Maximizing Your Potential

Or perhaps you are retired with few financial resources but much time. Pour yourself into a child. Whatever your blessings, find some way to share them. This is God’s intention for giving them to you. Your gifts may be different from mine, but their value is equal if we serve the same Lord with the same Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 12:1-7). Your gifts are for me and my gifts are for you. Together we can bless the world. This is how potential is released. Receiving Without Giving Results in Destruction True joy is found not in what you accomplish but in who benefits from your success. Dying to yourself and giving for me and others will reap for you the joy of seeing your efforts reproduced many times over in us. Your sharing will give life to many. If, however, you refuse to share, you will destroy both God’s joy in giving to you and your joy in passing on what He gives. You will also forfeit His blessings because those who wish to receive from the abundance of God must use wisely all He gives. This is true because selfishness concerns itself only with its own prosperity and wellbeing. It lacks interest in the concerns and needs of others. You cannot emulate the giving nature of God if you retain all you have for your own wants and needs; neither can your bucket draw from the deep waters in me. Such selfishness kills potential and lessens the likelihood that you will be blessed by my potential. True wisdom is understanding this interdependence: “The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out” (Proverbs 20:5). This cannot occur, however, if we are consumed by thoughts of ourselves. Selfishness Destroys Personal Happiness and Satisfaction You were created to give. When you lavish your potential on yourself, your potential and all you accomplish by using it lose their meaning. King Solomon learned this when he went through life doing one thing after another for himself. “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? I undertook great projects... I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs... I bought male and female slaves... I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself... I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,