#feelgoodfriday
What makes you feel good? Family is one of the things that makes me feel good, had a great time playing board games with the three of my children that still live at home this evening, and now watching Countdown with my sons as my daughter is in bed.
You have to take aside time for doing things that make you feel good. You have to enjoy the journey to tomorrow today.
Tomorrow is an elder’s meeting, training leaders always makes me feel good!
Have a great weekend people!
#futurethursday
For the next few weeks I want to focus on dreaming big. One of the ways you guarantee yourself a better future is to dream big. To deliberately use your imagination to imagine a great future. You need to see that God has a huge plan for your life. You need to see that God believes in you. You need to see that God is on your side.
But before I can help you get your mind on your great future, I need to help you get your mind off your past. Living in the past is a killer! It is deadly! Living in the past will kill your dreams, kill your potential, kill your self-confidence, kill your God-confidence.
Now all of you reading this have different pasts. Some of you will have horrific pasts, involving abuse and neglect. Others will have average pasts, others amazing pasts. But all of your pasts have one thing in common – they are over!
Many people are held back by negative emotions from thoughts of their past. They are scared people will find out what they have thought and done. They feel regret, they feel shame, they feel they wish they had never met a certain person, done a certain act. They feel emotions that are incredibly hard to shift and deal with.
But I want you to know today: God can help you shift from your past. Your past does not have to define you another day. It’s time for a new beginning and we can have one today! If you want a new beginning, Thursdays are the day for you in the new few weeks and months.
I want you to stop praying about the past, stop meditating on the past, stop rehearsing your past mistakes and past hurts, stop dreaming about past relationships. I want you to go to bed tonight not haunted by your past.
God allowed you to be born with a purpose and a destiny and a future. God wants you to be defined by your future success not your past failures. God wants you to know that holding onto your past is killing your future potential and it is time to let you.
I am such a strong advocate that God has a future dream for you, and I want all of you to know that God loves you and has a great plan for your future. No matter what has happened in your past, God can still use you. God wants to use you. I do not want you to die with your potential unlocked. I want you free from your past – there is too much to do in this nation and in this generation for you to be looking back in anger all the time!
In Luke 17.32 Jesus gave everyone of us a very specific instruction. He said: “Remember Lot’s wife!” Have you obeyed that instruction of the Master this week? Have you remembered Lot’s wife?
Have you thought about Genesis 19 this week, have you thought about God about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of their wickedness and their corroded and broken lives full of sin and shame? God loved these people so much but they were doing nothing but imagining new ways to sin and new ways to hurt people.
Have you thought about God’s love preserving Lot and rescuing him and his family from the destruction? Have you thought that God only gave them one simple instruction as he delivered them: don’t look back.
Have you remembered that Lot’s wife didn’t even obey one simple instruction and she looked back, even though God was saving her from certain destruction? Have you considered that she valued her past more than her future? Have you remembered that sometimes you remember your past more than your future, and that doing so will kill your potential?
Have you ever wondered what Lot’s wife’s destiny was? I wonder what plans God had to prosper her and to give her a hope and a life of abundance? Have you wondered what her story would be if she looked forward? Would you and I know her name, and not have to keep calling her “Lot’s wife”? Would her life have had some purpose and some destiny?
I want this story to shake you up a little. I want to not just inspire you today, but to really challenge you – I want to alarm you a little. Remember alarms are to wake you up, and I want you to wake up: to remain in your past in your mind will kill your future because you cannot dream and reminisce at the same time.
Looking back will make you as useful to the kingdom of God as a pillar of salt. Your past is over, it’s gone. Everything yesterday is over. God wants to do something new and powerful in your life, but He cannot do it if you are lingering in your past!
#wednesdaywisdom
It’s frightening to me how many people have no idea of the task in life they are assigned for and the destiny they are called to.
Let love lead you into your destiny.
Today, ask yourself and write down:
Where these intersect is definitely the right direction for you to move forward. Where the people you love and the tasks you love meet, I guarantee that this is a sign post to your destiny and your dream, and crafting the life you love!
