The supreme quest of every true believer is to be developed by God to such a point that he becomes a more perfect tool in God's hand, one that brings pleasure to his Father.

The Christian walk is an unending journey of developing our life to the highest spiritual level. It requires decisive action, determination and discipline, as well as diligence.

In our quest, the book of Colossians encourages us: "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth" (Col. 3:1-2).

Notice the Phillips translation: "If you are then risen with Christ, reach out for the highest gifts of Heaven, where Christ reigns in power."

Look up! You will see the possibilities that lie ahead.

Reach for the highest gifts heaven has to offer. They are within your grasp!

Set the standard high! Seek 100 percent success. That way, even if you were to attain only one-half of what you were reaching for, you would still be ahead of the person who had set his standard at 25 percent and made it.

Set your sights as high as you can. Then allow God to show you how to attain your goal.

You can see the Apostle Paul reaching for the high calling of God for his life: "Brethren, I do not imagine that I have yet laid hold of it. But his one thing I do: forgetting everything which is past and stretching forward to what lies in front of me, with my eyes fixed on the goal I push on to secure the prize of God's heavenward call in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:13-14).

Paul was reaching out, pressing toward the mark, pushing toward the goal: the high calling of God.

This is not the call of his apostleship. This speaks of the call that God has for every Christian. It is a high calling. The only way to continue toward this high calling is to forget your past failures. Set aside the things Satan uses against your mind to bring you under condemnation. Your failures of the past do not make you a failure today. Your determination to succeed sets your destiny.

When you allow your past failures to dominate your thinking, you undermine any confidence you have in God's ability in your life. Don't allow those destructive, negative thoughts to remain in your mind. Thoughts of despair, ugliness, negativism, self-pity and poverty are detrimental to you. Those thoughts are seeds in your life. Those seeds will ultimately grow if you continue to nourish them.

Cultivate new thinking! Let God's Word create thoughts of prosperity, power, confidence, compassion and beauty. This is God' nature. These new thoughts inspired by God's Word will begin to lift you into a new realm of living. They are seeds of achievement in your life. You begin to see the possibilities that have been made available through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now you have set the stage for your success in the kingdom of God. You have planted the seeds that will produce power in your life. It is those who reach out to know God's ways and think His thoughts who achieve the goals God desires for them.

Psalm 103:7 says, "He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel." The vast majority of Christians are content to see the acts of God, and those acts are exciting. But it was not enough for Moses to see God's great acts of power and deliverance.

Oh, Moses saw God's powerful acts and praised Him for them. But when he sought to know God's ways, God revealed His glory to Moses as He had to no other man. The more you know God's ways, the more you can be a part of God's actions and experience God's glory.

Our High Calling
One of the things Paul prayed for the people in the church at Ephesus was: "The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling" (Eph. 1:18). As Christians, each of us has that same high calling upon our life.

* We have been called to liberty. "For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty" (Gal. 5:13). We have been liberated from sin, sickness, demons and fear.

* We have been called to the fellowship of Jesus Christ. "By Him you were called into companionship and participation with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Cor. 1:9 AMP). When God created man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, it was for a purpose. God created man for fellowship and companionship. That purpose has not been altered. Redemption was planned to restore man to the place of fellowship with God. Now that you have been made God's companion, you are an active part of what He is doing in the earth today.

* We have been called to be conformed to the image of Jesus. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be confronted to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom. 8:28-29).

The Purpose of Our Calling
As believers, we are called of God, and the primary purpose of that calling is to change us into His image. We become the reflectors of God's nature to the world.

Jesus was God in the flesh, and He perfectly revealed the desires and attitudes of the Father. You are the very flesh and bone of Jesus, the Body of Christ. He desires to so dominate you that when people are with you, they become inspired to a fresh commitment to walk with God and are uplifted by the contagious way you look at life.

People wanted to hear what Jesus had to say because He reflected His Father. They will want to listen to you because you reflect Jesus.

John G. Lake was one of the greatest men of God in this century. In his article, "Christ Liveth in Me," he states: "Christ has a purpose in you. Christ's purpose in you is to reveal Himself to you, through you and in you." He goes on to say: "God's highest is to bring out all the qualities of God in your soul, to bring out all the individuality that is in your life, not to submerge or destroy, but to change it, to energize it, to enlarge it, until all your individuality and personality and being are of the nature and substance and quality of God."

God's purpose in us is to bring our way of thinking and our attitudes into harmony with His will.

In his book, "New Creation Realities," E.W. Kenyon writes, "As you study the Pauline Revelation you become convinced that the ultimate of every one of those epistles is the building of the Jesus life in the individual. His plan for building Himself into us is striking. We must learn to act in His stead. There must be the conscious training of our spirits to be His actual representatives."

This is the goal God has set before us. We are His ambassadors here on earth to present the world with an accurate representation of our God - this God of love Who replaces man's sin's with His own righteousness, Who substitutes health and healing where there was sickness and disease, Who gives peace of mind where there has been depression, and Who forgives where there is guilt.

The world has not seen that God. They have only seen God through the clouded eye of religion which never knew Him and could not possibly portray Him accurately.

We see in God's Word that the Son of God saves men from their sin, and changes their nature by His power so that they become like Him. He fills them with His Spirit, speaks through them so they would reveal Jesus, as Jesus revealed the Father.

We must reach out for maturity because only as we mature can we reflect the character of the Son of God. There is a breed of harmless Christians who lack the power of God in their life, and who represent a poor sample of the transforming power of the grace of God.

A.W. Tozer makes this pointed observation: "We have today theological saints, who can (and must) be proved to be saints by an appeal to the Greek original. We need saints whose lives proclaim their sainthood, and need not run to the concordance for authentication."

Our righteousness is an important legal aspect of our redemption. Far too many Christians, however, rest upon the righteousness that has been imparted by faith without allowing it to effectively produce the righteous conduct and action for which it is intended.

In the Body of Christ the world sees a reflection of Jesus. He will stand for nothing less than spotless mirrors.

We can see again from 1 Peter 2:9 that the purpose of our calling is to reveal with ever-increasing clarity the beauty of Jesus Christ. But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

We are called a "holy nation." Jesus actually created a new race of people. People who belong especially to God. People with a purpose. This purpose is made clear in the Phillips translation of this verse: "It is for you now to demonstrate the goodness of him who has called you out of darkness into his amazing light."

Live Up to Your Calling!
Demonstrate His goodness! Undo the works the devil has done. Reach out into the Spirit realm through the Word of God. It will begin to open to you a lifestyle of diligence. Those who demonstrate His goodness are those who are putting away the things that hold back His effectiveness.

God will create a dream within you, a dream of fulfilling His goals. Ascribe to that dream. Then cultivate a new way of thinking and speaking. Let your thoughts and words reflect the dream that is alive within you.

Then compel yourself to reach out and obtain God's high calling. You will become a living incarnation of His spiritual energy. This is not for the weak-hearted Christian who is looking for an effortless existence, but for the one who is ready to meet the challenge of our times with the greatness of our God.

Your willingness toward God is the limit of your usefulness. You have all of the right ingredients necessary to become a productive, committed believer. Discover what a life of diligence toward God can produce.

Source: A Guide to Successfully Attaining Your God-Given Goals by Dennis Burke
Excerpt permission granted by Dennis Burke Ministries