The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (19 page)

Napoleon Hill an American author in the area of the new thought movement, who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature and who is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers on success believes that the mind can work wonders (that meaning that there are many great ideas, life changing miracles, and wealth that can spring forth from your mind). He believed that the mind has special abilities especially when positive thoughts are repeatedly meditated. He proposed autosuggestion as a means to strengthen one’s positive thinking. Since repetition is important, a person should always remind himself of his assets and not just his or her liabilities. Napoleon believes that you become more powerful when you consider your strengths and not to focus on your weaknesses. This is why we each need to ponder about the good things in life and not just the negative part of life. If we don’t cultivate the habit of thankfulness despite where life has pushed us, we will never become fulfilled; neither are we going to experience happiness, joy, and success. This does not mean that we should go into delusion about life or areas in which we need to take proactive measures or responsibility.

Choose Your Thoughts and Feed Your Mind with Good

When you chose your thoughts carefully, and feed your mind with good things, this process will constantly help strengthen your convictions and values and enable you to succeed. Therefore it is imperative to entertain positive thoughts, feed your mental faculties with inspirational words, with motivational books or audio CDs or DVDs and automate our minds to think in the line of success always. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an American author and poet whose work was best-known in Poems of Passion, with her most enduring work as “Solitude”, once said: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.” Ella suggested that an individual should fill his or her mind with the right thoughts. It is not enough that you meditate by thinking about your unpleasant circumstances, but carefully, you should choose your thoughts as well and in choosing, one should select those which will keep you up, not keep you down. Furthermore, Ella believed that one’s thoughts reflect one’s self as stated in (Proverbs 23:7 NKJV), “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he”.

Thoughts somehow mold a person because the things people think can be likened to seeds which are watered and fertilized with daily pondering. When such thoughts grow, they are embedded in the mind. Eventually, when the seeds grow in the mind, they bear fruit and are manifested as attitudes, actions, behaviors, attributes or characteristics.

Constant meditation on the good side of life, on the word and promises of God and investigating success, with motivational literatures from powerful men and women of God, inspirational authors and teachers, books on entrepreneurships, on health and fitness, giving attention to the study of the Bible, praying and sometimes fasting and allowing the Holy Spirit to teach our minds how to grow wealth and think successfully can immensely lead a person to form a strong belief system that is free from doubts and distant from failure, for doubt has the capacity to destroy an individual’s focus and contain your ability to live your best life now. As (James 1:8 NKJV) says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways [i.e. in all his dealings].” This is why unstable people can hardly attain success and contentment. Because of doubts, the double minded person will always think that s/he will not be able to perform well, or s/he may not be able to put full energy on the task at hand. Consequently, a double minded person find it very challenging to decide on what is best for them, feed their thought with good, and swing into actions that enables them to achieve success and live to their fullest abilities.

Think About It

For your mind liberation and automation for success exercise, your life goal or life dream number 4, ask yourself: On a scale of 1-10, ten being the highest, what is the most important thing I need to believe God to accomplish in my life in the next
______________
?

1. What major steps do I need to take by believing God and automate my mind to work for success towards the number one belief on my scale?

2. Apart from the current inspirational book that I am reading now, what other pieces of literature have I read in the past one month or six months to help me do better than am doing right now and mentor my mind into action?

3. How best do I feed my mind with positive thoughts?

4. What other literatures apart from the Bible can I study to understand how I can do better than I am doing right today?

5. Ask yourself, who will be the best mentor to guide me towards my next goal on my list?

6. Which pastor, business leader or role model do I have access to that I can freely share the things that have been defeating my success? What are the things I need to be doing and how do I take actions and activate my mind to power in order to succeed?

7. What are the major initiatives I need to undertake to accomplish these tasks or goals out of the five goals for my life that I identified in
10 SLYBLNP # 1 above
?

Write down the initiatives below that you identified that you need to believe the grace of God to accomplish and begin to automate your mind into success to do them. Again, I will ask that you list or write them down as well as how you plan to go about them and begin to make declarations about them. If you want, put todays date by the side of it, and sign your signature. Remember that these goals and or initiatives must be SMART which is an acronym for:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic and

• Timely.

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STRATEGY NUMBER 5
ENLARGE YOUR DETERMINATION
AND INDUSTRIOUSNESS

“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”

— Coco Chanel

INVESTIGATE SUCCESS

Perhaps among the most miserable people in the world are those who for the fear of failure never took a big risk or those who are docile. Since I automated my mind to work for success many years back, I have never allowed fear to dictate my life. Success doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process, a network that starts and connects over the years as you enlarge your capacity, determination to excel no matter the odds, and take calculative risk by investing into industriousness. Success will never come knocking at your door. You have to be the one to look out for success, investigate success, chase success, and pay handsomely for success. I made my first “business plan” that will reward me financially when I was in my 5
th
grade (primary 5). This is something a number of people do not know about me.

