The Way to

Success

By Les D. Crause

The Way to Success

Copyright © 2011 by Global Business Resources International

All rights reserved

5663 Balboa Ave #416,

San Diego,

California 92111,

United States of America

1st Printing March 2011

Published by Global Business Resources International

E-mail Address: sales@global-business-resources.com

Web Address: www.global-business-resources.com

All rights reserved under International Copyright Law.

Contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without the express written consent of the publisher.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Apostolic Movement International (AMIV) version of the Bible.

Contents

Section 01 - Dreams Goals Plans Action. 8

Chapter 01 – You Need to Daydream.. 8

Chapter 02 - Move onto Your Goals 16

Chapter 03 - Have Clear Plans 22

Chapter 04 – Time for Action. 28

Section 02 – Finding Your Destiny in Life. 40

Chapter 05 – Knowing Your Life Purpose. 40

Chapter 06 - The Best Type of Partner 52

Chapter 07 – Problems Finding Your Destiny. 60

Chapter 08 – Taking Charge of Your Life. 68

Section 03 – Developing Core Desires 74

Chapter 09 – Staying Motivated. 74

Chapter 10 – Finding Your Existing Desires 80

Chapter 11 - Things You Can Change. 90

Chapter 12 - My Personal Story. 96

Section 04 – Going for Your Goals 108

Chapter 13 – Story of a Core Desire. 108

Chapter 14 - You May Need Extra Skills 114

Chapter 15 - Problems With Core Desires 124

Chapter 16 - Start Prioritizing. 132

Chapter 17 - Normal Does not Exist 140

Section 05 – Planning to Succeed. 144

Chapter 18 - Know Your Goals 144

Chapter 19 - A Biblical Way of Remembering. 152

Chapter 20 - Put Your Goals into Objects 160

Chapter 21 - Allow For Your Smaller Goals 168

Chapter 22 - A New Enthusiasm for Life. 174

Section 06 – Lights, Camera, Action. 182

Chapter 23 – Time to Get Moving. 182

Chapter 24 - Lethargy and Laziness 190

Chapter 25 - Keep Things Simple. 200

Chapter 26 - Don’t Be Introspective. 210

Chapter 27 - The Correct Way to Sell 218

Section 01 - Dreams Goals Plans Action

Chapter 01

You Need to Daydream

Section 01 - Dreams Goals Plans Action

Chapter 01 – You Need to Daydream

Dreams, goals, plans and action - four very important words that you need to remember and understand if you want to succeed in this life and in this world.

Every one of us needs to think big. We all need to have a realm of fantasy. This happens all the time. It happens sometimes if you are watching a movie or reading a book.

You are looking at life and you are not speaking to anybody. You are drawing into yourself and you begin to think and go over things in your mind. And especially when you begin to think about the future, you begin to dream.

I am not talking about dreaming like you do when you are asleep. I am talking about live dreams. I’m talking about  day-dreaming, visualizing, looking to the future and imagining things; of trying to paint a picture and seeing yourself in that picture.

Every one of us, if we are normal human beings, will have times of daydreaming and visualizing of the future. We will think to ourselves,

“How wonderful it would be if… .”

That might happen while you’re watching a movie, and you wish you could take that movie and put yourself right inside there. Your dream may begin to go that way and you might think,

“I wish I could be like the hero of that movie. I wish I could have the kind of life he lives and make the amount of money he earns. I wish I could travel.”

Every one of us at one stage or another has some kind of dream or fantasy about the future. And each of us has some kind of expectation of what we expect will happen in our lives.

Now let me ask a simple question. Have you fulfilled your dreams - those wonderful fantasies that you lie awake at night thinking about? Are you there yet? When do you expect to get there? Do you ever expect to get there?

Introduction to Goal Setting

I remember some years ago when I first discovered some tapes by Jim Rohn called ‘Adventures in Achievement’. He had a nice little workbook with it about goal setting. He said that you must sit down and look at your goals, and see how you could see yourself 5, 10 or 20 years from now.

You had to look at your own personal character and capabilities and your finances. It was actually very comprehensive; a tremendous little workbook. I sat down and I faithfully filled them all in as to what I could see myself being and accomplishing in the future.

Time went on, and many years later we discovered these workbooks lying amongst the junk when we moved. It was fun to pick them up and have a look and see what I had written. Some of the kids picked them up and had a look at the goals that I had written out so nicely and in such detail.

Do you know what? It sounded as though I did them last week, because I was still in about the same place then as what I was when I first wrote those goals.

My life really had not changed. My financial situation was just about the same as what it always was, and my capabilities and weaknesses were about what they always were. I just hadn’t progressed.

Why? According to the principles that were taught, if you could set goals you would succeed. You could get out there and accomplish. Well I set the goals, but many years later those goals hadn’t changed and neither had my life. Something was wrong. I was confused.

Start With Small Things

In recent times I have realized some things. I’ve taught that as we begin to apply the principles that bring success, and we begin to birth some of the things we desire using the power of the spirit within us, that we should start with something small.

In the past I always believed that the bigger your vision was the better. I thought if you aimed for the moon and just hit the ceiling, well at least it was further than you were right now. So why not aim further and then not quite make it, but at least get somewhere. That was always my logic.

Don’t Confuse Dreams and Goals

A lot of people seem to think that way. They say,

“Don’t just say, ‘Well I’d like $1 000.’ Say, ‘I’d like $10 000.’ Then if you just make $1 000 that’s great, but at least you were aiming further.”

“I mean if we made $10 000 it would have been nice. If we made $5 000 it would also have been great. But hey I’m not complaining about $1 000 either. If I aim for $1 000, I might only have made $200.”

That was my logic. The problem was that I was confusing dreams and goals. That is what everybody does. They confuse the two.

So in this Section I want to try and make it very clear what is the difference between a dream and vision and the setting of goals.

They are not the same. They are totally different. And unless you can grasp this, you may spend the rest of your life waiting for your dream to be fulfilled and find out that it never is fulfilled.

Later on you get to the age where you realize that your time is over. You are not young anymore. You’re getting old and are heading for retirement now. There are only so many years left in your life and you have still not accomplished your goals. Then you say,

“Well I might as well give up that dream. It’s never going to happen.”

You Need More Than a Dream

We all need a dream. There was a famous speech made by Martin Luther King where he said,

“I have a dream”.

People have taught this and exalted his great speech about having a dream. But he never did fulfill his dream because he was shot.

It requires more than having a dream. A dream is not enough. Every one of us has a dream, and dreams are essential. Without them you will never accomplish anything in this life. Only dreams have the power to inspire you and motivate you.

Dreams must be as big as possible - even huge. They must be magnificent and go into and stay in the realm of fantasy, otherwise they are not dreams. They are reality.

Go Into a Fantasy World

Reality doesn’t inspire, because you look around you and you see that your life is nothing to get excited about. So you have to get excited about what isn’t there. You have to get excited about what lies in the realm of fantasy.

That is why even as children, we loved the fairy stories, the fantasy stories and the magic stories - as demonic as what they were.

We just love the realm of fantasy. I know I love to watch movies like Superman and all the great superheroes, and things that are outside of the realm of the normal. I think,

“Wow, wouldn’t it be awesome to be like that?”

One of the best dreams I ever had was one where I was flying like Superman over the earth. I was able to dive and go wherever I wanted. It was a wonderful feeling. That was a real dream.

That one will never be a reality, but what an exciting thought. What an exciting feeling to be free like a bird and to be able to fly; to have magnificent powers like some of the great superheroes have in those comic books. These all lie in the realm of fantasy.

We all want a life that is free of stress, free of problems and difficulties. We all dream of a day when life will be easy and there will be no pressure. Well that fantasy will ultimately be fulfilled one day in the Heavenly realm, but on this earth there is a limit to what we can achieve.

And so we need to move out of the realm of fantasy and into reality.

But you know there are a lot of things that you can dream about that are entirely possible in this world. When you see somebody else living the kind of life that you’d like to live, for you to dream of having that same life is possible, because it was possible for them.

It doesn’t lie in the realm of the supernatural or the realm of impossibility. It is entirely possible. There are people living lives like that now, so why not you?

Desires Build Your Dreams

And so your dreams are built around every desire. All of us have different desires don’t we?

You know having great wealth isn’t necessarily everybody’s dream. In fact having wealth is never a goal that anyone aims for.

It is the things that the wealth can give you that you aim for. It is the kind of life that you can live because you have that wealth. That is really what you desire. You desire a place of freedom.

Different people have different desires. Some perhaps have a desire to be in control; to be somebody high up who is in charge of many other people. That is a foolish desire. If you start having to take care of a whole lot of other people it will just bring you more stresses.

We have this fantasy that to be the big CEO at the top and to be the boss makes things so much easier. You don’t realize the responsibility that goes with it, but that is beside the point. If it is your desire then you need to dream about it.

Dreams are Always Future

The operative word in dreams is the word ‘want’. A dream is always future and it has no time frame in it. A typical statement you might make based on your dreams is something like this,

“One day I would like to do this (whatever your dream is).”

Isn’t that what dreams are like?

You say, “One day my ship will come in. One day I will rise up and be like a queen (or a king).”

“One day I will drive in limousines and fly in my own private jet.”

“One day I will do this.”

It is always a future orientation and it has no time frame. In the end it is really just a fantasy and a hope, but in your mind you are thinking,

“It is way beyond my reach. I don’t know if I will ever have it. I would love to have it perhaps one day.”

Dreams Motivate You

If you start out with those kinds of dreams and you are still very young, you perhaps have so many years in your life for good fortune to shine on you. Maybe as the world puts it, good luck will come your way.

And maybe, by some pure accident and if it’s your lot in life, you might just make it and fulfill that dream. But it is somewhere out there in your vague, future fantasies.

You say, “Perhaps one day I’ll be a millionaire or a billionaire. Perhaps one day I’ll just cruise around the world on my own ship.”

Everyone has their own fantasies and dreams, and sometimes you have more than one. But dreams do not have the power to change your life. Dreams only keep you motivated and headed towards the future. You live in the hope that maybe one day you will fulfill your dream.

That is why your dream must be big and why it must be filled with emotion. That is why your dream must be exciting. It must be something that really thrills you, that drives you and keeps you going and says,

“Wow I would love to do that with my life.”

Your Dreams Through the Years

Look back on your life and where you stand right now. Think back on what you dreamed of when you were a young child, if you can think back that far. What kind of dreams did you have? What kind of dreams and visions did you have for the future?

Then as you grew up and you reached that adolescent age, what dreams did you have for the future? And if you are a bit older like me, as you arrived at that middle age stage, you were likely married and had settled down and had a family.

What were your dreams for the future? Think about it then think about where you are right now. Can you honestly say,

“I am living the life I dreamed of.”?

Or are you standing at the end now, knowing that you only have so many years left? You are already on the downhill run, and you have still not come close to attaining the things that you dreamed about?

What about the people who did achieve those things? Do you know someone right now, who perhaps was at the same place you were when you started out, but today they are fulfilling their dreams? Today they are living the kind of life that you dreamed of. They made it.

How many people did you grow up with and go to school with, that you can look back now and see that they rose up and became successful? They became great leaders of big companies; wealthy or influential men or women.

How many people do you know back then that have risen up and you didn’t? What made the difference?

You say, “Well I guess they were just lucky.”

No they weren’t lucky. They went beyond their dreams. And if you don’t go beyond your dreams, you will sit there for the rest of your life and you will die still dreaming. That is all it will ever be - a dream.

It will never become a reality in your life, because you have to go beyond dreams. You have to come out of the realm of fantasy and into the realm of reality before your dreams can ever be fulfilled.

Chapter 02

Move onto Your Goals

Chapter 02 - Move onto Your Goals

This is where we come to the second stage, which is goals. Goals bring your dreams into reality. You see a goal is built on action and planning. It is built on reality. A goal doesn’t say,

“Well it would be lovely to have this.”

A goal says,

“I’m going to have this. I plan to become this.”

Imagine running around the track in a race, with a whole lot of people just going out there jogging and saying,

“Well I hope I come first. I hope I make it to the end.”

Aim Your Sights at the Goal

You have to set your goal. You have to look at it and say,

“There is the goal right there. I am aiming for that mark. I am pushing with all that I can, and I’m going to reach that goal. I’m going to attain it in such and such a time, and I’m going to break the record.”

You know anybody who ever broke a record like that in sports did not do it by accident. They didn’t do it by saying,

“Well I was just running along doing my best. And what do you know? I beat the record.”

No, the guy who made the record before didn’t get there that way either. He made up his mind. He said,

“That’s it. The record is so many minutes. I’m going to push myself, go for the mark and do it in less time.”

He set a goal. He aimed for that goal and he made it happen.

You Will Do It

Do you want your dreams to become reality? Your dreams have to become very clear goals now. The operative word in dreams was ‘want’. The operative word in goals is ‘will’. You see, in your dream you said,

“One day I would like to do this.”

When it comes to goals you must say,

“By such and such a time period I will do this.”

Can you see the difference?

I thought I was setting goals way back then, but actually all I was doing was writing down my dreams. I found it difficult when somebody said,

“Where will you be five years from now?”

I thought, “Well I hope that within five years I will have reached a better stage than where I am now.”

So I kind of picked a little goal that was a possibility.

Unrealistic Goals

Then you get the people who want to get out there and just shoot for the stars. They say,

“Everything has gone wrong in my life, so therefore I am bound to be a success. I am going to get out there and become a millionaire overnight.”

That’s a good dream, but it’s a fantasy.

You say, “So how much money have you been earning up until now?”

“Well I was just fired from my job.”

“That qualifies you to be a millionaire I’m sure. How are you going to reach this millionaire status if you couldn’t even reach the status of getting your salary at the end of the month? What goal do you have, and what plan do you have to reach it?

“Oh it’s just going to happen. I’m just going to visualize it until it takes place.”

A lot of people seem to think that that is all you do. You just visualize it until it takes place. And some people think they can just pray until it takes place. They say,

“God will just do it all for me. If I pray hard enough it will happen. He will answer my prayers, and He will give me my dreams.”

Somebody will come knocking on the door one day and say,

“Oh by the way, we just had instruction to bring this to you - one million dollars. Here it is, in a case.”

“Wow I’ve been praying hard that this would happen, and it did happen.”

“And so after you prayed, what did you do?”

“Well the Bible says we should pray and say, Give us this day our daily bread.”

So then you went and stood outside, looked up and waited for your daily bread to come flying out of the sky.

Don’t Just Wait for it

That’s what a lot of people seem to think. If you dream big enough and you pray hard enough, it will just come to you.

Have you heard the story about the guy who was in the flood, and he was praying that he would be saved from drowning? A boat came by and offered to pick him up, and he said,

“No it’s alright. God is going to save me.”

In the end he drowned, and he complained to God and said,

“Why did you let me drown?”

God said, “I sent four boats and you never took them.”

People have their dreams, their faith and their prayers, and they are just waiting for it to happen. They say,

“We’ll just wait until it happens. Good luck and good fortune will shine upon me.”

No, there is something you have to do. You have to open your eyes and see the opportunities around you. You have to take the resources that are available to you and aim for the goal.

Set a Time Period

Goals always have a specific time orientation. If you don’t set a time you will not make the effort.

When you had a simple goal like graduating from High School, you had a certain time in which to do it. When you went to College and wanted to get a degree, you had a certain time period in which you were meant to reach your goal. You didn’t sit and think,

“Well I’ll sit here at College for a couple of years until one day they just give me a degree.”

No, you knew clearly how many years you were going to study, what it was going to require, and by what year you were going to finish. You were going to write the exam, and then you were going to qualify and receive your degree.

You must have a very clear, specific goal.

Do Something

Your goal has to have a time frame, and you have to know what to do.

“I will have to attend lectures every day. I will have to buy some books and read them. Then I will need to do a lot of writing, and write some examinations.”

There are things that you will have to do along the way to attain those goals. You had better know what they are, and you had better be prepared to do them, otherwise don’t aim for the goal.

If you do aim for the goal, you need to know how long it is going to take. You need to know what it is going to cost you in time and effort, and you need to make a commitment that says,

“That’s it, I am aiming for the goal and I will pay the price.”

Release Forces to Make it Happen

Now what happens when you set the goals and commit yourself to them? This is when you begin to release the forces that will bring your dreams to manifestation.

Goals release the forces that will create and bring into manifestation the things that you dreamed of. Goals have that power, and without them there is no power. They are just dead dreams and visions.

Chapter 03

Have Clear Plans

Chapter 03 - Have Clear Plans

Well you now have a goal and you have made a commitment to that goal. You have set a time frame, set the vision, and you are prepared to do whatever is needed to reach that goal.

You’ve taken your dream out of the realm of fantasy and brought it into the realm of reality. You have said,

“These are very clear goals. By the age of… (whatever you choose), I will be a millionaire.”

“By such-and-such a period in my life, I will have attained this particular goal. I will have traveled to so many nations in the world.”

You know there is something about goals that keep us going all the time, because they are always looking towards the future. But now it requires more than the goal. It requires some plan of action to reach that goal.

How do you reach your goal? You have to carry out some kind of action that must never be haphazard or vague. You could say,

“Well I’ll just read a few books and try a few things. I’ll mess around a bit and surf the Internet.”

“That is how you are going to reach your goal?”

“Yes.”

“So if your goal is to get married?”

“Well I’ll just walk down the street, and hang around and wait for something to happen. I’ll try this and I’ll try that.”

How clear are your goals? If your goals are clear, then how clear are your plans to reach that goal?

If you do not know how you are going to reach the goal, you will be like Columbus, who didn’t know where he was going. Somebody said,

“He didn’t know where he was going. When he arrived there, he didn’t know where he had arrived, and when he arrived back he didn’t know where he had been. It was an accident.”

No Accidents

Well sometimes those accidents happen. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of my life being an accident.

You must lay your plans out very clearly. If they are not laid out very clearly, and if you don’t even have a plan, do you know what is going to happen? You are going to be part of somebody else’s plan, and people around you are going to force you to fit into their plans.

You say, “It’s not fair. I always end up doing what they want to do.”

“What were you planning to do?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to see what was going to happen.”

Well they planned what to do. So what happened was you ended up in their plan, because you didn’t have one of your own. If you don’t have a plan, how do you expect anything to happen?

If you didn’t plan it, it is not going to happen like you anticipated. And if it does happen and you didn’t plan it, how will you know that what happened was part of your plan if you didn’t have one in the first place?

Make Circumstances Line Up

An event takes place in your life and you say,

“This has happened to get me closer to my goal.”

How do you know that? You can say,

“God is in control and therefore He brought it to pass. And so therefore everything that has happened in my life is planned. It is fate.”

Do you know how many religions of this world have this idea that fate is just something you have to accept as the hand of God? Did you have a plan? And when that thing came to pass, did you say,

“Yes, that’s exactly what I was hoping would happen. That helps me in my plan. Let’s take it and use it to go forward.”

Yes miraculous things will happen in your life. And as I said, as you begin to release those forces to work on your behalf, circumstances will be created for you in life. But when they happen, are they according to your plan, or are they against your plan?

This is because not everything that happens in your life is good for you. And not every bad thing that happens in your life is bad for you.

Maybe something really bad happened, but it fits in exactly with the plan. And when you look at it afterwards you realize,

“You know if I hadn’t gone that way then my plan would have failed.”

How are you going to know this if you didn’t have a plan?

You say, “Well I’m planning to be wealthy one day.”

“Good. How do you plan to do this?”

“I am going to travel around the world and visit all of the nations.”

“How do you plan to do that?”

“I’m going to be a big, world famous speaker. My name will be known everywhere. My books will be in every bookshop in every nation.”

“How do you plan to accomplish this?”

“Well I hadn’t thought about that, but I sure hope it happens. And I’m really praying hard that it comes about.”

Don’t Get Diverted

It is not going to happen. Your plans must be laid out clearly. They must involve specific actions that have to be carried out, and they must have deadlines.

Without a deadline your plan will just go off at a tangent into the air somewhere. Your goal is sitting there, and your plan is taking you in another direction. It just happens naturally all the time doesn’t it?

You say, “You know I really planned to work hard today, but I just went onto the Internet and I started surfing. I saw a few things that interested me. I saw this one page, and that led me to another page.

“I clicked on a link that took me there, and I listened to some stuff and read some stuff. And you know before I knew it, it was lunch time already.”

“So what were you planning to do today?”

“Well I was planning to reach my goal by sitting down and starting to write a new book.”

“So how did this diversion fit into your plan?”

“It didn’t.”

“Then get back to your plan.”

You see if you didn’t know what your plan was, you would have just sat thinking,

“Well maybe there was a reason that I found that web page. Maybe it will help me reach my goal one day.”

Deadlines Bring Your Goals Closer

Maybe it will - if it fits into your plan. And if it doesn’t fit into your plan then something is wrong. Either that, or your plan is wrong and you had better change it.

Your plan has to be very specific and very clear. You have to go stage by stage by stage, with deadlines and time frames in it, or your goal will just get further and further away like the horizon.

You know the thirsty guy in the desert? He is looking for water, and there is the water flowing over the sands. He can see the oasis in the distance, but the closer he gets to it the further away it gets.

That is our dreams, not our goals. Our goals are not just mirages. They have to be very specific, and the plans that we have to get there must also be very specific.

If you are going to travel to a specific place, you know how far it is, you know what speed you will be traveling, and you have an idea of how many hours it is going to take you to get there.

Yes you could have interruptions. You could go through a speed trap along the way and get pulled off. You could get a flat wheel. Something could go wrong and your plans have to be flexible. You have to allow for eventualities, where when something goes wrong you don’t say,

“Well that must have been a bum plan that I made. It just didn’t work.”

No there is nothing wrong with your plan. It is just that life threw things at you which came against your plan and interfered with it. We will be looking at that in a lot more detail as we continue in this book.

Chapter 04

Time for Action

Chapter 04 – Time for Action

The final stage is action. You have dreamed your dream. You have set a goal that you want to reach. You have made a plan to head towards that, and now the plan itself involves action.

Now dreaming the dream begins to release within you a power to create the things that you dreamed.

Man can Create

When God made man He made him in His image. God gave man the ability to create. It was not quite in the same way as the Creator, but in this world alone man was given the power to create.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the great artists, sculptors and musicians. Just walk down the street and look at the buildings.

Who made those? Well sure God created all the materials which they were made from, but who constructed that building? Man did. And who designed that architecture?

A motor car rides past, and you look at it and say,

“Who made that?”

“Well it just appeared.”

No, somebody made it. Man took of what was available to him in this world and he made a creation. You have a God-given creative ability within you.

Now how did somebody go about creating that motor car? Somebody dreamed a dream and said,

“One day I won’t have to walk anymore. One day I won’t have to ride in a horse and buggy anymore.”

Somebody dreamed a dream. Somebody set a goal, put a plan into motion and brought it to pass. But where did it start? It started with a dream.

You see it starts much deeper. It starts in those dreams and visions that come up from deep inside of us, from within the spirit of man. That is where your creative ability begins.

Words and Actions

Now as it comes up from your inward man, that creative ability begins to show itself in your mind and in your emotions; in your desires and in your feelings. Then by an act of your will you choose to release that dream into the world.

How do you do it? There are only two ways it can be done. You see if I just stand here doing nothing, can you see my dreams and tell what I’m thinking? No you won’t know until I open my mouth and speak. If I start scratching myself though, you know what I am thinking. I’m thinking,

“I am itchy.”

My action showed you what was going on in my mind.

Words and actions are the only two means that we have of bringing into reality and into this world, that which has just been a fantasy, a thought, a dream or a vision.

You have had your dream and you’ve set the goals. Can you see the actions already beginning to take place?

You have laid out a plan. Now you must put some kind of action into that plan, in order to reach the goal and to fulfill your dream.

Start Speaking Your Goals

Well the two actions are: Words, and some kind of physical action. And words are the most important thing to start with.

Why is it that words always come first? You must verbalize your plans before action can take place. You may wonder why. It is because words commit you to your goals. They are where you sign on the dotted line.

You see up until now your goals may have sat in your mind. But then you opened your mouth and said,

“I will be wealthy by the age of 30.”

The moment you do that people will say,

“Okay big deal, let’s see you do it.”

Now some people think you shouldn’t tell others what your goals are, so that in case you fail nobody is going to condemn you.

That is a cop out. The sooner you open your mouth and say what you are planning to do, the sooner you commit yourself to following it through.

You say, “I will do this. I am going to do that.”

Until you are prepared to say that you will never do it. It is one of the keys to success.

Confession Only Keeps You Dreaming

Now unfortunately a lot of people have taken this confession idea and thought that it is a kind of magic wand that says,

“I will be wealthy one day. I am going to become a millionaire.”

“I am intelligent.”

“I am beautiful.”

“I have a new car.”

“I am…”

“I have...”

You can confess these over and over and over again, but do you know what you are doing? All you are doing is you are confessing your dreams. You are still staying in the realm of fantasy. It requires you to say,

“I will raise a million dollars within the next 10 years.”

Now that is a commitment. Say it where people can hear you. But, it doesn’t start there. It actually starts by you talking to yourself. We have a little term that we use, especially when it comes to sportsmen.

Psyche Yourself Up

I remember way back when I lived in South Africa and they had the Comrades Marathon. This was an amazing race that so many people would enter. The idea was just to make it through, and to help one another to make it through to the end. That’s why it was called The Comrades.

I still remember the guy who won it for so many years in a row. He was a man by the name of Bruce Fordyce. We used to sit and watch it on TV every year, just to see Bruce win it again.

He was such an amazing guy. He seemed small and frail. There was nothing about him that looked like this big, strong runner who was capable of doing it. He was just an ordinary, nice guy.

You would see him gather there with these thousands of people. The gun would fire and off they would go. You would see these guys running - all the ones at the front wanting to start off so they could be on television as the front runners.

You would look for Bruce Fordyce and you couldn’t see him, because he was stuck there in one of the groups of runners right near the back. In fact it took a long while before the crowd began to thin out and people started to fall out.

People started to fall back, and eventually you would see the steady front runners beginning to come forward. You would look for Bruce Fordyce and he was there at the back somewhere.

Then it narrowed down even more, until you had three or four guys at the front, and you were looking for Bruce and he was fourth. You were thinking,

“Is this guy ever planning to win the race today, because he looks like he’s dragging behind all the way?”

But you see he was doing something that we call ‘psyching yourself up’. Have you ever heard that expression?

It means he was using the power of his soul, the psyche. He was getting himself geared for that final stint when he would win. And the runners who knew how to do that were the ones who always came out near the front.

When they started out, most of them perhaps had been doing the same amount of running. Probably all of them were about the same amount of physical fitness.

What is it that makes one person win? I mean they have proved that sometimes a person can win by a micro-second.  What is it that makes one person win over another? It depends how well he psyches himself up.

See it and Speak it

Well how do you psyche yourself up? You firstly see yourself carrying out the plan. You see it very clearly in your mind.

What is your dream and vision? See it in your mind. What is your goal? Can you see yourself reaching it? What is your plan? Can you see yourself following it? Can you see this clearly in your mind?

And then you begin to talk to yourself. No, it is not the first sign of madness. You must begin to mutter to yourself.

One of the terms used for this is meditation. Meditation is not TM (Transcendental Meditation) and getting into a spooky kind of state of mind. Do not open your mind to influences that you shouldn’t be.

Meditation is largely just muttering to yourself. God told Joshua to take the Scriptures that he had, and to speak them with his mouth and to meditate on them. He said,

“Keep these words in your mouth and meditate on them day and night.”

Joshua was a young man, who before was just his mentor’s servant. Moses his mentor had died. And now here he was, this little weakling taking over from his mentor. He was having a problem with all the people who were now looking at him and saying,

“You know Moses was a good guy and we could follow him, but we don’t know if we can trust you.”

But there was Joshua, taking all the things that Moses had written down. This made up what to him at that time was the Scriptures, and he began to speak them and mutter them, and see himself acting just like Moses.

And what happened? He became an even greater leader than Moses in the end. The people were following so strongly behind him, that when somebody tried to oppose Joshua the people said,

“Let’s put him to death. Don’t you dare disobey Joshua. He’s the man.”

Mutter to Yourself

It starts with words. It starts with visualization and muttering to yourself. Do you know what the most important reason for muttering to yourself is? It is because each one of us needs to be told what to do.

It is very easy. You go to work and your boss says,

“I expect you to do this job by lunch time. And can I have the file on my desk by 1 o’clock please?”

Well that’s pretty clear. You don’t go onto the Internet and surf. You don’t play games on the computer. You don’t get sidetracked by chatting to people on the phone. You get down, you do the job and you finish it.

Who is in charge of telling you what to do with your life? Only one person is. You will find him in the mirror. It is you.

