of our lives. I’m pretty certain of that. All the forces of change and destabilization are building up behind the dam, and eventually something’s going to break. I want to push Grounded into action to help a younger generation deal with that. You might sense a change in my tone and my topics. There are lots of great Bible teachers out there. The Bible will still be central to what I’m doing, but I’m not going to try to bring a deep and careful Bible study to every episode this year. But I hope to bring a flow of younger people join this space and help them become resilient disciples, even as they raise elementary and middle school kids, try to figure out how they’re gonna ever own a house, and work hard to shine a light for Jesus in a culture that is becoming aggressively anti-Christian. So you might feel my content and topics starting to turn a little younger. One thing I promise is not to turn this into a Christian self-help podcast and newsletter. no easy answers—just disciples learning to follow Jesus together into whatever comes next. I really hope you’ll join me, and I hope for some of you that I can turn this into a place where your children and grandchildren feel comfortable. Thanks for praying for me and Sherry. There are so many moving pieces in our lives, and we are listening carefully to the Lord, as I’m sure you are also, to discover the best way to focus our time and energy in 2027. It’s time to start making that plan already. Love and every blessing, Chuck and Sherry Quinley PS: The shirt is Japanese. The brand means to say “Old School” although I do have an old skull also by now—just trying to keep my brain young. It’s possible. Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

  5. Sep 1

    The Bible’s Meta-Narrative: Which Story Are You Reading?

