Anita Carman - Transforming for a Purpose: Fulfilling Gods Mission as Daughters of the King

I NTRODUCTION

W hen I began my journey to serve God, I was not alone in my enthusiasm. There were others who vowed to travel with me. Yet today, only a handful of those zealous friends remain. Various statistics show that approximately one-third of Christian leaders will abandon their dream before their time on earth is over. Why? Why do so many leave?

As I reflect on my own life and ministry and the many torpedoes that came my way as I was establishing Inspire Women, I see that the biggest challenge I had to overcome was me! I allowed my emotions to defeat me in the past, and there were times I couldn't even get out of bed. But that kind of situation can be disastrous for a life and a ministry. Has this happened to you? Have you ever found yourself in a place where you have given up before the battle was won?

Whether God has given you dreams for yourself, a family, a business, a church, a ministry, a nation, or the world, you are a leader in whatever group God has given you to influence. Your emotions can either fuel a passion to keep you on God's eternal timeline or they can shut you down and disperse your focus all over the map. When your heart shatters and you start grasping for straws to feel whole, you will begin to wander from God's purpose. Instead of acting like a sharpened arrow heading toward a target, your heart can become more like fragments that exploded from a land mine. In this state of disarray, it is easy to abandon any dream that had a chance to make an eternal difference. Has God entrusted you with people that He wants you to lead toward goals with lasting significance? If so, then you must learn to fortify your heart as God's keeper of the vision, the one entrusted to fulfill His dreams.

When you step into God's dreams for you, you are not living in friendlyor even neutralterritory. You are entrenched in enemy territory. The devil doesn't care what you do when you are unfocused and not doing anything for God's kingdom. But once you get focused on God's vision and dreams, you show up on Satan's radar and you can almost hear him say to his minions, "Vessel in motion. Engage and destroy." His goal is to put you out of commission.

One way I have seen Satan destroy us is through our emotions. His strategy is simply to get you to shatter on the inside so that one of two things will happen. Either you won't care enough anymore to make a difference in the world, or you will be totally defeated and not care at all. Neither of these scenarios is desirable.

As I began to train leaders, I asked God what I could teach the women that could be of help to their lives and ministries. I sensed Him saying to me, "Teach them the importance of guarding their hearts, and show them how My Word transformed your emotions before you were ready to establish Inspire Women."

In my life, I have discovered that there are three main emotions that God has helped me overcome through His Word: loneliness, rejection, and fear. God, through His power and grace, transformed those emotions in my life into a passionate purpose to accomplish His dreams. Through this process, He shaped me into a suitable vessel for His purpose, and my prayer is that He will do the same for you.

A Daughter of the King

No matter what family background you come from or how things were and are done in your earthly family, all believers belong to God's royal family. Imagine a family treeone of those kinds that you made in elementary school that actually looks like a tree, with little boxes to write in the names of the people in your family. This family tree is God's family tree. Imagine your name written in one of the boxes. You are part of a royal family... the royal family to end all royal families... the family of God Himself. And that family doesn't include just you and God. It includes all of God's childrenthose you know now and those you know through Scripture. You are on the same family tree as Abraham, Hannah, David, and Mary. What an amazing family we belong to!

So you are a daughter of the King, and as such, your role is to act according to the customs of the royal family. How does a daughter of the King know how to act? She follows the example of others who have gone before herthe great heroes of the faith that we read about in Scripture. Every family has a code of behavior, and our royal family's code can be found in the Bible. Throughout this book, you will be led to look into God's Word to discover how to transform your emotions for God's purpose, using His counsel and the experiences of His people. The Bible is how God has chosen to speak to us and reveal His character and purpose. The way God transforms your emotions is through practicing His Word, not just quoting it. My goal through this book is to give you a tangible way to apply God's Word in your life so that you can respond to your own situations in a royal way. You will learn that a life of faith is not a mystical feeling but is the concrete application of God's Word.

In each chapter of this book, you will learn about different situations that you may face that can result in the emotions of loneliness, rejection, or fear. But it is not exhaustive, nor will any of the situations be exactly the same in your life as they are recorded here. So I will let you in on a little secret that I hope will be helpful to you as you learn to transform your emotions. Whenever you experience an emotion because of a challenge or a decision you need to make, do what God has taught me to do:

• Ask yourself, "What am I feeling? What is the emotion I am dealing with?"
• Ask yourself, "Is the level of the emotion I am feeling in proportion to what just happened? If not, what wound did it open from my past to cause me to overreact?"
• Ask yourself, "Is there a teaching in God's Word that parallels the situation I just encountered? Are there verses that speak to the situation that will give me guidance on how to respond?"
• If you cannot find specific verses, then look for biblical examples of someone who dealt with a parallel situation. Since you are to act as a member of God's royal family, ask yourself, "What is the custom of God's royal family and how would God expect me to act?" A tangible way to learn the customs of the royal family is to study the lives of God's faith heroes and how they responded in a similar situation. Then you can imitate the way the faith hero responded.

A life of faith is a concrete way to respond to our situations and emotions based on what God has revealed in His Word. A person who lives by faith is one who intentionally models her behavior after the right choices of the faith heroes in the Bible and trusts that making such a choice is the best choice, no matter what the outcome. The result is a life that is full of conviction and confidence that comes from making choices that are anchored in truths from God's Word and learning from the lives of those who are part of our spiritual heritage.

There have been many times that I have been saved from abandoning God's dream for me by learning from the mistakes and triumphs of people in the Bible. My prayer is that the same will happen for you. Imagine the freedom of finding your compass in an unchanging God and arriving at a place where no human or event can rob you of your purpose. God alone holds our marching orders and we are to fulfill them with royal character and move with dignity and assurance toward our end goal with a commitment to finish all that the Father has sent us to do. We are not hired help, we are daughters of the King, and He wants us to see with His eyes, feel with His heart, and leave this earth changed with His fingerprints.

As you turn each page of this book, I pray that you will be in awe of a great God who works through earthen vessels. If you let Him, He will transform your emotions to empower you with a passionate purpose to fulfill His dreams for you, your family, your business, your church, your ministry, your community, your nation, or the world.