You can know all about God and still not know him
You learned the verses. You showed up. You did what you were told a good Christian does. So why does God still feel far away? Chris Hantla knows that feeling. He graduated from Bible college and felt empty. In his words, it was like reading letters other people wrote about their experience of God while never meeting God himself. So he did something radical. After 9/11, he moved to Baghdad to see if God would show up in a war zone. On this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast, Daron sits down with Chris, a coach and co-director of the Catalyst Experience at Identity Exchange, to talk about fear, false identity, and what it looks like to actually hear God speak.
Your fear is pointing to a false identity
Chris arrived in Baghdad just after an attack killed four of five teammates on a northern team. Weeks later, a bomb woke him at 4 a.m. He listened to two hours of gunfire and ended with a pillow over his head, begging God to make it stop. During a week of rest in Jordan, the fear caught up with him. Donna Winship sat down with him and prayed a simple question: “God, what is Chris really afraid of?” Chris expected something about dying. Instead, God brought up a memory of standing in front of his home church, terrified of their judging eyes. His real fear was failing and coming home as a disappointment. God exposed the lie and then spoke the truth. “Your mom named you Christopher. It means the one who bears Christ.” Not as a missionary with the right answers. As a person being shaped into the character of Jesus. Chris puts it this way. Negative emotions work like a check-engine light. You don’t smash the light. You look under the hood.
You were never meant to do this alone
Most of us live like it’s all up to us. Chris calls it the separation worldview. Look at the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples did the math and saw they didn’t have enough. Jesus saw the same crowd and knew the Father was with him. Same problem. Different worldview. That shift changed how Chris treated the people he once feared. After bragging about winning an argument in a watch shop, his future wife asked him one question. “Chris, do you even love these people?” He didn’t. So he asked God to change his heart. God answered through Nesmi, a friend from the soccer field who wanted to know God as much as Chris did. Years later, Nesmi told Chris what drew him to Jesus. It wasn’t an argument. It was how the team loved him.
Your next step
- God still speaks. He wants to talk to you about the lies you believe about him, yourself, and the world.
- Ask one honest question. What am I afraid of right now? Let the first thought come up and tell the truth about it.
- Ask Jesus what he wants you to know. It might be as simple as “You’re mine. I delight in you.” Believing that takes faith.
- Write it down and share it with someone you trust.
- Explore free listening-prayer exercises at identityexchange.com.
What would change in your life if you believed you were never alone?
Episode Summary:
Most of us are running our lives on an identity we never actually chose — one built to earn approval instead of received from God. Chris Hantla, coach and co-director of Identity Exchange’s Catalyst Experience, sat down with Daron to tell the story of how a mission trip to a Baghdad war zone stripped away his false identity as a “successful missionary” and led him into a real, conversational relationship with God. Chris walks through the exact moment God spoke a new name over him, the wife’s question that exposed his hidden pride, and the friendship that finally taught him how to love his enemies — and he closes with practical steps anyone can use to start hearing God’s voice today.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ False identity almost always shows up as negative emotion — fear, shame, and striving are signals, not just feelings, pointing to something untrue we’re believing.
⚡️ Your calling and your identity are not the same thing. Chris’s identity was never “missionary”, it was learning to bear the character of Christ, and that distinction changed everything.
⚡️ You can start hearing God’s voice today with a simple practice: notice what you’re afraid of, ask God what’s underneath it, and tell the truth about what you find.
If this episode stirred something in you, don’t let it stay a feeling — hit subscribe, and drop a comment telling us: what’s one lie you’ve believed about yourself that God might be ready to replace with the truth?
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Got a question about finding your identity or purpose? Email Daron at daron@daronearlewine.com
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Daron Earlewine: Creating on purpose and for purpose. Hey, welcome back to the Daron Earlewine Podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host, stoked to have you back. And today we are headed to virtual land. We have a guest joining us all the way from — actually, Chris, where are you coming from?
Chris Hantla: Well, a year ago we moved from the Middle East and now we’re in Texas, based north of Houston.
