Maximizing Your Potential

ahead. As we meet obstacles and discover the perseverance and hard work that will be required for us to fulfill our God-given potential, our enthusiasm often wanes and boredom or disillusionment sets in. Then, like the cyclists, we must simply stay with the journey in spite of the hardships and the discouraging situations and events that plague us. Even as a pregnancy is no guarantee of the birth of a healthy child, so beginning a journey does not ensure that it will be finished. Vision can be aborted. The world is proficient at aborting potential. Not only will it do nothing to help you reveal and use the hidden you, it most likely will discourage you by measuring your efforts against its standards for success—standards it made because the world doesn’t know what true success is. Beware of these standards and the disparaging words of those who live by them because, if you let them, they will undermine your journey. Then tragedy strikes as success dies in failure, hope dies in despair, and visions die in the absence of confidence. This abortion of potential breaks the heart of God. Tragedy strikes when success dies in failure, hope dies in despair, and visions die in the absence of confidence. You are responsible to release your potential. No one else can or will do it for you. Releasing some potential, however, does not mean that you will release all your potential. Redeeming all your potential requires that you protect your potential, cultivate your potential, share your potential, and discover and obey the laws of limitation regarding your potential. These are the keys to maximizing potential. You can work hard to achieve a dream, but if you do not protect it, cultivate it, share it, and act within God’s standards and directives, you will lose it. This loss occurs because knowing God’s requirements and fulfilling them are two very different experiences. One is information, the other action. Many times what should have been doesn’t happen because somewhere between the dream and its completion our great aspirations are trampled and destroyed. This is the work of the destroyer. > The Enemy of Your Potential When God placed man in the garden, He commanded him to work the garden and take care of it. The King James Version of the Bible says that man was to till and keep the garden, while Today’s English Version assigns to man the responsibility to cultivate and guard the garden. This requirement of God is given to man before he breaks fellowship with God through disobedience. Man is in his ideal environment, being filled with God’s power and anointing, living in perfect holiness and purity, and enjoying God’s fellowship and presence. Thus, this commandment implies that something or