“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the armor of kings, to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; Remember the picture. Babylon had impregnable walls 75 feet thick, 200 feet tall with 100 gates of solid brass which were surrounded by a wide ditch of flowing water from the Euphrates. But the Babylonians had been enjoying a night of feasting and some fool left the gate open affording Cyrus the opportunity to march right in take over with barely a fight.

There is a powerful lesson here. You can have every outward sign of strength. You can go to church every time the door is open and do all manner of good works. But if you have left a gate open, you are vulnerable to attack. Consider for a moment the eye gate… What do you allow your eyes to look upon? Job made a covenant with his eyes so that his thoughts would not be upon a maiden. (Job 31:1) Do you set your eyes upon riches which certainly take flight like the eagle? (Pro 23:5) There are many things clamoring for the focus of our eye gate but to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple (Psa 27:4) surpasses them all.

Your life may be a fortress of good works and good intentions, but if you leave your gate open… if you feast upon the wrong things, you may find one day, your city, your life has been taken over by hostile forces and you were unable to put up any serious resistance. What have you been feasting on?

I am wrapping up my four part series on personal productivity as modeled by the rainforest. In the previous three sessions, we discussed the importance of Eliminating the Unnecessary, Automating the Mundane and Delegating the Tactical. Now I want to get to your core competency as the CEO of your life. What are you the very best at? What gives you remarkable fulfillment? This is what you really want to do, free from the time wasters and time consumers that have plagued your life. It’s where you soar at the stratospheric level like an eagle overseeing the fields and forests, planning the next move from a place of strategic advantage.

In the rainforest, plants have certain designated responsibilities that only they can fulfill. They are wired or created to fulfill those roles and everything about their DNA beckons them to fulfill their primary purpose. The fourth law, therefore, is to Designate. By that I mean, designate your time, your resources, your heart, your mind, your strength to that thing you have burning in your heart, but as much as possible, do it at a strategic level.

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“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the armor of kings, to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before you, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of bronze, and cut asunder the bars of iron: And I will give you the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that you may know that I, the LORD, who call you by your name, am the God of Israel.” (Isa 45:1-3)

For the next several emails, I am going to break out this passage for all of us to consider. It has profound implications for believers, but I will focus my remarks on the business community. God gave this prophecy to Cyrus — a heathen king — who was given the task to overthrow Babylon and rescue the tribes of Judah and Benjamin from their captivity. It was an awesome task. The walls were seventy-five feet thick and two hundred feet high, surrounded by a wide ditch full of water, and defended with one hundred gates of brass. It was considered impregnable and Cyrus well knew the difficulty of his assignment.

To be clear, I know this was a word given to Cyrus and had literal fulfillment, but as so often true in Scripture, there is spiritual truth to be gleaned from historical happenings. In fact, oftentimes the historical event happened as an intended foreshadow of a future event. Consider Abraham who was about to sacrifice his only son Isaac as a clear picture of God later sending His only son to die for us.

Back to Cyrus, he was given a task that was so challenging, so seemingly impossible that it required God to go before him. By the way, God did go before Cyrus. The Babylonians had been feasting the night before the attack and forgot to shut the gates to the city! God truly opened the two-leaved gates for Cyrus! So here’s my question to you today… Has God given you an assignment that requires His presence to go before you to complete or are you working on something that sheer determination can get you through? If you can do it in your strength, what have you really accomplished? If it requires His presence, the second question must naturally follow; did He ordain you for this task? If He did, He will go before you and you can follow Him in the garden of His turbulence. (To be continued.)

We have been talking about how the rainforest is so incredibly productive. How does it stay so focused on the most important tasks it has like breathing in CO2 and exhaling fresh Oxygen for us to breathe? For the last two weeks we talked about the first two laws… Eliminate the Unnecessary and Automate the Mundane. These two laws, when properly applied, will create a vacation for you in every working day! But there’s more…

Once you eliminate the unnecessary and automate the mundane, it’s time to Delegate the Tactical. Don’t make the mistake of delegating to others the things you should have eliminated or automated. If you do, you’re just wasting their time and indirectly, yours. In the rainforest, there are many pests that consume the productivity of plants. While many plants have devised their own way of dealing with those pests, on some occasions, plants actually delegate the defense of their leaves to others. They hire ants by paying them with nectar. The ants get hooked on the income (the nectar) and ward off all potential intruders like caterpillars, grasshoppers, grubs, etc.

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I want to continue the discussion on intensity. Where does it come from? I submit that intensity is the result of FOCUS. When I was a child, I guess I had a cruel streak or at the very least an insensitive streak. On a lazy summer afternoon, we would grab a magnifying glass and go looking for ants.

Some of you already know where I am going with this. We would find some slow moving ant near an ant hill and try to focus the light of the sun upon the ant. If we were way out of focus, there was no effect. If we were nearly in focus, it got us excited, but the ant didn’t seem to pay any attention.

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