Category: MINDSET

Many people cannot think big.

Fact.

Today, it’s not uncommon to hear youths making remarks like, ‘I really hope I can get a decent job when I graduate’ or ‘I hope I will be able to make enough money to pay my bills and stuff.’

Rarely would you hear a young person say, ‘By God’s grace, I see myself making millions before I’m 25’

I get nauseous when I hear things like that, because getting a decent job, or making enough money to pay your bills isn’t even the biggest thing you can do with your life!

Sadly, many people are going to live mediocre lives, far below God’s best, because they’ve set the bar very low for themselves.

Psalms 78:41 says, ‘Yea, they turned back and tempted God and limited the Holy One of Israel.’

When I was in secondary school, I used to write the following words across the front cover of all my notebooks:

‘Sky is the beginning, God is the Limit’

Clearly, in the light of Psalm 78:41, that was a very toxic thought that could have potentially limited what I could receive from God.

If I had persisted in that way of thinking and had managed to see some level of ‘success’, I would still have fallen short of the richness and vastness His plans for my life.

Listen to this: God never was, never is, and never will be your limitation.

In fact, it works the other way around.

If there’s any variable in the equation…you are the cause!

I don’t mean to condemn you. I’m just pointing you to the answer.

You really need to renew your mind (Romans 12:2)!

Many of us think that renewing our minds merely means changing your way of thinking so as to lead a righteous life.

Renewing your mind is far more than that. It also means changing your perspective of God, so you’d see Him for who He really is.

God is BIG.

His thoughts are BIG.

He thinks about YOU.

And His thoughts about YOU are BIG!

Why would you want to limit what God can do in your life because of your small-picture thinking?

You’ve not been thinking big, and that’s why you’re dissatisfied with where you are.

You’re made for more than your current experience, and that’s why you’re looking for a change in your current situation.

Why not change your thinking and start to discover the plans that the LORD GOD has for you.

Start seeing yourself for who you are in the sight of God: His Righteousness.

Start seeing God for who He really is: The Almighty Potentate.

Start seeing your situation for what it really is: Temporal.

Think BIG and watch your life turn around for the best…just as He has planned it to be!

We live in a day and age where personal leadership and responsibility is at an all-time low…and it’s not going to be better anytime soon.

Debauchery and turpitude seem to be the order of the day. Indeed, the times that Paul spoke of in 2 Timothy 3:2 – 7 are happening right before our eyes. In High Definition (HD)!

“For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents…trucebreakers…incontinent…despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady…lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God….”

Curiously, though, we have decided to take Paul’s end-time warnings to the next level!

We’ve branded it!

We’ve made it our own!

In fact, we’ve made it look so fashionable and trendy!

More like,

Let’s s eat and drink and make merry, after all…#YouOnlyLiveOnce

But do we actually live once?

This is the point where some of you might bracing yourselves for a bashing about heaven and hell! 🙂

Hmmn…you’re right! That’s one way of looking at it!

But, nah, I won’t be going that way. We have much of that condemnation talk already.

This is the deal:

People have not yet gotten it into their craniums that there are two aspects to life.

The physical realm, which constitutes of all that we can interact with with our 5 senses and logically explain…

And the spiritual realm is the causal realm (2 Corinthians 4:18), which can only be sensed by our spirits.

You see, every individual is essentially made up of 3 parts: spirit, soul and body. However, ever since the Fall, every child given birth to had a dead spirit that was separated from Life-Giving Essence of God. So, such a child could only interact with his environment with his five senses (body) and his will, emotions, intellect and conscience (soul). However, when such person accepts Christ as his Lord and Savior, the very Life-Giving Essence of God quickens the spirit of such man – making it alive and responsive to God!

Unfortunately, spending years on a #YouOnlyLiveOnce psychology, takes its toll on our life philosophy…and it’s only when one has renewed his mind on the Word of God (Romans 12:2) that such mental shackles are shattered.

For instance, Ephesians 2:6 tells us that as believers in the finished work of Christ, God has “made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

Note that verse didn’t say ‘we will be made to sit’ or ‘He is making us to sit’

Nope. The verse says God ‘has made us sit in heavenly places.’

That’s past tense. A done deal!

But how can we be seated in ‘heavenly places’ if we are still very much alive in the physical realm?

Well, that’s because we live twice! In the spiritual realm, as well as, in the physical realm.

Yet, so many people live as though all there is to life is in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. A few more believe that their forays into the spiritual realm would only kickoff when they physically die.

As a believer, nothing could be further from the truth!

Jesus said, “…he that believeth on me hath everlasting life” (John 3:16, 6:47).

Do you think Jesus was merely referring to life in heaven after one’s death?

No, it includes the perks too. He was referring to the manifestation of the realities of heaven. That’s everlasting life!