    What’s your Meta-Narrative? Every reader of the Bible comes with a lens. A framework. A big story about what the Bible is fundamentally about. And that lens determines everything—how you interpret individual passages, how you understand Jesus, how you live your life. Most of us don’t realize we have a lens. We think we’re just reading the Bible objectively. But we’re not. We’re reading it through a meta-narrative. A spine story that tells us what all the smaller stories are about. The question is: Which meta-narrative are you reading through? And more importantly—have you actually decided for yourself, or have you just accepted what someone else told you the story is? The Responsibility Is On You All of us can read. All of us have access to a Bible. The responsibility is on each of us to read that Bible, to study it, to meditate on it until we can step back and see the lines of the big story before us. We need to decide which meta-narrative is the spine of Scripture. We cannot force a narrative into the text or blindly accept what someone else says the narrative is. This choice determines how we interpret every passage we read. It’s crucial. Alternative Meta-Narratives Each meta-narrative captures something true. Each also obscures something important. The Personal Salvation Meta-Narrative reads the Bible as fundamentally about getting individual souls into heaven. The Fall happened, humanity is sinful, Jesus died to pay the price, and now if you believe in Him, you go to heaven when you die. Everything is interpreted through this lens: Does this passage help me get to heaven? Does this teach me how to live a better personal life? This captures something real. Personal redemption matters. Your individual relationship with God is genuine and significant. But this lens makes the entire cosmic drama secondary. Why would God care so much about the politics of Persia and Greece if it’s all just about getting souls to heaven? Why would He speak so extensively through the prophets about the rise and fall of empires? Why the genealogies, the territorial conflicts, the prophecies about nations and kingdoms? More troubling: if the whole Gospel is about me—my salvation, my happiness, my eternity—then we’ve just baptized selfishness. We’ve made the central message of Scripture an appeal to the most basic human impulse: self-preservation. If one of the main struggles of the human spirit is selfishness, how can this be the whole Gospel? It seems to continue appealing to “me, me, me—my favorite person, me.” I want to be saved. I don’t want to go to hell. I want to live in heaven and be happy forever. If that’s the whole Gospel, it’s self-centered from beginning to end. For me, that’s the problem with it. The Moral Development Meta-Narrative chronicles humanity’s spiritual evolution. We start primitive and gradually grow more enlightened. The Old Testament is harsh because people were barbaric. God has to deal with them in physical ways because they weren’t spiritually developed. The New Testament is gentler because we’ve evolved morally. This sounds sophisticated. It appeals to our modern sensibilities, especially those raised in the age of Darwin, with the sense that we are the pinnacle of human development. But this denies the transcendent, unchanging nature of God’s own character and His Word. Is the God of the Old Testament not the same God who is the Father of Jesus? The Liberation Theology Meta-Narrative focuses on God’s love and priority for the poor and oppressed. This captures genuine biblical truth. God does care about justice. He does defend the vulnerable poor. But when this becomes the primary lens, it can reduce God’s concern to only the human struggle for fairness in society while ignoring the layers of spiritual corruption that fuel these problems. Staying at the individual, physical level, we can completely miss the eternal scope of God’s purposes. On top of that, this view often reduces Jesus to an example of the suffering good people endure at the hands of the rich and powerful—an activist who pays the price for bringing change. Jesus is much more than this according to Scripture. Why the Cosmic Conflict Meta-Narrative Rings True with me. The Divine Council/Cosmic Conflict Worldview doesn’t dismiss these other readings. It includes genuine elements of personal salvation, moral development, and justice. But it places them all within a larger, cosmic story. It rings true for several reasons. First: It takes Genesis 1 seriously. God creates humanity in His image and gives us dominion over the earth. Not incidentally. As the foundational purpose for human existence. We are meant to be God’s vice-regents, exercising His authority in His world. Every other biblical narrative—the Fall, the Flood, the nations, the covenants, the prophets, Jesus Himself—can only be understood in light of this original