Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (11 page)

Always point to success
. There will always be people pointing in the other direction, aiming you toward failure. But keep your eyes focused on success.

Daily review your plan
. Check your position every day. The giants move around on the hillside, and what you did yesterday to kill the giant may not work today.

Let’s go on to the fourth stone we have to pick up if we’re going to kill the giants in our lives: consider your Christ. David didn’t charge up that hill all by himself. He considered his Christ.

Then the Philistine came on and approached David, with the shield-bearer in front of him. When the Philistine looked and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, and ruddy, with a handsome appearance. The Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine also said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field.” (1 Sam. 17:41–44)

That is an example of positive thinking. Goliath said, “Come here, I want to make mincemeat out of you.” But there’s a difference between positive thinking and positive faith, and in verse 45 we see positive faith.

Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the L
ORD
of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have taunted. This day the L
ORD
will deliver you up into my hands, and I will strike you down and remove your head from you. And I will give the dead bodies of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the L
ORD
does not deliver by sword or by spear; for the battle is the L
ORD
’s and He will give you into our hands.” (vv. 45–47)

That’s the difference between positive thinking and positive faith. Paul made that great statement, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). This verse includes four positive things. The “I can” is the positive thinking. When Paul goes on to say, “I can do,” that’s positive action. If your positive thinking is right, it will result in positive action. When he says, “I can do all things,” that’s positive faith. A less confident person would have said, “I can do some things,” but Paul believes he can do all things. He also had positive power. “I can do all things through Him,” meaning Christ. When we measure our possibilities, we should do so not by what we see in ourselves, but by what we see of God in us. Our God “is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us” (Eph. 3:20). We cannot even imagine what God wants to do in our lives.

If you want to be effective, charge your challenge. Go get it! David seized his chance to get into action.

Then it happened when the Philistine rose and came and drew near to meet David, that David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand into his bag and took from it a stone and slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead. And the stone sank into his forehead, so that he fell on his face to the ground. Thus David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, and he struck the Philistine and killed him; but there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and killed him, and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. The men of Israel and Judah arose and shouted and pursued the Philistines. (1 Sam. 17:48–52)

I consider that last verse to be the key to the whole story. The reason we need to kill the giants in our lives is this: Those whom we lead will never kill the giants in their lives until we first kill the giants in our lives. When did the people shout? When did they charge? They did it after David had killed the giant. When leaders fail to conquer their own problems, their followers never become victorious. This is the number-one problem in leadership in the country. There are too many people in leadership positions who are not successful because they’re not facing problems headon. If they are unwilling to confront their giants, if they are not overcomers, neither will their followers be. When the leader fails, the people fail. When the leader fears, the people fear.

All over the country, I see congregations trying to survive in the midst of major problems because they don’t know how to deal with them. They don’t know how to knock off a giant because they’ve never seen their pastors do it. Think of how we would release our people if we become giant killers. Imagine what that would do to their faith. The number-one problem in the church is that we’re not seeing miracles; we’re not seeing God do his work. We think of miracles as history, and we think of victory as history. We ought to pray that God will give us a seemingly insurmountable barrier so that our people can see the power of God at work in us to defeat our giants.

My first church was in a rural area of Indiana. We decided we wanted to have three hundred people in our Sunday School. One sincere member of that congregation, Mike, was convinced it couldn’t be done. One Sunday he stood up right in the morning service and said, “Pastor, we can’t do that.” Mike had a sincere heart, a loving, wonderful pure gold heart, but he didn’t have an expanded mind. I remember looking at him and smiling, and saying, “Mike, if we do it, will you stand up and apologize and tell this congregation you’ll never think small again?” It was kind of a brash thing for a twenty-four-year-old kid to say, but it didn’t offend Mike; he said he would. The day we had 301 in Sunday School, Mike stood up, tears streaming down his face, and he told the whole congregation, “I’ll never think small again.”

I did something for Mike that day. It was great to have 301 in Sunday School; but for Mike it was greater to have the lid taken off his thinking. One of his giants had been slain.

In 1954, there were medical articles that said that the human body can’t run a four-minute mile. They said that physically the body was not able to withstand that much pressure. And then what happened? In 1954, Roger Bannister, a young medical student, went out and ran a mile in under four minutes. Today, any miler that’s going to have any kind of national recognition runs a mile in less than four minutes. Between 1954 and 1956, 213 men ran under four minutes, all because one guy broke the barrier.

