Power for Abundant Living…

In the Spring of 1982, I was a young college student when I first experienced the class that would change my life forever called, “Power for Abundant Living.” Having grown up with no religious training, I was fortunate not to have any compulsive, well schooled creeds to unlearn, except for one – fear. And, like most people, you would never know this by observing me. I said all the right things and generally made sure it appeared like I had it all together. However, underneath that deliberate facade, I was afraid of everything.

One of the first lessons from this class about the Bible was that fear is always wrong. (If you just mentally rehearsed some scenarios where fear is good, you need the class!) Fear has defeated more people’s lives than any other thing in the world. Fear always encases, always binds, always limits what you can and cannot do. Fear steals away your energy. Fear lowers your vitality. Fear produces inertia and eventually stops your life from moving forward as it should. “Fear is sand in the machinery of life.” Accordingly, “fear not” is the number one admonition in the Bible.

Fear is not simply an emotion or a sense of healthy caution that keeps you from walking off a cliff. Fear is a negative form of believing. What you believe in the depth of your being is what you receive or experience in this life, including that which you fear. The fears you unknowingly cling to either from wrong teaching or ignorance serve only to limit and thwart your life. When and where you have fear you have defeat in your life. Just as a person positively envisions some goal with the expectation of achieving it, fear is negatively envisioning something bad with a fearful expectation of receiving it. No-one would purposely expect bad things for their life and that’s why fear is always wrong! If you look for it and if you are honest, the places where you struggle the most have some fear interspersed in there. However, just as you began life without all of these fears, those fears can be overcome!

Fear, like any negatives that assault your life, doesn’t just show up overnight. Rather it begins as a process from which you are likely unaware. (If you knew it you wouldn’t participate…) Fear always begins with a doubt. Doubt appears following an uncertainty concerning some aspect of your life. The uncertainty you are experiencing leads to feelings that you have to “figure out” the source of your uncertainty. (This is a typical human response and why the technique is so effective.) As you begin in earnest to figure out the source of your uncertainty, you have to mentally entertain the troubling thought while you try to figure it out. Entertaining the troubling thought, though you are sincerely trying to solve a problem, now transitions into worry. Worry is dwelling on difficulties or troubles, always following uncertainty. “Dwelling on the darkness won’t bring forth the light!” Dwelling on and considering “potential” troubles doesn’t actually help to solve those troubles, but rather serves to entrench those troubles into your thinking. Entrenched worries now turn into fear. Fear means the devil is already inside the door. Fear is a hole in the hedge of God’s protection around your life. Your fear has now become a strong expectation for your life and if persisted in, will bring that negative potentiality into your life. Then you may exclaim, “I knew it!” and you would be correct but before it happened you had another choice! Get rid of fear in your life!

As frightening as this all sounds, it has been going on almost since the earth began, when another power gained access and began bringing fear into people’s lives. It continues to this day because it works wholly by deception. The reason you cannot solve the sudden uncertainty you are experiencing in your mind is because the uncertainty wasn’t true to begin with! You begin your attempt with a wrong starting premise. By entertaining the wrong idea, no matter your good motive, you are acknowledging it as true; as a real possibility for your life. In that you have already been defeated! If you start wrong you will end wrong. Instead of allowing the doubt to persist, leading eventually to worry and finally issuing in fear, you have to learn to control your thoughts and refuse to entertain the negative possibility! This is not an easy thing to do. You are going to feel real, real tempted to take that thing on in your mind. You’ll feel as if you cannot let it go and have to think about it. Well, it’s a trick and will always end badly. It’s not your job to protect yourself from all negatives and evil, it’s God’s job. Let God do His job while you do your job…

Power for Abundant Living taught me how, for the first time in my life, to completely rid myself of worry and fear. The class focused on the greater (greatest) power – God! It taught me how to understand the Bible for myself including those things written for my learning and those things directly applicable to my life. Ultimately the class taught me how to “receive” God’s power into my life via holy spirit and begin utilizing that power in my life, leading to power for abundant living! As vividly as I recall receiving God’s power into manifestation in my life, I also vividly recall and embrace being fear-free for the first time in my life! And although fear would continue its assaults on my mind and at times gain a little access, I continue to feel monumentally grateful for having learned these principles and to now experience my life as a son of God!

I encourage you my dear friends, no matter which path you may take, to learn for yourself the truth of God’s Word; to learn how to receive God’s power into your life; and to learn how to rid yourself of all fear in every category of life!

