Main Summary: Understanding Your Potential by Myles Munroe is a book that reveals that your potential is the dormant ability God placed within you before birth. The author explains that you are not a mistake, success can be your enemy, and staying connected to God as your Source is the only way to uncap the wealth buried inside you.
Lessons You’ll Learn From This Post
- Everything in Life Has Potential
- The Source of All Potential
- Who Are You?
- What Happened to the Real You?
- Whose Wisdom?
- Why Were You Born?
- What Can You Do?
- Challenge Your Ability
- The Key to Your Potential
- Limiting Your Unlimited Potential
- Keys to Fulfilling Your True Potential
- Dare to Believe in Your Potential
Also read Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren [Summary]
One of the greatest tragedies in life is to watch potential die untapped.
Everything in Life Has Potential
- Potential is dormant ability, reserved power, untapped strength, unused success, and hidden talents
- It is not what you have done—it is what you can do but have not yet done
- This makes success one of the greatest enemies of your potential because it tempts you to settle
- So stop accepting your present state as final—it is merely a phase
- See every seed as containing a forest, not just a single plant
- Reject the lie that anything in life is “instant”—everything begins as potential
- Refuse to die with your songs, books, inventions, or cures still buried inside you
- Stop letting what you cannot do interfere with what you can do
- Remember that graveyards are the wealthiest places on earth because of all the unused potential that is buried there
- Decide today to release your ability before you die.
God is a God of potential. Although He is the source of all things, He shares His omnipotent powers with His creation.
The Source of All Potential
- Everything that was and is was in God before creation.
- The potential of a thing is directly related to its source.
- God spoke to Himself when creating human beings—making you different from the rest of creation.
- Omnipotent means God is “always potent” (full of power and potential)
- Invisible does not mean nonexistent—everything visible first existed in an invisible state
- The word “spoke” in Genesis was a process, not a single word—God planned, conceived, imagined, then worked
- After that, God rested after creation because speaking things into existence was hard work
- However, God isn’t done yet. He is still pregnant with many things and continues to deliver them.
- Stop thinking your ideas are completely new—everything has already existed in God
- Tap into God’s power because He made you with potential.
Also read Plans Purposes & Pursuits by Kenneth Hagin [Summary]
You will never know yourself by relating to the creation, only to the Creator.
Who Are You?
- See yourself as God sees you—He looks beyond the surface to your hidden potential.
- Stop believing what others call you (nobody, worthless, incapable)
- Recognize that you came out of God—He spoke to Himself when creating you.
- Understand that you will never know yourself by relating to creation, only to the Creator
- Refuse to let others throw you away—you are not junk.
- Know that your potential is much greater than what you currently are.
- Accept that God sees Christ in you—that is your true identity.
- Realize that your task is not to get Christ into you, but to get Christ out of you.
- Stop competing with others to prove you are somebody—you already are somebody.
- Let God call you what He sees, not what the world calls you.
Jesus came, not to convince God of anything, but to convince us about who we really are.
What Happened to the Real You?
- Recognize that Satan destroyed man’s potential to be like God through deception and sin
- Understand that sin clogs up your potential and caps off your well of ability
- See that Satan’s mission is to minimize, nullify, and destroy what God planted in you
- Know that your real intelligence is not studied—it is discerned through a relationship with God
- Stop looking outside yourself to find knowledge—your true wisdom comes from within through the Spirit
- Accept that Jesus came to destroy the devil’s work and uncap your well
- Understand that until you get saved, you don’t have real life—just existence
- Recognize that Jesus came to convince you about who you really are, not to convince God
- See sin as the clog that messes up God’s plan for your life
- Let Jesus pry off the cap that Satan placed over your potential
Also read Praying in the Spirit by Peter Tan [Summary]
The Holy Spirit is the key that allows all the dormant power within you to come to life.
Whose Wisdom?
- Recognize that God considers any wisdom foolish that does not fulfill its original purpose
- Understand that Satan still has wisdom—but it became corrupted when he fell
- Know that God placed a secret wisdom in you before you were born
- Stop relying on the world’s wisdom—it is perverted and cannot reveal your true potential
- See that your eyes cannot see, your ears cannot hear, nor your mind conceive what God has prepared for you
- Accept that only the Holy Spirit can reveal the deep things of God to you
- Understand that you were born with wisdom that literally came out of God
- Recognize that you are in the God class—not because of pride, but because of your Source
- Let the Holy Spirit be the bucket that draws water from the deep well of your potential
- Know that you will never be fulfilled without God because you are looking for what only He has
Everything is possible if you abandon yourself to an idea enough that you are willing to lose your life for it.
Why Were You Born?
- Know that if you feel good about yourself, you will feel good about other people
- Recognize that God designed and predetermined you to be a success story
- Accept that you are not a mistake—God wanted you to be born regardless of the circumstances
- Understand that God has a book on you with every day of your life written in it
- Stop playing around in the table of contents—start living out God’s plan for your chapters
- See that God offers you a rewrite when you mess up His original plan
- Recognize that you were born to expose God’s nature and bring Him glory
- Know that God is disappointed when you live below your potential because He knows what you can do
- Take your thoughts and turn them into ideas, imagination, documented plans, and then action
- Refuse to be a follower or dreamer—become a visionary who turns into a missionary
Whenever God gives you a responsibility, He also gives you the ability to meet that responsibility.
