No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent
The people I have met who are progressing in life and affecting
other people’s lives people like Dale Carnegie, a tremendous
man who has touched many people’s lives, or Robert Schuler, who is
ministering to people all over the world to help them improve their
self-esteem all seem to say the same thing: If you feel good about yourself, you will feel good about other people. In other words, only
after you see yourself as a worthwhile person can you appreciate others as worthwhile people.
If you feel good about yourself,
you will feel good about other people.
That’s a very important insight because many people do not feel
good about themselves. They look at themselves and wonder why God
made them; or they doubt that anyone can find any good in them. But
remember, God sees what others, and we ourselves, can’t see. God looks at us and sees that we are worth feeling good about. We are special to God. We are valuable and important.
GOD PLANNED YOUR LIFE
The crowning work of creation came on the sixth day when God created human beings. As He looked around Him, God pronounced
His creation to be good. That includes you! God looked at the man and
the woman He had made and declared them to be “very good.”
God has a good attitude toward you. He created you in His image
and drew you out of Himself. Before you were born, you were in God.
Part of His potential has been placed within you.
Do you remember the verse we suggested could be considered as the
first verse in the Bible? Before the beginning was, God is (Genesis 1:0).
God is so big He began the beginning. There could not be a beginning
without God, because God got start started. Before start started, however, God had a finished plan for your life. Your potential is not a trial
and error experience. God designed and predetermined you to be a success story.
God designed and predetermined you to be a success story.
Psalm 139 tells us that God planned each of your days before you
were even born. Before you were formed, God knew you. He took
great care in creating you. No part of your being was made without
God’s knowledge and careful concern. God wants each of us. He gives
us what no other part of His creation received: His breath of life
(Genesis 2:7).
You Are Not a Mistake
Have you ever felt like you were a mistake? Have your parents
told you they wished you had never been born? Are you a child
whose parents have told you: “I wish you would have died when you
were a baby”?
You may have come into this world as the result of a rape. Your
mother may have hated you in the womb because you reminded her of
a man she wished to forget. But the fact that you were conceived is
more important than how you were conceived. People go around dealing with how things happened, but God is simply concerned with the
fact that He allowed your conception to happen.
Now when I say allow, I’m talking about the fact that you were conceived. You may be a bastard, conceived out of wedlock. Being omnipotent, God had the power to prevent your conception. Yet God allowed
it because He wanted you to show up. You are here because God wanted you to be born. How you came isn’t important. What matters is that you are here. And if you are here, God created you with care (Psalm
139:13).
You are here because God wanted you to be born.
King David doesn’t describe your mother in Psalm 139. She may
have been an old alcoholic or a drug addict, a bastard or a prostitute.
He is concerned with you. He describes how God knit you together in
your mother’s womb without describing what that womb was like. The
womb in which you were knit together is no longer important. You are
important. Your very existence means God wants you to exist. You are
somebody special simply because you were born.
God saw you in your mother’s womb when you were a tiny baby a one-centimeter embryo. He looked into the secret place in your mother’s womb and saw you. From the second your father’s sperm and your
mother’s egg joined to form a child, God tenderly created you and
watched you grow. God never would have allowed the sperm and the
egg to come together if He had not planned for you to be born.
My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret
place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, Your
eyes saw my unformed body (Psalm 139:15-16).
Although some parents feel their baby is a mistake, their thoughts
are not true. God planned for that baby to be born. The manner in
which the child was conceived may not have been in God’s plan, but
the child himself is surely part of God’s plan.
Those of you who were brought up in a nice family with a mother
and a father who love you may not understand those who have been
put down by their family since the day of their birth. You may not
understand how important it is for them to know that they are not
mistakes. Be patient with them. Help them to see that God designed
them long before they were born! Every child who comes into this
world comes as a setup from God. That little boy or girl doesn’t need
to arrive to see what is going to happen, because the happening was
already set up before he or she came.
God Has a Book on You
All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of
them came to be (Psalm 139:16).
God designed you to be somebody. He looked at your unformed
body and declared, “This child is good.” All His plans for your life
were set out long before you took a breath. He wrote out the order of
your days before you lived even one day (Psalm 139:16). There’s a
book on you. Some chapters God wrote about you haven’t even been
touched yet.
Some of you are playing around in the index or you have spent
years in the table of contents. Perhaps you are 30 years old and you still
don’t know God’s plan for your life. That’s playing around on the contents page. You are 30 years old and still wondering what you are supposed to be. You haven’t even started yet.
Others have jumped ahead of God’s plan. Though His design calls
for you to be married in chapter 17, you got married in chapter two.
You have ignored the things God wanted you to learn and experience
in chapters 2 through 16 so you would be prepared for marriage in
chapter 17. You have missed out on many experiences and discoveries
because you moved ahead of God’s schedule.