Life without fear is just the sweetest thing ever and God would have it no other way…

Just some good thoughts…

 

You Can’t Fix What You Can’t see…

Whenever you speak of solving problems or repairing broken parts of your life, there is always the assumption that you actually know what your problems are and where your life might need some repair. To rashly conclude your life is in no need of any revisions or improvement makes you a dummy.  But, if you are willing to at least consider that there may be something better out there for you, there are some things you have to get clear about first. You cannot fix what you cannot see…

I’m sure by now you are fairly clear on the reality that there is a right way to go and there is a wrong way to go. When you go the right way there is no downside to you or your life. There’s no negative price to pay or some sacrifice of something that is needful. The right way feels good and is good. There are no strings attached, no hidden snares, no “gotcha” waiting to get you. Conversely, the wrong way sooner or later makes itself known by reaching up and smacking you in the face! The cause may seem far removed from the effect, but the effect is always there as it necessarily must be. However, the wrong way carries with it another deleterious effect which you may not be aware of, namely its capacity to blind your eyes to its existence. In the same way that “right” clears your vision, “wrong” obscures it!

“A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” There’s no walking the fence when it comes to right and wrong. Choosing right is going to bless you and choosing wrong is going to hurt you. The method in which wrong seeks to harm you is by hiding its effects on you. If you have a disease hidden in your body, the sooner it is discovered the better. The longer a disease process has to work on you, the deeper its influence on your body and the worse your chances of surviving it. Wrong, of which “disease” is a member, works the same way. For wrong to continue to have access to your life, there has to be some principle or maxim or belief you are unknowingly perpetuating. The wrong way is often a very subtle distinction. The glutton eats himself to death because food is to be enjoyed. The rich man loses his health and family and eventually his life because life is supposed to be prosperous. You cannot fix what you cannot see…

The first step in getting results is not only to choose right, but also to stop choosing or allowing wrong. Wrong is not the excitement or spice of life it purports itself to be. Wrong isn’t the fun in life that you’ve been missing or the sin God doesn’t want you to do because He isn’t into your enjoyment. Instead those things are simply wrong’s commercial, advertising a claim that isn’t true. God not only treasures enjoyment, He wants you to find that enjoyment in your own life. Again this is part of how wrong hides itself in your logic. In its true essence, right is all of those things you are seeking, even if you cannot see that at the moment. Right is the love, the joy, the peace, the abundance, the prosperity, the health you are sincerely after! But for right to have its way, you have to lay aside the wrong…

Perplex yourself no further in futility trying to figure out why the good things you want in your life aren’t happening for you. No, no, no don’t start there. Begin by identifying the wrong things you are clear about and put them all aside. Stop doing them. Stop indulging them. Stop putting up with them. Now don’t you get all religious on me by refusing yourself nachos or wine in the evening or having sex with someone you love. That bondage is more wrong. I’m talking about those things you know in your heart aren’t right. Those habits of thought and action that have been promising you the same results for years; good feelings, peace, happiness, yet consistently giving you something else; bad feelings, guilt, general unrest; those are the things of which to rid yourself. If every time you do a certain behavior you feel bad about it, for the love of God stop doing the behavior. Don’t ignore what is, in favor of what you hope might be. You can’t fix what you can’t see…

Deciding you are going to forever stop a pattern of thought or a behavior on its own is like putting yourself on a perpetual, strict diet. It only works as long as you remain determined or until a delicious cheeseburger keeps showing up. Instead, the better way to stop something is to replace it with something else. Replace that obvious wrong with a new behavior or a new approach. The best of the best would be to see the wrong for what it is – wrong, and stop putting up with its lies. Decide to see for yourself the error and deeply consider the negative effect it has had on your life; if the effect is only that you no longer like yourself. That’s enough on its own.

The more you adamantly decide to put off the wrongs in life, the more clear your vision will become. Like the former drug addict or alcoholic, you will see maybe for the first time the stupid things that have been plaguing your life. You finally get a glimpse of the wrong beliefs you have been harboring in your heart for years and years. Glory, hallelujah you can see! And in seeing you can change or repair any aspect of your life that wasn’t the best and get on a new course to victory, love, peace, joy and abundance. Or said another day, get on the right path. You surely can fix what you can see! I promise you.