Daron Earlewine: North of Houston. For some reason I was thinking West Coast, but Texas, that works. So yes, we’re sitting down with Chris Hantla. Chris is a lot of things. One of the things he does professionally is work with Identity Exchange, as their coach and co-director of their Catalyst Experience. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about Identity Exchange — you’ve heard me talk about Jamie and Donna Winship, the Becoming What You Believe course that I went through, which has been so transformational in my life. If you listened to the episode with my son Ty recently, he talked about going through the Identity Exchange course too. So Chris, I need to talk to you about a financial kickback for as many people as I’ve sent to Identity Exchange.
Chris Hantla: Well, I’ll put you in touch with the right people.
Daron Earlewine: Appreciate it. But no, Chris — when I went through the Becoming What You Believe course, you were one of my coaches and helped walk me through that process, which was so transformational to me. And the more I got to hear about your story and the journey you’ve taken, I thought, I’ve got to get Chris on the podcast so people can hear more about your journey and learning to hear from the Lord, and being involved in a lot of amazing adventures with Jamie and Donna. So stoked to have you on, and excited to see where this conversation goes.
Chris Hantla: Yeah, thanks for having me, Daron. So that was my little intro — give us a better one, Chris, about yourself.
Okay, well, I’ll start with the coaching piece of this and identity — who am I, who does God say that I am. This has been a long journey of discovery, as it is for most of us. If you listen to Jamie Winship, you know that when he was maybe seven or eight years old, he goes to an R-rated movie and watches Serpico, and feels like God is naming him in that movie. That was not my experience. At that age I grew up in the church and I wanted to be a good kid. I watched my older brother — an amazing guy — but he got labeled the rebellious one. He has a very entrepreneurial spirit, which makes sense that at a young age he’d be viewed that way. Which is funny about the identity journey — often, in the way God made us, the world or the enemy looks at that and wants to rob us of it. So it labels us something. My brother got the label “rebellious,” and I watched all the conflict that created with my parents, and I wanted to be just a good kid.
So that was my heart — I wanted to be accepted and acceptable to people. Not realizing that in capitulating to that false identity of “good,” whatever that means, however people define it, we start to conform to that image, and it robs us of the truth of who we are. So I had this relationship with who I am and who I thought I should be, defined in a lot of ways by my religious upbringing. And God can work with that, which is beautiful.
Through the course of that I went to Bible college. While I was there, 9/11 happened. That was a significant event — I can remember, a couple years prior, being at a youth rally, and the speaker said, “Your generation is going to be contending with Muslims and Islam.” I’d heard of Islam but knew nothing about it. But something about the way he said it really got my attention. A few years later, 9/11 happens, and over the next couple of years the United States was at war with this entity called terror. Muslims were sort of our enemy in that season, and I moved overseas after Bible college.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq, I was watching the “shock and awe” coverage with my best friend, and it just hit me — I pointed at the TV and said, “We need to go there. That’s where we need to go.” I don’t know why. It was like a seed planted that I had to pursue. If you’d asked me at the time whether God speaks, I would have said no — he gave us the Bible, you learn it and follow it. But this was a compulsion.
Daron Earlewine: And in what context — like, go with the military, or just go be there?
Chris Hantla: I was a follower of Jesus, and that youth-camp speaker’s voice was still there. I’m not a military-fighter kind of person — that’s not my pathway — but I felt this compulsion, “I’ve got to do my part.” And at the time, doing my part as a follower of Jesus meant bringing the message of salvation to these people. I say it that way on purpose, because my understanding of the gospel at that time was basically, “How do you get into heaven when you die?” So we needed to bring this message to these people, and maybe that would help with the whole war-on-terror situation too.
Looking back, I realize that was the Holy Spirit moving me and speaking to me — the urges, the compulsion to go — but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I showed up in Baghdad. My first job out of college, I went with an NGO. I wanted to make a difference, make an impact, be a world-changer — you go to a youth conference and that’s the language, “go be a world-changer.” So, full of zeal and passion and very little knowledge and wisdom, I went.