In the 1900 Olympics, Irving Baxter high jumped 6'2". People said the impossible barrier was seven feet—no one would ever jump over seven feet. Then a guy by the name of Fosbury figured out that high jumpers were jumping the wrong way over the bar; they shouldn’t go over feetfirst; they should go over headfirst backward. Everyone else laughed and ridiculed while he worked on an unorthodox way to jump over the high bar. Critics dubbed his method “the Fosbury flop”—but he “flopped” over seven feet. Recently an East German jumped 7'8 3/4".

Back in 1956, fifteen feet was thought to be the limit for a good pole vault. Then someone discovered that a fiberglass pole gave a little higher lift than the conventional pole. Now a Polish athlete has pole-vaulted 18' 11 3/4". Nineteen feet will be the next record, and perhaps sometime down the road, twenty feet. Why? Because somebody broke the record. A giant was killed, so everybody else decided to charge. That’s what can happen every day in your life. No matter what your ministry is, the moment you begin to know those giants are down, people will say, “We can do that too!” And off they’ll go. It gives them permission; it gives them confidence.

What are some lessons we’ve learned from David’s encounter with Goliath?

We fail, not because of big problems, but because of small purposes
. Our failures are not caused by giants. Goliaths don’t defeat us; small purposes defeat us.

We usually have to charge Goliaths by ourselves
. Don’t expect a whole crowd of people to gather around you, waving banners and patting you on the back. Whoever steps out first will step out alone.

Small successes lead to greater successes
. Begin to have some victories over small things in your life. Make every day a victory over something, and build a track record of success.

Success for most people comes after someone else has done the impossible
. Success for the army of Israel came after David defeated the giant. Help someone else be a success—knock off a giant. Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

What would you say you have learned from David and Goliath? What have you picked up that may help make a difference as you face giants in your life? Take a few minutes to consider what you’ve learned—then go meet your giants!

chapter 6

SEE IT, SAY IT, SEIZE IT

T
HERE ARE THREE LEVELS OF LIVING
. F
IRST IS
the see-it level, which is the bottom level. Anybody can live on this level. Everybody has the opportunity to see. Now when I say “see-it,” I’m not talking about visual acuity; I’m talking about faith’s opportunity. Some of us are visually acute; but blind to opportunity.

In my church in Ohio, there was a fellow who was a great hunter. We sometimes drove together to Columbus, a twenty-five-mile freeway ride. As we drove, he would say things like, “Did you see that groundhog?” No, I didn’t see that groundhog. “Did you see that rabbit?” I didn’t see the rabbit. “Did you see that duck?” I didn’t see the duck either. We’d drive all the way to Columbus, and he’d see about ten animals and all I would see was the freeway. All those animals were in my range of vision, but I didn’t see them because I had not been trained to look for them. The see-it level of living is faith’s opportunity. We can all be looking from the same spot and not see the same thing.

The second level is the say-it level, and that’s what I call faith’s word. To see it is the opportunity for faith; to say it is the word of faith. That is where we begin to commit ourselves verbally to what has gripped our vision. The Bible is full of say-it faith. The Word of God teaches us, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord … you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9).

Then comes the seize-it level of living. This is the level at which faith becomes action. It’s more than verbiage, and it’s more than vision—it’s a vital action within our hearts and lives.

Since everyone starts on level one, the see-it level, we all have the opportunity to grab hold of faith’s opportunity. As you climb the steps, however, fewer and fewer people climb with you. When you get to the seize-it stage, the action stage, you will find yourself in an elite group; most people never climb this high. They have missed faith’s opportunity and life’s action.

There is an example in the Bible of a person who reached the seize-it level, and his name is Caleb. When we pick up Caleb’s story, it is forty-five years after he spied out the land of Canaan, bringing back a good report. Now the Israelites are in the process of taking the land for their own. In Joshua 14, Caleb is talking to the elders, those in leadership. “I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the L
ORD
sent me from Kadesh-barnea to spy out the land” (v. 7). That’s the see-it stage; he has seen the land. Caleb goes on, “I brought word back to him as it was in my heart” (v. 7). That’s the say-it stage.

The vision began to seize him. It not only got into his head through his eyes, but it got into his heart. He began to feel what he had seen. “Give me this hill country about which the L
ORD
spoke on that day, for you heard on that day that Anakim were there, with great fortified cities; perhaps the L
ORD
will be with me, and I will drive them out” (v. 12). Joshua, having seen Caleb’s commitment to the vision forty-five years earlier, gave Caleb the land: Caleb seized what he said he saw. Caleb is not alone in the pages of Scripture. I have found that most great men of God went through these three stages before their visions became realities.