Who is going to tell you what to do? There is only one person in this world that can tell you what to do, and that’s you. So when you mutter to yourself you are saying,

“Okay, listen here. You are going to do this now. You are going to push hard. You are going to cut down on all the calories and the food, and you are going to lose weight. You are going to go for long walks and run for a mile every day. You are going to do push-ups and push weights.”

Putting Everything Together

You must do whatever it takes. Just think about it and see yourself as this nice, slim person. That is your dream and that is your goal.

I say to you, “I’m going to lose 30 kilograms by Christmas.”

That’s my goal. I have given it a time. What is my plan? My plan is to eat less and exercise more. That’s a pretty simple plan. Forget about the diets.

So now I have to implement that. I have to put that plan in motion. Well how much less am I going to eat? Let’s start by say cutting my plate in half. You see we’re making a plan.

How much more exercise am I going to do? Well since I haven’t been doing any up until now, any amount of exercise is an improvement. No, that’s not good enough. I’m going to get on that exercise bicycle or strider, and I’m going to do 30 minutes a day. Now that’s a specific plan.

You get up in the morning and you are starved. You think,

“Let’s have breakfast. Bacon and eggs, hash browns, toast, coffee, pancakes, maple syrup - it sounds so good. Let’s get in there and eat.”

That is really what you feel like doing right now - having a big meal. But your plan says you are cutting down on what you eat. You see that is when you begin to mutter -probably not the way you should though. This happens unless you have been muttering to yourself all the time and saying,

“I’m going to eat half of what I normally do. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to cut down.

“I’m going to dish in only half a plate of what I normally do. Where I normally have two pieces of bacon, I’m only having one. Where I normally have two eggs, I’m only having one.

“Where I normally have toast, I’ll just cut that out altogether. We’ll just scrap the muffins and the pancakes and whatever else. I won’t have any more sugar because I’m cutting it down. I’m going to do this.”

It’s your plan. You have to psyche yourself up and say,

“Okay now you’re not really hungry. That food is really bad for you.”

You will need to do some muttering. But in the end you are going to say,

“Okay, listen to me boy. You are not going to eat this.”

You have to start with words, because if you don’t speak your plan out loud you will forget it. If you don’t speak your plan, mutter to yourself, and see all the time what you are going to be doing, you won’t bring yourself to that place where you can follow through with the action that is required.

Now you might think it is easy to say,

“Well I will just decide that this is what I am going to do, and this is what I am not going to do.”

Your Will is Often Weak

You see actions are often the servant rather than the master. And you may think that you have the willpower to decide what you are going to do and what you are not going to do. However you will find out soon enough that your will is weak, and that you can’t do the things that you want to do. Something inside of you just resists.

How many times have you sat down to do what you know you need to do today, and you just don’t feel like doing it?

You think, “Oh no, do I really have to do this?”

Then you get a phone call and you think,

“Great, let’s talk for half an hour.”

You say, “Well I was planning to do that, but you know this phone call was more important. Somebody needed me. Then somebody buzzed me on chat and we chatted for three hours and before I knew it the morning was gone.”

“You know I really did plan to do that, but you know time ran away.”

That is what will happen if all you are going to do is choose by the power of your will to carry out the action that is needed. It is going to take more than that. You will have to open your big mouth, and start talking to yourself and saying,

“This is what you are going to do. This is what you are not going to do. I am going to finish this by the end of this morning.”

Pressure from Others

And then just to make it a little bit clearer, you must tell somebody else that this is what you are going to do. That makes it even more difficult, because by the end of the day that person is going to say to you,

“So, did you get to finish that project this morning then?”

What are you going to say?

“Well you know I really was planning to. But I started chatting and there was an emergency in the house, so I couldn’t do it.”

People are going to look at you and say,

“Yeah, we knew you wouldn’t do it.”

That is one of the strongest motivators you can have. Then you get all angry and say,

“I’ll show you I can do it.”

That’s good. You need to get some good emotion going. Get some good motivation, even if it is anger. It’s great. Get it going, but carry out the action.

Break Your Actions Down

Your plan has a time frame that reaches your goal, and your plan has so many actions that need to be carried out before it is complete. The sooner you carry each one of them out, the sooner you will reach the goal. It is really that simple.

See if you can break your plan down into actions. We’ll be speaking about that when we look at actual planning and setting of goals, and breaking them down into smaller pieces that are reachable.

Then you must begin to put action to your plans, and your action is always based on your plans. Your action, because it is based on your plans, will always head towards your goals.

And your goals, which are being carried out by the plans that you are causing by your actions, will always be influenced and based on your dreams.

As you put them all together, you start to bring your fantasy into reality. And you cause your dreams and visions to come into manifestation in your life.

These four stages are essential to accomplishing anything in this world. I have given you a broad overview of all of them here. I want to show you further how to structure your goals and lay them out; to put them down on paper and see them clearly and know what the future holds for you.

Well there will be a lot of things happening between the start and end of the goal. But you must make up your mind and determine,

“I will reach that goal.”

Know God’s Plans First

You say, “But is that what I really should be doing? What if God has another plan for me?”

Well then you had better find out His plan before you start. Don’t try and think about it in the middle, because you know if He has a plan for you, He’s not going to change His mind half way.

Find out your goal in life. Find out the thing you are aiming for and what you are here for. Find out what you are living for, and make up your mind what it is that you want to accomplish in the future.

Once you have that set it is not going to change. It shouldn’t change. If it does then you haven’t made up your mind what you want yet, so we will look in a little more detail how to do that.

But as you put these four things together - your dreams, your goals, your plans, words and actions - you can and will accomplish anything that you choose in this world.

Section 02 – Finding Your Destiny in Life

Chapter 05

Knowing Your Life Purpose

Section 02 – Finding Your Destiny in Life

Chapter 05 – Knowing Your Life Purpose

Philippians 3:13-14 says:

Brothers, I do not consider myself to have attained but [this] one thing [I do], forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth to those things which are ahead,

I press toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Probably the most important question that you can ask any person while they are still young is this:

“What do you want to become when you grow up?”

But often the same question can be asked of somebody who has gone beyond childhood and already moved into adulthood.

You would think that older people know what they want out of life. But I guarantee if you ask the average adult what they see as their life’s goal and purpose, you are not likely to get a clear answer. Most people still do not know what they want to be ‘when they grow up’.

What is it that drives you to press on into the future and keeps you going? What is it that makes you want to carry on living your life in this world?

Most people do want to carry on living. They haven’t already prepared for their funeral, because they are expecting to die any day. It is our nature to survive, succeed, press on and keep alive for as long as we can.

But what are you living for? What purpose does your life hold? What is the reason you are here? Can you answer that question very simply and clearly?

Perhaps one of the best ways to answer it would be to ask another question. One day when your life is over, someone could write something like this on your tombstone:

“Here lies (your name here). He lived for (so many) years and then died.”

Is that what you want written on your tombstone?

You know the famous saying of Julius Caesar? He said,

“I came. I saw. I conquered.”

What is your tombstone going to say?

“I came. I lived. I died.”

Would this be an awesome story? Would people be writing books about it or making movies about it?

Well you might even have lived for a long time. But it could have been a long time where you suffered, doing nothing.

What is your life about? What is your purpose? If you do not have a purpose in life, and do not know your destiny in this world, then what are you living for?

Know What You Will Accomplish

You were born for a reason. You were born to fulfill a purpose in this life.

What will you accomplish in the short span of life that stretches from birth to the end of your life? What kind of mark will you leave?

Sit down right now and decide what you hope to accomplish by the end of your life. Think about what you would like people to say about you. If you were ever to go down in the history books, what would you like them to write about you?

In the three short years of Jesus’ ministry, according to the Apostle John He did so much that it was impossible to write enough books to cover it. But as you look back on your whole life so far, you might discover that they could probably cover it in a few pages.

What are you accomplishing in your life? What kind of life are you living? I would like to challenge you and wake you up to realize that time is going by faster than what you realize.

I am personally already looking at the beginning of the last stage in my life. And looking back at all the opportunities that were offered to me along the way, I have to ask,

“Did I make the most of those opportunities? Did I use the time that I had? Did I use the abilities that I had?

“Did I use the strength that was available to me when I was younger, to accomplish the most in this life?”

Do you know what your destiny is today?

I would like to help you understand and find it. I will help you locate the things that are blocking you, and preventing you from accomplishing your full purpose in life. I hope I will be able to motivate you to say,

“I need to get going. I need to do something. I need to take what God has given me and use it to accomplish something in this life, and leave my mark on this world.”

Who Have You Influenced?

In the future, will people know that you ever existed? Will the annals of history record what you accomplished in this world?

Will you meet people one day, either in the flesh or in the afterlife who will say,

“You probably don’t know me, but you changed my life. You influenced me and affected me. Because of you I’m here today, and you helped me to accomplish great things in life.”

I would like to look firstly at the keys to finding your destiny. And the most important one of all is ‘knowing who you are’.

Describe Yourself

If you were to introduce yourself to somebody else or someone said, “Tell me about yourself,” what would you have to tell?

Let’s assume that you just met a complete stranger and they wanted to know all about you. What would you tell them?

You would need to look deep inside and ask yourself,

“Who am I? What am I? What are my capabilities? What are my strengths and what are my weaknesses? What do I consider the important qualities that God has given me?”

Find out who you are, because if you don’t know who you are, how will you know what to do in the future?

You cannot set a future goal to aim for until you know who you are now. If your entire goal in life is trying to find yourself, you might get lost along the way. You may come to the end of your life, still searching to find out who you are. You might say,

“I’m going to do great things as soon as I know who I am. I will accomplish wonderful things, as soon as I know what my calling is in life.

“As soon as I know what I’m capable of and feel good about myself, then I will go out and conquer the world.”

Be Happy With Who You Are

But you can’t do it until you feel happy about who you are. So the next key is being happy with who you are.

Your mother should have given you the first acceptance in life. And if you have learned to come into the presence of the Lord and walked with Him in fellowship, you will have found that He accepts you and loves you just the way you are.

Now you need to take a good look at yourself and ask,

“Am I happy with who I am?”

If you are not happy with who you are, how can you take the person that you are and present him or her to the world?

What do you have to offer others? If you don’t have anything to offer them then why bother? You should be saying,

“I’m going to go out into this world to offer it what God has given me.”

Well, what has He given you?

“You know I’m not terribly sure. But there are many people out there. I will get to know them and receive all that I can. I will listen to great speakers and receive what they have.

“I will find mentors who will impart to me what I need. I will study hard and read all their writings and collect all that I can out there.”

What you are saying then is that you are not going out to influence others. You are going instead to let them influence you.

You still do not know who you are. Or perhaps you’ve discovered who you are and you don’t like it. Some people say,

“I’d rather be like you. Please give me some of what you have, so I can be like you.”

They think that when they have all these things and finally become somebody of value, perhaps they will have the courage to give it out to others.

Some people spend their lives trying to get what everyone else has, because they have not yet discovered what they have in themselves.

The Lord made you to be a unique and wonderful creature. He gave you abilities, experiences and knowledge that nobody else in this world has. You are as unique as your thumbprint - there are no two that are alike.

So how do you come to the place of being happy with who you are? It certainly helps to find out from the Lord by spending time in His presence. Find out what He made you to be.

Start With What You Have

Once you know who you are, you need to accept who you are. Then decide what you want to improve. There must be a starting point.

You cannot sit and complain that God made you wrong. He made you ugly, He made you short, or He made you tall. He made you thin, He made you fat, He made you stupid. He made you with a bad sense of humor, your feet stink, and you have bad breath.

You see you can change many of these things, but you have to start with what you have received. You have to be happy with what you have, and you need to take that and do something with it.

But before you can do that, you need to know where you are headed. You need to have a clear goal in life.

This is where your father was supposed to step in. Your mother should have put into you all that she could. She should have developed in you all the abilities that you have.

She should have told you what you are capable of doing. She should have encouraged you and said,

“You can be great. You can do this.”

Fathers Should Lead and Encourage

Then your father had to step in. He had to take all those abilities that you had and say,

“With what you have, this is what I suggest.”

What your father should have done is to take you aside and say,

“My child, I see these abilities in you.”

But what do fathers do? They say,

“I want my child to have everything I never had. I want him (or her) to succeed where I failed.”

Maybe he inherited the same abilities as you, and you’re trying to make him do what you are not capable of doing. Don’t try to relive your life through your children. Teach them to avoid the mistakes that you made, but do not try to make them into what you were never capable of being.

I have seen this so often in the past. You have a father saying,

“Well my child, you must go to University and get a doctorate. The more knowledge you can get the better for you.”

Often it is because dad was too lazy to learn at school, and now he blames his failure in life on the fact that he was never educated.

I tell you there is many an educated person who is still a failure in life. In fact the more educated people are, sometimes the greater they fail.

Often the only thing an educated person can do is to educate others, and they in turn follow the same pattern.

Find Your Unique Abilities

There is a big difference between education and practical knowledge, which is knowledge that you can apply to build a real life. What the father should do is to help the child to discover his or her own unique abilities.

Each one of your children has a different unique ability. Don’t try to squeeze them all into one mold, and make all of them into what you desire them to be. Find out what they are capable of doing and say,

“I can see you have this quality in you. I’m proud of you and I want to encourage you. I want to be there to help you accomplish everything you have ever desired.”

Get Excited

The next important thing is to become excited about the goal you are aiming for. You should never be doing it because it was someone else’s idea.

You say, “So what are you studying?”

“I’m studying to be a doctor.”

“A doctor?”

“Yes”

“Why are you studying to be a doctor?”

“Well doctors get paid very well, and they’re quite respected. People always look up to somebody who is a doctor. Besides, my dad says that being a doctor is a great thing to do, and so that’s what I should go for.”

“I see. So what really excites you about being a doctor?”

“Well I can get well paid. I can be respected and people will look up to me.”

“No, I didn’t ask you what your dad thinks about why you should be a doctor. I would like to know what excites you about being a doctor.”

The answer will often be,

“Well it will make my dad happy so I’ll do it.”

Trying to Make Dad Happy

Do you know how many people have grown up making their dad happy? They have gone to University and earned all their degrees and qualifications.

Then when they are free of making dad happy and have him out of the way, they dump the whole lot. They often follow a career that is the total opposite of what they have been studying.

You have someone who studied to be a geologist and now he is a salesman. I’ve met people like that and it turns out they are great at sales.

So why did they waste all those years in University learning about rocks, and everything else that goes with geology?

I met somebody once who was in that exact category, and he was really a good salesman. I couldn’t believe he wasted most of his life studying geology.

I said, “So what are you doing with your geology now?”

He said, “Who cares about that? I’m having fun making money in sales.”

He could have been doing that for many years already, but he was following someone else’s dream.

Bring Out Your Children’s True Gifts

If you are a father should think about two things.

Firstly it is important that you look at your sons or daughters and see what they really desire to become. Look at what they are capable of, and do not try to impose on them what they were never equipped to do.

Find out what their true gifts are. Take those gifts and encourage them, and motivate them to take what they have and to make something with it.

Many a child has grown up and spent their life trying to make dad happy. Eventually they reach the place where they are old and dad is already dead and gone, but they are still trying to make dad happy.

You need to be excited about what you desire to do in life. And I hope that your dad was instrumental in helping you to do that.

Tell Him You Are Proud

And you know what the wonderful thing is? All dad needs to do to get you excited about something is to see what you are doing and say,

“You know I’m really proud of you. You are doing so great. Do you know that you have an ability there that I don’t have? I wish I could accomplish what you are doing and be as good at it as what you are.

“I think you are doing wonderfully, and I want you to know that I am behind you all the way. I want to encourage you to take that thing and run with it. The world needs people with that ability

“You’re my child and I know you are going to do it better than anybody else, because I see in you the seeds for success. I want you to take that and become all that you can be. I’m backing you all the way.”

This is what the average young person needs, especially one who is going through a period of individuation in early adolescence and puberty. All it takes is for a father to say,

“I’m right behind you, I’m proud of you.”

Then suddenly that becomes a core desire and not an obligation. It is never a case of,

“Well I have to do it, because dad insists on it.”

Instead it becomes,

“You know what? I am pretty good. Yeah, I think dad’s right. I can do that. I’ll go and do it and prove it.”

And when you fail you come back to dad and say,

“Dad, I tried it and I messed it up.”

Dad doesn’t say,

“You are a useless idiot. Why did you do it the wrong way? I’m ashamed of you.”

Well dads sometimes do that because they’re human, but if you get it right this won’t happen.

You Need Continual Encouragement

You need someone to motivate you and encourage you to keep trying. You need someone to lift you up and affirm you.

Now mom will take you in her arms and say,

“My poor little Johnny, I understand. Just come and lie in mommy’s arms and cry a bit, and be a failure for me.”

That doesn’t motivate you to go out and succeed. It does make you feel a lot better though, because at least she accepts you even though you are a failure.

It is always useful to have your mother, a spiritual mother, or a surrogate mother. You need somebody to encourage you. But you really need a dad, who will give you an extra push and say,

“I know you can do it. You were made for success. Get out there and do it. I’m standing right behind you.

“I’m there to help you to succeed. No great man has ever succeeded without failing a few times. You’re doing it right. I’m so pleased to see that you failed, because it’s a sure sign that you are bound to succeed.”

Oh if only we could hear those words. But we don’t usually hear them do we? That’s why you need to know how to come into the Lord’s presence, because He is the only one that will always be consistent.

He is the only one who will consistently accept you as a true mother does. He is the only one who will continue to recognize your abilities, and continually motivate you to succeed even when a natural father fails.

Jesus is the only one who can replace both mother and father.

Chapter 06

The Best Type of Partner

Chapter 06 - The Best Type of Partner

It is good to have someone who will always accept you, and most of the time that person will be your mother. Most mothers continue throughout life to accept their children just the way they are. A true mother will love her child to the end.

But often mother has too many cares and problems of her own. And certainly there must come a time where you break free of her; where you don’t run to her any longer.

Perhaps a spiritual or surrogate mother will move in to take that place. But when you eventually leave home and look for a life’s partner, you will find somebody who believes in you apart from your mother.

If you don’t find such a person do not marry them. Don’t marry someone who doesn’t believe in you and who will not accept you the way you are.

Remove the Masks

You may think, “Well I have to become the perfect person to attract a spouse; somebody who will be interested in marrying me.”

So you build up a façade and put on these beautiful masks. You pretend to be who you are not in order to attract somebody. Then when you have that person, you settle down and revert to what you were all along.

Perhaps you are wondering why he or she accepted you so well while you were going out. Now that you are married, the acceptance is not there anymore.

You say, “Well surely he or she should accept me the way I am.”

Yes, but you are no longer the way you were. So if you want to attract the right partner as a single person, don’t think about what you have to change on the outside. Don’t just put up a big front.

Find out who you are and be comfortable and happy with that. This is what you must present and sell to your partner. Do as I said earlier. Write down a description of yourself and then ask,

“Am I a good prospect? How many people out there are looking for me?”

Encourage Your Good Qualities

How many people out there are looking for somebody just like you? What do you have to offer? You might have to dig a bit to find some good stuff, but it is there. You just need to find it.

It all starts with knowing who you are and being happy about who you are. Get excited about what you can do with what God has given you. Stop moaning and groaning and complaining about what everybody else has that you don’t have.

You need somebody who will accept you the way you are. But you also need somebody who will recognize your abilities and the things that you do.

That is where your father should first have stepped in. He should have recognized your abilities, praised you, encouraged you and corrected you where you went wrong.

To help mold a child, the father should look at what the child is capable of doing. He should then be able to take that and mold it together into a picture for the future.

If your father failed to do that, then you need to find a surrogate father, a spiritual father, or the ultimate Father - the Lord Jesus Himself. He will give you the clearest direction.

The Best Marriage

Apart from your parents though, the closest person you can ever find who will believe in you and recognize your abilities, will be the person that you choose to spend the rest of your life with.

Don’t marry someone who is not prepared to encourage you to become your best and to accomplish the greatness that is in you.

Many people are in a marriage where each one is still trying to find themselves. If you are still trying to find yourself, you don’t have time to give to your spouse. You should have found yourself a long time ago.

You should be able to take the one you love and pour into him or her everything that they need to feel good about themselves. You can help them to rise up and succeed and to feel accepted; to know that when they fail, there are arms that they can come and lie in and be secure.

You need to know that if the whole world turns against you, there is one person in this world who cares enough to take you as you are; someone who will say,

“Just come here and relax because I love you just the way you are.”

There are not too many marriages like that though are there? Instead most people want to change their spouse into what they want them to be. Sometimes you need your spouse to make you look good.

Can you see how important it is to know who you are; to be fully affirmed and to accept who you are?

You need to find within yourself your own sense of accomplishment and achievement. Then instead of needing to receive from others, including your spouse, you need to continually give out. Your whole approach and attitude to everyone should be,

“I have something to give. Here it is if you want it.”

There should always be an outward flow.

This type of person is the one who succeeds in life, not the person who says,

“I’m going to be wealthy. I’m going to be rich and famous.”

The most famous people never ever sought fame. They sought something far greater than that. What did the Lord say in His Word? It says in Matthew 6:33:

Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.

What does Jesus require from you in life? What has He motivated you or encouraged you to do, to be and become? Because in accomplishing His purpose for your life you will find that everything you ever desired will automatically come along with it.

Past Templates Influence Our Goals

What is it that motivates us? What makes us be the way we are and press forward to the goals that we do? We covered it in the series called ‘Transformed by His Presence’. It is past templates.

I want you to think seriously about the activity that you carry out the most in your life. If you were to keep a daily diary for a week or two and were to record what you do with your time, you will find out what makes you feel the best.

Just look at what you do the most, because you will always find time for the thing that makes you feel good.

You will find out that it is based on past experiences; on templates of the past. Every time you were involved in that activity in the past, that activity gave you acceptance, recognition, or a positive response from other people.

It may be something that you were good at. It may be something that you could do that most other people couldn’t do. So every time you did it, you stood out. People would notice you and say,

“Wow you’re pretty good at that.”

How I Received Acceptance and Recognition

In my youth I went through a long period of insecurity, not knowing who I was. And one of the things that helped me break free of that was the ability to play music.

I would be visiting with complete strangers. I’d see a guitar lying in the corner and I would say,

“Oh I see you play the guitar.”

They would usually say something like,

“Oh I mess around a bit.”

I would say, “Can I have a look?”

I would pick up the guitar and begin to strum and play. And they would say,

“Wow, I never knew you played the guitar.”

Then everybody would gather around and say,

“Somebody is playing the guitar. Hey can you sing us a song?”

Music became something that could put me right into the center of the crowd and make everybody notice me, whereas before I was just a blob on the wall.

I was not naturally one of the ‘beautiful people’. So I found an ability that could give me acceptance and recognition. When I became involved in church, one of the first things that I could do was play in the church band, and people began to notice me.

I brought together a group of young people and formed a singing group. We became so famous that the pastor would sometimes just call us up, unprepared and say,

“Hey, do you think you guys could sing a song for us tonight?”

I was the top dog there in charge of the group. I would say,

“Come on guys, let’s do it.”

We would be walking up and everybody would be whispering,

“So what song are we going to sing tonight?”

It was my decision. The pastor would look down and say,

“Brother Les, do you think the youth choir could sing tonight?”

I would say, “I think we can do it.”

It was an amateurish little group, but you know what? I was recognized. They wouldn’t let me stand behind the pulpit and preach. I wasn’t involved in terribly much else in the church. But every meeting I was up there at the front.

And when you are at the age where you are interested in members of the opposite sex, it is quite something to be up there playing and seeing all the good looking women looking at you.

I found an ability that brought me into the center of the crowd; an ability that could give me acceptance and recognition. That ability became so strong in my life, that even to this day if there is nobody else around and I’m sitting in my room playing music, it makes me feel good.

I have given it to the Lord to anoint and develop further into a ministry. I want to flow under the fullness of anointing, so that I can stand up and reach many people and minister to them with the ability that God has given me.

But it is not my prime calling. When I asked the Lord about it He said,

“I called you to preach and teach first.”

The Way People React Affects You

Preaching and teaching isn’t that easy. This is because when you stand up to preach and teach, sometimes people fall asleep and they have that look on their face that says,

“I wish I was somewhere else.”

Sometimes when you think you have preached the most wonderful message, you walk out afterwards and people start to avoid you. You think,

“They didn’t like it did they?”

Well they probably didn’t like it because you hammered and convicted them under the anointing of God. But you tend to think,

“They didn’t like it. They don’t like me. I must have preached really badly.”

Can you see how dependent we are on what other people think? Most of the reason you are not accomplishing anything in life, is because you haven’t discovered what to do that makes other people respond positively.

So you take the abilities you think you have and compare them with what others have. Somehow it always seems that they can do it better.

This always happens when you are too concerned about what others think.

Chapter 07

Problems Finding Your Destiny

Chapter 07 – Problems Finding Your Destiny

Problem No. 1 – Unhappy About Who You Are

Here are the problems with finding your destiny. Firstly you have a sense of unhappiness with who you are.

You say, “It’s not fair. Why did God give other people all these great abilities that make them famous? God gave this guy a beautiful rich baritone voice, and I sound like a squeaky little mouse when I speak. Some people sing like angels. I sing like a fallen angel.”

You start to compare yourself with others because you are unhappy with what God gave you.

Your starting point must be to look at what you have. Then start to thank the Lord and be happy for who and what you are, and stop looking at other people and what they are. Because you see if God made you like them you wouldn’t be unique.

People Don’t Like Being Unique

We don’t like to be unique. We like to be in with the in-crowd. But just take a good look at the in-crowd, and who is leading the pack? It is the one who is outstanding and different.

It so often bothered me to see people raving about a singer that I considered having an inferior singing ability. But nobody even notices singing ability. They like the style - as noisy and as guttural as it may be.

Singers who are known to not have a good singing voice have become famous, simply by the way they act on stage. Why is this?

It is because what they do is different. And the person who boasts in his uniqueness is the one who will be proud to say,

“I am different to everybody else. Isn’t that wonderful?”

But most people don’t say that. They say,

“I’m different to everybody else. I’m a reject. I’m the runt; the black sheep.”

Rejoice in Being Different

I remember the first time we had a dog that had puppies, and one of the puppies was a runt. What is a runt? It’s the one puppy that looks the most pathetic, bedraggled, useless specimen that you can imagine.

You look at all the good, strong healthy dogs, and everybody wants to take the strong, healthy ones. But who wants this weak little runt? It is half a dog – a pathetic looking thing with straggly hair and a neck that’s too long, or however it looks.

The most unbelievable thing is that as they grow up and reach maturity, the good healthy dogs look like just any old dog. But the runt comes out with a beauty that makes it stand out from the rest, and then everybody wants it.

It is like the ugly duckling story where it doesn’t fit in with the rest. But when it comes into that beauty of being the swan that is unique and different, everybody stands back in awe and amazement.

Are you still looking at yourself as a runt? You know the runt of the litter is always rejected. The runt always gets in last when the milk is almost over. Sometimes the mother will even push it away, because it is as though she says,

“I don’t want to have anything to do with you. You’re not one of my puppies. You’re too ugly.”

Are you a runt? It’s the most wonderful thing that could have happened to you. You are going to grow up to be the most beautiful specimen of all.

Boast in your uniqueness. Be happy with who you are. Be happy that you are different to the pack, because you know what? When the Lord looks upon you, He cherishes you as something very special.

He has a goal and a plan especially for you, based on what you can do. It is based on the abilities you have, not on the abilities you don’t have.

Problem No. 2 – Confusion about the Future

The next problem with finding your destiny is having confused goals about the future. There are so many things you want to accomplish; so many things you want to do. And one person tells you one thing, and another person tells you another.

So many who desire to go into ministry will look at all the big names out there and say,

“I want a bit of that, a bit of that, and a bit of that.”

In the end you don’t know who you are, and you don’t know what you are meant to do. You don’t know where to start first or which road to go down. You don’t have one clear cut, definite passion and desire burning in you.

So what you do is you try a bit of this and a bit of that. You go down this road for a while and it doesn’t pan out, so you try another one. That one doesn’t pan out.

You try another one and that doesn’t pan out. Maybe you try one of them again, and it still doesn’t pan out.

Eventually you have all these possible goals to head towards and none of them seem to succeed. You’re confused and you don’t know where you are going, and you sit there waiting for something to happen.

Well I can tell you what is going to happen. Every 24 hours you are going to be a day older. Every seven days you are going to be a week older. Every 30 days or so you are going to be a month older, and every 12 months you are going to be a year older.

After so many years you’re going to die while you’re sitting waiting for something to happen, unless somebody comes and kicks you in your behind and says,

“Let’s get moving.”

Problem No. 3 – Keeping Your Excitement Up

The third problem is an inability to keep excited about what you are aiming for.