commission. Second: It explains the patterns that recur throughout Scripture. The story of the elder son who resents his role and attempts to seize what belongs to another appears again and again. The conflict between faithful stewardship and rebellious usurpation is everywhere. The territorial language makes sense only if we understand this cosmic drama about the stewardship and control of the earth. Third: It provides the best explanation for Jesus. Why did He have to die? In a purely Personal Salvation reading, the answer is reduced to: to pay a debt so you can go to heaven. That’s true, but I feel it is incomplete, like zooming in on one facet of the diamond and saying it’s the whole diamond. In the Divine Council meta-narrative, the cross has cosmic significance and individual salvation. It cancelled the record of human debt that justified the rebel powers’ occupation of the earth. It disarmed them. It removed their grounds for dominion. And it installed a Human King on the throne so the entire creation can be redeemed and restored. This explains why Jesus had to be human. Only a human could reclaim human dominion. Only a faithful human could overcome what an unfaithful humanity had forfeited. Fourth: It unifies the entire arc of Scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, you see one consistent narrative: the Creator establishing humans as steward kings, rebel powers infiltrating and occupying those stewardships, God working through history toward restoration, Jesus defeating the powers and installing a Human King, and us being seated with that King to reclaim all of creation in the heavens and on earth. The prophecies, laws, histories, psalms—they all fit. They’re not disconnected stories. They’re chapters in one cosmic drama. What It Means to Be Seated with Christ Ephesians 2:6 says: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” It’s crucial to understand what this does not mean. It doesn’t mean you’re physically sitting in a chair in heaven. The throne of God is not a physical location in floating in outer space. When Paul says you’re seated there, he’s describing your position in God’s government, your actual standing in the seen and unseen universe. Jesus occupies the position of supreme authority. He is seated—it’s settled. He is immovable, occupying his space far above every power that ever ruled over humans. And because you are united with Him—because His victory is your victory, His authority is your derived authority—you occupy that same position. This is not aspirational language. This is the description of your actual reality right now, in this moment. Christ in You: The Indwelling Reality In Colossians 1:27, Paul writes about “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Not Christ separate from you, dwelling in some distant heaven. Christ in you. Animating you. Filling you. Making His presence and power active through your physical, earthly life. Colossians 3:3 says: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Your life—your actual, daily, embodied life—is “hidden with Christ in God.” Your ultimate security, your truest identity, is rooted in your union with the risen Christ. This is why Paul can then command: “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Your work. Your art. Your parenting. Your leadership. All of it is done from the position of being seated with Christ. All of it is an expression of His authority flowing through you. Greater Is He That Is in You You are not alone. * You are assisted by the loyal sons of God—the angels who embraced their role as stewards and guardians and actively work alongside you. * More importantly, you are filled with the Spirit of God—God’s breath, God’s wind, the life force that created and animates all existence. The Holy Spirit indwells you. He fills you. He empowers you with divine life force. This is why John writes in 1 John 4:4: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” Not greater is he that is with you. Not greater is he that watches over you. Greater is He that is in you. The Holy Spirit, the breath of God, is greater than every rebel power, every domain authority, every force arrayed against you. Your Call: Reclaim the Creation This brings us to your fundamental calling: to reclaim the creation for God. The rebel powers have occupied the pillars of civilization—government, finance, education, military, arts. They have corrupted them. But they do not own them. They are squatters. Our job—not someday, but now—is to reclaim these territories. Not through violence or force. Through your enduring faithfulness. Through integrity when tested. Through the intentional, forceful exercise of your derived authority as an ambassador of the Kingdom. * When you lead your family with wisdom rooted in God’s Word, you’re reclaiming family for God. * When you act with honesty in your business dealings

