Your Unlimited Life (11 page)

Key #4: Practice thinking and doing the new thing every day.

Repetition makes something a part of you. Anything you want to be good at, you have to practice. “Wishing” something were different won’t bring the change. You have to practice. If you want to play golf and be good at it, you have to practice. If you want to play baseball and be good at it, you have to practice. Many people want the change, but they don’t want the practice that goes with it.

Practice your new thoughts every day. Spend five or ten minutes a day seeing yourself as a new person. Say it out loud to yourself: “I am that new person. I am a kind, gentle, and patient person.” Make your new thoughts, confessions, and actions a hangindent1 part of your daily behavior. If you only work on it on Sundays when you go to church, then not much is going to change. Six days of doing your old thing and one day of trying something new won’t make much difference. James 1:25 says, “You will be blessed in what you do.” The more you practice the “new you,” the more change will come, the more blessings will come, and the more renewal will come.

Many times it’s helpful to get two or three friends to interact with you as you practice so you can be a help and support to each other. If you hang around people who are doing what you are doing, they will be an encouragement to you and you will also be an encouragement to them.

Key #5: You have to get to the place where the new thing is “hangindent1” in your mind.

If it never gets to the place where it is normal, then you won’t change. It’s normal for me to wake up early and pray, but it’s abnormal for me to exclaim to Wendy, “Wow! I’m telling you, today I was in the Holy Ghost!” That’s not the real me. It’s an aberration because it’s not normal. Waking up early and seeking God in the morning is normal to me. Giving is normal to me. It’s part of my lifestyle. I do it all the time, like breathing. Patience and kindness are normal to me. It’s normal for me to be a leader and set the pace for others to follow. You have to get your routine into your mind until you say, “That’s the way I am.”

RENEWAL TRUTH

As I think in my heart, so am I.

I see myself victorious in Christ Jesus

in achieving the destiny God has set before me.

(Proverbs 23:7; 1 Corinthians 15:57)

Using athletes as an example, when you go to the plate and hit a home run and then you’re excitedly asking everyone around you if they saw it, then we know that’s not normal for you. That was unusual for you. When you do something good and someone goes, “Wow! You’ve really changed,” you respond, “That’s just the way I am.” “I remember before, you’d have been throwing a fit right now, slamming the door, and kicking the cat.” “But this is the way I am. It’s normal to me now.” You have to make it part of you so that it’s no longer something that you are hoping for.

Key #6: When you slip back (or backslide), get up and go on without condemnation.

When you fail, fall, stumble, or go back on your old routine, acknowledge the mistake then continue on from where you left off. Don’t go all the way back to the beginning, because you’ve made a lot of progress. Just get up and go on, free of condemnation.

The devil will always, without fail, try and bring condemnation and guilt on you. He will try and convince you that you are a failure, haven’t changed at all, and are really still the same person. His lies will make you feel like it is pointless to try and change, saying, “Look at you. You talk about being patient and kind. Now you’ve gone off and put your fist through the wall again.” Patch it up, or hang a picture over the hole, and get back to your routine of, “I’m a kind, gentle, and patient person.” One step back doesn’t mean you’ve lost it all, so don’t let the devil condemn you.

RENEWAL TRUTH

I will not receive condemnation,

because I no longer walk according to the flesh.

I am a child of God, and I am led by His Spirit.

(Romans 8:1,14)

Many people mess up on their way to their improved self. They may be on a new eating program and they’ve lost five pounds. They feel good about themselves. Then one day they eat a bag of Cheetos and in their mind they convince themselves it’s over, they blew it! All is not lost. Pick up from where you left off and keep right on going, recognizing that a few missteps are a normal part of the process. That doesn’t mean you should excuse it to the point you take a step back every day, but if it happens, don’t let it be the end of your journey. Pick up and press on, acknowledge that it is not you anymore. Tell yourself that you are not going to make that mistake again and then move on.

If you carry guilt and condemnation, you are preparing to repeat that behavior again. But when you really decide to move on, let it go and go on about your business. Walk the renewal process free of guilt but full of focused determination.

Key #7: Be alert to past weaknesses that may resurface.

