The Hope QuotientSample

These steps will lead you to some of the most exciting places imaginable. Just remember, the spark to taking these steps is the belief that God has gifted you, even when you aren’t sure what those gifts are or whether they even exist.

Discover: Think about how various gifts work. People tend to be drawn to a specific area, and their gifts fall into one of the areas specified in Scripture.

Develop: You get good at something only through practice. You develop your gifts by using your gifts. The more you develop them, the better you get at using them, and the more fulfilled and effective you become. Keep exploring and using the gifts you discover.

Deploy: Take your gifts, plug them into service, and let God do whatever He wants to do through them. Do not approach your gifts with a preconceived notion of how God will use them. Never forget that He gifted you. Your job is to deploy your gifts wherever He puts you.

For more than a decade, Ira and Ann Yates labored to scratch out a meager existence, constantly worried about how to pay their bills. Ira had traded his dry goods store for a 16,640-acre ranch. A friend warned Yates not to trade.

Yates made the trade and struggled. Desperate to cover debts, Ira approached an oil company to drill some test wells on his property. Experts said they’d come up empty, but the company drilled anyway.

One of the wells produced a gusher, and Yates was an instant millionaire. Five more followed. And more. Today, oil continues to flow from the Yates Oil Field, one of the largest reserves in the world.

For years, Ira and Ann Yates struggled, not knowing what lay just under their feet. God basically says today, I created you. I have put some priceless things deep inside you. Take the time to discover them and get them out, and they will make all the difference to your future, to those around you, to the world.

Think Up:

Until you look, you’re usually not even aware that the gifts are there.

What “Yates Oil Field” is just waiting to be unleashed in your own life? (Read on).