Kindle Notes & Highlights
A popular misconception in the church today is that God winds us up like a doll and then lets us go our own way, leaving us to figure life out on our own. “If I get in a bind,” the thinking goes, “I can call on God and maybe He’ll help me.” This kind of philosophy leads people to do their own thing in life and then ask God to bless what they are already doing—instead of seeking Him for direction from the beginning.
When you are doing what God called you to do, you don’t have to spend time asking for His blessing or praying for Him to move on your behalf. God has already blessed what He told you to do.
Many people have never felt the satisfaction of knowing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they are doing what God made them for. No believer should live that way. God created you for something better than wandering aimlessly through life. You have a purpose.
The only way to have perfect peace and joy is to point your life in the direction God wants you to go. Otherwise, you may be praying to get rid of discouragement in your life when, in fact, the lack of peace you are experiencing is a result of not being in God’s perfect will. When you aren’t going in the right direction, He will sometimes turn you around by giving you a sense of unrest, or what I call a “holy dissatisfaction.”
God didn’t give me direction by a booming voice that echoed down from the heavens saying, “Thus saith the Lord, thou shalt leave Seagoville, Texas.” No, I just lost my desire to be there. This is one of the ways that God speaks to us—through the desires of our heart.
It’s sad to say, but a lot of Christians have never known the satisfaction that comes from being in the center of God’s will. One of the reasons for this is because the church has been more influenced by the world rather than influencing the world.
The Lord’s plan for your life is far better than that. You aren’t a mistake. You didn’t miss out on the talents you need to accomplish God’s will. You don’t have to struggle through life, bouncing from one crisis to the next. God has a purpose for you. He created you for a reason. You have a specific purpose in life and God wants you to discover that purpose.
He made you the way you are. You can change to a degree, but you can’t change the core of who you are.
The basic balance doesn’t change. Some people are built for speed; others are built for endurance. I didn’t like sprinting because I wasn’t built to run sprints. I was built for long-distance running.
If you let fate dictate your life, you will make a lot of wrong decisions. You can’t just let circumstances move and control you. God doesn’t move you around like a pawn. Many think God is sovereign and whatever His will is comes to pass, but that isn’t how it works.
You don’t have to mature as a Christian before God will love you. God’s love is unconditional and He accepts you right where you are. But you will be happier and a much greater blessing to the people in your life, once you find your purpose and start heading in that direction.
The words are easy to say, but you also have to believe what you say in your heart. You have to really mean that you are turning your life over to Jesus—which isn’t to say that you’ll never sin again.
Success, not failure, is the true test of character. The question is: Are you going to seek God as strongly during the good times as you do when you are struggling?
God hasn’t given up on you. The simple fact that you are reading this book shows that God is drawing you and trying to reach out to you. Not a single person alive is beyond hope. No one has messed up their life so badly that God can’t take it and do something supernatural with it. But you can’t do things the way you always have in the past and expect different results. You’re going to have to humble yourself and submit yourself to God.
The Lord sacrificed Himself so He could have you, not your service.
Jesus is more concerned about the quality of ministry than He is the quantity of ministry.
You need to be prepared. You need to get to where you aren’t ministering out of your own ability, but through the power of God. It takes a while for that to happen. Jesus wouldn’t commit Himself to those people because He didn’t want anyone to speak out of their own ability. The majority of people today who represent God are just teaching things they have heard someone else say. Their hearts may be good and they may mean well, but their teaching is just the teaching of men. It’s not the power of the Holy Spirit, therefore it causes problems.
little babies don’t give a rip about anything but their own needs. They scream and cry to wake mom up in the middle of the night to be fed—oblivious to the fact that mommy just went through labor and is exhausted. Babies will do whatever it takes to get what they want, when they want it, and they don’t care one bit how it affects others. Babies think they are the center of the universe. Every one of us came into the world exactly that way, and sad to say, a majority of us are still that way.