So you got all zealous, you were motivated and you thought,

“That’s great, I can do that. I’m going for it.”

You began to move, laid out all your plans and spent all your money. It lasted about two days, or maybe not even that long. Maybe you managed to keep it going for a week, or you really pushed it for a month. Then what happened?

You said, “I just don’t feel like doing that anymore. I’m not excited anymore. It’s boring.”

How do you keep going along a path you have chosen? We’ll look at that as we continue. But if you’re unable to keep excited and motivated; if you don’t have a full desire to move along to the goal that you believe is your destiny in life, you will never reach it.

You will finish your life saying,

“Well I was hoping I would do that, but I didn’t.”

Then you will be one of those fathers who try to impose on your son what you never accomplished. And if he picks up your DNA he will fail just like you did. Maybe he needs to go and find somebody else to motivate him.

People Don’t Care About Your Successes

One of the things that causes problems and stops us from losing our motivation is not having anybody to praise us for our successes.

So you held out. You pushed through and followed the goal to the end. You made it. But now who is there who will say to you,

“Well done, I’m proud of you. I think that’s awesome. For you to have accomplished that is just amazing. Keep up the good work.”

Who do you have who will do that? Most other people are so busy trying to reach their own goals that they don’t have time to be bothered about when you reached yours.

And when you reach that success and you are all excited, they will probably be jealous of you. So don’t expect them to get all excited and say,

“Wow you did so great. I envy you.”

Well they probably do envy you, but they will never admit it. But you see if that’s what you are looking for, where are you going to find it? Hopefully you will find it in your spouse, who is probably the only person in this world who cares enough and could really rejoice with you in your successes.

You know as believers we are meant to suffer with those who suffer, and to rejoice with those who rejoice. We can only do that if we become like Jesus. Once again there is only One person in this world who cares.

When your spouse, your mom and dad, or even when your spiritual parents let you down, and those you look up to and admire let you down, there is One who will never let you down. He will never fail you, but will be there to say,

“Well done good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of the Lord.”

The Lord Will Praise You

The Scripture speaks about how one day we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ. And there was one verse there that used to puzzle me. It says:

And God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.

We are coming to receive our rewards, and everybody is going to be crying? We’ll probably be crying because we know we could have done better.

We might be crying because we messed up and didn’t succeed in what He called us to do, and we feel ashamed. Some of us might be crying for joy.

Some of us might be weeping because,

“Thank goodness it’s all over.”

It says He will come to wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there’s a wonderful verse in 1 Corinthians 4:5 that says:

And then every man will receive praise from God.

You say, “Well I’m really just a third rate Christian. I did so little for the Lord and messed up so badly.”

You know what? He is going to find something to praise you for. No matter how much you failed, no matter how useless you were, He will find something good to say like,

“I think you did a really good job there. I’m very pleased with you.”

Praise and Encourage Your Children

You know we should learn to do this more with our children, instead of always majoring on the negatives.

I look back on my life when I reached that stage of going through adolescence into maturity. When I needed to start building the goals, probably most of what I can remember that was given to me was,

“That’s not good enough. You can do better than that. How come you are not doing as good as so and so? You’re intelligent. I expect more from you.”

I tell you what, that really motivated me. I wanted to go out and conquer the world for that. No I didn’t.

I remember my first year at High school. The first term I came seventh in class. That was pretty good. Then the pressure came on me to perform, and in the second term I came twenty-second. I kind of stayed down there, considering there were only about 30 in the class.

I had no motivation. I had no-one to say,

“I believe in you and I know you can do better.”

I just had someone saying,

“That’s not good enough. You’re a disgrace to the family. I’m ashamed of you, because I compare you with my friend’s children, and they are doing much better than you are. What’s wrong with you?”

You need someone to praise you when you succeed. You don’t need to look for somebody to condemn you when you fail. There are thousands of them all around you.

You don’t need anybody to tell you how useless you are. They are available, offering their advice even when you didn’t ask for it. It makes them feel better about themselves to put you down. Who are you going to have in this world that will praise you for your successes?

Seeing the Beautiful People Succeed

And then finally you see others accomplishing what you failed to do. You see people standing up and receiving the praise and the acclaim for succeeding where you failed.

It makes life miserable and devastating. It makes life not worth living. It takes away your entire destiny and you say,

“Well I never made it. I might as well give up and fade into the background. I’ll just get a job that gives me enough money to get by, to live and to eat.”

It changes your whole approach to life. You fade into mediocrity and you become a little nobody, because you see yourself as useless. You have given up all hope of ever succeeding, because there are too many beautiful people out there that are doing what you didn’t do.

So how are we going to overcome all of this? It’s a great help when you can have somebody there like a mother and a father, a spouse, spiritual parents or mentors - those that can encourage and motivate you and help you to keep going.

Chapter 08

Taking Charge of

Your Life

Chapter 08 – Taking Charge of Your Life

At the end of the day your life is in your hands. And even the Lord Jesus will not impose Himself on you. He will not force you or push you in any direction that you do not desire to go.

He will be there to help you, but you must take control of your life. You must make a plan for your life. And you must determine that you are going to go out, and you’re going to succeed and do something with your life. You must find your destiny.

How are you going to do that? Well a good place to start is by coming into His presence.

In my book entitled ‘Transformed by His Presence’, in the first Section I shared many different methods of how to come into His presence, how to be aware of His presence, and how to communicate with and speak with the Lord Jesus.

What the Lord Created You for

Take every one of those methods and use them to find out who you are and who you are meant to be. Use it to find out why you were put in this world, and what your destiny is in this life.

If there is anybody who can tell you, it is going to be the one who created you, because He made you for that purpose.

Find out what He created you for. Find out what He desires for you, why He made you the way He did, and what He intends for you to do with it.

One of the best methods to use is the method of journaling that I spoke about. This is for one very important reason. To journal means to write things down. And when you’ve written it down, you have a permanent record of it. You start to write down and paint a picture of who you are.

It might help to go back into the past first, and then return to the present. Take a fresh look at yourself and your experiences in life, and come to a decision concerning who you really are.

Dealing With it Practically

As you journal it and write it down, the plan and the picture begins to come together. Now go through the list of each key to find your destiny that I gave you:

1.      Knowing who you are.

2.      Being happy with who you are.

3.      Knowing where you are headed.

4.      Becoming excited about the goal you are headed for.

5.      Having someone who accepts you.

6.      Having someone who recognizes you.

7.      Having good templates from the past reinforced towards the future.

Go through all of these, check each one and say,

“Is this in place? Do I have this key in my life? What must I do to bring it into place?”

Once you’ve done that, go through all the problems you are having.

1.      Are you unhappy with who you are?

2.      Are you confused concerning your goals for the

future?

3.      Are you unable to keep excited about what you are aiming for?

4.      Do you not have anybody to praise you for your successes?

5.      Do you keep seeing others accomplishing what you have failed to do?

Go through those problems. Deal with each one, and with His help and with the wisdom that He gives you as you journal, overcome every one of them.

Look for the Good and the Bad

Now find out what you are good at and what you enjoy. Write it down. Don’t be modest.

Supposing you were selling yourself, or supposing you were applying for a job or for the position of spouse.

What do you have to offer? Find all your good points. Find all the things you are good at and the things you are excited about. Sometimes they will overlap; other times they won’t.

Now find out the things you are lacking that you need to get. Start comparing your desires with your abilities and see where they don’t overlap. See what things you desire and would really like to have, but you don’t have them. Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself,

“Is this thing within my reach? Am I able to play basketball being 5 foot 6 inches tall? I probably could – but not very well. So let’s just forget about basketball. I wasn’t made for it.”

That’s just a natural skill. Be honest about who you are, about what you have, and what you are capable of getting. And ask the Lord to show you how to get what you are capable of getting and really desire.

I’m going to be sharing in the next chapters how to use some of these principles. I’ll show you how to reach out and develop things that you don’t have, and how to build all of these things. This is just the introduction.

Bringing it Together

Then you bring all of these together. You bring all of the things you are good at, and all the things you desire and that you plan to develop in your life. Now you have a final picture not only of who you are, but of who you will become.

That is your first goal - to become that person. Unless you have that clear picture of who you are and who you will become, you have no goal in life. So your first goal in life is not to get a million dollars. If that is your aspiration, your first goal is to become a millionaire.

You say, “Well I thought a millionaire was somebody who has at least a million dollars.”

Yes, if somebody suddenly put a million dollars in your bank, you could be classed as a millionaire. But would people be coming to you and saying,

“Could you show me how you became a millionaire? I would like the secrets to your success.”

Your only key may be,

“Keep buying lottery tickets and keep going to Las Vegas.”

You see when you can see yourself as a millionaire and have a millionaire mentality then the millions will come in automatically.

Work first on the goal of becoming who you want to be. Once you become who you want to be and who God says you are going to be, then when you become that person, the success and everything that you do will become automatic.

So in conclusion, you need to set a goal for your life. You need to find out what burns in you the strongest and you need to find ways to fulfill your desires.

You will do all of these by coming into His presence and letting Him help you with this. Then once you have all of these together, just go and do it.

Don’t say, “Well the Lord showed me very clearly what His plan is for my life. I’ll just wait until He does it now.”

He’s not going to do it for you. He will help you and He will live His life through you. He will give you abilities and He will encourage you and motivate you.

But at the end of the day you have to take the step. You have to go into action and make it happen. It is your destiny, not His.

Jesus Fulfilled His Destiny

Jesus fulfilled his destiny when He walked this earth, right down to the last detail. He did it in full cooperation with His Father, who told Him step by step what to do. But in the end, even as Jesus stood ready to face the cross, He had a choice.

He could have called the angels to come and wipe out all the enemies and rescue Him. But He made a choice based on the will of His Father. And that choice made him so famous that even our calendar is based on his birth.

Wow, imagine if one day they had the Les Crause calendar? Imagine if everybody out there was using my name for something they do all the time? Everybody would know about me, even though they may never have heard about me. They would know and demonstrate it daily.

That would be an awesome goal to aim for. I don’t aspire that high. I certainly would like this ministry to be a household name all over the world. And that’s my goal and my aspiration.

One day people will be talking about this ministry and they will never have even heard who Les Crause is. But that’s okay. My goal would have been accomplished.

Now you’re ready to face the future. You’re ready to build a life time of success. We’ll show you further how to do this as we carry on.

Section 03 – Developing Core Desires

Chapter 09

Staying Motivated

Section 03 – Developing Core Desires

Chapter 09 – Staying Motivated

Psalms 37:4 says:

Delight yourself also in the LORD [Yahweh]; and he will give you the desires of your heart.

When was the last time you became excited about something - I mean really excited? You just made up your mind that you were going to get out there and do this thing.

You were going to conquer the world, and you were going to overcome. You were going to do something new. You were going to… going to… going to…

Think about fairly recently. How long did it last? Why is it that we always get excited about things?

We get new ideas. We get a real desire building up in us to do something or to change something in our life, but we lose the motivation. We just don’t keep it up anymore. I think every single person knows this experience.

Lack of Motivation a Common Problem

How can you keep the motivation going? That is the million dollar question which, if you could answer, would probably lead to success in life.

You need to not only get excited about something, but keep excited about it for a little longer than 20 minutes - or a day, a week, a year or 10 years. That’s really pushing it.

But you know every single person who has succeeded in anything had to have a desire which lasted a bit longer than our desires normally last. If you are to succeed in anything, you need to have a desire that lasts a little longer.

Self-help and Motivation

In English we have this word – motivation. It’s become a big thing out there for people to become motivational speakers. In fact it has become big business.

We’ve recently been looking at some of the videos and reading motivational materials. We wanted to see what everybody else out there is giving.

You have this whole genre of teaching and training out there called ‘self-help’. And in most of these self-help groups you have this strong emphasis on motivation.

I did a bit of studying and tried looking up to see exactly what the word motivation means. Apparently the word motivation has not been used for that long in the English language. It is a fairly new word. When I tried to find somebody who could define for me exactly what motivation is, nobody could really say.

Now you know what I mean when I say ‘motivate’ or ‘motivation’. You understand immediately what I am saying. But how do you describe the word motivation? It’s a very complex thing. About all you could say is ‘to stay excited about something’.

Motivation means a reason for me to go on. I want to do this job, but what is my motivation? What is the reason for me doing it?

But you see it’s more than a reason. What is the driving force within me that keeps me going until I’ve finish what I started to do?

This is the one thing that is lacking from every person who fails to succeed in life. If you are to learn how to succeed in anything - whether it be in your natural life, the secular world, the church or in your spiritual life - whatever you wish to accomplish in this life is going to require motivation.

Know Your Purpose

I shared last time about finding your destiny in life; about finding the goal and the main purpose that you are here for. Perhaps you have already had a problem and are saying,

“Well that’s a good question.”

What is your main purpose in life? Is it to live as long as you can? Is it to stay healthy?

That’s pretty exciting. It means you have to do without all the good foods because they are bad for you. So your whole life is one misery of staying healthy?

There is nothing wrong with staying healthy, but it is going to take far more than that to have a purpose. What are you here for?

Once you find that purpose and you know your destiny, what is going to keep you pushing ahead until you find that destiny? There needs to be some kind of inner drive or motivation that keeps you going.

Sources of Motivation

Where are you going to get this from? People out there are buying motivational tapes, books and videos, and they are watching motivational speakers.

And when they’ve finished watching the motivational speaker or they’ve attended a live course and have been through all the lectures, they are excited. They are motivated and they leave there saying,

“I’m going to go and succeed. I’m going to conquer and overcome my weaknesses. I’m going to finally do something real with my life.”

It lasts until this weekend. And then what happens? They say,

“Well it was pretty exciting. You know while we were there in the seminar it was awesome. There was such an atmosphere. There was such a power and a vibe in the air – you could just feel it. You felt like you could go out and do the impossible, but it disappeared during my sleep.

“When I woke up in the morning I felt a bit down and a bit miserable. I had some pain in my body. And you know I just don’t feel motivated.”

Motivation Doesn’t Last

I’m sure you have had that experience. So you know what you have to do? You have to take the tapes and listen to them again; get all wound up again and motivated for another five or six hours, or maybe a day or two. Or maybe it’s really good and keeps you going for a week.

Statistics show that the motivation disappears soon. It takes about as long to get you de-motivated as what it took to get you motivated in the first place.

So you may have listened for an hour to a speaker. And by the time another hour has gone and you get out there and meet the negative world, it has disappeared and gone.

I remember one speaker, a guy by the name of Charlie Jones. He wrote a book called ‘Life is Tremendous’. It is probably about the only successful thing that he did.

He said he would see the same people again and again every time he had his Life is Tremendous seminar. They would come and sit through the same identical lecture.

Well didn’t they get it the last time? I mean they could have bought his book where he taught all the principles. They could read it again in case there was something they forgot. They could have memorized it.

But you see it wasn’t what he said. At the beginning of his seminar he would say,

“I don’t want you to remember anything that I’ve said. I just want you to remember what you thought about and what you felt as a result of what I said.”

That was great. They went out remembering how good it felt listening to what he said. But the feelings didn’t last. They had to come back again and again.

Motivation is Evasive

I have seen so many of these self-help speakers that have been going for years and years. They’re still teaching the same things now that they taught 20 or 30 years ago. And people are still going to their seminars to hear it again and again. The penny just never seems to drop. They just never get it.

Why? It is because motivation is an evasive thing. It comes from deep down inside of you. You can feel when it comes and you know it is there, but it is like a butterfly. You try to grab it and off it goes.

I’d like to look in this chapter at how we can catch some of those butterflies. You see if we can hold them down long enough they can stick around a little bit longer.

If you can just create some good feelings and some good desires that won’t just disappear, you can hold onto them and follow through. You can keep that motivation going until you reach the goal that you chose to reach.

Now where are you going to find those deep desires? You can’t get them from a self-help seminar, or from someone preaching a good, positive word.

Where are you going to find the right desires? You will find them deep down inside of you. Many of them are actually already there. You just haven’t identified them.

So I’d like to look firstly at how to find the desires that already exist inside you, because they are there. They’re just hidden away so that you don’t experience them and feel them all the time.

Chapter 10

Finding Your

Existing Desires

Chapter 10 – Finding Your Existing Desires

I would like to ask you a couple of questions and I want you to think about each one. I want you to dig down and look inside of you, and find that desire that is already there.

Think What You Would Like to Do

The first one is this: If you were free to do as you please and whatever you want to do, what would you like to do? Imagine there was nobody telling you what to do. You didn’t have a boss saying,

“You have to be at work at such and such a time.”

You didn’t have other people squeezing you into their mold, and you didn’t have to take everybody else into account. You had total freedom and liberty to do whatever you chose.

Imagine if tomorrow morning when you woke up you didn’t have to look at your watch and think,

“Oh boy I had better get moving because I have a meeting at 10:30. I have to get to work, and we have to make breakfast.”

Examine Your Long Term Desires

If you had total freedom, what would you like to do? Come on, there is something deep down inside there. What would you love to spend the day doing tomorrow?

For some people it may be just staying in bed. That is a pretty unproductive desire, but it is a desire.

I’m looking at something though that would go a bit longer than one day. I’m looking at what you would like to do every day for the next week if you were free to do that.

If you really want to sleep every day for the next week, when the week is up you should be slept out. I’m looking at something bigger than that.

Perhaps you would like to do something with your hands. Maybe you want to go into the garage and take a few planks, some nails, a saw and a hammer and make a box or construct something.

Maybe you would like to do some sewing. Or perhaps you would like to go and play some music. Whatever it is, it’s a simple desire, but you must start there.

You say, “That’s great. There are a lot of things I would love to do, but the kinds of things I want to do cost money.”

Having Enough Money

So the next question is: If you had enough money, what would you do? What goal would you aim for? What would you spend your time doing?

You say, “Well I always wanted to travel the world. I’d love to go on a cruise ship. I would like to visit exotic places and go on trains, boats and planes.”

That’s a good desire. If that has been burning in you for years, and you’ve always wanted to travel to different places, hold onto that desire.

You say, “But I’ll never be able to afford it.”

Just hold onto it. I’ll show you how to deal with the yes-buts later. I just want you to dream a bit. I want you to fantasize and get excited; to feel and to desire things.

You may say, “I’ve always wanted to visit Switzerland - that wonderful country with the snow on the mountains where they go skiing.”

Or, “I want to go and visit those German people with their oom-pa bands, and go to Italy and see the Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

Think about it. Let it burn inside of you, until you say,

“I just have to have it. I can’t live without it. I’m tired of sitting around here in this miserable back end of nowhere. I want to get out there and see the world.”

That’s a wonderful desire. Whatever your desire is, it is something strong that burns inside of you. And you know what? You’ve probably had it for years. It has lasted longer than 24 hours. It’s been inside of you for a long time.

You say, “Well I don’t really know if that’s what the Lord wants me to do.”

I didn’t tell you to find out what the Lord wants you to do right now. I want you to find out the desire that burns inside of you. We’ll deal with that desire and how to use it later. For now just find it.

Developing Your Skills

My third question is this: What if you could develop a skill that you don’t have right now? What would you like to be able to do, that you are not able to do right now?

Perhaps you want to play guitar or piano or do something musical. Maybe you would like to become an actor or a singer. Or perhaps you would like to become a preacher.

What if you were given divine ability to suddenly be able to do what you’ve never been able to do, but you have always wished you could do that?

You Are Not Born With Talents

You say, “Yes but some people are just born with the gift.”

Tell me have you ever seen a baby playing a musical instrument? Have you ever seen a baby just singing with an awesome sound that captivates the audience?

Well the sound that the baby makes might captivate the mother at times, but I wouldn’t call it a wonderful sound. A baby is born with the genes of its parents and a clean slate.

In my teaching on ‘Transformed by His Presence’, we looked at how templates are formed. Some are formed in the womb, some in childhood, and others are formed in late adolescence going up to maturity. A child is not born with natural ability.

You say, “Why is it then that the child of a singer always seems to be able to sing? The child of a musician inevitably can play.

“And you get these virtuoso musicians, who from childhood it seems, can just pick up a guitar and play. Or they can sit at a piano or an organ and just play it. They seem to have it just like their mom and dad. It must be genetic.”

Well which genes in the body determine your musical ability, or which ones determine whether you can speak well or not? You see everybody can speak and everyone can do things. They have the same muscles, unless they were born deformed or there is something physically wrong like a missing limb.

Every normal person has the same parts. There is a bit of variation between males and females, but by and large we all have the same bodily parts that we need to function in this world.

Why is it that some people can function in a way that we would call gifted and others cannot?

Spiritual DNA

They weren’t born with it, they developed it. They may have picked some of it up as we shared before, by picking up a spiritual DNA. Yes, if your parents had some ability you could have picked up their spiritual DNA. But you could have picked it up from somebody else as well.

You could have had a music teacher that had great musical ability, and as you absorbed her spiritual DNA you began to play like her.

You could have had a singing teacher, and you absorbed his ability and began to sing like him.

It didn’t change your bodily parts. It just meant that you were able to do with your body the same kind of thing that person was doing.

I’m just putting that in to give you some hope here, because you’re probably thinking,

“You know I always wished I could do this, but it’s not one of my gifts. It’s not one of my abilities.”

I didn’t ask you to tell me whether it is one of your abilities or not. I asked you,

“If you could be given that, and if you could develop that, would you like to have it? Does it burn in you?

“Have you often desired it? Have you been envious of people who have these things and thought to yourself, ‘Man I wish I could do that.’ ”

That is a burning desire. It exists within you. You can use that desire to accomplish great things in life.

Your Secret Desires

If you could change anything in your life right now, what would you change? Again I’m trying to help you find a deep rooted desire that has perhaps been in you for a long time. Perhaps it has died and you’ve given up hope.

But I want to make you think. I want to make you stir up all the feelings and all the deep desires of your heart. These are things that will help you to decide what in the future you are going to succeed in.

You say, “What about the Lord?”

Well in the fairy stories of the world, the fairy godmother appears and says,

“I’m granting you three wishes. Whatever you wish can be yours.”

There are so many stories about having three wishes. Some of them are humorous, others are stupid, and some of them are exciting. I know as a child I would sit and think,

“Wow, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could have three wishes?”

So if the Lord is going to give you three answers to prayer like the three wishes, what would you choose?

You say, “Well I’d love to be married.”

“I’d love to not be married.”

“I wish I was taller.”

“I wish I was thinner.”

What burns in you? What is important to you? And what do you pray about secretly that you would never admit to anybody else?

What is that deep desire that you’ve often cried out to the Lord for and said,

“Oh Lord I just wish that I could have that, or be that.”

I’m sure you have some desires churning in you right now. Have I stirred up some of your emotions? I hope so otherwise I’ve failed.

I want you to think about them and meditate on them. Then afterwards I want you to write them down, because these are things that have been inside of you for a long time.

These things are very strong and powerful, and they have the power to change your life if you will use them correctly. And with the Lord’s help I’m going to show you how to do just that.

Desires You Can’t Change

Now not all the desires that you have are good desires. And not all your desires are at the kind of power and strength that you can use them. So firstly I want to look at some deficient desires; at what you cannot change.

Okay we’ve had our little fantasy about the three wishes. You see if you’re a guy and you want to be a woman, then you have a problem, because your gender was set and it’s too late. There’s no place in God’s economy for a transvestite.

You say, “Well you know I’m really a woman in a man’s body.”

That is nonsense. Get rid of the demon. It’s a wrong desire. Get rid of it and lose it. It’s not going to happen. I don’t care what they can do these days with operations to change a person’s body. You are what God made you.

We can improve the body. Thank the Lord for the marvels of modern science. If your nose is too big you can probably have it fixed. And you can get implants if you really need them. I am not saying these things are wrong.

Perhaps you put too much importance on the physical, and that’s often where our desires are deficient. We look at our physical characteristics and say,

“You know I wish I wasn’t black. I wish I was a white man.”

You say, “I wish I wasn’t white. I would love to be Chinese.”

Perhaps you are not happy with being born in a certain part of the world and you say,

“I wish I wasn’t born in Australia.”

Changing Your Looks

Of course with your physical appearance, there are some things you can change and some things you cannot change. If you don’t like your hair cut it off, dye it, put it in a different style or maybe wear a wig. You can change things a bit.

You can try wearing high heeled shoes if you are short. I don’t know what you can do if you are tall; maybe stoop a bit.

All of us have things that we are unhappy with that we can’t change. Those are not the kinds of desires that I am looking at, because those desires are not possible. And even if they are possibilities, they are outside the realm of what will make you a success.

Many people think that they would feel better if they could change their appearance by having plastic surgery.

Have you ever read a book called ‘Psycho Cybernetics’ by a man called Maxwell Maltz? It is a very good book if you haven’t read it. He was a plastic surgeon and he spoke about how he would change peoples’ appearances.

He said in some cases it was amazing how a small change in a person’s physical appearance would change their whole character. In other cases he would make drastic changes and the person would still feel ugly. They would look at themselves and say,

“You didn’t do it right. You didn’t change me. I still look horrible.”

He showed them the two photos and you could see they were not the same person. But inside they still felt ugly.

You Are Unique

Well there is a way of dealing with that, and I shared quite extensively in the Transformed by His Presence series on how to find who you are. But let me mention again in passing the importance of accepting who you are.

The psalmist said,

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

And there is a psalm that speaks about how God looked down and saw how you were formed even in the womb.

You are a unique creature, and maybe the qualities that you have are not as unique as everybody else’s. But if you put it all together you can find out who you are and accept who you are, instead of desiring to change who you are for your whole life.

Trust and Praise the Lord

You must come to the place where you accept not only who you are and the way God has made you, but you begin to thank Him for it. Now there’s a good way to start.

Do you want to get rid of all those bad feelings? Start thanking the Lord for making you just the way you are. You may find one day that one of the things you thought was the biggest defect in your life could be the key to your success in this world. You have to trust Him.

Once you know who He made you to be, as you learn to walk in His presence and find out and accept who you are in Him, you can start taking some of those deeper real desires and start using those to build a life of success.

Chapter 11

Things You Can

Change

Chapter 11 - Things You Can Change

So far we have looked at the things that you cannot change. Now let’s look at the things that you can change.

What can you change? Mostly you can’t do much to change your body. You can exercise and you can diet. You can change and improve what you have but that is as far as you can go.

It’s great if you can do that. You can be physically fit and well and your life can be long on this earth. Your body is very important, but it is not the most important thing that will determine your success.

Just take one of the things that you desire to be and do. For example, supposing you want to be a great singer. Do you know how many great singers there are out there? Do you know how many people out there have awesome singing voices?

You say, “If only I could change my vocal chords so that I could sound like them.”

That would be wonderful. But do you know what the competition is going to be like for you to get out there and try to rise above all those thousands of people? It is better to find something that is unique.

But when it comes to your soul, this is the part that makes all of the difference in the world. You see your soul is your control tower.

I have taught elsewhere that God has put power and forces into our spirit; that the Holy Spirit dwells in there, and that the fullness of His power is available to us in our spirit. The spirit communicates that power outwards into the world via your body, but it always has to come through your soul.

I explained a concept called ‘templates’, and how they need to be built for the soul. I also showed how you can develop templates.

So what can you change? You can change templates, but I won’t go into that just yet.

There are three very important functions that you can change. They are your mind (your ability to think), your will (your ability to choose) and your emotions (a place where your feelings and desires lie).

Learn New Things Continually

How can you change your intellect? How can you change your mind and improve that part of your soul?

It’s very simple. You do it by gaining knowledge and by learning new things. You have the ability until the day you die, to pour new and fresh information and knowledge into your mind.

It will never become saturated and never run out of space. It is a sponge that will never become fully soaked. In fact you should be learning new things every day.

You know something that has really puzzled me is listening to preachers that had a good Bible training. You see I was denied the opportunity to go to a real Bible School.

I managed to get by with a bit of correspondence and a little bit in the local church. But I never had the money to go overseas to one of the big professional Bible Schools to get a proper qualification.

The Lord opened the way for my two brothers to go. But as for me, I just stayed at home. I lost out.

They are not alone. I’ve seen so many people like that who went and studied and prepared. And then you hear them speak. And if they really have some knowledge and ability, you’ll hear them teach and preach the same doctrines that they were taught in Bible School.

Well that’s great. You had three or four years of learning depending on how high you went. Now you get into a local church. Normally you only stay in a local church for so many years according to the standard status quo system, and you only have to preach once or twice a week.

So you know what? You have all these years of knowledge, and you can spread it out nice and thin to give everybody just a little piece of it at a time.

By the time you have run out of everything that you’ve learned, it is probably time for you to move onto the next church. Then you start a brand new series of Bible studies again on the foundational principles.

Time to Grow

The writer to the Hebrews said,

Having left behind the first principles, let us go on unto perfection.

