One of the most significant aspects of the Creator’s provision lies in the fact that he never sends any of us into this world empty handed. With infinite wisdom and grace, he has placed a great treasure inside each and every one of us – a treasure beyond price. Each person arrives at birth with a divine potential planted in his or her heart. This potential contains the vision God has for that particular person as well as the talents, skills, and creativity to make that potential a manifest reality. Dr. Myles Munroe, the highly-respected pastor and Bible teacher, speaks eloquently of this seed of potential planted within each of us:
“The entire creation possesses this principle of potential. Everything has the natural instinct to release its ability. The plant and animal kingdoms abound with evidences of this fact. The Creator designed everything with this principle of potential, which can be simplified to the concept of a seed. The biblical document states that God created everything with ‘seed in it according to their kinds’ (Genesis 1:12). In essence, hidden within everything is the potential to fulfill itself and produce much more than we see.”
It is vital that every person understand that we are responsible for developing the potential stored within us. We must deepen our contact with our divine potential, which I call our Sacred Self, and do all that we can to nurture, feed, and actualize our true potential. Further, we must recognize that as we move forward in developing our optimal potential, we can never afford to stop. In essence, when we travel the spiritual journey, we are either moving forward or backward. There is truly no place to stand on the spiritual path.
Our journey of discovering and developing our divine potential must begin with a commitment to excellence – an agreement with our Creator that we will walk in cooperation with the Spirit to become the best version of ourselves.
Necessarily, this commitment will involve personal challenges and, at times, a degree of personal discomfort. Spiritual growth involves change and change always requires stepping out of our comfort zone. Still, the process of realizing and manifesting our divine potential is one of the greatest adventures we will ever undertake.
When we make a commitment to excellence, we are basically telling God and ourselves that we are finally getting serious about our spiritual development. When we firmly dedicate ourselves to become who God intended us to be, we get honest with ourselves about where we are, where we are not, and where God wants us to go. We then make a personal commitment to, with God’s help, become all that we were created to be, all that we were intended to be, and, in the final analysis, all that we truly are.
Contrary to popular belief, living a life committed to Christian excellence is far from a tedious, joyless affair. When Christ calls us, he does not call us to a life of drudgery and boredom; he does not lead us into a life characterized by a restrictive morality and a scowling face. Christ’s call and claim on our life is a challenge to our limited ways of being in the world. When the Lord whispers in a person’s ear, saying, “Follow me,” he is issuing an invitation to an exciting journey of exploration and spiritual discovery. Erwin Raphael McManus, noted author and pastor of Mosaic in Los Angeles, tells us:
“Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. It begins the moment we choose to follow Him. It is no less than to pass from existence to life. Though we are not taken out of time and space, we are translated into an entirely different dimension of living. Jesus tells us that He is the portal into this life and the quest that follows. Jesus describes Himself as a door, a gate, a portal. In other words, an escape hatch. He has come to lead us out of the mundane and into the extraordinary. Strangely enough we find it hard to trust Him, while all the time he has been trying to lead us out of the dark dungeons we have created for ourselves and let us run free in the light of day. When we come to Him, he translates us into an entirely new realm of living. His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.”
The process of realizing the potential God placed in us is individual in nature. One person may see his or her potential unfolded in one way while someone else may have a different experience altogether. Still, there are several truths that hold firm for each of us as we journey forward with the Holy Spirit. Let’s discuss three of them: the need for discipline; the need for persistence; and the trap of complacency.
Discipline is not a popular word in post-modern culture. Instead, we are encouraged to “follow our bliss” and “do our own thing.” The world pays lip service to the importance of discipline and self-control in daily living, but the over-arching message is in actuality much different. Often, instead of encouraging individuals to delay gratification, defer rewards, and develop character, our culture tells us, “If it feels good, do it.” No one ever manifested divine potential by adhering to this advice.
Scripture repeatedly stresses the importance of discipline, self-control, and personal morality. Without personal discipline, we squander our energies, waste precious time, and lose direction and focus. If we want to become the person God intended us to be, we have to be disciplined individuals governed by an internalized biblical value system.
As we move forward in this sacred journey of spiritual development, we will experience periods of accelerated growth as well as times when it seems we are advancing at a snail’s pace. This unpredictable pace of spiritual formation is to be expected. There will be times of elation and excitement a you realize the positive changes God’s Spirit has brought about in you life. At other times, you will experience something quite different as you struggle with a particular habit, sin, or negative personality trait. This can be a critical juncture in your growth process. It is easy to become discouraged when change does not come at the pace we would prefer. However, the important point to remember is: “Don’t quit.”
