Success is not a pinnacle to stand on; it’s a foundation to build on
The measure of our success will be the measure of our ability to help others.
F. B. Meyer
Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.
Saint John Chrysostom
David continued to succeed in everything he did, for the LORD was with him.
1 Samuel 18:14 NLT
I first met Danny Duchene when a group of pastors from Saddleback Church went to minister to prisoners in Jonestown Prison in Northern California. Danny was one of those inmates, serving a life sentence for his involvement in a double murder at the age of eighteen.
Danny didn’t grow up in the gang culture of the city, but in the supposedly safe environment of the suburbs of a smaller city. Here is his story in his own words:
I grew up in Redding, California, with my mom and stepdad and five brothers. One thing I remember about my childhood is that I had a lot of freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. I was a latchkey kid, and by the fourth grade, I was spending entire summers by myself. My parents had nice homes and cars, and I grew up thinking that the goal of life was just having nice things.
Possessions became a substitute for loving relationships . . . I started partying on the weekends and discovered how easy it was to make friends because I was the one who had the car and had the freedom to throw a party while my parents were out.
Shortly after I turned sixteen, I came home from school one day, and my parents were sitting with a friend with thousands of dollars in cash spread out on the kitchen table. I was told that they were going on a business trip to Peru and that I would see them at Christmas. So I was left to take care of my eighteen-month-old little brother with the help of some family friends.
But my parents did not return from that trip. Instead on Christmas Eve 1979, I learned that my parents had been arrested in Mexico for smuggling cocaine. This was a total shock since my parents were neither drug users nor drinkers.
The news that my parents were in jail in another country filled me with fear. But soon my fear turned to anger. To cope with all the painful emotions I felt on that Christmas Day, I drove to a parking lot and got high in my car. Getting high gave me temporary relief. And I remember committing myself to a life of getting high every day.
Little did I realize that the decision to stuff my fear and anger and soothe myself with drugs would become an addiction that would imprison me long before I went to prison . . . I became more and more impulsive and began a downward spiral of one bad decision after another.
I started committing crimes to support my drug habits . . . There were people around me who loved me and tried to help, but I quickly became addicted to my way of dealing with all my loneliness and pain . . .
As my debts piled up, I struggled to keep myself supplied with an increasing need for alcohol and drugs. I was reckless and never worried about getting caught for my crimes, and I certainly didn’t consider the consequences to others. I was only thinking of myself. All this came to a crisis when I was part of a crime in which two men were killed.
Thankfully, I was quickly arrested in September of 1982, which I also called being rescued. Sitting in a county jail before my trial, it took about three weeks to withdraw from the drugs and alcohol, but once I became sober, the full weight of my crimes came crashing down on my conscience.
I was overwhelmed with depression and remorse as I realized how many people I had hurt. I believed I was lost and going to hell, and I was truly, truly afraid.
It was at my lowest point that God’s mercy showed up in my life. God began bringing a lot of Christians to see me who shared the love and mercy of God with me. At first, this good news seemed over my head. It seemed unbelievable and too good to be true that God loved me and wanted to show me mercy after all I had done to hurt others . . .
But the message of God’s mercy eventually got through to me. I learned that Jesus could give me a fresh start, changing me from the inside out . . . I decided to open up my life to Jesus and begin to serve him with whatever kind of life I had left. And knowing my crimes, I didn’t expect the rest of my life to be very long.
On November 7, 1982, in a county jail waiting my trial, I asked Jesus to forgive all my sins, come inside, and to take charge as the Lord of my life . . .
The Bible says in Romans 5:20 that “where sin increased, grace increased all the more.” And I rapidly grew spiritually while in the county jail. I was hungry to know more about this God who had shown me love and mercy, and I wanted him to use me, even in prison.
Graciously God blessed me with mentors, spiritual fathers, and spiritual mothers who took the time and raised me in the Lord. At my trial, I was convicted and given a double life sentence for two deaths. And as a nineteen-year-old, I was sent to prison for life in August 1983, never expecting to see the outside world again.
But I was thankful to be in Christ, and inside I had been liberated. Let me make this clear: I never expected that I would ever be paroled—but I was free.1
It was striking to me that Eric Munyemana, whose story we looked at in the last chapter, and Danny were both nineteen when their lives dramatically changed. Eric heroically headed to war, and Danny tragically was sent to prison. It’s a reminder that no matter what our circumstances, God is at work in our lives to put the pieces back together in a way that shows his power.
