Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

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Reach Your Potential By Playing The Long Game

Reach Your Potential By Playing The Long Game

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In chess, the pawn is the weakest piece. However, if you stop your understanding of the pawn there, you’ll miss that the pawn also has the most potential of all the pieces. If it reaches the other side of the board, it becomes more powerful because you can upgrade it to any piece you want.

God Wants You To Reach Your Potential

You might think you’re only a pawn, but God sees your full potential. When you are born again, you are upgraded to a new creation that permanently holds God’s Holy Spirit.

Even then, God has more in store for you.

Life isn’t a game. I’m not suggesting you play games with your life. But life is all about growth. Playing the long game means investing the effort to achieve maximum results. There isn’t a more fulfilling way to live even though most of the time this requires sacrificing short-term rewards.

Sacrifice Immediate Rewards To Reach Your Potential

Jesus gave up His earthly life to secure an everlasting victory over death. His life was short but long on results. He achieved such outstanding results because He followed the Father’s plan. He fulfilled His destiny.

You, too, have a clearly defined destiny. Have you invested the time to learn what it is? You can’t play the long game without it. You can expect to spend your whole life in preparation for the next moment of your life. God wants you to know your identity as a created masterpiece and walk in good works. The more you know your identity, the more you know your destiny.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

—Ephesians 2:10

God made you for a specific purpose. Who you are is enough to fulfill your purpose. You have all you need to reach your potential. But you must seek and discover to reach your potential.

To accomplish this, you have to be sure you don’t become distracted away from God’s higher plans. As you become more, you’ll be able to accomplish more. But, if you don’t invest in growth, you delay reaching your potential. What are some examples of distraction traps?

  • Spending on material gain when you could be investing in spreading God’s kingdom.
  • Elevating entertainment above the hard work of spiritual and emotional growth.
  • Living an imbalanced life by working your job most of the time.

Care For Others To Reach Your Potential

The long-game player focuses on whatever it takes to cross the finish line. Sometimes this means prioritizing the immediate to achieve maximum impact. Jesus spent time healing people who eventually died. At first glance, this seems like a waste of time. He did it anyway because He cares. He showed us the Father’s heart.

Whatever you do while motivated by God’s love is never a waste of time. Focusing on the end-results shouldn’t prevent you from doing what is right in the moment. You just want to make sure that what you are about to do doesn’t sabotage your ability to finish the race.

Jesus never allowed any short-term gain to delay, diminish, or deter Him from God’s long-term plans. God’s long-term plans are non-negotiable, but He is flexible with immediate events. After all, it’s taking each step that moves you closer to the finish.

You can’t play the long game without faith. God always sees the end—the infinite future. Because you can’t see that far, you must trust His vision. You can, however, see far enough to take the next step.

More About Potential and Some More
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Use Your Potential or You Might Lose It

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One of Aesop’s Fables, The Miser and His Gold, demonstrates that without God, the fear of not having enough is strong.

Once upon a time there was a Miser who buried his gold near a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and left town with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair and raised such an outcry that all the neighbors came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold.

“Did you ever take any of it out?” asked one of them.

“No,” said he, “I only came to look at it.”

“Then come again and look at the hole,” said a neighbor; “it will do you just as much good.”

Wealth unused might as well not exist.

The Miser lives a stagnant, distracted life and remains empty despite having a treasure. He is mesmerized by his treasure but he only has the illusion of fullness. He has the wrong focus: external and worldly. He clings to the vain and empty. He feels anxious because he uses creation the wrong way.

Using the visible to attempt to fill the spiritual doesn’t work.

The Miser expects security from wealth when God didn’t make money for this purpose (1 Timothy 6:10). Using something the wrong way is expecting more from it that it is capable of delivering. If you put too much strain on a shovel, it will break. Or, if you put too much weight in an elevator, the cable snaps. If you expect too much from a friend, you might lose your friend.

