Pastor Steven Furtick

Archive for the ‘Personal Development’ Category

Shut Up and Get Moving – 2011 Revisited

| Personal Development, Spiritual Growth

As 2011 comes to an end, I’ve decided to revisit some of my top viewed blogs of this year. This post seemed to challenge and encourage people to act in faith. Check it out.

Shut Up and Get Moving

14 “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.” 15 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.”
Exodus 14:14-15

Exodus 14:14 is by far one of the most misinterpreted verses in the Bible.

Most of us, including myself, have looked at it as a faith infusing verse of what we should do when we need help or a breakthrough. When we’re looking for God to do something big. Or when we’re waiting to see God bring something into our lives.

Be still. Let the Lord fight the battle for you. Let go and let God.
In short, do nothing.

There’s just one problem with that: verse 15.

In verse 14 Moses tells the people that God will fight for them and to be still. But in verse 15 God comes in and immediately contradicts Moses. He doesn’t tell them to stand still. He tells them to shut up and get moving. Into the sea.

Moses was wrong. In isolation, verse 14 is wrong. Yes, God’s going to fight for them. But it won’t be while they’re standing there and doing nothing. It’s in the parted sea. It’s while they’re moving that God will be fighting.

Sometimes it can be easy to mistake patience for what’s really passivity.
Faith for what could be laziness. Or even faithlessness.

Sometimes it can be easy to think that we should stand still and cry out when God’s actually looking for us to shut up and get moving. Not to do everything on our own, obviously. But to realize that faith isn’t necessarily sitting and waiting for God to do everything on His own for you. God fights while you move.

For example, if you’re unemployed it isn’t faith for you to stay at home and watch the Price is Right while praying during commercial breaks and expecting God to throw a job into your lap. Faith is updating your resume. Getting your butt out the door. And applying for jobs. Let God fight for you in your job search.

You could apply this to pretty much every area of your life. Relationships. Finances. Major life decisions.

Faith isn’t passive. It’s active. If you don’t believe me, go read Hebrews 11. I defy you to find me one verse that says, “By faith, they watched.” It’s always by faith, they moved. By faith, they did.

That’s because faith is knowing who God is and acting accordingly.
And then watching Him act accordingly.

Stop the Hop – 2011 Revisited

| Personal Development, Spiritual Growth

Looking back at 2011, I’ve decided to post some of my top viewed blog posts of the year that really seemed to make an impact in people’s lives. Check this out.

Stop the Hop

One of the things that really troubles me about the church today is the phenomenon of church hopping and church shopping. It’s a consumeristic mindset towards the body of Christ that grieves the heart of God.

It’s time for us to stop the hop. This isn’t Christianity. Jesus didn’t die so we could sample different churches like varieties of meat on a party platter. Jesus died to establish His church as the most powerful entity on the planet.

We are alive at the greatest time in history for the advance of the gospel. We have so much going for us.

We have the ability.
We have the resources.
We have the people.

What we don’t have is them committed to a place where they can actually be used for their God-ordained purpose.

If this generation doesn’t make the impact it should, it won’t be because it didn’t have the resources. Or even the passion. It will be because it was too busy hopping to different churches to stop and commit to one where its resources and passion could actually find an outlet.

The church is the change the world is waiting for. God help us if we keep the world waiting for us while we try to find the perfect church for us.

If you’ve fallen into the trap of church hopping, let me encourage you: embrace your place somewhere where God can use you. At the end of your life, God’s not going to be impressed or pleased that you saw what He was doing at ten different churches. He’s going be more pleased that you were a part of what He was doing at one church.

And you’re never going to find the perfect one, so give up looking. If the church you’re visiting doesn’t have what you’re looking for, it might be because God wants you to provide it.

Let’s all commit together to begin a campaign to stop the hop.
Find a place to get planted. Embrace it. And start changing the world.

The question of our day isn’t if God wants to do incredible things through the church. The question is will we be in place to experience it?

Be Careful Who You’re Counting Out

| Motivation, Personal Development

The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.
-Matthew 14:21

Jesus didn’t feed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish.
He fed a crowd of people that numbered 5,000-besides women and children.
But in those days, the women and children typically weren’t part of the headcount. Therefore, we typically refer to this incident as the feeding of the 5,000. Actually, it was more like 20,000, at the very least.

With this in mind, isn’t it remarkable that the ingredients for the miracle came from a little boy?

Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
-John 6:8-9

God fed the multitude through the meager resources of a child who wasn’t even included in the original count.

God likes the unlikely.
When He looks for someone to use, He often looks for the under looked.
He calls for the youngest son, who wasn’t even worth bringing in from the sheep field, from the perspective of his father and older brothers.

Be careful before you count someone out.
They might be the channel of your miracle.
And if you’ve been counted out lately, don’t worry.
God often hides His provision in places where no one else would know to look for them.
Man looks at the outward appearance. But God looks at the heart…

Naming Stuff

| Elevation, Personal Development

At Elevation, we place a high priority on naming stuff. Events, Meetings, Teams, Rooms, People who need new monikers, we name them all. It’s part of who we are, and we have fun doing it.

For a season I ate lunch every week with our lead staff. I didn’t just call it Lead Staff Lunch. No siree, I called it XLC. X-treme Lunch Challenge. Our strategy meeting that took place right after lunch was called CN. What that stands for is confidential. Now the meeting is called Preview. Before CN it was called something else, I can’t remember.

Just now, before writing this blog, I spent an hour trying to come up with a tagline for our Code Orange Revival. That was after a whole long segment of a meeting where we banged our heads on about 20 taglines that didn’t work. Coming up with the name Code Orange Revival itself was a whole other, multi day on and off process. I used two pages of research to nail that one down.

Maybe this seems eccentric, but I won’t even commit to doing something until I can figure out what we’re going to call it.

The upside is that this helps me think about an initiative at a vision level before I get all bogged down in the details.
Asking the question: What are we going to call it? helps me make decisions about who is it for? What should it feel like? How big will it be? Before we ever roll it out, and get it in the works.

There is creative power in our language.
Put a little extra thought into naming the stuff you’re responsible for. It might make more difference than you think.

Genesis 2:19-20
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

(It only took me about 5 seconds to name this blog entry, ironically.)