Month: July 2022

The most powerful thing that God gave you is your ability to choose. You can choose what you think, you can choose what you feel, you can choose what to do with your life. You can choose to be a success or fail. You can choose to learn how to live your life as the head and not the tail, or you can choose not to.

Here is one of the most important truths that everyone who wants to be a success in life needs to know: you can choose what you want, but you then have to live with your choice. You have the freedom to choose whatever you want, but you do not have the freedom to choose not to have the consequences of your choice.

God told the Israelites they could choose life or choose death. Those words are in the Scripture and still reverberate to every man and woman today. We can choose life or we can choose death. We can choose to think big or think little. We can choose to sulk or rejoice. We can choose to lie down or stand up and fight. We can choose to worry or dream. We have the power to choose.

But what none of us have the power to do is this – to choose life and get death, or to choose death and get life. What you choose is what you get.

If you fail to make godly, good choices, you will not live a life of abundance. You might say “Hey I didn’t know” but if you don’t know about gravity, that does not stop you falling! That’s the principles that the universe runs on – and you have a Bible and can find them out and work them.

If you do something selfish, it will come back to you – the principles of the Word are always working and they will work. If you do not understand how God has designed the universe, you will mess up. But if you do, you will win. Do not look at God’s Word as something restrictive, realize it is a necessary gift that if we study it and focus on it and imagine it – it will take us to an open place, a wide place, a great place.

You have to make a choice – life or death, and that is the only way to get to life is to choose it. You cannot get there without choosing it, you cannot stumble on life and success; you cannot change God or His Word or the way He runs life. You cannot have enough power to change the Word, you cannot have enough money to buy life without choosing it. You have to live in harmony with God’s Word – that is choosing life. That is the only path to success. True success.

God’s Word is an unchanging thing, and it holds you to it. You cannot excuse yourself for not knowing it. When you walk according to God’s Word, and dream big and count the stars and live in faith and hope and love and expect great results then you will get them. When you don’t, you won’t. That’s the truth.

And the principle we looked at in the last post is still the grandfather of them all – what you imagine is what you become. We have to see ourselves moving mountains, living like Jesus, forgiving the hard to forgive, loving our wives, opening blind eyes. All of it. Start reading the Bible, and start using your imagination over and over. This is choosing life, and failing to do that, is choosing death. No one can control your thoughts and no one can force you to choose life. God Himself will not force you, all He has done is set before you life and death and told you choose life.

I tell you the same: Choose life!

God has designed the universe to work, and gave us a Bible to find out how it works. There are principles to success and those principles are very exact. Far too many Christians are just doing their own thing and hoping God will bless it rather than find out what they should be doing.

Being a success in life is like mathematics, there is a way of doing it that leads to the correct answer and ways that lead to the wrong answer. When we study the Word, find out the principles of success and do them, we will be a success – we will be rich, healthy, happy, in the right place, with strong, healthy friendships and doing what we are designed to do.

You cannot make God, He has always been God, and you cannot destroy Him or diminish Him in anyway whatsoever. It’s that simple. God is, and you cannot change Him. You are the one who has to change. The will and purpose and passion of God is that you are a success, so if you are not, it is you who needs to change not God. If what you are doing is not making you an unbeatable winner, not bringing increase and prosperity and peace, you need to do something else because God is not about to suddenly change and start releasing glory into your disobedience of His principles!

Now one of things that you need to understand if you are to win in life is this – God is not just enough, He is more than enough. One of the names of God is El-Shaddai which means more than enough. There is more than enough energy, life, resources, money, peace and friendships in the world. There is absolutely no scarcity in the kingdom. If you are making decisions from a position of scarcity, your mind is not thinking in a godly way, your mind is thinking in a satanic way. Every pastor upset that another church has started in their town is thinking like satan not God. Every person who does not tithe because they think giving 10% to God will make them poor is thinking like satan not God. Everyone who thinks if they turn the other cheek they will become a doormat is thinking like satan not God.

There is more than enough energy in your body to do everything you are called to do. So many people complain about a lack of energy. Listen – even after you die you are still moving. Every molecule in your body is moving around – that’s how it turns into dust. There is more than enough energy. The walls in the room you are sitting in are moving at the speed of light right now. They look still but electrons are zooming around protons and neutrons faster than you can dream or imagine.

When we put our minds to anything, start to believe we can, we can do anything – the energy is there, the power is there, all we need to believe what God says, believe who we are, believe that we can do what He said we can do, and we can do. There is more than an abundance of life from Jesus!

President John F Kennedy asked Werner von Braun what it might take to build a rocket to take people to the moon safely, and his reply was all it takes is will. That is the truth.

We just need to believe we can have success, and successfully do everything God has called us to do. Most people do not have the ability to believe this, their faith is too weak because they never exercise their faith. They can barely hold an image of success in their mind for more than a few seconds, but you can develop the muscle of your imagination!

I challenge all of you to develop your imagination. Pick a book of the Bible, one of the gospels or Paul’s epistles and just read it, do not stop reading it until you read something that is outlandish to your imagination.

