We are walking in today: The Enemy of Your Potential part 1
Witness before throughout the Bible: H6923 qadam--to confront, anticipate; to meet, come or be in front, go before
Psalm 89:14 Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go H6923 before thy face.
The Torah testifies...............
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The prophets proclaim..................
Micah 6:6 Wherewith shall I come before H6923 the LORD, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before H6923 him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?
The writings bear witness...........................
Psalm 68:25 The singers went before, H6923 the players on instruments followed after; among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.
2 Kings 19:32 Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the king of Assyria, He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before H6923 it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.
The Enemies of Potential
Your ability is your responsibility.
The cyclists arose early the first day of the journey. By noon they were well on their way to completing the first leg of their cross-continent trip. As they fell into bed that night, exhaustion and exhilaration vied for attention. The day had given them an exciting taste of the joy that lay ahead. It had also warned them that much hard work lay between them and their intended destination.
The next morning they awoke to blisters, sore muscles, and a spectacular sunrise. Amid groans, teasing, and words of encouragement, they prepared to break camp and to begin riding. To their chagrin, however, two of the ten bicycles had flat tires. Repairing the flats delayed their starting by an hour or more so that the heat of the day was upon them when they hit the road.
That evening as they set up camp, anxiety and discouragement overshadowed the exhilaration of the night before. First, the bikers had been soaked by a late afternoon downpour. Then, the campfire was difficult to start because wood was scarce and what they found was wet. Finally, one cyclist discovered that a strap on his pack was nearly worn through, and another realized that his canteen was missing from his gear. As they huddled in their sleeping bags on the damp ground, each hoped the next day would be better.
Dawn was just beginning to light the sky when an angry shout broke the silence. An early riser had awakened to find the contents of his pack strewn all over the ground. Something—or someone—had gotten into it during the night. The others quickly checked their packs, only to find that some of their food was missing too.
Although no one voiced the thought, more than one cyclist wondered if someone was trying to stop them from finishing their journey. It was a silent, troubled group that mounted their bikes that third morning.
Our lives are not unlike this cross-continent bicycle trip. When we come back to The Most High and begin to glimpse and act on His plans and purposes for our lives, we become excited and we anticipate the joys and the surprises that lay ahead. As we meet obstacles and discover the perseverance and hard work that will be required for us to fulfill our The Most High-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 The Most High. 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 The Most High’s standards and directives--found in the Torah His 613 principles on how to live your life, you will lose it. This loss occurs because knowing The Most High’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 The Most High 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 The Most High is given to man before he breaks fellowship with The Most High through disobedience. Man is in his ideal environment, being filled with The Most High’s power and anointing, living in perfect holiness and purity, and enjoying The Most High’s fellowship and presence. Thus, this commandment implies that something or someone was waiting to take or attack what man had been given to keep. The Scriptures warn us of this thief.
I [Yeshua] am the gate; whoever enters through Me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full (John 10:9-10).
Hasatan is our enemy. He wants to destroy the power of The Most High within us so that The Most High’s glory is not revealed in us. He who was thrown out of Heaven to the earth, where he “leads the whole world astray” (Revelation 12:9), is out to remove us from the One who is our life and our salvation. He’s out to destroy all we could be because he knows that those who become re-rooted in The Most High have the ability to act like The Most High, showing His nature and likeness. Consequently, hasatan comes as a thief to steal our potential because he cannot boldly challenge The Most High’s power within us. Our outward container, which is our body, reveals nothing of the treasure inside us. This all-surpassing treasure is The Most High’s power and wisdom.
The Lord is exalted, for He dwells on high; He will fill Zion with justice and righteousness. He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is the key to this treasure (Isaiah 33:5-6).
In other words, the key to releasing The Most High’s power within you is reverencing Him, which is living with Him in a relationship of obedience and submission. You are filled with heavenly wisdom, but you have to follow The Most High’s program to benefit from it.
Yeshua spoke of this need to live in relationship with The Most High when He said:
Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in Me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you (John 15:4-7).
No wonder hasatan tries to steal our potential. He fears The Most High’s power within us because it is greater than he is. Therefore, our dreams, plans, and ideas are targets of his evil forces. The minute we have a good idea, the deceiver will send someone to criticize our dream because he cannot permit us to accomplish our vision. As long as we are only dreaming, he is safe and he’ll let us alone. When we begin to act on our dream, he’ll hit us full force.
