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Os Hillman
Discover Your Purpose
“I will give you the treasures of darkness,
riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the
God of Israel, who summons you by name.” -- Isaiah 45:3
In other words, He "breaks" our staff,
or our vocation.
The purpose of the breaking is not to destroy
us, but to bring us to a place of willingness to lay down our vocations so that
God can use them.
The breaking prepares our heart for the new
calling.
In Exodus 4, God required Moses to lay down his
staff in order for him to see it as something that had power. As soon as Moses
obeyed, God changed his staff into a snake.
Notice what one commentary says about this act
of obedience:
The turning of Moses' staff into a serpent,
which became a staff again when Moses took it by the tail, had reference to the
calling of Moses.
The staff in his hand was his shepherd's crook,
and represented his calling as a shepherd. At the bidding of God, he threw it
upon the ground, and the staff became a serpent, before which Moses fled.
The giving up of his shepherd-life would
expose him to dangers, from which he would desire to escape. At the same time,
there was more implied in the figure of a serpent than danger, which merely
threatened his life.
The serpent had been the constant enemy of the
seed of the woman (Genesis
3), and represented
the power of the wicked one, which prevailed in Egypt. But at the bidding
of God, Moses seized the serpent by the tail, and received his staff again
as "the rod of God," with which he
smote Egypt with great plagues.
From this sign the people of Israel would
necessarily perceive that Jehovah had not only called Moses to be the leader of
Israel, but had endowed him with the power to overcome the serpent-like cunning
and the might of Egypt; in other words, they would believe that Jehovah, the
God of the fathers, had appeared to him.1
God was instructing Moses to lay down that which
represented his life and calling, so that He could transform it and raise it up
for His purposes.
Once Moses laid his staff down and then took it
back up, a significant change took place. It was no longer only his shepherd's
staff; it was the "staff of God."
"So Moses took his wife and sons, put them
on a donkey and started back to Egypt. And he took the staff of
God in his hand" (Exodus 4:20, emphasis added).
God's staff has power. After Moses' staff became
God's, it was used as the instrument of deliverance and transformation for the
people of God.
It delivered people out of the slavery
of Egypt through one of the most dramatic miracles of all time-the
parting of the Red Sea (see Exodus 14:16).
Moses' staff transformed a people from slavery
to freedom and was used to demonstrate his God-given authority.
Circumstantial Setbacks
Saul was trying to solve a problem in his dad's
business when God called him to be king of Israel.
We read in 1 Samuel 9-10 about how Saul was
working for his father, Kish, in the family business. We don't know what
type of business it was, but it required the use of donkeys.
As we discussed in chapter 1, donkeys
transported goods and were the key commercial distribution system of the
day. Kish had lost some of his donkeys.
No doubt, his distribution system was severely
affected. So he asked his son Saul to find them.
Saul took a servant with him and they spent the
day searching unsuccessfully in four different places. It was getting late and
he was ready to abandon the search.
At the end of his resources, Saul was now in the
perfect position for God's divine intervention.
Like Saul, most of us attempt to solve our
problems as well as we can, and often we are not in a position to hear God's
answer to our problem until we have exhausted all of the options in our own
strength.
Just when Saul was ready to quit searching, his
servant spoke up and said, "Look, in this town there is a man of
God; he is highly respected, and everything he says comes true. Let's go there
now. Perhaps he will tell us what way to take" (1 Samuel 9:6).
Saul decided to take his servant's advice, and
two began to look for the prophet.
On the way, they met two young girls who told
them where and when the man of God would be in the city. (God often uses
situations that seem very incidental in pointing us to the way He has for us.)
Following the girls' directions, they ran right
into the prophet Samuel. Immediately, Samuel told Saul that his father's
donkeys had been found, but that there was more to this meeting than that.
He anointed Saul with oil and told him that God
had chosen him to be king over Israel. He specifically described signs and
wonders that were about to take place in his life.
What must Saul have thought? All he intended to
do was to find his dad's donkeys and suddenly he found himself talking to a
prophet who said he was going to be king.
In his book Experiencing God: Knowing
and Doing His Will, Henry Blackaby writes, "You cannot go
with God and stay where you are."2
God must change us if we are going to fulfill
His purposes in our lives.
Samuel said to Saul, "The Spirit of
the Lord will come upon you in power, and you will prophesy with them; and you
will be changed into a different person" (1 Samuel 10:6).