By the time you should have been eating meat you are still sucking milk. You’ve been on your mother’s breast for 20 years. It’s time to grow up.

Your knowledge should be increasing day by day and hour by hour. But you just kind of float through your day and come to the end and say,

“Well nothing really exciting happened today.”

Let me ask you a question. What did you learn today that you didn’t know before?

“That it’s not a good idea to sleep in the afternoon? “

No I think you knew that. Think about it.

You say, “Well I listened to that excellent speaker called Les Crause. I learned so much as I listened to one of his messages.”

“That’s a good start. Why don’t you do more of that?”

“Well you know I was forced to do it. Somebody put pressure on me and told me I had to do it.”

Aren’t you glad that they did? You learned something didn’t you?

When last did you read a good book?

You say, “What is a good book?”

There are so many of those. Maybe I will give a list one of these days of some good books I recommend. There are some very good ones.

You should continually develop your knowledge. If you are to continually succeed in life, you need to know everything that you can about what you plan to do. You need to take one of those desires and add knowledge to it.

It Takes Effort

But most people are waiting for the fairy godmother to come and wave a magic wand and give them their three wishes. Then we do the Lord that way and we say,

“Lord I am asking you to provide. Give it to me – instantly. When I get off my knees let it be done.”

God has put it into your hands. When God made man He gave him everything he would ever need to succeed in this world. But we don’t like the ‘w’ word - work. Why not?

You say, “Because I don’t ‘feel’ like it.”

You see now we are getting back to desire. When was the last time you did something you didn’t feel like doing, because you really wanted the result from doing it?

You know every day I do things I don’t want to do, because I desire to accomplish certain things. I know that if I’m going to get this thing I really want, it is going to take a bit of effort. I gladly make that effort because of the result that I know I will get from making it.

You say, “I wish I could lose some weight and get physically fit.”

There are no fitness pills. You are not going to get it that way. You cannot get down on your knees and say,

“Lord, I ask you to make me physically fit today. Thank you, in Jesus’ name.”

Then you get up off your knees and you have super power and energy. The booster drinks give you a bit of energy and that lasts only so long. It is going to take work and it’s going to take effort.

Past Experiences Influence Decisions

Now why is it that some people can be at the gym every day, and it is as though they are addicted to exercise? I mean they just can’t sit down and relax like normal people. They’re always on the go doing something.

They say, “Let’s go for a walk today. Let’s do something physical and stimulating.”

You have seen those types haven’t you? They walk around with their big muscles and you hate them. I do because I just can’t be like that. What makes them do that?

You say, “Well they were born that way.”

No they weren’t born that way. They had a deep core desire within them.

I find it amusing looking at the history of some of these big body-building types. You’ll usually find the guy who really zeroes in on this the most, was a weak, miserable little runt that was picked on by all the bullies. He grew up with this burning desire in him.

He said, “Just wait. One day when I get big and strong, I will have the muscles, the strength and the power to never let anybody pick on me again.”

That’s a desire isn’t it? It is a deep desire that drives a man to exercise, to develop muscles and to do the body-building. It drives him to do the weight training, to go without certain foods, to take vitamins and do all the things that he can do to increase the stamina, power and strength of his body.

What drives a person to do that? What drives a woman to go without food to lose weight so that she can be beautiful? What drives a woman to have implants?

You see there is a deep desire there that probably came from experiences of the past. The emotions are the strongest influence of all. How do you change them? The knowledge that you have is not enough.

You see I can learn and I can know what I must do. I know how to make my body fit, how to lose weight and how to succeed. The self-help books have given all that man has ever discovered on what you should do. The knowledge is already out there.

Changing Your Will

And so we come to the next part of the soul that you have control over, and that is your will. How do you use your willpower to apply that knowledge?

One of the teachings that I gave in Transformed by His Presence, was how to break bad habits and change them. I looked there at how habits are based on templates of the past.

Now you can exercise your will and you can grit your teeth and make yourself do something. But if you don’t really desire to do it, it won’t work.

Chapter 12

My Personal Story

Chapter 12 - My Personal Story

I remember when I was forced through circumstances to go and sell life insurance to survive. It was the only job available to me where I could make a bit of money.

Oh Lord, who wants to be a salesman? Who wants to go out and ask other people to buy stuff they don’t want? You have to go and tell somebody,

“You need to be ready in case you die suddenly.”

Nobody is planning to die suddenly. Nobody is beating down the doors to buy life insurance, in case they die suddenly.

You have to go and bother people and upset them and say,

“What if you should die suddenly?”

They don’t want to hear that. That’s why they pay such good commissions for selling life insurance. Even after the person has bought it, they don’t hold something beautiful in their hands and say,

“Wow I’m so glad I bought one of these. I love it.”

You have to keep them worried that they might die suddenly or they will get rid of it.

Let me tell you, when everybody else was going home from work, settling down and watching TV for the night or whatever they do in the evenings, I was getting in my car and riding down the streets. I was knocking on peoples’ doors and saying,

“Hi, I’m Les Crause. What if you were to die suddenly?”

It was a great experience. People couldn’t wait for me to come. I’d grit my teeth and say,

“I’m going to go out there, because if I don’t make any money, we’re not going to eat. I can’t pay my rent and I won’t be able to provide for my family.”

I would force myself to go out. Eventually the sales started coming in. And you know when I did get a sale, I was so overwhelmed and excited I just wanted to go out and get more.

No I didn’t. I wanted to take a week’s break, because I finally managed to get a sale and now I didn’t have to go out for a while. I kept it up for a couple of years until my nerves couldn’t take it anymore.

You can’t grit your teeth, and by an act of your will overcome something you do not desire to do.

Development of a Core Desire

During that time I discovered a little minicomputer. It wasn’t even a computer. It was a glorified calculator, but you could program it.

It was a little hand-held device and you could program it to do calculations and things. You could put a little printer on it that would print out a tape. If you look at today’s stuff it was so primitive.

I thought, “You know I could program into this device how to calculate people’s life assurance needs, and I could spit out a little tape giving them all their figures.

“I could say, ‘This is what you have; this is what you don’t have. If you were to die now or if you were to live to your pension, this is what you are going to need. This is what your wife needs, and this is what your children need.’ ”

I’d take all the policies that a guy had and I’d write a program into the machine. I’d ask him what his salary was and what he thought his wife would need if he died.

I would say, “You’re under insured.”

That was quite impressive. It helped me in my sales, once I had it together.

If you have done any computer programming, you know that it really eats time. You can sit all day on one little program. And you know what? I love programming.

I became so excited about programming this thing. I would spend hours and days and write fancy little programs, and it would spit out beautiful figures.

It was awesome. I was bragging and showing it to all the other guys there. But they were coming home with the sales and I was starving.

But you know I enjoyed what I was doing. It was exciting. It met a deep desire in me to accomplish. I was very proud of my little program. I’d show it to everybody and they would say,

“Wow that’s really good. Do you think you could do one for me?”

That is when I realized I was not called to be a life insurance salesman. I definitely felt I was called to be a computer programmer.

That desire burned so strongly in me that I cried out to the Lord to deliver me from this pain of having to go and sell people things they didn’t want. I didn’t really believe in it anyway. It was just a way to try and make enough money to live.

The Cycle Continued

That desire gave birth to something brand new. The Lord led us to pack up everything and move down to the coast, about 1100 kilometers away. We knew that there was nothing waiting, but I knew I was going in the will of the Lord. I knew the Lord had called me to ministry.

Everybody thought I was mad because I didn’t have a job there. We went down and just lived in a Trailer Park for a while.

God brought to me a Christian man who was a life insurance broker, and everybody said,

“You learned how to sell life insurance. Why don’t you go and work for this guy and sell life insurance?”

I thought, “Okay Lord. I guess I was prepared for that.”

I contacted the guy and he said,

“Sure, I can give you so much commission to go and sell.”

So I had to go and see people and it started all over again.

Then somebody lent me a little home computer. It was much better than the stupid little thing I programmed before. I could program in Basic, that wonderful computer programming language that I think Microsoft created originally.

So I sat at home learning to program. It was exciting stuff. Then I had to go out and try to sell. I felt really horrible, but I had to do it.

Then this guy’s secretary left him. She used to type all his letters. I said to him,

“You know I really need the money. I can type. I’ll be your secretary.”

He felt embarrassed about that, but I said,

“You pay me what you paid her and I’ll type all your letters. I can do it.”

A Core Desire in Operation

What I didn’t realize was that he had been working on a franchise to sell computers. If I had never learned life insurance I probably would never have met this man.

I started the first day as his secretary and he said to me,

“Listen I have the agency to sell these computers. I’d like you to help me with it. I’d like you to learn all the software so that when people buy a computer you can teach them how to use it.”

I spent all day doing the things I love - and I was paid for it. It was awesome. Then after a while he said to me,

“You know what? People are asking for other programs we don’t have. I’m battling with all my paperwork. You’ve done a bit of programming haven’t you?”

I said, “Yeah, I’ve been learning.”

He said, “Do you think you could write a program where I could just type in all my paperwork and keep a record of it? It will help me know what’s done and what isn’t, and where I am.”

I said “I’ll give it a try.”

Before you knew it I was spending the whole day programming and getting paid for it. It was awesome. It was exciting and life was worth living.

And so it developed on and on. Eventually the Lord opened the way for me to go completely into that kind of work and to even start my own business.

Even today that knowledge and ability to program is still there. And it is still fun to sit down and write a new program. It is not as much fun as it used to be, because I have greater desires now that concern the Kingdom of God.

But you see it’s your desire that drives you on. You can educate your mind. You can grit your teeth and try and use your willpower, and you can even change your habits up to a point. But the final goal always is to create the right desires.

As you fill your head with knowledge, the more you see what you can do and the more you begin to desire it. And when you change your habits, your habits are continually driving you to the place of saying,

“I need to be able to do this thing that I desire.”

It always focuses in to what you feel, because as I said in the Transformed by His Presence teaching, we always do what we feel.

This really excites me, and it should excite you too. I want you to get stirred up. There are things that you can change.

The most important thing that you can change is to take those desires and build them up until they are fiery red hot. Add a bit of faith, hope and love to them and release the power of God, and God will create for you the very things you desire.

He said in his word,

Delight yourself in me, and I will give you the desires of your heart.

There’s nothing wrong with those desires. God put them there.

Watch Out for the System

Now there are some desires that can violate your life’s purpose, and that is why you need to find your life’s purpose. Be very careful that the things you desire fit in with your destiny and with your purpose in life.

Sometimes keeping the wrong company can create wrong desires as well. So there are a lot of negatives that you have to watch out for. And above all are the things that violate God’s purpose for your life and violate His laws.

The most dangerous is what we call ‘the system’. What is the system? The system is the way the world does it. There is a system in the world and a system in the church. It is doing what everybody else is doing; getting in with the ‘in crowd’.

The biggest thing you will always see, whether it is in business or social or anything else, is the idea that you must have contacts. These are people that you can pull stuff out of or you can learn stuff from.

I am not talking about contacts here, but mentors. Be very careful who mentors you. You can have many mentors. And in a limited sense you can have spiritual parents as I taught previously.

But the most dangerous system of all is the system of this world which is controlled by Satan and his demon forces.

Do not get caught in the system of this world, because the way the world does things is not the way God does things. So as you look at these desires that burn in you, don’t go out first thing and find out how the world does it.

The Lord led me recently to read almost every self-help teaching that is out there, until I’d covered all the main strands of thought and what they teach. And you know they have a lot of good ideas. But they lack the deep, inner knowledge of who we are and who God has made us to be.

They leave God out of it completely. You get the odd little Christian who will almost acknowledge that he is a Christian, and about the best he can offer you is to pray.

I read one of them who spoke about how he tried different things and they didn’t work. He tried praying and that didn’t work either, so he had to find another way.

Don’t follow the systems of this world in fulfilling the core desires that burn in you. God has a purpose for your life. He has given you a destiny, and those desires must be fulfilled within the context of that destiny as we covered in the last chapter.

Developing Strong Desires

The third main point I want to look at is how we can develop desires. I want to look at these three areas:

1.      Desires that are already strong

2.      Desires that are not strong enough

3.      Desires that do not exist

Let’s look at desires that are already strong.

Where do your good strong desires come from? Why do you want to do a certain thing or be a certain thing? Where did that desire start? What made you decide one day that you would like to accomplish a certain thing in life?

What made me decide that my main purpose in life would be to stand up and preach the Word of God? It wasn’t natural let me tell you. I was so insecure and so incapable that I would get nervous for other people when they stood up to speak or sing.

Find Your Good Experiences

Where did it come from? It came from experiences of the past. Think back on all the good experiences you had.

In the Transformed by His Presence teaching we covered inner healing, about going back into the past and identifying all the bad experiences you had.

I’d like you to do a different project after you have finished this chapter. I want you to sit down, take out a blank piece of paper and pen, or open a new word processing document on your computer.

Go back over your life and write down all the good experiences. Go through all the good memories, through those parts of your life that you would like to revisit. Think of times where, if you could do the time travel thing, you would say,

“I would like to go back and relive that one. We had fun that day. It was nice.”

Give it a try. Write them down and start looking for some patterns. I’ll guarantee that right in the middle of those you will see some of the current desires that you have that are very strong in you.

You’ll see some events that were repeated over and over. You’ll see how when that good template was created, further experiences in life amplified it. That template has grown so strong in you now, that it has become a driving force in you with a very strong desire.

And now that template, which started in the past, is still with you in the present. And as you look into the future you project that template into the future. That’s where the desire was developed.

So start with those good templates and the good experiences of the past. Think of all the events that made you feel good and positive. Write them down and identify your existing desires.

Desires That Are Not So Strong

Then let’s look at some of the desires that are not quite strong enough; desires you have, but they’re not burning in you to the point of driving you to succeed. They’re kind of half-hearted desires.

The desire is still there, but it is not strong. It is the kind of desire where you are sitting relaxing, and in order to fulfill that desire you have to get up and walk somewhere. You are thinking,

“You know I really need a glass of water. But oh it’s so nice and comfortable in this rocking chair.”

You say, “Love, can you get me a glass of water?”

Love is not there though.

“Oh boy, you know I could really do with a nice glass of water now. It feels so good in this chair.”

You see, the desire isn’t strong enough yet. Do you know what I’m talking about? It is desires in life of things you would really love to be.

You know I would really love to have those muscles and a good shape – broad shoulders going down to narrow hips. I would really love to be able to just run for miles, and to play some tennis and beat everybody because of my stamina.

I would love to do that. But the desire is not strong enough for me to forfeit my afternoon sleep and go and play tennis instead.

You know what I am talking about. These are desires that aren’t strong enough.

Bad Experiences Block Real Desires

Why aren’t they strong enough? It is because there are some bad experiences along the way. There are some bad templates that are blocking you.

You may have had a couple of good experiences and you may have had the desire. But there are too many bad events or feelings, or bad templates from the past that keep blocking you and preventing you from fulfilling that desire.

So what must you do? You must go back and transform the templates. I showed how to do that in my other teachings.

So now that you’ve written down all the good experiences of the past, write down all of your desires. Now start to make a list of those desires that you wished were stronger but they’re not strong enough to drive you.

Then go back and be honest with yourself and say,

“Why do I not want to do this?”

I have so many bad templates with physical things, and I must practice what I preach now. I must go and deal with all my bad templates.

Deal with those templates that are blocking you and your desire will spring to life. And what should have been a core desire will once again become a burning fire within you that will drive you to overcome all the obstacles.

Get Someone to Help

You might need a bit of help as we taught in the last chapter. Find somebody who will mentor you; somebody to put pressure on you.

You say, “Oh no.”

I told my wife that I give her license to nag me when I am slacking on things that should be done. It’s not a good idea because your spouse will take advantage of it. So be very careful before you take a step like that. But it works.

Ask your husband to put pressure on you. And if it makes you mad it is good. Anger can be a very good emotion. It can drive you to success.

You say, “What? Aren’t we supposed to not get angry? Isn’t it a sin?”

Do you know what one of my strongest driving forces in wanting to stand up and preach well was? It was the anger at having to suffer through pathetic preachers for years, who droned on and on about nothing and who bored me to tears.

I looked at the poor congregation and I thought,

“Lord, if you could just teach me how to do this, I could get up there and improve on that. I could stop these poor people from suffering. It’s no wonder people don’t want to go to church.”

Find a spiritual father, because your natural father should have given you a goal in life. You need a spiritual father to take you beyond that; somebody whose DNA you could pick up. You can take their success. And some of the desires that are burning in that person can now become your desires.

Finding Desires in His Presence

And then finally there are the desires that do not exist. Why? Perhaps because you never had any specific experience, either positive nor negative. Maybe you just never thought about it.

Where are these desires and where are they going to come from? They are going to come from spending time in His presence, because when you come into His presence, you will find His desires.

You’ll discover that He has a purpose and a calling on your life. There is something that God intended for you before you were born.

I think there is no greater motivation than knowing that God has chosen me for a special purpose. To think that He has laid His hands on me right before I could do anything, and made a choice that He was going to use me one day in a certain type of ministry.

I think it is one of the most wonderful desires that can rise up in you, to please Him in everything and to fulfill His purpose and His calling for your life.

The Holy Spirit Will Empower You

How do you develop that desire? It’s easy. Jesus said,

“I’m sending you the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to come and remind you of all these things.”

Jesus gave all these things to His disciples. After His arrest and death they all scatted and all gave it up. Even the favorite disciple Peter did.

He said, “You know what? I’m going back to fishing. Forget this ministry idea. It’s a dead loss.”

On his very first day of fishing they arrived back on the beach, and guess what? Jesus was standing there. Jesus took Peter’s three failures, where he denied Jesus three times, and he turned the three of them into ministries.

He said, “Go and feed my sheep. Go and shepherd my sheep. Go and feed my lambs.”

All it needed was for the Holy Ghost to come down on the day of Pentecost, and there was Peter, the big failure, standing up in front of the crowd and preaching boldly. And 3000 people were saved.

There is no greater desire or motivation that you can have than the desire to fulfill God’s calling on your life. And there’s no greater power available to you, to help you fulfill that calling, and to cause the desire to burn in you, than the mighty anointing of the Holy Spirit. It is one of the most exciting things in this world.

The world thinks that sex is the most wonderful experience in this life. But they have never known the anointing of the Holy Ghost.

There is nothing more exciting than standing up with His power upon you; to stand and represent him, to speak His word and to release His power; to speak to demons, sickness and disease, and to change this world for Him.

There is no greater core desire than that. Maybe you haven’t had it, but you can get it.

It is one of the desires you can get very quickly. And you can develop it very quickly, until it burns in you with such a passion that everything in your life revolves around that one core desire.

We have something the world doesn’t have. You just need to come into His presence and find out. Come into His presence and experience His anointing.

And so in conclusion, core desires are what keep you going in life. If you can develop them, and if you can keep them white hot, they will automatically drive you on this way to success.

Section 04 – Going for your Goals

Chapter 13

Story of a Core Desire

Section 04 – Going for Your Goals

Chapter 13 – Story of a Core Desire

1 Corinthians 9:25 and 26:

And every person that competes for a prize has self-control in everything. Now they [do it] to obtain a crown that decays; but we [do it for one] that does not decay. I therefore do not run with unclear goals; I do not box like someone just hitting the air:

I was 18 years old. I’d been called up to do nine months of military training in the Army. It was hell on earth. They put us through our paces. They made us do things with our bodies that I didn’t think my body was capable of doing.

They pushed us to the limit on the amount of training and knowledge we had to absorb in our heads. They disciplined us to the point where you didn’t breathe or make a step without thinking about what you were doing.

We needed a break - and that break was about to come. We were going to have a weekend pass; a whole weekend away from the Army. Just the thought of it was exciting. It was a core desire.

But before we could get that pass there was Operation Flatfoot. They dropped you right out there in the bush, in the jungle, with a radio, a compass and a map.

They said, “Your destination is that Motel right there in the middle of the jungle. When you get there, Operation Flatfoot is over and you can go home for the weekend.”

I was the signaler which was sometimes great, except when they dropped you to go on a patrol like that. This is because the radios in those days were not little cell phones. It was a great big box that you strapped to the front of you. So little me had to carry this great big radio with the aerial standing out.

They dropped us in groups of about three or four people as night was about to fall. We had a couple of hours of daylight left. They showed us on the map and said,

“This is where you are and that is where you are going. Find your way there and be there by mid-morning tomorrow.”

So we headed out. We pulled out the map, charted our course, and looked about to see where we were, to see if we could identify the landmarks and find them on the map.

We took the compass and plotted a course to our destination and started to head that way. We had to watch that we didn’t fall into holes, trip over stones, get caught in bushes, and had to look out for wild animals, etc. It was not the kind of weekend trip I would have chosen for myself.

I didn’t like physical things and I sure didn’t like walking in the dark where I couldn’t see where I was going. But you know what? I had a core desire. I wanted that weekend pass.

Just the thought of a whole weekend without the sergeant breathing down my neck, without morning inspections, and without eating the junk Army food was awesome. What a desire.

So I pushed on. I carried that radio until I was dragging on the ground, and some of my friends that were with me took pity on me. Some of the tall, strong guys helped carry it.

Together we plotted our course, and we kept correcting every time we went off, until it was too dark to carry on and we had to sleep. First thing the next morning we were up again.

Well you know I would not choose to sleep out in the open, but we didn’t have any choice. There we were in the middle of nowhere and it was time to sleep. So you lay down on the hard ground and you slept.

There was a core desire burning in me. And that desire kept me going and heading towards my goal. My goal was just one thing – to make it to that Motel by any means possible.

When I finally made it there people were amazed that I made it, because I was not known to be physically strong and capable. Of course I had a bit of help along the way.

Do you think those guys were going to leave me behind? If I didn’t make it they also wouldn’t make it. That’s why they were willing to help carry the radio some of the time, otherwise they just would not have cared.

I made it through. In fact I made it ahead of some of the other people. And there came the promised goal and desire – a wonderful weekend away from the Army.

Now in the last section, when I spoke about core desires I didn’t indicate that because you were excited about something, and because you had this core desire, that suddenly everything was going to easily fall into place.

I could get up in the morning and say,

“Okay, here we go. I’m going to succeed.”

You say, “Succeed at what?”

“Well at my core desire of course.”

You Need Help to Succeed

It’s going to take a lot more than just desire to succeed in life. You’re going to need to have some goals to aim for and reach before you can fulfill that desire. You’re probably going to need a lot of help and motivation along the way, and there are times when you will want to give up.

They used to have a race in South Africa called the Comrades Marathon. It took place once a year on one of the public holidays, and it became so popular that thousands of people would join it.

It was a long, grueling run from one city to the other. And you’d see these thousands of people going off at the crack of dawn as they fired the gun. Everybody would start running with great zeal, from the top athletes, to the poor, feeble weak nobodies.

They showed it on TV, and it was so popular that everybody wanted to try it out to see if they could make it through.

You would watch during the day as the great athletes started out. The wannabies would start out with great gusto thinking they could make it. Then the jog would slow down to a walk, the walk would slow down to a shuffle, and the shuffle would become a crawl.

It was called the Comrades because people would help one another to make it through. I remember seeing scenes of people literally crawling over the finish line on their hands and knees. They were exhausted, but they wanted to make it just so they could say,

“I did the Comrades and I reached the end.”

Giving Your Desires Specific Direction

Whatever your desires may be, it is always going to cost you to fulfill those desires. I’d like to share in this section about going for your goals.

The first thing you need to do is to establish some goals. What I’d like to do here is to just give you a few simple guidelines. Mostly I’m going to give you several projects to do. These will help you to move from taking those deep core desires within you and translating them into some kind of definite direction.

Paul spoke about self-control and really aiming for the goal. He used the analogy of a boxer who is just boxing into the air. Well you know you’ll never learn to win a fight boxing into the air.

I know you have those sorts of boxers. I remember Muhammad Ali. He was always jumping around beating at the air. He just beat at the air and avoided the opponent.

It used to irritate me. He was always jumping backwards while the other guy lunged at him. But that was his style. He waited for the right moment and then he hit. He eventually weakened the person until his eye was bleeding or something and he couldn’t go on, and then he would win the fight.

I never really thought that was boxing, but who am I to say? I’m not a boxer.

Have a Clear Goal

There must be a definite goal. Well his goal was quite clear. His goal was not to knock his opponent out, but to make his opponent incapable of continuing the fight until he won by a technical knockout. And as far as I could see, for most of his fights that was his goal, and that was how he won most of them.

Well it’s a pretty good and unique goal. It made him famous for a long time because he kept on winning.

What was his desire? His core desire was to become the World Champion. What was the goal? The goal was to get as many technical knockouts as possible, and so retain that title.

Well there’s a bit more to a goal. There’s the way you fulfill the goal and everything wrapped together. I’ll be sharing about that in due course. But in the next chapter I want to try and help you to find out what your goal should be.

Chapter 14

You May Need

Extra Skills

Chapter 14 - You May Need Extra Skills

I want to look firstly at something that you’re going to need in addition to your core desires. You see I may want to really go out and accomplish great and wonderful things. I may want to become a star basketball player.

To do that I will have to learn to be one of the greatest high jump experts in the world, because I’m not tall enough to drop the ball in. I will have to jump about 6 feet.

You say, “Well it’s stupid for you to want to play basketball.”

No it’s not. It’s just that to do it I will need to spring like a kangaroo. If I can become like a kangaroo my height won’t count against me anymore.

You see I’m going to need a skill that other people probably don’t need, in order to become a basketball star. And people will no longer speak about Michael Jordan. They will speak about,

“Les Crause - the greatest basketball player at 5 foot 6 that the world has ever seen.”

Well I can think of easier things to accomplish, but if that’s your core desire go for it. You see, you will have to firstly consider not only your desires, but also your skills and abilities. The two have to work together.

So before you can go setting your goals and a way of fulfilling your desires, you need to first find out what you are capable of doing. Do you have the ability or the skill right now to accomplish and reach those goals? If you don’t, then you have a bit of work ahead of you.

Look At Your Skills

So let’s start here. Let’s start with the skills that you already have. Those skills will fall into the realm of:

1.      Your physical skills - what your body is capable of

2.      Your mental and emotional skills - all the things that lie within the realm of your soul

3.      Your spiritual skills - what you have in your spirit

Your starting point is to make a list of all the skills that you do have. Go and stand in front of a full length mirror and look at yourself. You should be used to that by now. You do it every day. What do you see? What skills and abilities do you have?

Imagine you needed to advertise yourself for other people to want to take you and use you. If they were to be involved with you or get to know you better, what would you sell? What are the features and the benefits that other people could have by getting to know you?

And so you could write down:

1.      I’m one of the most beautiful women in the world

2.      I’m just a good looking guy

3.      I can kick a ball really far

4.      I can pull funny faces and make people laugh

You’ll be amazed what skills you can find. Be honest with yourself.

If you were going for a job interview, what would you present to your prospective employer to make him want to employ you?

You would go in there and say,

“Well you know I’m not very good at anything, but I’ll give it a good shot.”

I’m sure you’ll get the job first. Not. I think you know better than that.

Our Personnel Business

I remember years ago we tried to run a personnel business where we would find prospective employees for companies. The idea was that if you could supply a company with somebody that they wanted to employ, they would give you a portion of the first salary. Sometimes they would give you the whole of the first month’s salary as your commission.

It was pretty good business. You could make a lot of money if you placed somebody in a job.

So what did you look for? You had to learn to look at the person and find out what they already had. You looked at all their Educational Certificates and sporting accomplishments. You wanted to look at who they knew - anything that would make this person a good prospect.

Find Your Unique Selling Points

Well what kind of prospect are you? If somebody were to put an advert in the paper, would they be looking for you?

Imagine now that you are such a person putting an advertisement in the paper. How would you sell yourself? What would you present as all of the good qualities that you have?

You see these are your skills and your abilities. You’ll be amazed how many abilities you have; how many things you can do that you didn’t really think were that important. But as you look around you, you find that there are some things you can do that others can’t do. It makes you stand out and makes you special.

I remember in my younger days when I used to do press ups every day. I did it to try and develop some chest muscles because I was so skinny. Of course I wish I could be skinny like that again, but things change with age.

So every night I would do these press ups and sit ups – whatever I could do to try and build some muscles. And I remember the one day somebody came up with a brilliant idea.

You would drop a matchbox or a small object on the ground. Then you would go down with your hands, pick it up with your mouth and go up again.

The difference was you wouldn’t go down on two hands like you would normally do with a press up. You would do it with one hand only. So leaning on one arm, you would go down, pick it up and come up again.

Nobody in my class could do it, but I could do it. Of course I discovered afterwards that the reason was because other people had long arms and I had short arms. But that didn’t matter. I was the star.