When everything seems to be coming together, look desperately to God as the only one who can truly build what is great. When everything seems to be falling apart, look desperately to God as the only one who can rebuild out of the ruins of what has been lost.
Danny began to build his life on the freedom that Christ had given him, even while in prison. He started by serving the inmates in ministry and then as a Bible teacher under the mentorship of his chaplain.
We met him after he had been in prison for twenty years because he had decided to start Purpose Driven Life groups in his prison. He dreamed of having fifty men sign up; two hundred men signed up instead! These two hundred men would form into a church, worshiping together, meeting each week in what grew to be sixty small groups, and supporting each other in their journeys to become free of their addictions in Celebrate Recovery groups.
The impact of this church within a prison was so dramatic that the warden couldn’t help but notice. The fights in the prison yard leading to lockdowns dropped from a regular occurrence to rare instances. “What have you done to my prison?” the warden asked us. News of the ministry spread, leading to the start of Purpose Driven Life and Celebrate Recovery groups in other prisons. Eventually, the story hit the front page of the New York Times.
I’ll never forget watching Danny and his fellow leaders during our visit with this new church as they took a group of about one hundred men to the middle of the prison yard. They were there to express their intention to be a church in this place. The men took off their shoes to state that even that prison yard could be holy ground when dedicated to God. It’s a risky thing to take shoes off in the yard, when there might be a need to fight or flee at any moment.
Then they turned to each of the cell blocks and boldly shouted together, “We claim Cell Block A for the purposes of God . . . We claim Cell Block B for the purposes of God.” A reminder of this day hangs proudly on my wall in the form of an honorary certificate of membership in the Sierra Christian Center Purpose Driven Fellowship.
These men were not waiting to build on the grace they had been given in Jesus Christ; they started right where they were.
More than a decade later, Danny was to face one of his greatest challenges. It came in the form of an unexpected blessing. With a double life sentence, he had no hope of ever being released from prison. But based on his service to others over his entire prison term and a letter from Rick Warren stating a desire to have him work with Saddleback Church to help prisoners across the nation, Danny was given a parole.
The challenge came in what he would do with this unexpected freedom. A wise chaplain had told him how easily he could become overwhelmed with the number of decisions he would now have to make every day. In prison, what he wore, what he ate, and what his daily schedule looked like were all decided for him. He compared it to moving from a small pond to a fast-rushing river.
I asked Danny what kept him secure in this transition. He told me there were three pillars. First was the priority of his love for Christ. Instead of getting caught up in all of the new opportunities he now had, he committed to get caught up in his worship of God.
Second was his commitment to serve others. Being released from prison did not mean he was released from ministry. Far from it. The ministry to others that he had carried out in prison to build a successful life would be what he now did on the outside.
The third pillar was what he called “living my amends.” While he knows he is forgiven by Christ for his crimes, he also knows that lives were devastated. He can’t make amends to those whose lives were taken, but he can live his amends in the ways he gives to others. Through God’s grace, he is turning from his guilt toward love and ministry.
Today, based on that heart for ministry, Danny Duchene serves on the staff of Saddleback Church as the pastor who takes Celebrate Recovery inside prison walls. He is building his life on the successful ministry he started while in prison.
THE STEWARDSHIP OF SUCCESS
One of the key questions in life has to do with what you are going to do when your greatest successes come, whether that success is personal, relational, or vocational. This is the question Danny had to face when he got his parole.
You can treat a success in one of three ways: like a trophy, a threat, or a foundation.
You can treat a success like a trophy. Put it on the shelf to admire it, and there it dies. Nothing else comes out of that success. More and more, it becomes a story from the past.
You can treat a success like a threat. More of us do this than you might think. We run from a success because we realize it’s going to bring new responsibilities into our lives. Any parent who doesn’t admit that sometimes they want to run away from that responsibility is not an honest parent. It can be overwhelming to think, I’ve got to raise this human being.
You can treat a success like a foundation. Instead of treating the success like a trophy or a threat, you can use it as a foundation. Successes are given for you to build on. Your greatest success is not a pinnacle to stand on; it’s a foundation to build on. Your successes are one of your greatest stewardships.
Nehemiah had a great success; the rebuilding of the wall was completed. Look again at these verses that express the success: “So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days. When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God” (Nehemiah 6:15–16).