  6. Aug 25

    Enforcing Christ's Victory: You’re Seated with the King

    Hi Friend! Let’s dive into the fourth and final installment in our series on understanding the supernatural worldview of the Bible. For most of human history, we’ve been helpless. We didn’t understand why. We just felt it. The weight of it. The impossibility of it. We tried to push back against forces we couldn’t see, couldn’t name, couldn’t comprehend. And we lost. Over and over, we lost. Ancient people understood this instinctively. They saw humans as devolving from greatness—From living as those unexplainable civilizations whose ruins we still marvel at, whose architectural feats we can’t replicate today. They blamed our downfall as humans on the elohim. They blamed the weight of spiritual powers that ruled over human territories and nations. When Daniel prayed, he encountered resistance from the prince of Persia. That wasn’t metaphor. It was the reality of a spiritual realm that occupied the physical world. We’ve rationalized it away. We’ve convinced ourselves that power operates only through politics and economics and human ambition. But the spiritual reality hasn’t changed. The elohim are still here. Evil is intelligent. The domain authorities still occupy territories. They still rule through the systems we navigate every day. What’s changed is our awareness of them. We’re the first generation that doesn’t see them. We pretend they don’t exist. We look at the coordinated manipulation of government, business, education, military, and arts—and we assign it all to human agents. But according to Scripture, the elohim are real and terrifyingly powerful. The Gospel That Changes Everything Here’s the gospel that changes that reality: Jesus confronted them. He went to war with them. And He won through his sacrifice on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, and his ascension to the right hand of God. He won as a human. He defeated them by perfect faithfulness, by perfect alignment with God’s character. He lived the only human life perfectly aligned with the heart of the Creator. He did what we were created to do—take dominion over our world as humans made in the image of God. Today, Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, a human, ruling as co-regent with the Creator. He holds all authority in heaven and on earth. Jesus Installed You And then He did something almost incomprehensible. He installed you—yes, you—in your designated seat of authority. He gave you the power to take charge of your little world. Your family. Your workplace. Your creativity. The limitless development of your own mind. The sanctity and strength of your own body. You are no longer helpless. As you exercise that authority aligned with Him, you’re not just fixing your own life. You’re contributing to the march of Jesus across the planet. This is the gospel. Not the small version we’ve reduced it to. The massive, cosmic, everything-changes gospel that doesn’t just get you to heaven—it restores the universe itself. What Seated Actually Means Paul writes in Ephesians 2:6: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Present tense. Right now. You are seated. With Christ. In the heavenly realms. This isn’t poetry. This isn’t a future promise. This is your current spiritual reality. Think about where Christ is seated. Far above every rule and authority and power and dominion. Above every elohim that ever ruled a nation. Above the powers that occupy government, business, education, the military, and the arts. Above all of them. And you are seated with Him in that same position. This means you have authority. Not because you earned it. Not because you’re special or particularly spiritual. Because you are united with the one who holds all authority. Your authority is derived—it flows from your alignment with Him, your union with Him, your participation in His victory. An ambassador carries the authority of their nation. But only when they act as a representative of that nation, only when they’re aligned with their sovereign’s interests, only when they operate within their commission. You are an ambassador of the Kingdom of God. Seated with the King far above every power. Carrying His authority into every sphere where you have influence. The question is: will you exercise it? Territory and Expansion Dominion is not domination. It is not aggression. It is not greed. It’s stewardship. It’s the wise, faithful exercise of authority to bring order and flourishing to a specific territory or realm. We have power under the authority of the King. You have dominion over your little world. Your family. Your workplace. Your community. The sphere of influence you actually occupy. And the degree to which you exercise that dominion—the degree to which you enforce Christ’s victory in those spaces—determines the expansion of His kingdom right now. This is not passive. This is active. This requires you to show up. To take a stand. To make decisions based on who Christ is and what He values, even when it costs you. When you lead your family with intention, you’re enforcing Christ’s dominion in that space. When you act with integrity in your workplace instead of participating in corruption, you’re reclaiming territory for the King. When you create something beautiful in the arts to the glory of God instead of joining the celebration of darkness, you’re declaring that Christ reigns. When you speak truth in education instead of accepting lies, you’re enforcing the victory. When you stand for justice in government and the military instead of accepting that “that’s just how power works,” you’re challenging the occupation. These are acts of cosmic significance. They matter. They expand the territory of Christ’s dominion. Here’s the promise: as you exercise dominion faithfully, He gives you more. More territory. A bigger life. Greater sphere of influence. Not because you’re accumulating power for yourself, but because a faithful steward receives more to steward for the master. Alignment Is Everything You’re facing opposition. The forces that occupy these pillars won’t step aside when you decide to enforce Christ’s victory. They’ll push back. They’ll make it costly. They’ll offer compromises and shortcuts. This is where alignment with Christ becomes absolutely critical. Your power in any situation is proportional to your alignment with Christ’s heart, His character, His values. If you’re operating out of your own ambition, your own hurt, your own desire for revenge or control, you’ve already lost. You’re fighting in your own strength, and you’re outmatched. But when you act in alignment with Him—when your motivations are His motivations, when your character reflects His character, when you’re pursuing what He pursues—you carry His authority. That authority is far above every power. Open prayer is the practice of maintaining that alignment. Not begging God to act, but positioning yourself under His authority so that His power can flow through you. It’s not weakness to pray. It’s the source of your actual strength. Your physical body matters in this too. The rebel powers covet physicality. How you treat your body—your choices about health, purity, how you use your senses—declares whose kingdom you serve. Your body is sacred territory. Use it as an instrument of Christ’s dominion. The Personal Challenge I don’t know what you’re facing. I don’t know what battle you’re in right now. I don’t know what pressure you’re under. I don’t know what compromise you’re being offered. I don’t know what cost you’re being asked to pay for standing up for what’s true. But I know this: you’re seated with Christ far above the powers arrayed against you. You carry His authority. You have access to His strength. The victory is already won. The only question is whether you’ll enforce it in your little world. Whether you’ll exercise the dominion He’s given you. Whether you’ll let His character flow through you as you face what’s in front of you. You don’t have to win. He already won. You just have to be faithful. You just have to show up aligned with Him. You just have to refuse the shortcuts and stand even when it costs you. Because the King is seated. The dominion is His. And as you exercise authority aligned with Him, His kingdom expands. Your territory grows. Your life deepens. And the occupation slowly retreats. The Lamb has conquered. Now rise up and enforce His victory in your world. Thanks for reading Grounded Podcast! This post is public so feel free to share it. This week: Identify one space in your life—one pillar where you have influence—where you’re being called to enforce Christ’s victory. Not someday. This week. Where will you take a stand aligned with Him? Every blessing! Chuck Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