I showed up in Baghdad, and there was a couple on the team — Jamie and Donna Winship. Pretty quickly after arriving, I noticed they were living a kind of life that was really attractive, different. The way they talked about God was beautiful — like they had a deep, intimate, conversational relationship with him. That was a deep desire of my heart. I really did want to know God. I’d been doing everything my tradition told me to do — learn the scriptures, know them backward and forward — and I can remember graduating from Bible college feeling empty. Like, I don’t really know you, God. I know about you. It’s like I’ve been reading letters other people wrote about their experience of you, but I want to know you.
Part of why I wanted to go to the Middle East, into a war zone, was — let’s see if God will show up there. Let’s see what happens if I follow him into this place.
Daron Earlewine: That’s a big deal, Chris, because I think a lot of people wouldn’t think, “I’m going to meet God in a war zone” — they’d think church, or a coffee shop conversation. That’s where I know I can find him.
Chris Hantla: Yeah, it’s like, “you’ve got to go to a hard place” — which isn’t true. But for me, that was what I needed. Part of it was that I needed to do something crazy, radical, and countercultural. My dad had a beautiful pathway planned for my life — a nice job, a good income, and he wanted me to become an architect. I actually enjoyed drafting and architecture. But I watched people follow that American-dream path and it felt unsettling to me. I remember reading Jesus’s words in college and being haunted by them — “I came to give you life, and life in its fullest, abundant life” — and thinking, the American dream, played out to its end, doesn’t feel like what Jesus had on offer. So in the background was this pull to do something crazy and countercultural and see what would happen. I really did feel like I was following Jesus, but I was surprised by what he actually had for me in that space.
Meeting Jamie and Donna was the real start of this identity journey. And what’s significant about identity is that it’s external to us — it’s received. We’re either looking to our community, or to the world, or to God to define it. For me, growing up in a religious community, I received my identity externally: be a good person, don’t make mistakes, figure out what the Bible says and follow it — that’s your identity, and that’s what will make you acceptable and belonging. Even going overseas as a missionary was honorable in my community — but it wasn’t a true identity. Our vocation, what we do, is not our true identity. Learning to listen to God is the fundamental first step in starting to experience and learn who you actually are.
I remember having a moment of fear. We experienced a lot in Baghdad in a short period. I arrived on the team shortly after an attack that killed four of five teammates on our northern team; one survived. So I showed up on a team that was reeling from that loss. I wasn’t married yet, but a girl on our team had lost a former roommate in that attack, and I watched the grief everyone was carrying.
There were a lot of chaotic, war-torn moments. The day we were leaving the country for a week of R&R, I was awakened around four in the morning by a bomb that went off at the entrance of our neighborhood. The house shook, the windows shook. First there was an initial blast, then small-arms fire, then RPGs — total chaos. I went up on the roof, and for the first few minutes your adrenaline is pumping and it’s almost exciting, like a war movie. But over the next two hours, listening to that battle — I could hear every shot fired half a mile away — by the end I had my head covered with a pillow, begging God to make it stop. It was traumatizing, not exciting. The only thought going through my head was, I’m listening to people kill each other right now. This is not romantic. We watch a lot of war movies as guys and there’s something that touches on manhood in that — but the reality is not romantic at all. In total, thirty-six people were killed from the U.S. side alone, and I listened to that happen for two hours.
We had a flight that afternoon to Jordan for R&R. We all arrived at the office shaken and got on the plane, and in the air I just thought, that was insane.
During that week in Jordan, fear started bubbling up in me in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It was one of the first times I came to the end of my own abilities, my own sense of myself, and I began to really doubt — what am I doing here? Those are the moments we become open to really hearing from God. Up to that point I hadn’t experienced God’s voice in the way that’s now become normal for me.
There were some other horrendous things that happened that week too — contractors from our neighborhood were kidnapped and it made it onto the internet in an infamous way. I won’t say more, but you understand. It was, again, what is happening — this world is broken. It began producing a lot of fear in me.
One evening our team went for a walk, and I was just getting to know Donna Winship. I told her, I don’t know if I can go back to Baghdad — I’m freaking out a little here. She’d been talking about listening to God and something she called inner-healing prayer, which was foreign to me. She invited me to sit down together and ask God about it. I honestly didn’t know what she meant, but I respected her, so I said okay.