For example, you might read what Jesus said in John 14.12, “Anyone who believes in me will do the works I do”. Most Christians nod their head to that but very few carry that in their imagination or heart. That’s just a fact. But it is God’s Word, so you need to give yourself just a few minutes. Just let’s say 5 minutes. And you sit in a comfortable chair, play some soft music (instrumental only), and you imagine yourself doing that Scripture, or whatever one jumps out at you. YOU THINK ABOUT NOTHING ELSE AND JUST DOING THAT SCRIPTURE, and any other thought comes, kick it out and concentrate on the Word of God itself. By doing that you are doing a gym workout for your imagination and making it stronger. This is such an important skill, and sadly it is being lost today, people have neither the creativity or fortitude to dream the Word, and that is going to be one of the biggest bottleneck to revival. LEARN THIS SKILL. DEVELOP YOUR IMAGINATION, MAKE IT STRONG.

You have the ability to do anything in God’s Word, you are not lacking strength, energy, love or power. So think that way, over and over, until it becomes how you think. Then what you dream, as you think it is, it will manifest in your life. It will be created if necessary!

Do not nod your head at this and not do it. This is more important than working out your biceps, quads or even your heart. This is the most important thing that will bring you into success. Do not try and achieve success your way, do it His way.

Selah.

God is huge. Like really really big. Like bigger than the whole universe. He is huge, and His thoughts are huge. And He loves you, I mean really loves you.

So never be ashamed of how big our God is, how much we win, and how much blessing He wants to pour out on us. Never be ashamed of being alive, of being blessed, of being rich, of winning in life. of living life to the full, of winning every battle, of being absolutely abundantly blessed. The Lord told me once that He wanted the level of favour on my life to be ridiculous, and I believe it, and I enjoy it.

There is a conference I used to go to every year. And the teaching was great, but many of the people there did not like me, they have lied about me, attacked me and my family, spoken about me behind my back and made it their job to really humiliate me and put me down. A few weeks ago I was praying about this conference, and the Lord said to me “Do you know why you go there?” I said “To hear the good teaching”, and the Lord said “No, you could do that on your phone!”. So I said “I don’t know”. And the Lord told me that I go in the same way some religious people wear sackcloth and ashes, to deliberately make myself feel uncomfortable because on some subconscious level I am a little embarrassed about utterly blessed I am and how well my life is going! I actually go there to have a bad time because I am ashamed of how blessed I am. That’s crazy, but it resonated with me and brought me great freedom!

I was a little shocked to hear this, but I have run with it, I will not be going again, I will go to places that celebrate me – and there are loads of those places, so many! God said don’t try and mix the oil on your life with the water of people who don’t have any oil and just want to dilute you to make themselves feel better. That is the work of people with tiny dreams and that is not our portion!

We have to grow up and stop being satisfied with small! I heard a pastor recently tell me God had told him to have a small church. I don’t believe that man heard God, I believe he heard his own peanut brain! That’s not the God I know – God wants us to disciple nations! I am not ashamed nor do I despise small beginnings but everything that has God’s fingerprint on it grows. Because God is huge and He loves us!

I got an email last week from a man who left our church running us down and being rude to us, he went to another ministry and was trying to start his own ministry, but this email was asking for money. Like he was a little bird looking for seed in a bird feeder, or a beggar sitting on the floor.

The money was supposed to be for his ministry, but we are not fed by his ministry so why is he asking us for money – I know why because his ministry isn’t feeding people! Now give where you are told, but the normal way for a ministry to be funded is by the people we feed.

All our biggest givers at Tree of Life are people who are there in the services, that I am feeding and challenging and inspiring, I don’t call other churches and Bible Colleges and ask them to give me money for my ministry. Come on now! Aren’t we supposed to be clothed more than bird? Aren’t we supposed to live in abundance? If he needs money, he should get a job, earn, sow, give, and expect increase. That’s what we all need to do. We are designed by God to live a life of dignity and be the head not the tail, be the giver not the beggar. We have the glory and power of God inside us so let’s dream bigger than beggars! If your ministry is not big enough that the people you feed with it are not paying your way then stop begging other ministers and go get a day job until your ministry grows.

We have the life of God inside us, and we should expect it to manifest. We have the divine right that it will manifest! Stop being satisfied with low levels when we are supposed to be changing the world. You might have enough to buy yourself a car, but what about buying everyone in the church a car? That is abundance, that is life, that is the heart of God! We need to listen to His heart and dream as big as Him. We need to not be ashamed of how blessed we are.

The purpose of life is to advance and multiply, to grow. God’s work is always about greater than before. He never retreats. He doesn’t believe in retreat or stagnation, He believes in taking ground! I do too, because I am in Him and think like Him!

Now let’s talk about money. We cannot be ashamed to talk about money! You cannot change the world without money. Money alone won’t do it, but your dream and destiny requires money. If your heart was good, and you suddenly got more money, you would do more good tomorrow than you did today! So, earn more. Everyone can earn more. No one is at their limit of earning. All the money in the world is ours as children of God, the wealth of the wicked is ours, the gold and silver is ours, the cattle on a thousand hills is ours (that’s why I had a steak for breakfast today and another one for lunch!). It’s all ours. All you have to do is go and get it in some way that is legal and honest and godly. Earn it! Every single person should earn more and use that more to make more disciples across the world. You should be expecting increase. You should expect to own everything you need and have so much more for investing into the lives of others. That is God’s will and purpose for you.

