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.
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