Blog Posts by Courtney McBath

God is efficient. He gets maximum work out of our limitations, and then He moves us on: the prison sentence is over. When God finishes using your limitations, your release will come. Even the fact that God has you reading this is an indication that your change is at hand.

We’re not having this conversation just to keep you satisfied with the past, to keep you living in the past, or to cause you to limit your understanding of life to the past. We’re having this conversation because the past was critical and necessary to bring you to today so that God could bring you out of limitations.

When we believe God, we can walk with Him, learn to love Him, let down our guard with Him, and depend on Him—we can become intimate with One whom we expect to come through. The problem is we give up on God too easily. Expectancies are a place of trust, and trust is the basis of friendship. To protect our hearts from frustration in difficult times, we often lower our expectations of...

When our journey in friendship with God seems to lead us to prison, we have to process our way through a storm of emotions. “What happened?” we want to know. There we were—we made ourselves vulnerable to God. We committed to being His friend. We opened our hearts to Him. We asked Him to help us learn to love Him better. We were doing our part, cultivating that first Next Level heart attitude—a heart for His friendship and leadership style— now, suddenly, we find ourselves alone, arrested, thrown into a cell, locked down in chains, and slapped with a trial date. We don’t see our prison as a “springboard for spectacular beginnings.” We wonder if we will ever fulfill the dreams and plans in our hearts.

When I was 13 years old, I found myself in this very position. There I was, walking in friendship with God—getting to know Him, even involved in ministry and leading others to Christ at a young age—when suddenly, the life I had...