Maximizing Your Potential

safeguarding and protecting it from injury and loss. To do so you must understand how satan seeks to rob you of your destiny. Enemies of Potential Satan’s methods for stealing dreams are many and varied, according to the vision and the personality of the dreamer. Let us identify some of these enemies of potential so you will recognize them for what they are, the deceiver’s activity in your life. 1. Disobedience The Bible repeatedly states that disobedience withholds God’s blessings and rains His curses upon us. This is true because disobedience brings into our lives the natural (God-ordained) consequences of our actions. Teenagers who experiment with sex destroy the beauty of the first intimacy that is to be enjoyed between a husband and a wife, open themselves to AIDS and other diseases, and risk losing the joys of youth due to the birth of a child. They also forfeit their dreams to problems in marriage in later years, to serious illnesses and possible death, and to the responsibilities of raising a child before they have matured into the task. Jonah learned the consequences of disobedience when he boarded a ship going in the opposite direction from the city to which God was sending him. He nearly lost his life by drowning. In a similar situation, Lot’s wife, in spite of God’s commandment not to look back, sacrificed her life for one last look at the city she was fleeing from. Disobedience always wastes potential and retards the attainment of goals. You cannot persist in disobedience and maximize your potential. To maximize your life you must submit to God’s will in everything. 2. Sin Although the effects of disobedience and sin are similar, sin is a more basic ill because it is total rebellion against the known will of God—or to say it another way, a declaration of independence from your Source. The resulting alienation from God destroys potential because we cannot know God if we do not have His Spirit, and His Spirit is the password to unlocking our potential. Sin, in essence, says, “I know better than you do, God, how to run my life.” King David experienced the desolation and death that result from a rebellious spirit when he violated another man’s wife and tried to cover up his action by having the woman’s husband killed in battle and taking her for his wife. The son born to David from this affair died, and David endured the agony of separation from the God he loved. What the child could have done in his lifetime was sacrificed, as were David’s energy and vitality during the months before he confessed his sin. It is no wonder David prayed: Hide Your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure