Mike Q. Daniel LIVE!

Welcome to Ep. #1044 — SAINTED, Part 1: “Who Gets to Be Called a Saint?”   You probably wouldn’t think twice about calling yourself forgiven.  But would you ever call yourself a saint?  Something in you hesitates.  It sounds arrogant, almost wrong, because you’ve quietly learned to define yourself more by your struggles than by what God says is true of you.   What does it actually mean to be a sai...

Welcome to Episode # 1043, “You really are the Gift”  Have you heard people sarcastically say “well, you really are God’s gift, aren’t you,” meaning your stuck up and prideful. But what if true humility is embracing divinely given adequacy for others?   What if you really ARE God’s beloved gift to those around you today? 

Welcome to  EP # 1042 - “Being the Bread?”  We’ve been talking about living as the Beloved of God, that He loves us and loves through us as we live from Christ as our Life.  But what about brokenness?  Is God breaking you?   What does that really mean for those who are made new and whole and complete and forgiven and beloved in Christ?  Is God breaking down his Beloved?   We’re going to look at wh...

Welcome to #2 in our Living as God’s Beloved series: Ep. 1041 - “The Blessedness of your Belovedness”.  It’s not that you can demand whatever you want from God, and it’s not that you get everything to go your way, God isn’t the kind of dad that spoils his kids.  But because you’re Beloved, it’s nice to know the pleasure of your heavenly father toward you, isn’t it?  Pour a tall cup of coffee and p...

Good MORNING Grace Tribe!  Episode # 1040, “You Know What YOUR Problem is?”   It’s a good problem to have and an absolutely glorious problem to fix.  And fixing THE problem, fixed pretty much everything.   I’m so excited to be back with you after a long weekend at our conference in Pennsylvania!    Can’t wait to pour a big ol’ cup of coffee and drink deeply of life in Christ reality with you all t...

Good morning Grace Tribe! Welcome to Ep. #1039 - The Redemptive Power of Emotionally Healthy Living in Christ (part for in our series on emotionally healthy living in Jesus!).  God is in the redemption business, and when we live from Christ as our Life, we join in with His redemptive work.   How? Grab your coffee and pull up a comfy chair as we diving in together to His Life in and through us for...

Welcome to Ep. #1038 - "The Courage to Be Known"! (Emotionally Healthy Life in Christ, Part 3)  You've perfected the art of being “fine”.  Someone asks how you're doing and the word is out before you've even thought about it - very smooth, & yet completely unconvincing to anyone paying attention.   You’re pressing a version of you that’s well edited, and approved for p...

Welcome to Ep. #1037 — “Are We Really Listening?”!  You’ve sat across from someone and nodded in all the right places while your mind was somewhere else entirely - or already forming your response, already waiting for your turn.  They could feel it, even if neither of you said a word.  We call it listening.  It might be something closer to a performance.  So are we the same with God - half-present...

Welcome to Ep. #1036 - “An Emotional Awake Faith”!   We’ve all seen it and been there ourselves… Something happens and you're already reacting before you even knew you were upset.  Whether we said something you didn't mean, or went quiet when you should have spoken, or spent three hours managing an emotion you never actually saw or considered the source of.   This is broken, it’s a whole...

 Welcome to Ep. #1035 - “Why The Cross (More Than Revelation)”  What problem did Christ solve on the cross?  Was it just revelation of something about us, or is it offering, inviting something entirely different?  That wasn’t yet true? 

Welcome to Ep. #1034 - Perfect Joy of Beautiful Focus! Have you ever had a hard week - your temper short, your thought life a mess, your devotion thin - and underneath the discouragement, a quieter, colder question surfaced?  What if I'm not really saved?  Maybe you've never heard that taught directly, but you've felt it in the air: if you were truly reborn, your life would show con...

Welcome to Ep. #1033 - “Not so Wormy!”  There’s a voice that says the most honest thing about you is your wretchedness.  That your joy is shallowness.  That your peace is naivety.  That if you just felt broken enough, long enough, deeply enough — then maybe God would finally be satisfied with you.  But what if that voice isn’t speaking for God at all?  What if the most radical thing you could do i...

