Your Deepest Work Is Not Free—and It Shouldn’t Be

What took years to develop shouldn’t be treated casually.

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to undervalue something once you’ve become good at it.

What takes you twenty minutes today may have taken you ten years to learn how to do. What feels obvious to you now may only feel obvious because you’ve spent years studying it, practicing it, living it, getting it wrong, getting better, investing in help, asking better questions, allowing God to correct you and becoming the person who can see what you see now.

We forget that sometimes.

We look at what comes naturally to us in this season and forget everything it took to make it natural.

This becomes especially important when you’re carrying something that is meant to serve other people, because your deepest work is not free. And it shouldn’t be.

I don’t only mean financially.

I mean it cost something to develop.

There are things I can teach today because I’ve spent years living them. There are things I can see quickly now because I’ve spent years developing the capacity to recognize them. There are things I understand about leadership, formation, capacity, communication, publishing, coaching, ministry and building that I could not have understood simply by reading about them.

I had to live them.

Some of that education was intentional. I invested in it. I hired people, joined programs, studied, practiced and kept learning.

Some of it came through experience.

Some of it came through mistakes I would have preferred not to make.

Some of it came through seasons I certainly wouldn’t have chosen.

And some of it came from sitting with God long enough for Him to show me what I couldn’t see yet.

All of it became part of the work.

It Cost Something to Become You

I think we need a healthier understanding of value in the Kingdom.

We can become so concerned about appearing self-important that we minimize what God has actually developed in us. We can confuse humility with pretending something isn’t valuable. We can confuse generosity with unlimited access. We can even treat years of wisdom, experience and development casually because acknowledging their value makes us uncomfortable.

But recognizing value is not the same thing as worshiping yourself.

Sometimes recognizing value is simply stewardship.

It cost something to become you.

That doesn’t mean every difficult thing that happened to you was sent by God. It doesn’t mean pain automatically produces wisdom. Plenty of people go through difficult things without allowing those experiences to form anything useful in them.

But when you bring your life before God—when you allow Him to teach you, heal you, correct you, mature you and show you what to do with what you’ve lived—experience can become wisdom.

Information can become revelation.

Failure can become discernment.

Practice can become mastery.

And eventually, what God has done in you can become something He does through you.

That deserves to be taken seriously.

Devotion Looks Different Than Interest

There’s a difference between being interested in something and being devoted to it.

Interest fits something into the leftover spaces of your life. Devotion begins rearranging your life around what matters.

That doesn’t mean obsession, striving or abandoning every other responsibility. It means recognizing, This matters enough for me to develop it.

Paul told Timothy to practice these things, immerse himself in them and allow people to see his progress. I love the expectation of development in that instruction.

Practice it.

Immerse yourself in it.

Let there be progress.

We sometimes want the finished expression of something without giving ourselves to the process that makes us capable of carrying it well.

• We want the book without becoming the writer.

• We want the business without developing the leadership capacity.

• We want the platform without developing the message.

• We want influence without the formation required to sustain it.

• We want to be trusted with more while remaining casual with what is already in our hands.

But if something matters, it deserves development.

If it has value, it deserves stewardship.

And if God entrusted it to you, there may come a point when continuing to treat it casually is no longer humility. It may actually be avoidance.

Stewardship Requires Structure

This is something I’ve had to learn in my own life.

There is a difference between freely giving and failing to recognize value.

There is a difference between generosity and having no boundaries around what has taken years to develop.

There is a difference between serving people and continually pouring out something you’ve never built the structure to sustain.

You can be extraordinarily generous and still recognize that your work has value.

You can serve people and build something sustainable.

You can give freely and also create places where people invest to go deeper.

You can love people deeply without making everything you carry endlessly accessible.

Money is only one expression of this. Sometimes stewardship looks like charging appropriately. Sometimes it looks like protecting your time. Sometimes it means not answering every question in a DM. Sometimes it means creating a framework instead of explaining the same thing individually a hundred times. Sometimes it means hiring help, receiving training, building systems, editing the book again or finally giving something the concentrated attention it requires.

The larger question is not simply, What can I get for this?

It is, What does this require from me if I am going to steward it well?

That is a very different question.

Your Work Has to Become Useful to Someone Else

Ultimately, the point of recognizing the value of what you carry isn’t to protect it so tightly that nobody gets to benefit from it.

It’s almost the opposite.

You recognize its value so you’ll develop it enough to give it well.

There are brilliant ideas that never became useful because someone wouldn’t develop them. There are powerful messages buried underneath poor communication. There are people with tremendous wisdom who never built a structure capable of carrying it beyond one conversation at a time.

Potential is not the same thing as stewardship.

Having something valuable inside of you is not the finish line.

The work is learning how to translate it, communicate it, structure it, refine it and carry it in a way that becomes valuable to someone else.

That takes devotion.

It takes courage.

It takes humility, because development requires remaining teachable.

It takes investment.

It takes practice.

And it takes a willingness to stop treating significant things casually.

So if there is something God has been developing in you for years, honor that.

Not with ego.

With stewardship.

Give yourself to becoming excellent at it. Get the support you need. Let yourself remain a student. Develop the skill. Build the structure. Refine the message. Do the difficult work required to make what is inside of you useful to somebody else.

Because what God gives us isn’t meant to terminate with us.

We’re supposed to multiply it.

And some things are simply too valuable to keep treating casually.