She started asking questions to God, and then went quiet. I asked, “Are you expecting God to speak to me? What’s happening right now?” She said, “Whatever comes to your mind as I ask these questions — we’re trusting the Lord can give you a thought, a sense, a feeling in your body, or even a picture in your mind. Think of your imagination as a stage, and we’re inviting God onto that stage. Just tell me what you sense from God.” I said, okay, that makes sense — a little uncomfortable, but okay.
The question everyone has about this process — and I get this all the time now, doing this professionally — is, how do I know it’s God and not me? We test it: it lines up with scripture, it won’t violate the character of God, and it brings joy, energy, and strength. We’re not saying anything that pops into your head is automatically God.
So Donna prayed, “God, what is Chris really afraid of — would you take him to the source of his fear?” I expected something like being afraid of dying, given everything traumatic I’d just experienced. Instead, what came to mind was a memory from just before I left — my home church in Oklahoma had invited me to get up and give a testimony and ask for prayer. I was terrified to get up in front of people who loved me. I remember sweating, feeling sick to my stomach, even though I’d written it all out to just read. Public speaking like that terrified me.
I told Donna, “I don’t think that’s God.” She said, “Just sit with it a second — God, why are you bringing this to Chris’s mind?” As I sat with it, I suddenly had this sensation of eyes in the audience — judging eyes. And in an instant I realized: I’m afraid of their judgment, of failing, of not being able to cut it here as a missionary. That was my false identity — a missionary goes and saves the world, then comes home and tells great stories. But I was afraid of failing and going home to the community that sent me out — that had prayed for me, told me I was so inspiring — going back with my tail between my legs as a failure.
As we kept working through it, God was exposing a false identity in me — something that wasn’t true about me. And in exposing the lie, he could reveal the truth of who he actually says I am. At the end of that prayer time, Donna asked, “God, what do you call this guy? Who did you make him to be?” And the Lord said to me, very clearly — it surprised me how clear it was — “Your mom named you Christopher, and she named you well. It means the one who bears Christ. And it doesn’t mean as a missionary or evangelist carrying my name to the nations — it means I want to build into you the character and nature of Christ, that you may bear it in your person.”
That was so different, so profound. Over the next couple of years, the question became: God, if your mission field is me being transformed into the likeness of Christ, what in me isn’t that right now? Immediately the answer was: you don’t love these people. You don’t know how to love your enemies — and that’s a top-five teaching of Jesus. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. And when you ask who your neighbor is, Jesus tells parables about the person you have no regard for. So my whole mission shifted from “go conquer these people and get them to know the right thing” to “God, your mission for my life is to become like you, and Jesus is the paradigm for that — and the first thing you’ve got to root out of my heart is a lack of love for people, especially my enemy.” I wasn’t expecting that. That was the beginning of my identity journey.
Daron Earlewine: Chris, thank you for sharing that whole story. Here’s where my brain gets stuck, and I think it does for most people listening — how easy it would be to get deceived and caught up in the idea that “I’m doing it right, I’m here as a missionary, I’m an all-star in the hierarchy of Christendom” — Sunday school teachers, pastors, and then missionaries, like I’m doing the whole thing, I’m literally risking my life in a war zone. There’s so much that could bury you in that. And what’s been breaking my heart this past year — having been a local church pastor and involved in ministry for twenty-five years — is that I think the vast majority of Christians in America have little to no practical understanding of what you just described. They’re getting ripped apart trying to perform in religion, trying to get the favor and approval of people around them, and thinking that’s what God says or thinks about them.
Chris Hantla: What you’re saying is exactly right. We know we’re in a false identity when it’s producing negative emotion in us. Our natural state in the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Most of us — myself included — experience negative emotions of fear, shame, guilt, anger, and so on. If we pay attention, the Spirit is speaking to us through those feelings, saying: you’re believing something about yourself or God or how the world works that isn’t true. You’re operating in something false. We’d call it the empire versus the kingdom — two stories running parallel through scripture.
