Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling Sampel

Called to Persevere

All mountains have one thing in common: they are big. They loom large and cast dark shadows: illness, opposition, stress, disappointment, bereavement, persecution, fear of the unknown.

Mountains can stop us in our tracks. They can force us to rethink and replan. Their size drives us to feel insignificant and hopeless. But we need to know that God is bigger than they are. We are supported by someone mightier than the mountains we face. Our weaknesses are no obstacle to God’s power.

God is able to use the weakest person as long as he or she relies on his Spirit to perform at a higher level. This dependence is the cornerstone on which our lives are built. The recognition of our weaknesses is powerful, more powerful than any example of human strength. Such a paradox can only exist in the topsy-turvy world of Jesus Christ.

In 1978, the young coach of the St. Mirren football club in Scotland was fired, as he was thought to be doing a bad job. But he would have none of it. He believed he had been dismissed unfairly and took the management to an industrial tribunal, asking to be reinstated as the club’s manager.

The presiding official at the tribunal hearing rejected his claim for reinstatement and described him as petty, immature, and lacking any managerial ability. He set out to prove them wrong. That man was Sir Alex Ferguson, the best football manager of his generation.

Jesus told us directly to speak to the mountain: “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them” (Mark 11:23).

This is, of course, a figure of speech. But it is an important lesson nonetheless. We should “speak to the mountain”—speak the promises of God aloud when encountering overwhelming opposition.

Words of faith will dissolve the mountains of attack, destruction, and despair and wash them away, as if a mountain suddenly slid into the sea. There is something unbelievably powerful in articulating and speaking out the words of God.