Another story, the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30), demonstrates that without a Confident Identity you can’t please God. In the parable, the master gives his servants talents (money) according to their ability. Two of the servants multiply their God-given resources. The master showers them with equal praise, independent of their ability. But, the master condemns the lazy servant who doesn’t attempt to use his ability. He lacks initiative because he focuses on his fear of failure. He is unable to perform because he doesn’t feel secure in his identity.

Why doesn’t the servant feel secure enough to invest? He probably didn’t take the time to pursue learning his identity with the help of others’ encouragement. The lesson for the servant might be potential that you never use might as well not exist. Those who completely avoid God out of fear demonstrate they don’t really know Him. God wants you to trust and invest. God wants you to activate what He’s given you. Your identity won’t do you any good unless you discover it and use it wisely.

Both the Miser and the lazy servant believe the wrong information about God and their own sense of self. Both are fear based and seek a false security. The Miser relies on a treasure instead of God. The servant would rather not try at all than to try and fail, even though to not try is the surest way to fail. Neither is willing to risk failure in order to live up to their potential. Both seek self-preservation apart from God.

As with many stories Jesus told in the Bible, the interpretation depends on your standing before God. When you’re in good standing already (meaning you’re a believer) the stories are meant to encourage and reassure. God wants to shower praise on you for your sincere efforts. For those who hate God and don’t know Him, the messages are extreme. They’re meant as a warning to encourage drastic action to put you in good standing.

Use it or you might lose it. Think of a gift or blessing God has given you. How can you use it today?

To Identity and Beyond cover
Man desiring to be powerful, looking to God for help.

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

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The quickest way to be powerful is to develop healthy doses of humility and confidence. If you lean too far in one direction then life becomes unbalanced and can lead to a world of hurt and trouble. But, healthy humility and confidence result in joy.

How does joy related to power? To answer this, I first want you to consider the following four possible combinations of humility and confidence:

  • Self-loathing: a false humility without much if any confidence means harmfully low self-worth. This person actively rejects the truth about who God is and who He made them to be.
  • Self-deprecating: a helpful amount of humility without enough confidence leads to questionable self-worth. This person is healthy when they have a lighthearted ability to laugh at their mistakes. However, their negative self-expression can also come from a poisoned self-image.
  • Self-confident: a helpful dose of humility and confidence means self-care without arrogance. This person lets God be God while also feeling good about who they are.
  • Self-absorbed: too little humility with too much confidence results in an inflated sense of importance. This person becomes overcompensates for their low self-worth by focusing too much on trying to feel powerful. Increasing focus on self becomes a dead-end at self-loathing. An unhealthy preoccupation with self misses out on what God has to offer.

People become self-absorbed when they look only within themselves to heal their brokenness. In futility, people try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the power that originates anywhere except from God promises only the illusion of confidence.

For example, if self becomes everything and God is minimized, then God isn’t in His rightful position in our lives. We’re not really going to succeed – maybe we’ll succeed with financially or something – but overall for God’s kingdom and his purposes we won’t be succeeding.

Be Humble So You Can Be Powerful

The world says you must be strong and independent to be powerful. But an “I can do it all by myself” attitude fails to activate God’s power.

Do you want to be full of your own power or full of God's power? You can be humble, confident, and full of God's power. Why settle for only what you can muster without God? Share on X

God says to be powerful, you must be weak enough to accept His help. A healthy weakness is a vulnerable dependence. Depending upon God activates His power.

Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.

2 Corinthians 12:9 NLT

Be Confident So You Can Be Powerful

If you focus too much on God, if that’s possible, and minimize yourself then you can develop self-loathing where you don’t feel like you’re much of anything. Self-loathing is simply another form of arrogance that blocks God out of your life.

God’s power isn’t going to shine through you then. You need to have a right view of yourself so that God’s power will rest on you and work through you.

Be Joyful So You Can Be Powerful

The joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10). How can you experience joy if you carry the heavy load of bitterness toward your own spirit?

