Nobody Builds a Tower Without Counting the Cost First
Jesus once asked a strange little question to a crowd that was following Him for all sorts of reasons. He said, if you wanted to build a tower, wouldn’t you sit down first and figure out whether you actually had enough to finish it? Because nothing looks worse than a half-built structure with the foundation exposed and the money gone—everybody walking by just shakes their head.
I think about that question a lot when I hear people talk about wanting a breakthrough, a miracle, a “supernatural” move of God in their life. Everybody wants the tower. Almost nobody wants to sit down and count the cost of building it.
Preparation is such an unglamorous word. It doesn’t trend. Nobody posts about the quiet, repetitive work of getting ready. But every single supernatural moment in Scripture has preparation standing behind it like scaffolding you can’t see once the building is finished.
Preparation is the act of making something or someone ready for a specific use, event, or test.
Take David in Psalm 63. He doesn’t just casually mention God. He says, “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee.” That word seek isn’t passive. It means to search, to pursue, to put in deliberate effort toward finding something. David wasn’t waiting for God to show up in his living room. He was up early, going after Him, thirsty like a man in a desert because that’s exactly the image he uses. Dry and thirsty land, where no water is. He wanted to see God’s power and glory the way he’d seen it before, in the sanctuary, and he understood that this kind of encounter doesn’t just fall out of the sky onto people who never go looking for it.
Here’s an honest question: when’s the last time you sought anything with that kind of hunger?
Now, when we say supernatural, we mean something that happens outside the normal rules of how the world runs. A man dead four days walking out of a tomb at the sound of his name. Bread falling from the sky every morning for forty years in a wilderness that couldn’t naturally sustain that many people. A widow’s jar of flour and jug of oil that simply would not run empty, day after day, for as long as the famine lasted. None of that is explainable by ordinary means. That’s the whole point.
But notice in almost every one of those stories, somebody had to do something first. The widow at Zarephath had exactly one meal left in the house. She’d already resigned herself to eating it with her son and then dying. And Elijah’s instruction wasn’t “sit tight, a miracle’s coming.” It was “make me a small loaf first, then make something for yourself.” She had to act toward the miracle before she saw it. Her obedience came before her evidence.
That’s usually how it works. Preparation isn’t the opposite of trusting God for the supernatural—it’s the doorway to it.
So what does actual preparation look like, practically, for people like you and me who aren’t waiting on wilderness bread but are waiting on breakthroughs of our own?
It starts with what you let into your heart from God’s word. David wrote, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” Not read once and forgotten but hidden, tucked away somewhere it can be pulled out later when you need it most. Jesus said He didn’t even speak on His own authority; He said what the Father gave Him to say. If the Son of God operated that way, it’s worth asking how much of what we say and do is actually rooted in something He’s given us, versus just our own instincts running the show.
Then there’s obedience, which is a different animal from just hearing. Jesus was blunt about people who honored Him with their lips while their hearts stayed far away. It’s entirely possible to be familiar with Scripture and still never actually do what it says. Joshua was told that meditating on the word day and night, and doing what it said, was the actual mechanism for making his way prosperous. Not meditating alone. The doing.
Faith matters too, obviously. Scripture calls it the substance of things hoped for, evidence of what you can’t yet see. But faith isn’t a feeling you manufacture. Paul said it comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. In other words, you don’t work up faith by trying harder to believe. You build it by spending time on what God has actually said.
And then, maybe the part people skip most often—contending. There’s a picture in Deuteronomy where God tells Israel, essentially, I’ve already given you this territory, now rise up and go take it (Deuteronomy 1:21). The land was promised, but they still had to walk into it and fight for it. Prayer, fasting, the words you speak over your own life, even sacrifice, these aren’t decorations. They’re how you contend for what’s already been promised to you but hasn’t yet arrived.
There’s something else worth understanding here, and it’s this: your life moves in seasons, and not every season looks or feels the same. There’s a seedtime, when you’re sowing and it costs you something with no reward yet in sight. There’s harvest time, when what you planted finally shows up. There’s a cold season where nothing seems to be working even though, underneath the surface, it actually is. There’s a dark season that can feel disorienting and lonely. None of these seasons ask for your permission before they arrive, and none of them last forever either.
The men of Issachar, according to 1 Chronicles, were valued for one specific thing — they understood the times, and they knew what Israel ought to do because of it. That’s worth wanting for yourself. Not just knowing that God is good in a general sense, but discerning what season you’re actually standing in right now, so you can respond to it correctly instead of fighting the wrong battle at the wrong time.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Jesus spent thirty years preparing for roughly three and a half years of public ministry. Forty days fasting in a wilderness before He ever preached a sermon or healed a single person. If He needed that kind of preparation, it’s worth humbling ourselves enough to admit we probably do too.
So before you keep asking God for the tower, it might be worth sitting down first, the way Jesus described and asking honestly what you’re doing today to get ready for what you’re believing in Him for tomorrow. Preparation has been called the mother of manifestation, and there’s real truth in that. Your breakthrough is probably not waiting on God. It might be waiting on you to get ready to receive it.
Your season of struggling without direction can end. But it tends to end for the people who were found seeking, found obeying, found believing, and found ready—not for the people who were simply found waiting. I declare over your life, your season of pain and struggling is over in Jesus’ name. Amen.
- The Thoughts of God