Some people are so busy peeking into chapter 17 they don’t have
time to live chapters 2 and 3 and 4…. Or perhaps you have pulled
chapter 17 into chapter 2 so that the rest of the book is destroyed. You
will never have the opportunity to experience all the chapters if you
pull parts of later chapters into the early ones.
God Offers You a Rewrite
God wants to take you back to the beginning, because His plans far
outreach your plans. His design for your life is so great that King David
describes it as vast (Psalm 139:17). You are thinking about being a
teacher while God wants you to open a school. You have plans to be a
clerk while God wants you to own the store. You want to work in a
neighboring town while God wants you to go to Africa. You often
cheat yourself because you don’t realize the potential you have. Why
settle to be a doorman when God wants you to own the house? David
says it this way: “God, when I look at your thoughts in the book on me,
it’s like all the sands in the ocean. Your thoughts are endless. I can’t
fathom your confidence in me.”
God designed you to live out the careful plans He prepared for you.
You are made in God’s image. The plan He wrote for you is perfect and
right. No detail or part is missing. You have the potential to live out all
that God has planned for your life but only if you accept Jesus Christ
as your Savior and Lord. That’s the first step toward understanding
why you were born.
Though you’ve messed up God’s perfect plan for your life, He graciously offers to write another book for you. It probably won’t be the
best-seller the first book was designed to be, but at least God gives you
the chance to start over. He comes and puts you back in chapter one so
you can live the many details of His plan. That’s what being born again
is all about. It’s the opportunity to start over it’s finally getting back
to the first chapter of God’s book on you. God has great plans for you that’s why He gave you life. Self-acceptance is the key to healthy self-esteem. Accept yourself as God made you. Allow His power to transform your weakness, rather than belittling yourself when you
make mistakes.
BORN TO EXPOSE HIS NATURE
Not only did God carefully plan for the details of your life, He also
determined how your life would fit into His total plan for man. Part of
the answer to the why of our birth is revealed in God’s desire that we
should show forth His glory. The glory of God is the excess of His
nature. It’s all the potential of our omnipotent God that has not yet
been revealed. He’s full of so much more than we can think or imagine
and He’s waiting to use us to realize that potential.
Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask
or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him
be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen (Ephesians 3:20-21).
Throughout the Bible, God tells us to make His name great in the
earth. Praise and thanks are due God’s name, which is great and awesome (Psalm 44:8, 99:3). His name is to be proclaimed among the
nations (Malachi 1:11) as well as in Israel (Psalm 76:1). His name is
holy (Luke 1:49; Psalm 99:3) and mighty in power (Jeremiah 10:6).
Everything is done for “His name’s sake.” To understand this concept,
we must also understand that the Hebrew concept of “name” literally
is synonymous with the object. In other words, the name of the thing
is the thing. Therefore, the name of God is Himself, and He is His
name. To glorify His name, then, means exposing His nature.
God created you to bring glory to His name. His predestined plan for
your life was designed to bring Him glory. He knows there is more to
you than we can see because He placed part of Himself in you. His plan
for your life is part of His creative work through you God wants to
continue the birth of His potential. Because you share God’s omnipotent nature, Jesus said you can do even greater things than He did, if
you only believe (Mark 11:23).
KNOCK THE LIMITS OFF YOUR LIFE
The concept of Mark chapter 11 is that if you ask anything if you
can believe what you desire hard enough God says it will be done.
Somehow God gives us a little glimpse into our potential. He comes
into our situation as if He’s disturbed. God is disappointed in the
human race. It’s almost as though God looks at the ideas He stored in
us and says with a voice of disappointment, “If you only knew what
you can do.” That’s the attitude of God toward you and me. God is
totally disappointed in us because He knows what we can do. But we
don’t. And so He says to us: “All things are possible if you’d just
believe, dummy.” He’s always knocking the limits off our lives.
Too often we are not willing to believe like God defines believe. God
does not say, “Everything is possible if you get the idea.” Things don’t
become reality because we have an idea. We have to believe in the idea.
We have to believe we can do it by committing ourselves to it abandoning ourselves to it—even if it costs us our lives. That’s what it takes
to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ to lose our lives…to abandon ourselves. We must say, “I’m going to go into eternity believing in Jesus.
I’m not sure what’s out there, but I’m going to ride on that Name and
that atonement.”
God isn’t impressed by your dreams. Most of us never wake up long
enough to do anything with our dreams. You may have great dreams
for your life, but you prefer to stay asleep because when you wake up
reality says, “Okay, let’s get to work.” It’s easier to dream an idea than
to work it out. Everything is possible if you will abandon yourself to
an idea enough that you are willing to lose your life for it. Thinking is
great. But all things are possible when we believe. Jesus said in Mark
chapter 11, “Whatever you desire when you pray, believe you’ll receive
it, and you will have it.” The word desire is the key. Being interested in
or attracted to something is not desiring it. To desire means “to crave
for something at the expense of losing everything.”
