The next few laps of the life of Quest will involve us Gearing Up in four areas of life and ministry. First is the aspect of ‘belonging’, which is a need for every human on planet earth… a place to sit together under the authority of Christ, a place to sit together and care for one another and a place to invite skeptics and inquirers to sit together with us and discover that God actually is real and worthy of our worship.
The second aspect is ‘equipping,’ which is the process of ’setting the broken bones’ and ‘mending the torn nets’ of our lives. Certainly there are external skills and activities that we want to train and develop people to do, but the real issue of ‘equipping’ is the transformation of the broken and torn areas of our lives into healed and repaired areas of our lives. If we take this seriously the process will be painful and costly. It would be much easier to avoid the profoundly deep fractures in our souls. I might seem unwise to dig up all the junk in our hearts in order to deal with it. It may seem impossible to actually address the pain and inadequacy that we live with everyday. However, living life short of what we were made for would be tragically sad. We were made for more than the broken and torn pieces of life scattered across the landscape of our days. The church is called to equip people to recapture the glory that comes with being made in the image of God, people who were created to walk with Him and to reflect Him in the world today. We have all fallen so painfully short of that haven’t we!! But there is hope… hope that the power of a risen Christ can transform our hearts… one day at a time, one area of life at a time, one dimension of our souls at a time. Painful and costly? Yes! Worth it… absolutely!! 
Just consider Bovard Administration Building at the University of Southern California… see you Sunday and I will explain.