Maximizing Your Potential

Unfortunately, much potential is sacrificed on the altar of discouragement. Perhaps you’ve experienced this enemy as too many sour notes hindered your ambition to practice or the failure to win a prize took you from the race. Replaying the music until it’s right and running every day are the only ways to fulfill your potential. Concert pianists and Olympic athletes aren’t born. They move beyond their discouraging moments to perfect their innate skills. The same attitude is required of you to maximize your potential. God will not give you a dream unless He knows you have the talents, abilities, and personality to complete it. His commands reveal thepoten-tial He gave you before you were born. God commanded Joshua to be courageous (see Deuteronomy 31:7; Joshua 1:7-8). Even though Joshua didn’t feel courageous, God knew courage was in him and commanded him to show what was there. Those who are under command—military command, for example—just do what they are told. No matter how they feel about the command, they just obey it. You must respond the same way to God’s commands. Even if you are feeling discouraged about completing the task, you must start it. Do what needs to be done no matter how difficult or impossible God’s commands feel. Then discouragement will have no opportunity to destroy your potential. To maximize your life you must neutralize discouragement with hope. 5. Procrastination How many times have you delayed so long in making a decision that it was made for you, or in completing a project that it was too late for your intended purpose? Most of us do this more often than we’d like to admit. Procrastination, the delaying of action until a later time, kills potential. The Israelites discovered this when they found many reasons why they couldn’t obey God and enter the land He was giving them. When they saw that the land was good, with an abundance of food, and finally decided to take the land as God had commanded them, they discovered that the opportunity to obey God was past. Disregarding God’s warning that He would not go with them, they marched into battle and were soundly defeated. God left them alone to fight for themselves. If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done (Ecclesiastes 11:4 LB). Procrastination often grows out of discouragement. When we become discouraged, we stop finding reasons for doing what we know we can do. Then God allows us to go our own way and suffer the consequences. Sooner or later, we will discover that we’ve lost much because we refused to act when God required it. Very often He will find someone else to do the job. Procrastination is