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August 3 - August 9, 2022
Go after a dream that is destined to fail without divine intervention.
Live for the applause of nail-scarred hands.
if your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s too small.
When everything is said and done, God isn’t going to say, “Well said,” “Well thought,” or “Well planned.” There is one measuring stick: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”5
Unless God does it, it can’t be done! And that is precisely how God gets the glory. He does things we can’t do so we can’t take credit for them.
A God-sized dream will always be beyond your ability, beyond your resources. Unless God does it, it cannot be done! But that’s how God gets the glory.
let go of mistakes you made three seconds ago.
What we perceive as positive sometimes turns out to have negative side effects, and what we perceive as negative often turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to us.
Mismanaged success is the leading cause of failure. Well-managed failure is the leading cause of success.
The seeds of your dreams are often buried in your memory,
over time your favorite scripture becomes the script of your life. The promises of God become the plot line of your life. And the more you rehearse those lines, the more you get into character—the character of Christ. Your life becomes a unique interpretation of that life verse. For Wilson Bentley it was Job 38:22. For me it’s 2 Samuel 23:20. What verse is your life exegeting, interpreting, translating?
Don’t underestimate the power of one compliment.
Every God-sized dream has a genesis—a God-ordained opportunity, a God-given passion. But at some point you need to raise your spear of faith. That’s how the door opens and lets the future in.
some of God’s best premoves are closed doors.
Someday you may thank God for the closed doors even more than the open doors!
“Sometimes the greatest opposition to what God wants to do next,” said R. T. Kendall, “comes from those who were on the cutting edge of what God did last.”20
you keep doing the right things day in and day out, look out. Somehow, someway, someday, God is going to show up and show off.
God-ordained dreams often go through a death and resurrection. Only when the dream is dead and buried can it be resurrected for God’s glory.
More often than not, what we perceive as a no is really a not yet.
Sometimes God will put a dream in your heart that is actually for someone else to accomplish.
Sometimes you need to stop praying for something and start praising God as if it has already happened. Isn’t that what the Israelites did when they marched around Jericho? God didn’t say, “I will deliver it into your hands”—future tense. He said, “I have delivered it”—present perfect tense. In other words, it had already been accomplished in the spiritual realm. All they had to do was circle Jericho until God delivered on His promise.
If Noah would build the ark, God would send the animals two by two.5 If Elisha would dig ditches in the desert, God would flood them.6 If the widow would borrow empty jars, God would fill them with oil.7
If you want to experience God’s miraculous provision, you have to attempt something that is beyond your resources. It might not add up, but God can make it multiply just as it did in a field of dreams filled with five thousand hungry souls two thousand years ago.
Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A thousand years before the birth of Christ, it was the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. And a thousand years before that, it was the site on Mount Moriah where God provided a ram in the thicket for Father Abraham.4 Those events are separated by thousands of years, but they are connected by geography and theology. At the very place where God provided a ram to take Isaac’s place, God would provide the Lamb of God to take our place. One event foreshadowed the other by thousands of years.
an opportunity isn’t an opportunity if you have to compromise your integrity.
Killing Goliath was an epic act of bravery. Not killing Saul was an epic act of integrity.
Joshua 3:5: “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you.”
What if the life you really want, and the future God wants for you, is hiding right now in your biggest problem, your worst failure, your greatest fear?
If you aren’t willing to throw down your staff, you forfeit the miracle that is at your fingertips. You have to be willing to let go of an old identity in order to take on a new identity….
Before you take a step of faith, get the facts. Dumb doesn’t honor God. Due diligence does.
Faith doesn’t ignore facts, but it doesn’t ignore God either. It confronts the brutal facts with unwavering faith.4 It carefully counts the cost, and then it adds almighty God into the final equation.
At the end of our lives, our greatest regrets won’t be the mistakes we made. It’ll be the opportunities we left on the table.
Our greatest regret at the end of our lives will be the lions we didn’t chase.
When you stop building altars to God and start building monuments to yourself, it’s the beginning of the end.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred Adler proposed the counterintuitive theory of compensation. Adler believed that perceived disadvantages often prove to be well-disguised advantages because they force us to develop attitudes and abilities that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. It’s only as we compensate for those disadvantages that we discover our greatest gifts.4 Seventy percent of the art students Adler studied had optical anomalies. He observed that some of history’s greatest composers, Mozart and Beethoven among them, had degenerative traces in their ears. And he cited
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I thought my inability to speak extemporaneously was a preaching handicap, but it proved to be a writing advantage. Those sermon manuscripts, after some adaptations and alterations, would become book manuscripts. And without that perceived disadvantage, I doubt I would have cultivated my writing gifts. Writing, for me, is a compensatory skill.
When it comes to difficult circumstances, you have two choices. You can complain about them, or you can make the most of them. Whether those circumstances are self-inflicted or the result of someone else’s actions, lion chasers make the most of them.
Sometimes the circumstances we’re trying to change are the very circumstances God is using to change us. We ask God to change those circumstances, but God says, “No, I’m using those circumstances to change you!” Instead of expending all your energy trying to get out of them, get something out of them. In other words, learn the lesson God is trying to teach you.
Chasing a dream often starts with identifying and confessing your excuses.
You cannot finish what you do not start.
“I was living in delayed obedience,”
give God an hour a day every day. It might mean getting up an hour earlier or staying up an hour later, but that’s how dreams become reality.
Are you called to write? If the answer is no, don’t waste your time. If the answer is yes, then anything less is disobedience.
Write for an audience of One. Write as an act of obedience.
you cannot finish what you do not start.
I prescribe Ecclesiastes 11:4 once a day for seven days, and it must be taken with meditation. Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks to the clouds will not reap.
Henry James once wrote a story titled “The Madonna of the Future.” It’s a fictional account of an artist who devoted her entire life to a single painting. When the artist died, it was discovered that the canvas was blank. She never finished because she never started, and she never started because of perfectionism.
Delayed obedience is disobedience.
Generally speaking, we see only what we’re looking for. If you’re looking for excuses, you will always find one. But the same is true for opportunities. If you look for them, you’ll find them all around you all the time—even
what the Enemy means for evil, God uses for our good and for His glory.
