Ken,

The Christ Quest Institute with you and Tim leading us has helped me experience God’s perspective on how I can be more Christ-like with my emotional connections to God, my wife, and others.  Thank you!

Dan P., Idaho

Dear Ken,

I love the wonderful new level of grace and insight our Lord has blessed me with as a result of my time in the Christ Quest Institute and the corner I’ve turned as I’ve applied its teachings.

It’s as though God has flipped some divine spiritual switch in me wherein, I’m finally gaining the revelation of how quickly and deeply my twisted flesh will seek its own way. One thing is for certain, through the Christ Quest Institute, you and Tim have showed me how to apply Christ-likeness, and that has changed my life forever!

Today, my life and thus my marriage are now a living witness of the power God has given me to single-handedly heal my marriage. Indeed, the way I think, act, and respond to life has completely changed since attending the Institute.

One of the things that impressed me about those who attended the Christ Quest Institute was the way their wives genuinely looked admiringly at their husbands. I had never seen anything like that before. I deeply desired that, but within me was the false understanding that my wife was the problem who needed to change. Now I know that nothing could be further from the truth.

My whole marriage is now ten-times better. Now I long to be with my wife. Moreover, there’s now peace in my home, and the only thing that needed to change was me! Now, my wife looks at me the same way I saw other wives look at their husbands who attended the Christ Quest Institute, and it happens spontaneously in response to the Christ-likeness in me.

A Tennessee Husband

On Friday, September 13, 1959, Nancy and I were married. That was a year after we met and during that time, I realized that Nancy was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. I remember standing on the stage, watching her and her dad walk down the aisle, with a huge smile on my face because I was overjoyed that she was about to become Mrs. Ken Nair.

Please remember, growing up in orphanages, for the first fourteen years I only saw adults who were single, no married couples, no families, which resulted in having no recognition of what a husband or wife were, what a mother or father were, nor what a family was.

Still, because of God’s love — His design for my life was on track when I married Nancy. Part of that being on track was revealed after thirteen years of marriage (where I believed I was an example of what I had been taught was a good Christian husband), as Nancy had been spiritually wounded enough that she was done with me.

That forced me to look for answers. So, God used her to motivate me to read His Bible (His Manual for life) from cover-to-cover. That brought me to a place where my goal is: that every encounter Nancy has with me, is to her, as though it were an encounter with the Christ. The results: here we are celebrating our 65th Anniversary.  

Of course I had to make a card for her.

I tell people I’m 60 years old with 88 years of experience which means I only have 32 more years to spend with her. Time sure flies.

God and Emotions

Because God created every emotion and named each one, can that motivate you to consider the extreme importance that God places on emotions? Can you imagine a big smile on His face, or tears running down His face, due to Him being fully, emotionally functional?

Here’s an interesting fact: Each person is designed by God so that after experiencing severe physical damage, that’s incredibly painful (even though we can remember that physical damaging incident), we cannot re-experience the physical pain.

And yet, when a person, who is emotionally functional, experiences a specific emotional event — any time a similar circumstance take place — not only can it be remembered, it will be emotionally re-experienced. That’s because God has designed us with that capacity — we’re able to re-experience emotional pain.

Although I tell people I’m only 60 years old with 88 years of experience, during those 88 years, I’ve unfortunately heard men in positions of “spiritual” leadership say that emotions are not trustworthy; that women have too many (Yeah right! Somebody ought to tell poor ole God that He gave women too many!) I’ve even heard some of those “spiritual” men report that emotions are evil — even of Satan. Really? Would that include the emotion of love?

Those types of conclusions by men definitely validate that they do not understand God’s purposes in creating emotions.

Here’s another thing that must grieve the heart of God — too many men have sufficiently chided women and thereby convinced them (along with other men) to judge their emotions as negative and wrong — certainly not of God. Therein, women are found rejecting their own superior, God-given, emotional capacity, because they’ve accepted men’s opinions of women’s emotions, rather than God’s.

Nor do men seem aware of the extensive use of emotional words by God in the Scriptures. Here’s what I mean, in the Amplified Version of the Bible, in II Corinthians 7, there are over a hundred emotional words in that one chapter alone.

Then too, since God (Who is Spirit) demands that a husband understand his wife — and the type of understanding that God’s emphasizing (and requiring a husband develop) is not physical, nor is it mental understanding — but spiritual understanding. God’s talking about understanding her spirit — like Jesus would.

That’s just one example of what we want to accomplish as we disciple men/husbands through our ministry and specifically in the Christ Quest Institute.