Bill Johnson - Strengthen Yourself in the Lord
I don’t think it’s possible for us to come into God’s intended destiny for us without learning how to navigate disappointment, loss, and destruction—those kinds of horrible things. David is a great example. Before he became king, he was sought after to be killed by Saul; he was rejected by his own brethren. He faced a whole bunch of rejections that brought him to a place of personal strength. The turning point was when the men he had poured his life into sought to kill him. At that point, the Scripture says David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.
The crazy thing is that in the next scene, he becomes king. I think our destiny lies on the other side of learning how to minister to ourselves. It’s not an excuse for independence or withdrawing from people; it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the fact that God wants us to learn how to embrace our own destiny and how to minister to ourselves. What I do is get into the Psalms when facing difficulty. I read the Psalms until I hear my own voice. When I can hear my own heart’s cry on the pages of Scripture, then I know I have found a safe landing place. I read and pray through those verses until I really hear the mind of the Lord for me.
I work with that; I embrace it. I sing it, I pray it, I declare it—I do all those things because that’s the heart of God for me. Once I have found that, I know I have found a place of great personal strength. My encouragement to you is to find those places of strength through His Word. If you find in your heart that you’ve been accusing God for the difficulties you’ve faced, then you need to identify those things. It’s vital that we harbor no accusation in our hearts towards God, that we don’t blame Him, and that we don’t question His goodness in any way.
If you do, bring it out into the open, confess it to Him, talk to Him. But by all means, repent—turn from those ways of thinking and those false belief systems that really mess us up. I encourage you to take what’s in front of you—the difficulties and challenges—find God’s heart for you, and then find His goodness. In the midst of that goodness, give Him thanks, give Him praise, take His promise over your life, and minister to yourself.