You may have noticed from my other devotional/blogs that I tend to hammer salespeople. That is mainly because I have a lot of experience in sales, especially phone sales, inside sales, and telemarketing. Let me tell you, there is a lot of pressure in sales to make your numbers. You may know people in sales and you may notice they tend to be fat. That is because many salespeople deal with the pressure by overeating comfort foods. If they are not fat, then they tend toward addictive substances like drugs or alcohol. You may have seen the movie Boiler Room or The Wolf of Wall Street. The crazy drug use and sexual promiscuity in those movies were not far off from what really happens in some sales companies as people try to deal with the pressure and to motivate and reward top sellers. At one sales job I knew of a girl who regularly did cocaine at her desk to deal with the pressure and because she was a top performer, the boss essentially did not care!

I have been tempted by such rewards and excesses. However, I know that God has called us to more and less. He has called us to follow Him and that we devaluate our spiritual rewards if we seek only earthly ones. Even if we are top performers at our business, He has called us to follow Him, eschewing pretty baubles that He may not want us to have because they will only tempt us to want more. An example of this is Joseph. He did not say to himself, when tempted by the wife of his boss, that he deserved to take her as a reward. He knew that his reward was something that had to come from God. He knew that, despite being a top-performer in his business, that sin was sin. There are numerous scriptural examples of top performers who were tempted with things but who choose a different path including Paul, Moses and Esther.

Thankfully, I currently work at a place that, “gets it”. They require and reward success but they realize that stress relief via drugs or alcohol or through sexually harassing others is not good for the long-term. They have a weight-room. They have apples and bananas averrable to eat (for free!) instead of vending machines with candy and chips. They encourage you to go out and take 10 minutes. They understand like Zig Ziglar said, that motivation is not permanent, but neither is bathing! So they have tri-weekly meetings where they give encouraging speeches. All these things work to reduce stress in the sales environment.

However, these things have not stopped me from being challenged and put under pressure. God does not excuse his children from pressure! Getting sales has been tough. I learned a lot about sales at this job though even though I already had a good deal of experience in it.

Throughout the Bible, the Lord has put His children under pressure. There have been days when I have felt the way Moses and the people of Israel must have felt on the beach of the Red Sea. God had wanted them to leave Egypt. Okay, they left. But then they ended up at the Red Sea with seemingly no place to go.  However, the Egyptian army was not far behind them and charging hard. Talk about pressure! Most of the people must have thought, ‘Did God want us to go out here to die in the wilderness? With no place to go? With no hope?’ Am I supposed to make this happen or will God? I would have been running around in a circle jabbering to myself, biting my nails! But the Lord did have a plan. He did. It involved something that no one had even imagined. Time and time again, for 40 years they complained and grumbled, but the Lord kept showing them ways that they had not even imagined to save them.

Are you there? Has the Lord led you someplace where you think there is no way out? Has God led you to a place where you think you have no hope? Try this. Let the Lord be the God of the universe, your universe. Do not let yourself be overwhelmed by the fact that you cannot see the answer to the problem and think that the only way to pacify yourself is with drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Try something new. Turn it around and do as Joel Osteen has said, “Don’t talk to God about how big your problems are, tell your problems about how big your God is”. Remind them that the Lord parted the Red Sea. Remind your problems that all of creation is subservient to Him who made everything. Remind your lack that Jesus filled the fisherman’s nets when they could not catch anything. Remind your problems with your spouse that the Lord has specifically stated in His Word that He hates divorce. Remind the sells in our sick child’s body that you come against the sickness in the name of the one who created that body. That does not make hope come easy. Being put in the position where all you have is hope is really tough. But the good news is that God is faithful and that hope and faith are strengthened by practice and exercise.
Mark 9:23-24…23And Jesus said to him, “‘If You can?’ All things are possible to him who believes.” 24Immediately the boy’s father cried out and said, “I do believe; help my unbelief!!!!” (exclamations mine) 

 ——————————————————————-W.