Let’s slow down and look closely at three things in these verses. First, notice how long it took to rebuild the wall: fifty-two days. A wall that had been in ruins for more than 140 years was rebuilt in less than two months. That’s the kind of miracle God can work when you decide you want to put it together again.
We look at what we need to rebuild and feel that it’s impossible because all we see is the rubble and the ruin. The rubble is a lie! If all you look at is the rubble, all you’re looking at is the lie. You can never rebuild out of the rubble; you can only rebuild out of God’s resources. When you get your eyes off of what you can’t do and get your focus on what God can do, amazing change often happens much more quickly than you could have imagined.
Second, notice the result: the enemies lost their confidence. This was a great personal victory for Nehemiah after his battles with these enemies. It’s a reminder to not listen to the seeming confidence of someone who opposes our faith. Their confidence will melt when they see what God can do.
Finally, notice the reference: chapter 6, verses 15 and 16. There are 406 verses in the book of Nehemiah—119 come before the wall is completed, and 285 come after these verses about the wall being completed. When the wall is finished, Nehemiah is less than one-third of the way through the project! He achieved his greatest success, which means he now has a lot of work to do. People needed to be appointed to care for the wall, and plans needed to be made to revitalize the city within the wall.
Nehemiah continued to rebuild because he knew what to do when the initial task was completed. His life had not become the rebuilding of the wall. He kept in focus that the wall was being built for a purpose, and he began to work toward that purpose of a place for the people of God to worship and live once the wall was rebuilt. He was able to change gears and begin to build on the success so the people of Israel could benefit from that success.
Building on success is the key to sustaining the success that God gives. So how do we do that? Many business books have been written about this, and we can learn much from them. Nehemiah showed good business sense in the decisions he made, and he did so with a blending of strategy and spiritual dependence on God that has rarely been matched. We can learn four lessons from Nehemiah for stewarding our successes.
Secure Your Investment
The first step to build on your success is to secure that success. Nehemiah 7:1 reads, “After the wall had been rebuilt and I had set the doors in place . . .” The wall needed doorways so people could get in and out of the city. If the builders had left the doorways without doors, all the work they had done would have been wasted.
To build the wall and not set the doors in place would have meant enemies or animals could just as easily have gotten in as if there were no walls. Doors made the walls effective for keeping out and for letting in. You secure your success by protecting your investment.
When it came to this protection of an investment, Nehemiah took personal responsibility. He personally set the doors in place. He didn’t personally build the whole wall; he delegated all along, but he put up the doors.
He knew we can get to a place of great victory at the completion of a project and then not do the one final thing to secure the success. We get tired, and so we say we’ll wait. There are some things that can wait, but protecting the investment of what we have rebuilt must be done immediately. Otherwise we could lose all that we’ve fought to restore.
In a business that you’ve rebuilt, this can mean hiring people to sustain what you started or getting patents to protect the investment of what you’ve created. In a marriage that you’ve done the hard work to restore, it means being humble enough to recognize how easily you could slip back into the old patterns that got your relationship in trouble. So you build in some new patterns, such as a daily walk together to keep communication fresh or a regular time away together to keep your connection strong.
This seems like such an obvious step. Why does it so often go undone? One of the reasons is that we don’t prepare for the slump. With every great success, there is a slump. With every mountaintop, there is a valley. We always expect a loss of energy after a failure, but we’re often surprised by the physical and mental slump that follows a success.
It is a combination of the natural letdown from the adrenaline of the success and the emotional depletion that comes from the giving of yourself. Be prepared for it. Don’t let it overwhelm you, and let God carry you through. And then make it a priority to personally secure your investment when you get to the other side of the slump.
Don’t Do It Alone
The second thing Nehemiah did to build on his success was to appoint workers. That’s the decision to delegate, to not do it alone. Think of it this way: if God has given you a success, it’s not just for you; he wants other people involved in what he is doing.
Nehemiah 7:1 reads, “After the wall had been rebuilt and I had set the doors in place, the gatekeepers, the musicians and the Levites were appointed.” He specifically delegated people for all the jobs that had to be done now that the wall was rebuilt.
Nehemiah understood the importance of including others, so immediately after the wall was completed and the doors set in place, he appointed gatekeepers. If you have a door, you need somebody to open and shut the door. If Nehemiah hadn’t appointed gatekeepers, he would have been running from gate to gate in the morning and at night, opening and shutting the doors.
