There was a time in my life when I would have seen that sign and said, “Amen!” But not anymore. You and I really cannot do anything we want to do. We cannot do anything or everything that everyone else is doing. But we can do everything God has called us to do. And we can be anything God says we can be.

We must get balance in this area. We can go to motivational seminars and be told with a lot of emotional hype, “You can do anything. Think you can do it; believe you can do it; say you can do it—and you can do it!” That is true only to a degree. Carried too far, it gets off into humanism. We need to speak about ourselves what the Word says about us.

We can do what we are called to do, what we are gifted to do. There are ways we can learn to recognize the grace gifts that are on our lives.

I have learned this regarding myself: when I start getting frustrated, I know it is a sign that either I have gotten off into my own works and am no longer receiving God’s grace, or I am trying to do something for which there was no grace to begin with.

From the book New Day, New You by Joyce Meyer. Copyright © 2006 by Joyce Meyer. Published by InProv. All rights reserved.