Charles Stanley on unrealized potential

Even though the world may not recognize your potential or help you achieve it, God does. He believes in you and advocates for you because He knows what He has put in you. He loves you because you are His child and for no other reason. He seeks to perfect you, however, because He knows the unique purpose for which He created you. God is never content with your having unrealized potential. He is relentless in seeking to help you bring your potential to full fruition.

God’s process of perfection has two dimensions, like two sides of the same coin:

1. teaching and guiding

2. chastisement

You must embrace both processes.

The natural tendency is to like the teaching and guiding of the Holy Spirit, and to pull away from His chastising. Some have even gone so far in this era as to proclaim that every negative experience is from the devil, not God. That position cannot be supported by the Scriptures.

God always works for your ultimate and eternal good. From His perspective, all that He does is good and for good. But from your perspective, what God does is sometimes painful and difficult. You must be very cautious in concluding that something isn’t good solely because it doesn’t feel good to you.

Jim had a serious setback in his relationship with a young woman whom he had hoped to marry. He discovered that she had been secretly seeing another man. She said that she saw him because she wanted to be sure about her love for Jim. He gave her another chance, only to discover that she continued to see the other man under an even greater cloak of secrecy.

Jim’s trust in her was shattered. Even so, he forgave her and tried to keep the relationship together. She eventually broke off the relationship. He blamed himself for not loving her enough, not being good enough for her. The pain he felt was intense. He had been deeply in love with the woman and had anticipated living in a happy marriage relationship with her. All of his hopes and dreams and plans seemed destroyed.

Initially, Jim blamed a number of people, including the devil, for the breakup of the relationship. I asked him, “Do you think perhaps it was God who caused this to come to light so that you might not marry her?”

He didn’t respond, but I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t believe God had been involved in the painful experience. It was against his theology that God could have a part in anything that might feel negative.

I said to him, “I’d like to ask you four questions.”

He said, “All right.”

“First,” I said, “do you truly believe that God loves you?”

He responded quickly, “I have no doubt that God loves me. Jesus is my Savior. God has rescued me from sin and has given me a new life. Yes, God loves me.”

“Fine,” I said. “Do you believe God knows about everything that happens to you?”

He again responded quickly, “Of course! He knows everything.”

“Including what was happening between you and your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” he said. “God knew about that too.”

“Third,” I continued, “could God have stopped this series of events if He had desired to stop them?”

He said a little more slowly this time, “Yes, He could have stopped what happened.”

“But He didn’t intervene,” I said. “He allowed this to happen. And that brings me to the fourth question: Why did God allow this in your life?”

He didn’t say anything, so I continued, “I believe there is something in this that God wants to teach you, refine in you, or change in you. Ask God what He desires to do in your life.”

“But maybe all this has nothing to do with me. Instead, it’s all about what God is doing in her. I’m not sure that I’m supposed to change as much as she should change.”

“God will do something in her as well,” I said. “He has her potential in mind as much as He has your potential in mind. But there’s always something in every circumstance or situation that God uses to refine us.”

As the weeks passed, Jim began to accept a new way of thinking. He came to the conclusion that God, indeed, had brought about the circumstances that led to his breakup with the woman. He came to see that God had spared him what no doubt would have been an even greater heartache had he married her. He also began to accept the fact that God was desiring to change some things in him about the way he related to women, about how he rather blindly entered into relationships and allowed his heart to rule over his spirit and head, and about how his relationships tended to be based upon lust more than spiritual values.

Jim later admitted to me, “I think perhaps God caused me to meet that woman and to be hurt by her so He could change some things in me and prepare me for the right woman when she comes along. I’m not the same guy I was, and that’s good.”

God uses a wide variety of methods to teach you and to chastise you in a way that will lead to change, growth, and refinement in your life. He is always seeking ways in which you might be perfected. The perfecting process may be difficult and painful, but in the end, if you submit to God’s work in your life, it is always good. You may not like the way you feel as you are going through a period of chastisement, but you certainly will like the end result.

Stanley, C. F. (1997). The reason for my hope. Nashville, Tenn.: T. Nelson.