Usually what happens is, once you’ve had some success, you relax and the tendency is to slip back into the old behaviors again. Right after David had won a great victory for Israel, instead of going out with his troops as he should have done, he stayed home and rose from bed in the middle of the day. Looking from the roof of his house, he spied a married woman, Bathsheba, as she was bathing on a nearby rooftop.

As a result of his affair with Bathsheba and his plot to kill her husband, which was carried out, he entered into one of the greatest seasons of pain and defeat of his life. This all took place right after one of his greatest victories. (See 2 Samuel, chapter 11.)

As you make progress, don’t allow yourself to slip back into some of your old habits or routines. This is where people get into the cycle of up and down. Habits are kind of like ruts in a road. It’s easy to slip into the ruts, but it’s harder to get out of them. To stay out of them takes a conscious effort, but to get into them takes little or no effort.

When I was a kid, we used to ride motorcycles on a military reservation. Before it was a military reservation, there were many homes, orchards, and farms on the property. There were many old roads, driveways, and cart-ways that had grown over with weeds, but we knew that we could still get through on our horses and motorcycles. We could reopen old roads much easier than we could build new ones.

In your attitudes and mind-sets, you will reopen old roads much easier than building new ones. So be alert to keep from slipping into some of the old routines again.

Remember, we talked briefly about “time-released beliefs,” where attitudes surface that you had no idea were a part of you, because as a young person they weren’t a part of your lifestyle.

But when you hit thirty-five, suddenly you start acting like your mom. When you hit forty, you start talking about things that you picked up from your parents. At fifty, you start saying things that you had never thought before. Suddenly, you realize that you are talking like people in your past. That’s what I call “time-released beliefs.”

We have a video where I am giving Caleb a bath the day he was born. A few minutes after his birth in our home, I had him in the sink. I watched this video and realized I was talking just like my dad. I never talked like that before, but I’d never been a dad before. So at the moment of my son’s birth, a time-released belief went off in me. I picked up thoughts and behaviors and words that I’d heard from my father and began to repeat them to my son. That caused me to realize I’d better plug in here because I would probably discipline him the way I was disciplined without even thinking about it. I would probably do things with him the way things were done with me without even thinking about it. There are some great things that I got from my dad, but I needed to be aware of time-released beliefs.

If you are in your twenties or thirties, age is not a great concern to you yet. But when you are sixty, your attitude about age will surface and you’ll start saying and doing things that you never thought were inside of you. That’s why we need to be extremely intentional about programming ourselves to say what God says about us starting now, at whatever age you are.

Everyone we’re around is checking out at seventy or eighty. They are not planning to live beyond seventy or eighty. They’re middle-aged at forty and are preparing to die at sixty. If they make it to seventy or eighty, they’re talking about how they really had a good life. If you’re going to go beyond that, you have generations of thoughts, words, and attitudes to break.

Fred Price from Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles taught me years ago that God gave me 120 years. Genesis 6:3 says, “
The years of man are 120.
” So I began to program myself that I was going to live until 120. I’m not going to be middle-aged at forty or fifty. At sixty, I will celebrate middle age. You have to program it into your mind and come against those time-released beliefs.

When some people hit forty, they start to confess and tell others that they are over the hill. No! I’m still on my way up. That’s why, in my fifties, I’m doing things I’ve never done when I was twenty. Things I’ve never done before, stretching myself physically, mentally, and spiritually beyond where I’ve ever been before. I’m still on my way up! When I’m sixty I will say, “Now I’m at the top of the hill.” Then I can start charging into the last half of my life. It’s a whole new mind-set. You have to fight the old belief and most people don’t have the guts to fight it. The majority of people repeat the cycle of life that has been modeled for them and inevitably do what they were raised to do. We are not the average. We are fighting for our unlimited life.

We may not get the full benefits of what we are committed to in the areas of change and renewal, but we can pass something on to the next generation so they can go beyond us. If we hand them the ability to get out of the rut, out of the routine, and not get stuck in the old ways, then we’ve done them a great service. We’re not just living for ourselves. We’re living for the next generations. We’re not just doing this for what we get on this earth, but for what we can give to the generations that follow.