I would brag and I would challenge anybody out there and say,

“Come on, see if you can do it.”

They would go down and I’d say,

“Let me show you.”

They would say, “Wow, you have some muscles.”

I had a skill nobody else had. I didn’t even know I had that skill until somebody said I should try it.

Try Out New Things

You would be amazed what skills you have that maybe you never tried. Try and do a few things that other people do and say,

“I can do that.”

I grew up with that attitude. I would see somebody doing something and I would say,

“I can do that.”

I would see a preacher standing up and taking the Word of God, and making the same kind of mess out of it that a lot of cooks do out of good food. I would say,

“I can do that. I can do better than that.

What skills do you have? What abilities do you have?

Even going on to the spiritual side, what about the anointing of God or the gifts of the Spirit? What about the ministries that you have developed and God has given you? What can you do that you can offer and use to fulfill those desires that are in your life?

Work on What is Lacking

And then look at the skills that you don’t have, but the skills that you will need in order to accomplish your desires. You see if you are going to reach a goal and fulfill what you desire, if you don’t have the ability to do it, then you are going to desire it for the rest of your life.

It will continue until you come to the place where you make up your mind that this is what you are going to do. Then you will make the effort to obtain the needed abilities and skills, whether it be knowledge or a physical skill.

You see if I am planning to become the table tennis champion of North America, I will have to play a lot better than I do right now. Yes I play pretty well. At least I thought I did, until other people came along and beat me.

I realized that I have a skill, but it is not as good as it could be. And if my goal is to become a champion, that skill will have to be improved. I will have to learn to develop other skills that I didn’t have.

You see if the desire is strong enough, you will make the effort to develop that skill, whether it means developing your body, your mind or your spirit.

You want to rise up and be a great preacher. You want to move in signs and wonders and turn the world upside down for the Lord.

You’re going to require the anointing of God to do that. You are going to need far greater faith than what you have right now, and a greater measure of His love in order to accomplish that. It is going to take some effort.

Have the Right Desires

You need to look at it and say,

“I don’t love enough.”

You know I hear people saying,

“Well I know I should go out and win the lost, but I really don’t have a desire to win the lost.”

They want the Lord to say,

“There it is. You have the desire.”

Suddenly he has the energy to do what he didn’t want to do.

Forget it. If you don’t have a core desire to go out and reach the lost, then don’t go out and do it. You will fail. You will persuade a whole lot of people to never ever think about getting saved. You’ll do more harm for the Kingdom of God than good.

Leave that to people who have the burning desire. Don’t get it mixed up. Start with your core desires, not what everybody else told you that you should do.

You say, “Well you know everybody in the church is aiming for Prophetic Office. I’m going to be a nonentity around here if I don’t become a prophet.”

That’s the wrong desire. Get it right. Look at the skills you need and say to yourself,

“Am I able to obtain these? Is it within my reach?”

If it is outside of your reach you are looking at the wrong thing.

Look at the Timeframe

And then consider how long it will take.

You say, “I believe that God has called me to go and preach the Word to the Japanese.”

“Can you speak Japanese?”

“No.”

“So how are you going to do it?”

“Well I’m sure there must be a Japanese person somewhere who can speak English and who can interpret for me.”

“Do you know anybody in Japan?”

“No.”

“I see. So you’re going to go out and start the New Move in Japan, and you are not prepared to even sit and learn the language.”

You see you are going to need that skill. So here you go. You sit down and you begin to learn Japanese. I did know a few of the numbers in Japanese, but I can’t remember them now. I think one of them was ‘ichee’ or something.

You see I have a great knowledge of Japanese. I’m ready to go to Japan tomorrow. It’s going to take a bit of time to develop the skill. But you need that skill in order to fulfill your desire.

Consider What Effort You Will Make

So you need to ask yourself,

“How long will it take me to develop this skill? How long will it take me to learn the language?”

The answer is as long as it needs to; as quickly as you desire it to. You’ll have to be prepared to make the effort and listen to Japanese all day, memorize Japanese words and not speak English to anybody. You will have to just sit around talking Japanese to yourself all day.

Now you might say,

“Okay Lord I want this the easy way. I will pray in tongues and you speak it out.”

No, that’s not Japanese. Forget it. In any case you can’t understand what you are saying.

People have been known to learn foreign languages by the Spirit, but it’s not the norm. Sorry, you are going to do it the hard way. It is going to take effort.

If the desire is strong enough you will make the effort and develop that skill. But until you have developed that skill you cannot set a goal to fulfill your core desire.

And so the bottom line that you need to ask yourself is,

“Do I really want to do it? Is the desire strong enough for me to develop those skills?”

Now I can see you going through your list of core desires and starting to put a line through them already. Maybe those core desires were not as strong as you thought they were.

That is what we are trying to accomplish here. We are trying to help you take all those desires that you developed from reading the last section, and to develop them fully.

But you need to add to them the skills that you will need, so that once you have the skills and the desire, you can now set yourself a goal. You can say,

“Okay, that’s it. Now I’m going to go and accomplish this goal.”

Match Your Desires and Skills

So now you have sat down and made a list of all the skills that you do have. You’ve also made a list of all the skills that you don’t have, but that you need in order to obtain your core desires. Now let’s start matching them together.

You say, “Well you know I have this tremendous skill. I really play the guitar well.”

“Okay let’s see. What is your desire?”

“My desire is to become a great musician.”

“How strong is that desire?”

“Well you know I don’t really play that well. I can play in church.”

“Can you imagine yourself on a stage? You’re a pianist and you’re going to go on stage, and people are going to pay money to come and hear you play.”

Is that your desire? Match the two together and you will soon find out which of your desires are matched to the things that you do well. The best match is when a core desire fully matches a skill that you have.

Rate It

Now you need to give your desire a rating. You can give it a percentage rating, or you can give it a number from 1 to 10. You could widen it even more and give it a number from 1 to 100.

Whatever scale you take, your desire should be at the highest number. So if you are doing it at 1 to 10, your desire should be 10. If you are doing it at 1 to 100, your desire should be at 100.

Now you also need to rate your ability and say,

“Am I really good at this?”

If you are really good at it, and if you really desire it strongly, then you have a winner. If you set your goal with that skill and that desire matched together, the chances are very good that you will accomplish what you set out to do.

Chapter 15

Problems With

Core Desires

Chapter 15 - Problems With Core Desires

Now you are going to find that you will look at some of your skills, and when you come to put your desire in it isn’t a full 100% or a 10.

You say, “Well I would really like to do that, but it’s not something I dream about every day. It isn’t something I lie awake at night thinking about. I do desire it, but it isn’t my prime goal or desire. It isn’t my full passion.”

Well you know I really would like to go out and preach, but I can’t really see myself standing up there. I can’t see myself on the billboards that say,

“Les Crause is coming to town. We’re having a great campaign. Come and hear this wonderful man of God, who has toured the world, stirred so many souls, and changed peoples’ lives.”

It would be nice, but I really can’t see it. I don’t know if I’m capable of that.

You see there is a block. Somewhere there is a blockage, a fear or some negative attitude that is stopping it. And that blockage is going to lie within the realm of your templates of the past.

Find the Blockages

So begin to match your skills and your desires now. Then if you find one where the desire isn’t rated quite like it should be, make a note of it right there and start to find the blockage. If you can, find out why you don’t really have the full drive to take that skill and use it to its fullest ability.

Perhaps you failed in the past when you tried it. Or maybe you stood up to play and sing and people booed you. And as much as you would like to do it, you’re afraid to try it again in case the same thing happens.

Perhaps you thought you were a great sportsman, but you kicked the ball into the wrong goal. Now you know you can do it, and you really would like to do it. But, you’re afraid to try again because of what happened that day, when the crowds were shouting,

“Take him off. Take him off.”

It has never happened to me, but I’m sure it has happened to somebody.

These are bad experiences. They are blockages that prevent you from having that full passion and desire; from being prepared to take that skill and use it to its fullest.

Mentors Can Help You

Once you’ve found the blockages, there may be another reason why those desires are not at their full potential. Maybe you need some help from a mentor.

I have spoken about all these things but I am just bringing it all together. Maybe you need a mentor; somebody who does have those skills and who can teach you and train you.

In the sports arena a coach is essential. You have people with potential to be great sportsmen. But it is a known fact that a team will often win, not because of their skill or ability, but because of the coach who focused that ability and brought the best out of them.

Do you want to do great things for the Kingdom of God? You will not always accomplish it by yourself. Yes you can come into His presence and the Lord can give you so much. But there are times you need someone else to put pressure on you, to help you overcome negative templates of the past.

Again we’ve seen all of this, but before you can set your goals you must bring all of the principles together.

Remember Your Destiny

So you have your list. You now want to set your goals. The second section in this book was entitled ‘Finding your Destiny in Life’.

That is your first and prime goal. What are you here for? What do you exist for? At the end of your life if they were to write your story, and they were to put a headline at the top, what would that headline read?

Les D. Crause:

1.      The guy who thought he could preach

2.      The man who traveled the world and brought change to the face of the Body of Christ and turned the church around

3.      The initiator of the new standard in the Body of Christ that everybody uses today

4.      The one who launched the New Move and who bought revival to all of these countries

My life purpose is bigger than that, but those are just a few. That’s what burns in me. What about you?

You say, “Well you know I would really like to get married.”

That’s a great life’s purpose. You see that is a goal and it’s a good goal, but that is not your life’s purpose. Look at the big picture. Look at your whole life and say,

“By the time I get to the end of my life, this is the goal I hope to have reached.”

Then within the framework of that purpose, you now start to write down some of the other goals that you must reach in order to achieve that purpose.

Plan Goals While You Are Young

Now as you look at these goals, some of them need to be accomplished very quickly and in the short term. Some of them are going to take a bit longer, and they need to be accomplished over the long term.

How long a term can you allow for? Well if I were to set these for myself right now, I wouldn’t be setting the goals that I am going to accomplish in 50 years time, because the chances are I will not be here then.

I mean it would be great if I could live to 105, and I know the Bible says we can have 120. But the chances are that the most I have left to really accomplish anything in this life is going to be the next 20 or 25 years. It’s a frightening thought isn’t it?

If you are a young person, you have more years than that. Don’t waste the time. Start setting your goals now. And even if they are long-range goals, you have the years available.

Don’t wait until it is all over, until you’ve used up all your energy and your capability and then say,

“Well it’s time I start thinking about what I am going to do with my life.”

Jesus accomplished tons in three years, and you could too. It’s never too late. But you know Jesus spent 30 years getting ready for that.

What have you done with the last 30 years? Are you not that old yet? Well what are you going to do for the first 30 years? Set some goals.

Different Length Goals

So you have your life’s purpose right at the top, and you have some of these goals that are reaching towards your life’s purpose. Some of these are going to take a long time. They are long term goals and you know that. Some of these are short term goals.

You see if I am going to reach the world for the Lord, I am going to need certain things. If I’m going to reach a country for the Lord, and it is a foreign country, then I may need to learn the language.

Now I could learn the language very quickly. It doesn’t have to be a long-range goal. It can be a short term one. But it may take time to become known.

It may take time to advertise, to get out and meet people, to set up a structure and to reach out into the community. That is going to take time. It’s a long-range goal.

So my goal is to go and establish the pattern that God has given to me. I want to go and establish it in those countries. Well my goal is bigger than that because it is to the whole world. So I need to start with the continents. I need to say,

“I would like to have a ministry presence in Africa, in Asia, in North and South America and Australia – in all the big land masses.”

That’s a long-range goal. It is not going to happen tomorrow. It’s going to take time. I will need to meet people in all of those continents, train them and pour into them all that I have.

From there it has to spread further until I can have somebody in every country. And then from every country it has to reach out to every city in the country. We are still looking at a very sparse goal, because some of the cities are very big. It’s a huge goal.

So I have to start with the short-term goals. And the short-term goals are like what Jesus had - to find a handful of people to train, then to find a larger group, and a larger group still. Then I want to take those and let them spread out further.

Consider How Big Your Goal is

Now if your goal is to be in fulltime ministry and to build one of the biggest churches in the world, then your goal is too small. If your goal is to build the biggest church in the world, your goal is too small.

You say, “Well actually I was hoping I could just have 50 or 100 people. I want just enough tithes to come in to pay my salary and to build a nice little church building. We can have meetings every Sunday and have a great time, and I can minister to the people until I go on retirement one day.”

Well if that’s all you have, then the Lord bless you. You don’t have any skills you need to develop. Just be nice to people and preach the Word.

Take everything you learned at Bible School and spread it over the next 20 years. You could make it. You see if that’s your core desire, maybe that is all that God has called you to do. I’m not going to take it away from you.

For me it always gets bigger. As soon as I can see the goal in the local community, I want it in the whole city. When I can see it in the city, I want it in the country. When I see it in the country, I want it in the continent. And when I can get it in the continent, I want it in the world.

Start Small and Grow

Well you know when I started out I didn’t think I was even capable of reaching my community, but it became bigger and bigger.

You see your life purpose may start very small, but it’s going to build up and up. So start with what you have right now. Start with the main goal and main purpose in life that you have right now.

If your goal is just to reach the Prophetic Office, that’s great. Structure all your goals underneath that. But once you get there you are going to find that Prophetic Office is not enough. You will want to go to Apostolic Office. And when you get to Apostolic Office you will say,

“That’s not good enough. I want to become an integral part of the executive leadership of a huge ministry organization.”

As you set up your goals and you label them long-range and short term, give them a deadline or a timeframe. If you don’t give them a deadline you will never accomplish them. Ten years from now you will look at the goals you wrote down today and you’ll say,

“Those are still my goals. I haven’t accomplished any of them.”

Well maybe you didn’t write down goals that matched your desire. Maybe that is the problem. You have to work them together. If you have a core desire at the highest level, then you will accomplish it. If you don’t, work on that desire, and then set the goal and aim for it.

Three Simple Steps to Success

So now you have all your short-term and long-term goals written down. Now take each goal and say,

“What skills do I have to reach this goal? What skills do I need? And what level of desire do I have to reach this goal?”

There are three things that you should be working on:

1.      To develop the skill you already have to its greatest capability

2.      To develop skills you don’t have

3.      To fan the flame of desire until it is white hot

You’ll reach that goal as easy as can be. In fact nothing in this world can stop you from reaching this goal. When you wake up in the morning you will be thinking,

“I have to reach that goal.”

When you go to bed at night and your mind is turning over the events of the day, you will be thinking,

“I need to get closer to the goal.”

It is burning in you. You don’t need to make excuses and say,

“Well you know I was too busy and I was interrupted. People kept chatting me and taking my time. And you know I had pain. I didn’t feel so good, and I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

Don’t Fulfill Other People’s Desires

You don’t have to make excuses to anybody but yourself. It is your desires we are talking about here. The problem is you are trying to fulfill other people’s desires.

Supposing one of the senior pastors says to you,

“God says that you have to become an evangelist.”

You say, “But I don’t want to be an evangelist. I want to become a prophet.”

“I don’t care. God says you are an evangelist.”

“Okay. I don’t really feel like it but I’ll give it a try.”

Six months later you will be saying,

“You know I really am battling to become an evangelist.”

“That’s because you had no desire. Why don’t you desire to become an evangelist?”

“Well you know I really don’t like talking to people. I’m a shy kind of person. And the worst is I was in this church where the pastor was an evangelist. The only thing that was ever important to him was going out onto the streets and handing out tracts.

“I remember I took all the tracts, and I couldn’t come back saying that I never gave them out, so I dumped them all in somebody’s mailbox.”

Have you been there? If you are supposed to have the desire, then develop it the way I have showed you. But find out if that’s really what God wants you to do, and if you are prepared to do what He wants you to do. Otherwise give the opportunity to somebody else who really wants to do it.

Chapter 16

Start Prioritizing

Chapter 16 - Start Prioritizing

You have your goals and desire listed and you’re working on each one. Now give your goals a priority. Ideally you should be working on the short-term ones first because they are going to be here quicker.

You say, “Well you know this long-term goal is going to take me about 15 or 20 years to accomplish, but it really burns in me and I’m really excited about it. And you know I’m going to spend every day working towards that goal.”

“So what are you going to do for the Lord in the next 20 years while you are working towards that goal?”

Start with the short-term goals, and start with the things that you can accomplish now and very quickly. Set yourself a priority.

My Wrong Priorities

Now I want to tell you what most of us have as a priority in our daily work.

I remember how one time I was a Personnel Clerk, where you had to do all the paperwork for employees of the company. You had to do their salaries and vacation leave. You had to keep all this on file, and you had to write letters and do their pay.

I remember I had three baskets on my desk. They were the ‘In Basket’, the ‘Out Basket’, and in between that was the ‘Pending Basket’. This was for things that needed to be done soon.

Guess which basket had the most stuff in it? It was the one in the middle: the Pending Basket.

You see it would work like this. In came all my work for the day - a whole pile of papers. I would pull them all out of the In Basket and say,

“What do we have? I don’t feel like doing this one now. Put it in Pending. What about this one? I don’t feel like doing that now, so put it in Pending. This one will take me five minutes so I’ll do it now. This one can go to Pending.”

And so I would keep the little handful of things that were quick and easy so I could slap them out and then take a break. One, two, three and they were in the Out Basket.

I would think,

“Just look at all the stuff in my Out Basket. Now I really should get to that Pending stuff shouldn’t I? I really should. Well I’ll have a cup of tea first.”

I would have a cup of coffee and meet someone down the hall and we’d have a chat. Then I would realize,

“Wow it’s lunchtime already?”

You know I just feel so tired in the afternoons. Do you feel like working in the afternoons? I don’t. I hate working in the afternoons.   I would think,

“Just one hour to go until knocking off time. Let me pull one of those things out of the Pending Basket and have a look. I should start it. Well, let’s give it a try.”

I would start something and think,

“Oh no, I’m really not enjoying this. Put it back in the Pending Basket.”

If you’re the same, tomorrow morning you come into work and there is a fresh batch of stuff in your In Basket. So you take it out of your In Basket and leaf through it and say,

“Yeah I can do that now. But that one can wait, and that one can wait.”

About a week later your Pending Basket has now reached its limit and you finally begin to work on it. You start pulling some of the stuff off the top, and you work on it and half empty the basket. Now you feel you can take a break because you caught up on all of this stuff.

Tomorrow there is a fresh batch of stuff in your In Basket, and you do the same thing. You put it on top of the Pending Basket. Do you know what is happening to the first thing you put into your Pending Basket? You never get to it.

Then one day the boss walks in and says,

“There was a very important letter that needed to go out three weeks ago. I haven’t seen it. Where is it?”

You start digging through your Pending Basket, and there it is lying at the bottom. Now you are in trouble.

We Do What We Enjoy

It is human nature isn’t it? We’ve all been there.

You do this every day. You get a pile of emails in your Inbox. Which are the ones you answer right away? And which are the ones you say,

“I’ll do that later.”

More and more stuff comes into your Inbox and it starts dropping to the bottom. And the things you don’t feel like doing are the things that eventually you don’t do at all.

It’s going to happen in life, because your core desire is to get everything done so you can go swimming, or so you can go out for a meal. You do it so that you can go and play music and do what you enjoy doing, or so that you can have a social. You see that was your core desire.

Deal With the Most Important Things

Now take your core desires and prioritize what you should do first. You don’t have to put your greatest skill or your greatest desire at the top of the list because those will happen automatically.

In fact, once you’ve done all the things you don’t feel like doing, you will find that the one that has the greatest core desire will probably be the fun thing that you do feel like doing. So don’t put that at the top of your list as a priority.

Put at the top of your list of priorities, the most important thing that needs to be done. If you don’t have a full desire for it, your top priority and goal is to develop the desire and get excited about it.

You see how important is it that it gets done? Be honest with yourself. And if you don’t have the desire, what can you do to increase that desire so you can get excited about it again?

How can you have that driving force within you that will cause you to reach that goal? It’s good to write it down because you can see it better.

Now you’ve finally done it. You have found what you’re good at and what you need to become good at. You’ve found what burns in you and what desires you really have and you have found your life’s purpose.

You’ve put down all the short-term and the long-term goals. And if you’re an analytical you have it all laid out beautifully and systematically - in perfect diagrams, main points, sub points and sub-sub points.

Confirm it with the Lord

You say, “I have it together. I’m ready to go out and conquer the world.”

No you’re not. You left out one very important person – your boss. I am not talking about a physical boss. I’m talking about the Big Boss. What does He think about your goals? What does He think about this great big blueprint that you put together?

Your next and most important step of all is to take it and say,

“Okay Lord I did it the best I could. Could you check it over for me?”

You might want to find a human person to check it over with first, like your mentor or spiritual father. But the time will come when you have to give it to the Lord.

You will see the Lord reach into His pocket and pull out a red pen, and He will say,

“Scratch that.”

“But Lord, that was top of my list. I really felt that I could do that.”

“Not yet. Not now. Scratch it.”

He will look and say,

“I see you’ve left out a very important point here.”

“Well… yeah. I did think about that Lord, but it wasn’t really a core desire. I didn’t think that it should be there, so I just left it out.”

“And where did you get this whole section here from? You didn’t ask me about it. This doesn’t even fit in with your life’s purpose.”

“Yes Lord, but you know ‘so and so’ did that, and they became famous. I know I can do that too. Why can’t I put it in Lord? It’s a core desire isn’t it?”

“No, I have a higher purpose for you. That’s the purpose I had for them. It’s not the purpose I have for you. Take it out.”

By the time He is finished, what you had on five pages now fits on half a page. It could happen. Are you prepared to let Him do that? Or have you given Him a big yes-but?

“Yes Lord, I’ll do what you want me to do, but included in that must be this, this and this.”

Journal Each Part

Here’s what you do. You take your plan and you journal every single part of it.  Don’t try and figure it out in your mind. If you have developed the ability to journal, sit down, take each one of these things that you have written down, and ask Him on paper or journal out loud.

I have taught in many different places about different methods of hearing God’s voice. Do whichever way you find the easiest. Journal it through and find out what he says.

Before I make my notes I journal every one of the messages that I teach. I journaled about the principles that I am sharing with you here.

As you journal each part, make the changes that the Lord shows you, until you have the plan and the full set of goals that are in accordance with His will; in accordance with your abilities, and in accordance with the Word of God. They all build together.

Speak Your Goals Out

When you have done that, go through the whole thing and summarize them into several main points. Take those main points, write them down, put them on the wall somewhere and speak them out loud every day.

If you come into my bedroom you will see a piece of paper on the wall. It says this:

My Personal Goals

I have there seven points for each of them; seven points specifically for my ministry and seven points for myself personally.

You ask, “Why seven?”

I don’t know. It just happened that way. Seven is God’s perfect number. I thought it was a nice number to go for.

You say, “What happens if I want eight?”

You can have 20 if you like. But the less you have, the easier it is going to be for you to remember them. You will find me sitting on my bed in the morning, or at night before I go to bed, talking to myself and reading out loud.

“This ministry is present and exists on every continent and country in the world, is a household name and sets a standard in the whole world.”

Those are pretty big goals. And yes, we are going to reach them because the Lord told me that that is what I must do. And I am doing what He told me to do and not just my personal desires.

Chapter 17

Normal

Does not Exist

Chapter 17 - Normal Does not Exist

My personal desire was to stay in the home town in which I was born, and to grow up and live a normal life and die there one day. People would talk about traveling around the world and I thought,

“Who would want to do that? That is stupid. Why do you want to travel around and see what people do on the other side of the world? I’m quite happy here at home.

“I have a good job. It pays a good salary. I have a wife and family. I don’t drive the best car, but it gets us around. We’ll save up and buy better furniture, buy a better car, and buy a better house. We’ll enjoy life and be normal.”

The Lord said,

“Normal is not in your vocabulary. Die to it.”

Well you see I have a goal that gets bigger and bigger. And until such time as they begin to populate the moon or any other planet, my goal is for this world. That’s about as big as you can get. God has a big vision.

I have some personal goals too, but I am not going to tell you those until I accomplish them. One day you will start saying,

“Man you are really good at that.”

I’ll say, “Yeah, but you should see what I was like. I can show you my goals. Many years ago I started confessing that when I was really useless.”

Set your own goals. Build them and put them in place. And every day you look at that list, and with the power of the Lord and with His anointing you speak and you decree, and you cause the desire to burn in you.

You visualize it and you see yourself doing it. And you say,

“I will not die until I have done this.”

I have often remarked on this and it has become like a joke. I remember seeing a movie once where one little part really impressed me. These guys were in a battle scene, and one of the guys was hit. As they were busy fighting there, one of his friends turned to him and said,

“You’re bleeding”.

He turned to him and said, “I’m too busy to bleed.”

Just Do the Work

Well I’m too busy to die. When the time comes that I know I can just let go, like Paul I will be able to say,

“Well I’d really like to get out of here and go and be with the Lord, but I have a few things to do before I go. And you people need me around a bit longer, so I’m not leaving just yet.”

But when I’ve accomplished my goal and I have done all that God has given me to do; when I’ve handed it over to others that I can trust to take it over and to take the work further, then it’s time to go.

That’s the way Jesus was. The Scripture says that He set His face as a flint, to go and accomplish what the Father had given Him to do. And when He finally hung there on the cross and He had done all, He uttered those famous words,

“It is finished.”

He accomplished everything that the Father gave him to do.

And so in conclusion, locate and set in place all the goals that you desire to accomplish. And then daily transmute and birth them into the earth.

You say, “How do you do that?”

If you don’t know how to do that, go and get ‘The Way of Blessing’. There are two chapters there, one called ‘Spiritual Transmutation’, and the other called ‘Spiritual Birthing’. You should know how to do that by now.

Transmute and birth it into the earth and press on towards the mark as Paul said. Then the day will come, when you are about to enter into His presence, and you can say like Jesus,

“It is finished. I have reached the goal. I have accomplished what the Father gave me to do. It’s time now for me to get out of here.”

You can do it. Just set the goals and aim for them.

Section 05 - Planning to Succeed

Chapter 18

Know Your

Goals

Section 05 – Planning to Succeed

Chapter 18 - Know Your Goals

The scripture says in Proverbs 29:18:

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

We spoke in the last section about setting goals. We looked at finding your destiny. We saw how you could develop core desires, and how to set goals so that you could go for the goal.

In this section I want to look at how we are going to go for the goal, because without a clear plan to reach your goal, you will never get there.

I shared last time about laying out a very clear pattern and blueprint of exactly where you are headed in the future. I even spoke about giving some deadlines.

Knowing Your Goals Isn’t Enough

Now a lot of the success philosophies out there emphasize the importance of goals, and it is true. The Scripture confirms this. Where there is no vision or clear goal, or where you can’t see where you are going, you will perish. You will accomplish nothing in this life.

What most people fail to teach you is how to go about reaching those goals. You see, you can sit with the blueprint of all your goals, and you can even put it up on your wall and look at it every day. You can say,

“There it is. That’s where I am headed for. That’s my destiny and what I am going for in life. That is what I am going to accomplish this year, next year, in five years time - in 10 and 20 years time. And if I should live that long, what I will accomplish in 50 years time. These are my goals. Aren’t they awesome?”

People come to visit and you show them your chart. You say,

“Here it is. Do you see my goals? Do you see where I’m headed?”

Somebody looks at it and says,

“I see here that you said that you were going to reach this goal two years ago. Did you reach it?”

“Is that the date I said? Are you sure? Oh dear. Well you know I fully planned to reach that goal.”

But it’s a bit late now to try to reach it two years ago. What clear plan did you have to accomplish that goal?

In this section I would like to look at some very important things that you need to take into account and to apply that will keep you headed towards the goal. Because you see the goals are wonderful things to dream about, but dreams can become fantasies that are never ever fulfilled.

The Myth of Writing Things Down

Now let me ask you a simple question. How good is your memory? For most of us, it’s not terribly good. So the most important thing firstly, is when you think of something you must write it down.

You’ve heard that one haven’t you? You’ve heard it from plenty of the teachers of self-help and success philosophy.

They say, “Write down your goals and your plans. Write down everything you think of before you forget. And then if you write it down, you won’t forget it.”

That is such nonsense. How much can you remember of the things you wrote down? Do you know what? I have written so many songs already. I produced the words myself, all nicely laid out with verse, chorus, bridge and ending.

I sat down and I put music to it, wrote out all the chord changes that should take place in the song, and printed it out in a nice song book which we sing from every time. But if the time comes when I forget to bring the song book and I can’t sing.

You say, “Well didn’t you know the song?”

“Yeah, I wrote the words.”

“Can’t you remember the tune?”

“Yeah I can remember it. I wrote the music.”

“Well why can’t you play without the songbook?”

You know what? I don’t remember all the words, and I can’t remember exactly where to change the chords.