Up to this point, Saul had never prophesied or
led a group of people. He had also never had to be accountable to a prophet and
to God for his every action.
Saul took a big step of faith right away and
prophesied with the prophets just as Samuel said he would. How exciting that
must have been.
Yet, when Samuel called the entire nation
of Israel together to announce him as Israel's first king in
history, Saul was nowhere to be found.
This part of the story is humorous. Excitement
is in the air, but when they call Saul's name, he doesn't even come forward.
So the people "inquired further of
the Lord, 'Has the man come here yet?' And the Lord said, 'Yes, he has hidden
himself among the baggage'" (1 Samuel 10:22).
For us, this should be an encouragement. God
continues to pick the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.
Your greatest setback can be thinking that
there's no way that God can use "little me." However, the reality is
that He can and will, if we respond properly to the negative circumstances
around us.
The Joseph Calling
Joseph had a tremendous calling on his life that
ultimately resulted in his becoming a physical and spiritual provider over
nations.
However, God had to do extensive breaking and
preparation in his life to make him ready.
By 1994, I had a life that many people would
have longed for.
I had made enough money to retire at the age of
44; I was playing golf about three times a week, and my walk with God was
"adequate" in my eyes-or at least not much different from any other
Christian businessperson I knew.
Then one day, my wife of 14 years announced that
she wanted to separate. This led to a divorce three years later.
At the same time, investments of more than
$500,000 disintegrated over a period of a few months, and I lost 80 percent of
my business along with clients who failed to pay bills that added up to more
than $140,000.
My world quickly changed from having a
successful small business and family to having no family, little money and a
shell of a business. My world had fallen apart, and I was devastated.
I had heard stories of other business people who
had gone through difficult times and had always looked at them with a
judgmental attitude, thinking they probably had made unwise choices and were
reaping from those choices.
My problems, though, did not stem from unwise
choices. At least they didn't appear that way to me. I was forced to find
answers.
So, for the next two years, I sought answers. I
questioned what I had done wrong and why God had allowed this to happen to me.
During the first year, a man came into my life
who helped me to work on control issues related to my character. The next year
another man came into my life who provided insights into what God was trying to
accomplish in my life.
Finally, two years into the process, someone
sent me an audiotape from a Swedish businessman named Gunnar Olson, the founder
of the International Christian Chamber of Commerce (ICCC).
In that tape, Gunnar talked about a phenomenon
that he called the "Joseph Process." He described how many people go
through great trials in their business life as part of a calling by God to be a
"Joseph" in their day.
This piqued my interest a great deal, and when I
learned Gunnar Olson was going to be in Washington, D. C., the next month
to host the ICCC international conference, I knew that I needed to go and meet
him.
I flew to Washington, D.C., and was
able to arrange a meeting with Gunnar at his hotel. When I walked into his
suite, Gunnar asked me to tell my story, and for the next few minutes I
recounted my narrative in every gory detail.
When I finished, he looked at his fellow board
member, James Lockett, and began to chuckle.
I couldn't believe his response. At that moment,
I did not know whether to stand up and leave or smack the guy.
However, Gunnar immediately apologized and
said, "We are not trying to be rude to you. We have heard this
story so often that it is simply uncanny to us. Be assured, my friend, you are
one of God's Josephs He has called."
From that moment, my life began to take on a
whole new perspective.
Learning about the Joseph Process was the first
glimmer of hope in what I had viewed as a hopeless situation.
It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from
my shoulders, and for the first time I saw my circumstances in a new light. I
no longer saw the reason for my problems as something I had done to
myself.
Sure, I had not been perfect in my life, but the
kinds of problems I was experiencing were much larger than the mistakes that I
may have made.
Spiritual Boot Camp
In Exodus 2, we read how Moses had been on the
backside of the desert for 40 years because he had tried to do God's work in
his own way.
Moses had known back then that there was a call
upon his life, and after he had murdered the Egyptian, "Moses
thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue
them, but they did not" (Acts 7:25).
His God-given desire to free his people was
mixed with his human methods of achievement-manipulation, violence and force.
And because God never calls us to fulfill His
plan in our own strength, He had to lay Moses aside for 40 years in order to
"remove the Egypt" from his life.
In Scripture, Egypt always
represents a place of slavery, sweat, toil and manipulation. And there is no
better way to remove the Egypt from our lives than to remove us
totally from the old system that taught us.
There had to be a season of separation to change
Moses' paradigm.