No sickness, no pain, no lack, no want. That’s everlasting life!

As it is in heaven, that’s how it is on earth! That’s the kind of life that Jesus Himself lived here on earth.

You need to realize that God has given every believer all that is needed for an abundant life on earth (2 Peter 1:3). Unfortunately, many believers are just managing life. That’s not an abundant life to me!

So, how can you live twice?

Simple.

Have faith in God!

In the same way you believe a mirror’s description of your face in the natural, you’ve got to believe that God’s Word about you is the true description of your spirit.

God is Spirit. His Words are the truest description of reality.

So, when God says you’re righteous (2 Corinthians 5:21), or you have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16), believe it with every fibre of your being. Because, His Truth is The Truth!

It’s only when you’re able to do this that you’d be more aware of the riches, wealth and abundance bubbling around and within you per time.

It’s only with this understanding that you’d realize that the very words on your lips are a bridge that funnels wealth and blessings from the unseen realm into the tangible world.

Only then would you be able to take your position of authority in heavenly places in Christ, believe and speak your desired reality into manifestation.

Who cares about #YouOnlyLiveOnce, when you can live twice?

Not me.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Job’s story is included in the Bible, so that we can profit from his experiences and not repeat the same mistakes (1 Corinthians 10:6).

In the last post, I shared how our actions have spiritual implications, which in turn would determine the quality of our experiences in life. This time around, we’d be examining more actions that clearly mark out Job as the architect of his predicaments.

First off, from Job’s story, it is crystal clear that the man was more sin-conscious than he was God-conscious. The Bible records that the first thing Job did each day was to offer burnt offerings in case his children had sinned and cursed God ‘in their hearts’ (Job 1:4 -5).

Job didn’t offer sacrifices of thanksgiving or those of praise.

He didn’t meditate on the awesomeness of God.

Oddest of all, he didn’t even wait for his children to commit the sins first, before he started worrying about offering sacrifices for them!

You have to understand that since Job lived in the patriachal times – long before the advent of the law (Genesis 46:13), he wasn’t obligated to have offered sacrifices solely for sins. After all, Abel, Noah and Abraham, all offered burnt offerings for diverse reasons other than sin. Ironically, Noah got drunk and Abraham lied that Sarah was his sister, yet not once did the Bible record that these men offered sacrifices for sins.

Why?

These men were more God-conscious than they were sin-conscious. Noah found grace in God’s eyes at all times, while the Bible calls Abraham a Friend of God. The sins of these men could have easily given the devil a foothold in their lives, but, listen, nothing can beset a God-conscious man. He is unbeatable!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for a riotous lifestyle where we don’t give a rip about God and His Holy Standards. But what I’m really against is becoming so ‘over-religiously’ paranoid about sin that we start treading that fine line between sanity and outright madness.

The truth is that you’d never be able to overcome sin by focusing on sin. The effect of that would always be counterproductive. That’s why Ephesians 5:16 has got to be one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It says,

“…walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”

It’s simple.

The only way to overcome sin is to shift your focus to walking in the Spirit. In other words, be Spirit-conscious, be Word-conscious, and then, as a result, you’d not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.

While Job’s intentions are good, it’s clear that his decision to be sin-conscious, rather than God-conscious somehow kickstarted spiritual events that led to his unpalatable experiences.

Secondly, Job had the problem of speculative imagination, or as Psalms 19:13 puts it, ‘presumptuousness’ (i.e, using your imagination to picture bad things based on wrong or incomplete information). When you observe his practice of offering sin offerings every morning, you’d see speculative imagination at work.

I mean, how could Job have known that his children may have been nursing the idea of cursing God?

Well, it takes an actively misused imagination to do that!

You cannot have constant and continual evil imaginations and then expect good to happen to you. Proverbs 24:14b says, ‘…and thy expectation shall not be cut off’.

Job later says plainly in Job 3:25, ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me’.

It’s my belief that Job’s continual choice to be more sin-conscious, than God-conscious, somehow led him to have an expectation of the worst from God someday. You can see that much when Job tells his wife: “…shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”

What a statement!

Because Job was so sin-conscious, his theology was totally messed up. The devil was able to convince Job that all his sufferings were the handywork of the Loving Father!

Listen, God is a good God. He’s all together wonderful, loving and caring for His children. He would never use sickness, poverty or tragedies to ‘teach His children sense’.

No! No!! No!!!

It’s inconsistent with His very Nature!

However, if you’re sin-conscious, you’d never see this side of God. Instead, you’d continue to see yourself as a miserable sinner that God’s out to get. And once this happens, you’d gullibly accept every ware of tares that the devil brings at your doorstep – all in the name of receiving the punishment for your sins.

