Managing the Six Phases of Faith While Chasing a God-Given Dream

In every God-given dream, there are six phases of faith. We dream the vision; we make decisions through the Spirit to manage the dream; we will all eventually experience delays, difficulties, and a dead-end as we chase the dream; thankfully, God always eventually brings forth deliverance, keeping the dream alive.

Managing the 6 phases of faith properly in spite of the fear of failure demands relying on grace, seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance, trusting in God’s perfect timing, maintaining our character, and surrendering completely to God.

It is going through these testings and trials that our faith and character is being forged, equipping us to fulfill our God-given dream in the future as the dream grows and complicates.

Rick Warren’s 6 phases of faith

“Phase 1: The Dream (The Conception)

What it means: God gives you a brilliant idea, a vision, or a burden to do something meaningful—like starting a business, writing a book, healing a relationship, or helping a community in need
The feeling: Excitement, inspiration, and awe. You feel energized because you can see what could be.

Phase 2: The Decision (The Commitment)

What it means: Having a dream isn’t enough; you have to choose to pursue it. This is the moment you step out, make a commitment, and burn your bridges behind you.
The feeling: Determination, but also a sudden awareness of the risk involved. You realize there is no turning back.

Phase 3: The Delay (The Waiting Room)

What it means: Almost immediately after you commit, nothing seems to happen. God puts your dream on hold. Why? Because God uses the wait to test and grow your patience. He is more interested in building your character than in building your project.
The feeling: Frustration, doubt, and impatience. You wonder if you heard God wrong.

Phase 4: The Difficulty (The Obstacles)

What it means: Just when things start moving, problems show up—money runs out, people oppose you, or unexpected life crises hit. This is the storm phase.
The feeling: Overwhelm, fear, and exhaustion. This is where most people quit because they think difficulty means they made a mistake.

Phase 5: The Dead End (The Impossible Situation)

What it means: The situation gets so bad that the dream looks completely dead. There is no logical human way out, and all your resources are completely gone.
The feeling: Despair and total helplessness. God brings you to a dead end on purpose so that when the breakthrough finally happens, He gets the credit and you realize it was a miracle.

Phase 6: The Deliverance (The Miracle)

What it means: God steps in at the last possible second with a miraculous solution. He turns the impossible situation around and brings the dream to life.
The feeling: Relief, overwhelming joy, and a massive boost in your faith”.

(Reproduced: Source from AI)

5 Steps To Manage Rick Warren’s 6 Phases of Faith

1. Rely On Grace

“Life is not designed to run on human ability but on the frequency of Grace” (Nicholas Duncan Williams).

When experiencing delays, difficulties, and dead-ends, God often allows our human strength and our resources to run out, to strip away our self-reliance. Instead of falling into total despair, we must totally rely on grace, not ourselves.

“Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).

We must consistently rely upon grace to manage our thorn in the flesh (delays, difficulties, dead-end).

Grace Defined

In the context of 2 Corinthians 12, grace is God giving His strength to empower us to survive and do His will when we cannot do it in our own strength.

Grace sustains our patience when we go through delays. Grace strengthens our mental fortitude when we experience difficulties. Grace gives us resilience, rescuing us from despair, when we are in a dead-end.

The acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss (Thomas a Kempis).

Grace only helps those who admit their weakness, not those who pridefully and stubbornly choose to be self-reliant in hopeless situations when their strength is insufficient. Obtaining grace only happens when we humbly admit: “God, I am weak, I am stuck, and I need your help.”

“Before He furnishes the abundant supply, we must first be made conscious of our emptiness. Before he gives strength, we must be made to feel our weakness. Slow, painfully slow, are we to learn this lesson; and slower still to own our nothingness and take the place of helplessness before the Mighty One” (A. W. Pink).

Deny your weakness, and you will never realize God’s strength in you” (Joni Eareckson Tada).

“Real true faith is man’s weakness leaning on God’s strength” (Dwight L. Moody).

Relying on grace in faith involves acknowledging in your heart: “I cannot do this on my own, but God can do it through me.”

Paul didn’t say, “My strength will make your life completely easy.”; instead, he said: “My grace is sufficient for you.” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9).

“Remember something, God never permitted a difficulty to come into our life without also giving us the ability to handle it. God has provided us with every faculty. He has given us the power that we need for living victoriously. It is a fact that everyone of us down deep has what it takes to successfully meet whatever life brings” (Kathryn Kuhlman).

Grace doesn’t always immediately remove the delay, difficulty, or dead-end, for it is through enduring these obstacles, our faith and character grow. Grace always supplies sufficient amount of strength, patience, resilience, and character to us, the exact amount needed to survive the specific phase of faith you are in.

“When we pray for the Spirit’s help … we will simply fall down at the Lord’s feet in our weakness. There we will find the victory and power that comes from His love” (Andrew Murray).

2. Seek the Holy Spirit’s Guidance

Fulfilling a dream requires sound decision making, especially when you experience a delay, difficulty, or dead-end, where it’s difficult to know which direction to turn. Instead of making “impulsive, fear-driven decisions”, a faithful steward allows the Holy Spirit guide all of his steps, trusting in the Spirit’s perfect wisdom. A wise steward relies not only on grace, but also the Spirit’s guidance to maneuver through each stage of faith.

3. Trust God’s Perfect Timing

“Faith is a belief; trust is an action.” Faith is theoretically believing God will give me sufficient grace, and the Spirit will successfully guide me through the delays, difficulties, and dead-ends safely, and that deliverance will ultimately happen. Trust is the willingness to leave comfort zones despite risk and uncertainty, and trying to wait patiently as long as it takes until God’s deliverance happens.

