Have you ever discovered something about yourself that you did not know? I was having a conversation with my wife and she pointed out to me that I always work from a position of No, meaning I always expect a no for whatever it is I am asking and hence start working everything else around that answer. People say plan for the worst and hope for the best. The Word of God has this the other way round…. Hope and Plan for the best because now Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the Evidence of things not seen.
The Word also says, “when you pray, believe that you have received it and it shall surely come to pass”. This revelation about myself led me to question if I do this with God. You see it’s a conditioning of the mind that I need to unlearn. Our minds since birth go through three cycles if we are willing to grow mentally. These are:
- Learning – where we discover by way of information and condition our minds according to the environment we are exposed to.
- Unlearning – where we have been exposed to a new environment or to new truths that causes us to need to discard everything that we believed to be either true or normal about our environment and beliefs.
- Relearning – Now that we are exposed to this new Truth we have to start learning afresh how to behave and think in this new environment.
Everything you knew since birth up to the point of being born again is either a lie or a fact that may not fully apply to the new you after salvation. I will expound on that further. As a child the most significant relationship that shapes your thinking of who God is, is your parents. How your parents modelled God is very vital to how you relate with God.
Let me expound more on the statement I made earlier on either a fact or a lie. The fact is two fish and five loaves of bread cannot feed five thousand people, the truth is that Jesus took the bread and fish blessed it and multiplied it. The fibbing from the devil is that you do not deserve the blessing of God because you are a sinner. The truth is that all of us are sinners and the gift or blessing of God will be given to you not by merit but simply because of your identity, i.e a son of God. The bible says, “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” or dare I say, the relearning of your mind.
As mentioned earlier I believed that the answer would always be No, but now I must condition my mind to the answer Yes. Lottery winners are known for not knowing how to handle the sudden windfall they experience, probably because they never prepare for the eventuality of winning. My mind was conditioned to a No so I planned around a No but never a Yes. Which is a dangerous thing because when the Yes comes we blow away the blessings because it did not meet a prepared mind. There are four ways to prepare your mind for the answer Yes.
- Strive to be thankful always – Do not forget the one who blessed you by magnifying the blessing more than the blesser. As soon as God answers you Yes, you then become too busy to find time to fellowship with Him or His people. Your prayer time significantly reduces to a drive by prayer. The story of the ten lepers is a good reminder of this fact. After Jesus healed the ten, only one went back to give thanks and while the others only received healing, only one was made whole (fully restored time and resources that his condition had cost him.)
- Strive to be faithful – When God elevates you, remember where God took you from. Do not lean on our own understanding but always acknowledge God. Let us not let the gifts that God gave us to serve Him become a distraction to serving Him.
- Strive to stay humble – humility is the ability to be without pride or arrogance. When God has blessed you, you then demand preferential treatment if and when you go to church. I pray to God that He would always remind me to be humble and not treat people like they are beneath me. Not to think that all things revolve around me. Brothers and sisters this is the one sin that so easily eludes us and we are most blind to.
- Do not envy or try to compete with anyone. Competition is a mindset of the simple minded. To have thought so little of God’s brilliance to think He would make us copies of each other, rather than a unique and beautiful creation, created to run his or her own race. Paul said I have run MY Keyword there is MY. Run your own race of faith brothers and sisters.
I will end by repeating a story I mentioned before about the army of the locust. The most fierce and unstoppable army known is the army of the locust. When they came to a city, nothing would stop them from achieving their goal. One of the characteristics of this army is that they had no leader. Every locust was a leader in their own right. Let us be like the locust having one goal and letting our different gifts and calling lead us to the common goal that our Father has set for us.
God bless you.