Move Toward Greater Definition of Your Highest
Work hard! Invest passion into purpose, and allow purpose to prioritize your work ethic.
Some people call this “narrow your focus.” I refer to the pattern of leadership maturity that moves leaders into greater specificity as they step into the deeper reaches of “life’s work.” The principle of pouring passion into an increasingly more well-defined purpose is a recognizable trait of higher level leaders, or “next step leaders.”
In the areas of your life where you are operating by a job description, become the best worker possible! Pour passion in a prioritization of fulfilling the purpose of that assignment. That doesn’t mean that this job description is your destiny; it means that your destiny will be positively impacted by your effort to produce your highest in everything you do, learning to apply passion to a narrowly defined aspect of purpose.
Some people make the mistake of thinking greatness comes by greatness in all, so they apply the same level of passion to making an omelet as they do to intercession. No great intercessor does that. No great mother does that. No great apostle does that. No great artist does that. No great business leader does that.
The greatness comes in choosing the narrowly defined focus that God provides for your preparation, submitting to that process with passion, suffering the pain that process provides, to reap the greater capacity of grace that makes you the person who can fulfill destiny.
Destiny is a Person
Destiny isn’t a goal. Destiny is a person with a purpose. Destiny is a design with definitions for success. Destiny is you becoming the person you were created to be so you can do all God calls you to do.
You must become that person to fulfill that purpose.
Life begins with the generalities. Parents invest in the development of those generalities all founded upon the basis of love, trust, hope, honor, peace, and personal leadership. These come by strengthening the will of a child to submit as a basis for learning to obey. By learning to submit and obey, the child develops inner leadership so he or she can live by principles form Someone outside of and greater than themselves. Children learn this by experiencing discipline, and this discipline is defined, in part, by pain.
Mature adults continue in this process, and the process reaches for a revelation of higher and more specific aspects of personal character and identity that reach ultimate when the person reaches ultimate fulfillment of purpose.
That means that the greatest decades of your life may be your fifties, sixties, and seventies with your eighties and nineties being more about inheritance investments and final wrap ups of generational transition. That means that living with the more general “I’m good at everything” gives way to “I’m investing passion in the highest of my personal purpose by serving the highest of God’s purpose.”
Serve God’s Purpose to Serve God
Serving God’s purpose, by submitting to God’s preparation and positioning, will never conflict with your highest purpose.
Prodigals run from this preparation and positioning and produce waste. Authentic sons and daughters maintain the preparation and positioning until they reach the highest or ultimate of personal preparation and positioning just before death.
Moses was a great leader. His great writing of the five books of the Bible are so foundational the rest of revelation is a painting fitted to that frame. Yet, Moses wrote the book of Deuteronomy just before his death. This is the book Jesus quotes to satan in answer to each temptation. Deuteronomy means, “second law” or “let’s rehearse God’s expectations for culture now that we have lived through a rebel generation and are about to carry these principles, processes, and protocols into the Promise.”
Moses realized the greatest tests of submission and obedience at the end. He produces his greatest contributions as a leader as he is turning things over to someone else. He sees the Promise but dies. His life story continues in the Promised Land through others.
Sound familiar? It is true of Jesus and every great leader!
Moses is good at leading, gets better at leading, reaches the highest of leadership. Then, he dies. The higher reaches of leadership come through deepest levels of pain as the passion applied to the process brings more pressure and narrows the focus of life and leadership to purpose. As you near those great days of producing, your focus narrows more and more to purpose.
Submission Strengthens the Will to Endure the Process
The sooner you have the submission strength to narrow your passion investments to purpose, the sooner in life you enter into the higher levels of leadership. Nothing about this process is measured by outward success: you can be in prison like Joseph while becoming a more mature prophetic leader. The sudden elevation of Joseph didn’t prepare his character; it revealed the character he has pursued while in prison!
Today, consider how you are investing your greatest emotional energy and passion for purpose. If the distractions are feeding on your passion, shut off their supply lines! If people demand that you come down to their level of expectation in order to please them, choose rather to please God. If you are investing your passion in delusional dreams processing as a teenager with a glossy-paged magazine, inserting yourself into scenarios for which you have made no investment of preparation’s pain, shift your imaging to revelation you already have.
Working toward what is next, begin with what is. If your choices have left with a “I must now start all over,” you are prodigal in our pursuit. You are making the terrible error of assuming that disconnecting from the process God uses to prepare and position you puts you in control. You are vagabonding into a wasteland. Reconnect.
Invest passion in what God has revealed in your real life, right now production as a basis for taking the next steps of passion investment. Delusion requires no discipline, so avoid it. Preparation process always include passion, and passion contains the pathos of pain.
Today, allow passion to set the priorities of your work ethic.