In the desert, he entered a new season of
learning and usefulness in the hand of God. His failure was now going to be an
instrument of wisdom to build something new in his life and in the life of a
nation.
Moses' 40 years in the desert was a process of
maturation that was required for him to become God's man.
The Bible says that Moses was the most humble
man on the face of the earth (see Numbers 12:3).
Humility, obedience and faith are the traits God
requires of those He uses in a significant way.
Moses didn't have all of these traits when he
began. It required a divine encounter and then a process. God does the same
with each of us.
Just as Moses had to spend 40 years in the
desert before he could fulfill God's call on his life, Joseph also had to go
through a spiritual "boot camp."
Joseph's spiritual boot camp was 13 years long
and required a separation from his former life. It involved a breaking of his
will and his ability to control anything.
He was forced to choose to believe that God was
still in control of the events in his life.
My friend Bob Mumford once said, "Beware
of any Christian leader who does not walk with a limp."
It is often this kind of preparation that is
needed to get the man or woman ready for God's use.
Like Jesus, Joseph suffered for those he would
ultimately save. He was rejected by his own people. He provided spiritually for
those he was called to serve.
God invested a lot in Joseph for this special
calling-a calling that would save an entire nation and the world from
starvation.
At the age of 30, Joseph was one of the youngest
rulers in history, and God could not afford to have a man in this position with
any pride.
Joseph's years of trials and testing were
designed to remove any vestiges of pride in his life and to build an unshakable
relationship with God.
Four Tests
God took Joseph through four unique tests. I
believe that Joseph was required to pass each one successfully before he
qualified for the next.
When he passed the last one, he was finally elevated
for the call that God ultimately had on his life.
Test #1: Loving Your Enemies
Joseph's first test involved his family's
rejection. His brothers had sold him to slave traders. What could be worse than
to have your own family sell you into slavery?
It would be very easy to fall into bitterness
toward your family and God if something like this happened to you. Betrayal is
one of the most difficult tests in life, and it often comes from one's own
family or those in the Body of Christ.
Every day, you and I must work and live in
environments that do not treat us in an honorable manner. Sometimes, it's
downright cruel.
I believe some of these experiences are actually
allowed in our path in order to find out how we are going to handle them.
A. W. Tozer said, "It is doubtful
whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply."3
Most leaders who are used mightily by God have
experienced a Judas-type of betrayal at one time or another. Whether or not God
later elevated them was dependent upon how they handled the situation.
I believe our response to betrayal is God's
graduate-level course in our walk with Him.
King David had a similar test when his closest
companions created a source of pain in his life.
We read of his struggle in Psalm 55:12-14, where
he states, "If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a
foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him. But it is you, a
man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet
fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of God."
Bitterness and unforgiveness have disqualified
many people from moving on in the kingdom of God. God will not
elevate you if there is any root of bitterness in your life.
If you have something against a brother or
sister, you must forgive him or her if you expect God to bless your life.
I had a very close friend who had become a
mentor to me. We were the best of friends.
However, an issue arose in our relationship that
turned out to be very negative. It was very painful, but God used the situation
to show me exactly how Jesus must have felt when Judas, one of his closest
companions, betrayed him.
I decided to bless this man in very tangible
ways even though he refused to resolve our differences.
Five years later, he asked to reconcile our
relationship. I believe that this would not have happened if I had not taken
the initiative to "love my enemy."
Are you willing to wash the feet of Judas, as
Jesus did?
Test #2: Moral Purity
The second test for Joseph was in the area of
moral purity. Joseph was living in Pharaoh's palace and he had not been around
women for a long time.
To make matters worse, his boss's wife began to
make passes toward him, which can be a huge temptation for any man.
However, Joseph did the only thing anyone can do
to withstand sexual temptation-he fled. He passed the purity test.
Judah, however, did not. In Genesis 38, we read
how Judah, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, allowed his purity-and his very
staff-to be taken from him.
Judah had just lost his wife, and after
mourning her death he went on a little trip to Timnah. His widowed
daughter-in-law, Tamar, posed as a prostitute, and Judah succumbed to
sexual temptation, having intercourse with his dead son's wife.
The form of payment was supposed to be a young
goat, but because Judah didn't have one with him at the time, Tamar
asked for a pledge.
"Will you give me something as a pledge
until you send it?" she
asked.
He said, "What pledge should I give
you?"