Just some good thoughts…

 

 

Asking Yourself the Right Questions…

With the New Year upon us, we often find ourselves making goals and plans for some new and improved version of ourselves. At its core, is a fundamental belief that something is not right about us. We have some fault or failing we need to remedy. And from that erroneous starting premise we desire to make repairs. The whole world seeks to fit itself within this system, yet continues to fail year after year after year! The fundamental reason for this persistent, pervasive, cancerous approach is that we are failing to ask ourselves the right questions.

Life is spiritual, not religious, spiritual. Behind everything that you experience in your life is a spiritual cause or influence. The only two spiritual options are good and evil. Sounds simplistic but it’s true whether you believe it or not. Good only seeks to influence you for a good end; happy, healthy and fulfilled.  Evil seeks to influence you for something less than desirable and in most cases things that take your life away from you in part or in whole. The end of evil is always death. Short of killing you, evil seeks to “eff” your life up!

At your core essence as a human being there is nothing wrong with you. Persevering with questions about what is wrong with “me” are always the wrong questions. The right question is what are you allowing to influence your life?  You have difficulties in your life and can easily see where and how the same things seem to defeat you year after year.  You can tell by noticing how many times you have written the same goals, in earnest. You are frustrated because you ‘should’ know better and choose better. The wrong that you and I do is not because we are bad people, yet that is quite hard for us to believe. The wrongs we do are because we have been influenced by evil in some form or fashion. We have accepted something that isn’t true. We have too often taken the bait promising us something that we want only to find out later that’s not what we are getting. In short, we have succumbed to evil influence.

No-one would ever choose evil if they saw it for what it really is. Evil always comes with some deception, some guise, some hard to detect cover. Yet there it sits working behind the scenes on everything that has ever gone wrong with your life. Everything! “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.” (The Usual Suspects, circa 1995) Because of this, many, many people attribute things that go wrong to God, the source of all goodness. In catastrophe they seek meaning instead of looking for the evil influence and how it gained access. Absent an answer, again from asking the wrong question, they make up fables concerning God’s greater purpose etc. Goodness cannot do anything but goodness and His influence is always preservative and safe.

Being influenced by evil doesn’t just consist of pursuing lustful pleasures but also encompasses sin, guilt, unworthiness and all unnatural preoccupation with oneself. Feelings of not being worthy, perpetuated by churches and religion, always leads to the most powerful weapon in the adversary’s gun belt – fear! Once the enemy has convinced you that something is wrong with you, you have already been defeated. Once you get on the hamster wheel of making mistakes, feeling badly and doing good works to atone for your sins, get ready because you’re going to be spinning on that wheel for a long, long time. When you arrive there fear is at the threshold!  Most of what has gone south on you in life is due to fear. Fear is the number one evil influence to extricate yourself from.

The right question to ask yourself in the New Year is what am I afraid of? Where am I unknowingly allowing evil in the door? What influences in my life are leading me astray? If you really want to see you can see and God will make sure of that. All humans are susceptible to these influences and true goodness will never put you in bondage to some religious behaviors you don’t really want to do. Escaping evil influences isn’t about focusing on your behavior and all you do and shouldn’t do. That poison will only put you in deeper. Instead the better question is what things have I allowed into my life that end up bringing me pain? Why have I allowed them and what false promises have they offered me that really aren’t true?

Detecting and discerning evil influences require a spiritual standard outside of yourself. What feels right only works on occasion. Many things that feel right or that you have no problem participating in, only feel right because you have long been systematized into their error. In this winning at life thing you cannot always trust your feelings. Instead you have to learn spiritual realties from the spiritual book called the Bible. Before you discount that for your life, you have to ask yourself do you really know what it says or have you made some snap judgments about it? I think it makes sense that the same influence messing your life up will also work to keep you away from that book! The Good Book is why we know that evil does exist no matter how many thousands of voices in the world shout disagreement.

The New Year, like any new year offers the promise of a better future. Gain access to your better future by learning to discern evil influences in your life. Quit making it all about you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you! What is wrong is your failure to see what is behind all of your difficulties and challenges. None of us are good by our own merits. Thinking so is a dangerous game heading for disaster. See life for what it is spiritually and then pursue the good influences. The good influence will only help you and bless you and as is often needed, repair you! The Good Influence loves you no matter what you do. Isn’t that what you need the most? Sure it is and you know it…

Have a happy and prosperous 2018.

Just some good thoughts…