He also appointed musicians and Levites, people who would help the city of Jerusalem be a place of worship. He made sure the city would fulfill the purpose for which it was made through the people he involved. One of the greatest mistakes we make in delegation is only getting help with the daily tasks. We also need people to help us with the overall purpose.
Getting others involved keeps a great success from becoming a great burden. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by your successes. What started out as a great achievement will become a huge burden if you try to manage it all by yourself.
The work begins to grow beyond what you can do by yourself. On top of that, the success attracts others who want to learn from what you did right. The feeling starts to hit you—What have I created? How will I manage it? I just want to run away and start all over again.
Don’t run away, but also don’t run from that feeling. In fact, embrace that moment of feeling overwhelmed as an invitation into one of the greatest decisions you’ll ever make. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, remember that you’re not supposed to do it all alone. God didn’t create you to do it all alone. This is the feeling that says, Who else needs to be involved?
One of the great examples of delegation in history is found in the life of Moses. He was judging the disputes of the people of Israel and found himself overwhelmed by the needs. He was talking to people from morning to night, with the task unfinished at the end of every day.
The great success of seeing God set the people free had become for Moses the burden of a task with no end in sight. It was a sure sign of his need to delegate, and his father-in-law, Jethro, gave him the wise advice to include others in the work: “You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone” (Exodus 18:18). His words are a reminder that the failure to delegate is a burden not only on us, but also on all those who must now wait for us because we are too busy.
The practical advice given by Jethro was to divide the people into groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. Then Moses was to appoint capable men of integrity as judges over them: “And let them judge the people at all times. Then it will be that every great matter they shall bring to you, but every small matter they themselves shall judge. So it will be easier for you, for they will bear the burden with you” (Exodus 18:22 NKJV).
Stop bearing the burden alone. You were not meant to bear the burden alone.
These principles of delegation apply very obviously when you are rebuilding a business or ministry. How about when you are restoring a relationship or rebuilding a sense of purpose in your life? The ways that you get others involved will be different, but the need to not bear the burden alone is just as great.
Delegation in these cases will include people who will pray for you and encourage you, some who will give the counsel you need, and others who will free up your time for relationships. When you get too busy with tasks, the first thing to go is usually time for relationships. There may be some tasks you’ll need to delegate to others to open up the time you need to keep your relationships healthy.
I can’t help but think about a lot of moms I know. The wonderful success of having a family easily becomes a growing to-do list of daily tasks. Bottle dispensed, diaper changed, asleep in crib—the parenting tasks are done for the day. Eighteen years later, it’s dinner eaten, schoolwork finished, in by curfew. Yes, dads are also involved, but anyone who doesn’t see that moms are bearing the brunt of this avalanche of tasks isn’t paying attention.
For most of history, moms and dads didn’t do it alone. Families stayed together in the same town for generations, so there were grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends to help with the tasks. This is how it should be. We weren’t meant to do even parenting alone.
There may be some people you need to reach out to who can support you in your parenting. Chaundel and I are forever grateful to people like Bob and Jan Snook, who became surrogate grandparents to our kids when our parents died at early ages. I’d argue that the greatest building project on earth is the building of children’s lives and character in families. Of course we were not meant to do it alone.
What do you need to delegate to help you in your business, family, or ministry? God has given you this success, and he wants to accomplish great things through it. Who needs to join you in what God has given?
Let It Go
Let it go—these words are more than the title of the hit song from the Disney movie Frozen! There is a step beyond delegation—a third step for stewarding our successes—that many of us never get to, one that will allow a success given by God to truly become all it should be. When we delegate something to someone, it is often still under our control. We check up on them to be sure they’re doing a good job in the task we’ve delegated.
Because we can only do so much, if we don’t let things go as they grow, we will find ourselves overburdened. It’s often our need to be in control of everything that causes us to feel out of control in life. The step beyond delegation is to release control into the hands of those we trust.
Parents must do this with children. As children grow up, we delegate to them more and more responsibility. There will come a day when they move out of our home and we release a measure of control over them. If we don’t do this, they will not grow into the adult responsibilities and opportunities God has for them.
We’ve begun to call parents who cannot seem to release this control “helicopter parents.” They are always hovering nearby, ready to rescue. The truth is, most of us want to be in the helicopter; most of us want to keep trying to control what we know we should release.