  7. Aug 18

    The Real Reason God Didn’t Just Blast the Devil Away

    I know you’ve wondered this. I have too. If the Almighty can speak galaxies into existence, why not just snap His fingers and blast away the devil and all spiritual darkness? Why not open the heavens and incinerate the rebel powers with raw divine force? But the answer isn’t about God’s power. His power was never in question. The answer is about His character—and specifically, about His stubborn, unwavering commitment to His own word. In our last episode, we established that God’s gifts and callings are irrevocable. He built our world by using His voice and speaking commands. Those commands become the fabric of the universe. When He makes a decree, it stands forever. When He gives humans the gift of dominion over the earth in Ge. 1, it remains our dominion, even when the holder of that dominion fails God. If God makes a person a king they may be a great king or a horrible king, but they will be the king for the rest of their life. God’s gifts are permanent. He stands by his word. The universe exists because his word cannot pass away. God governs his world by faithfulness to His word. So although he had the ability, and they surely deserved it, YHWH wouldn’t just swat the rebels like flies. There’s no point building a society of free-willed beings if all of them only obey you because you threaten to nuke them if they don’t. Any successful society on earth must be a true collaboration between God and his higher creations. Secondly, dominion over the earth wasn’t given to Heavenly Beings. It was given to humans. To us. Irrevocably. Therefore, since humans are already the ones in charge of this planet, it was up to the human to defeat the cosmic powers who had seized this power and take back dominion over the earth. That created a cosmic dilemma. A human had to reclaim what humans had lost. But no ordinary human could defeat the host of celestial beings who had seized control. The domain authorities, the territorial powers, the principalities that rule over nations—these aren’t enemies you fight with swords or missiles. A mortal can’t stand against elohim if the battle is going to be power vs power. God could have done it alone, but that would have violated the very structure He established. From the first day of our creation, He declared that humans shall have dominion over all of his creation. Only a human could take back from this occupation army the dominion that already belongs to humans. The solution was the Incarnation—the God-man. Fully divine, fully human. Only a human had the legal standing to reclaim dominion that was given to humanity. Only an unblemished human, operating within the bounds of human limitation, could undo what humanity had lost. But that human also needed divine power, because fighting celestial forces requires power beyond human capability. Into this dark arena steps our champion, Jesus Christ—perfectly human, perfectly divine, wielding both the legal standing to act and the power to enforce the restoration of human dominion on planet earth. This is the strategic brilliance of the Incarnation. Jesus is the Human Champion. The one being in all of creation who could rightly reclaim dominion while possessing the power to pull it off. He was aware of this calling. You see it in the wilderness temptation. Satan didn’t tempt Jesus to do evil in the way we usually imagine. He tempted Him to bypass being bound by the human condition. He tempted him to meet his own human needs and to engage the fallen powers using the supernatural abilities of God. He baited him to reclaim authority without going through the cross. Turn stones to bread. Use divine power to escape hunger. Jesus refused. He limited Himself to what was possible for a human. He stayed hungry. Throw yourself from the temple. Force God’s hand. Demand the miraculous rescue you deserve as the Son of God. Jesus refused. He wouldn’t use His divine power to bypass human limitation. He chose to remain subject to the consequences of His own actions. Show Respect to Satan for all the kingdoms of the world. The ultimate shortcut. The rebel powers offered Jesus the very dominion He came to reclaim—minus the suffering. Just acknowledge that Satan’s authority is legitimate. Take the kingdoms without the cross. Jesus refused absolutely. Every single time, He stayed within the boundaries of the human condition. He chose the hard path of perfect human obedience, perfect trust, even in agony. He would win not through divine force, but through living out a loyal life as a righteous human. That brings us to the pivot point of cosmic history. The cross wasn’t just about personal salvation. It was a legal revolution. The rebel powers had used the law as their weapon. They had a case. Humanity was too sinful, too disloyal to God to exercise dominion on the earth. We had proven ourselves unfit. Every failure was recorded. The Bible uses a specific legal term for this: cheirographon. A handwritten certificate of debt, written in the debtor’s own hand, self-condemning in court. The powers could point to this document and say, “God, your own law condemns them. Dominion was given to humans, but look at the evidence. They are unfit to rule. The contract is void.” But, according to Paul, Jesus did something unexpected on the cross. He took that record of debt—all our sin, all our shame, all our legal condemnation—and He became it. Then He nailed it to the tree in His body. Colossians 2:14-15 says He “canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” He disarmed them of their right to assert the need to be at least a provisional government over the Creation. Jesus didn’t destroy them yet. He removed their primary weapon—the legal justification for humanity’s oppression. The cross was a cosmic act of legal liberation. It canceled the debt that justified the occupation. Jesus didn’t just die so we could have nice feelings about God and go live in heaven after we die. He died to legally disarm the powers that had oppressed humanity since the beginning, removing their supposed grounds for taking dominion (like forcing a drunk driver out from behind the wheel of his own car). The story culminates in the Resurrection. In Matthew 28:18, the risen Jesus declares: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Not partial authority. All authority. Every corner of the cosmos. This is the legal transfer of dominion from the defeated rebel powers back to the rightful King—a human being. A physical, resurrected human. He appeared in a body. He ate fish. He bore the marks of crucifixion. Then comes the Ascension. A physical human body is now seated at the right hand of Yahweh. This echoes Psalm 110:1, where Yahweh invites a second figure to sit on His throne and rule. Paul is explicit in Ephesians: Jesus is seated “far above every rule and authority and power and dominion.” Those aren’t poetic flourishes. Arche, exousia, dynamis, kyriotetes—these are technical terms for the territorial powers that rule over nations. The same beings allotted the peoples at Babel. The same powers sentenced in Psalm 82. Jesus is seated far above every single one of them. A human now holds dominion over the powers that occupied the earth. Every rebel power is under His feet, waiting for final judgment. This is the answer to ending refrain of Psalm 82: “Arise, O God, and inherit all the nations.” God inherits the nations—by enthroning a man. The dominion lost by the first Adam, forfeited at Babel, has been reclaimed by the Last Adam. Here’s what changes everything: we don’t have to wait for heaven to participate in this. One human has done it perfectly. And one human doing that is enough. Jesus has ascended the throne. He is King of earth and heaven, and all powers are subjected to Him. We have authority through His authority as we live in alignment with Him. We can now rule our little worlds in Jesus’ name—not through brute force, but through the same stubborn faithfulness that won the cosmos back in the first place. The war is won. The King is crowned. The only question left is whether we’ll live like it. Ready to dig deeper into the ancient biblical worldview that reshapes your faith? Get the full series and discover how ReJesus Everything is calling believers back to the Jesus of Scripture—not the domesticated version we’ve inherited, but the King who reclaimed the cosmos. Order here. Get full access to Grounded Podcast at www.quinley.com/subscribe

