I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Life is fragile. Handle with care!” What good advice. I like to say, “Life is fragile. Handle with prayer.” Prayer is not chasing after God and begging Him to help us with our issues in life. Prayer is God’s gift to us. God designed prayer to be a two-way communication that helps us to live our daily lives in sync with His will for us.
Do You Know God’s True Nature?
If we want to see God’s power move through us, we need to build a relationship with Him. God’s power needs faith to activate, and the best way to increase our faith is to know our God and believe His promises. When you know God’s true nature, it’s easy to trust Him. When you read the promises of God, you see that He is a kind, big-hearted God. He’s not a hard taskmaster. He’s not a stingy God. He is a good God, all the time!
When you internalize the truth that God loves you deeply, you will see your future differently. You will see your future through the eyes of God, who has destined you to be successful in the plans He has for you. He’s not up there waiting for you to make a mistake so He can kick you when you’re down. He is a good and loving Father who is in your corner, cheering for you. What’s more, God’s abundance is limitless, and He has the means and resources to take care of all your needs and ensure your success. Simple faith that God loves you will change your life in so many ways. No longer will you be coming to God “begging” Him to have mercy or rescue you. You will understand that it is His plan out of love for you to change your circumstances for the better.
See Yourself the Way God Sees You
We all battle with low self-esteem and negative thoughts. “Who am I that God Almighty would care about me? I’m not worthy.” We are going to leave those feelings in the dust and
buried in the dirt! You are God’s precious child. He loves you. He tells us in Isaiah 49:16 that He has our name written in the palm of His hand. When a person commits to getting a tattoo of a loved one on their arm, it symbolizes a commitment and means something deep. God, your Father, has your name inscribed on His hand. That’s genuine love and commitment to you!
Access to God’s Unlimited
When our family got hit with two separate diagnoses of potentially terminal cancer, the promises of God went to a new level of reality for us. When you are suddenly hanging on a branch on the edge of a cliff peering out over the valley of death below, your prayers and faith aren’t a backup plan anymore. They become your lifeline to God’s supernatural help and healing. Our faith, prayers, and declarations had to go to an entirely new level. We became adamant about connecting God’s super to our natural.
Never had we faced battles of this magnitude. We had to “pull out the big guns” on these. It was sink-or-swim time. As Larry has said, “When you’re facing a financial crisis, even if you lose everything, there’s always some way to recover and rebuild. For the most part, the challenges most of us have faced always have some way out or backup plan. This time everything really is on the line. It was all or nothing.”
I’ve always said, “Don’t wait until you need a miracle to get to know the miracle worker!” I thank God that before we were hit with these horrific health reports, we had a long history (HIS-story) of knowing our God intimately. We had already established a foundation of knowing God’s promises and experiencing His power as we pressed in through prayer and perseverance. Without a doubt, prayer and faith change everything. God’s intervention rewrites your future! God’s promises are true and “trump” our problems! These are not simply catchy clichés. These are absolute truths that have brought undeniable miracles and breakthroughs to us. He brought us through, and He will bring you through too.
A lot of people quote the verse that says, “The truth will set you free.” But it’s not just the truth that will set you free; it’s the truth you know that will set you free. The truth of the Word of God can sit in your Bible on a shelf every day, but that truth doesn’t set you free from anything. You can teach a parrot to quote scriptures, but that truth doesn’t set anyone free. It is only the truth that we hear, comprehend, and internalize, or “own,” that can set us free and change our circumstances and futures. That’s why it is critical that we know, receive, and declare the promises of God for our own lives. We have to take ownership of them personally.
God Believes in You
When you know that God believes in you, it changes the way you feel about yourself and transforms the way you view your life. When you know that God believes in you, your “Goliaths” look smaller. The impossible turns to possible because we know that “with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27).
When you realize how much God believes in you, it will change the way you view your own potential. You will have hope for your future. Rather than thinking, “Oh, I could never do that,” or “That’s beyond my abilities,” or “My problem is too big even for God to help,” you realize that God Almighty lives within you. Because the Spirit of truth dwells within us, we can live beyond the limitations of our own natural talent, ability, IQ, or physical limitation.
We have the opportunity every day to draw from the well of God’s Spirit and the living Word within us and tap into the mind and resources of God Himself! The very God who spoke and formed the world lives within you and me. The moment we asked Him into our hearts and were born again, His Spirit took up residence and started living within us.
One of my favorite Scripture passages has always been Ephesians 3:16–20. “…That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.
Paul was talking about being strengthened with might by God’s Spirit in our inner man. So, we see here that God’s power is already alive and working within us, for us, and through us. Romans 8:11 says, “The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in [us]” and “will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in [us]” (NIV). Do you grasp the significance of that? The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and brought Him back to life is living within us. That same Spirit can raise us up and enable us to do whatever He has put within our hearts to do! I made a point to speak this scripture (and many others) out loud as a declaration of faith and dominion. When we boldly declare God’s promises, things happen to release the miracle power of God.
