The Process Precedes The Promise

Approximately 5 years ago, I preached my first sermon which was titled The Process Precedes the Promise.  When I preached it, I thought that I had arrived at a promise and finished going through a process.  Boy was I wrong.  You see it was at that moment when the words which are the title of this blog exited my mouth that the process truly began.  These last 5 years have been a process that is bringing me into a place that I’ve only imagined (and will blog about once it is fully realized) and has begun to restore much of what I thought was lost in my life.

At the same time this process has stripped a lot of relationships from my life, some that started off good but ended up being toxic to me and toxic to the vision for my life.  Sometimes we don’t see how many of the events of our life are a part of the bigger picture or the promise that we are seeking to live out and achieve.  You must know that every promise has a process and every process has both a fixed and variable time limit to it (the fixed portion are things that you must go through that are not under your control while the variable portion is what is under your control).

Don’t give up on your promise when it seems like you’ll never get there.  It’s usually in those moments that you will find the breakthrough that you need to get to your promise.  While that may sound trite and prepackaged (especially those that are in a Pentecostal/Charismatic Church), I assure you from personal experience as recent as last week that it is true.

One thing that I must stress is that you have to validate every promise that you receive with your life’s purpose.  If you have received a promise that doesn’t resonate with who you are, your dreams and goals, or your purpose then that promise might not be for you in the first place.  Everything that is added or taken away from your life is meant to either augment or diminish your purpose.  This is why your have to go through and complete a process before receiving your promise.

In many parts of the Western world, people don’t want to wait anymore.  It’s become what I like to call a Microwave society; give me what I want quickly, I don’t want to wait anymore.  People don’t seem to want to wait anymore, nor do some people remember the value in being slowly cooked under intense heat.  It’s only under the intense heat that you will find all of the impurities being stripped away from you.  It’s during these “hot” times that you will find out if you truly can handle that which has been promised.

I hope that you keep pressing forward towards your promise and know that you’re not alone in it.