There is an old saying: “Never rest on your laurels.” Basically, this means that we should never be satisfied with what we have accomplished. Reaching a goal is satisfying, but we shouldn’t allow this to be the final act in the play. We must continually press forward toward new goals that will allow us to manifest the best version of ourselves. Also, it is important to keep in mind that we should never focus our mental energy on what it is we think we cannot do. Rather, we should believe in ourselves and always refuse to let what we cannot do interfere with what we can do. By focusing on doing what we can do, and doing it better, we make progress. Moreover, we facilitate our continuing spiritual development by challenging ourselves to reach higher. Both personal experience and deep study has taught me that the optimal method for moving beyond where we are is by “stretching ourselves.” By this I mean it is highly advantageous for us if we encourage ourselves to move beyond what we are now capable of, even if only to a small degree.
For example, I enjoy playing table tennis. I am far from a great player, but I can achieve some degree of success when I am at the top of my game. (Of course, I played much better when I was younger and my reflexes were quicker.) Early on, I discovered I could not improve my play by competing against players who I could easily defeat. By the same token, I could not get any better by playing against opponents who were my equal. If I wanted to improve, I had to play against competitors who were more skillful than I was. I soon discovered that if I took on players whose skills were slightly above mine, my play gradually but consistently improved.
The same is true in terms of realizing our potential in any endeavor. If we want to improve at something, we have to challenge ourselves; we have to stretch ourselves to get to the next level.
Dr. Myles Munroe, the highly respected pastor and Bible teacher mentioned at the beginning of this article, begins one of his books on divine potential by observing that the richest place on earth is not the vault of a large bank or even Fort Knox. Instead, Dr. Munroe points out, the world’s greatest wealth is often found in the cemetery. It is here, in the graveyard, where many dreams lie buried – dreams that were never realized, missions that were never accomplished, and potential that was never realized.
As I reflect upon the tragic reality of Dr. Munroe’s observations about the wealth lying beneath the grave stones, I ponder another possible tragedy, equally distressing. I wonder how many people are going about their daily rounds, oblivious to the potential placed inside them by the Creator. How many of us will squander this precious life that we have without realizing and manifesting their God-given potential? How many will have their potential buried with them? I, for one, have made a covenant commitment with God not to allow this to happen to me.
How about you?
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Monday, October 19, 2015
What are you doing with your 'God given gifts'?
We have a responsibility before God to be faithful in the tasks He places before us, because He does not want us to take our gifts, talents, and abilities to the grave unused. The wise man in Ecclesiastes gives us good counsel here: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Eccles. 9:10). God did not create us to do nothing. He has endowed us with intelligence, creativity, spiritual gifts, and natural abilities, and He expects us to use them, to pour them out in service to others for the glory of His name.
Dr. Myles Munroe
(from The Glory of Living)
The battlefield of the mind - a lesson from Joyce Meyer
According to Joyce Meyer in her book; Battle Field of the Mind, the following are the summary of the situation.
- We are engaged in a war.
- Our enemy is Satan.
- The mind is the battlefield.
- The devil works diligently to set up strongholds in our mind.
-He does it through strategy and deceit (through well-laid plans and deliberate deception)
- He is in no hurry; he takes his time to work out his plan
In my short time of knowing and walking with God, I notice that when I'm low on the word or short of quality time with God in prayer time, I suffer. When I say I suffer, I don’t mean I mean starved of food or water or maltreated by anyone or God. I mean I suffer in my mind; I become anxious, fearful, suspicious, unhappy, easily angered and my relationship with others suffers too.
This doesn't happen to me suddenly, and this is the trend I have noticed. It starts by me becoming busy with many activities ( usually activities that really doesn't matter) and I stop praying as I should. I rush through my bible in the morning and go about my day focused on me, myself and I. Then it continues by me postponing my study and prayer time till late at night because I am so busy and I have to rush out. At night, I don’t get to study or pray because I am tired. I then begin to feel convicted but I brush it aside because I am busy. I stop giving the conviction attention and start to live the day as it comes. At this time, my mind becomes open and filled with all sorts of thoughts that produces negative feelings such as fear, anger, anxiety, selfishness and the likes. I know some of us can relate to this but thank God for His unending mercies that never gives up on us.
Our heart is where our life starts. Our heart is like our control tower. It’s the core of our being; where we have our emotions, beliefs, thoughts, convictions, our values. The condition of our heart determines our life and so it must be guarded with all diligence. Anything that has your heart, has a control over you.
Every action whether good or bad starts as a thought in the heart.