Well I wrote it down didn’t I? You know I’ve sung it 100 times over and over. I’ve read the words of that song at every meeting until we have became sick of it. And now I leave my book at home and we can’t sing.

You see just the fact that you wrote it down does not mean that you will remember everything that you wrote. There is only one way that you can keep it in your mind, and that is to keep reading it. You need to put it on the wall, and every day go and have a look at it and say,

“What were my goals again?”

People Rely on Written Things

And then you go on vacation for a couple of weeks and you forget to take your nicely written down goals with you.

You say, “Oh dear, what were my goals again? What was I supposed to accomplish this month? I know I wrote it down, but I can’t remember what it was.”

I sit and have a nice relax on the beach there in the warm sun, doing nothing, and do you think I would like to just go over my goals and think about them now. Oh dear, I left them at home.

We are so reliant on the things that we write. It’s great and it is important that we write them down, but you know what? Pieces of paper disappear.

You know there have been times when I’ve come to preach and found out I left my notes at home. Then I had to preach out of what was inside of me.

It’s not enough to write it down. It’s not enough even to read it every day.

Review Your Goals Continually

Now the greatest success philosophies out there tell you to write down your goals and plans the way I showed you, and to sit and read them two or three times every day. Yes it will work if you do it consistently. But you know I’m too busy to make time to sit down and read.

Do you know how much spare time you have? When you are driving in your car and you get a red light, now is the time to pull out your goals and read them. You have a bit of time. But the goals are at home on the wall. You can’t use that time.

You’re standing in the line at the bank or at the shop, and it is going so slowly because there is some granny in front there counting out all her cents.

Well this would be a good time to review my goals. But I don’t have them with me, and I would look pretty stupid holding up a big piece of paper while I am standing in line at the shop.

Memorize Your Goals

So what’s the most important thing? The most important thing is to memorize your goals.

So supposing I come to you and I say,

“What goals have you set for your life? What is your main purpose and destiny in life, and what are the main goals that you have set in order to reach that destiny?”

You should be able to say,

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There they are.”

Whatever number you have, you should be able to rattle them off without thinking.

“Okay now tell them to me backwards.”

Oh dear we don’t have that kind of memory do we? You see, even if I have my goals nicely written down on a piece of paper, I would need to actually memorize them.

I always used to do this when I was younger. I had a great memory. I would just say it over and over again, until eventually I could just close my eyes and tell you what was on the paper. I learned the books of the Bible that way, and I can still remember them. But it’s not an easy thing to do.

You know we have enough trouble actually getting to take the time to sit down and write down our goals in the first place. And even if you were so zealous that you finally did that, now you have to take extra time and effort every day to go over those goals again.

And now I’m doing something even worse. I’m telling you to go and memorize them.

You say, “Do you know how big my goal sheet is? Do you know how many fine details there are? There are dates and deadlines and all sorts of things, and you expect me to remember all of that?”

“Yes, because if you don’t you will never reach them. That’s why nobody ever reaches their goals.”

Introduction to Jim Rohn

When I first listened to Jim Rohn who was one of the leaders of the self-help out there, he gave this wonderful teaching on setting your goals. He was a guy who acknowledged God and was very sound in his teaching. He gave a workbook with the teaching, and I thought,

“This is awesome.”

I set all my goals and wrote them down. I took the time to write them all out nicely in the book, and then I put it away. Many years later while going through the junk when I had to move houses, I found my little workbook from Jim Rohn with all my goals in it. I read it and I thought,

“Man those are awesome goals. I wish I could reach them.”

I hadn’t reached one of them. Well I wrote them down didn’t I? I thought them through. I understood what I wanted to do in life, but life caught up with me. I didn’t remember those goals. I forgot them. As I continued in my normal day to day life, I forgot to plan to reach those goals.

Now if you are going to make any plan to accomplish anything in this life, it better be in your mind and in your heart - in that order.

This is because what starts in your mind gets into your heart. And when it goes from your mind into your heart, it gets mixed with your desires, and it forms a driving force within you.

Keep Your Goals Visible

Now you may have had that driving force when you sat down to write your goals and you were very motivated. We spoke previously about keeping your motivation. How do you keep your motivation? You do it by having it in front of you all the time.

Well how do you do that? You could try writing it on your hands. Do you know how often you look at your hands during the day?

If ever you want to remember something, try writing it on your hands. I guarantee you will remember, because throughout the day you keep seeing this stupid ink all over your hands.

I love a Scripture where it speaks about the Lord saying,

“I have written you on the palms of my hands.”

I always found that a precious promise that says,

“You know what? He will never forget about me, because I am written on the palms of His hands. Every time He looks at His hands He thinks about me. He’s not going to forget about me.”

So if you have a real problem remembering your goals, walk around with them written on your hand. But after a while you are going to be a bit embarrassed at people always asking you,

“So did you spill some ink on your hands?”

Or “What’s that? What do you have written all over your hands?”

There must be a better way to put it in front of you so that you don’t forget it all the time, other than writing it on your hands.

Chapter 19

A Biblical Way of Remembering

Chapter 19 - A Biblical Way of Remembering

In the Old Testament the Lord told the Israelites to wear things around their foreheads and on their hands, and to put it up on the walls of their houses.

Have you tried that? Have you tried to put one of those little yellow post-it stickers on the screen of your computer, just on the corner there where it doesn’t interfere too much, to remind you of what to do?

Have you tried that and did it work?  Do you know why it didn’t work? It is because after a day or two you started to ignore it and you thought,

“That stupid thing is bugging me. We’ll just ignore it and look at the rest of the screen.”

It is like the alarm that goes off every morning at the same time. You learn to ignore it.

You can put something on the dashboard of your car or on the wall of your house. If it stays there, you will ignore it. It must be a bit more outstanding than that, because it is just sitting there waiting for you to focus it out. There needs to be a better method of memorization.

The Loci Memory Method

Now I would like to share with you some basic principles that are not mine. They are not original. But as I studied and looked at all that has been taught out there, there are some people who have come up with some very good principles.

There is a memorization method which the Romans used many year ago, called the Loci Method. We discovered a teaching course on it put out by a man called Ron White.

If you are interested, look up Ron White and his memory course. Ron is a Christian. He has a memory course specifically on how to memorize Scripture. But he has a larger memory course in which he teaches the Loci Method of how to remember things.

He gives something like 30 days of training, which I am going to give you in five minutes. So if you want the detailed stuff, go and buy the course. But first you can read about it here.

We Remember Pictures

What is the Loci Method? Everybody knows already that the best way to remember something is a thing called association. This is where you remember something by associating it with another thing or another object. But to make it easier, the one thing that you remember better than anything else is a picture.

What kind of picture?

You have now read four full sections in this book. If I were to ask you now to sit down and give me a full summary of what you read, without looking back on the pages, how much could you remember?

Could you remember the titles? You see words are very difficult to remember.

However if I were to ask you to remember the last three movies that you watched, you could probably tell me quite a lot about the movies. You could probably tell me who the actors were if you knew them. You could tell me the plot. In fact you could probably give me a very quick rundown on what happened in the movie.

People do this all the time. They say,

“We watched this movie last week. It was awesome. They did this, that and that, and this happened and that happened.

I say, “Keep quiet. I want to watch the movie. Don’t tell me the whole story.”

But what if I asked you for details and said,

“What happened there, and what happened there? Tell me a bit more.”

If I did that we could sit for half an hour and discuss this movie that you watched once. We remember pictures better than we remember words.

You Remember Comics

Now let’s take something that has pictures in it. Let’s take a comic book that you have read. If you are a young guy you probably know this better. Every young person loves comics, and every older person who will admit it also loves comics, because pictures are easier to read.

I want you to go back through the last comic story that you read, and I want you to describe to me each of the picture frames, and each scene in the comic story.

If you haven’t read a comic in the last while you might have a problem with this. But if you have read a comic, I want you to see how much you can remember of the actual pictures that you saw in the comic book.

Now you might be able to remember the story and basically what it was about. But I’ll guarantee that you can’t remember the pictures. You can’t close your eyes and actually see the pictures.

However if I asked you about the last movie that you watched, you will remember the picture. You will remember the sound of the person’s voice, some of the expressions, and some of the jokes.

You might remember some of the violence. You will remember so many things in that movie, that you could probably go back and re-picture a whole lot of the scene and give me a description.

You say, “Well there was a scene where these two guys were in the bar and they got into a fight. The one guy reached out and punched him. The other guy ducked and he hit the guy behind him instead.”

It’s not very edifying, but it happens in pictures.

Why is it that you can remember that amount of detail? It is because something more was added to the picture. There was action.

Now here are the simple principles that Ron White teaches. He says there are three factors that you have to take into account. You need a location, a code and an action.

He kind of likens it to computers. You need those three elements in order to remember something easily.

Find a Location

And so the method is this in very simple terms. You need to find an object that you are familiar with. And the best place to start would be the room you are in.

Let’s visualize a scene. I am standing in front of a screen and in front of me there is a pulpit. On my left is a loudspeaker. There’s a guitar on my left and a fan to the right. There’s a bass guitar further away to my left. Those are all objects.

All of those objects can be locations. And the idea of using a location is that if you want to remember something, go and see where you stored it.

It is quite simple really. You’re going to take what you want to remember, and you are going to put it in an object; in a location.

Now if your location was a whole lot of boxes lying on the ground you would have a problem, especially if they all looked the same. You would say,

“Now I can’t remember which box I put it in. Was it box number one, two, three or ten?”

You can’t remember that. But you see each object is unique, so you can remember the object very clearly. Why? It is because it is a picture.

So find locations that are objects, and that are a clear picture that you can imagine with your eyes closed. Look around you for a bit and then close your eyes.

Can you see the objects that are all around you? Now close your eyes and think. Can you visualize those objects, especially if this room always looks like this?

If you are spending every day in a room with the objects exactly where they are right now, you can at any time close your eyes and see those objects. You can visualize them very clearly. It doesn’t take any effort to remember those pictures.

Once you have chosen your locations, you then need to use the code that links to that location. This is the thing that you are going to store right there. It is what you want to remember.

Picture it in Detail

Imagine you are standing in front of a big screen, and the following words are on the screen:

(Your name) will exist in every country of the world.

Could you see that? If this was your main goal could you remember it? If you close your eyes, can you speak the words forwards and backwards? You couldn’t do it very easily because they are words.

Let me change it. I want you to imagine a picture; a globe of the world. It is a nice big one. Actually it’s massive. In fact it is so big that it stands a whole lot taller than you. It’s almost touching the ceiling. Can you see it?

There’s America, North America, Canada and South America. And there’s Africa, Asia and Russia – and Australia stuck down there with little New Zealand. Can you see that picture very clearly?

Okay, now I want you to look a little bit closer. As you look at North America you see the name of your ministry in big bold letters all the way across. You go to South America, and there it is going vertically because it fits better that way.

Then you go to Australia, and there it is - all the way across that rabbit-looking thing that Australia is. Then you go right there into the middle of Asia and Russia. Can you see all the ministry names there?

Now let’s go and look a bit closer at some of the countries in each of those continents. Let’s come to Europe, and there it is. In tiny little Switzerland, there’s a tiny little one in there. And there’s Germany, France and Italy, all with tiny little names in all of them.

Can you see it? Can you see this great, big globe with all these little ministry names everywhere? There are big ones and small ones, all in different colors.

There is black for the countries that have mostly black people in them, and yellow for the countries with mostly yellow people in them. I don’t know, whatever you want to imagine. Let your imagination go mad.

Now that is a nice picture to remember. And that picture means your ministry will be in every country of the world. But you see even that picture could fade from your mind, so we’re going to change it.

Give It Some Action

There is this great big globe standing there, and I want you to see Jesus standing next to it, as tall as can be. He is taking His finger, and He’s flicking it and making it spin on its axis. It is like one of those great big globe atlases that you get.

And then He is taking you and picking you up, like a child playing with a little toy, and He’s putting you in a country. Then He spins it a bit, and He picks you up and puts you in another country. Then He spins it another time, and He picks you up and puts you on another country.

Can you see that picture? I just created a movie. You will remember this movie for a long time. And you will remember that your chief goal is that your ministry will exist on every continent and in every country in the world.

Now where am I going to put this picture? Find a suitable object in your room and put it there. Every time you look at that object in your room, you are going to look at it and say,

“What is my main goal?”

You are going to see this great big globe with Jesus standing spinning it, and this tiny little person that is you, that He is dropping all over the world. Ten years from now you will remember that picture. Can you see it?

What did I do? I found a location. My code was the picture. And then I put action into it.

Make Your Pictures Big and Strange

Now the more different and obscure the picture is compared to anything you have ever seen, the easier it is going to be for you to remember it.

If I just put a small, normal atlas globe there that would be boring. You have seen that before. But you’ve never seen one that big, standing up high up like that. You see that’s different. And you have never seen Jesus standing there spinning it.

Now that is simply the loci method of memorization. You take each thing that you want to remember, and you find a place where you are going to put it.

Now there are different kinds of places you can put them in. If you’re in a room you can take objects in the room.

If you are driving your car and every day you are spending time in the car, then take parts of the car. Take the hood at the front, take the rearview mirror, or take the seat next to you. Take the tires or the wheels and the trunk. Take the radio or tape player that is in there – whatever you want to.

Find a whole lot of objects. Each of those things are locations in which you can store something you want to remember. Then find a picture for the thing you want to remember. Take the concept or the words that you have.

An Example in Operation

Now supposing your goal is to become this great singing star. Find a picture of you singing. Try and see it. Either that, or take a picture of somebody that you know who sings really well. You can maybe take your favorite singer, and put some action to it.

Maybe the singer is standing up doing what they do best, and you are standing next to them doing a duet. Maybe you climbed right inside of them, and their face changed to yours.

That’s a nice action isn’t it? So this famous singer is standing up there, and the next moment it is you standing up there.

That’s a good picture. It’s a good little movie. Store it somewhere. Maybe you put it in your guitar. That’s where we’ll put it. So every time you look at that guitar, there you are being famous and everybody is cheering.

Use whatever grabs you. Take something exciting. Take something big or extraordinary, and translate your goal into a picture that you will never forget.

Now, here’s what is going to happen. Every time you come into this room and you look at that guitar, you are going to see yourself singing, because that is where you put it. You’ll never forget this goal. It will be staring you in the face.

And you know what is so great? You may at times not notice the guitar anymore. But just let your eyes go over the guitar and you no longer see the guitar. You see something far more important than the guitar.

It will not disappear, because it is one of your goals and one of your desires. It is something you want to accomplish.

Now you can take all of your goals like that, lay them out and store them somewhere. Every day as you see those objects, you will be reminded of what you stored there. And you will be reminded of what your main goals are.

Chapter 20

Put Your Goals into Objects

Chapter 20 - Put Your Goals into Objects

So here is the first thing you must do. Take all of the main goals that you wrote down, and the project that I gave you in the last section.

I showed you how to break your goals down into main points that you would confess every day. And I advised you to write them out and put them on the wall.

You can cancel that now. There’s a better way. Instead of putting it on the wall, you are going to put it in your heart. And you’re going to put it out there in the objects all around you.

Now the problem with these objects is that you may not see them every day. It is not a good idea to choose objects in a hall if you come there only once in a while for a meeting. I would not choose objects in there, unless you continually want to be there and think about it all the time.

Perhaps you may want to choose objects in your room at home.

That’s great, because when you wake up in the morning and you sit in front of your computer and look at your computer screen, you see this great big globe with GBR-I all over it. This happens before you even switch it on, because that is where you put it.

I go to my drawers where my clothes are, and there is - another one of my goals. That is where I stored it. I go and sit down at the piano and play, and there is one of my goals. I want to go and switch on the stereo to play a CD and there is another one of my goals.

It is staring you in the face all of the time. You can’t forget it. You are continually reminded about it. Every time you see that object what comes back is the picture, the movie or the active picture that you stored there which represents your goals. These are your main goals.

Using Your Body to Store Objects

If you are the kind of person who travels around a lot, I suggest you use storage places that are a bit closer to home. This is a bit more difficult at times, but I have a whole lot of storage objects right here.

I have a head, a nose, ears and a mouth. I have a chest, a stomach, ribs, hips, knees and feet. There are a lot of objects in your body that you could use.

So here it is. Your round head looks like a globe. That’s a good place to put it isn’t it? Let’s put the globe right there. Can you imagine it written right there?

You see your ministry name, with the Lord standing and spinning it right there on your head. So every time you go and look in the mirror to comb your hair, or to wash your face or brush your teeth, there it is.

Talking of brushing teeth, here is a great one to put right there. What about if your desire is to see your ministry or business products in everybody’s home?

Imagine a huge bookshelf with lots of books in it. You see somebody pulling out all of the other books to make place for your books, audio tapes and videos, and everything else that was put on that bookshelf in everybody’s home.

My goal says that our products will be distributed throughout the world. They will be in the homes out there of everyone who knows the Lord as well as those who don’t.

That’s a big goal. When I brush my teeth, there it is - the bookshelf. You see, I remember the goal.

I say, “We are going to do this. And you know what? We really need to work hard. We need to make more products. We need to get out and sell some of them. We need to do some more marketing, and encourage people to give to their friends.”

You see I get motivated to fulfill my goal every time I brush my teeth. Hopefully you do that at least once a day. If you do, every time you brush your teeth there it is. You are reminded of your goal.

Maybe I could put something in my nose, so that every time I blow my nose I remember there’s a goal.

One of my goals is that there would be Ministry Centers all over the world. And each Ministry Center will have in it an emphasis on training and ministry, and then business. That’s the two nostrils.

You are never going to forget some of these things. Every time I blow my nose, there it is. More training went out, more business and more money. I had better blow my nose more. We will get more ministry or business and more money.

Use association, pictures, storage places, action. Remember location, code and action. You can do this.

Review Them Any Way

Do you know what the amazing thing is? If you put each one of those goals in a different object, you can actually review them in any order you like.

I can say, “Okay, what’s your third goal?”

You say, “1, 2… that was the third object. There it is.”

I can say, “Give me your goals backwards.”

You start with the last object and you work backwards. You see it’s good to take objects that are in an order like that, so that you can visualize them. You can say them forwards and backwards. I can wake you up in the middle of the night and say,

“Tell me, what are your main goals?”

You will rub your eyes and look around the room at all the objects and say,

“That one, that one and that one.”

“Now tell them to me backwards.”

“Okay, that one, that one and that one.”

You may still be half asleep, but you can remember them because you stored them. You can relive those movies any time. And do you know what is so good? They are good movies. They’re not like some of the junk you fill your mind with all the time.

Adding Deadlines to Your Goals

Now you may want to put a little bit more than just a picture in, because you may have a deadline with each goal. And maybe you want to add a second picture on top of the first picture.

So here it is. We have the great big globe standing here with Jesus spinning it. And I see a great big calendar that is hanging in front of it.

I see the pages flipping - 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020. And as each one flips I see Asia, Africa, Australia and South America. Maybe those are the deadlines I set. You can add that picture on top. You see, it’s a movie and it’s active. You can remember that.

And every time you think of one of the countries of the world you think,

“We plan to be in that region of the world by such and such a year. Let’s work on it. You know it’s only two years away, and we don’t even have a contact there yet. We had better do something about it.

“We had better start looking for somebody. Maybe we should go and visit there. Maybe we should start advertising more or we should translate some books into the language of that country, because nobody even knows we exist.”

Interpretation in My Mouth

That is another one of my goals - that our materials would be translated into the many languages of the world.

Now how do I remember that? The picture that I thought of was me standing up and preaching with about four interpreters. I say something and each guy repeats his bit. I would say a word and each one would interpret.

I can remember that picture. Can you see it? Could you see someone doing an African language? And then we have German and Spanish, and we have somebody doing it in Chinese. I can see that picture. Our materials will be translated into all the main languages of the world.

That’s a great goal. I’m going to store that picture right here in my mouth, so that every time I open my mouth to speak I can hear all these people talking.

The very words that come out of my mouth will be translated into all the main languages. And when I yawn, there it is - all of those interpreters in there.

You know the great thing about my mouth is that I carry it with me wherever I go. It is in my head. So it’s great to use the bodily parts, because no matter where you are, there they are.

So here I am standing in the line at the shops. There’s a long line of people in front of me, I am waiting and I get itchy. And I remember that one of my goals was that there would be a phenomenal amount of finance that will be available in order for us to accomplish these goals.

There’s an English expression that says, ‘He has money coming out of his ears.’

So here it is - great big dollar bills pouring out and just falling on the ground. It’s coming out of my ears. I better scratch some of it out. There it is - some money.

Can you see how easy it is to remember your goals? Store them in places that you will see all the time. Every time I go there to look at myself in the mirror, I just see all of these things staring at me.

I get a stomach ache, and I remember,

“Something was stored there. What was it? Oh yes, one of my goals is that we will set a standard for the pattern for the church that God has given us. We will set a standard for the new church in the new move.”

There it is. Just take one look at my stomach and see all the lines and the scars. It’s like a map there. There is a pattern there.

You see you must be creative. You’ll never forget these things for the rest of your life. And you won’t be caught out when somebody says,

“So have you done your goals?”

“Yes I’ve laid them all out. I have about seven of them.”

“Could you tell them to me?”

“Umm, yeah, one of them was … and that was that, and…”

“Okay, so which is the most important?”

“Well, um… just hang on. Let me just go home quickly and get my list off the wall.”

A Continual Reminder

Do you see what I’m saying? Commit them to memory. Get them in your heart. And you know everywhere you look and everywhere you turn, it is staring you in the face. It is reminding you. And every time you see it, you get excited all over again.

You think, “Wow I forgot about that. Let’s do it today. Let me work on it now and not waste any more time. You know what? I clean forgot that that was one of the goals that I needed to accomplish.”

You will never ‘clean forget’, because every day wherever you turn, it is coming up. It is staring you in the face, showing you and reminding you, that these are the goals that you set for your life.

Chapter 21

Allow For Your

Smaller Goals

Chapter 21 - Allow For Your Smaller Goals

Now you need to memorize the details of your goal. We have had the main goals that I mentioned and we’ve stored them in the locations, but each of those goals has sub-goals. Some are short-range; some are long-range.

We spoke about that last time. You have many different lower level goals that are reaching up to those main goals, and those main goals of course are reaching up to your life purpose.

So now I need to start somewhere. Although I’ve memorized them and I’m seeing them, every day I need to make a plan to start reaching and fulfilling those goals. And so the first and most important thing to do is to plan each goal separately.

So take one of your little goals. Preferably start with the short-term goals, because those ones are going to be done first, before you reach for the long-term ones. Start with one goal. Now can you close your eyes, and can you see that goal very clearly in your mind?

Imagine It

Supposing you have never been able to stand up and preach effectively. Every time you do stand up, you stumble and mumble and get all nervous. Now you’d really like to get to the place where you can stand up and preach for an hour like me, without notes.

Can you see it? Can you close your eyes and can you see yourself standing up there? There are thousands of people in the audience, and you’re standing there with boldness, with confidence, with authority, with the anointing and the power of God. Can you see the goal?

You Need to Make Changes

That’s the end picture. Now I want you to look at yourself right now. Where are you right now? Somewhere between where you are right now and where you hope to be, a few things have to happen.

Supposing you are Swiss and you have this great vision to be able to stand up and preach in English. Right now however you need a dictionary to write a letter in English. So there are a few things between where you are now and where you are going to be. And one of those important things is you need to learn English better.

And then you have this weak little voice, because you’re kind of shy about standing up and speaking loudly. You tend to hide away. You’re not a bold, confident person who can say,

“I’m telling you to do that.”

You would rather say,

“Now you know I really think it’s a good idea for us to do that, don’t you?”

You see you will have to make some changes between where you are now and where you are there. Can you see it? Can you see yourself there? Well it might help to watch somebody else and to say,

“I’d like to do it the way they do it.”

Break It into Stages

Whatever it takes, build a picture in your mind.

Firstly, see the end goal clearly in mind. Secondly, compare this with your current circumstances. And now start to see several stages from one to the other. You’re not going to jump from here to there overnight. It is going to take a while.

Perhaps you have given yourself a deadline of three years to get to that place. Well a lot is going to happen in three years. And if it means a language change, probably the very thing you are going to need is to be able to be comfortable in that new language. So that’s your first stage.

Now that you are comfortable in the new language, you need to be comfortable about how to prepare a message properly and homiletically. And now that you can do that, you now need the boldness and the confidence to stand up there.

It may be that there are several stages that are required. Write them down. See them very clearly. And try to give them a target date.

Say, “Well I have three years to get from here to there. So I will give myself one year to be totally fluent in the new language, and to be able to preach in it.”

It’s one thing to speak a language, and another thing to preach in it. So you could say,

“I could do it in three months.”

Don’t kid yourself. Give yourself a year. A year is actually even too short perhaps. It depends on how strong the desire is? Set a reasonable goal, a mini goal, and see each stage. Then start working on one stage at a time. Put all your effort into it.

Memorize the Smaller Goals

You must memorize each stage using the memorization method. So you have this one, big goal. Maybe it’s the one that you put in your ears or whatever it is. That is my big goal. Now I’m going to take that and I’m going to break it down into smaller goals.

Now if that goal is something you are going to accomplish, say in the work place, then it’s good to find some storage locations in your place of work.

If you are going to accomplish it at the office, then I suggest that you sit at where you are at the office every day and find some objects there. Every time you go to work and sit down in the office, immediately you will see these objects and they will remind you.

If your goal is something that involves the home, then I suggest you take your bedroom and take a few objects in there.

If you are learning to become a good cook, you might want to use the kitchen. Of if you need to develop social skills, perhaps the living room would be good. Choose the place that is suited to the kind of thing you want to accomplish.

Assess Your Progress

And then break it down into each stage. As you look at those objects in the room, you think,

“Okay, I’m doing pretty well on that one. That one is still weak. I’m getting to that soon.”

You see you are scheduling yourself all the time. All the time you’re seeing it, and you’re thinking, desiring and motivating yourself continuously towards that goal.

So you see the goal, and if necessary you put a date on it. You might want to see a calendar or a New Year’s celebration. You see the year, and then you see yourself drinking a toast to finally accomplishing and reaching that goal.

“Hooray, we accomplished.”

Everybody cheers. It is action. It’s a movie. Do whatever it takes to motivate you so that you want to reach that goal.

Plan Reachable Goals

Next, don’t take on too many goals at a time, otherwise you will give up. You get all zealous, you make out your full plan and all the goals you want to accomplish, and you think,

“I want to accomplish all of these within two years.”

Think back on what you accomplished in the last two years. Think back on what you accomplished in the last five years and 10 years, and you’ll find that you have a very sorry history; that you have a wonderful record of failure to accomplish anything significant in your life.

It’s great to get excited and to shoot for the stars. But you know what? Until you get one of those powerful rockets that they make at NASA, I would aim for the roof of your house for now, because that’s probably as high as you are going to fly.

Start with something that is reachable. Start with smaller goals, like one short-term goal only.

Work it Daily

Then work on that goal every day. You get up in the morning, and what is the first thing you see? Think about it. Visualize your bedroom, or the first thing you set your eyes on. If you are like me, perhaps it is the bathroom.

Well while you are wasting your time in the bathroom, choose something there as your object and store your first goal picture right there, since you go there every day first thing.

Or maybe the first thing you see as you open your eyes is the first main object in your room. Maybe it’s the first thing you reach for - a glass of water.

Whatever it is, it must be something you see daily and that you will not forget; something that will remind you and that you will continually progress towards.

Start with that goal and that one only, and begin to build that it to a place where it is a core desire. Do it to where you are so excited about it, that when you open your eyes in the morning, the first thing you think about is that exciting goal.

Chapter 22

A New Enthusiasm

For Life

Chapter 22 - A New Enthusiasm for Life

What will happen after a while is that you will look forward to waking up in the morning. You won’t wake up rubbing your eyes and saying,

“Can’t I just go back to sleep? I don’t want to get up. I don’t feel like working today. Can’t we just take today off?”

Who feels like that in the morning? Am I the only one? You must change it so that the first thing that happens as you start the day is you are reminded of your goal. You must build everything into that, until the core desire is white hot and you are really flowing in it. And now every day becomes an exciting time.

And then when you go to bed at night, look at it again. You might find yourself visiting the bathroom before you go to bed as well. Some people do. So the bathroom might be a great place to hide this, because you go there so often.

Of course your computer is a great place also, seeing as you likely spend so much time sitting in front of the screen. Use whatever you need.

Add More Goals

Now you have one goal that has become a habit in your life. It’s something that you remember and think about, you have a great desire for and you really feel like reaching this goal. Once you have developed that core desire to its maximum, now you can add additional goals.

Perhaps there’s a goal that you can store in the dining room table, so that you are reminded of it when you sit down to eat breakfast.

