EVERY BELIEVER HAS an assignment from God (see 1 Cor. 12). There is something that God has called you to do. Maybe it’s not to stand behind a pulpit. That doesn’t make your assignment any less. You may be called to be a teacher, a bus driver, an attorney, a nurse, a doctor, or a stay-at-home mom. Whatever it is, there’s a specific assignment for you.
The enemy will bring opposition to try to stop you from fulfilling that assignment (see 1 Cor. 16:9). He wants you to get so consumed with the opposition that you forget your position.
There are two lenses through which we can view our circumstances: the lens of our own human natural strength, or the lens of God’s Word. Choose to focus on the Word.
No matter what comes against us, we have the Word of God that tells us we’re overcomers. The Bible says that in this world we’ll have tribulations, but it didn’t stop there. Jesus said, “But be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 NKJV).
Things are going to come against us. We know and understand that. But God has given us the necessary tools, equipment, and resources we need to stand against the enemy’s attacks and walk in victory. To illustrate this, I want us to look at a very familiar person in the Word of God—Abraham.
Romans 4:17-18 (MSG)
17 We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint,
but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as the father of many peoples”? Abraham was the first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing.
18 When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.” And so he was made the father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!”
Sometimes we’re too quick to respond. How do I know? Because I’ve done it many, many times—in the wrong way. The stories in the Bible aren’t included just to make a great Sunday school story. These things are in there for our example. And if we do what they did, we’ll get the same results they did.
When Abraham received God’s promise that he would be the father of many nations, he could easily have made a list of every single reason why that wasn’t possible.
In verse 18, we notice that Abraham chose which direction to look. “When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do, but on the basis of what God said he would do.”
Every day, we have a choice about what we focus on. Abraham focused on “what God said.” He lifted his attention from the natural onto God’s Word.
The next time your problems start screaming for your attention, ask yourself, “Is what I’m seeing greater than what He [God] says?” Absolutely not! I want to encourage you to look through the lens of God’s Word today, fix your focus on the answer, and defeat the opposition.
Rhonda Cloin
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Rhonda Cloin
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