Did you know that you can carry a blessing and still be broke? It’s not often said in church. It is entirely possible to carry the blessing of God on your life and still be struggling. Still stuck. Still wondering why nothing seems to be working, when the truth is, something in you has simply never been switched on.
Take a look at Gideon. An angel showed up and called him a mighty man of valor, and Gideon’s honest response was basically, who, me? He was hiding in a winepress threshing wheat, terrified of the Midianites, with zero self-image as a warrior. The valor was already in him. He just didn’t know it yet. Or think about Jeremiah—told by God that before he was even formed in the womb, he’d been set apart and ordained as a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah didn’t discover that about himself. God had to tell him.
That’s the pattern. A lot of us are walking around loaded with exactly what we need for our lives to work, and it’s sitting there dormant. Deactivated. Like a phone with a full battery that’s never been turned on.
To activate something simply means to put it to work, to move it from sitting there doing nothing to actually functioning the way it was designed to. And here’s the part that stings a little: Scripture is honest that this can take time. God told Abram he’d be the father of many nations back in Genesis 12. He didn’t become Abraham—the actual father of that promise, holding his own son—until Genesis 21. That’s roughly twenty-five years between the word and the manifestation. The blessing was real the whole time. It just wasn’t active yet.
So if you’ve been sitting with a promise that hasn’t shown up, you’re in good company. The question worth asking isn’t “did God lie to me?” It’s “what activates what He’s already spoken.”
Which brings me to doors again — but from a different angle than you might expect. Jesus tells the church at Philadelphia, “I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.” That’s a gift already given. But notice what qualifies them to walk through it: a little strength, keeping His word, not denying His name. The door being open doesn’t mean it walks through you. You still have to move.
So how do you actually activate what’s already yours? I want to walk through a few things that, honestly, sound simple but tend to get skipped.
- Knowing God: This is different from knowing about Him. There’s a difference between knowing facts about someone and actually knowing them: what they love, what grieves them, how they want to be approached. Jesus told His disciples that if they remained in Him and His words remained in them, they could ask what they desired and it would be done. That’s not a formula for getting stuff. It’s a description of closeness. The access follows the relationship, not the other way around. And knowing Him costs you something, because it means worship stops being about you. It’s easy to walk into a service more concerned with how you look or whether the music was good than with the God you supposedly came to meet. Job lost everything—children, wealth, health—and his first response wasn’t to demand answers. He fell to the ground and worshipped, saying the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be His name. That’s a man who understood that everything he’d been given never actually belonged to him in the first place.
Knowing God also means obeying Him, which is where a lot of good intentions quietly die. Saul was told plainly what to do and didn’t do it, then tried to dress up his disobedience as an act of worship — I kept some of what you told me to destroy, so I could sacrifice it to you. God wasn’t moved by that logic, and Saul lost the throne over it. You can’t build a real relationship with someone while consistently ignoring what they’ve asked of you. That’s not devotion. That’s negotiation.
- Prayer and Fasting: Matt. 17:21 says “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers. There are ancestral altars erected before we were born, fighting hard against our access to open doors. Therefore, we must be strong in the Lord (Eph.6:10-12) and to strengthen our spirit is to pray and fast.
- Discipline: There’s also the plain, unglamorous discipline of staying in the word. God told Joshua that this book of the law shouldn’t depart from his mouth—meditate on it constantly, do what it says, and then your way will be prosperous. Somebody once put it this way: when you close your Bible, you close your destiny. That might sound dramatic until you notice how many people wonder why their life feels stuck while their Bible sits unopened on a shelf.
- Sacrifice: This plays a part too. Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings at Gibeon before God ever appeared to him in a dream and asked what he wanted. That kind of extravagant giving wasn’t a transaction to earn God’s attention. It was evidence of where Solomon’s heart already was, and God met him there.
None of this is complicated. It’s just costly, in the way that anything real usually is.
I’ll leave you with this: You didn’t arrive on this earth empty-handed. You came loaded with gifts, with calling, with a specific measure of grace nobody else was given in quite the same way. Somewhere along the way, life may have convinced you otherwise. Disappointment does that. Delay does that. But dormant is not the same as absent. What God has placed in you is still there, waiting to be switched on.
So don’t let another season pass assuming you’ve been left out. You haven’t. You’ve been loaded with keys you haven’t fully turned yet. Go turn them. Your doors are open.
- The Thoughts of God