Don’t Sit Around
I wonder if you are starting to dream some dreams for 2024. If so, don’t sit around and expect God to do all the work! Sometimes people abuse that saying ‘let go and let God’. They use it to say ‘God can do it, I’ll take a back seat’. And God is saying ‘don’t sit around! You do it, and I will give you the strength and the ability. But you’ve got to put the effort in.”
Dreamers vs. Doers: The Call to Action
They say there are two types of people, dreamers and doers. Some people dream their life away and never do anything about it. Popular Bible scholar William Barclay once wrote the following about a talented but unproductive man named Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little… It has been said of him: ‘He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one—the gift of sustained and concentrated effort.’ In his head and in his mind he had all kinds of books… But the books were never composed outside Coleridge’s mind, because he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached it ever maintained it, without discipline.”
Coleridge had a dream. But instead of making it happen, he sat around. Waited. Dreamed some more. Sat around some more. And got nowhere.
Are you a Coleridge type? Dreaming a whole lot, but doing very little?
Perhaps the most famous statement that people think is a Bible verse, but isn’t, is the sentence: God helps those who help themselves. It’s not in the Bible. But this is in the Bible, and it says very much the same thing: “Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.” (Proverbs 12:11 NIV11)
Action Over Words: Making Dreams Reality
You can chase fantasies. Dreams. Visions. But if you aren’t gonna work the land and put in the effort, you’re a fool. You have no sense, Solomon writes.
Solomon also wrote this: “Much dreaming and many words are meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 5:7 NIV). You can talk about it all you like. But if you sit around, it’s pointless.
I wonder if the time has come for you to quit talking and start doing. I wonder if the time has come for you to quit fantasizing and start working the land. Start that business. Start your studies. Start that group. Start that ministry. Make that phone call. Send that message. Open that book.
Put down your cellphone, close TikTok and Instagram, and do something!!! A dream is only going to become a dream come true if you put your head down and do the work.
Don’t limit God. And don’t sit around. Get to work and see how God makes your dream take shape!!!
