Month: February 2023

God made you to be fruitful and multiply and to increase. Pastors should be pastors of growing churches. Businessmen should be increasing the size of their business. Salesmen should be selling more. Apostles should be planting more churches. Our nature should be growth. You should be getting smarter, wiser, more fruitful as life goes on. The entire planet was designed for increase.

You should be driving a better car than you used to, wearing better clothes, having a better house, having more luxury, more knowledge, more enjoyment out of life. You are designed to advance not retreat.

You know this at a spiritual level but so often our soul gets accustomed to retreat and stagnation, and we need to refocus and remind ourselves violently that we are designed to increase.

OUR CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT can go back generations, telling us to settle where we are, telling us that our nation, our city, our community cannot have a growing church. We need to refocus and remidn ourselves – we are designed for increase!

Your spirit is craving increase, and your soul is saying “well, you don’t deserve it, that dreams is probably not from God, you should be content with your lot in life” – you need to understand that you are a spirit being and your spiritual nature is designed to be fruitful and increase.

You are the highest level of creation that can be created, and you are in the image of God, so you are actually designed to create too, reflecting your Creator. You need to get this inside your mind and let that form the images of what you are and what you will be. Stop thinking lack, stop thinking limits, stop thinking of getting to the next level. Resist the problems, shift your perception and grow and advance!

You need to think about how essential this is – that you increase. We cannot avoid it. If you do not increase, you cannot help more people, influene more people, lift more people to a higher level, and your attitudes will not help others increase.

Pastors, never be stagnant. A stagnant pastor makes a stagnant church – that is one that no one benefits from. Always be learning and growing!

Right now in your mind is a battle between your culture and worldview and your dream. Your culture and worldview confines you to what everyone else has done in your surroundings and what you think you can do – and your dreams are trying to break those strongholds and raise your imagination to the highest level so you can dream big and walk in your dreams.

Now you want to walk in your dreams – your spirit wants your soul to grow and prosper, and your life to grow and prosper. Your spirit has deep, God-given desires and wants them to flow through your soul and your soul is blocked with cultural ideas and family ideas and experiences and circumstances that you have built into strongholds in your mind. Now your spirit and your soul are at war – and you cannot afford for the strongholds in your soul to win. You cannot allow your cultural norms, your experience of the past, your opinion of what you can or cannot do define you. You have to let yourself walk in your heart’s desire.

You want to advance – I want you to advance – so start believing you can advance and walk in that right now. When you get that inspiring you and filling your soul – then you will always walk in your dreams. A prosperous soul is true freedom.

You need your dreams to fill your soul. This battle is essential. You have to fight the energy holding you back and get more energy on the spiritual side. Pray in tongues, listen to great preaching, be in church, be in small groups until your mindset changes. Until you see yourself the way God sees you.

And what if you get there and increase your vision to an immense image. Use that as the new normal, and get some more immense images.

Most people are restrained by their own thinking. They never think any different, so they never have any different results. They are being held bondage by their mind, destroyed by what they do not know, not being transformed because their mind stays same-old rather than renew. You can call it whatever you want – but it is a restraint caused by a refusal to renew their mind.

To break free from that kind of restraint, there are three simple steps (well, simple to explain, never quite so simple to do, but always possible in Jesus’ name). The first step is HAVE A NOVEL THOUGHT. You need a new thought. You cannot renew your mind without a new thought. You need to go somewhere and hear a new thought. Maybe our leadership conference, maybe this blog, maybe a wise friend, maybe a sermon, maybe a book. But you need to get a new idea. Not an idea that fits in your mind, but a new one. Not one that comes from your tradition or culture, but a new idea. A NOVEL IDEA. A NEW THOUGHT. You need one. Nothing else changes at this moment on the outside, but this is the very first and non-negotiable step to change.

Most people novel thoughts, then reject they have had them. They are like when the seed falls on the path, gets eaten by a crow and there is no fruit. The idea went in their head but didn’t hang around long enough to make any change.

So, you need to HOLD ON TIGHT AND NOT LET GO. It can be unnerving to have a new thought, it can be disconcerting. Sometimes it can be plain terrifying. Let’s imagine you are listening to a sermon by someone who planted a church, like I was in 2008, and God spoke to me to plant a church. That was a new thought, and it was not pleasant and wonderful. I had to hold onto that thought and never let go. At times I wanted to let go of that thought, I wanted to ignore every idea that I was called to plant churches.

Finally, you – if you keep steps 1 and 2 well – will end up at the third stage HAVING WHAT YOU ARE THINKING AND NOTICING IT IN THE NATURAL. That’s where we need to be – where things happen in our life. But to get to having it in the natural, you must absolutely change your thinking first and hold onto the new thought.

Get somewhere you hear new thoughts. Hold onto those new thoughts, and watch it manifest. You cannot get a new life without new thoughts, so go looking for the new thoughts, find the godly ones and hold on tight!

There is a difference between you thinking “oh that would be nice” or “I am going to get that no matter what I have to invest in that”. You do not need to know how to get it done, but if you have a dream, you need some determination.

You do not need to know how to get it done, you do need to know that you are going to get it done.

When God spoke to me on September 26th 2022 to plant 100 churches in the UK, I did not know how to even have more locations. In the just 20 weeks since then, we have gone from 12 to 15 locations, starting two locations with twenty people in each, and seeing salvations every time. Not knowing how to do it is not stopping me do it.

But here is the stretch – no one will ever do anything for the Lord until they grasp that they can do it. Not in their strength, but in His strength. That attitude is faith, and it has substance. It is beyond a wish or daydream, it is solid. I know beyond any doubt that the day will come when I am the planter of one hundred churches in the UK. I don’t know how, but I know I will. That is the stretch, you have to know what God says is what will work. Wishing won’t get you there, but an attitude of determination – God said it, I believe it, I will do everything God has called me to be.

Listen to me though – if every goal you have in your iife, if every image in your mind is something you know how to get done, then you do not have immense images. You have limited images. You need some dreams that you want to see come to pass, but you have no idea how to see them come to pass. That is how you walk in your dreams.

Stop accepting a miserable life, a poor life, a life where you are not influencing people, and start dreaming of a life of influence of success of joy!

Your spirit is righteous and pure and love and power. It has so much life that you could not measure it with any scale. Your spirit is utterly limitless. Either your soul thinks that and you start to live a spiritual life, or your soul looks at circumstances, events and senses and you live tied to this earth – the lowest life of all.

You choose – start to think about who you are in the spirit, then dream dreams that match that. Stop being satisfied with living a natural life when you are not natural. You need to have a passion to go deeper, go higher, go furhter. WHY? BECAUSE THAT IS WHO YOU ARE IN THE SPIRIT! IN CHRIST. To stay at a natural level is to ignore what Christ did for you and in you and is restricting Him from doing anything through you. Do not dishonour Christ – stretch for more!

Let the spirit dominate you and start to expect miracles and all sorts of glorious things.