In the community where I grew up, my father, High Chief Stephen Wulu Nwankwo (a High Chief among the Ngwa people of Igbo tribe of Eastern Nigeria is someone (usually males) who has been dignified and distinguished by the king and given the title by merit because he has accomplished something of great significance for the well-being and overall good of people in his community) and my late mother, Mrs. Comfort Nwaogbu Nwankwo who was fondly called “Daa Comfort” ran and owned a small clinic facility for over three decades. My mother was a community Nurse-midwife. The great surgeon, late Dr. Chima Nwafor, who will later leave clinical practice and rose in politics in Nigeria to become a two-term deputy governor of Abia State in Nigeria was one of my parent’s business partners and one of the surgeons who worked with my mother for a number of years. As a child, I watched my mother dress up and go to her own office. Beginning from 1973 until 2008 when my mother died, she never worked for any other person, except in her own firm which she founded with my father. This clinic trained and produced many auxiliary nurses and community mid-wives in those days.

Who Do You Look Up To?

In our community, my father who studied political science at the University of Nigeria—Nsukka and my mother, a community nurse-midwife were one of the earliest couples who saw opportunity and sized it in healthcare and education as they were one of the very first to own a private clinic and an early government approved childhood educational institution. I am not surprised that I grew up to also be involved in the educational and healthcare industries. I got my early childhood education at Osaa-Ukwu Progressive Nursery School—the school my father founded as well as my two older brothers. My dad will later upgrade this school to a primary school educational standard. Those days, as the children of a middle class family in my community, owing a car was luxury in Nigeria for most families. I saw my father drive us to places where we could catch some fun. The Aba metropolis was a lovely place to live in. The roads were good. Aba had good road networks, constant electricity, efficient running public water, functional fire services, good hospitals and many manufacturing plants and industries. Life was very good in Nigeria then.

My father apart from his joint business with my late mother also worked as a civil servant in numerous local government areas. Because of this, Dad was mostly away and my mother had more than enough hands to help at home with extended family members. As the last child in a family of eight, what I witnessed growing up when the Nigerian economy was more stable is that my middle class parents had access to finances to meet our daily needs. Dad had a very strong work ethic. Mum was a workaholic and one of the most passionate loving mums you could imagine. She never ever played with her children’s well-being—nutrition, sports, education and health. Apart from the clinic she ran efficiently, she was a big time farmer and sold stock fish, thus creating multiple streams of income. We had many servants on staff and maternal relatives living or working for my parents.

Don’t Be Docile

Beginning from this time, I was exposed to a work ethic that said: When you automate your mind to work success for you, depend on the grace of God and work hard, you will definitely succeed no matter how many times you failed. This is why you don’t have to take issues of your success easy! Don’t be docile about issues of your own life. Be proactive. God cannot do much or go too far with people who are lazy. Taking action about your life will help you defeat failure. Because of my upbringing, I learnt early to take ownership of my destiny.

“There are times in life when you must not fail to keep your spirit up.”

Society, people, friends and family members and even pastors and mentors sometimes will fail to meet up with your own expectations in matters that have to do with the climbing up of your life. This is why it is your sole responsibility to help yourself keep standing up in order to get to your destination. In the Christian Scriptures in (John Chapter 5:1-14 NIV), a true life story was told of a certain unnamed man who was paralyzed and was immobile for 38 years. When Jesus saw the man and learned that he has been in this condition for a long time [i.e. the man had become docile], the story accounted that he was moved to set him free. But before Jesus will do so, John chapter 5:1-14 present the following account: Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate was a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here, a great number of disabled people are used to lying down such as—the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed. One (among them) who was there had been an invalid (paralyzed) for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the paralyzed man replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this miracle took place was a Sabbath, and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ” So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”

You Can Walk Again On Your Dreams

The man who was healed had no idea who Jesus was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” Now a look at this story has a number of life lessons on the importance of determination and industriousness for anyone wanting to live their best life now. First, it clearly tells us that God is not only interested in spiritual matters about your life, but pays greater attention to your human physical needs and your material needs. Again, it reinforces the importance God attached to industriousness and our willingness to cooperate with him in the issues about our own life. Obviously the man in our account had no health insurance, Medicaid or Medical and was not a member of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). Because the economic situations and government of their times were different, the man did not have 401K, Roth IRA, and did not have any pension or social security benefits since neither of these existed then.

