By Ron Yates
I love my kids. My desire is for every one of them in their life to be successful. How much more does our Heavenly Father desire for us to be successful in life?
A good father sets his children up for success. With my Father God, I’ve watched this happen on numerous occasions.
“He stores up success for the upright; He is a shield for those who live with integrity.” – PROVERBS 2:7 (CSB)
In this verse, the word “success” in the Hebrew is actually the phrase “abiding success”…you’re not going to have success for just one moment; that success is what you’re going to wear in life.
A few weeks ago, Pastor Dale Culbertson preached the message, “What Are You Wearing?” that stated, “What you wear is what people will determine who you’re serving.” If you’re wearing defeat, who do you think people will think you’re serving? In the same way that people in Jesus’ day didn’t want to have anything to do with someone wearing leprosy clothes, people won’t want to have anything to do with you.
But when they see you wearing the success of the kingdom of heaven in your life, they’re going to want to know how you got there. God wants to set you up for success in life, but you have to believe that. God isn’t trying to keep you down; that would be the devil. Depression and being downtrodden is not from God, despite what some people think (thinking that religious, “humbled” life is somehow glorifying to God).
The devil doesn’t want you to believe the truth about your new identity and who you are in Christ.
“See yourself as sons, not as illegitimate children, [children of faith, not of the slave woman], welcoming your spiritual education together with the rest of the family of faith. As we have shown respect to our natural fathers in the process of our education, how much more should we value the instruction of the Father of our spiritual origin Who upholds the life of our design. In their opinion they gave us the best possible education during the brief time that we were under their roof; God has our ultimate wellbeing in mind. The process of education is not immediately appreciated; at the time it seems to be more pain than pleasure, but it certainly yields the harvest of righteousness for the faith athlete.” – HEBREWS 12:8-11 (MIRROR BIBLE)
There is a harvest when the Father God speaks to us. He is trying to produce a harvest of the kingdom of God in our life (a kingdom where there’s only goodness laid out for us).
I’m not talking about a trial-free life; that’s not going to happen. There are some things that you might believe for that you don’t see yet.
I’ve been believing God for promotion at work. I had kept being promised I was going to get one. But with all the COVID-19 stuff that took place, everything going on, my company put out an announcement that nobody was going to get a merit raise or anything. But I heard clear as day in my heart, “Don’t stop believing Me.”
I heard clear as day in my heart, “Don’t stop believing Me.”
What was God doing? He was redirecting me; He was correcting me. It would have been really easy for me to just say, “Well, with all that’s going on, I guess it’s not going to happen for me.”
A couple of weeks ago, my manager came to me and said, “You know that your promotion came through.”
In the midst of everything that’s going on around you, your faith in the Father will pull you through every time. I started calling those things that didn’t exist as those they did. I kept on saying, “I don’t care what ‘they’ say, my promotion is coming through.” I didn’t care if it happened that week or the week after. I wasn’t going to throttle back on what I was believing God for.
Neither should you.
Link to the entire message here.
