Leaders learn to celebrate small victories, gaining confidence for bigger ones!

Turn back to 1 Samuel 17 and read 35  – 37 again. Here, we see David acknowledging and celebrating his prior successes. He says, “Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear.” He’s saying, “Listen, I’ve done this before! I’ve been doing this, and I will do this!” His history of success helped him believe that, with God’s help, David would do it again. It’s the same with us. Our history of success in God keeps us believing we will do it again.

Building a history in God is one of the greatest ways to build confidence in Him. If we have gone through defeat and we’ve made it, we don’t fear defeat like we once did. If we have success and acknowledge and celebrate it, we build confidence that success will come again. The more we acknowledge the process and embrace our progress, the more we will expect the same outcome.

I have been in ministry for 17 years. I have had high times and low times and a bunch of stuff in between. One of my favorite things to do right after leaving a speaking event, whether it felt like a success or not, is to say to my family, “Let’s celebrate our victories and ignore our losses.” I simply mean: we need to remember we obeyed God and did what He asked us to do. That, in itself, is a victory! We need to protect ourselves from the enemy beating us up over our defeats and celebrate the fact we actually did what God asked us to do.

God also asks us to not despise the days of small beginnings. I believe at times we can be so focused on large defeats or large victories, we forget to acknowledge our little successes. We have a “fairytale” experience where we believe our BIG victory will catapult us into success in every area. But this is not always how the kingdom of God works. Even David had to fight a lion and a bear before he took on Goliath, and so will we. We have to get really good at working on our history with God!