Releasing control is just as important in business or ministry. God has something for us to do next, but we cannot do what’s next until we release what we are now doing. We need to learn the lesson from children who swing on monkey bars. You can hold on to two bars, but unless you release one, you can’t swing to a third. Unless you release one, your arms will eventually get tired and you’ll drop to the ground. Some of life’s greatest lessons can be found right there on a playground!
We learn from Nehemiah that the key to releasing control is deciding to trust. You won’t be able to release what is important to you without finding a person you know you can trust. Nehemiah 7:2 reads, “I put in charge of Jerusalem my brother Hanani, along with Hananiah the commander of the citadel, because he was a man of integrity and feared God more than most people do.”
Notice the humble risk that Nehemiah took. He had been the one who put his life on the line when he asked the king if he could go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the wall. It was Nehemiah who led the people in the daily work, defeating the opposition. He alone was out in front making this project happen.
Then he put someone else in charge of the wall he had built.
He easily could have thought, No one else is touching that wall. I built it. And he would have crumbled under the pressure. He could lead by himself for the short term, but he needed others to come alongside him in leadership for the long term.
Nehemiah shows wisdom in two important ways as he releases a responsibility to someone. This is the wisdom that will prevent letting go from turning into a nightmare. The nightmare is that we release it to someone else, they don’t do well, and it comes back to us worse than it was.
Our temptation then is to think, I should have just kept doing it myself. What we should think instead is, I chose the wrong person or didn’t prepare them well. How can we choose better and prepare better? As a first step, choose integrity over skill.
Skill is important in a leader, without a doubt. But there are thousands of stories of those who had great skill but no integrity, and thus ruined a business, family, church, or ministry. Skill indicates they can do the job, but character is what tells us a person can be trusted with the responsibility to lead.
Find someone you know you can trust. Nehemiah chose his brother to be one of the leaders because he knew him so well. He also chose Hananiah, whom he had come to know well enough to see that he was “a man of integrity.”
Not only do you need someone you know you can trust, but you also want somebody who you know can trust God. Hananiah was a man who “feared God more than most people do.” One of the keys to great leadership is great humility. The place that great humility comes from is our trust in God.
As long as we think we’re doing it ourselves, every success will only build our pride. Through trust in God, we recognize how dependent we are on his working through our work. One of the greatest Christian leaders in history, the apostle Paul, recognized this when he wrote, “Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5 NASB).
After you choose a person of integrity, it’s just as important to give clear instructions. If you’ve ever been given a responsibility without guidance, you understand the value of instructions. Decide to overcommunicate rather than undercommunicate.
Nehemiah 7:3 reads, “I said to them [Hanani and Hananiah], ‘The gates of Jerusalem are not to be opened until the sun is hot. While the gatekeepers are still on duty, have them shut the doors and bar them. Also appoint residents of Jerusalem as guards, some at their posts and some near their own houses.’” There is much to learn about giving clear instructions here.
The command to “shut the doors and bar them” reminds us that clear instructions don’t assume anything. Nehemiah could have just told them to shut the doors, assuming they’d understand that it meant they should lock them with a bar. Instead of leaving this command to chance, Nehemiah tells them to shut and then bar the doors. What’s the use of shutting the door if it can be easily pushed open? Clarity made sure the purpose was fulfilled in the task.
A story from Saddleback Church’s early days serves as a reminder of the need for clarity in what we instruct. Years before our emphasis on health through the Daniel Plan, Saddleback had a standing order with a nearby baker for forty dozen donuts each weekend.
We were doing a wedding renewal for the whole church as a part of the services one weekend and decided to order wedding cake for everyone to enjoy. Realizing at the last minute that we wouldn’t need all those donuts, someone called the baker and hurriedly told them, “You know that standing order we have? Well, cut it in half.” The caller realized he should have taken the time to be clearer the next day when the full order of forty dozen donuts came—all sliced in half.
Through the right leaders and clear instructions, we can have greater confidence as we let something go. Even then, it’s always a risk, but the greater risk is found in holding on for too long.
One of my greatest lessons in many years in a rapidly growing church is the need to let go. If we don’t let go, we won’t continue to grow. We’ll stay stuck where we are. If we don’t let go, the ministry or business won’t continue to grow. It will stay dependent on us.
