Todd and Katie explore what it really means to stay in position for God's plan, from taming the tongue to passing the tests nobody talks about.
Positioning yourself for God's use is not a single dramatic act. It is a sustained condition, physical, spiritual, mental, and attitudinal, maintained over years, tested by small things, and often missed because people are looking for the grand gesture instead of tending to the ordinary requirements.
The word that came this morning was simple: position yourself to be used by me. What followed was a conversation that kept circling back to one central truth: God is more willing to increase us than we are willing to be increased. The limiting factor is almost never God's reluctance. It is our inability to stay in place.
There is a tendency in Christian ministry, and really in life generally, to tuck the Holy Spirit in the corner and say, "Stay there. We'll let you know if we need any help." It shows up as pure human effort applied to God's purposes, which is a bit like using your bare hands to rake a yard full of leaves when there is a leaf blower sitting right there in the garage.
The biggest thing isn't will God do something, or can God do something. All we have to do is ask, and God will speak to us.
The Book of Acts frames it plainly: the Lord was working with them, and signs and wonders followed. That sequence matters. It is not signs and wonders that then attract God's involvement. It is God's involvement that produces them. Which means positioning ourselves for that involvement is the actual work.
A miracle, as the saying goes, is not the extraordinary exception to God's way of operating. It is his ordinary mode. When we treat the supernatural as a last resort, something to hope for after we have exhausted every human option, we have the whole thing backwards. The expectation ought to be set at the beginning of the day: today is a supernatural day.
Isaiah's call in Isaiah 6:8 is worth sitting with. The question from heaven was not, "Who is qualified?" It was, "Who will go?" And Isaiah's answer, here I am, send me, came before any detailed assignment. God was looking for availability and willingness. Those two things, offered genuinely, are what position a person.
Isaiah was already a prophet in the eyes of God. He would never have received the assignment until he said from his heart: here I am, send me.
The Bible's own composition illustrates this. The 66 books were not produced in a single burst of inspiration. They came through men and women who made themselves available over time, positioning themselves for the Spirit to move through them. Lester Sumrall would take out a pad and pen, wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon him, and then write. Kenneth Hagin's books came through an inspired scribe, Billy Brim, who recognized her role was to capture what God had put in another man's mouth. Neither origin made the contribution insignificant. Both required positioning, and both required obedience to the part each was called to play.
The message doesn't start with us. It starts in heaven. Our job is to be where we need to be when it arrives.
Authority works in one direction: you cannot walk in great authority until you have been tested in what feels like smaller authority. This is not a ladder metaphor about career advancement. It is about the formation of character that can actually be trusted with influence.
Dr. Rodney Howard-Brown, whose ministry has reached heads of state across multiple nations, still talks about submitting to protocols when entering different countries, following the procedures required when addressing kings and prime ministers. The people who say, "Well, if I were ever speaking to a king, I wouldn't have trouble with that," are the exact people who will never get there, because they haven't learned to serve the department leader of the helps ministry with a good attitude and a right heart.
You can never walk in great authority if you have not been tested in what we view as smaller authority.
Joseph is the archetype here. Serving as a steward under Pharaoh, sometimes in exalted ways, sometimes in deeply humbling ones, he was being prepared for something he couldn't yet see. You don't reach any significant height without learning how to humble yourself first. And critically, you cannot fake that humility in public while venting in private. The aside, the quiet complaint to a trusted friend, the expression on your face when you think no one is grading it, these are all part of the test.
One real example: being at church, wearing a nice outfit bought from a good boutique, and having an older woman look at it and say, "Oh, that's a nice jacket. I think my grandmother has curtains like that." The instinct in that moment is pure and predictable: blame the other person entirely. If she hadn't said that, I wouldn't be dealing with this right now. But the Lord's point in those moments is not the other person's manners. It is what is on the inside of you that just got exposed. The test is not whether you control your words. It is whether your face gives it away anyway, and whether, when it does, you recognize what you're being shown about yourself.
James identified the tongue as the indicator of spiritual maturity, and not as a standard most people are quietly meeting. An untamed tongue is not just a social problem. It is a positioning problem. Whatever you say, whether publicly, in an aside, or to someone you trust to keep it private, you genuinely do not know who is picking it up. The truck said this out loud just this morning: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. In today's technological environment, your words are always potentially on record, and they will either exalt you or condemn you.
"See what great a fire a little flame kindleth." — James 3
But beyond what other people might hear, there is the internal cost. Anything harbored grows. The fermentation process is slow and invisible until it isn't. Bitterness held quietly, like something in a slow cooker, builds flavor, but not the good kind. When it eventually comes out, and it always does, it is an explosion, and nobody benefits from that kind of mess.
The alternative is not pretending you weren't hurt or that the thing didn't happen. It is a deliberate decision: Father, I'm making the choice to forgive. Holy Spirit, help me carry it. The Spirit is exactly suited for that work. And over time, the remarkable thing that happens is that the offense loses its emotional charge. You don't necessarily forget it, but it becomes as if it happened to someone else. No attachment. That is freedom, and that freedom is part of what keeps you in position.
Proverbs 3:5 is more precise than it usually gets credit for. "Lean not on your own understanding" is not primarily about humility as a virtue. It is a structural warning. Whatever direction you start to lean is the beginning of the fall, because you will end up carrying the full weight of that lean. The verse does not say, "Lean a little less on your own understanding." It says don't start. Because starting is already the trajectory.
Dad Hagin used to say: stay under the spout where the glory comes out. That is the posture. Not just spiritual positioning in the formal sense, but the practical condition of your thoughts, your attitudes, your heart. Squirrel-brained thinking pulls you out of position. An offended heart pulls you out of position. A short-term mentality, the idea of giving God "a little bit of time" to work something out before you reassess, pulls you out of position in ways that can delay or entirely abort what God had planned.
If God speaks something to you, it's going to be all that and more. It is so massive.
God only has supernatural plans. His ways are not our ways, which means the scope of what he is working toward almost always exceeds what we can hold in our imagination initially. The response to that is not to scope it down to something manageable. It is to stay in place, stay faithful, and refuse to return to Smallville.
Second Timothy 2:21 lands the whole thing in a single image: if you keep yourself pure, you will be a special utensil for honorable use, ready for the master to employ for every good work. Open your silverware drawer and find a fork that didn't get cleaned properly. You're not going to use it. You'll put it in the sink, run it through the dishwasher, clean it yourself, but it is not going to be used as intended right now. And God is not operating from scarcity. There are others who are ready. They positioned themselves.
The four things that keep you in position, according to verse 22, are righteous living, faithfulness, love, and peace. Surround yourself with people who call on the Lord with pure hearts. Don't get drawn into arguments that only exist to generate conflict. Be patient with difficult people, not as a strategy for managing them, but because love sees the possibility of change even when the odds look poor. Perhaps God will change those people's hearts. Perhaps is enough to keep going.
The people who miss the best are almost always the ones who wouldn't give the time that God required. They pulled away when the timeline stretched past what they expected, got offended when someone around them didn't come through, let something harbor until it fermented, or simply stopped being hungry. Staying hungry for God, lighting yourself up when the fire starts to cool, putting yourself under the fire rather than under the busy, is the ongoing work. It is not glamorous. But it is what position actually looks like, maintained day by day, year by year, until the assignment finally arrives.
