Grounded with Chuck Quinley

About Grounded with Chuck Quinley

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 (https://www.quinley.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Learn to be rock solid even if the world around you is not

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Jan 2024

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

61 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   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. (https://a.co/d/0fGkPkKo) 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 (https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   12 Oct 2026

   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 (https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   8 Sept 2026

   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 (https://www.quinley.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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