God says, if you knew what it meant to come into the kingdom and follow Jesus as Lord, your life would be — not free of conflict or persecution, Jesus promises those things — but watch how Jesus walked through people hating him, spitting on him, eventually torturing and killing him, with perfect peace and joy. The joy set before him, he went to the cross. That’s the paradigm for how we’re meant to live. Most of us have no idea that’s what’s on offer as the good news of the kingdom. When Jesus says “follow me and I will make you fishers of men,” he’s showing his disciples a new way of being human — because up to that point they’re living paycheck to paycheck, hand to mouth, in fear, self-protection, self-promotion — constant anxiety and shame, “I’m not enough.” All of that produces negative feelings.
Jamie and Donna teach it like this: if a check-engine light comes on in your car, you don’t smash the light and say, “Fixed it.” You stop the car and figure out what’s going on under the hood. That’s what our emotions are doing for us. The promise of scripture is, “I will keep you in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on me.” When my awareness is, “I’m not doing life alone” — versus the common lie that it’s all up to me, I’m alone, I have to figure this out myself, what we’d call the separation worldview — that’s the empire worldview, and it’s constantly reinforced by life itself, especially something like middle school, where most of us learn “nobody’s going to show me how to do this, I have to figure it out alone.” That produces immediate fear: it’s all up to me, I’m not enough, I don’t know how. That was my life, growing up in religion — anxiety and striving to be perfect, afraid God would be disappointed in me. All of that produces internal turmoil. And Jesus says, come follow me and I’ll show you a totally different way. I’m with you. That was his promise — I am with you always, I will never leave you or forsake you. How different.
I was reflecting on this the other day — here’s the difference between the separation worldview and the connected, kingdom worldview Jesus operated in. Take the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples notice a problem: everyone’s hungry, nobody’s eaten all day. They look at it through a disconnected lens — it’s all up to us, and we’re not enough. Jesus points that out and says, “You feed them.” Their minds go straight to, we don’t have enough — this would take a hundred years’ wages to feed everyone. They’re looking at the situation as individuals disconnected from God. Jesus looks at the exact same situation through a connected worldview: I and the Father are one. So for him individually, without the Father, the math is exactly as impossible as the disciples describe — but with the Father, this problem is not too big. He tells the disciples, I want to show you what it looks like to walk connected. If it were just up to you, you’re right, you’re not enough. But you’re not disconnected from the Father — he’s here right now. Five thousand are fed, twelve baskets left over.
And right after that beautiful story, the disciples go straight back into disconnection — they’re on the boat, the storm comes up, and it’s the same lesson: you’re not alone, the God of nature is with you right now. He speaks to the storm and it’s stilled, and they start to get it — but it really comes together at Pentecost, when the Spirit is poured out, and then they go about their lives seeing the world through this connected way. The same thing that was true of Jesus becomes true of us. He promised in John, “I’m not going to leave you as orphans.” If we Christians actually got that — that this is the gospel, God with us — that’s what abundant life is. Going to Baghdad and doing all these things was terrifying, honestly — I didn’t walk away from a lot of it thinking, “that was abundant, amazing.” But going with Jesus into terrifying situations and watching him do things I could never do on my own — that was something different. That’s what Jesus was training his disciples toward, and they got it — you see it play out in the book of Acts, learning to incorporate the “with-ness” of God into their lives. The Spirit is with you, we will come and make our home in you, you will never be alone again. That’s identity 101 — that’s sonship.
That’s what’s on offer in God’s kingdom, not just for unbelievers, but especially for Christians — that’s a radical thing for us to actually hear and walk in. How would your life change if that were true, and you were living that way?
Daron Earlewine: Hey, sorry for the interruption in the podcast, but I wanted to take this moment to invite you into something. If you’ve ever felt stuck, like you’re just spinning your wheels, thinking there’s got to be more for me — you hear me talk about “on purpose and for purpose” all the time. I have to discover my purpose. That feeling is right. And I want to be a guide for you to step into who God created you to be — that’s the purpose behind what we do at Rogue Collective Coaching. If you’re curious — or if you know it’s time to take action — here’s your call to action. Go to RogueCollectiveCoaching.com, click “Book a Discovery Call,” jump on a thirty-minute conversation with me. We’ll talk about where you are, and whether Rogue Collective Coaching is your next step to becoming who you were born to be. RogueCollectiveCoaching.com — book a discovery call. Can’t wait to chat with you. Let’s get back to the episode.
