Purpose And Power Of Authority (16 page)

People who have discovered their personal authority and have created an optimum environment for it will work at it even if they don’t get paid. When you are doing what you were born to do, you don’t need external motivation to work long hours. People have to tell you when it’s the lunch hour or when it’s time to go home. When you find your real work, you want to stay with it all day and all night. The right authority and the right environment give you powerful motivation and satisfaction.

The “Wrong” Environment Can Be Your “Pre-Occupation”

People who are in jobs or circumstances that are not related to their personal authority don’t really have occupations; they have pre-occupations. When you find your true vocation, you will not be “pre-occupied” but “occupied”—interested, absorbed, and engaged with your purpose. It would be a terrible thing never to get beyond your pre-occupation.

However, I believe that the Creator, in His wisdom, will sometimes allow us to be “pre-occupied” in certain jobs for a time in order to gain experience and skills that we will be able to use later in our true occupations. In this way, your pre-occupation is your job, but your occupation is your real work.

Most people don’t go to work. They simply go to a job. If you are in a job that is not aligned with your purpose, then consider it to be only temporary. Your managers and coworkers don’t know who you really are inside, but God does. Every position in life is only temporary until you reach the point where you are in a position to manifest your true self.

If your present job is a pre-occupation, don’t just resign without having any specific plans. You can ease your job frustration by focusing on what it can prepare you for—on the knowledge, experience, and skills you are gaining through it. You can go to your place of employment telling yourself, I’m going to discover my authority, my assignment, and then relate this job to my true work, learning everything I can here that will help me to move further along toward where I want to go.

Patiently Await Your Manifestation

One other point to keep in mind is that you may be a “late bloomer.” It takes some people a little longer than others to manifest their latent gifts and skills, for various reasons. It may be that the combined experiences of your life, and not just your “pre-occupations,” are preparing you for the time when you will find yourself in the right environment, among the right people, and then your personal authority will take off. Again, this will be an environment where you can run freely with your gifts, and, most likely, your progress will be exponential because you have been preparing for this moment for quite a while. Therefore, if you are still nurturing the knowledge and skills that will enable you to fully manifest your personal authority, then be patient with yourself and your circumstances and thank your Creator for authorizing His perfect timing in your life.

People who know and manifest their personal authority are not arrogant about their accomplishments; they don’t throw their success in other people’s faces, as if they are superior. While they enjoy their work, they are humble about it because they know they didn’t create themselves but were given their gifts by God.

When you are operating in your personal authority, you will experience great personal fulfillment and the joy of working in your domain. There is nothing wrong with this. It is natural to enjoy what you are meant to do! But those who keep their personal authority in perspective don’t show off. Like Carl Lewis, they are down-to-earth. In addition, they are able to submit to others’ authority in their realms because they recognize that valuable gifts have been given to all.

In chapter one, I listed four foundational principles for understanding authority and entering into the power of your personal domain, which we have been exploring in this book. Let us now consider them in light of your specific personal authority.

The Principle of the Author. The only one who knows the true and original purpose and function of a product is the author. Are you connected to the Author of life, so that you can discover the purpose and authority He has placed deep within you? This is the first and most important step to manifesting your personal authority. Authenticity begins with being connected to the Creator God through Jesus Christ, the Authorized Dealer, and desiring to live according to His established principles and standards. He is Reality. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

It won’t do much good to pursue personal authority if you are only half committed to the One in whose image you are created, the One who deeply loves you and has placed wonderful gifts and dreams within you. Even if you were to exercise certain inherent gifts and be successful from an outward perspective, you wouldn’t be truly reflecting all that He has placed within you and all that He could do with those gifts if they were used for His purposes and to honor Him. As Paul wrote, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20).

Once you know you are connected to the Creator, stay connected to Him by reading His Word and by talking with Him, which is also called praying. As you talk with Him, ask Him to make your personal authority clear to you. He made you, and He knows what He put inside you to do for your generation. “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10, emphasis added). Then, anticipate His answer, recommit to Him everything that He has placed inside you, and see what happens!

The Principle of Authorization. Authorization is the legitimate transfer of power to a representative to be used specifically for the purpose for which it was delegated. The one who receives the delegated power is consciously aware that he does not personally own it.

The Author put something within you that He wants to see manifested on the earth. Your personal authority is the authorization that the Creator has given you to represent His image, desires, ideas, and purposes in the world. You were born with the authority to execute a specific assignment, and only you can do it the way you were born to do it. When you discover what you were created to be, then God expects you to use that discovery to maximize yourself. Your personal authority is to be offered back to Him with gratitude.

The power, or backing, for this authority is the unique blend of inherent gifts, abilities, and perspectives that you possess in order to fulfill the purpose for which you were created. Through the restoration provided by the Authorized Dealer, the Creator has also given us His own Spirit to live within and enable us to carry out our purposes. This is the ultimate gift of His representation in our lives, and we need to follow the guidance of His Spirit within us.

