By Bradley DeRuiter
Some material was adapted from Lance Wallnau’s “Destiny by Design”
We all have a future. Our future, our destiny is formed by what God imparted to us and by the choices we have made! We have no control over what God has given us. For example we had no choice in our gender, where we were born, who are parents are or what gifts and talents we have. We also have no control over past choices. What we can control and we are held accountable to are the choices we make today! How we chose to use the gifts and talents we have will direct our future destiny!
Recap of Last Teaching
God formed us for a purpose a Destiny. Psalm 139 The Zones – History Zone, Personality Zone, Gift Zone, Passion Zone, People Zone, Activity Zone, Knowledge Zone
Parable of the Talents: God gave the talents but the one who was given 1 Talent buried because he thought God does not reap where He sows he was afraid and buried God’s talent.
Every single thought, feeling, and action you experience has an effect on your destiny ! If choices create our futures, what creates our choices?
1. Everything we think and do is a “seed” set in motion. It is living energy cast into the soil of the Universe.
2. Every thought or action “seed” will produce a harvest—an effect and a consequence. “God is not mocked man reaps what he sows.”
Proverbs 23:6 Do not eat the bread of a selfish man, Or desire his delicacies; 7 For as he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, “Eat and drink!” But his heart is not with you. (The selfish man says one thing but is thinking another; he is out of alignment with his words, his heart is NOT with God!)
3. Our harvests or consequences begin to “stack up” to shape our lives toward a particular direction.
4. For every direction there is an ultimate “destination.” That destination is YOUR DESTINY.
What drives your life, what grabs your nervous system, is going to determine your behavior.
Seed = Harvest Behavior =Destiny
Once again, what drives behavior? You don’t just change an eating habit, a spending habit, or a saving and investing habit because you decided to at New Years. You do not suddenly become a bold and confident salesman or nurturing, intimate husband or wife because of one sermon. Why? Because those patterns running inside your belief system trigger your pain and pleasure connections in your body. We will talk more about these patterns latter on. (e.g. Some kids throw a fit and find out they get attention that way, so they develop a pattern misbehave=atten)
Desire literally means: conscious impulse toward something that promises enjoyment or satisfaction in its attainment.
In its original form, desire connected us to the thing we are called to do. Abraham Maslow, the celebrated Jewish researcher of human behavior, discovered that fully actualized people had found a connection between desire and gifting. The painter must paint and the singer must sing. Why? The painter had a desire to paint because at the end of the day, it brought out the actualization of his talent and his gift to the world. With man’s fall, however, desire has suffered a setback. Jesus accused His enemies of being driven by the lusts of their father, the devil. All people manifest the desire of the spirit realm with which they commune. This is an important point. If you desire God, you will conceive God’s desires in your heart.
If on the other hand you allow bitterness or the lust of other things to enter in and choke the Word of God, you will experience a harvest of disappointment. Your heart expresses its desires through longings, images, and daydreams. As you continue to commune with God, you can be confident that the dreams which recur in your mind and heart are in fact the desires of your heavenly Father. Desire is connected to destiny as fruit is connected to the vine. Desire is pure potentiality seeking manifestation. The fact that your spirit man persists in stirring a particular desire or projecting a certain image in your mind is the evidence of the potential in you to make it happen. Thus desire, faith, and the imagination are connected. In fact, it could be said that especially strong persistent thoughts are more than thoughts. They are THINGS. That’s right!
Thoughts are things. They are often the manifestation of the spirit realm. Angels, many times, are ministering to us in the thoughts that come, just as devils are talking to people who do destructive things. Learn to guard your heart and you can have confidence to discern the source behind thoughts that are strong in your life. That is why Paul taught us in:
2 Corinthians 10:3 - For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,
Once you know that the thing you desire is of God such that you have taken every thought captive, you can have boldness to ask for it! Jesus taught:
“Whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” Mark 11:24 KJV
When your heart beats after God, you can be certain that your desire is your call. The great revivalist Charles Finney would say that the intense desire in prayer for God to save someone was sufficient evidence that God actually wanted to act, because He was the one prompting the prayer.
DESIRE is pure potentiality seeking to connect you to your life purpose. DESIRE connects you to a future that is seeking to be made manifest! EXPECTATION is the power that draws that future toward you.
As you begin to recognize the dreams and desires that God has put in you, you will be forced to confront old ways of thinking that are incompatible with the mind of Christ. As Romans 12:2 teaches, the renewing of your mind is the key to the personal transformation that equips you to know and do the will of God. The Holy Spirit wants to renew your mind so entirely that you think as your Father thinks and act as Jesus would act. God is in the business of bringing many sons and daughters to maturity. John 4:34 (My food is God’s will)
He wants your mind renewed so that your will can be done on earth as His will is done in heaven. With a renewed mind you see how heaven operates and begin to administrate that same reality into the realm of earth.