So Chris, you start to crack the veil in that trip to Jordan. You go back to Baghdad, I assume, and begin learning to live into this fullness of identity. I’m guessing that wasn’t an overnight thing — that was walking for years into it. As you started getting your feet under you, what are ways that showed up and changed how you began to operate — how you began to actually love your enemies? How did that practically play out?
Chris Hantla: Yeah, that’s a fun question. The very first lesson I had to learn was this: Jesus speaks identity to me, and then says, come and follow me and I’ll show you how to do this. It’s not left up to me to figure out how to become the bearer of Christ — come follow me, and I will show you.
As it happened, the organization decided they weren’t sending us back to Baghdad — too dangerous at that point — so we ended up settling in Jordan, and I received amazing discipleship and training from the Winships and another guy named Dave McCollum, who’d spent thirty-five years in the Muslim world. He trained our team and gave us tools. I didn’t immediately make the switch to knowing how to do this — that’s what discipleship is, the process of becoming. I think of it like Mount Sinai: the Israelites heard their identity, and then had to spend years learning how to actually become God’s treasured people, his kingdom of priests to the nations. God had to get Egypt out of them and get the kingdom into them so they could step into the promised land. That’s the wilderness process of discipleship.
For me, that looked like: okay, I’m the Christ-bearer, and God wants to build Christlike character in me. I’m receiving this great training — here’s how to talk to Muslims about faith in a way that isn’t offensive, here’s how to address what they believe wrongly about what we believe. I took those tools out into shops around Amman, but my mindset was still conquering, still winning arguments. I remember going into a watch shop at Mecca Mall — one of the beautiful things about Muslims is how spiritual and religious their worldview is; almost the first question they ask you is, what do you believe, are you Christian, are you Muslim. For us those are taboo conversations; for them it’s one of the first questions. So we got into it, and I was using these tools I’d learned, but from the wrong heart — not as Christ-bearer, but as missionary, trying to convert these guys. And it was working — I was explaining the Trinity in a way that made sense to them, we got through Jesus’s death, which they believe was an exchange at the cross — and I felt really good about myself. This is working.
The family that owned the shop — a dad and two sons — invited me to come to their house and keep talking. I went back to my team, and I’d just started dating a girl on our team who’s now my wife, and I was bragging. Here’s what I just did, look how successful that was, these tools are working. My wife had grown up in the Middle East and didn’t have the same hangups I did — she genuinely loved people, loved Muslim people in particular. As I was bragging, she saw through it and stopped me. “Chris, do you even love these people?” I went silent. It was one of those moments where someone says something and God is speaking through it — not condemnation, just, “This isn’t what I asked you to do, son. This is you thinking about how you’ll tell your church back home how good a missionary you were — the ego in that, and the falseness in it. I called you to love them. Not beat them, not conquer them, not argue them out of their position — you have to be changed first.”
I told her, “You’re right. This is total arrogance. Pure ego. I don’t love these people. I don’t know how to love them. I’m afraid of them — if we can win them, then they’re on our team, and I don’t have to be afraid of them anymore.” That’s what was happening in me. So I spent the next week asking God to purify that part of me — help me love these people I do not love.
The Lord answered that prayer, and brought along a guy named Nesmi — a Palestinian-Jordanian, a great soccer player. I’d play soccer at the local fields and met him there, and we became close fast. From day one his heart was, “I want to know God.” I said, that’s my heart too. He became not someone I needed to win to Jesus, but a brother. Through him I began to see the Muslim world not through the lens of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, but through Nesmi — who was nothing like that. We began walking toward the kingdom together, and God used him to teach me how to love the people I’d been afraid of. I’d go to his home, meet his mom, his brothers and sisters — they were so hospitable and kind. It changed the way I viewed and loved this people who’d formerly been my enemies. That wasn’t overnight — it was a process. But when we discover our identity and walk closely with Jesus, he walks us into the truth of who we are. I began to repent of and change the way I thought about Muslims — walking away from fear, hatred, self-protection, the “we’ve got to win them or kill them” strategy — realizing that was fear and brokenness in my own heart to deal with first, and then God gives really creative solutions for what to actually do.