Authorization is therefore the lawful right and freedom given by the Author to His creation to exercise and manifest the ability or power He caused it to possess. Do you have the mind-set that your gifts and abilities are authorized by the Creator to be used to fulfill His purposes in the world? Until we exchange the idea of selfish ambition for selfless service, we will not be able to truly manifest our personal authority.

The Principle of Authenticity. Inherent authority is found in one’s purpose, or assignment, in the world. You may find that you have more than one assignment at different times of your life within the same domain or related domains. You must know your area or areas of authority and thus discover your authentic self so that you can be faithful to fulfill what you are authorized to do. How well do you know your area or areas of authority? If you are well acquainted with your personal domain, are you being faithful to operate within it? What might be hindering you from this, and how can you address it?

The Principle of Authority. An author naturally incorporates into the making of his product the capacity—or, the authority and the power—to perform, to produce, and to fulfill its purpose. You were born with delegated authority. Your authority is the divine gift, assignment, passion, and contribution that you were placed on this earth to deliver to humanity. No one can steal it, prevent it, devalue it, or stop it unless you let them. How will you serve your gift to the world?

The principle of life for every human being is to reconnect to the Author, discover his personal authority, become authentic, and fulfill what he is authorized to do.

I hope you will take these truths about manifesting your personal authority to heart. For me, this knowledge came about by a process of reconnecting with the Creator, studying His Word, experiencing life, reading a multitude of books, and talking with many people. I want to make this process easier for you, and that is why I have written this book. I want you to discover the freedom and joy of operating in your personal domain. Therefore, we will next explore the benefits you will receive from exercising your God-given authority.

Chapter Eight

In this chapter, I provide an overview of the tremendous benefits you experience as you exercise your personal authority, which allows you the freedom to be who you were created to be. Then, in the next chapter, I show how you can discover your personal authority to ensure that you begin receiving these benefits.

Everybody was born an original, but most people end up being copies. The world has so many duplicates that it’s hard to find an original walking around. The “normal” people are the copies.

When you manifest your personal authority, you are not just a variation of someone else. You know who you truly are, and that is the key to your originality. There’s only one of you, and you make the most of it, expressing your unique design. You put into effect your God-given vision and goals for your life, even though they may be different from those of the people around you.

While many people struggle to find a sense of personal significance for their lives, you understand that your significance comes from your inherent personal authority and from the love of the One who made you. Because you are aware of your intrinsic value, your life is filled with hope and purpose. You don’t succumb to uncertainty about your worth because you recognize that you are of tremendous importance to your generation, and this insulates you from any arrows of undue criticism and negativity that may come your way.

As you live according to your personal authority, you experience the contentment and gratification that come from serving the world through your natural gifts and inherent purpose. You have the certainty that you aren’t wasting your life but are using your time, talents, experience, and energy in the best ways possible.

Because you know you are authorized by your Creator, you move forward with confidence so that you are able to fulfill what you were born to accomplish on earth. You have courage, take risks, and express your creativity, but you never “experiment” with your life. You have a specific reason for living, and you purposefully pursue it.

In addition, you don’t wonder if what you are pursuing is going to work; you know it is going to work because you are meant to do it. First, you are confident in your inherent natural abilities. Even if what you are trying to do fails twenty times, you know it will eventually have to succeed. You interpret failure as only a temporary school that teaches you lessons in character, skill, and perspective. You never quit; you only rest before you begin again.

Moreover, you are confident that the resources you need will be available. Why? You believe that everybody is supposed to be prosperous—having more than enough for himself—through the exercise of his gifts, so that his resources can be reinvested in his purpose and also given to those who are in need: “One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed” (Proverbs 11:24–25).

By exercising your personal authority, you establish yourself as unique and genuine, and this reality counteracts any momentary thought that you have to compete with others to confirm your own worth and place in the world. Because you know who you are, you can’t be easily manipulated by those who want to use you. You aren’t looking to boost your ego, beat out the competition, or put anyone else down. You want only to manifest who you truly are in fulfillment of your God-given purpose.

Likewise, you are not intimidated by others. No one can threaten your true authority—even though some people may try to—because you’re not trying to outrun them; you’re just being yourself.

You also know that if you try through manipulation or force to compel other people to conform to your ideas for them, you will be working against the Creator’s purposes. You have learned that the Creator wants you to awaken to your own ability and calling and to keep out of others’ business so that you can eliminate any perceived need to be in open or subtle rivalry with them. As you do this, it enables you to work according to your own authority.

Because you recognize that you are distinct from all others in your authority, you don’t compare yourself with anyone else. You don’t keep checking your progress in life in relation to others and judging whether they are ahead of you or behind you, and you don’t compare the results of your work against theirs.

You may learn new skills and techniques from observing other people who have gifts and abilities that are similar to yours so that you can grow in effectiveness in your personal domain. But this observation is not for the purpose of comparison; it is a form of mentorship. You are blessed as you exercise personal authority because you don’t feel a need to mold other people to be like you, and you don’t feel a need to mimic other people in order to measure up to them. Your style, your focus, your perspective remain yours. You know you have an audience of One, your Creator, and that He is cheering you on.