Another Journal Throwback – Knowledge Is Power Part II

Here is Part II of an unedited (only names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent) journal entry I wrote years ago.

August 9, 2006

If knowing is half the battle, taking action is definitely the other half. One cannot be successful without the other.

I’ve found even with myself that too often we excel in one but completely lack the other. Take one of my family members Sara for example. She has gone to school, classes, conferences and seminars on just about everything from insurance to real estate to childcare! She is a very smart lady and she is knowledgeable in many areas, heck she even has experience running her own successful business. So what’s the problem you say? She won’t get off her fanny and do anything with it. She has all these certificates and knowledge but when you ask her what she’s doing with it, she simply replies, she’s waiting on God to give her the opportunity. Well, keep waiting sister, because that’s exactly what you’ll be doing until Jesus comes!

Unless she decides to get off her fanny and do something, all that knowledge will go to waste!

Now take another family member Marie on the other hand. She is definately a doer. When she sees an opportunity or the mere hint of an opportunity, she’s off and running. Don’t try to ask her if it’s a good idea because when you turn around she’s already gone! She seizes every opportunity and her willingness to get up and move will make her a millionaire. But there’s just one problem. She refuses to look into anything before she does it. She takes too many things at face value. Instead of researching and learning all she can about a subject, she takes off running without giving it a second thought. This has cost her thousands and thousands of dollars and a consignment of insurmountable stress through the years. She takes the term “pay someone smarter than you to do it” to the extreme. While this is a smart idea, she doesn’t take the opportunity to learn or even learn about the person she’s leaving in charge.

When you take Sara’s myriad of information and knowledge and Marie’s get up and do attitude you’ve got an undeniable success waiting to happen. Even in the spiritual realm, we have got to learn that learning without doing and doing without learning is detrimental. We can read the bible all day long and get every prophecy under the rainbow but if we don’t use the inertia God gave us we’re just water lillies waiting to be stumped. On the other hand if we jump at our own whimsicle and neglect to learn what God says about the matter, we too often dive head first into a self-made disaster!

Faith without works is dead: Knowledge without action is futile!