Your Hidden Potential

Has life become so filled with efforts to cover every financial contingency, to realize one's full earthly potential, and finally to retire comfortably, that without realizing it we are finding our hope in this world rather than in God?  Dave Hunt

In one of my previous devotionals I told you the story of a former boss of mine who, after turning in my resignation, told me I would never amount to anything.  At the time I was an impressionable college student and a people pleaser, so this was devastating to me. Looking back on that early experience, I can now see that this was the first step in me learning my hidden potential. 

Too many times in life we take others opinions of us and we accept them as truth.  If we look at it from a godly viewpoint, God is the only one who really knows our potential.  He created us so how could He not know what we are capable of. 

If you have ever had someone tell you that you will never amount to anything, or you are worthless you understand what I am saying.  The person who tells you that will never know what your potential is and often there is a hidden agenda behind that person’s words. 

Using the example I listed above, I can now see the hidden agenda behind my former bosses’ words.  She was angry because she had paid for me to go to training for merchandising the store where I worked.  I made a decision to do my internship at another store because the experience would be better for my degree.

 

God knows what our true potential is and he wants us to reach it.  We can strive all our lives for our earthly potential or God’s potential. How do we unlock God’s potential in our lives?

Studying God’s Word is the place to start. But all the reading and studying of His Word is not going to do us a bit of good if we don’t apply it to our life.  If I don’t live it then this amazing resource is wasted on identifying my hidden God-given potential.  God will reveal to us everything we need to know. 

One of the most interesting questions in the Bible comes from Matthew 13:10.  The disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables. The most profound statement is when Jesus replies, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.  For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.  Matthew 13:10-13 

      

If we don’t have God in the form of the Holy Spirit living in us, we will never reach our full God-given potential.  We will never reach that goal if we don’t study the Bible, meditate on it and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to us through it.

Prayer for the Day: Heavenly Father, I can’t even begin to imagine what my true potential is unless I spend time with You in Your Word.  If I am more worried about my worldly potential I will never allow the Holy Spirit to reveal to me what God’s purpose is in my life.  Open my eyes and ears to see and hear so that I may reach my God-given potential.       

Scripture: But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.

These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.