Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (5 page)

This has to do with planning. It’s better to look ahead and prepare than look back and regret.

A passenger was talking to the captain of the
Queen Mary
during an ocean cruise, and he asked the captain, “How long would it take you before you could stop this vessel?” The captain said, “If I shut down all the engines, it would take me a little over a mile to get this vessel completely stopped.” He added, “A good captain thinks at least a mile ahead.”

I went through the book of Proverbs in the Living Bible, and here are the verses I pulled out that have to do with planning.

We should make plans—counting on God to direct us. (Prov. 16:9)

Plans go wrong with too few counselors; many counselors bring success. (Prov. 15:22)

It is dangerous and sinful to rush into the unknown. (Prov. 19:2)

A sensible man watches for problems ahead and prepares to meet them. The simpleton never looks, and suffers the consequences. (Prov. 27:12)

Any enterprise is built by wise planning, becomes strong through common sense, and profits wonderfully by keeping abreast of the facts. (Prov. 24:3–4)

Plan ahead, chart your course, and if God is going to be your partner, make your plans large.

Paul Harvey said, “You can always tell when you are on the road to success; it’s uphill all the way.” If you find a path that has no problems, you will find that it leads nowhere.

I’ve talked many times to leaders about “sap strata.” Sap strata are those levels of living beyond which it is hard to rise. It happens in churches, organizations, and in individual lives. Have you ever felt that you just weren’t making any progress, as if you were hitting your head up against the wall? We have to make an extra burst of effort to get through those strata that keep us from being what God wants us to become. There are two ways to meet our problems, two ways to get through those sap strata. One way is to
change the problem
. This is only a temporary, partial solution. We can try to make the problem more manageable, but it will get out of hand again tomorrow.

The most effective way for us to overcome our problems is to change the person. Adversity is not our greatest enemy. The human spirit is capable of great resiliency and resourcefulness in the face of hardship. It’s not problems that mess us up. Someone said, “Cripple [a man] and you have Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in prison and you have John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge and you have George Washington. Raise him in poverty and you have Abraham Lincoln. Strike him down with infantile paralysis and he becomes Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Burn him so severely that doctors say he will never walk again and you have Glen Cunningham, who set the world’s record in 1934 for the outdoor mile. Deafen him and you’ll have Ludwig van Beethoven. Call him a slow learner, retarded, and write him off as uneducatable and you have Albert Einstein.”

The Word of God encourages us in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.” Someone asked James Corbett, the heavyweight boxing champion at one time, what it took to be a heavyweight champion, and he said, “Fight one more round.” When asked how he had been so successful in his inventions, Thomas Edison said, “I start where other men leave off.” Napoleon Hill, in his book
Think and Grow Rich
, records that he studied five hundred of the wealthiest men in the world and concluded that all wealthy men are persistent. When Winston Churchill went back to a childhood school to speak, the audience anticipated a great speech from the prime minister. He stood before them gave a speech titled: “Never Give In, Never, Never, Never.” And that is probably the speech for which he is most remembered. Stand firm on your commitment. Don’t be a quitter.

Don’t ever forget that although you may succeed beyond your fondest hopes and your greatest expectations, you will never succeed beyond the purpose to which you are willing to surrender. “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33).

The secret of the surrendered life is giving God the first part of every day, the first day of every week, the first portion of your income, the first consideration in every decision, and the first place in all of your life. When we surrender to him, then we have a power that really caps off the formula for success. Surrender is what brings power. We fight for power and we lose it; we surrender and we find it.

Jesus Christ has not only shown us the righteous life—many great and good men and women did that before his time—but he has given us the power to live this righteous life. He not only shows us the beauty of God, as others have done, but he gives us the means by which we can become part of that beauty. We can learn the power of hourly surrender to the living Christ. Change in our lives is not brought about by our tense tinkering. It is brought about by the radiant, immeasurable energy of Christ, which has never left the world since he first said yes to God. His “yes” was complete; he kept nothing back for himself.

As Flora Slosson Wuellner says, “There is nothing so tragically ineffectual as trying to live the Christian life without the Christian power. Try turning the other cheek without using the spiritual weapons of Christ’s power to love and see what destructive situation develops. Try going the second mile with a neighbor without going all the way to surrender to Christ and see the damage done to the neighbor’s personality and your own.

Try to love and pray unceasingly without turning daily to the living water of Christ and see how quickly the personal well runs dry.” Surrender to Jesus Christ.