  8. Aug 10

    Are Demons Envious of Humans?

    When you look at the major systems of our civilization—government, finance, education, the arts—there’s a pervasive sense that something is off. Not just slightly misaligned, but fundamentally bent away from God’s order. Institutions designed to serve justice become instruments of oppression. Systems meant to transmit truth become tools of propaganda. Culture meant to reflect beauty becomes a celebration of darkness. We often blame individual corruption, dysfunctional systems, or that it’s just human nature. And yes, those factors matter. But the Bible offers a more unsettling explanation: we’re living in occupied territory. The Envy That Never Dies Imagine you’re one of the elder elohim—a spiritual being who has existed for ages, powerful beyond human comprehension, serving in God’s heavenly court. And then, God creates humans. Fragile. Physical. Temporary. And He crowns them with glory and honor. He gives them dominion over the earth. You might expect the response to be graceful acceptance. These elder beings were assigned to be shepherds, tutors, guardians to help humanity steward the world. A sacred role. A partnership. Instead, according to Scripture, envy festered in many. Psalm 8:5 captures the shock: “You have made them (humans) a little lower than the elohim and crowned them (humans) with glory and honor.” The implication is clear: this was unexpected. Humans—shorter-lived, weaker, more vulnerable—were exalted above the elder spiritual beings in terms of delegated authority regarding planet Earth. The beings who had been closest to the throne, who had served longest, found themselves subordinate on Earth to creatures they might have viewed as inferior. This, it seems, is the birthplace of the cosmic rebellion. Not from ignorance—from wounded pride. From the refusal to accept God’s mysterious choice to place authority for this world in human hands. The Hunger for the Physical Even to powerful spirit world beings, according to Genesis chapter 6, humans are beautiful. Part of our attraction is that we are part of the physical reality. We have bodies and experience being alive through our bodies. These spiritual beings don’t just want power—they want physicality. They want bodies. They want to feel. There’s something unique about physical existence that transcends mere utility. To taste. To touch. To experience the weight and texture of the material world. To inhabit a body and feel its sensations. This is not something disembodied spirits possess. And according to the gospels, they want it. The demoniac of Gadara illustrates this graphically. When Jesus confronts a legion of demons, they beg Him with a specific request: “Send us into the herd of pigs.” Not freedom. Not peaceful annihilation. Pigs. They would rather inhabit filthy pigs than remain disembodied. Why? Because physicality itself is the prize. This hunger drove them to something far darker. Genesis 6 describes how the bene elohim—the sons of God—”saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married (took) any of them they chose.” This wasn’t romance. It was strategy. By interbreeding with humans, these rebel powers sought to do something brilliant and horrifying: they attempted to merge with human bloodline. If they could corrupt the human line, they could seize claim to human dominion. They could make the earth theirs not by stealing it, but by infiltrating it, by becoming part of it. The result, according to the Genesis account, was the Nephilim—hybrid beings trying to rule the physical realm with absolute authority. Giants. Tyrants. The visible manifestation of spiritual rebellion in physical form. Most ancient cultures have stories of superhuman beings that were in the form of humans but were much larger and had impossibly great size and abilities. God’s response was the global flood because this corruption and the ensuing violent downward struggle of human society threatened the very foundation of His irrevocable decree to humanity. Human dominion had to remain human. The bloodline had to be preserved. But the spirit of this rebellion never died. It just adapted. The Parable of the Tenants: A Cosmic Story Jesus tells a parable that speaks directly to this rebellion, though most of us read it as mere social commentary. Matthew 21:33-41: A landowner plants a vineyard, leases it to tenants, and goes away. At harvest time, he sends servants to collect his share. The tenants beat and kill them. Finally, he sends his son. And the tenants say: “This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.” On the surface, it’s about corrupt workers. But read in context of the cosmic rebellion, it becomes something else entirely. I think the “tenants” are stand-ins for the rebel elohim—the spiritual beings assigned by God to help steward the earth for humanity. But they decided to squat on the property. To occupy. To claim ownership of what was never theirs to possess. They saw humanity’s irrevocable gift of dominion and wanted it. They couldn’t take it by force—God’s word is unbreakable. But they could plot. They could scheme. They could be a provisional government that drags on and