Being a living sacrifice is the first step in finding God’s will. It would really jump start your spiritual life to get off the throne and say, “Jesus, I want You to control my life.” Still, it’s a process. If you are living a totally selfish life right now, you have a lot of momentum built up in that direction. You can’t make a complete U-turn instantly. If the Lord suddenly turned you around, it would be a disaster—like trying to flip a U-turn while going 65 mph on the highway. It’s going to take God some time to turn you around and get you moving in the right direction.
What you don’t know is killing you.
Whatever we focus our attention on is what will dominate our thoughts
The only way we are going to get what is in our spirit to flow out into our lives is by letting the Word of God speak to us and direct us.
For you to go from zero to a thousand miles an hour instantly isn’t acceleration, it’s a wreck.
The strength of a person lies in his or her focus.
The way to kill a man’s vision is to give him two visions.
Serving God is not boring. If you’re bored, you haven’t found God’s will for your life. Following God’s will is like riding a roller coaster: there’s excitement at every curve. You will face challenges and be stretched. Not everyone is supposed to be in full-time ministry, trying to reach millions of people, but everyone should be excited about the future and what they are doing. God didn’t create any of us to just occupy space.
Another time, the mother of these seven sisters died so they prayed over her and she was raised from the dead. Then their mother stood up, walked two miles into town, bought groceries, and came back. These sisters aren’t on television, they aren’t even preachers, but they are walking in the supernatural power of God. Their town knows who they are and people have been born again because of their testimony. They are making a difference. Their lives count!
Nobody lies on their death bed and says, “Oh, I wish I had owned a bigger house and nicer cars. I wish I had more diamonds and jewels.” The regrets people have at the end of their lives involve relationship failures. People regret that their lives didn’t make a bigger impact, because life is all about relationships. God is in the people business. Whatever God’s purpose for your life is, somehow or another, it is going to relate to changing people.
has been trying to lead you by putting His desires in your heart. But you have to get out of the boat. You have to take a step and get out on the water. Be bold enough to step out and follow the desires of your heart. Your life will take on meaning; it will be exciting! You will make an impact in the lives of others. It will be worth the risk of getting out of your comfort zone.
Those four lepers brought deliverance to the entire city of Samaria. They became heroes because somebody finally said, “How long am I going to sit here, until I die?” It’s better to take a step of faith and fail than to sit around doing nothing and call it success. God can bless you doing the wrong thing because you are trying to move in faith—more than He can bless you doing nothing out of fear, which is unbelief. If God has put a desire in your heart, don’t sit around waiting until you die, do something about it!
God ’s will for your life involves His timing. You can’t just take a Word from God, make a paragraph out of it, and do whatever you want to. God’s plans can’t be sped up. You can delay God’s plan—Moses delayed it 40 years—but you can’t make it happen any quicker than it’s supposed to.
God wasn’t going to deliver Israel in some way that would allow Moses to get all of the credit. It wasn’t going to be Moses’ position within the household of Pharaoh that gave Israel freedom. God was going to do it in a miraculous way so there would be no mistaking Who saved them.
God is going to call you to do something that is absolutely beyond your natural ability. He wants to do things in a supernatural way so it testifies of His glory and people will recognize His love for them. God uses people to do things beyond their ability so when others see it, they say, “Wow! That had to be God!” God uses the base things of the world, things that are despised, things that are nothing, so no flesh will glory in His presence and say, “Look what I did.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-30.)
This attitude is in stark contrast to Moses’ self-confidence 40 years earlier. It took a few decades in the wilderness for Moses to come to the end of himself. As long as you are sufficient in yourself, trusting in yourself, then you are going to have a hard time trusting God. You won’t find the beginning of God until you get to the end of yourself. Moses was a different person with a different outlook. He was no longer second in command over all of Egypt—he was working for his father-in-law, herding sheep on the back side of the desert. Moses had lost the arrogance and self-will from his days
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When I first started seeking God, I did all kinds of things. You might have to try a number of avenues before you find the right one. You might start off in one direction, only to see everything go wrong and lose all of your peace. Sometimes the way you discern God’s will is by finding out what He doesn’t want you to do—like when God gives you a holy dissatisfaction. If you don’t have peace about what you are doing then don’t go that direction.