Nesmi eventually came to faith too, but by that point it wasn’t even about that for me — God was teaching me to become the light on the hill, a little Christ in the world, so that people are drawn to the Christ in you, not to a better argument. That’s never how people actually come to faith or change.
Years later I asked Nesmi what convinced him, what changed his thinking about Jesus. He said, “It was your team, how you guys loved me. I experienced a kind of belonging and love I’d never experienced before, and you guys knew God — that’s what I wanted, to know God in that same way.” From the time he was fourteen, he’d had a dream where he sat at a table with a stranger who said, “I want you to know God.” He woke up, went to his imam, said “I want to know God,” and they had no idea what to do with that — “we obey God, we obey the rules, that’s the thing.” He said, “That’s not what this voice is calling me to — he wants me to know him.” He experienced God and love in our community, and that’s what led him to keep moving toward Jesus, because he experienced something true and real that every human wants.
Daron Earlewine: Wow, Chris. I would sit here with you for the next three hours just hearing stories, but I want to be respectful of your time. I feel like there’s somebody watching or listening right now whose brain — and soul — is just exploding with, “yes, yes.” What’s a simple first step or two for someone who says, “I want to know God like this — I want to begin this journey”?
Chris Hantla: Yeah. It starts with just hearing God’s voice — knowing that he wants to speak to you. He does speak; he’s still the God who speaks, that hasn’t stopped. Closely tied to that is the question a lot of us misunderstand or get wonky about: what does he want to speak to us about? Simply put — he wants to speak to you about all the lies you’re currently believing about him, about yourself, about how the world works. As he exposes those, you can just tell the truth about it: “Yeah, that’s actually what my heart believes — I believe God is disappointed in me, I believe I’m a disappointment, because of my past, whatever it is.”
So you can take a second — it doesn’t have to be long — and ask, what comes up in my heart right now? What am I deeply afraid of? Let it surface. Remember, those feelings are a dashboard telling you something’s going on under the hood. So start with a simple question: what’s deeply concerning to me right now, what am I afraid of, what am I anxious about? Let that first thought or feeling come up, and ask God, what’s the message attached to this? Maybe a thought flashes through your mind — I’m afraid I’m not enough, I’m afraid I’m all alone. Whatever comes up, tell the truth about it. Don’t push it down, don’t “Bible-verse” it away — let your heart speak, and confess it honestly. “God, I actually believe I’m all alone, even though your scriptures say I’m never alone — but I act like it’s all up to me.” When you tell the truth, God, who is the God of truth, can speak truth back to you.
Then ask Jesus to show himself — just a picture of his presence with you, a sense of his nearness. You don’t have to see him clearly, or picture him next to you — let him give you a sense of his presence. Then ask him, “God, this is what I’m believing about myself or about you, and it’s producing fear and striving and negative fruit in my life — what do you want me to know?” Trust the first thought that comes: it might be as simple as, “Son, you just need to know that I love you,” or “Daughter, you’re mine, I delight in you.” It’s going to go against the grain of how you’ve always thought, so it’ll be easy to dismiss — “that’s just what I want to hear, that’s just me.” But it actually requires faith to believe it. We agree so quickly with what the enemy says about us — you’re no good, you’re worthless, you’re alone, you’re not enough. But it takes faith to believe: you’re loved, you’re not alone.
Then ask, what’s one thing today I can do to begin incorporating this into the truth of who I am? Maybe it’s simply receiving it — receiving that you’re loved, that you’re a treasure, a lost coin worth sweeping the whole house for, a pearl of great price he sold everything to possess. Write it down. Share it with someone you trust: “I heard this crazy podcast, and this guy said we could hear from God — here’s what I sensed, does this sound like what God sounds like?” This is what we do at Identity Exchange — these processes and listening-prayer exercises to learn how to listen, abide, and discern what God is saying, discovering the truth of our identity, and learning to live fearlessly in it. This is discipleship for anybody who wants it. It’s a joy to get to do this.