Friend, Jesus has paid the price in full for your sins. You don’t have to believe the lies of the devil and continue to ‘serve punishment’ for your sins. Instead, shift your focus away from your sins to Jesus’ grace. Shift your attention to God’s deep love for you. And as you do so, you’d find that you’d can have an expectation of good experiences in your life, resulting in an exponential increase in the quality of your life and all that’s associated with you!

God bless you.

The Book of Job introduces Job as a perfect and upright man who feared God and eschewed evil. In a generation of men whose imagination constantly churned out evil, Job was God’s Quintessential Man. Yet, for years, I struggled with the notion that the innocent Job had to suffer so much hurt and pain. At that time, it seemed to me that Job was caught up within a ‘power tussle’ between God and the devil. It looked so unfair that Job was treated as the proverbial grass that suffered while two elephants were at war. The picture I had in my mind was that Job was so helpless….

Or was he?

Upon a closer examination of the story from a pair of unbiased, non-religious eyes, we’d find that neither God, nor satan was the primitive cause of Job’s predicament!

As it were, Job was the unwitting designer who took up the thankless job of orchestrating his own misery.

How?

Well, to understand the ‘how’, we have to appreciate the reality that all our actions have spritual significances. All through Job 1 and 2, we can observe the narrative seamlessly switching from Job’s actions and activities in the physical realm; and the spiritual realities of God, angels and the devil. This is because Job was doing some things in the physical realm that was having spiritual implications.

You see, the causal realm is the spiritual realm. That’s the Ultimate reality that gives rise to our individual apparent realities. 2 Corinthians 4:18 tells us that the seen physical realm is temporal, time-bound, while the unseen spiritual realm is eternal.

While it is true that the unseen gives rise to the seen, our actions in the physical realm trigger events in the spiritual realm that would ultimately determine the quality of our next experiences in the physical realm. These experiences, in turn would cause us to take further actions and decisions in the physical realm that have spiritual significances which would in turn determine the quality of our next experiences, and the cycle repeats itself again and again for the rest of our lives.

This is why Romans 6:16a tells us this:

“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey….”

God is Love. And that’s why He has given us our Freewill. He would never, ever force Himself on you. Revelations 3:20 shows man’s Owner and Creator, at the door of man’s heart, saying, almost respectfully, ‘Behold, I…knock…’

If you decide to use the freewill God has given you to choose to yield yourself to Him through your thoughts, decisions and actions, it would cause a series of spiritual events that would ‘allow’ God the right of way to make your next experience in the physical and prosperous one.

Conversely, if you choose to yield your members to the devil, you’d give him the right of way to make your next experiences in the natural to be deleterious!

Job’s story is included in the Bible, so that we can profit from his experiences and not repeat the same mistakes (1 Corinthians 10:6). I’ve shared one thing that Job didn’t understand, there are still others I’d like to share in the continuation of this truth in the next post.

Remain blessed.

For a moment, let’s assume that you had a plot of land which you took the time to clear and uproot the weeds. Now, what would happen if you refused to plant any seeds in your cleared land?

It’s simple.

Your land would would be overgrown with weeds again.

Now, did the fact that you DID NOT plant the weeds prevent your land from being overrun?

No! Actually, despite the fact that you did not consciously plant weeds in your cleared land, your decision NOT TO deliberately plant seeds was also a decision to permit the growth of weeds in your land!

It’s the natural order of things: When you plant seeds, crops grow; when you don’t plant seeds, weeds would grow!

Many people agree to this truth, yet it’s astonishing that so many find it difficult to understand that the same principles hold true in the art of observation.

You see, everyone has the ability to see and observe. However, the sad thing is that not everyone is CHOOSING to observe deliberately!

Principles would always be principles. They aren’t respecters of one’s consciousness. With principles, ignorance isn’t an excuse; with principles, there are no alibis!

Whether you are conscious of the fact or not, the quality of your life at the moment is dependent on what you saw in the past; and the quality of your life in the future would be dependent on what you are seeing NOW…regardless of whether you’re looking deliberately or not!

The difference between the observers and passive seers lies in the deliberate effort applied to the stream of consciousness. The observers refuse to allow the land of their lives to dictate the sort of fruits that would come out of it. Rather, they deliberately and consciously select the kind of seeds that they want to propagate on the lands of their lives.

Observers understand that man is a partner with God in the continuous creative process of instituting order in the world.

In spite of this reality, the truth is that many people are merely seeing, but not consciously observing.

The irony is that what they see is often an accurate description of their APPARENT REALITIES. What many people are seeing all around are chaotic weeds of poverty, unpredictable economic tides, wars and rumors of wars, lack, strife, loose morals, ever-dropping standards, and so on.

There are apparently weeds of chaos everywhere. Note the term ‘apparently’. It implies that the weeds of chaos aren’t the ULTIMATE REAL DEAL! It’s just a perception of reality.

