Building on Your Strengths

“The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him” (Romans 12:3 MSG).

Long before words like empowerment became popular, business writer Peter Drucker was telling us that the secret of achieving results is to focus on your strengths and the strengths of those you work with, rather than focusing on weaknesses.

The truth is all of us are a bundle of both strengths and weaknesses. No one is strong in every area. If you closely watch anyone with outstanding strengths, you’ll eventually notice that they also exhibit outstanding weaknesses.

I think God planned each of us this way. No one is good at everything, so we need each other and are forced to cooperate. The Bible says this:

“In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t. If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else” (Romans 12:4–6 MSG).

Here’s the point: Find out what God made you to do well and do more of it. Don’t worry about what you don’t do well. In fact, try to do as little as possible of what you don’t do well.

Rick Warren