#teachingtuesday
Last week we discussed the importance of dealing with worry as an enemy, and that is very important. Today we are going to look at the leading cause of worry, and what I am about to say you may never have considered before, but I want you to carefully consider this as it will, if listened to and appreciated, change your life for the better.
The number one cause of worry is trying to taking responsiblity for and authority over things that God never wanted and does not want us to have responsibility for and authority over.
If you can grasp this then you will be able to deal with worry in your life. 1 Thess. 4.11 in the NLT tells us to “mind your own business and do the thing you are commanded to do”. Do you realize all of paradise was lost because both Adam and Eve didn’t mind their own business and do the thing they were commanded to do. We often are found in disobedience to the commands of God when we are refusing to mind our own business.
One of the biggest reasons people worry is that they do not mind their own business, it worries them about how the country is doing, what the pastor of the church they left is doing, what their adult and now-married children are doing, what the neighbours are doing and so on.
People seem to enjoy poking their nose into other people’s business and telling them how to do their job. That will lead to worry and anxiety. You shouldn’t even treat the people who work for you like that! Respect what God has given other people to do, and I promise you will immediately worry less!
I’ve seen people get involved in correcting other people’s children, other people’s church culture, other people’s anything. Here’s a new thought: mind your own business. You are causing your self needless anxiety.
Recently a pastor in the UK did something a bit foolish and a bit strange, and a couple of other pastors approached me and said “You should talk to him, you are respected, he will listen to you”. I said “I don’t know him that well, we have only ever met in person two times, and I don’t have the right to push something heavy over such a flimsy bridge”. What was I doing – minding my own business. Some of the other pastors are getting worked up like he works for them, and he doesn’t. Me, I don’t worry at all. It’s not my sphere of authority. Now if he asks me for help, that’s different, but I am talking about not poking your nose in where it is not wanted and not asked for. Doing this will save you loads of worry and anxiety that would otherwise be yours.
Or to quote St Francis of Assissi, give me the patience to accept what I cannot change.
The number one cause of worry is this: not accepting what you cannot change. You are not the god of this universe. Your authority is amazing, but it is limited – especially where other people are concerned. Why not today choose to trust God to help other people? He helped you when you were procrastinating, getting it wrong, missing the mark – He can help others.
You will sleep better at night when you are minding your own business and not poking your nose and heart into the affairs of others that you will never be in control of.
#motivationmonday
One of the things we can get wrong is putting urgent things at the top of our to-do list. If we are constantly doing the urgent then the important will not get done. Take at least one day a week to ignore the urgent, ignore the emails and the messages and the phone and the demands of what *must* be done now, and do what is important.
What is important:
Selah!
Saturday is your day, Dream Academy!
Why not let us know any deep questions you have?
Anything you want us to discuss in the blog in the future?
Or why not just post a shameless selfie of yourself in the comments section?
We want to connect today, and support you!
Sorry, it’s now Saturday morning. My Friday was so feel-good, I didn’t take the time to blog! Ooops!
#feelgoodfriday
What makes me feel good right now is that the summer of miracles has truly began with Joan Hunter last night in Dagenham and tonight in Watford. Just really powerful stuff, many healings and miracles, not to mention words of knowledge and prophetic words.
And it doesn’t stop when Joan leaves – we have miracles on Sunday morning too!
Makes me feel good!
#futurethursday
On Thursdays at the Dream Academy, our goal is to help you see the future more clearly. You need a hope for your future, it’s part and parcel of living in this world and part and parcel of walking in your dreams.
Part of the job of the news media is to spread fear, and especially a fear for the future. Go and read the headlines of the major newspapers – they will tell you the future is going to be worse. They don’t keep telling you all the indicators that the future is going to be better – you have to work at, and continually and consistently work at, creating a picture of a better future in your mind, so that it can manifest for you in your life.