We have one of these Lazy Susans in the middle of our table with all the spices and things on it. So there it is. I’m going to store my next goal right there, which is to lose weight.

Putting it by the dinner table is a good place to put it don’t you think? So there it is. There’s a skinny little me, dressed in some swimming trunks and flexing my muscles. And everybody around the dinner table is looking at me and saying,

“Wow how did you do that?”

That’s a good place to put it, and a good second goal.  So, after I’ve been to the bathroom and renewed my first goal every day, I go to sit down to breakfast and start thinking of my next goal of losing weight. And now these become part of my daily schedule.

Make it a Part of Your Schedule

Look for things you do every day. Start adding one at a time until you are comfortable with it, and until it becomes part of your daily life. Then you won’t have to sit and think,

“Oh dear I forgot to read my goals today.”

You know I’ve had my goals up on the wall of the room for quite a long time now, and I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t read it every day.

There are times when I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I look up at the wall and I think,

“Oh whatever, let’s read it.”

Sometimes when I can’t sleep and I’m sitting there deciding whether I should eat something to make me sleepy or not I think,

“Hey let’s pass the time and read my goals.”

You see it’s not good enough. It’s not a core desire. It isn’t burning in me and it is not staring me in the face.

Actually it is staring me in the face, but you know what? The piece of wall where the paper is has just become white. I don’t even notice it anymore.

And so you must begin to build some of these goals into places where you can see them, remember them, visualize them, and where the desire will grow.

Now what is it that makes us do something over and over again? It starts with the templates of the past. Why is it that we repeat past templates? It is because they feel good.

That is how we develop core desires - by repeating good templates over and over again, until we feel good all the time as we think about reaching that goal. So now you have programmed your goals.

Share Your Goals With Others

The next point is something that some people advise you not to do. You must talk about your goals to others. Tell other people what you are planning to do. Why? Well firstly people will remind you if you forget.

“So tell me, you said that you were going to lose weight. I notice you’re still looking a bit chubby there. In fact I remember you bragging that within three months you were going to lose 20 pounds. It kind of looks like it went in reverse there hey?”

People are cruel, but this is good. Get them to remind you. Tell people what you are planning to do. They will remember before you do.

Of course they may also try to discourage you, and that’s the problem. There is a risk involved. But you know what? If you are an expressive that’s a good thing. If you want an expressive to do something, tell him he can’t do it. Tell him you don’t believe he will do it.

“This is just big talk. I’ll believe this when I see it.”

So the next time she is sitting down and looking at that nice Swiss chocolate, she hears my words come ringing in her ears,

“Yeah big deal, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

She thinks, “Okay, I can live without the chocolate.”

Next time he doesn’t feel like going to play tennis he thinks,

“I could lose a bit of weight there. Let’s go and do it.”

Speaking Goals Commits You to Them

You see it will remind you of your goals, and that is the important thing. But the most important thing of all for telling others your goals, is that when you say something you commit yourself to it. It’s kind of like signing on the dotted line.

You see there are many things that you can cancel, reverse or take back in this world, but words are not one of them. Words, when they have gone forth from your mouth, cannot return. You can’t ‘unsay’ them. So there is kind of a commitment when you say,

“I’m going to do this.”

There’s kind of a commitment there where you have put yourself on the line. And if you are in one of those countries that always do the right thing, perhaps that bad archetype might be used to advantage. This is because you will feel too guilty to not do it now, after you opened your big mouth and said you were going to do it.

Whatever it takes, you want some way of being reminded continuously and remembering what your goals are.

Bulldoze and Confess Them

And then you need to continually transmute your goals through bulldozing and confession. What is bulldozing and confession? Well everybody knows what confession is, although some people think it is when you go to a priest to tell him your sins.

Amongst the Word of Faith Movement, it became quoting the Scriptures all the time. The self-help movement call it affirmation. But in the Way of Blessing we taught it the right way. If you don’t know the right way, go and get the Way of Blessing.

What is bulldozing? My wife Daphne originated that idea when she wrote an article called Bulldozing through Problems.

The idea is to take some powerful promises from the Word of God, and to speak them over and over again until you charge up with power. Then you face that problem, and you just bulldoze it and flatten it to the ground. We have taught this elsewhere.

Speak your goal aloud yourself, over and over again. Say,

“I will rise up. I will stand behind the pulpit and I will preach and teach with authority. I will teach so well that I’ll have the people eating out of the palm of my hand. And after I’ve preached for two hours they will say, ‘Oh gee, are you finished already?’ ”

You wish. It could happen. If you speak it long enough, you might get to believe it yourself. And if you get to believe it yourself, maybe other people might also. It is important.

Program these things into you until you are saturated with it, until success becomes your very nature, and until failure becomes something that is foreign to you.

Make Jesus a Part of Your Goals

Then the final point is a little phrase. It is this simple little statement: Come into His presence.

I shared about doing that in the last section where I shared that you should take your goals and give them to Him. And now as you begin to implement those goals and plan to succeed, talk to the Lord daily about your goals.

Don’t only talk to other people. They might try to discourage you. They might try to put you off and persuade you that you are going to miss it, and tell you that you are stupid.

Speak to Jesus about your goal, and hear Him say,

“You know you are doing great. I am so proud of you. I really believe in you. I know that you can do it, and I’m right here by your side. And if you need any help I’m here to help you. I’ll show you how to do it and give you wisdom.”

Secondly, what you need to do is ask Him for wisdom every day on how to proceed.

Say, “Lord, I’m really having a problem learning this foreign language. How anybody could speak a language like that is beyond me.”

The Lord says, “You know what? I love the people who speak that language. Haven’t you heard that lovely ring they have in their voice; that nice little sound?

Isn’t it beautiful? You know it’s like music to my ears. I could listen to it for hours, especially when they pray to me.”

You start to feel guilty and you say,

“Okay Lord I take it back. Help me to get into this musical language that they speak in.”

Look to Jesus for Motivation

Ask Him for wisdom. And then ask Him for motivation when your feelings let you down and you don’t feel like going on. You want to pack it all in and you say,

“Lord I’m just never going to reach this goal. Lord it’s impossible. I’ve tried and I just keep on failing.”

Ask Him to help you, to encourage you, and to say,

“You know what? You’ve come a lot further than you realize. You don’t realize how far you have come. You know you used to be there, but do you realize how far you have come? You are doing well. Keep going. I am here to help you.”

He’s the only person in this world who will always be consistent in helping you. Speak to some of your friends and family and they will say,

“You see I told you that you would fail. You think you are such a big shot. You think you can do things that nobody else can do. You think you are so great. I knew you wouldn’t make it.”

I’m not talking about your enemies here. I’m talking about your friends and your family. You see there is only one person who really believes in you, and that is the Lord.

If you are blessed there might be one other person who believes in you, and that’s your spouse. And if you have a good spiritual father, he might believe in you too.

By the time you’ve finished counting, you have more fingers than you can find people who believe in you. But the Lord will always be there. He will always be consistent.

So in conclusion, commit your goals to memory. When your goals are committed to memory you will never forget them.

And then, if you follow a daily plan to reach your goals that you have committed to memory, there is nothing in this world that can stop you from succeeding.

Let’s do it.

Section 06 – Lights, Camera, Action

Chapter 23

Time to Get

Moving

Section 06 – Lights, Camera, Action

Chapter 23 – Time to Get Moving

We come finally to the last section in the Way to Success. We’ve covered a lot of ground in this book. We’ve started at the top with finding your destiny.

We have broken it down into goals and found out how to stir up core desires. We’ve looked at how to plan the whole thing and head towards the future. Now only one thing remains, and that is for you to do it.

Ecclesiastes 2:24 says:

[There is] nothing better for a man, [than] that he should eat and drink, and [that] he should express himself in satisfying work. I realized that this [was] from the hand of God.

Taken from the book of Ecclesiastes which is a very carnal book, it has strange verses in it, and some strange conclusions that Solomon, the wisest man, came to.

This was his natural conclusion: It is good for a man to eat and drink and express himself in satisfying work.

While we have our journey on this earth, we need to enjoy the things God has given us, and we need to have some sense of accomplishment. Without that, life is not worth living.

It is the basic fact of human life, even leaving the spiritual side out. This is what Solomon was doing. He was coming to basic conclusions as to what we are on this earth for.

Now we are ready. The stage has been set, the script has been learned and the actors have all been taught their parts. Now it is time for action.

But before you take any action, there are some very important things you need to bear in mind, as you step forward now to put into practice all the principles that you have learned.

Timing is Important

The first thing is this. You need to learn the importance of timing.

Think of a famous man by the name of Jonah. I don’t know how he became famous, because it is one of the smallest books in the Bible; just a couple of little chapters about the story of some obscure little prophet.

God told him to go and speak a word of judgment against Nineveh, but he wasn’t too keen on the idea. He dragged his feet and dragged his feet, and while he was dragging his feet a whale swallowed him up.

Jonah woke up and got the message. He went out there and did what God wanted him to do.

And then he couldn’t wait for God to do what He wanted to do. He wanted to run ahead and tell God what to do. First he was dragging his feet and then he was running ahead of the Lord.

Don’t use Jonah as your model. You could get swallowed by a whale and life will not be pleasant. Timing is very important.

Expressives and Goals

Now how do you deal with the tendency to run ahead or to drag your feet? If you are an expressive, the chances are you have a problem with impulsiveness.  You get all excited and you want to do it now.

You don’t see the great big hole in front of you. You see the target on the other side of the hole and you say,

“There it is. Let’s go get it.”

Crash! You have the core desire burning white hot. You’re ready to go and you say,

“I’m going to do it.”

Remember that between where you are now and where you want to go, there are several stages. That is why I taught you to keep that very clearly in mind. Don’t try to skip any of the stages; not the way you read your emails or the way you skim through web pages.

Somebody asks you,

“So, what did you think about what that person wrote?”

You say “What about it?”

“Well he said ‘that’.”

“I don’t remember reading that.”

Yes, you didn’t read that part did you? You skipped right over it. You just jumped right over it and went to the end.

I used to do that when I read books. I get bored. I get all built up by the plot. It’s exciting. What’s going to happen? Will he marry her, or will it be her?

If I never finished the book in one sitting, I had to go to the end and find out how it ended. I didn’t have time to find out tomorrow, so I would skim to the end of the book and find out how the story ended.

And if it was really exciting enough, I might go back later and read how it happened. But quite honestly I didn’t really care.

You see I may have learned something by how it ended. I may have learned that little twist that took place in the book at a certain points and that caused everything to change.

Don’t try and miss out one of the stages. You might make it to the end.

Follow the Stages Through

I used to love mathematics at school. You could start with a problem, and if you knew a little bit about where you were going, you could work your way through to the end.

Well you know you may have memorized the example and know what the answer is. Or you might just guess and get the right answer. But how did you arrive at that answer?

What if you are faced with the same kind of question next time, you can’t work your way through to the end, and you guessed the answer wrong?

You see the fact that you reached the end doesn’t mean that you reached it successfully, or that you reached it to the quality that you required.

Don’t rush it and don’t be impulsive. Take one stage at a time. That is why it is so important that you lay your goals out a stage at a time, and that you go through each stage one at a time.

Don’t miss them, otherwise later on you will find that somebody is going to come to you and say,

“Wow, I would really like to know how you managed to reach where you are and how you achieved the success that you have.”

Then the chances are you are just going to say,

“Well I guess I was just lucky.”

Have you ever heard that? But we don’t believe in luck as Christians. We believe in divine design. God works according to a pattern. He didn’t just say,

“Earth come into being.”

Then He hit it lucky and it turned out okay.

He said, “I want to create woman”.

Well she just happened to come out okay. Thank the Lord that He didn’t do it that way. Imagine what we may have ended up with? He worked according to a design and a pattern. Don’t be impulsive, and don’t try and skip out any of the steps.

Don’t Procrastinate

And then you get the opposite of the extremes. It’s called the ‘p’ word – procrastination. Procrastination means putting things off and saying,

“I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it next week. I’ll do it later.”

Every person who has been at school knows what procrastination is. You have been given a project and you have two weeks to do it.

“Wow, two whole weeks. That’s all the time in the world. I’ll take a break for a while and get to it in a couple of days.”

But you know what? A couple of days takes at least 10 days. Isn’t it amazing how a couple of days can suddenly be gone, and then there are only three days left?

You say, “I better get moving. But you know the weather is so good today. The sun is shining so nicely on the beautiful white sand of the beach, and everybody is out there swimming.

“I don’t feel like sitting at home working on a stupid project. I’ll just go out there and swim a little bit and tan in the sun. Then I’ll come back and I’ll do it.”

Then you get back and you think,

“You know I’m really quite tired, especially after the lunch. I’ll just have a sleep quickly.”

And so you sleep and you wake up and say,

“Okay, I’ll get into the project now.”

But now everybody is sitting watching a video so you say,

“You know I’m sure I can do it a little later. Let’s just watch the video quickly.”

Then it is late at night, and you are sitting down to do it and you get an email. You know the story don’t you? So the morning the project is due, you get up early. It’s called procrastination.

Why do we procrastinate? It’s very simple. We don’t feel like doing what we know we should do.

Well there’s a very easy way to overcome procrastination, and I have taught you that. You don’t touch the project until you have a core desire at maximum potential.

It must get to the point where it is white hot, where nothing else can distract you, and where you are so excited about that thing you just want to get into it.

But you know core desires can wane. They can be great today, but tomorrow they are not so great. So you have to learn to keep them going. You have to learn to keep that emotion going.

How are you going to do that? We are going to look at that when we get to the next point which is to do with attitude.

You have a choice, not over the way you feel, but you have a choice over what you think and do. And what you think and what you do can change your feelings.

Swallow Your Daily Frog

Now every day we have those things we don’t want to do, and somebody likened this to swallowing a live frog.

“Yuck - swallowing a live frog.”

You know most days we have a live frog we have to swallow. Do you feel like swallowing a live frog? I sure don’t. But you know what? If you don’t swallow that live frog, it starts to grow, and tomorrow it’s a bit bigger. It is better that you swallow him while he’s still small.

So learn every day to swallow your frog. You’ll find it. It is that thing that you really know you should do; the thing which has to be done.

You just wish that it would go away, or that somebody else would do it, or that you wouldn’t have to do it anymore. But you leave that frog long enough and it will start having babies. And then you will have a whole pile of frogs to swallow.

Sometimes you have to simply, by a choice of your will, get out of the way the thing that is blocking you. If you don’t get it out of the way, you get behind on the things that really count.

Now life will throw this at you. And certainly if you want to do something for the Lord, Satan will throw things at you that you really don’t want to do. The problem is that this thing is probably not your core desire, and it’s not your goal.

You say, “Well you know my goal really is this, so I don’t need to do that.”

But that thing stands in the way of you doing what needs to be done to attain your goal. So you must look at it and say,

“Okay I can do this.”

You probably have some negative templates that are blocking it. Come into His presence and change that picture.

Say, “I can do this. I can enjoy it. I’m capable of it.”

Do it Now

See yourself doing it in the Spirit. Ask the Lord to help you. And if necessary get somebody else that you can rely on who has no mercy, and who will put the right pressure on you to make you do it.

Get it out of the way, because the longer you leave it, the more behind you will get on your goal. Then your feelings will start to wane on the goal and you will start to lose your core desire. And before you know it, you will not be accomplishing anything.

So here’s something to do every day. You get up, and you see that object that you stored your goal in that we spoke about. You get excited about it, you get all stirred up and you say,

“That’s it. I’m going to do it.”

While you are all white hot and keen, now is the time to do the thing you don’t want to do.

You know if I’m really hungry enough, I’ll get up and go and make myself a sandwich or something to eat, even though I’m too lazy and I don’t feel like doing it. But if my hunger drives me I’ll do it.

So build up the hunger for what does count. This will be sufficient motivation to cause you to overcome the procrastination in doing the thing that you don’t want to do.

Do it. Make a choice. Practice this until it becomes a habit. Until eventually you get to the place where every day when you get up, the first thing you do is the most important thing that needs to be done that you don’t feel like doing.

Swallow your frog. Get it out of the way.

Chapter 24

Lethargy and

Laziness

Chapter 24 - Lethargy and Laziness

The next thing that stands in the way of action is lethargy and laziness.

Well lethargy can be physical. Perhaps you sat up the night before playing games on the computer instead of going to bed. Maybe you were talking to somebody and you talked into the middle of the night and went to sleep too late.

Now you are up early the next morning, your eyes want to close and you don’t feel like doing anything. That’s lethargy.

There are a lot of things you can do to overcome lethargy physically. You could try exercising.

Or you could try medications that are acceptable, that can make you feel a bit brighter. I’m not talking about drugs. But you know the thing that will motivate you more than anything else is excitement and emotion.

Excitement and Emotion Gives Life

So perhaps a starting point if you’re feeling really lethargic and lazy, is to get excited about something. Perhaps do something different, something new, or something that’s not even your goal. Try something that is a total diversion, and that is not work at all.

Yes I’m actually encouraging you to get into something else that is not your goal. Why? Because in getting into that, it can cause your emotions to flow and get rid of that feeling of lethargy. It’s amazing how much energy you will suddenly find if you do something exciting.

You see, we live by our feelings. I can’t emphasize that enough. And all you analyticals and drivers who will not admit you have feelings, let it die. You just don’t show your feelings, but they are strong inside of you.

Without emotion you will accomplish nothing in life. If your emotions are dead, stir them up in some way. Find something exciting to do and get that need out of the way.

Of course don’t spend the whole day doing it. Just do enough to get you feeling better and wide awake. Then you can sit down and get into what you know you should be doing.

Just even that stir of emotion can get you to the place where your core desires are beginning to operate again. And you have the energy and the motivation to go ahead and fulfill your goal.

Depression Slows You Down

The next problem that stands in the way of action is depression.

Well the lethargy could be caused by depression. Your procrastination could also be caused by depression. Your feeling weak, weary and tired and wanting to sleep all the time – these are all actually natural physical symptoms of depression.

When a person is depressed their bodily reactions actually slow down. Their pulse rate slows down and their whole body will operate at a very low level.

It is as though everything gets turned down; like you are almost asleep. You will walk around in a daze, feeling like you have no energy, no excitement, no anything.

That is the way your body is responding to the feeling of depression. It is one of the worst feelings you can have. Everybody has experienced it at one time or another.

Depression is a very simple thing. Yes, I know all you medical types are saying,

“Yes well you know depression is caused by certain chemical imbalances in the body.”

Rubbish. The chemical imbalances in the body are caused by your mental state. You have put the cart before the horse.

Now I’m not arguing that there are not medical things that take place in your body. But trying to deal with it medically is like trying to deal with the warning light that comes up in your car. The light comes on and says,

“This is it. The engine is overheating.”

You say, “Well I don’t have time to fix the engine overheating. I’ll just smash the light. There’s no light on anymore now, so that solves the problem.”

No it doesn’t. Pretty soon the car is going to come to a grinding halt, because your engine is going to seize. You must deal with the root of the problem.

The feeling of depression and the experience of depression is not the root of the problem. It is the symptom of the problem. It’s a very clear sign that is staring you in the face and saying,

“Hey, there’s a problem inside.”

Well what is the problem? What causes depression? I’m not going to give you a whole lecture on depression. I have done that elsewhere. But it is very simple.

Sometimes depression is caused by lack of goals. Well you shouldn’t have that problem. You’ve set all your goals, so scratch that one.

Obstacles Block Your Goals

I’ll tell you what caused your depression. As you were going out there trying to fulfill your goals, something happened that you weren’t expecting. Somebody said to you,

“Do you honestly think that you could stand up and preach? You can’t even hold a decent conversation. I have known you for years. How could you ever stand up and be a preacher? It’s impossible. You don’t have the intelligence.”

Somebody says something like that or it can be anything that happens. But an event takes place, a problem comes up, or an obstacle appears in the way of you pursuing your desires and following through to the goal.

Now you have a choice right there. You have a choice to ignore that problem and deal with it. Or you have a choice to respond to that problem incorrectly. You see there are only a limited number of ways of responding to a problem.

Imagine that I’m walking down my path to fulfill my goal, and suddenly there is great big boulder in the way in the middle of my path.

Now what should I do? It’s a pretty big stone. Maybe I can climb over it. Maybe there is some space on the side, and I can edge my way through and get past it. Or maybe there’s another road I can take like a detour.

Problems Cause Depression

All of those ways ignore the great big boulder that is standing in your way. A problem comes in your life and how do you respond? You try and just go around it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Or you say, “Well you know what? That’s not really my problem. My problem is this. I’ll deal with that one. I can handle that problem. It’s a small little stone.”

Sometimes you take one look and you say,

“Well you know I was stupid to think I would accomplish this anyway.”

Then you turn around and you walk back.

You see these are all ways that we deal with problems. Every one of them blocks you from pursuing your goal. And as soon as you lose your goal, what is the first thing that happens? Depression sets in.

If you are feeling depressed, I will guarantee that something happened, or somebody said something that stopped you from carrying on with that desire that you had.

And by you responding to it incorrectly, your goal became blocked and you lost the excitement. You have nothing to live for, and you want to just sit down and die. Some people literally do that. They commit suicide because they just can’t go on.

Face the Problem

Okay, this is worse than swallowing a frog. You have to start attacking that rock.

You say, “But how do I do that? All I have is this tiny little hammer in my hand.”

Well hit the rock. ‘Ping’ - one tiny little piece of rock smashes off. Hit it again. ‘Ping’ - one tiny little piece of rock smashes off.

You know you could be there a long time smashing that rock. But that rock must be removed from your path. It must be dealt with. So what you have to do is to find a way to overcome that problem.

How do you do that? I mean there is just no ways I am going to smash that big boulder with my tiny little hammer. Well if you dig deep down inside of you, you may find that there are ways that you haven’t thought of.

But what is the best way to overcome a problem? It is to come into His presence. It’s easy isn’t it?

Say, “Lord, please tell me how I can deal with this problem.”

Journal it, pray it through, find Scriptures and start bulldozing. Do everything you know how to. Something is going to work, but you don’t give up until you have found a way to remove that obstacle from your path.

Don’t ever say,

“Well I made a big mistake. I should never have gone down this road. I should never have headed for this goal. I don’t know what was in my mind. How did I ever think I could accomplish that?”

Don’t think that you can get away with it and say,

“Well I’ll just change my mind.”

Sin Starts Off the Cycle

No, what is going to happen is you are going to hit a cycle of depression. Depression is caused quite simply by responding to a problem incorrectly. Translated in Christian terms, responding incorrectly means you responded sinfully.

You respond to a problem in a sinful way, and immediately your feelings go. The moment you lose your goal, there is nothing to live for anymore. There is no excitement.

Ask the Lord for wisdom. Sit down and journal. Write down every way that you can think of to overcome that problem. And if the problem was that somebody made you mad, you lost your temper and you said or did something you shouldn’t have, then work your way backwards.

Say, “What did I do wrong last?”

“Okay, Lord please forgive me. I shouldn’t have said that.”

If you have to, you may have to go to the person and say,

“Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have responded the way that I did.”

Get rid of the guilt, because one of the things that is weighing you down is the guilt of your sin and your failure. Coming into His presence solves most of those things.

Drugs Do Not Help

That is why it is so important that you have a living, walking relationship with the Lord Jesus every day. You don’t have to continue in depression, and you don’t have to go and take drugs to make you feel better.

While I am standing looking at the rock, and I’ve had a couple of good beers and a couple of scotches and whatever else I could find in the cupboard, I am feeling good. I think,

“Hey this is great. We’ll play with the rock a bit.”

But it will wear off, and the rock will still be there. And now you will have a headache to go with it, and you will feel even more depressed.

I don’t care if the drugs make you feel good. It doesn’t solve the problem that caused the depression in the first place.

You have to just keep going. You have to continue to do what you set out to do, to reach your goal. Let nothing in this world stand in the way.

Satan will throw these things in your path. He will make sure of it because he doesn’t want you to succeed. He wants to make sure that you fail, because he knows that when you succeed, the Kingdom of God will be extended in the earth.

Do not allow yourself to be sidetracked. If this has already happened and you are caught in that cycle of depression, start unwinding it and start going backwards.

Taking a Wrong Turn

Now here is another one. You lose a sense of assurance that you are going in the right direction. You lose the presence of the Lord. It is like you are praying about it and there is no answer coming any more. What is wrong?

You are standing there having to make choices and you say,

“Lord I’m not sure which way I should go now.”

Go back to your original goal and the path that you have set for yourself, and have a look how you went. You may find that somewhere along the line you had to make a choice.

Maybe you reached a crossroad. You came to a road and you had to turn left or right and you didn’t stop to get into His presence.

You see you were impulsive and the results were obvious. You could see that going left was the better road. It was the right one to take. Maybe it wasn’t, and you took the wrong turn.

Have you ever done that? We did that in Switzerland once. It took a long time to find our way home and we were in a foreign land. Thank the Lord for GPS. You take a wrong turn and you could get lost.

You see sometimes when you lose that assurance and direction from the Lord, it is because you made a wrong choice. There is only one way to fix it. Turn around and go back to where you made the wrong choice.

Look at your plan or your goal and ask the Lord,

“Where did I miss it?”

You will find that when you go back and find that place where you missed it, the assurance will return and the direction will return, and now the Lord can say,

“Okay, go here. Then go there and go there.”

A Lost Opportunity

You know the wonderful thing about GPS systems, is that if you take a wrong turn the GPS will try and find an alternative route for you. The Lord has the same thing for you. There are times when you mess up. But you know sometimes when you take the wrong turn, there is no road left when you go back.

You see you are traveling in this journey of life. And as much as it sounds like a fun idea to want to go back in time and time travel, you can’t do it. You can’t repeat what has happened. The circumstance and situation that existed yesterday may no longer exist. It may be gone.

It is as though the roads are built fresh every day, and if you don’t take the right turn the road disappears. The angels have been working to create an opportunity for you to fulfill your desire and your goal. That is why it is so important day by day to walk in His presence and to get His direction all the time.

But you don’t need to panic. We make mistakes. And sometimes God actually allows us to make mistakes, so that we can learn from them and so that we can help other people not to make the mistakes.

Chapter 25

Keep Things

Simple

Chapter 25 - Keep Things Simple

And then, as you approach your goal and begin to put into action what needs to be done, you get over analytical. Or you are just a woman and you see too much detail. You try to work it all out and you say,

“We have to do this, but if we do this, that’s going to happen. We have to think about that. And what about that aspect? It is very important. We can’t leave it out. And don’t forget that.”

And so you have this big complicated puzzle in front of you to work out.

Well if you arrived at that problem because of over-feminine thinking, find a man. It could help. The best man I know is Jesus. So if you can’t find a physical man, you can always go to the Lord. He will work it out for you.

But there is one simple principle which the world has even taught us about, and they call it the KISS principle. KISS is an acronym which stands for: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Keep it simple. Don’t get over-complicated. That is why I told you to break your goals down into stages and steps, because each step must be something simple. So don’t look at the big picture. Look at one piece at a time.

An old saying that I heard years ago is one which I’ve used many times. You have probably heard it. It says,

“You can eat a whole elephant, if you eat it one mouthful at a time.”

Keep it simple - one step at a time. Don’t over-complicate it, or in the end you will just give up and say,

“You know this whole goal thing just doesn’t work. I’m just not going to accomplish anything in life. It’s too complicated. I can’t handle it.”

If it’s too complicated, it is because you made it too complicated. Keep it simple.

Take Things Slowly

And then there is a Latin expression, ‘festina lente’, which means make haste slowly. Or some people quote it as, ‘more haste, less speed’.  That is when you try to get in and do everything so fast, that you find out you have two left hands.

For me that would be a great advantage, because I’m left-handed. But for most other people, two left hands would be bad news. You fiddle and you fumble, because you try to go too fast.

If you are an expressive emotive type, you love to do that. You just want to run before you wait and hear what is going on. Somebody starts to give you instructions, they finish the first sentence and you are out there doing it already.

They say, “Hang on. I just wanted to warn you that if you go that way you will fall into the hole.”

It’s too late. You are already in the hole.

Take it slowly. You have lived many years up until now and survived. It doesn’t have to happen today or tomorrow. Go more slowly, and the amazing thing is you will get further much quicker.

A Personal Example

We try to do that in so many areas. For example memorization was one that I started on. I found out that I was great at memorizing Scripture.

Of course I didn’t know the methods of memorization that I know now. I just learned them by rote. I put them onto cards and learned all the words, turned them around and learned the reference.

I was doing so well. I could memorize Scripture after Scripture, and I built up a big pile of them. I would memorize one then add it in; memorize another one and add it in.

I was doing so well that I figured I could memorize 10 Scriptures a day. You know after a week I had memorized 70 Scriptures. And after two weeks I’d memorized 140 scriptures.