The bible tells us in Luke 11:22 that when a strong man fully armed guards his own house, his possessions are safe until his armour is taken away from him. Like the Strong man, our hearts are safe when we are fully armed guarding it. When our hearts are guarded, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we consciously think of only things that are true, noble, of good report, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse (Philippians 4:8)
To be in control of our lives, the devil tries to get a hold of our hearts through his one and only strategy. His strategy is to strip us off our God-given armour to make us vulnerable to his schemes so he can get our hearts. It’s a process. He strips off, gets a hold of our hearts in a subtle way and then he fills it with negative thoughts, suspicion, fears, anger, bitterness and the likes.
As Christians, we have God on our side who fully arms us with His truth, Righteousness, Word, faith and prayer so we can withstand the wiles of the devil.
Any distraction that tries to take you away from the only thing that matters; your relationship with God is the devil’s scheme to strip you off your armour and like Paul wrote to the Ephesians, I also write to you; You need to be head-to-toe in the full armor of God: so you can resist during these evil days and be fully prepared to hold your ground. Stand with TRUTH banded around your waist, RIGHTEOUS as your chest plate, and feet protected in preparation to proclaim the GOOD NEWS OF PEACE. Don’t forget to raise the shield of FAITH above all else, so you will be able to extinguish flaming spears hurled at you from the wicked one. Take also the helmet of SALVATION and the sword of the Spirit, which is the WORD of God. Pray always.
Pray in the Spirit. Pray about everything in every way you know how! - Ephesians 6:13-18 (The Voice translation).
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- We are engaged in a war.
- Our enemy is Satan.
- The mind is the battlefield.
- The devil works diligently to set up strongholds in our mind.
-He does it through strategy and deceit (through well-laid plans and deliberate deception)
- He is in no hurry; he takes his time to work out his plan
In my short time of knowing and walking with God, I notice that when I'm low on the word or short of quality time with God in prayer time, I suffer. When I say I suffer, I don’t mean I mean starved of food or water or maltreated by anyone or God. I mean I suffer in my mind; I become anxious, fearful, suspicious, unhappy, easily angered and my relationship with others suffers too.
This doesn't happen to me suddenly, and this is the trend I have noticed. It starts by me becoming busy with many activities ( usually activities that really doesn't matter) and I stop praying as I should. I rush through my bible in the morning and go about my day focused on me, myself and I. Then it continues by me postponing my study and prayer time till late at night because I am so busy and I have to rush out. At night, I don’t get to study or pray because I am tired. I then begin to feel convicted but I brush it aside because I am busy. I stop giving the conviction attention and start to live the day as it comes. At this time, my mind becomes open and filled with all sorts of thoughts that produces negative feelings such as fear, anger, anxiety, selfishness and the likes. I know some of us can relate to this but thank God for His unending mercies that never gives up on us.
Our heart is where our life starts. Our heart is like our control tower. It’s the core of our being; where we have our emotions, beliefs, thoughts, convictions, our values. The condition of our heart determines our life and so it must be guarded with all diligence. Anything that has your heart, has a control over you.
Every action whether good or bad starts as a thought in the heart.
The bible tells us in Luke 11:22 that when a strong man fully armed guards his own house, his possessions are safe until his armour is taken away from him. Like the Strong man, our hearts are safe when we are fully armed guarding it. When our hearts are guarded, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we consciously think of only things that are true, noble, of good report, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse (Philippians 4:8)
To be in control of our lives, the devil tries to get a hold of our hearts through his one and only strategy. His strategy is to strip us off our God-given armour to make us vulnerable to his schemes so he can get our hearts. It’s a process. He strips off, gets a hold of our hearts in a subtle way and then he fills it with negative thoughts, suspicion, fears, anger, bitterness and the likes.
As Christians, we have God on our side who fully arms us with His truth, Righteousness, Word, faith and prayer so we can withstand the wiles of the devil.
Any distraction that tries to take you away from the only thing that matters; your relationship with God is the devil’s scheme to strip you off your armour and like Paul wrote to the Ephesians, I also write to you; You need to be head-to-toe in the full armor of God: so you can resist during these evil days and be fully prepared to hold your ground. Stand with TRUTH banded around your waist, RIGHTEOUS as your chest plate, and feet protected in preparation to proclaim the GOOD NEWS OF PEACE. Don’t forget to raise the shield of FAITH above all else, so you will be able to extinguish flaming spears hurled at you from the wicked one. Take also the helmet of SALVATION and the sword of the Spirit, which is the WORD of God. Pray always.
Pray in the Spirit. Pray about everything in every way you know how! - Ephesians 6:13-18 (The Voice translation).
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Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Developing your self-image
Relentless, repetitive self talk is what changes our self-image.”~ Dennis Waitley
Today I want to share a powerful strategy that will change your self-image. Few things about us are more closely linked to our thinking than our self-image. Someone’s belief about who he or she is can make the anorexic feel fat, the average athlete a star, and the beautiful girl see herself as an ugly duckling. When it comes to this topic, thinking not reality, rules.