Many people cringe at the thought they are addicted, but what about the deep driven need to experience: insecurity, insistence on being right, anger, being the best, inflexibility, fear and STRESS? You can see the wisdom in proverbs warning to “guard your heart with all diligence for out of it flow the issues of life.” The first experience of sex, sorrow, grief, power, or applause is not an addiction. Addiction is the continual striving to recreate that experience and feel the high over and over.
In some ways it is pretty grim, but thank God it only makes our freedom in Jesus Christ more powerful! Your brain and your spirit were meant to work together to constantly create NEW experiences. If you want to stop waking up to Groundhog Day, you must get a grip on your tendency to live with unconscious patterns reacting to situations based on past programming. Just as Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day finally changed the behavior that was keeping him stuck, you can also break the links and experiences, the renewing of your mind and body, to form new connections.
Another challenge to manifesting new destiny patterns is that many do not feel they are able, worthy or supposed to have what they desire. Therefore, they are not aware of the impact of this deep seated uncertainty so they put their energy and focus on trying to make things work.
Try this experiment: say out loud “I’ll Try!” Notice how it feels. Do it again and take note what you feel like. Now say out loud, “I’ll Do It!” Notice what it feels like. Say it again. Did you feel the difference? “I’ll Do It” is the scripting of intention and “I’ll Try” is the language of uncertainty.
Not knowing this, people focus on a formula that looks something like this:
Thinking + Feeling + Behaving = Results.
T + F + B = R
But at a core level a sort of curse operates that robs them. It is the curse of “uncertainty” in their INTENTION! At a sub-conscious level the INTENTION waivers. It is not lined up. It is like a radio signal that is not in the right frequency and cannot transmit. Intention is the byproduct of your personal history. Like it or not, you have a number of scripts and beliefs running around in your head that may not be compatible with the truth. They were shaped by powerful forces while you were young. Many times they were influenced by generational patterns set in motion before you were born. Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, there is an addiction to chaos and uncertainty that overrules the need for single-minded focus and intensity. Remember, those feelings, those “peptides,” become chemicals that demand to be fed. The more you feed them, the more they create the situation that repeats the feeling. At some point the “anger need” becomes an “anger spirit.” I am inclined to believe that demons seek to create the unhealthy feeling/addiction and then embed themselves into the addiction.
The REAL FORMULA is:
Past Programming + Thinking + Feeling + Behavior = Results
Past programming at an unconscious level will mess you up every time, until you change it to God focused programming!
The TRUTH has the ability to set you free! God’s Word has supernatural power to create new programming at a level that reaches to the conscious and unconscious scripts that lie at the core of who you are. For the moment, it is sufficient to know that “Desire” draws you toward your future. “Expectation” draws that future into the present. Your quality of “Intention” determines how effective your strategies will be in making things manifest.
When our scripting is made new our “intention” will be clear and forceful. Our thinking, feeling, and behaving will be congruent and we will find that still small voice of conscience, a reliable guide. The result will be manifest in NEW RESULTS! That core alignment with our inner voice will manifest through us in the expression of our AUTHENTIC VOICE.
You will discover the place where your passion, talent, and conscience line you up for a specific role you are uniquely qualified to occupy. That role will address a God-size need.
Are you consciously aware of the choices you make, OR are most of your choices automatic?
Creating choices, consciously, is how you change your life.
The Process of Changing Your Thinking Patterns
Unconsciously Incompetent
Consciously Incompetent
Consciously Competent
Unconsciously Competent
We need to consciously choose to pursue God’s Patterns in our thinking so His thinking pattern becomes our default mode – Unconsciously Competent!
QUESTIONS
1. Our ability to fulfill destiny depends to a great extent on our ability to take responsibility for the outcomes of our life. Prove to yourself how powerful this is. List everything in your life right now that came as a result of your power of choice.
2. Listen to this statement and write your reaction: “The time to create the next 10 years of your life is now.” Do you believe you have power to create the next 10 or 20 years of your life? To determine the quality of your relationships, health, income, spiritual growth, dominant emotional state and physical environment?
3. Destiny comes in the dreams of the pure of heart. No season of life is more innocent than your childhood. What daydreams and aspirations did you have as a child?
4. If you could solve any problem or do any one thing in your life, what would it be? Is there any need or pain that you really care about addressing?
5. Jesus spent 30 years in development for 3 years of ministry. What does this tell you about the attitude of God toward preparation? On the other hand when it was time for Israel to cross over into the territory and they were not willing, it set them back 40 years. What does that tell you about Gods timing to step into destiny?
Look back to your answer to question #1 about your choices. Did you list your job, marriage, car, physical condition, income, friends, apartment or house, state you live in, education, clothes you are wearing, church you attend, etc.? Notice how little in your life exists without your power of choice. You have created the life you are living. Isn’t it time you exercised this power of choice to shape your destiny on purpose? How do you feel about this last statement?