What Can You Do?
- Teach your children (and yourself) that there is nothing named “can’t.”
- Recognize that the people who change the world take “impossible” out of their dictionaries
- Know that you can do all things because Christ infuses you with continual ability
- Understand that your potential is as great as God’s potential because He spoke to Himself when creating you
- Stop arguing with God when He demands something—He built the ability into you
- Recognize that whenever God gives a responsibility, He also gives the ability to meet it
- Believe that if you can think it, you can do it—God only allows you to think what you can accomplish
- Know that if God has it (love, joy, peace, patience, self-control), you have it
- Stop saying “I can’t love” or “I can’t control myself”—you won’t, but you can
- Remember that God created you to dominate the earth, not be dominated by anything in it
Your ability needs responsibility to expose its possibilities.
Challenge Your Ability
- Do what you can with what you have where you are
- Stop waiting for a “dog” to chase you—jump by your own challenge
- Make demands on yourself instead of waiting for someone else to challenge you
- Recognize that Peter walked on water because he had the guts to respond to Jesus’ order
- Understand that every disciple could have walked on water—only Peter asked
- Refuse to die without maximizing your ability—that is irresponsible
- Know that miracles happen when you give your potential responsibility
- Beat the odds—don’t let physical handicaps, bad family situations, or poverty stop you
- Reject shortcuts—they negate your potential and destroy what God planted in you
- Remember that success is never final and failure is never fatal—courage counts
Only disciples—those who are committed to abiding in Christ—will maximize their potential.
The Key to Your Potential
- Stay attached to your Source—like a branch to the vine, you cannot live apart from God.
- Recognize that whatever something comes from determines its components and its potential.
- Understand that plants need soil, fish need water, animals need dirt, and you need God.
- Know that if you decide you don’t need God, you decide never to become all you can be.
- Accept Jesus as the true vine—other sources like education and philosophy are false vines.
- Let God the Gardener prune away habits, attitudes, and relationships that stunt your growth.
- Recognize that all God’s commands and laws maximize your performance and free your potential.
- Understand that God gives you freedom to do anything except disobey Him.
- Stay hooked up to God—that is the secret to a happy, productive life.
- Become a disciple, not just a Christian—disciples maximize their potential.
The key to knowing your true potential is to know your Source.
Limiting Your Unlimited Potential
- The measure of your true potential is your spirit, not your body or soul.
- Man does not just have a spirit—man is spirit living in a body and possessing a soul.
- Death mainly refers to isolation from the spirit world of God.
- Stop letting your body dictate your potential—your body is 100 percent dirt.
- Refuse to let physical handicaps, age, or the opinions of others immobilize your potential.
- Understand that Abraham succeeded because he considered not his aging body.
- Your soul (mind, will, emotions) can make you smart, but not wise
- It will take your mind being controlled by the Spirit to have life and peace
- So stop measuring your potential by IQ tests, academic scores, or social norms.
- Understand that God’s desires for your life are discerned by your spirit through fellowship with the Holy Spirit.
To release your true potential, you must be willing to work.
Keys to Fulfilling Your True Potential
- Read the Manufacturer’s instruction manual (the Bible)—it describes your parts and their potential
- Recognize that God is rebuilding and remaking you with genuine parts after Satan messed you up
- Know that you have the potential to be in God’s class, operate like God, and dominate the whole earth
- Understand that you have the ability to imagine, plan, and bring into being anything you desire
- Believe that you can influence both physical and spiritual matter—binding on earth binds in heaven
- Accept Jesus to unclog your true self and start the journey of fulfilling your potential
- Apply these ten keys: know your Source, understand your design, know your purpose, understand your resources, have the right environment, work out your potential, cultivate it, guard it, share it, and know the laws of limitation.
- Stop claiming promises without work—potential must be exercised to be released.
- Guard your visions from sin, discouragement, procrastination, failures, opinions, distractions, traditions, and compromise
- Remember that freedom needs law to be enjoyed, and power needs responsibility to be effective.
Human potential without godly purpose produces self-destruction.
Dare to Believe in Your Potential
- Human potential without a godly purpose produces self-destruction.
- Understand that God paid the greatest price—His own life—to release your full potential.
- Stop worrying about food, drink, and clothes—life is so much more than these things.
- Remember that you don’t need things to enjoy life; you need life to enjoy things.
- Seek first the things of God, and everything else will fall into place
- Know that faith deals with potential—what you cannot see yet but believe is there.
- Understand that desire means “craving enough to sacrifice for,” not just dreaming.
- Refuse to be distracted—your desire controls your direction in life.
- Accept that only a few will find the narrow gate and fulfill their potential
- Decide today to be one of the few—leave your footprints in history and carry none of your potential to the cemetery.
You have a forest buried inside you. Stop letting fear, failure, or the opinions of others keep your potential capped. Get connected to your Source, make a plan, and start releasing what God placed in you. Don’t die with your song still unsung.
Finally, here is a question we’d love you to answer.
If God has already built the ability into you to dominate every habit and challenge in your life, what is one thing you’ve been saying “I can’t” to that you actually need to start saying “I won’t quit” to?
We would love to hear from you. Please leave your answer and comment in the comment box below.
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God bless you
