We love a good exclamation point at the end of a sentence. It means excitement and thrills! But life is often not all exclamation points. Often, it’s full of more question marks. In this video from The Quest Bible study, Beth Moore breaks down how our faith journeys tend to look more like question marks.
Learn more about Beth’s Bible study, The Quest: An Excursion Toward Intimacy With God.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
One of the things that happens here is that we are getting trained – culturally trained – to constantly go for the exclamation mark.
I want you to think about it, if you would please, with me. Because in our spiritual lives, in everything we’ll see on social media, everything has become a caption to us. And if we’re gonna have an event we want to have an event that is full of exclamation marks. We want every other sentence to be a tweet-able. We want it to be something that we can post. Something that we can just like every moment that we would just be thrilled and exhilarated and excited.
We just live our lives adapting to this kind of mentality that everything in our faith walk– because everything we pour into ourselves we get to choose now. All of our podcasts, everything we listen to. And we can choose everything to be one big exclamation mark. Where everything is a straight line and then a jump.
And here’s how we want it: We want our whole journey to be one straight line and then a big jump. We love that. We love that. We love that. It’s exciting. It’s thrilling. It gets the blood flowing.
Only there’s a very big difference between adrenaline and anointing. You can have all the adrenaline in the world and never know an ounce of outpouring of anointing on your life or on my life because we confuse the two.
If we have to make everything in our entire spiritual lives into an exclamation point and the only thing we’ll listen to and the only the thing we’ll attend, the only thing we’ll be a part of – it better be exciting! And it better be something we can put on social media! We’re going to need it to be a straight line and a dot. Because we love us a sentence that ends with an exclamation mark.
Only that is not often how it goes. Now trust me on this, there’s a lot of exclamation marks. Praise His name! It’s thrilling. It’s exhilarating. It’s exciting.
But the other part of that is that a significant portion of it also turns into one big question mark.
What on the ever-lovin’ earth is going on here? Anybody? Anybody?
And all of a sudden a question mark starts kind of becoming this map of our journey. Because see if this doesn’t happen sometimes. For many of you it’s already happened.
So we’ve surrendered to something. We’ve got a fresh word on us. We got a little bit of vision. We feel like we know some of what God has called us to do. We surrender to it. We’re pretty excited. We start our journey.
And instead of it going straight to the point, we start going way over here. And suddenly we’re like further away than we were before we even knew that’s where we were going. I need somebody to tell me if I’m telling you the truth? Anybody know what I’m talking about?
Only this is the quest. What if that did not disturb you next time? What if you began to understand that it is part of the quest, that there’s going to be that faith walk? Ask Abraham. Ask Moses. Ask Joshua. Ask David.
Over and over again this is going to happen like this is going to be a straight line and we’re going to get to the point. Only that’s not what happens. It seems to get further and further and further away from what you thought was going to happen.
And then, it starts to make a curve. The thing about it is that in a question mark, there’s always a gap of space – isn’t there? – before you ever get to the point. Sometimes the point’s so far you can’t even jump to it. You just have to look at it from a distance like this. Because you can’t have a quest without questions.
