This is part 3 of the series No Lost Causes.
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There is something nobody tells you about the season you are in right now.
It is not a mistake.
I have talked to too many people over the years who felt like they were sitting on the sidelines of their own life. They had gifts they could not seem to release. They had ideas no one wanted to hear. They had prayed big prayers and felt like the ceiling was right above their heads. And in those seasons, the enemy is always right there to suggest the same thing he has been suggesting since the beginning: that God has forgotten about you.
He has not. And I want to spend some time with you today around a passage of scripture that I believe will shift the way you see the season you are in.
The Field Nobody Talks About
In 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah walks out into the middle of a field where a young man named Elisha is working. Elisha is plowing behind twelve yoke of oxen. Not glamorous work. Not visible work. Just a man, walking behind animals all day in a field, doing the job in front of him.
What makes this moment remarkable is everything we find out about Elisha later. He goes on to perform sixteen recorded miracles in scripture, double the number of Elijah himself. He is one of the greatest prophets in the history of Israel. He carries a double portion of anointing that changes everything around him.
And on this particular day, none of that is visible. On this day, he is just faithful.
That is the thing I keep coming back to in this text. When Elijah finds him, Elisha is not standing on a stage. He is not being celebrated. He is walking behind oxen in a field. And that is exactly where God chose to find him.
I think about that when I think about my own dad. Growing up, I knew my parents had a dream to start a church. But I also watched what we went through to get there. My dad, who had always been in sales, music, or creative work, had to take a job working on the railroad at one point because it was what would get us through that season. He came home the first day with the skin worn off his hands from handling materials he had never worked with before. Weeks went by like that. And I remember thinking as a kid that maybe this was just what my dad did. Maybe he was a railroad worker now.
I was wrong about that. And here is what I want you to understand: the people standing next to him on that railroad had no idea who they were standing next to.
You Cannot Judge Someone's Destiny by Their Season
Jeff Bezos was once flipping burgers at McDonald's. His manager told him to speed it up. He kept his head down and kept working. Nobody getting served at that counter was thinking about the future of global commerce. They were just getting their order.
Chris Pratt was homeless, living in his car in Maui, when he got his break. Pope Francis worked the door at a nightclub before becoming the most prominent spiritual leader in the Catholic Church. The person you write off today may be exactly who God is preparing for something you cannot see yet.
This is the principle Jesus lays out in Matthew 25:23: "You have been faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many." God does not start with finished products. He never does. He finds people in the field, people who are willing to do what is in front of them with everything they have got, and He calls them forward.
The reason He works that way is simple. God wants the glory. He does not want us to get the glory. And so He takes people that the world has written off, people in seasons nobody celebrates, and He does something in them that no amount of human strategy could manufacture.
If someone has called you a lost cause, that may be the best news you have heard all week.
The Principle of the Season
In Galatians 4, Paul describes something I think about a lot. He talks about an heir who technically has everything waiting for him, but who cannot access any of it yet because he is too young. Paul says that until the right time, the heir is no different than the servants working around him. He has zero access to what belongs to him. He is in a season.
I have tried to force seasons before. I have knocked on doors, made calls, built connections, and entered rooms I wasn't authorized to enter. And I can tell you from experience: there is nothing worse than forcing something without God's grace on it. You can get the opportunity. But if His favor is not on it, you will feel that absence in ways that are hard to explain.
There is something so different about stepping into a season that God opens for you. It feels like the ground is cooperating. It feels like things that should be difficult are somehow not.
I wrote the script for my film, Southern Gospel, more than twenty years ago. For years, I pitched it to every producer I could find. We were trying to raise three million dollars. Nobody wanted it. I finally gave up. Seven years went by without a word about that script. I had moved on. I was doing other things, being a pastor, being a father, being a husband. And then one day, I got a call telling me that a businessman had found a copy of the script, wanted to fly his private jet to Kissimmee Airport, and was interested in giving six million dollars to make it happen.
I was not chasing that. I had stopped chasing it years before. God raised that resource Himself, and He brought it to the table when the season was right.
Pablo Picasso once drew something on a napkin, and when someone offered to buy it, he said it would cost $100,000. The buyer was shocked. "That took you ten minutes," the man said. Picasso looked at him and said, "No. It took me forty years."
Your preparation time is not wasted time. It is being counted.
Faithful in the Field
When I was a younger man, in prayer one day, I asked God to give me an anointing for thousands. And He corrected me. He said, very clearly, that He would never give me an anointing for thousands until I had a heart for the one.
That changed something in me. I started reading scripture differently. I went out on the streets by myself and learned how to talk to people, how to share my faith, how to walk someone through a conversation about Jesus one at a time. And over time, that grew. One became ten. Ten became thirty. And eventually God gave me the vision for Blink, where we had thousands of people flooding toward this church trying to get inside, traffic backed up for miles, officers managing the chaos. He gave me the anointing for thousands. But not until I had first been faithful with the one.
David had an audience before he became king, and that audience was a field full of sheep. So he wrote songs in front of the sheep. He practiced the Psalms on the only crowd God had given him. That same faithfulness is what Samuel saw when he came to anoint the next king of Israel, and nobody thought to even bring David in from the field. "Are you sure there is not one more?" And they went and got the one they almost forgot.
God finds people in the field. He always has.
Are You Ready for What Comes Next?
When Elijah cast his mantle on Elisha, he kept walking. He did not wait around. Elisha had to run after him. And when Elisha asked to go say goodbye to his family, Elijah's response was interesting. He asked, "What have I done to you?" That sounds strange until you read it more carefully. He was saying, "Do you understand what you are being called into?"
Because when God transitions you from one season into another, you have to leave the old season behind. You cannot carry the old narrative with you. You cannot hold onto the victim story, the "nobody ever listens to me" identity, or the safety of staying stuck. Elisha went back, killed the oxen, burned all of his plowing equipment, fed his family, and walked away. No plan B.
That is what full surrender to a new season looks like. It is not dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. It is intentional, and it is final. He was done with the old life.
I want to encourage you today with something my dad experienced on the very railroad he was working on. He was on a break one day, stuck in the middle of nowhere, at a literal crossroads. And God spoke to him and said, "Look up. Everything you see, I am going to give you." He asked the foreman what he was looking at. The man said, "That's St. Cloud. That's Kissimmee." My dad had never even been to Osceola County before. And a few weeks later, he started the church that became City of Life.
God speaks purpose over your life in the middle of the railroad.
Psalm 1:3 says that the person who delights in God's word is "like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season." Be planted where you are. Be faithful in this field. Seasons change. They always do.
And yours is coming.