Everything is possible if you will abandon yourself to an idea
enough that you are willing to lose your life for it.
God’s work in creation began with a plan. God conceived in His
mind what He wanted before speaking His creations into visible form.
By the time God was ready to speak, it was just a matter of taking what
was in the plan and putting it on the site.
FROM THOUGHT TO ACTION
A thought is a silent word, so a word is an exposed thought.
Everything in life starts in the thought form—it’s a thought first. After
it’s said, it is no longer a thought. It becomes a word.
The next step is an idea. An idea is the concept of the thought it
has moved into a reality. Ideas are potentials.
The third level of operation is what I call imagination. Imagination
changes an idea into a plan. If you have an idea it can come and go. You
have many ideas in a day what to cook, what to wear, what to do. You
may decide the night before what you are going to wear in the morning and then wake up with a different idea. Ideas change. But if an idea
develops into an imagination, it means the idea has become a plan. It
is still not written or drawn, but it is in your head. Imagination is
therefore a plan that is not documented. It is a visual display of your thoughts and ideas. Ephesians 3:20 challenges us to believe God is able
and willing to do “exceeding abundantly far beyond all we can think or
imagine.” He dares us to use our imaginations.
If you want to be successful in life, take your ideas and turn them
into imagination; then take imagination and duplicate it physically.
Put it down. Let it become a plan of action.
Followers, Dreamers, Visionaries, and Missionaries
Many people never get beyond the idea stage. That’s sad. They are
usually followers. The people who get to the imagination stage often
talk a lot but they do nothing. They are dreamers. But when a man or
woman takes his imagination and puts it on paper, you are looking at
a visionary who is becoming a missionary. Visionaries see great things
in their minds. Many visionaries are in the graveyard. They had
visions, but their visions never made it to mission. When a visionary
becomes a missionary, you have a man or woman who is going to
change the world.
MAKE PLANS…SET GOALS
God wants us to become people who have plans. He says, “Use your
imagination. I won’t give you a thought if you can’t do it. If you think
it, I’m ready to do it.” Plans are documented imaginations. If you can
document an imagination, you’ve developed a plan for action.
If you are having problems in your life, I mean real problems, you
probably don’t have a piece of paper on which you have documented
your plans for the next five years. If you are disillusioned with life bored and confused I can almost guarantee that you don’t know what
is going on in your life. You’re just living from day to day in the
absence of a concrete, documented plan by which to live. You’ve been
dealing with the same issues and habits and struggles for years. You
slide forward a little only to slide backward again. Whenever things get
hard, you start reminiscing about “the good old days” and fall back
into habits you had conquered.
If there is no goal in front of you, you’ll check the hazardous holes
behind you. If there is no vision in front of you to pull you on, you will
be dragged back to the path you know well. If your imagination does
not become documented, it will soon ferment into vapor and disillusionment.
Let me explain. If you do not have a paper on which you have written a general plan for your life, you may decide something one minute
only to change it five minutes later. You will be confused, disoriented,
misguided and frustrated. Progress requires a plan of action. Ideas
must be put down if they are to influence the way you live.
Many of us plan our meals for the next week, but we have nothing
planned for our lives. The food we eat just goes away it doesn’t touch
the future.
Stop. Set your course. Imagine into your future as far as you can.
Chart what you are going to do for the next five months…twelve
months…two years. Start imagining what you want to be…what you
want to accomplish…where you want to go…who you want to influence. Do something and then put your plan in a convenient location so
you can check your progress, seeing how close you are to your next goal.
You will be amazed how that will make you work every day. It will
encourage you to move. You will begin to see God’s power at work
within you, and that will motivate you even more. Don’t worry how
you are going to meet all your goals. God says, “You make the plan and
I will give the answer how it will be accomplished.”
God created you to change the world. He carefully designed a plan
for your life that allows you to share in His work of creation. Because
you were made in God’s image, you share His potential to be and do
much more than is visible now. Everything you see was originally a
thought in the mind of God—an invisible idea that God worked into
sight. Make a plan. Give yourself something to be motivated toward.
As you dream, think, imagine, and plan who you want to be, you will
begin to see why God created you and the work He has designed you
to do. You are destined by God to reveal His glory—His very nature.
PRINCIPLES
You are worth feeling good about because
God wanted you to be born.
God has a detailed plan for your life.
The first step in living out God’s plan is accepting
Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.
God created you with a part of His potential so you
could expose and share in His glory.
God’s glory is the excess of His potential His
many plans that wait to be revealed through us.
Develop a plan for your life that fulfills some of the
possibilities God placed within you before you were
born. Then believe and work them into existence.
