Success at anything comes not without struggle. Struggle demands perseverance if it is to bear fruit. And perseverance requires strength of character and faith to carry you through. But where does one find strength and faith?
Strength comes from the doing. If you have faith but are not doing, your faith is dead and will not get you there.
So you must do, when you’d rather not.
You must do when you feel you can’t.
You must do when other things lure you.
But all the doing, must also be done in faith because whatever is not of faith, misses the mark and cannot please God.
The “doing” however, is not the starting point. The prophet Joel when raising a battle cry, exhorts, “Let the weak say, I am strong!” Before the “doing”, comes the “saying”. It’s the message you tell yourself, whether spoken aloud or not.
It’s true that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, but it never speaks it all. I dare say, we speak less than 10% of what we’re thinking. The self-talk that goes on in our mind is where the battle rages. That is the place we must turn the tide. But how? How do we overturn the deluge of negative self-talk and low expectations built up over decades?
So glad you asked. Think of your mind as a processor that can only process what it is given. It cannot process what it has never heard or seen. Do an inventory of what information you give your mind, your soul, to process on a daily basis.
Generally speaking, the input you give yourself is the life you ultimately create. That can be scary if you think about it. But it’s true. That’s how most people become the product of their culture. They feed on what the culture is feeding on. Want to change the culture? Want to change your life? Change your diet!
Marinate your brain and the affections of your heart…
…on those things that Paul describes in Philippians 4:8 as true and noble, just and pure, lovely and of good report, virtuous and praise worthy. What has your brain been soaking in lately?
You want success? It only comes through struggle. That requires perseverance. Perseverance requires strength. Strength is preceded by self-talk and self-talk is preceded by the input we feed on. Don’t eat a diet of nothing but prunes and complain about the outcome, (say I delicately). Worse, don’t feed on garbage and complain that your life stinks!
The Bible is like a grocery store full of fantastic, healthy food, but we still must purchase and prepare it. The purchase price is the laying down of other activities to acquire it. The preparation I speak of is the meditation of its substance and its applicability to our lives. That takes work.
Sometimes our lives leave us hard pressed to do the preparation.
We crave the healthy lifestyle we know is available, but we don’t know how to prepare the food if we buy it. In other words, we often choose to read God’s Word, but fail to see how, what we just read, actually helps us get free from the grind we find ourselves in and to live the life we know is out there somewhere. We have the ingredients on our shelves but we lack the recipe and knowhow to prepare the meals that will change our destiny.
That’s why I’m doing the MPI Business Institute. Think of me as the chef. I am going to take the same ingredients you have on your shelf (God’s Word and God’s world) and prepare the kind of meal that will provide the knowledge that feeds your self-talk, that provides strength to persevere so you can be victorious in the struggle for the life you know God has for you.
And just to be clear, that life may look like our new friends from Australia whose blogs I enjoy following. It is not ostentatious, but it is rich with beauty and love, and I dare say enviable to most folks alive on the planet.
So if you want to dine at our table, and allow me and my amazing wife Judy Ann to prepare a feast for you that will satisfy your soul and fuel your spirit, then I invite you to join with us and many others to change not only what we think on, but HOW we think, that we may enter into the zoe life Christ died to give us.
Like all good meals prepared from the finest ingredients, they cost more than fast food but are always worth it. I invite you to check this out, complete a short survey found here and plan to be at the first online meeting where the full menu will be shared with all. And from that, you can order your meal, if you so choose.
Thank you for linking to our blogs, Michael. We definitely love adventuring far and wide with our cameras to capture as many delights as possible in His Creation!
Looking forward to hearing more! Any tentative date as to when the “sharing of the menu” will be? 🙂