Month: October 2022

You have to eliminate and remove and assault and attack any idea tht God wants you poor or sick, or that His purpose for your life is in anyway served by your poverty.

God loves you and wants you to live in prosperity, abundance and wealth. God wants you to have a life of good things.

God is big and huge and is not afraid of plenty. Everything God makes grows. Tiny little seeds become corn. Tiny little acorns become huge oaks. Tiny little sperm and eggs become 6′ 4″ humans. Baby crocodiles hatch at eight inches long, then grow to as large as 20 feet. Everything God makes grows. The whole universe is expanding. Your bank account should be growing, Your assets should be growing. Your life and influence and reputation and abundance should be growing. Life is increase because life comes from God and God is all about increase.

Look at nature – it grows. The only time nature is not growing is when people are in charge of it. You have to work hard to stop nature growing and taking over your house and garden!

A seed becomes hundreds of seeds! Each of those seeds becomes hundreds of seeds. Dave Duell, my spiritual father, used to say “I can count the seeds in an apple, anyone can, but no one can count the number of apples contained in a seed”. LIFE IN ABUNDANCE! INCREASE IS GOD’S WILL.

If you want to keep living, you need to grow. People die when they stop growing. Retirement is a terrible idea, people travel less, move less, think less, learn less – and they stop living. Then they stop living. No – keep growing.

I was a school teacher for many years and one of the main topics of conversations was how many years or even decades people had until retirement. They wanted the retirement age for teachers to be lowered. They wanted to do nothing, learn nothing and grow nothing. I cannot understand why anyone would want to retire – I love doing what I do, and I love it even when it challenges me. Days away from the single largest (and most expensive) meeting I have ever held, I feel some things on my back, but I am being stretched which means I am growing. I never want to stop that. I want to grow, to increase, to do more, to be more.

Imagination either slows you down or speeds you up. It either stops you advancing or leads you into new places. If you want to be more, you need to do more, if you want to do more, you need to know more. The more things you have, the more money you have, the easier it is to grow. So many people when there is a problem want to retreat – they want to regress, but we are designed by God to life – to grow – to advance – to learn the new technology – to understand the new culture – to embrace the new generation. Money and riches are not there to pile up – they are there to invest in dreams, to learn more, to life more, to do more, to change, to grow.

Let’s say you try to start a new habit in your life. It’s New Year’s Eve, so you decide to go to the gym. You decide to lose 20lb. You decide to pray every day for twenty minutes. Whatever it is – you have a new habit to make your life better. You start day 1 awesomely, maybe day 2 or 3 too, but suddenly, and faster than you thought, your discipline fades, and you are back in the same place, totally stuck and you hate yourself for it. There is no success there, just failure, and it leaves you frustrates and annoyed.

Not only have I heard that story or variations of it as a pastor for years, more times than I care to admit it’s been my story as well! We presume that discipline is the key – that if we just grit our teeth and try hard enough, we can change, and so we try again and again until we are disgusted at ourself by failing.

What you need to do is actually not discipline yourself more, but start by changing your desire and dream. You need to change at the idea-level, at the imagination level to walk into success. Then when you cultivate the new dream, then – although you will still have to discipline yourself – but it will be possible, even easy.

You start to see yourself as a godly man. You have an idea – you are holy. You start searching the Scriptures and you find out that the Word of God itself calls you holy and righteous and pure and blameless. You start to let that image dominate you. You start to see yourself as a righteous man, as a man of God, as a spiritual success. That image is painted in your mind by the Word and you accepting and meditating on that.

Then when the alarm goes off at 5.30am for you to pray in tongues for an hour, you spring out of bed and pray – not to become a man of prayer, a holy man, but because you deep down, at a heart level, see yourself as you truly are – a holy man.

You do not pray to become holy, you pray because you have finally realized you are holy. You do not stop stuffing your face with cake because you are trying to be healthy, you stop because you are healthy. You do not discipline to get disciplined, you discipline because you are disciplined.

You need to be more like Martin Luther King – “I have a dream”. You need a dream, then go for it. To try and go for it without the dream will not lead to success. When Jesus taught about moving mountains, His first instruction was “what things you desire”. the Greek word is aiteo, which means to crave or ask for something. Seeing results starts with desire, with a craving, with a dream of success. Start there and you will get to the right place!

Living by faith is tbe process of letting the image inside you transform the outside. You desire something because there is an image inside you, you fill your heart with that image, you believe you receive it, you command mountains to move and you will have what you say.