Passively waiting for God to make you powerful doesn’t work. To be full of power, you must actively allow God to fill you, which also means keeping yourself empty of substitute fillings. Being filled with the Spirit means having great joy in God.

So be very careful how you live, not being like those with no understanding, but live honorably with true wisdom, for we are living in evil times. Take full advantage of every day as you spend your life for his purposes. And don’t live foolishly for then you will have discernment to fully understand God’s will. And don’t get drunk with wine, which is rebellion; instead be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 5:15-18 TPT

How Can We Be Powerful And Not Self-absorbed? How Can We Be Confident While Also Humble?

If we want to be powerful, we must be joyful. If we want to be joyful, we can’t live rebelliously independent from God. We must stop living with the habits of self-deprecation and self-absorption. The antidote for poisoning shame is to look to God for help.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.

Psalm 34:5 NLT

So we should go for everything. We should do all that we can – shoot from the moon so to speak – but also keep that in check by accepting whatever God provides or doesn’t provide in our lives.

He may have a different plan than the one on our minds, and it may take some time to figure out what that is, but it doesn’t mean we should just be sidelined and sitting back and waiting for something to happen either.

We should take the truths in the Bible that God has given us and run with them as best as we can. But ultimately it is up to God to author our success.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with Kidron Tirey.

Image by İbarihim Halil Uyğur from Pixabay

The 4 Steps to Growing a Fruitful Marriage

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You are probably thinking, “Awesome! Only four steps! I can be done next week.” But God made marriage to last a lifetime for a reason. The steps I am about to show you are real steps that we all go through at one time or another. But first, read Matthew 13:3-9.

Jesus uses the Parable of the Sower to speak about our receptivity to God’s words. Let’s consider how the parable also applies to marriage. The four types of soil in the parable match up with four types of relationships. From least to most desirable, these are Path, Rocks, Thorns, and Good Soil. The typical inexperienced couple begins as either Conflicted or Careless. Along the way, every couple experiences being Conflicted, Careless, and Choking before making it to Cooperating.

Ch01_Fruitful

The Conflicted Couple needs to learn how to experience a basic positive connection. The Careless Couple needs to experience and resolve conflict to build endurance. The Choking Couple needs to find a deeper enjoyment amidst the busyness of life. The Cooperating Couple needs to refine and maintain what they’ve accomplished so far.

As no person is perfect, no marriage is perfect. No matter which soil condition most closely describes your relationship, you can decide to grow a godly marriage by cultivating the path, clearing out the rocks, pulling out the thorns, and planting in the good soil. When you do this, you will be well on your way to yielding fruit one hundred times what was sown.

Is Your Identity Defined By What You Do?

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Identity can’t be defined by what you do. It’s the other way around: what you do flows out of who you are.

The two are correlated though. What you do provides clues about who you are. But you are always more than what you do. And, in the case of a mistake, one moment in life doesn’t have the power to immortalize you.

What do you helps you discover your identity, but it doesn’t create or define your identity.

At the moment you came into existence, you have your identity. It serves as a map like your DNA. Life experiences are like sonar waves going out to detect your identity. Even what you do can be like identifying waves. Sometimes those waves contain distortions and you might get the wrong impression of who you are.

Your self-image is your best estimate of who you are. Your self-image is a limited, distorted version of your true identity. You limp along in life to some degree because you don’t know what it’s like to be completely free from the distortions. You can’t know, at least not in this life.

You can change your self-image to move into alignment with your identity. But your identity is fixed and unchanging for all time. That should be reassuring. You’re not aiming for at a moving target. You can become more aware of who you are.

Your identity is defined by your creator. If you want to know who you are, you need to ask God. So in this sense, who you are is somewhat of a mystery. Only God knows your identity completely.

Some people try to wrest control of their identity from their creator. “I’ll define myself my own way apart from God. I’ll manipulate my physical appearance, my body, and maybe even my DNA.” But this is only a superficial change compared to the identity God created for you.

