Dharius Daniels - You are Uniquely Designed by God for This Season

I will try to use pain to cause you to change a part of your personality to protect yourself from pain, not realizing that when you do that, you also separate yourself from purpose. It’s like, «Okay, I’m going to stop caring as much so I won’t be hurt as much,» and God’s like, «When you stop caring as much, you can’t be used as much.» The enemy will use pain to cause you to question who you really are. I want you to see you’ve been uniquely designed. We must be clear on something called our unique design. In Jeremiah 1, God tells Jeremiah, «Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.» Here’s the emphasis: God says to Jeremiah, «Before I formed you.» It’s almost like God is saying your parents conceived you, but after conception, they had no more control. Everything else after conception was Me. They made you, but I formed you. The only thing they could do was engage in the activity that created the possibility of you being made; that was all they could do. Everything else, Jeremiah, was Me. They could not control how tall you would be, the color of your eyes, the color of your hair, your strengths, or your proclivities; your tendencies were all Me. He said, «Before I formed you, I designed you uniquely.» Watch this; I want you all to catch this, family. When I say this, I am not just talking about our competencies. Yes, we’ve got natural abilities that you’re born with and spiritual gifts distributed to us by the Holy Spirit, and those two things are not the same. Singing is a natural ability; a spiritual gift is something different. I might have the natural ability to sing but not possess the gift to lead worship. One’s a natural ability, a talent; the other is an ability that has been sovereignly distributed to me by the Holy Spirit, who gives me the gifts when it comes to ministry—gifts that edify, but He who gives me the gifts I need to accomplish my assignment in the season that I’m in. Sometimes different seasons require the distribution of different types of gifts. So yes, God gives us competencies, but that’s not what I want to focus on today when discussing unique design. This is something I believe the Holy Spirit wants us to embrace. When I talk about unique design, it’s not just the gifts or the talents or the abilities that God has given you. Listen to me. I want you to see that your personality is purposeful. Let’s talk about that—your personality. I’m not talking about dysfunction, but your personality. We should never attach dysfunction to our identity. We should never touch anything dysfunctional and say, «That’s me.» No, no, no! But your personality—listen to me, guys—it’s necessary for your purpose. Let me just use—I’m not your example; Jesus is your example—but I’d rather use me as an example than anyone else, so nobody gets mad. Let me use me as an example. Personality-wise, I’m an ambivert. What does that mean? It means I’m a little mixture of an introvert and an extrovert. It means that I can’t be alone for too long, but I can’t be around people for too long either. It means that people who work with me or travel with me are just used to the rhythm—sometimes I’m talking, and sometimes I’m not. For me, I draw energy; I have to be alone to recharge, and once I’ve recharged, I’m ready to re-engage. Does that make sense? All right, I want to show you how I didn’t pick that part of my personality. I can’t control that; that’s God. That’s purposeful because I want you to see how that ties into my purpose. So I’m carrying out my call to pastoral ministry in a way that is consistent with my understanding of what God wants me to do. And that is, watch this, not just leading and feeding our local congregations, but also being a spiritual pharmacist, a content creator for others in the body. Got me? So I see it as a spiritual pharmacist—it’s like the pharmacy; you don’t need medicine all the time, but when you do, you want to be able to reach for it and get what you need. Does that make sense? So that’s a part of my calling; it’s what I’m passionate about, what I feel called to. So you have two things here: you have the responsibility to provide pastoral leadership to the churches I’ve been called to, but then I’ve got this passion and calling to create content and present it in various distribution forms—books, ebooks, e-courses, and coaching programs. I seek to put it in these forms to help bring transformation to people’s lives in a way that can reach them beyond my ability to physically engage with them. So if I can take my thoughts and put them in a book or a course or whatever, you can access it whenever you want, even if you can’t physically reach me. Here’s the thing: for content creation to be an output, there must be input. And if there’s going to be input, you have to be okay with being alone; you must be okay sitting with books for hours, with just you and the books—no one to talk to but the book. So you’ve got to be okay being alone so you can have the input. Does that make sense?