"Your seal and its cord, and the
staff in your hand," she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and
she became pregnant by him (Gen.
38:17-18, emphasis added).
Judah gave up his staff-the one thing that
represented his very life and work - to a woman who would later frame him with
it.
Sexual failure is like this. It requires
everything from you. When you encounter sexual temptation, you must be like
Joseph and flee. You cannot overcome sexual temptation any other way.
Men, especially, need to take heed and stay away
from compromising situations. You do not want to be disqualified because of
failure in this area. Even your computer can be a source of sexual temptation.
Test #3: Perseverance
The third test for Joseph was perseverance.
Joseph had been in prison for many years. He had successfully interpreted a
dream for some powerful people who could deliver him from prison.
It is clear that Joseph had his hopes up, but he
was not released. He remained in prison for another two years.
Joseph was tired of being in prison, but there
was something inside that kept him going. He persevered.
This is one of the most difficult aspects of the
Joseph process, for it can take many years to get through this stage.
Scripture tells us, "hope deferred
makes the heart sick" (Proverbs 13:12).
Many will give up the fight at this point, and
they may even consider taking their own lives.
When my advertising agency was successful, I had
a staff of seven people. When my world fell apart, I was by myself for five
years-alone and forced to do the best I could to satisfy creditors and make
ends meet.
At times, it seemed like a never-ending
treadmill.
But God was doing a deeper work than I could see
at the time. He was building character. He was removing pride. He was preparing
me for something hand-tailored for me.
The test of perseverance is the one that many
people cannot endure. All too often, they will move when God tells them to be
still and wait.
They will decide that they have been waiting
long enough, so they set out to deliver themselves. This is a big mistake.
If God has not completed the deeper work, He
will take you around the mountain one more time-or even more if that is what is
necessary to complete the inner work that He has begun in your life.
The depth and width of your calling is often
proportional to the depth of the faith experiences in your life that come
through adversity.
A faith experience is any encounter you have
with God that allows you to experience Him in a greater dimension.
God frames your life through these experiences
in order to speak to others. Moses' Red Sea miracle was a faith
experience. Joshua's crossing the Jordan was a faith experience.
However, if we short-circuit God's process in
our lives by delivering ourselves out of our difficult circumstances, we will
miss some incredible faith experiences.
Perseverance is of vital importance if we are to
enter God's promised land for our lives.
Test #4: Stewardship
After 13 years of slavery and imprisonment,
Joseph was finally freed from prison and elevated to the second highest
position in Egypt.
I wonder what that must have been like. Joseph
performed well in his new role. He was a good steward. He passed the most
challenging test of all-stewardship over prosperity.
When God began to change my difficult
circumstances (after seven years), the funny thing was that it just didn't make
that much difference anymore.
I had learned to live in that difficult state
and had become satisfied that I could live in it forever if I had to. In
essence, I had finally "died."
In Romans 6:4, Paul instructs us that we must
die in order for Christ to be resurrected in each of our lives.
How can you tell when your adversity will be
over? I believe your adversity will be over when it doesn't matter anymore.
When Joseph was elevated to his high position,
he was able to do it without fanfare, because he had learned to be content in
his hard circumstances.
Four years into my Joseph Process, I began
attending a new church. Now divorced and wondering what life would be like as a
single 44-year-old Christian man, a woman sat next to me in church. She was
pretty. She was single. To my surprise, God allowed a friendship to develop.
Nine months later, I was married to Angie.
And seven years after the start of my crisis,
God allowed me to sell a piece of property that allowed me to pay off all of my
debts and become debt-free. He had delivered me.
A Modern Joseph
Bill liked his life the way it was. He was a
tithing churchgoer who was doing well in his work. Then the contracting
business in which he held a 50 percent stake lost seven million dollars.
The next three years were the most stressful of
his life. He went into severe depression. He ended up selling off the division
that had lost all the money and spent a million dollars on legal fees for three
major litigations against his company.
The experience brought
Bill to the end of himself, and he learned to be totally dependent on God to
meet all his needs. He recalls, "I used those years to 'sow in
tears' as the psalmist exhorts us to do. Like Joseph, God made me fruitful in
the land of my suffering."
During that time, God gave Bill a vision for
bringing the Kingdom into the marketplace and a passion for helping people see
their work as a calling and a ministry.
To fulfill the vision, God led Bill in an
unusual way. He had been introduced to the idea that God can give creative
concepts to people - "witty inventions."