My strongest experience with this came with the letting go of teaching our midweek Bible studies. During my first ten years at Saddleback Church, I taught a weekly study through the Bible, first to a few dozen people and eventually seeing it grow to a few thousand. I’m a Bible teacher at heart, so what a privilege it was to teach God’s Word to God’s people!
As much as I enjoyed the people at this Bible study, the feeling began to grow in me that there were thousands more who needed to study God’s Word who were not there. And I felt that what we were doing in these Bible studies was much the same as what we were doing on the weekends. People needed something different for their growth.
We were beginning to emphasize small groups more strongly, but I knew that as long as people were coming to midweek Bible study, they probably weren’t going to join a small group. Their full schedules would make them feel they couldn’t fit it all in. So I went to Rick Warren and suggested we stop doing midweek Bible study so more people could be in small groups. I knew that in a large church, people would not be able to grow spiritually without the relational interaction and accountability of a small group. I think Rick had been patiently waiting for me to come to this conclusion—one he had been seeing for some time.
So I let go of something I loved to do. And many of our members let go of a midweek service that was meaningful to them. In this case, the result was almost immediate. Up to that point, we had about eight hundred small groups meeting at Saddleback. That year, our number of small groups exploded to three thousand. We saw a tenfold increase when we let go of our midweek services and started Purpose Driven Life small groups.
Obviously, as wonderful as our midweek services were, they were a bottleneck to the greater thing God was looking to do. A. W. Tozer wrote, “In the kingdom of God, the surest way to lose something is to try to protect it, and the best way to keep it is to let it go.”2 The greatest stewardship of your successes often comes in this moment of letting it go.
Put It to Use
As a fourth step to building on your successes, you must see the ways you can continue to be put to use. Nehemiah 7 tells of the registering of the families who lived in Jerusalem. This was done because there was a problem: “Now the city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it, and the houses had not yet been rebuilt. So my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles, the officials and the common people for registration by families” (Nehemiah 7:4–5).
The wall had been rebuilt, but the city inside that wall still needed to be rebuilt. Why rebuild the walls if the city wasn’t going to be filled? So God put it into Nehemiah’s heart to register the people so they could live, be protected, raise their families, and worship God in the city. God gave Nehemiah the idea that allowed the success of the rebuilding of the wall to be utilized for the blessing of God’s people.
Before seeing what we can learn from the registration of the families, let’s take a moment to look more closely at what it means for God to put something into our hearts. Just as with Nehemiah, God is going to put some things into your heart that allow you to build on the successes he has brought into your life. How does that happen? What does it feel like? If you don’t know the answers to those questions, you might miss this all-important moment of direction.
When God puts something into your heart, it’s the result of listening with a desire to obey. Nehemiah obeyed God by rebuilding the wall, and then he listened for what was next. That listening was prompted by noticing a need: the city was spacious, but there weren’t enough people in it. From this, God put it into his heart to register the families. When God puts something into your heart, it is the key moment in building on the foundation of your successes.
Sometimes it comes in a practical idea that pops into your head; other times it’s almost like an audible voice you hear from God; and other times it comes in the form of a conviction that gradually grows in you. The common denominator is an unusual certainty that this is what God wants you to do—a certainty always verified by the truth of God’s Word and almost always by the encouragement of other believers.
When I became a pastor at Saddleback Church many years ago, it was because God put something into my heart. I was in my tenth year of pastoring the church in Marysville, the last five years of which had been spent rebuilding after the flood. Our family and the Warren family were together at a church conference. My wife, Chaundel, is Rick’s younger sister, so we regularly looked for times to connect in the flow of ministry.
Before one of the conference sessions, Rick was sitting behind me, talking to our mutual friend Harry Williams. Rick didn’t know I was listening as he talked about his desire to make the next change in the structure of Saddleback’s staff that would draw it more closely around God’s five purposes for the church.
He’d have a pastor of membership, a pastor of maturity, a pastor of ministry, a pastor of mission, and a pastor of magnification. In this moment of holy eavesdropping, it was as though God was sending an arrow into my heart telling me I needed to talk to Rick about being the pastor of maturity at Saddleback Church.
It was not an audible voice, but it was a powerful impression like I’ve had only two or three times in my life. I knew that if I didn’t talk to Rick, I’d be disobeying God. It was not a matter of me telling him, “The Holy Spirit said you have to hire me.” Whether he said yes or no was his decision; I just knew I needed to ask. By God’s grace, I came to Saddleback Church in 1991 to serve as pastor of maturity for ten years and then as teaching pastor in the years since.