After three weeks I had memorized 140 Scriptures, after four weeks I had memorized 140 Scriptures, and after two months I had still memorized 140 Scriptures.

Do you know why this happened? My mind just packed in. I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t keep it up so I stopped memorizing.

Well you know if I count the years and the months since then, if I had memorized one Scripture a month from then until now, I would know quite a lot of the Bible. And you know what? It’s easy to memorize one Scripture a month.

But we don’t want to do that do we? We want to hurry on through, get it done now and get it done fast.

You say, “I’m going to be the best. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get out there, and I’m going to accomplish.”

Build Your Schedule

Keep the core desires going. Keep the action slow and consistent, slow and continual. Build it into your life to make it a habit.

Decide what you can do every day and then do it every day. But maybe there are some things you need to do every week. So as you arrange your schedule choose a day.

Say, “Well you know Friday is kind of the end of the work week. And so what I’m going to do is this. I have time on a Friday night to do something I never have time for on the other days of the week, because I don’t have to go to work the next day.”

Use that time and say,

“Okay, every Friday night I’m going to do this, which will help me to reach my goal.”

Do something every Saturday or every Sunday, whatever the case may be. Do something once a month. Set something consistent that can become a good, comfortable habit in your life.

We love habits don’t we? This is because habits are formed from good templates. Isn’t it nice on a Friday night to just chill out? You don’t have to think about work.

You have a good social time, take out a movie, and waste the evening building your goals. And what are your goals? Are they to sit and do nothing? What goals are you accomplishing?

The Power of the Right Movies

Well you know you could accomplish tremendous goals watching TV, provided you watch the right program. You could accomplish a tremendous goal by taking out a video every Friday night. But what are you watching it for?  At the end of the video can you say,

“I pulled some things out of this movie that have helped me get closer to my goal.”?

Be honest. Were you just watching the latest movie that came out?

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t watch movies. Sometimes you are just feeding your mind with poison. But we do live in a world where you need to know what is going on, and there is nothing wrong with knowing what is going on.

There is nothing wrong with seeing what is happening in the world. There is nothing wrong with seeing what is being portrayed, because what they are portraying is real life out there.

But I have come to the place where if I am going to sit down for a couple of hours and watch a worldly movie, then by the end of it I want to say to myself,

“What did I learn from this that can help me to serve the Lord better? What did I learn from this that can help me to accomplish my goals now?”

If you do that then it is wonderful. Friday night is movie time, and every Friday night we go out and we find a good movie that somehow is matched to our goals.

Do you want to be a great singer? Go and find movies about singers. Do you want to be a great businessman? Go and find a movie about somebody who became successful in business and learn from him.

Don’t just take any old thing for entertainment value. Try and use the time valuably. Be consistent but slow. Remember ‘festina lente’.

It is All About Attitude

Now that we have our timing right, we need to look at our attitude. Somebody once said,

“Attitude is everything.”

Well what is attitude? Attitude is one of those strange words almost like motivation. We understand what it means, but it is very difficult to actually describe exactly what an attitude is.

I pondered this one and I thought,

“If my attitude is going to change whether I succeed or fail, then what can I do about it?”

You see the wonderful thing about attitude is that it’s under your control. You can say to somebody,

“You know your problem is just that you have the wrong attitude. That’s what it is. You have a bad attitude and that is why you’re failing.”

What is attitude? As I thought about it in the context of spirit, soul and body, I came to this conclusion. Attitude is a combination of thoughts and choices; of mind and will.

You see thoughts are things that come, sometimes out of your control. You are walking down the street minding your own business, and a thought just crosses your mind.

Where did that come from? Somebody must have just beamed it in there. Well that somebody may just have been the Devil.

That source may have come from deep within you, like a template of the past. Maybe as you walked down the street, something you saw reminded you of a past event.

Whatever it may be, thoughts come sometimes when you don’t expect them. You don’t want them and they come out of your control, like thoughts of desire, thoughts of temptation or thoughts of lust.

You Can Choose Your Attitude

Here is an example. A man is walking down the street and there is a beautiful woman. There’s the thought. So what are you going to do with the thought?

This is where a thought becomes an attitude. You choose what to do with that thought. Now the thought is no longer out of control. It is in control. And so you can choose to do something with that thought.

If it is temptation or a lie from the enemy, you know what to do with it. You just kick it right out and you say,

“I reject you right now. You are unacceptable.”

Now the thought may be a good idea, and you want to meditate on it and think,

“Hey I never thought about that before. Let me think about that a little bit.”

It is a choice.

You are tempted to lust. Well what is your choice?

Jesus said,

Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her in his heart, has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Why is this? It is because his attitude said,

“Ooh, I’d like to get to know her better.”

But the attitude could change. You could look at her and say,

“Wow Lord, it’s so good that you made women. I’m so glad you gave me such a lovely wife.”

You see that’s an attitude. You can take a thought and turn it into something positive, or you can take that thought and turn it into something negative.

The thought comes and says,

“You know what? You just don’t have what it takes. You’re not one of the beautiful people. You are ugly and stupid.”

You see you choose to take that thought and agree with it or disagree with it. And if you agree with it, the more you think about it the more it gets a hold of you.

Stop the Negative Thoughts

Somebody likened meditation to one of those old washing machines. You had those old washing machines that had an agitator.

You still get them I’m sure. Even the rotary ones you get now, what they do is they keep hitting the clothes. The clothing item gets spun around, and it gets hit again and again until all the dirt comes out.

Well you know you can choose to keep a thought going in your mind until some dirt starts to come out. If you take a negative thought and you keep thinking about it, you could end up with worry. You could end up with fear, or you could end up with hate and strife.

Dealing With the Roots of the Flesh

Probably one of the strongest things that you need to handle with the right attitude is anger. This is because in your day to day walk, somebody is going to do or say something to make you mad. What is to be your attitude?

Well I gave a whole teaching on Hurts, Anger and Bitterness in my book The Way of Freedom, so I don’t need to give you a complicated teaching on that. But here’s a simple one.

Ephesians 4:31 and 32 speaks about being kind, tender-hearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.

You see being kind means you take a right attitude towards the offense that is being committed. Somebody did something to anger you. You could choose to look at that and say,

“How dare he. I’m not going to take that. I’m not going to have somebody say something like that to me and do that to me. It’s unforgiveable; unpardonable. I will not tolerate it.”

They have just committed the unpardonable sin in your eyes. Attitude can look at that and say,

“You know what? I’ve had people say worse things than that to me. I have broad shoulders. I can take it. Hey, maybe it’s true. Maybe I am stupid.”

It’s an attitude. You can choose.

You see, being tender-hearted means you have a right attitude towards the person. You look at the person, you get angry and you hate him. You want to kill him, you want to slap him, and you wish the earth would open up and swallow him.

You can take an attitude that says,

“Shame, you know what? This guy probably had a fight with his wife at home. He must be battling financially. There’s something wrong. He must have had a tough deal in life to act like such an idiot.”

Sorry, that’s a bad attitude. Do you see what I’m saying? You can choose. If you choose to take a thought and use it negatively, you can develop bitterness which is one of the main roots of the flesh.

You want to look at things. You can have an attitude of covetousness and an attitude that says,

“I can’t live without that. I must have one.”

This happens until eventually your life is dependent on things, and you are bound by temporal values. And I already mentioned your attitude to members of the opposite sex. You can choose to lust or not. That’s the third root.

Attitude can determine your whole spiritual life. An attitude can determine if you will continue on this path to fulfill your goal and succeed in the thing that you have chosen to do.

You will face this every day. You will face thoughts, and you will face words and experiences. You must make a choice as to what you are going to keep in your mind, because what you keep in your mind will change the way you feel.

It’s that simple. Your feelings are governed by what you think. And what you think is governed by what you choose.

Attitude Can Change Feelings

In the end you can actually choose the way you feel, but not directly. You see I’ve proved this before. You just need to paint a word picture.

I can just use words to make you think something negative, and you will start to feel negative and depressed. I could paint a beautiful picture of something positive.

I could paint a picture of your mother. Just look at her. She’s miserable, she’s sour, and she hasn’t smiled in years. She’s dressed in her nightgown with curlers in her hair, and she is screaming at you.

It makes you feel really good doesn’t it? Meditate on it. Think about it and pull out all those bad templates you had in childhood.

Are you feeling good now? You see you can change your feelings by an attitude.

You say, “Poor Mom. You know she had arthritis and had really bad pain, and she never ever told us. You know she suffered for all those years. She worked hard to try and care for us and do her best.

And you know I always looked at her and thought she was just miserable and sour all the time and she hardly ever smiled. But all that time she was suffering and working for me.”

Now you feel like crying. Attitude will change the way that you feel. And the way that you feel will determine if you continue on the path to fulfill the goal. Your attitude will determine what you are going to do in life.

Chapter 26

Don’t Be Introspective

Chapter 26 - Don’t Be Introspective

Now the most important thing about attitude is that it should never be selfish. When your attitude is totally introverted you are always thinking about,

“Poor little me.”

While you are looking inwards, you cannot put your eyes on the goal and on the path that lies ahead. You can’t, because you are too busy looking at yourself.

I am sure you’ve heard me tell the story of the centipede. Somebody asked him which leg to put forward first. When he tried to think about it, he couldn’t think which leg to put forward first and he couldn’t move. He became paralyzed.

You see, while you are looking in at yourself you say,

“Now where have I failed? What must I deal with? You know I really need to die to this thing.

“I need to deal with this in my life, and I need to deal with that in my life. And you know what? I don’t know if I am ever going to be qualified. I don’t know if the Lord could use me, because I just keep failing and sinning all the time.

“And you know people really don’t like me. I don’t feel good about myself, and people don’t think much about me.”

You are drowning in an ‘I’ pool.  Can you see that it’s all about attitude?

Develop an Other-Orientation

Now how do you move out from that? The answer is you cannot accomplish anything in this life without working with others. You must have what I call an ‘other-orientation’.

Supposing you meet somebody for the first time. They say,

“You know what? I am going to become a preacher. I am going to stand behind the pulpit and God is going to use me greatly. I’m going to be anointed.

“And you know I’m studying. I’m enrolled in this Bible School, and I’m really going to grow. God has been taking me through death. And I’ve been doing this, and I’ve been reading the Word and I’ve been doing that. I’m really just so pleased that God has called me.”

I’m sure that you just can’t wait to hear more - from somebody else.

What is your first attitude, when you meet somebody or when you come into the presence of another person?

“I just can’t wait to tell them about me. I just can’t wait to tell them what I want to do and what I’m going to do.”

Well if they have a miserable look on their face, you might be able to motivate them by showing them your excitement. It can have its place.

We have learned that when we write articles or emails, or anything that is going to influence other people, we take out the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘we’, and we start putting in the words ‘you’ and ‘your’.

You say, “Well you know we should pray more.”

The person is saying, “Yes you should”.

But you can change it to say,

“You are not praying long enough.”

Now the person thinks about it and says,

“That’s true. Wow, when last did I have a good prayer time?”

You Need People

That is other-orientation. You look at the person and you say,

“You’re not looking good today. What’s wrong? You seem to be down. I don’t see that usual smile on your face. Is something wrong?

Of course, then the other person is going to talk about ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’, but that’s okay. Give them their time and make them feel good for a bit, because you see they are the ones who are drowning. They are the ones who don’t have a goal and who are failing in life.

But you are the one that is going to succeed in life. And you are going to do it by realizing that you cannot succeed unless you are giving out. Nobody has ever yet become successful by just taking in and taking in. You must sow seed before you can reap.

You think you are going to sit there at home and buy all the study books and study by yourself. You are going to learn by yourself and practice by yourself, preach by yourself and prophecy over yourself. What for?

Sooner or later you are going to preach to other people. Sooner or later you are going to pray for and prophecy over other people.

So you need to get into practice now. You need to realize that to fulfill in life the goal that God has given you, and to fulfill the core desire that is burning in you, it is going to require other people.

You can’t be a monk, who is going to sit in a Monastery, shut yourself out from the world and accomplish great things for God.

These people have an appearance of holiness. They say,

“Well I’ve dedicated my life wholly to the Lord. I’m separating myself from women, so I won’t be married. I’m separating myself from the world. I am not looking at things. I’ve taken a vow of poverty.”

What use are you to God? You might as well go to Heaven now and be in His presence. You’re not much use on the earth. If you don’t develop an orientation towards other people, what do you want to succeed for?

You say, “Well I want to become a very famous person.”

Fame requires a lot of people knowing who you are and thinking you are great. How are you going to accomplish that? Get out of that introverted, inward ‘I’ attitude. Take your eyes off yourself and start looking around you.

I’m sure you’ve heard this old famous expression. It says,

“Well it’s alright for you. You have an outlet.”

How did that outlet arrive? You had to have created it.

People Can Help Fulfill Your Goals

So start now as you fulfill your goal. As you walk along this path and start putting into action the steps that need to be taken for you to succeed, right at the beginning, in the middle and at the end - and all the way through - you will be involved with other people

You may need other people to help you to reach that goal. Don’t try and do it all by yourself. Don’t think that you are so great that you can accomplish it.

You say, “Well I have the Lord. That’s great - just Him and me. You know the Lord and I do great together. I don’t need people.”

Well why don’t you just die now and go to Heaven and be with Him permanently? Then you and Him can have a wonderful time for eternity. But you’re not much use to anybody else, while you are walking in that awesome, intimate presence with the Lord and hiding away in your room.

You say, “She’s such a spiritual woman of God. You come into her presence and you can feel the Lord.”

Yes that can happen if you can get to meet her, because she’s always hiding away. There is no place for loners in the Kingdom of God.

Destroying the Opposition

And then the other problem we have is we use people the wrong way. The Bible calls that strife and vainglory.

Those horrible words are from the King James Version. What they mean quite simply, is breaking other people down and lifting yourself up. It means destroying the competition.

You see somebody else is better than you, and they are now fulfilling the goal that you are aiming for. If your orientation is selfish, your thinking will go like this:

“I could never be as good as her she is. She’s just Miss Perfect. She has it all. She was born with all the right proportions and has all the abilities.”

Have you ever known people like that? They just have it all right. It just fell into their laps. They were born into the right family, given the right opportunities in life, and went to the best schools. Everything was just handed to them. They are one of the beautiful people.

And so you come to the conclusion that if you are to ever reach your goal, that person will always stand in your way. And the only way you can ever reach that goal is for them to fall.

When the person succeeds you go home depressed. When they fail you say,

“Ha, she messed it up tonight. Isn’t that good? She stood up on the stage and sang terribly. It was vile. Everybody was blocking their ears. Isn’t it great? I can do better than that.”

We start looking for the downfall of other people. But you know we don’t do it openly do we? We are Christians. We don’t hate. We don’t pray evil on people. We don’t pray and say,

“Lord, please remove him.”

But in our hearts we think,

“You know if they weren’t here I really could do well.”

And when they fall we say,

“Thank you Lord. You knew what the best way was.”

We try and keep this little spiritual approach. We say,

“God has dealt with him. You see he had a proud attitude.”

You say, “God is dealing with you. He’s breaking you down. He is bringing you to death. You must die.”

“Not me. I don’t need to die already. I’m rising up. God’s called me.”

Share Your Knowledge With Others

Then the next mistake we make in dealing with other people is that we try to keep to ourselves everything that we have gained.

You see if I were to share my knowledge with you, you would know as much as me.

I know that if I share my revelation with you, you are probably going to go and preach it and make it famous before I get a chance to. So I’ll keep it to myself, until I get the chance to stand up one day and reveal my gems to the world.

You say, “It must be copyrighted with my name on it. I can’t have somebody else preaching it.”

We shared last time about preachers who want to spread out the little bit that they learned at Bible School in the time of their ministry. You see you keep people ignorant enough so that you always know more than them.

That’s a good philosophy for success there. Always keep people under you and then you will always be the top dog. No it’s not.

I have a very simple philosophy which I have shared many times. It is this: Catch me if you can. Catch me if you can, because I’m not staying in one place.

You may look at where I am and say,

“I can do that.”

I say, “Sure you can, but by the time you get there I’m somewhere else. Catch me if you can. I dare you to. Come on, give it a try. Overtake me if you can. The road is wide and the world is big. There is plenty of opportunity.”

I’m not afraid to give you everything I have. I’m not afraid to pour out to you everything the Lord reveals, even as He gives it to me.

I’m not afraid to have you stand up, and to take that gem of revelation and expand it further. Maybe it will make you famous, and everybody will say,

“Wow, she is just so brilliant.”

I will sit back there and say,

“Yes, she is isn’t she, especially after I taught it to her.”

But you know what? If she’s my spiritual child, I am excited. I say,

“Isn’t that awesome? As a result of my influence she could rise up and become world famous.”

And you know the rest of the world may not know it, but I know it and that is good enough for me. That’s what God gave me to do.

That is what your goal is. It is other-orientation.

Materials Meant for the Whole Body

You know when God first gave us the revelations that we preached and taught on the Fivefold Ministries, especially on the apostle and prophet, there was nothing like it out there.

Well there wasn’t anything like it when we first did it, and we kind of hogged it to ourselves. We just had select people that we brought in and trained, and they were the only ones we would share it with.

The Lord said to us one day,

“I didn’t just give this for you. I gave it for the world, for the Body of Christ.”

And you know it was hard to say,

“Okay, if I put this stuff out there, people are going to preach it.”

We discovered that somebody once took one of our studies and put it out virtually as it was, with his name on the bottom. Well he didn’t say directly that he wrote it, but he didn’t put our name there either. And everybody thought,

“He writes such good studies. Isn’t that awesome?”

You know what? I was excited. I thought,

“Our stuff is good enough that people want to copy it. Isn’t that awesome? Isn’t it wonderful that people out there are starting to talk about the Moses Apostle now, and nobody ever thought about it before?”

We had to let it go. We had to give it to the world, because it didn’t belong to us. God gave it to us for His Body.

Don’t ever think that the gifts and abilities God has given to you are for you and you alone. If that is your attitude you will fail. You will never reach your goal. Share freely what God has given you.

Chapter 27

The Correct

Way to Sell

Chapter 27 - The Correct Way to Sell

Now perhaps some of your goal is business. It is so difficult to mix business and ministry isn’t it? The two really just don’t go together so well. We have the wealthy businessmen who are Christians, and we kind of use this term ‘Christian businessmen’.

What it means basically is a businessman who happens to be a Christian. But the term is almost as ambiguous as a Christian adulteress, because you know you do business one way, and you do Christian another way. You don’t mix the two together.

You see when I come to sell you something, the idea is to coerce you, persuade you, bombard you and force you to give me your money - so I can get rich.

I struggled with this one for a long time. I said,

“Lord, how can we sell products and use the world’s way of doing it.”

I have studied up on all these marketing methods, and you have to use the right techniques that somehow trick the person so that he doesn’t realize he is being sold. The next moment he has bought it, and you’ve caught him like catching the fish.

Make Both Parties Happy

I asked the Lord about this and He gave me a very simple principle. I will share it in more detail in another series. But here it is very simply.

Any business transaction or sale transaction always involves two parties. Well there can be a third person in between who brings the two together. But essentially one person is buying and another person is selling.

You know in the early days there was no money, so how did you buy or sell? You held up an object and you said,

“I have five of these, but I really don’t need five. Do you need one of these?”

The person said,

“Yeah, I’ve been looking for one of those.”

You said, “Well what do you have that maybe I don’t have?”

I find that you have something that I really want. So I say,

“I tell you what, we’ll do a swap. I’ll give you what I have, and you give me what you have.”

We’re both happy. You see now if you want to be crooked about it, you try and pretend that this thing is really valuable even though it is a piece of junk that costs 5 cents.

If I can fool you and convince you that this is really valuable, you might give me something that is worth $100 dollars, and I come off with the better deal don’t I? You took this piece of junk made of plastic, and you gave me something made of gold.

It’s a pretty good business transaction don’t you think? I made quite a profit there. That is not God’s way of doing things.

But now if I hold this up to you and say very clearly,

“Now listen, this thing only costs 10 cents.”

You say, “But I really need one of them.”

“Well sure you can have it. What do you have to give me in return?”

You say, “Well you know I have hundreds of these thousand dollar gold bars lying around. Do you want one?”

You know what? I’m not going to be stupid. But when that transaction has been done, none of us have fooled each other.

What was valuable to you was not what was valuable to me. But when we exchanged it we both received value. We both had something that made us happy, and we walked away saying,

“That was a good transaction.”

Is that the way you feel every time you buy something in the shops? If it is, you are going to go back and buy some more.

You say, “That’s really good stuff. It’s good value for money. And even though it’s expensive, it is worth it. I really like it. I really enjoy it and it’s good for me. It’s part of my life.”

Do Christian Business Honestly

You see business is simply a transaction between two people that makes both of them happy. And you know we can sell that way as Christians, and we can do business that way by being open and honest and aboveboard.

We can do it by offering people things that they really want, and receiving from them of their money which we want.

And afterwards we are both happy. We don’t fool the person by selling them something worthless for a lot of money. That is crooked business practice, and it is contrary to the Word of God, unless the person knows that it is junk and worthless, he still wants it and is happy about it.

It’s very easy. You take your products and you present them and say,

“You know I can see that you really need one of these because you don’t have one. You know what? This thing has really changed my life. I use it every day. I’m being honest. I really think that you could benefit from this. If you are interested, I have some of them.”

The person says,

“You know I’ve been looking for something like that for years.”

That’s a good way of making a sale. I have advertised, I’ve persuaded you, and I’ve influenced you to buy. I’ve done everything that is normally included in a sale or a business transaction, but I have done it in such a way that both of us are happy.

Now could you get wealthy that way? Of course you could. You could get extremely wealthy if you’ve made a product that people really want.

You know people complain because we are charging for the Word of God. They say,

“How can you say that you have copyright on the revelation that God gave you?”

Well God said it, because He gave the copyright to Adam of things that take place in this world. Everything that takes place in this world has been put into the hands of man. And God was down there every day to talk to Adam, to give him advice, and to make him successful.

The Wrong Way to Get Rich

But what is your attitude? You say,

“I need to make as much money as I can at other people’s expense.”

If that is your attitude, you will fail in your goal to rise up in business. Your attitude should be,

“I want to benefit the world. I want to help other people and provide them with the best products possible.

“I want to meet the needs of people out there. People have been crying out for something like this for years. God has given me the wisdom and shown me how to do it.”

If you are reading this book, I want you to be so happy with it that you are able to say,

“You know what? This thing has changed my life. It has caused me to succeed in so many areas.

“It has caused me to become wealthy. The little bit that I paid for it was a drop in the bucket. Here’s another million dollars for helping me. Thank you.”

Wouldn’t that be great? I tell you I would be thrilled if this teaching could teach you to become a millionaire. And I’d be thrilled if in becoming a millionaire you helped me become one too.

You know why? Because then I will have money to make more books like this. I would be able to reach more people to reach the world, and to fulfill the goals that God has given me. You see, it is about other-orientation.

Success in Your Personal Life

Now there’s a place for individuality, and there’s a place for incorporation. They are big words. What do they mean?

Individuality means personal goals and accomplishment. Each one of us needs to feel even this. Even Solomon said that a man must have satisfaction in his own work.

At the end of your life you should be able to say,

“I accomplished this. I stood out from the rest. I was unique and I did something special. I made a contribution that was different to what everybody else has done.”

We all need that individuality. Children growing up in a home, like to feel that they are important to parents in a different way. Parents make mistakes when they have twins or triplets, by dressing them all the same and treating them all the same, as though they are carbon copies.

Each one wants to be unique and each one wants to be special. Each child wants to be noticed and to say,

“I did something different. Notice me.”

We all need that. The Lord wants us to fulfill that, and He wants us to have that sense of accomplishment. But there comes a time where you have to succeed with the group, and where the group will get the praise.

The time will come where people will look at you and say,

“You have done such an awesome job. You have led your ministry to such influence in the earth.”

Well I’d like to feel as an individual, as the spiritual father and the leader, that I kind of had a hand in that. But I don’t have to put anyone down and say,

“You think they did great? You know what? They couldn’t have done a thing unless I taught them.”

You see I don’t have to do that. I can stand and I say,

“Have you seen my spiritual children?”

I will name them one at a time and say,

“Aren’t they awesome? You know what? I could not have done a thing without them. Every single one of them was a vital part of this machinery. And together as a group and a team we have fulfilled the mandate that God has given.

“And we lay ourselves on the altar and we thank the Lord for His grace that has enabled each one of us to accomplish this great thing. I am so proud of every one of them.”

You see now we get the glory as a group. It’s a wonderful feeling.

You say, “You know I’m part of that group. Isn’t it awesome to be part of that group?”

We all need that. We need individual recognition and accomplishment, and we need to feel we are part of a group that together have pooled all their efforts and become successful in this world.

A Leader or a Follower

And then the last thing in working with others is that you have to decide if you want to be someone who influences others, or somebody who is influenced. In simpler terms, do you want to be the leader or the follower?

Well I would rather be the leader. I would rather be influencing other people for good, than running around to see what I can get.

You say, “I’m going to go to this seminar and that seminar. I want to go to the business seminar and then that Christian conference. We’ll visit this church, and that church, and the other church.

“We’ll go to this great preacher and see the revival that is happening there. I want to get a bit of everything - a bit of this and a bit of that. And maybe by the time I am finished I might be able to accomplish something.”

Be Original

A preacher was standing up and preaching very fervently and very eloquently from the pulpit. There was an old man sitting in a chair there who had lived a little bit. The preacher said,

“And this…”

The guy said,

“That’s Spurgeon.”

He glared at him and carried on preaching. The old man said,

“That’s Wesley.”

He carried on preaching, and the old man said,

“That’s John Calvin.”

Eventually the preacher started to get irritated. Of course what he was preaching was all the great stuff he had read. There was nothing original. He said something else and the guy said,

“That’s so and so.”

The preacher became so angry he said,

“Shut up you old goat.”

The old man said, “Now that’s original.”

You see you are going to be like that if you’ve gone and picked up all this knowledge. Everybody will think you are very clever, but you never came up with anything very original or that was your own. You didn’t receive your own revelation. You just picked up everybody else’s stuff.

Be one that influences others. You must be the one that people are talking about saying,

“And Les D. Crause said…”

You know I give honor where honor is due, and I have mentioned some names in this teaching. I don’t have a problem saying that I learned from these men. But by the same token I taught you all their stuff in my way.

You can go and read their books and get their tapes. I’ll guarantee that you will not hear what I taught you here, because I added my own originality and my own revelation to it, and I took it beyond.

I read them all. I studied them all and I followed all the paths. I learned everything out there, then I took it and I added the revelation that God had given me.

And in my own unique and original way I have presented to you in this book the principles of success, the way to success and all the self-help stuff you will ever need. Yes there is probably a whole lot more, but I’ve given you the germ thoughts of all the main things.

You can find elements of them out there, but you are not going to read them the way I have presented it to you here. This is because this is success according to Les D. Crause, inspired by the Holy Spirit, in collaboration with the Lord Jesus Christ.

To end now, you have a unique contribution to make in this world. You must lead so that others can follow.

People will admire your courage and love your willingness to share, and when you’ve finished your course, this world will be a better place. But for now, work hard and have fun. That is the way to success.

Table of Contents

Section 01 - Dreams Goals Plans Action

Chapter 01 – You Need to Daydream

Chapter 02 - Move onto Your Goals

Chapter 03 - Have Clear Plans

Chapter 04 – Time for Action

Section 02 – Finding Your Destiny in Life

Chapter 05 – Knowing Your Life Purpose

Chapter 06 - The Best Type of Partner

Chapter 07 – Problems Finding Your Destiny

Chapter 08 – Taking Charge of Your Life

Section 03 – Developing Core Desires

Chapter 09 – Staying Motivated

Chapter 10 – Finding Your Existing Desires

Chapter 11 - Things You Can Change

Chapter 12 - My Personal Story

Section 04 – Going for Your Goals

Chapter 13 – Story of a Core Desire

Chapter 14 - You May Need Extra Skills

Chapter 15 - Problems With Core Desires

Chapter 16 - Start Prioritizing

Chapter 17 - Normal Does not Exist

Section 05 – Planning to Succeed

Chapter 18 - Know Your Goals

Chapter 19 - A Biblical Way of Remembering

Chapter 20 - Put Your Goals into Objects

Chapter 21 - Allow For Your Smaller Goals

Chapter 22 - A New Enthusiasm for Life

Section 06 – Lights, Camera, Action

Chapter 23 – Time to Get Moving

Chapter 24 - Lethargy and Laziness

Chapter 25 - Keep Things Simple

Chapter 26 - Don’t Be Introspective

Chapter 27 - The Correct Way to Sell