The famous scientist Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the creator of Psycho-Cybernetics stated it plainly,“The self-image is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.”
I encourage you to say any of the below listed affirmations over and over so they will change your thinking and become part of your belief system about yourself.
By the way, affirmations are words or phrases which are said over and over to AFFIRM a single thought about yourself or other people. This is the way you have formed negative and positive programming throughout your lifetime, saying things to yourself, about yourself, over and over. After thoughts are repeated, they soon become a BELIEF, and then we think this belief is our reality. Since we created these beliefs we can also change them. This is where real freedom comes from.
As you say the following affirmations, feel so jazzed up about what you are saying that you feel like it is already there, then you’ll be well on your way to a healthy self-image.
1. Being who I am is a blessing and a rush. There’s no one else I’d rather be!
2. I accept myself exactly as I am. I am at absolute peace with myself.
3. I like myself. I don’t like everything I do, and I want to change—but I refuse to reject myself.
4. I unconditionally love and respect myself in every way.
5. I am the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am glad to be who I am!
6.Today I make a bold statement. The world deserves the real me and today it gets me.
7. I am a unique and worthy person. I require no more justification than that to be exactly who I am.
8. What matters is who I AM not who I’ve been! Today I release everything I hold against myself.
9. When I look into the mirror I see my perfections not my imperfections!
10. My beauty flows from inside to out. As I recognize my inner beauty, my outer beauty blossoms.
11. Those who told me I was unworthy were wrong. I AM worthy.
12. As I feel more attractive, I AM more attractive. Today I am very attractive!
13. The more I love and appreciate myself, the more beautiful I become.
14. I look and feel wonderful.
15. Happiness is an attitude NOT a number on a scale. Today I am happy with who I am.
16. I am beautiful in mind. I am beautiful in body. I am beautiful in spirit.
17. I am a valuable and important person, and I am worthy of the respect of others.
18. I feel warm and loving toward myself, for I am a unique and precious being ever doing the best my awareness permits, ever growing in wisdom and love.
19. I am powerful.
Love Yourself Today: Review the list of 19 affirmations that will help you gain a healthy self-image. Which one do you need to focus on most today?
Today I want to share a powerful strategy that will change your self-image. Few things about us are more closely linked to our thinking than our self-image. Someone’s belief about who he or she is can make the anorexic feel fat, the average athlete a star, and the beautiful girl see herself as an ugly duckling. When it comes to this topic, thinking not reality, rules.
The famous scientist Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the creator of Psycho-Cybernetics stated it plainly,“The self-image is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.”
I encourage you to say any of the below listed affirmations over and over so they will change your thinking and become part of your belief system about yourself.
By the way, affirmations are words or phrases which are said over and over to AFFIRM a single thought about yourself or other people. This is the way you have formed negative and positive programming throughout your lifetime, saying things to yourself, about yourself, over and over. After thoughts are repeated, they soon become a BELIEF, and then we think this belief is our reality. Since we created these beliefs we can also change them. This is where real freedom comes from.
As you say the following affirmations, feel so jazzed up about what you are saying that you feel like it is already there, then you’ll be well on your way to a healthy self-image.
1. Being who I am is a blessing and a rush. There’s no one else I’d rather be!
2. I accept myself exactly as I am. I am at absolute peace with myself.
3. I like myself. I don’t like everything I do, and I want to change—but I refuse to reject myself.
4. I unconditionally love and respect myself in every way.
5. I am the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am glad to be who I am!
6.Today I make a bold statement. The world deserves the real me and today it gets me.
7. I am a unique and worthy person. I require no more justification than that to be exactly who I am.
8. What matters is who I AM not who I’ve been! Today I release everything I hold against myself.
9. When I look into the mirror I see my perfections not my imperfections!
10. My beauty flows from inside to out. As I recognize my inner beauty, my outer beauty blossoms.
11. Those who told me I was unworthy were wrong. I AM worthy.
12. As I feel more attractive, I AM more attractive. Today I am very attractive!
13. The more I love and appreciate myself, the more beautiful I become.
14. I look and feel wonderful.
15. Happiness is an attitude NOT a number on a scale. Today I am happy with who I am.
16. I am beautiful in mind. I am beautiful in body. I am beautiful in spirit.
17. I am a valuable and important person, and I am worthy of the respect of others.
18. I feel warm and loving toward myself, for I am a unique and precious being ever doing the best my awareness permits, ever growing in wisdom and love.
19. I am powerful.
Love Yourself Today: Review the list of 19 affirmations that will help you gain a healthy self-image. Which one do you need to focus on most today?
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