Success is a word that is greatly misunderstood, and we need to grasp what it means biblically to be a success—to love God with all of our heart, our mind, our soul, and our strength; to allow him to unlock the imprisoned potential in our lives; to set godly goals and not be content to settle for second best when we realize that God gave everything he could give so that we could have the very best of life; and to realize that one of the greatest sins we commit against God is not reaching the potential he has placed in us.

chapter 3

STRETCH TO SUCCESS

R
UBBER BANDS COME IN DIFFERENT SIZES AND
different colors and different shapes, but they all work on the same principle: They must be stretched to be effective. Like rubber bands, our personalities, talents, and gifts are different; we’re also not effective unless we’re stretched. If you’re not stretching in your own personal walk with God and in your leadership abilities, then you’re not going to be able to be as effective for God as you really need to be.

Leonard Ravenhill relates that a group of tourists were in a village in Europe, and one of them asked an elderly villager, “Have any great men been born in this village?” The old man replied, “Nope, only babies.” Every person who has ever achieved anything has stretched for it. There’s no such thing as a self-made person; there’s no such thing as a person who comes into the world fully equipped for success. Every person who has ever made it to the top, every person who has achieved anything for God, every person who has been effective has learned to stretch.

One of the most common mistakes, and one of the costliest, is thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic something or other, which we do not possess.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them. There’s no such thing as a man who was born great.

I would guess that 95 percent of us try to avoid stretching. When we come up against something that is bigger than we are, we tend to back off. What keeps us from expanding? Why do we avoid these stretching experiences?

Fear has to be the number-one reason. The unknown out there can really paralyze us. Another reason is that we’re
satisfied
. Why stretch? We already like where we are; we have it made. Or perhaps there’s a streak of
laziness
in us. There are times when we would just rather take it easy. I have found that
self-esteem
has a lot to do with one’s willingness to stretch. A lot of people with low self-esteem have above average ability; they just do not see themselves in the proper light. Some of us just don’t want to be
different
. If you stretch, you’re no longer ordinary. To stretch is to be out of sync with many of our friends and associates.

I would encourage you to put this book down for a moment and evaluate yourself. Ask yourself why it is that you’re not always stretching.

Take about five minutes to do some introspection and be honest as you sense God dealing with the reasons for your complacency. If you’re trying to avoid stretching, you need to begin to regroup so you can become useful and effective in your ministry and leadership.

Most of us need to be motivated before we will stretch. It’s not something that comes naturally. We need to learn how to stretch and motivate ourselves, but we also need to know how to motivate others and help them to reach their potential.

One of my modern-day heroes is Bear Bryant, who was the coach for the Alabama Crimson Tide for many years and who held the record for several years as the college football coach with the most victories. Bear Bryant was an outstanding coach and a tremendous motivator. His players knew they had better play good football. The story is told that during one important game his team was ahead by six points with only a minute left in the game, and they had the ball. It looked as if they had the game sewed up. He sent in a running play to his quarterback, but the quarterback decided to surprise the other team—and Coach Bryant—by calling a pass play. He said, “They’re looking for the run; let’s throw a pass.” So he went back and threw a pass, and sure enough, the defensive cornerback, who was the speed champion of the league, intercepted the ball and headed toward the goal line. Alabama was about to lose the game. The Alabama quarterback, who was known for a good arm but not for fast legs, took off after the cornerback and caught him on the five-yard line. He saved the game; Alabama won. The opposing coach went to Bear Bryant after the game and said, “I thought that quarterback was slow! How’d he catch my world-class sprinter?” Bear Bryant looked at that opposing coach and said, “You have to understand. Your man was racing for six points. My man was racing for his life.”

Some of us have to be racing for our lives before we’re motivated to stretch. What motivates you? What makes you want to be your best for the glory of God? Think about it for a few minutes. For some people, challenge itself is a stimulant. Others are motivated by dissatisfaction with their present situation. Or we can be spurred on by previous success.

One of the things that helps me stretch is a public commitment, a public goal. I have found that when I tell others what I want to do, it really helps me to keep on track. They can hold me accountable by checking my progress. John F. Kennedy loves to tell stories about his grandfather Fitzgerald. When his grandfather was a boy in Ireland, he would walk home from school with a whole group of boys. There were a lot of very jagged, high cobblestone fences. They were kind of difficult to climb, and some of them were ten to twelve feet high, so they were a little dangerous to climb. But, being adventurous boys, they always wanted to go over the walls, but were afraid of getting hurt. One day as they were walking home from school, Fitzgerald took his cap off and threw it over the wall. The moment he threw it over the wall, he knew he had to climb over to get it back, because he didn’t dare go home without his cap or he would be disciplined. Throwing your cap over the wall commits you to stretch and do something you would not normally do. I encourage you to begin to throw your cap over the wall.