Living out your Potential

Dr. Cecil Clements
Duration: 14:51 (Compressed for the Internet)

I’d like to talk to you this morning on the theme ‘Living out your Potential’ or being the person you were meant to be. The statement automatically begs the question – are you the person that you should be or God intended you to be? Or has life slowly recast you into a new mold, one that you know isn’t the real you but you seem to have no way or maybe even the desire to change it. Famous philosopher and author, Walden Henry David Thoreau once remarked, ‘The masks of men live lives of quiet desperation’. It seems that despair and tragedy are closely linked. A person who’s living out a nightmare is not living out his or her dreams. And if your dreams are not being lived out, then you’re not living to your truest potential.

Tom Patterson who wrote the book ‘Living the Life you were meant to Live’ says, ‘The greatest tragedy of all is for a person to be managed by circumstances and live a half-dead life.’ Sometimes life does that. We look back on our lives and say, ‘I wasn’t this timid a person 5 years back. I was confident, self-assured, and capable of taking on the world.’ Today when you look back you find that the confidence, the zest, that initiative has been whittled down into somebody you’re not very proud of. Or even deep down you know that maybe you were not born to be this kind of a person.

Well, if I’ve caught your attention in these last couple of minutes, I want to move us to a story that I heard many years ago, the moral of which I love. It’s a story from Czechoslovakia. An old man was walking down a country road. Tired and weary, he leaned against one of the posts along the way. It happened to be a farm. As he looked across the fence at some of the things that were going on, his eyes settled on a brood of chickens that were running around. He watched them for a couple of minutes and suddenly realized that one of those chickens was not really a chicken. So he watched this brood of chickens running around with this one chicken acting like them. Finally he went up to the farmhouse and knocked on the door. The farmer came out, looked at the man in surprise and said ‘Sir, what can I do for you?’ The old man said, ‘I noticed that you had a brood of chickens but within that, one chicken doesn’t seem to be a chicken.’ The farmer laughed and said that it was a little eagle that had come to their little daughter and it had just grown up with the chickens. Now it was part of the brood. The old man looked at the farmer and said, ‘Sir, would you mind if I tried something?’ The farmer was a little perplexed but didn’t know how to say no and so he said ‘Sure’.

The old man walked up to this brood of chickens, he caught a hold of this little eagle that was there with the chickens. He lifted it high above his head and threw it as far as he could, shouting, ‘You are not a chicken, you are an eagle.’ And the poor eagle went flying through the air wondering what had happened to his normally very quiet mundane existence. Where did this mad man come from? Then it fell to the earth, picked itself up and ran for cover. The farmer and the old man looked at each other and the old man said, ‘Sir, begging your indulgence, can I try one more thing?’ This time the farmer wasn’t too happy but he still agreed. The man then asked for a ladder. They got the ladder from the farmhouse and placed it against the side of the house. Then the old man went to get the eagle who tried to run, but eagles acting like chickens don’t get very far. So the old man caught hold of the eagle and climbed up the ladder and got 6 feet of height, raised his hands high above his head and once again threw the bird as far as he could shouting ‘You are not a chicken, you are an eagle.’ This time the bird went in a huge arc and thought ‘when I fall, I’m going to die.’ Then it fell with a thud, lay there, then picked itself up and ran and hid. The old man came down, thanked the farmer, and went home. But he couldn’t sleep.

About 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, he retraced his steps to the farmer’s house and knocked on the door. The farmer came bleary-eyed to the door and said that if he wanted that eagle he could just take it and go. The man said he just wanted to try something else. The farmer had had enough and told him to just take the bird and leave him alone. The old man went and there he saw the little eagle sleeping along with the chickens. He picked it up and put it underneath his coat and walked away. He walked to the foot of a mountain and began to climb to the top. The little bird sensed that its end had come and this time there was no escape from this mad man who had invaded its quiet lifestyle. The old man got to the top of the mountain, raised the bird as high as he could and then he flung the bird with all his might shouting ‘you are not a chicken, you are an eagle.’ The bird went out into a long loop and then slowly began to plummet down knowing that its end had come. As it began to gain momentum while falling, the wind began to blow against it and began to pry one of its wings loose. To its utter amazement the bird began to realize that as its wings began to open, the fall had been stopped and it was beginning to soar. Then it waved one of its wings, then the other and found that it could turn. And in amazement it began to flap its wings and then took a wide circle and realized that it was flying. Then it came around and there on the top of that mountain was the old man, his hands cupped to his mouth shouting, ‘don’t forget, you are not a chicken, you are an eagle.’

Sometimes, that’s what life does to us. We get caught up in circumstances and situations that mold us into the way that those situations want us to be. And we allow that to varying degrees of acceptance until suddenly we find, ‘this is not me, this is not the real me.’ And then it takes God to come along one day and say, “You’re living as a chicken when you could be soaring like an eagle.” Maybe today God would say to you, “You’ve let the world mold you into the kind of person that you ought not to be. That’s not who I created you to be. But you’ve allowed situations and circumstances to make you into this kind of person.” Maybe this morning God is shouting out to you, “You’re not a chicken, you’re an eagle. I made you with a different DNA, a different purpose in life.”

In the Bible there’s a very beautiful story of a man called Gideon who was a nobody. He was part of the children of Israel and the children of Israel were having a difficult time with the Midianites. They were raiding them, took their crops, cattle. The Israelites were in deep trouble. Then God comes through an angel and He says: “Gideon, God is with you, O Mighty Warrior!” Gideon at that time was actually threshing wheat in a wine press. Now you don’t thresh wheat in a wine press, because wheat needs to be threshed outside and the winepress was inside. But Gideon was so scared that he was hiding there. Look at the way he is addressed: ‘God is with you, O Mighty Warrior!’ God says: I’m going to send you to defeat the Midianites. And Gideon says, ‘Me? I’m the weakest from the weakest clan. And I’m the weakest in my family. But God says to us: “I see potential that even you or your family or your company may not see.”

Paul Holbrecht, a sculptor from Belgium, says, ‘It’s some kind of magic how every piece of rock contains its own biggest possible sculpture inside it. You just have to remove the rest of the stone which you don’t need for your sculpture’. Maybe today God is saying to you: “I see your potential. I see who you are. If you’ll allow me to just remove the excess stone, you can begin to be who you are.”

The Bible again says, ‘if God is for us, who can be against us’, in the book of Romans. Then again in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”. And God says “For I know the plans I have for you. They’re plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

I wonder this morning my friends, whether some of you on this call are thinking – that’s me. Some part of my life I have been molded by my situations and circumstances and deep down I know that it’s not me. To you I would say this morning, God is your encourager. God is saying to you, “that’s not the way I made you. I want you to soar like an eagle. I want you to unleash the potential within you. Be who you were meant to be.” I would like to pray this morning that God would be the one to come and shout: “you’ve been molded into a situation/circumstance into the kind of person that you’re not meant to be. And I want to release you. Maybe your response to that is ‘God, that’s where I am. Will you release me? I’m willing’. I want to pray that God would be the one to be the restorer of who you are.