So today, set aside some time to imagine a future better than it is right now. Imagine you walking in victory, imagine you walking in your dreams!
In the next few weeks, we are going to teach you how to shape your environment so that everywhere you look you are surrounded by reminders and visual clues to remember your dreams.
But today, just get a post it note and put it on the mirror you use the most – for shaving, for your make-up (for shaving and doing your make-up if that’s your thing) – and put the post-it note on the mirror.
On the post-it note write this: I WILL WALK IN MY DREAMS!
That’s going to start stirring you up and leading you into the future of your choice!
#wednesdaywisdom
I promised you that we would give you a simple instruction on Wednesdays that if you put it into place in your life would bring you closer to making your dreams come true.
And here is our first piece of Wednesday Wisdom for you: take good notes.
The Bible tells us that those who wait on the Lord shall be made strong again. We read that “wait” as in wait for a bus and just did nothing hoping one day our strength to walk in our dreams would magically return, like the number 62 bus.
But that didn’t happen because we read the verse wrong, it actually means “wait” as in wait on a table. And what is the first thing you associate with a waiter or waitress: a notepad.
To be a success in life you must write things down! It’s that simple. Studies show that if you write down your dreams you are now ten to fifteen times more likely to see them come to pass. If you keep a food diary, you will lose weight. There is a power in writing things down.
Here are some of the things you should be writing down and reviewing regularly:
Here are some things you should definitely consider writing
Learn to become a note taker. Don’t be the waiter who tries to do it all from memory and forgets it all.
When you take notes, you free your mind up from the task of memory and release it to be more creative. You know you won’t forget your assignment because you wrote it down and can look it up again.
Finally three simple tips to take good notes:
Welcome to the Dream Academy. We are here to help you walk in your dreams through motivation, teaching, inspiration and challenge.
Today is #teachingtuesday, and we are going to start a series on dealing with worry. Worry is one of the biggest dream-killers that exists. You need to learn how to identify and deal with worry.
The English word worry actually has its roots in the word “strangle”, which is one of the most powerful descriptions of what worry does to you – it strangles the life out of you. It sucks the life and peace and joy out of you and stops you from moving forward and walking in your dreams.
Worry can easily become an obsession in your life – you look at a situation, a problem, a fear, and you obsess over it, you look at every aspect of it, you analyse every potential situation that could happen, and you end up making mountains out of molehills.
Worry is not just in your mind though, it starts to affect your body. You start to get hot-and-bothered, you start to feel sick. Even if the chances of something happening is next to nothing, we can still worry about it to the point that we cannot function. This is something we have to function.
Worry is a force of destruction. It will mess up your mind and body. It is not healthy. It is not something we should be permitting in your life.
One of the things I want to teach you about in this #teachingtuesday series is how to tell the difference between worry and faith. Sometimes the Holy Spirit will speak to us about something – for example, the Holy Spirit might tell you that one of your children is facing a problem. That’s not worry, that’s the witness of the Spirit. You have to listen to the Comforter when He tells you there is a problem, so you can bring the Word of God in prayer to that problem; and you have to realize that is not worry – worry never brings the Word of God into a situation and has no comfort. Some people are so anxious that even the witness of the Spirit is turned into worry by their mind, rather than turned into prayer in the Spirit.
The opposite of worry is hope. When you have hope, in God, in your ability to win, in your future, then you start to feel at ease. Sometimes hope and worry exist in our mind together at the same time, and that can be hard to deal with. We will spend some time learning how to control our thinking and deal with worry forever.
Now this is a simple introduction to the topic, and we will go in depth in the next few weeks in our dream academy. Consider this module 1. But the fact is some of you reading this cannot wait 4-8 weeks to learn more to deal with worry, because right now it is paralysing your mind. So let me give you the condensed version of how to deal with worry right now:
If you start to take that advice, you can deal with worry forever! But keep coming back and reading as we will unpack all this advice and give you some really practical help on how to deal with worry.
Inspiring and Challenging Dreamers 