on. And when the Son came to reclaim the land that was rightfully His, their response was murder. “Kill him and we’ll get it forever!” This parable reveals the core sin of the angelic rebellion: Coveting. The refusal to accept the order God established. The determination to seize what belongs to others. The Fingerprints on Society’s Pillars The rebellion isn’t abstract theology. It’s tangible. If we open our eyes, we can see it woven through the institutions that shape civilization. Government everywhere consistently wants more and more control. This lust for power always corrupts it absolutely. Instead of justice, it becomes oppression. Finance could be the stewardship of resources to make sure that everyone flourishes. Instead, the banking system in every nation becomes machinery for exploitation. The love of money drives the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Greed becomes structural. Education that’s meant to transmit truth. Knowledge is a wonderful thing. But once the stewardship of knowledge becomes institutionalized it gets perverted. Young minds are indoctrinated rather than enlightened. The transmission of wisdom becomes the propagation of rebellion against God. Enlightenment is another word for independence from our Creator. The Arts are designed to reflect beauty and divine creativity. Institutionalized, they become twisted into celebrations of darkness and rebellion. Beauty gets corrupted into obscenity. This isn’t coincidence. It’s not mere human sinfulness (though that’s present). Ephesians 6:12 names it explicitly: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” These are intelligent, organized entities. They’re not just tempting individuals—they’re occupying entire systems, bending institutions toward their rebellion, marking civilization with their fingerprints. The Divine Courtroom: Psalm 82 But Scripture doesn’t leave us without hope or clarity. Psalm 82 pulls back the curtain on the divine courtroom. “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the elohim he holds judgment.” Yahweh is presiding over the assembly of spiritual beings. And He speaks an indictment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.” He condemns them for corruption. For defending the unjust. For failing to uphold the cause of the poor. For betraying their original stewardship role. Then comes the sentence: “Nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” This is a legal proclamation—shockingly, it’s their death sentence. Their time is limited. Their authority is revoked. They stand condemned before the highest court in creation. What This Means for You If you understand that your world is occupied by intelligent spiritual powers bent on subverting human dominion, you’ll see things differently. The systems you navigate daily aren’t neutral platforms. They’re battlegrounds. They’re occupied territories. But through Psalms 82 you also understand something crucial: their occupation of the pillars of human society is already judged. The sentence has been pronounced. The rebels know their time is short, and they fight with increasing desperation. This is the moment we live in. The indictment has been issued. The rightful King is moving to reclaim His vineyard. Our response isn’t to despair at the occupation of our world’s power positions, but to see them clearly. To be discerning. To recognize the anti-God bent in the structures around you—not with paranoia, but with the clarity that comes from biblical realism. The occupation is real. But it’s also—Praise God!— temporary. Share this post. If you’re enjoying this treatment of the Cosmic Rebellion please pass it on to your friends. Just click the button below. In Our Next Podcast The rebellion of the elder sons is the backdrop against which the entire drama of redemption unfolds. In our next episode, we’ll explore how a human—fully human, perfectly human—became the key to cosmic victory. Because only a human could legally reclaim what humans had lost. Ready to dig deeper into the ancient biblical worldview that reshapes your faith? Get the full series and discover how ReJesus Everything is calling believers back to the Jesus of Scripture—not the domesticated version we’ve inherited, but the King who reclaimed the cosmos. Order here. Stay grounded. God’s Lamb has conquered. His kingdom is advancing. Every Blessing, Chuck Get ful

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Grounded is about forming resilient disciples of Jesus who stand firm while the world shakes. Drawing on 50 years of serious Bible study and a lifetime following Jesus across cultures, Dr. Chuck Quinley explores what the worldview, practices, commands, and mission of Jesus mean for the decade we're entering. No Christian self-help and no easy answers—just disciples learning to follow Jesus together, whatever comes next. www.quinley.com

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  • Creator
    Learn to be rock solid even if the world around you is not
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    62
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Chuck & Sherry Quinley
  • Show Website
    Grounded Podcast with Chuck Quinley