Hearing
God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. God said that it’s not good for a man to be alone, so he made a woman—not another man. God’s plan is for us to live in heterosexual relationships, but He loves homosexuals too. The grace of God applies to everyone. He’s not mad at people for living a gay lifestyle. God loves homosexuals, but living that way gives Satan a huge inroad into their life.
You can’t live in sin and prosper. Sooner or later, it’s going to catch up with you.
The devil believes—but his works are against God. He doesn’t have saving faith. People can say, Oh, I believe God exists, but if their actions are contrary to the Lord’s direction then they ’aren’t believing with “saving faith.” They only have mental assent. Faith without corresponding action is not true faith.
Faith doesn’t reach completion until we begin to act in accordance with what we profess to believe—action must be joined together with belief. We can’t just quit taking medicine, thinking the action of stopping our medicine is going to make us well. People die doing foolish things like that. The Bible says with the heart man believes and with the mouth confession is made (Romans 10:10). First we have to believe in our heart that God has healed us then we can act on what we believe. If we believe with our heart and confess with our mouth, we will see it come to pass. Actions follow faith—they
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Many Christians are more dominated by their emotions than by what they believe. They let their feelings control how they act, instead of letting faith steer them. Seeing God’s will fulfilled in your life means learning to obey Him no matter how you feel. After you have heard God’s direction and learned how to follow His will, you have to learn to be obedient to see His will fulfilled in your life. I highly recommend that you obey
God in every area of your life, even if you feel like you simply can’t do what God is leading you to do. Trust God and follow His leading. He will never lead you to do something you can’t do or something that isn’t in your best interest.
The truth is that there are always reasons why we are the way we are, but there are no excuses.
To fulfill God’s will, you have to accept responsibility in your life. You aren’t an evolved animal simply responding to stimuli. You are a person created in the image of God, therefore you are responsible for your actions. Quit blaming other people for your current situation. Maybe some terrible things happened to you in the past, but you can accept responsibility for any wrong choices you have made in response and move on with your life. As long as you play the role of a victim, you will never be a victor.
Jesus said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). He admitted that we are going to have problems, but He told us to be of good cheer. The word “rejoice” is a verb; it’s an action, not something you possess. You don’t have to feel joy to rejoice in the Lord because you always have joy in your spirit, whether you can feel it or not (Galatians 5:22). You can rejoice through gritted teeth or with tears running down your face.
We can do what God tells us to do regardless of how we feel. Once we start obeying God, we will discover that we have a well on the inside of us that is full of the life of God. Rejoicing is like putting a bucket down into the well of life in our spirit and drawing out the fullness of God. We may start rejoicing through gritted teeth, but if we keep rejoicing we will draw out the life of God that’s inside of us. We will experience real joy and peace. We can’t be led through life by our emotions. We have to be led by the Spirit of God.
Nature tends toward a state of decline. It’s easier to be fat than it is to stay skinny. It’s easier to be sick than it is to get well. It’s easier to float downstream than it is to swim
upstream. We have to fight against the problems and sicknesses that try to come against us in life. A lot of people think they don’t have any control over these things, but they do. You resist the devil, and he will flee from you (James 4:7).
Many seek what God has to offer, but they don’t seek God Himself. When they are in a crisis, they seek Him. But when things are going good, they take their eyes off of Jesus and begin to sink. Our goal should be to seek a relationship with God first, then everything else will be given to us.
It’s like being in an airplane. People say, “I’m flying 500 miles an hour at 30,000 feet.” No, you’re not. The plane is flying; you’re not. It’s your position inside of the plane that keeps you airborne. If you don’t believe it, then step outside of the plane and see what happens. You will plummet like a rock. In the same way, Christians aren’t changing unbelievers’ lives and causing miracles to happen. You aren’t doing those things; God living in you is doing them. And if you ever take your attention off Jesus, the author and the finisher of your faith, you are headed for a fall.
