Hi, I am Beverley Watkins with Global Impact Ministries, and welcome to God Today. You know, in your life, you have to leave the place you are at to get to the place God has for you. Everyone in the Bible, who had an impact, they had to leave somewhere. Abraham had to leave his father’s house. I can’t even think of the others right now. But, people had to leave they were to go to the place God wants you to go. Sometimes, we think about that like, “Well, do I have to pack up and be a missionary?” No. Not everybody is called to be a missionary. Here’s the thing. You will need to leave the place you are in, the place that is comfortable for you, the culture – sometimes – that we are in. The way we think, the way we approach things.
I 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 will know about – which was racial segregation. The world I grew up in, I grew up in a very “white world” is what we would call it, because I lived with racial segregation.
People say to me, “But Beverly, how did you not know that?” I say, “I grew up in it. I never knew anything different. It just didn’t even cross my mind. It 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 released from prison, I was like, “Who is this dude and why is it such a big deal he is being released from prison?” And people said to me, “How did you not know with what was going on in your nation?” I said, “I didn’t know.” You see, I am using that example because many of us grow up in cultures and we think, “This is how the world is. This is just normal.” If we are Christians, we believe the world we grow up in is God’s world. Just like my world was not God’s world, not God’s ideal world, your world is also probably not God’s ideal world, because our culture has been formed by other things.
When God calls you into making an impact and beginning to shift things for the Kingdom, you are going to have to leave your country, you are going to have to leave your culture and come into God’s Kingdom. We have to begin to learn God’s way. We have to learn about His country. We have to learn about His culture. We have to learn how He does things. Here is the kicker. It is different from your culture. It is really challenging. Someone said, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Most of us don’t know our culture, and what we would call the country we live in, doesn’t really look like what Jesus wants it to look like. We have to have the courage to leave where we are 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 have believed things, and I have set up pillars of belief, and I have built my life around things that are actually not like you.” That is a scary place to be. When God begins to take those things out of your life, you can feel unsteady. You can feel like, “I don’t know how to behave, I don’t know how to act. Is there something wrong with me?”
That is what happened to me. As we came out of apartheid in 1994, and I began to understand how terrible that situation had been, and what it had done, and all those things. I was like, “God, help us! Help us! Help us!” You know, He has been faithful. He calls you out of those things. He shows you what doesn’t line up with Him. He resets new pillars in your life that line up with the Kingdom. Now, you are able to begin to make an impact from the Kingdom into the world. From the Kingdom into your nation. From the Kingdom into the sphere of influence that you have.
Perhaps for you today, it is time for you 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 has shown you.