You can observe your identity by looking at how you react to life experiences. You can also define it based on the truth found in the Bible. For example:

  • You are made in God’s image (similar to God but different, like how women are similar to men but different). See Genesis 1:26–27
  • You are a spiritual being that God made with intention. See Genesis 2:7
  • You are created to accomplish great things. See Ephesians 2:10

And there are many other defining statements in the Bible. Some of the definitions apply to everyone (everyone is made in God’s image), and some apply only to those who have become believers in Jesus Christ (Christians have a renewed spiritual connection with God and experience His love in a more intimate way – see 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Romans 5:5).

Then there are the specifics that only apply to each individual. You are unique. No one else has the same combination of abilities and perspective on life. You see God in a way that others need to hear. Your voice and contributions are needed – otherwise, God wouldn’t have bothered to create you. You are significant.

To define the specifics, you can look at your:

  • physical appearance and athletic ability
  • sex (male or female)
  • cognitive and emotional patterns and preferences
  • personality patterns
  • spiritual gifting
  • work preferences

When you start to notice the patterns in all of these, you will have a stronger sense of your identity.

As you seek your identity, remember that you aren’t self-sustaining. You can’t keep yourself alive forever. You have a distorted self-image. You need to look beyond yourself to find your identity. You are defined by your context; God is where you came from, and if you’re a believer, God is where you will return.

How are you doing with discovering your true identity? What struggles or obstacles are preventing you from realizing all God made you to be?

I posted this answer on Quora for the questions: Is our identity defined by what we do? If not, what is it defined by? If you like my answer, upvote it on Quora.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Your Perception is Your Reality

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You’re swimming in the ocean. The sky is clear and blue. The sun is warm and bright. You see dozens of people playing in the water and countless more on the beach.

Your friends are near you. You’re talking about where you want to eat tonight. You’re relaxed and peaceful, except for your churning legs keeping you afloat.

The water is up to your neck. As far as you know, all is well. Except you don’t know what is lurking below the surface. Have you ever seen the movie, Jaws?

I chose this scene, not to discourage you from swimming, but to help you see the contrast between your awareness and ignorance at any given moment. Do you know what is lurking beneath the surface of your life?

Are you missing out on sunken treasure or are you about to be blindsided? When you consider only what is above the surface, you have an incomplete picture at best, and a false peace at worst.

God Has More for You

Your perception is your reality but it’s probably not God’s reality. God sees all; you see a little. God has more for you but you won’t be able to receive more than you’re capable of comprehending.

What you’re able to perceive is limited by your internal reality. You’re limited because you can’t yet see or accept the reality beyond your perception. You can’t accept more for one of the following reasons:

  1. You lack awareness or maturity.
  2. You lack faith or belief.
  3. You’re stuck in denial.

To remedy your blindness, something needs to change. You need new experiences, new eyes, or a new embrace.

New Experiences

If you lack awareness or maturity, you need new experiences to help you perceive more of God’s reality. You’ve done nothing wrong; you simply need to expand the number of tools in your toolbox. Seek to learn something every day.

Wisdom is with the aged,
and understanding in length of days.

Job 12:12

New Eyes

If you lack faith, you need to borrow God’s eyes so you can see more of His reality. Perhaps the busyness of life is distracting you from seeing the spiritual reality all around you. Ask God for faith so your eyes will be open.

When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. And when the Syrians came down against him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, “Please strike this people with blindness.” So he struck them with blindness in accordance with the prayer of Elisha.

2 Kings 6:15-18

New Embrace

If you’re stuck in denial, you need humility to embrace the reality in front of you. Pride and stubbornness limit your vision. Trust that God is on your side, even amidst the most difficult times.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4

In God’s reality, perceptions can be misleading. What you see isn’t what you’ll get. God’s grace is beyond comprehension.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
    his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
    and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
    and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
    they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
    they shall walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:28-31