A friend told him about an invention that had
potential in the oil business. Through a series of developments that enabled
him to invest time and money in the new technology, Bill was able to bring it
to a worldwide market.
However, it was not back to business as usual.
Bill set up a team of 18 intercessors to establish a prayer foundation for the
business. They prayed for a year and a half before they had the formation
documents in place.
Bill is convinced that without this prayer
foundation, the company would have failed.
As they transitioned into the implementation
phase, this group of intercessors became a spiritual board of directors that
continued to pray for the day-to-day business matters.
.
The five startup partners see their business as a ministry and a conduit for blessings to flow into the Kingdom.
.
The five startup partners see their business as a ministry and a conduit for blessings to flow into the Kingdom.
Although the oil company promises to generate
massive returns, they believe the primary focus is how the Lord wants to use
their company and the technology of which they have been made stewards.
Bill's Joseph Process prepared him for his new
venture.
Stewards of His Resources
As God's Josephs, we go through trials so that
we can be fully yielded to His purposes. God has His way of taking us aside to
get our undivided attention.
For Paul, it was Arabia for three years; for
Moses, it was 40 years in the desert; for Joseph, it was 13 years
in Egypt.
God knows the stubborn human heart. He knows
that if He is to accomplish His deepest work, He must take us into the desert
in order to give us the privilege of being used in His Kingdom.
In the desert, God changes us and removes things
that hinder us. He forces us to draw deep upon His grace. If He had not allowed
me to be plunged into a desert season in my own life, I would not have known
what He was calling me to do.
Even my unusual name, Os, turned out to be significant
to the process.
I am a third generation business owner. My real
name is Omar Smallwood Hillman III. Quite a mouthful.
My parents put the "O" and the
"S" together to call me Os. No one in my family knows where the name
"Omar" came from. We only know that "Smallwood" was the
name of the doctor who delivered my grandfather.
During my desert season, one of my mentors
challenged me to find out more about the meaning of my name. He felt it was
important for me to know as I tried to figure out God's call for my life.
He also wondered if my father had been
distracted or deflected from pursuing a similar call, leaving me to pick up the
reins.
Throughout the Bible, we find that names were
given as an indication of God's purpose for an individual.
In some cases, names were altered to represent a
significant change, as in Abram to Abraham, Saul to Paul, Jacob to Israel,
or Sarai to Sarah.
When I looked up the name "Omar," I
discovered that it was Arabic for "first son" and
"disciple," Hebrew for "gifted speaker" and German for
"famous."
In the Bible, Omar was a grandson of Esau (see Geneis 36:15), and another meaning of his name means
"eloquent."
Esau, as you will remember, had forfeited his
birthright for a bowl of pottage.
What gave significance to this series of
meanings was that both my father and my grandfather may have become distracted
from God's calling for their lives, based upon the limited history I could
piece together.
It appeared that God was giving me a chance to
fulfill this call. It was like putting a puzzle together, especially in light
of the recent events in my own business career.
I was the first and only son of my parents. . . I
am a disciple of Jesus Christ. . . I felt that God was calling
me to public speaking. The puzzle pieces were beginning to come together.
Apparently, my Joseph Process included becoming
a steward of God's resources for God's people in the workplace. Part of my job
would be to help other descendents of Esau recover their birthrights, even
though they may have sold their birthright for earthly pleasure and prestige or
remained in Egypt as brick-makers instead of moving to the Promised
Land.
To make sure that I was an instrument fully
yielded to His purposes, God had to break my vocation decisively, sending me
into oblivion for a time, before He could bring me out and use me.
Someone once said, "God uses
enlarged trials to produce enlarged saints so He can put them in enlarged
places!"4
The desert is only a season in your life. When
God has accomplished what He wants, He will bring you out.
He has given you a mission to fulfill that can
only be fulfilled after you have spent an adequate time of preparation in the
desert.
Don't fear the desert, for it is there that you
will hear God's voice as never before. It is there that you will have the idols
of your life removed.
It is there that you will begin to experience
the reality of a living God as never before.
Reprinted with permission from The 9 to 5 Window: How
faith can transform the workplace by Os Hillman, Regal Books. To order
this resource click on bookstore to the right of this page. Also, click on The
CALL for information on our self assessment tool.
Os Hillman is the president of Marketplace Leaders,
the author of twelve books, and writes a daily e-mail devotional called TGIF
Today God Is First, which has over 200,000 subscribers worldwide.
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