What Is Actually Holding You Back From Walking in Your Full Potential?
A lid that is no longer there. A rope that has already been removed. A pair of ruby red slippers you forgot you were wearing. The thing holding you back is not your circumstances, not your past, and not God's withholding. It is a perception that has not yet caught up with your redemption. And today we are taking the lid off for good.
We have spent this whole series looking at the lenses we carry and how they fog up what we see. We looked at how our cultural lens shapes every relationship we are in. We looked at how it shapes the way we read Scripture. We looked at how biblical paradoxes are going to feel like rowing against the current because they run completely opposite to what the world around us says is true. And yesterday we looked at the flea experiment and what happens when you keep jumping like a lid is on that Christ already removed.
Today we close it out by answering the real question. What is actually holding you back? And what do you do about it?
Why Are We Still Producing the Same Limitations?
Remember the fleas. They adjusted to the lid. The lid was removed. They still only jumped as high as their conditioning told them they could. And then they reproduced. Their offspring carried the same limitation. Generation after generation, no lid, but nobody jumping any higher.
That is generational curses in one of the clearest pictures I have ever seen. Not because God designed them to stay stuck. But because the limitation became the norm. It got passed down not through the lid but through what the fleas had learned to believe about their own capacity.
This is happening in families all around us. Women who never saw financial freedom in their household growing up carry a lid over what they believe is possible for them financially. Women who grew up in homes where love came with conditions carry a lid over how safe it is to be fully known. Women who were told early on that they were too much, or not enough, or not the one God was going to use for something significant, are still jumping just under the words that were spoken over them years ago.
The lid may have come off. The perception of the lid is still running the show.
What Does Jesus Show Us About This?
Jesus saw lids on people all the time. And He consistently refused to honor them.
There was a woman caught in adultery in John 8. The religious leaders dragged her out and said she deserved to be stoned. Every lens in that room had already decided who she was and what she deserved. And Jesus said, John 8:7 (NKJV), "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first." He refused to let anyone else's perception of her be the last word on her life.
There was the woman at the well in John 4. A Samaritan woman, the lowest social class in that society, going to draw water alone because she had been excluded from the community. Everyone's lens had already decided she was not worth stopping for. Jesus sat down with her anyway. He met her exactly where she was, engaged her whole story, and used it to bring her to belief. She went back to her town and became one of the greatest evangelists in that whole encounter. She went from someone everyone had written off to someone who brought a whole community to Jesus.
And then John 14:12 (NKJV) says, "Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father." Greater works than Jesus did. That is what He said is possible for the people who believe in Him. Not the same works. Greater. The lid is not just off. He threw it away.
What Are the Fictitious Lids You Need to Remove Today?
Here are some real ones worth naming. The lid that says you are too old to start. The lid that says you already missed your window. The lid that says your family background disqualifies you. The lid that says what you want to do has already been done and the world does not need another one. The lid that says you do not have the education, the resources, the connections, the platform. The lid that says women like you do not get to do things like that.
None of those are from God. Every single one of them has a Scripture that says the opposite. And Ephesians 3:20 (NKJV) says, "Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us." He is not limited by your lid. He is not limited by your perception of what is possible. He is not limited by your conditioning or your family pattern or what the people around you have decided is your ceiling.
Jump. Click your heels. The lid is off. The rope is gone. The power has been inside you the whole time.
Shed every perception that is keeping you small. Shed the belief that your limitations are permanent. Shed the habit of reproducing those lids into the next generation by jumping low in front of the people watching you. And shed the story that God designed you for anything less than exceedingly abundantly above.
Take this to the Word yourself. Ephesians 3:20, John 8:3-11, John 14:12, 2 Timothy 1:7, Romans 8:37.
What This Means for You
What is one fictional lid you are committing to remove today? Name it, write it down, and then find the Scripture that says the opposite. That Scripture is what you jump with.
This is the final post in the Our Foggy Lenses series. Here's the full thread from the beginning.
Post 5: What Is Actually Holding You Back From Walking in Your Full Potential?
I teach God's Word weekly inside the SheShed Community, and this is exactly the kind of teaching that hits different when you're in the room for it. The replay of this teaching, "Our Foggy Lenses," is available inside the community as well. Come sit with us.
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