You cannot change the world without lots of money. Life is not simple in our generation, it is complicated and to change things we need wealth. You dream of being rich, then feel guilty because religion told you poverty is tied to godliness. It’s not. If I can buy my son dinner for £5, I can buy 100 children dinner for £500, I can buy a million children dinner for £5 million! The more I have the more I can live for God and change the world. I am not talking about living for me, I am talking about living for God.

You have a talent no one else has. You have a destiny, and with that destiny, God gave you a super-power. He designed you in your mother’s womb to do something so well that other people would think you must be an alien! You have to find it (listen to what I am teaching on Love and Destiny on Sunday mornings at www.tree.church/app for more on this) and you have to start using it. You will enjoy life and earn more! What a deal!

Do not be ashamed of the size of your God. Everything you have done up until now is merely the small beginnings of another chapter that is going to open up a life beyond anything you can ask or imagine! God loves you, God’s will and passion for you is increase, God is on your side.

It’s time to stop being ashamed of how big God is and how big His blessings on your life are. Start expecting more blessings, start expecting ridiculous favour! It’s yours! You are designed for success, not failure. Success will not make you proud, failure will not make you godly. Stop being embarrassed at how good God has been to you, and start expecting more goodness than you have ever seen!

You cannot succeed in life until you see yourself the way God sees you.  Your mind is like soil, it just takes all the seeds sowed into it and reproduces them according to kind.

If I took some soil and planted wheat, I would get wheat. I could not get anything else.  The soil has no power to produce anything different than the seed.  So it is with thoughts.  What you think is what you produce.

Your life cannot produce different to what you think, and nowhere is that more true than when it comes to what you think of yourselves.  If you think you are going to fail, you will.  If you think you are going to succeed, you will win.

God thinks of you as a winner but that doesn’t make you win.  Only when you agree with Him and submit your thoughts to His thoughts will success suddenly become a visible harvest.

What you think about you is what will bring the abundant life to you or keep it forever put of your reach.  Your mind just produces what you think like the soil just produces what is sowed.

When was the last time you went to the Word of God and wrote down who you are based on what God says and spoke it out loud to yourself.  You have a book that describes you in the most powerful way. Stop ignoring it and blabbing your mouth with your stupid opinions of yourself all the time.  You have to get a grip of your thoughts by speaking the truth about who you are.

You are not who anyone else says you are.  You are not who you say you are.  You are who God says you are, but you will only manifest who God says you are if you think it and say it too.

You are who God says you are.  You manifest who you say you are.  So speak what God says!

Stop letting other people’s opinions root in the soil of your heart.  That produces a paradigm of us as a loser and we start to lose.  Then because we keep losing we reinforce the paradigm.

There are different ways to define the word paradigm but it is a picture of the world and your place in it that is painted in your heart.  Change the painting, change your life.  Or in Paul’s word… Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Why does our image of ourself need renewed?  Because it was old even when you got it.  Your parents and the people around you started painting a picture of you in your heart as soon as you were born.

Think, if you were born to English parents you will grow up speaking English.  If someone kidnapped you as a baby and took you to China, you would grow up speaking Mandarin, and you would not know English.  The environment matters because it paints your heart.

You speak the language of the people you grew up surrounded by, but you also got your self image from their words too.  You painted a picture of your self using their words and I guarantee a lot of their words were wrong, so we need to repaint the image properly using God’s Word. Otherwise that image will dominate your life and hold you back from godly success.

That painting of your self in your heart, which you didn’t paint yourself, dominates your life and limits your ability to win. You must repaint it, and you must do it right.

There are limitations in your life you didn’t paint, problems you didn’t cause, lack you didn’t ask for. You need to repaint. That image more than anything else controls the way you behave. You have to grasp this and then put the effort in to change that image.

You went to school and learned maths and English and science, but no one taught you the most important thing to succeed: to repaint your self image in your heart. So we know what to do, but we don’t know how to make ourselves do it.

As a pastor, I meet brilliant, wonderful people nearly everyday who are having terrible results. Broke geniuses. Smart people who don’t know how to love their wife or submit to their husbands. Christians who are sick and sinful.

Their problem is not external, they don’t need a new course or new church or new job or new wife. They need to repaint the image in their heart. It’s that vital. Let’s make it personal… You need to repaint the image of you in your heart.

You can talk about the virtues of poverty as long as you like, but it doesn’t take long to realize that money helps you serve God, invest in others, and do what you are designed to do, not to mention it really helps you enjoy life. Broke people are not broke because they have no money, but because in their heart they see themselves as broke. Repaint the image and money will suddenly fly at that person!

We will continue this discussion later, but today make a commitment to go through the Word and find out one or two things it says about you and start declaring it and thinking it and start repainting that image.