Hi, I’m Beverley Watkins with Global Impact Ministries, and welcome to God Today. You know, in your life, you got to leave the place you’re at to get to the place that God has for you. Everyone in the Bible who had an impact had to leave somewhere. Abraham had to leave his father’s house. People had to leave the place they were at to go to the place that God wanted them to go to. Sometimes we think about that like, oh, well, do I have to pack up and be a missionary? No, not everybody’s called to be a missionary, but here’s the thing – you will need to leave the place that you’re in. The place that’s comfortable for you. The culture that we’re in. The way that we think. The way that we approach things.
I just want to share with you a moment because I had to leave my country. I had to leave my father’s house. I had to leave the way that I always saw the world and understood the world to be. You see, I grew up in a country called South Africa. In my country, when I grew up, I grew up under apartheid, which many of you of course will know about, which was racial segregation. I grew up in a very white world is what we would call it because we lived with racial segregation.
People say to me, “Beverley, how did you not know that?” I grew up in it! I never knew anything different. It just didn’t even cross my mind because that was the culture. That’s what it looked like. I didn’t even understand what racism was. It was only when I was leaving school in 1990 when Nelson Mandela was being released from prison, I was like, who is this dude? And why is it such a big deal that he’s being released from prison? People say to me, “How did you not know what was going on in your nation?” I didn’t know.
I’m using that example because many of us grow up in cultures that we think is how the world is. This is just normal. And if we are Christians, we believe that the world we grow up in is God’s world. And just like my world was not God’s ideal world, your world also is probably not God’s ideal world because your culture has been formed by other things. When He calls you into making an impact and beginning to shift things for the Kingdom, you’re going to have to leave your country. You’re going to have to leave your culture and come into the Kingdom. We have to begin to learn God’s way. We have to learn about His country. We have to learn His culture. We have to learn how He does things.
And here’s the kicker. It’s different from your culture. It’s really challenging because as someone said, we don’t know what we don’t know. And most of us don’t know that our culture and what we call the country we live in doesn’t really look like what Jesus wants it to look like. And so we have to have the courage to leave where we’re at. We have to have the courage to look at our country and look at our culture and say, “Lord, show me in here what doesn’t please You. Show me in my life where I’ve believed things and I’ve set up pillars of belief and I’ve built my life around things that actually are not like You.”
That’s a scary place to be because when God begins to take those things out of your life, you can feel unsteady. You can feel like “I don’t even know. I don’t know how to behave. I don’t know how to act. Is there something wrong with me?” That’s what happened to me is we came out of apartheid in 1994 and I began to understand how terrible that situation was and what it had done and all those things. I was like, “God, help us, help us, help us.”
But you know, He’s been faithful because He calls you out of those things and He shows you what doesn’t line up with Him. And then He resets new pillars in your life that line up with the Kingdom. And now you’re able to begin to make an impact from the Kingdom into the world, from the Kingdom into your nation, and from the Kingdom into the sphere of influence that you have. So perhaps for you today, it’s time to leave your country. If you want to make an impact, it might be time to pack up your things and leave your father’s house and go to a place that He is showing you.