In spite of this, here’s what distinguishes those who have mastery in the art of observation:

‘While the majority choose to see and adapt to the weeds of chaos in their lives; the very few who observe, challenge chaos to create order, because they can choose to see that too!’

Observation is a deliberate and conscious effort that God has designed and ordained everyone to be a master at.

Unfortunately, many are merely seeing, and quality of their lives naturally matches up with the quality of their defective vision.

Friend, why don’t you just take a step out of the traffic, and for once, take a look at what ought to be.

I promise you, you’ve got nothing else to lose, and everything to gain!

For years, I read Psalms 127:2 as,

“It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep”

But the original Hebrew, in which the Old Testament was written, did not have commas and fullstops; and this may have posed a challenge to the English translators.

Now, watch what would happen if you’d place a comma in the second part of that verse…

“…for so He giveth, His beloved sleep”

The Lord is doing the giving, while His beloved ones are doing the sleeping!

Pretty cool, right?

The truth is that until you receive a revelation of the love that God has for you, you’d never be able to sleep and rest in His Love.

You can only rest and sleep when you secure yourself in the fact that your Heavenly Father loves you deeply!

Just take a look at what John the Beloved called himself. Do you know that Jesus didn’t bestow John with special preferential treatments? The truth is that Christ loved all His disciples the same – even Judas Iscariot.

But what distinguished John from the other disciples?

Well, John simply secured himself with the revelation that the Mighty God in human form could actually love him. He meditated on this, and magnified the love that Jesus had for him in His heart.

The truth is that until you receive the revelation that you are God’s beloved, you cannot rest and sleep and allow Him to give His benefits to you.

Instead, you’d always want to do things to earn/merit God’s blessings, favour and all. You’d wake up early and sleep late, all in a bid to merit God’s blessings by your works!

But there’s a better way!

Receive a revelation that YOU are the Lord’s beloved. And then you can rest and sleep, as your Heavenly Father does ALL the giving, while you do the receiving!!!

So far, we’ve shared that God doesn’t use evil to chastise His Children.

How then does God chastise us?

Good question.

The common scripture used in explaining this is found in Hebrews 12:5-7,

“…My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of Him: For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not?”

In the course of studying this topic, I made an interesting discovery by the Holy Spirit. You know, in the original Greek in which the New Testament was written, the word translated ‘chastisement’, as used in Hebrews 12:5-7, literally means, ‘tutorage’, ‘education’, or ‘training’!

Wow! I wonder what this would do to many people’s theology.

So, we can see that ‘chastisement’ doesn’t even mean that God is busy inflicting you with pain, sickness, poverty and so on for the majority of your Christian walk!

Biblically, when God is chastising you, it simply means that He’s educating, tutoring and training you!

Isn’t that liberating?

You see, as a believer, you have the Holy Spirit of God residing right in your spirit man. Hence, you have access to the Mind of Christ at any given time (1 Corinthians 2:12, 16).

As a result, God doesn’t have to use external factors to communicate His Will to you. Rather, as a believer, He speaks to you in your heart.

Let me share a personal experience:

During my one-year mandatory Youth Service, I had an ‘intense discussion’ with a brother over a doctrinal matter. In the heat of the moment, I told the brother that he was religious, but not spiritual. As soon as those words left my lips, I didn’t hear God’s audible voice rebuking me for yelling at that brother. Neither did God strike me with blindness or cause me to be sacked from my place of work.

Instead, I perceived in my heart that it wasn’t God’s Will for me to speak to my brother in the manner that I did. In fact, I was restless in my spirit until I apologized to the brother for the way I addressed him.

Would you believe it if I told you that the entire process was God chastising me?

Well, that was God chastising me – tutoring, training and teaching me to walk the way Jesus walked. It was easy for God to do this with me because I have His Spirit resident within me. This, of course, is also related to the fact that I had also been exposed to the Word of God, which “…is profitable…for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).

As believers, the LORD is going to use His Word to chastise us. His Words are Spirit (John 6:63) and the Holy Spirit is committed to reminding us of God’s Word (John 16:13-15) when we are in danger of missing the mark!

It’s very liberating to realize that God would never chastise us with pain, sickness and poverty.

It’s even more liberating to know that God is madly in love with you and He’s ever ready to teach, train and tutor us on how to walk like Christ per time.

With this at the back of our minds, it makes perfect sense to heed the advice contained in Hebrews 12:5,

“…despise not thou the chastening of the Lord…”

God loves you and He wants you to manifest the life of Christ!

When you’re armed with that understanding, you can resist the lies of the devil; you can actively kick out sickness and lack out of your life; and most importantly, you have the right perspective about the chastening of the Lord – allowing it have its perfect work in you!