If God Is About to Use You, Expect These 8 Tests

• You know, I can look out across this sea of faces tonight and I sense something. I sense a holy hunger, a deep aching desire in the spirit to be used, to matter for the kingdom. To see God move through your life in a way that leaves no doubt, leaves no question that he is real and he is mighty.
• We pray, “Oh God, use me. Take my life. Let it be consecrated to thee.” And we mean it. We sing it with every fiber of our being. But my dear friend, have you ever considered the pathway to being used? It is not usually the pathway of the bright spotlight and the cheering crowds. No. Very often the first answer to that prayer, use me, is a gentle leading, a quiet nudging of the spirit into a place that feels utterly contrary to every promise you believe he has spoken over your life.
• I want to talk to you about that place. Before God ever places you on a platform, he very often leads you into a wilderness. You find yourself there. Perhaps you’re there right now. It’s a season where the provision you counted on dries up. The relationships that supported you grow distant or fall silent.
• The vision that once burned so brightly in your heart seems like a mirage, fading on the horizon. The phone doesn’t ring. The doors don’t open. The manner from yesterday has spoiled. And you look for the fresh bread of today. And the ground is bare. And in the quiet of that barren place, a whisper rises from the soul. A terrible aching whisper.
• Has God forgotten me? Did I hear him wrong? Is this all there is? This, my friend, is not the abandonment of God. This is the attention of God. This is the first and one of the most profound ways he tests the heart that he intends to use. You see, God is not in the business of employing spiritual mercenaries. He does not recruit talented individuals who can accomplish his tasks with their own cleverness and strength, sending him a report when the job is done.
• No, he is building sons and daughters. He is shaping vessels, and a vessel to be useful must be empty of everything it once carried that was not of him. The wilderness is the great emptier. In the wilderness, your resume means nothing. Your connections cannot help you. Your past successes cannot feed you.