Trusting in God’s perfect timing requires having faith in His goodness, sovereignty, and in promises like Romans 8:28. A lack of faith and trust in God’s perfect timing breeds fear and panic, often leading to impulsive, impatient, poor fear-driven decisions, ones which can hinder progress of the dream and of our character growth. Trusting in God’s timing fuels our patience during delays, sustains our courage during difficulties, and brings us peace at dead-ends.

How To Trust God More

Growing in faith in someone requires relational intimacy. If you don’t get to know God increasingly by consistently spending time in reading God’s Word, prayer, etc., then it will be increasingly difficult to trust Him well during circumstances where risk and uncertainty are involved. When you don’t trust God sufficiently, because you don’t know Him well, it will be more difficult to be a faithful steward when facing delays, difficulties, and dead-ends, which are geared to increase character, resiliency, and trust in Him.

You must also build your trust in Him by putting what you believe (faith) into action (trust) by testing what you believe about God’s deliverance when facing life situations to gain real-life experiences of what it means to trust God’s perfect timing.

Delays, difficulties, and dead-ends are opportunities for God to prove His reliability in His faithfulness to our needs, while simultaneously a chance for us to learn to trust in His faithfulness as we attempt to patiently wait for deliverance. By exposing us to such situations, God is preparing us for greater challenges as our dream grows and complicates.

Starting with small risks and incrementally making us endure increasingly more challenging trials, God is gradually building us without destroying. As 1 Corinthians 10:13 implies, God will never give us a temptation or trial beyond what we can handle through Grace, and ultimately, He will provide a way of escape from the obstacle (delays, difficulties, dead-ends), in His perfect timing.

Learning how to walk for the first time is similar to learning how to trust God’s perfect timing better. When we attempted to walk as an infant, our loving Daddy was near, encouraging and helping us back to our feet each time we stumbled. Abba Father is doing the same with us as we try to learn how to trust in Him through the six phases of faith. As an infant, we fallen countless times, but we never gave up. What seemed impossible to us then, now has become natural; imagine how life would be today if we never learned to walk. Now, as we journey through the six phases of faith, we must not give up trying to learn how to trust in God; what seemed impossible can someday become much easier when we rely upon Grace for help; if we choose not to grow, it will stunt our future.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” (Lao Tzu). To journey through the 6 phases of faith, to build trust in God’s perfect timing, always begins with taking the first step. Then another. And another. Until we reach the finish line. The first step is always the longest and most difficult, but without taking it, you will never get anywhere in life.

Rely upon grace to give you sufficient strength and courage to take the initial step despite your fears. Momentum can then build up thereafter, propelling you along. Keep depending upon grace until the race is over.

From successful, positive experiences of overcoming life challenges through grace, we can gradually grow in our faith in God as we now know Him better by experience. God is a faithful, good, sovereign, reliable God whom we can firmly put our trust in.

4. Maintain Your Character

As we pursue our God-given dream and we face roadblocks (delays, difficulties, dead-ends), our character of being a faithful, moral steward will get often tested, as these roadblocks may tempt us to “compromise values, cut ethical corners, or quit entirely”. During these times, it is crucial that our character continues to live with integrity and faithfulness to God, the kind He would approve.

5. Surrender Completely to God

Surrendering completely to God entails “handing over to God our broken plans” when all hope is gone and all human possibilities and strength has seemingly run out. Doing this shifts the focus away from what you perceive as the dream being a potentially future mistake, to God’s perfect ability to miraculously remedy the situation.

Surrendering to God completely shifts the burden of fulfilling the dream away from you to Him. Surrendering makes us realize that “we are the steward, not the Savior”, and it is God and not us who is responsible for the outcome of the dream.

Surrendering to God puts and end to destructive self-reliance, which gives God free space to do a miracle, bringing forth deliverance from a dead-end, enabling God (and not us) receive the glory for what will happen next.

How do you Actually Surrender to God?

Step 1: Admit to God you are powerless to bring forth deliverance.

Step 2: Give God ownership of how and when deliverance will happen, when and how the dream is supposed to happen.

Step 3: Lean on Grace for strength.

Step 4: Wait expectantly. Keep doing your “daily steward duties” faithfully, led by the Spirit, “while you wait for God to open an unexpected door.”

Final Thoughts:

We grow in character by continuing. We continue through the power of grace and through the Spirit’s leading. We continue because we have a perfect reason to have hope in God’s deliverance as to trust in His perfect timing. Meanwhile, we properly maintain our integrity and character, and when things feel hopeless, we surrender the situation and our fears completely to God as we patiently wait for Him to take action toward deliverance.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

God promises deliverance to every dead-end of a God-given dream. Don’t give up on God when the dream seems dead. The same God who resurrected Christ from the dead, also has the same power to resurrect your dream from the dead.

“Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).

Sources:

https://iask.ai/q/when-god-tests-your-patience-when-allowing-a-god-given-dream-have-delays-ho-kud9v7o

https://iask.ai/q/biblical-stewardship-heart-postures-and-Rick-Warren-6-phases-of-faith-explai-j9jh6j0

https://iask.ai/q/biblical-principles-of-faithful-stewardship-and-Rick-Warren-s-6-phases-of-fa-tdv3jbo

https://iask.ai/q/Rick-Warren-6-phases-of-faith-explained-and-how-to-overcome-fear-of-failure-idgkri8

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https://iask.ai/q/how-grace-empowers-stewards-to-overcome-obstacles-in-pursuing-divine-purpose-e5t1m1o