Simply put—the man was docile. If he had dreams and visions at all, he must have given up on them. But one outstanding thing is that something can be done about his life situation. This is where and why Jesus came into the picture. Now, I want you to never forget that the unnamed man in this account was created in the image of God in Jesus! According to the account given by John chapter 5 in the Gospels, the first thing that Jesus did when he saw the man was to ask him to take responsibility and do something about his life. Jesus hates to see folks docile. Jesus engaged the man in a discussion to prepare the man’s mind for action and aid him become part of his own recovery plan. Notice that Jesus could have just healed him right away, but Jesus started by way of question: Would you like to get well? In order words, is it your desire to walk into your freedom? Mind you, Jesus wanted the man to automate his mind into actions powered by the grace of God that will necessitate his healing. Jesus wanted to reinforce his belief system and make the man’s hope come alive again.

The man’s response in verse 7 of John chapter 5 is the most shocking of all: “I can’t sir, for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone always gets ahead of me.” Here you can notice the level of unbelief in the man’s mindset which is why Jesus engaged him in the discus in the first place. He could have responded to Jesus by saying—Oh that will be so kind of you sir, or simply put—I will be most excited to. The man simply stated what his belief system has become because of his unemployed mindset. “I can’t Sir!” He affirmed. He asked Jesus indirectly not to waste his time, because it was not what the trying. He cannot get well. It will never work, no matter what, and narrated his life story. Instead of rejoicing in that moment of deliverance he has longed for, the unnamed man kept on winning in the negativity of his past. This is what happens to us when we allow our past and unpleasant circumstances to dictate our actions for our future. It is all what we have learned to accept and what our belief systems are. Many people are docile like this unnamed man, physically, mentally, and emotionally. One good thing in the whole of this story is this: Jesus is much more interested to restore your life goals and dreams today, and every stolen goods the enemy has taken from the treasury of your life than ever before. Jesus is not interested to hear you repeat the story of defeat and negativity about your past life. He wants you to take actions now that will counteract that past! Your ability to excel in life begins and ends on what is on your mind now, and what is next for you. Many times, the enemy is not going to be able to keep you down. You are the one person that will be responsible for your own defeat or victory.

I Can Do All Things

After Jesus had noticed the level of destruction in the man’s mindset for success due to the programmatic disbelief and doubting system the enemy has installed on his mind and in his life never to dream again that yes, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me [i.e. my means for reaching limitless heights and achieve what appears to be impossible is now through Christ’s strength] (Philippians 4:13 NKJV), Jesus disappointedly surprised the unnamed man, for he ignored the details of what caused him failure repeatedly in his past history. Graciously, Jesus authoritatively or better still, autocratically ordered the man in verse 8 of John chapter 5: “Stand up, pick up your mat and walk.” The following verse announced that the man was instantly healed and he walked for the first time in 38 years. What Jesus actions communicated to the man by implication is this: You still have untapped potentials. You belong to God’s great family and are therefore, mine. I created you in my image; it’s about time that you stop being docile. You have greater potentials. You can start to dream again. You are a powerful person that can do the uncommon and do exploits in the hands of God and become a powerful force for society and for the kingdom of God. I know you can do it. But I want you to take a risk—walk!

Something tells me that the unnamed man biggest risk was the fear to think and believe that his paralyzed legs can walk again after 38 years of docility. That is the same risk that has kept numerous people from maximizing their God-given potentials for life. Jesus wanted the man to defeat that thought, and kill the fear by taking the biggest risk of his life that will necessitate his freedom and liberation through the audacity of God’s grace. Rise up, pick up your mat, and walk!

The Blessing to Your Breakthrough is in Obedience

The fascinating thing about the story of this man who has become docile for 38 years is that Jesus never said something like this: Brother, I know that you have been docile for 38 years, now I want you to crawl, and slowly walk. I understand that you need to learn to walk again. You can start with a scooter, crotches walking stick, or a cane. Instead, Jesus imperatively challenged the unnamed man to do the uncommon. The man’s act of obedience to take a risk—a leap of faith to do what Jesus commanded him to do was able to grant him the breakthrough he has longed for. The lesson is this: Every time you obey God or the power of God’s word, God’s blessings of healing or supernatural increase—or favor will follow. God rewards those that earnestly obey him. If you will learn to obey God in the small things of life, if you can learn to pass the small tests in life, there is no limitation to how high God is able to take you, for God is able to release his supernatural blessings and cause stupendous increase in every area of your life. Obeying God will cause his blessings to pursue and overtake us, for we cannot outrun the goodness of God. When you obey God in small things, God will turn around and release big blessings, big and new levels of favors, big opportunities, healing and restoration, vindication, promotion, and a future that allows you to become and achieve every purpose for which the Lord has created you for. This is why the promised power of God’s word in (Deuteronomy 28:1-2 NIV) declared according to the Christian Scriptures that: If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God.

“The breakthrough you have been looking for is in obedience to the power of God’s promised word.”