Welcome to Ep. #1032 - “Always Enough!”  No matter how hard we try, why doesn’t it feel like enough?  We want to do better, to do more for God and others, but we have real limits - is our hope that God understands or that He will make up the difference because we get a “A” for effort?  Should we feel good or bad about all the trying and not quite arriving?  What if obedience was never meant to wor...

Welcome to Ep. 1031 - Never Enough!  We've tried and worked, then failed and felt horrible.   Doesn’t God deserve more of our effort?  Should we be more committed?  Isn’t that maturity?  What if the whole framework of striving for obedience and growth was wrong from the start? What if obedience was never meant to work that way? The answer might not be what you’ve been taught.

Welcome to Ep. #1030 - "What Makes THIS Rich? - The Purpose Question".   What brings life and fullness into every situation, and shouldn't God's purpose for each room and conversation fulfill God's purpose FOR us as well.  Grab your coffee and pull up a comfy chair to join Mike and the Grace Tribe for this message from Bonhoeffer to Paul to Proverbs to discover the enrichi...

Welcome to Ep. 1029 — The Purpose Question  You feel it every time. Someone says something that isn’t quite right - in a comment, in a conversation, in a sermon - and you sit there carrying a question you don’t know what to do with.  Do you say something?  Do you stay quiet?  You’ve been running that triage your whole Christian life, and nobody ever gave you anything better than instinct to answer...

Welcome to Ep. #1028 - How Might God Make Much of Grace?  Are you shrinking so Christ can be increasing?  Should you?  Can you?  Stick around.  This one might change everything you thought you knew about that verse - and much of how you live out His Life.

Welcome to Ep. # 1027 - The Beautiful Hazard of Life Together!” The incredible irony that God has made us to know him through one another, and made us to live in His character with one another, is the very thing that makes us completely incompatible with one another apart from Him!  Maybe the greatest miracle in the universe, the greatest Divine feat in history, is that we can love one another tod...

Good morning, Grace tribe! Welcome to Ep. #1026 - “Not from around here, are you?”   Not sure if you’ve ever returned to places you used to live in it no longer felt like home, but that certainly our life in Christ, isn’t it?  We used to be from here, living like the locals, but we’re not from around here anymore!   We’re gonna talk about how and why that is today in a very interactive way, so pou...

Welcome to Ep. #1025 - “When Sorrow Gets Loud…”  Sometimes loss & hurt hit so deeply that everything familiar suddenly feels fragile.  And somewhere in the middle of the ache we can scramble to find what actually holds when the world hurts this much.  What does it look like to trust (or encourage someone to trust).  What is eternally true when your emotions are screaming something else?

Welcome to Ep.# 1024 - Proceeding!  You’ve sat down with God and come away feeling like you did it wrong.  Like you weren’t focused enough, or sincere enough, or whatever enough.  Like something was supposed to happen and it didn’t — and the problem was you. But What if the river doesn’t need you to start it?  What if it’s already moving — right now, through you, whether you felt it this morning o...

Happy Wednesday! Welcome to Ep. 1023 - Our Eternal Shepherd!  Does God actually know you?  Not know of you.  Know you — by name, as a specific person He is specifically attending to?  The answer might not be what you’ve expected.

Welcome to Ep. #1022 — “The Backup Plan! “  You didn’t plan to stumble and cope.  You didn’t sit down and decide this sin was a good idea.  But before you even made a conscious choice, it seemed you were already reaching toward it, again.  What if the problem isn’t your willpower?  What if it isn’t even your behavior?  The answer might not be what you’ve been taught.

Welcome to Ep. 1021 — Rubbish!  You’ve been doing all the right things.  Showing up.  Staying faithful.  Building something for God.  And underneath all of it, there’s a quiet accounting that never quite closes.  A low-grade pressure that sometimes feels less like calling and more like unbelief.  You don’t feel like a failure.  You feel like a project - the proverbial “work in progress”.  And the...

Welcome to Ep. #1020 - “The Wisdom of The Inside-Out Life”!  You’re tired.  Not lazy-tired.  Not I-need-a-vacation tired (or not Just that!).  You’re tired in the way that only happens when you’ve been carrying the weight of parenting, of showing up at work, of being a spouse, a caregiver, a friend, a functioning human being in a world that never stops demanding.   And on top of all of that, you w...