If you say your dreams and you will have what you say, then you will have what you dream.

The tricky bit in doing that is this: to enable what is inside you to transform what is outside you, you must refuse and deny what is outside you the right to change what is inside you.

In other words, do not let your circumstances intrude inside your dreams. You get your dreams from the Word and the Spirit, and that is all. You do not get your dreams from anything you can sense – anything you can see, hear, taste, smell or touch.

You do not let the amount of money in your pocket affect your dreams. You let your dreams affect the amount of money in your pocket. You do not let what the doctor says to you affect your image of health, you let your image of health affect what the doctor says.

You do not let your life transform your mind. You renew your mind and let your mind transform your life.

You must create the image of what you desire in your mind, and then refuse to let the world tell you to change it. You dream in the darkness and let your dream illuminate and transform the darkness.

Stop looking at your bank account and letting it decide what you do next. Imagine what you want to do then imagine what your bank account needs to be to do that. See what you want on the inside.

God designed you as a dreaming machine, you were not designed to let this world influence your thoughts, you were designed to dominate this world by what you think.

If you renew your dreaming, your life will be transformed. It’s that simple. Everything the Father can do you can do, if you dream and if you refuse to let the world decide what you think.

Selah.

I recently heard of a man who as a young man in his twenties cut up pieces of paper the same size as $100 bills. He would get two $100 dollar bills, and put his paper inside. He only had $200 but he looked at his wallet and it looked like he had thousands. You may think that is silly, but when you find out the man is today worth over $100 million, you realize he was working something that works!

If you develop a dream, you will walk in your dream. If you dream of health and wealth, you will walk in health and wealth. Religion hates success, it hates health and it really hates wealth, but how can you do what God tells you to do if you have neither the energy or financial means to do what He says? Jim Baker says more dreams are crippled by sickness and poverty in the church than anything else – that more people fail to walk in their destiny because of those two things.

If you have more money – guess what? You can give away more money. It’s really simple maths. Every time you give, you are feeding the dream that you are prosperous and generous. You cannot outgive God, I have tried, and I have failed. He is bigger, more generous and kinder than any of us have imagined – but the more we give, the more we can imagine it.

But we have to not just dream of giving, but receiving too. Givers gain – that is how God designed the universe. Become aware of sowing and reaping, and start to sow into other’s dreams. People sometimes tell me I should give less to successful ministries and more to the poor (often not realizing I keep my giving to the poor quiet like Jesus told us) but I like to give to big dreamers who dream big dreams because then my giving and receiving inspires me to dream bigger.

Jesus told us birds do not sow or reap – they cannot, they cannot invest in their future. Birds are living as animals – fight or flight, live for today, respond to nothing, react to everything. Sadly, many humans are exacly the same, they have never tithed, given, received, or believed. They are at a low level. They make snap judgments and run away when money is talked about, and they never think about things or consider things. Being able to consider and imagine a better world is part of maturing and being a true human.

A baby thinks like an animal, it has no dreams or plans. Then a child thinks like the crowd. Children are terrible when it comes to peer pressure, they want the same shoes as every other child, the same hair, the same experiences. Sadly, many grow up and that doesn’t change either – they cannot originate ideas. I see churches that are clones of other churches with no originality, no purpose, no life. I see people who are clones of other people. I have been in rooms where an original thought is expressed and everyone looks to everyone to see how to react rather than be genuine. Listen – the crowd always walks the wrong way, it’s that simple. Find your feet, your voice, your lane – find your dream by investing time with the Lord, and dream your dream.

You need to believe there is something greater for you. You need a dream bigger than yourself. Being able to not fly off, or charge at something, but to stop, think, dream and imagine is a superpower every human has but very few use. But you are unique. Your personality is not mine because I could never do what God has called you to do. You have a unique spiritual DNA, find out your dream, dream it and live it. Desire something greater than yourself and without fail, you will find out what it is. Cut up pieces of paper if you have to. I have written cheques that I have had no money to give to someone, but it forces me to dream. I have a board of thing I believe are manifesting in my life above my bedside cabinet. I have a whole host of things in my office that force me to dream.

The Hebrews took 12 stones out of the middle of the Jordan river when God stopped it so they could cross over. Looking at those stones forced them to remember what God did for them, and forced them to confront the truth that God loved them and would keep doing that for them. Find your 12 stones and put them somewhere you see them.

Set up an environment in your house that forces you to dream! That provokes you to dream!

Selah.