Daron Earlewine: Wow, Chris. Thank you for leading us through that — the beauty of it, the simplicity of it. It’s so powerful. If people have been listening to the podcast, they’re probably thinking, “this is all Daron talks about now” — and honestly, it basically is. I’m so grateful you joined us today, and I can’t wait for January to be with you guys in Phoenix, growing more in my own journey of learning to hear from Jesus and letting it transform my life. If somebody wanted to get connected with you guys, Chris, what’s the best way?
Chris Hantla: We have a website, identityexchange.com. There are some free listening-prayer exercises there — Jamie and Donna put together a twenty-part series of short teachings paired with listening exercises. Beyond that, I’d recommend a deeper level of discipleship: one-on-one coaching through something called the Becoming What You Believe experience — group work and content, daily exercises, because it is a practice. It’s not “I heard God” and you’re done — it’s a practice of learning and discernment, with guides in the process, which is necessary. Donna and Jamie have been my guides in this for a long time. We get to coach people through that experience. Jamie’s also written two books — Living Fearless, full of incredible stories with these principles woven through, and exercises for listening. And he just released a new one called The War of Worldviews, about that separation-versus-connection worldview. Both are deeply transformational.
Daron Earlewine: I love that there’s free content on the site people can dive into. And Chris, as you were talking, I felt led to say — there is a financial investment to go through the Becoming What You Believe course, and I don’t think we’ve ever done this on the podcast, Coop, but I want to scholarship somebody through it. So, to make it fair — whenever this episode comes out, the first person who emails me at daronearlewine.com and says “I want to go through the course,” I’ll scholarship you to go through it. Is this our first scholarship ever, live on the podcast, Coop?
Coop: I’m trying to listen to the Lord, and I think he said give away a scholarship — so I’m going to do it.
Daron Earlewine: So, first person to email me when this episode comes out, if you want to go through the course, whoever I hear from first, I’ll email you back and we’ll scholarship you through it. Chris, I loved it.
Chris Hantla: Can I follow up on that? You sure can — that’s awesome, thank you for doing that. Because there is a financial investment. What prevents people from actually stepping into this is fear — fear of scarcity, that there’s not enough. One of the first lessons the Israelites had to learn, and one of the first lessons we all have to learn, is that if God is inviting you to move forward into something, he’s also saying, “I’m going to be responsible for the provision.” So just ask him, how? Maybe you get to be the first person to get the scholarship — but if you’re not, don’t let that be a barrier. Ask the Lord, “Are you inviting me into this? And if so, how do you want to pay for this?” Whatever comes to mind — maybe it’s already in your savings, just make the investment. Or maybe, and this happens a lot, someone’s going to be moved to send you a check — I’m not kidding, it happens all the time. Or maybe the Lord’s just asking you to invest by faith. That’s the first lesson of walking in the kingdom: I’m going to provide for you. So test him on it — and I mean that in the right way.
He invited my wife and me to go to graduate school. I told him, we plan on living overseas for years, and I don’t want to carry a ton of debt — but God, I feel your invitation into this, so will you make a way for us to finish debt-free? That’s a whole other story for another podcast — but he did. My wife and I both graduated debt-free because the Lord provided in incredible ways. I’m not saying this as a health-and-wealth gospel thing — I’m saying, if God’s inviting you into something, ask him the next question: how do you want to pay for it, how do you want to provide for it?
Daron Earlewine: Love it. That’s it. Chris, thank you so much, man — it’s been an absolute blessing. Instantly one of my favorite episodes recorded, so I appreciate it. And I hope you’ve enjoyed it — we’d love to hear your feedback. You can always email me, Daron, at daronearlewine.com. And until we talk again, remember these three things: God is for you, he’s not against you. He is near you, not far away. And he has created you on purpose and for purpose. Thanks for downloading this episode of the Daron Earlewine Podcast.