These heart impressions may come in powerful ways such as this, or they may come in simpler ways. Many years ago, my friend Buddy Owens mentioned to me that I should take the studies I had taught at our midweek Bible study for many years and teach them online in a podcast. He said, “You could call it DriveTime Devotions.”
I’ve now taught through most of the Bible in this ten-minute-a-day podcast, with tens of millions of downloads—all because of a heart impression that came from a brief conversation with a friend. While different from the powerful impression I had when I came to Saddleback, it was an idea that I knew came from God.
By God’s grace, the teaching I let go of in midweek Bible study has now been multiplied to many others through this daily podcast. When you let it go, God often gives it back to you in a way that’s greater than you expected.
Whether it’s a powerful impression or an idea from a friend, what is God putting into your mind about how to build on the successes he has given you in your life?
For Nehemiah, the idea was to register the families. In so doing, he could see the resources that God had given him to use: the families who were available to live in the city. In its listing of name after name of those who were registered, chapter 7 is one of those “boring” parts of the Bible that many of us skip over as we read.
It was anything but boring for Nehemiah! In every name there was an opportunity. He saw where they could live, how the city could be built, and how the generations would be raised there. When we get to chapter 10 of Nehemiah, we’re going to see how Nehemiah connected these people to God’s purposes for the city through their dedication to God.
There is a powerful principle here concerning what happens when you look at the resources God has given you. When you do an inventory of the available resources, you start to move from “what if” to “what now.” You begin to see how God can use the resources he has given to further build on the successes he has given.
When your successes aren’t being utilized, you have some choices. You can live in frustration, quit in anger, or search for solutions. It’s amazing how often the solutions are found in looking at the resources God has already given.
Nehemiah didn’t waste his success. He searched for solutions so he could put to use what God had given. In the search for solutions, we see three key actions throughout the book of Nehemiah.
The first is praise. If we’re going to build on the success God gives, the first thing we need to do is praise God for the success. As long as we think the success is ours, we won’t be able to build as God wants us to build. We’ll be filled either with pride that we’ve done so well or with discouragement that things are falling apart. As we praise God for the success, we recognize that it’s his. This praise to God causes us to look forward in anticipation of what he wants to do next rather than looking backward in self-satisfaction or frustration.
Praise gets the focus off of what we can do and on what God can do.
The second action is service. Nehemiah recognized that God had not given him his position and success for his own sake. It was in serving others that he found the fulfillment of God’s greatest goals for his life. Jesus said that even he, the Son of God, “did not come to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45).
God allowed us to rebuild that church in Marysville so the church could serve the community. He is restoring your marriage so you can serve him by serving others in that marriage. He restores your business so it can become a vehicle for loving God and others.
With this attitude of praise and the decision to serve, you next evaluate your resources. What gifts, opportunities, people, and talents has God given you to work with? The point is not to ask if you have enough. Almost always you will feel you don’t have enough to do what God has put in your heart to do. The point is to look carefully at what you have and to put what you have to work.
David had only five smooth stones, and God was able to work with that to defeat a giant. Gideon had an army of just three hundred men, and God was able to work with that to defeat thousands. And don’t forget a little boy who had only five loaves and two fish. Jesus was able to work with that to feed five thousand people.
You don’t look at your resources to see if you have enough; you look at your resources to see what you can give. And it is always when you give those resources that don’t seem nearly enough that God works in ways that are more than enough.
Whatever success God has given, he has given it for a reason, and that success is a part of the stewardship of your life. Use the success he gave of restoring your marriage to help strengthen others in their marriages. Build on the success he gave of restoring the relationship with one of your children by encouraging other parents. Serve God with the success he gave of rebuilding a business by using that business to serve others. As you do this, you are trusting God to finish the story he started.
BUILD ON YOUR SUCCESSES: My First Steps
SECURE YOUR INVESTMENT
What is the one most important thing you need to do to secure your investment in what you are beginning to put together again?
DON’T DO IT ALONE
Who can you involve in supporting you?
Who can help you with accomplishing the details of what needs to be done?
Who can help you with strengthening the overall purpose of what you are doing?
LET IT GO
What do you need to release to someone you trust in order to do something new?
PUT IT TO USE
How can you give praise to God for what he has put together again?
How can you serve others out of what God has given you?
What resources has God given you to work with?