Our dreams, plans, and ideas are targets of hasatan’s evil forces. You are responsible to guard your dream and bring it to reality by safeguarding and protecting it from injury and loss. To do so you must understand how hasatan seeks to rob you of your destiny.
Hasatan’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 The Most High’s blessings and rains His curses upon us. This is true because disobedience brings into our lives the natural (The Most High-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 The Most High was sending him. He nearly lost his life by drowning. In a similar situation, Lot’s wife, in spite of The Most High’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 stops the attainment of goals. You cannot persist in disobedience and maximize your potential. To maximize your life you must submit to The Most High’s will in everything.
2. Sin
Although the effects of disobedience and sin are similar, sin is a more basic, because it is total rebellion against the known will of The Most High—or to say it another way, a declaration of independence from your Source. The resulting alienation from The Most High destroys potential because we cannot know The Most High 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, The Most High, 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 The Most High 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 heart, O The Most High, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from Your presence or take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me (Psalm 51:9-12).
Destroying your relationship with The Most High through sin is always suicide. You cannot become who The Most High created you to be if you persist in rebelling against Him. Without The Most High’s Spirit living and working in you, you will die with your potential. Sin caps the well of your potential. To maximize your life you must avoid compromise with ungodliness.
3. Fear
ear is having faith in the impossible. It’s dwelling on all that could go wrong instead of what will go right. Although, for example, accidents do happen and cars must be carefully maintained and driven, fear that prevents us from driving or riding in a car immobilizes our potential because it severely limits where we can go. Fear is dwelling on all that could go wrong instead of what will go right. When as a lad, David met the giant Goliath with a slingshot and five stones, he most likely was afraid. Yet because he mastered his fear by trusting in The Most High instead of thinking about all that could go wrong, he freed the Israelites from the oppression of their enemies and honored the name of The Most High. (See First Samuel chapter 17.) His faith in The Most High moved him beyond timidity to power. Fear is seeing Goliath too big to hit. Faith is seeing Goliath too big to miss.
Paul wrote to Timothy about this ability to move beyond fear:
...fan into flame the gift of The Most High, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For The Most High did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:6-7).
A spirit of self-discipline submits the information we receive through our bodies and our minds to the knowledge we receive from The Most High’s Spirit. It refuses to allow our minds to run wild imagining everything that could happen and chooses instead to apply The Most High’s promises to the situation and to depend on The Most High’s love and power for the outcome. Faith, our The Most High-given mode of operation, combats fear and encourages the maximizing of potential. He who fears to try will never know what he could have done. He who fears The Most High has nothing else to fear. To maximize your life you must neutralize fear with faith. He who fears to try will never know what he could have done.
4. Discouragement
Most things worth having require patience and perseverance. No pianist plays perfectly the first time she touches the keys, nor does an athlete win a race the first time he runs. Many discouraging moments exist between an initial experience and the perfecting of a skill.
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. The Most High will not give you a dream unless He knows you have the talents, abilities, and personality to complete it. His commands reveal the potential He gave you before you were born.
The Most High commanded Joshua to be courageous (see Deuteronomy 31:7; Joshua 1:7-8). Even though Joshua didn’t feel courageous, The Most High 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 The Most High’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 The Most High’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 The Most High 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 The Most High had commanded them, they discovered that the opportunity to obey The Most High was past.
Disregarding The Most High’s warning that He would not go with them, they marched into battle and were soundly defeated. The Most High left them alone to fight for themselves. If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done (Ecclesiastes 11:4).
Procrastination often grows out of discouragement. When we become discouraged, we stop finding reasons for doing what we know we can do. Then The Most High 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 The Most High required it. Very often He will find someone else to do the job. Procrastination is a serious enemy of potential. It eats away at the very core of our time and motivation. To maximize your life you must destroy procrastination by eliminating all excuses and reasons for not taking action. Just do it! Procrastination eats away at the very core of our time and motivation.
Shema Selah be watchful of the things that come to steal your potential The Most High has already gone before you in all things!! https://www.facebook.com/fiveam.prayer/videos/2062662957145143/?l=5714791757739091371
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