Today's Encouraging Word

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You need to ask this simple question to get yourself properly adjusted and in focus: What should I be doing? Every one of us has a unique and important role in human history. All of us have been created by God to bring him honor through serving humanity and doing something that makes a difference in the world. There is a hero within you waiting to be awakened. Some were born to be the hero of a story of epic proportions, others perhaps the hero for one small child sponsored across an ocean. Both require a hero’s soul and have a hero’s call. While you can’t do everything, you were created to do something of incredible importance. The tragedy is if you try to be everything and do everything, you may so diffuse your effect that you will not optimize who God made you to be and what he created you to accomplish. This is why you need convergence. You need to bring together all of your talents, gifts, passions, intellect, energy, time, and resources and harness them in such a way that you focus on the mission God has given you for your life.

Erwin Raphael McManus
(from Wide Awake)

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Today's Encouraging Word

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We have been designed by God to succeed. However, you cannot unlock your potential to become the winner that you are unless you learn how to think and maximize your tripartite (body, mind, and soul) makeup……….we are spirit beings who live in physical bodies that possess a soul. Our souls are made up of five components: the mind, the will, the imagination, the emotions, and the intellect……If I analyze the truth, I see that my potential for doing well in life as a believer is relative to the development of my mind, my will, my imagination, my emotions, and my intellect. This statement may come as a startling revelation for some, because many “church folk” tend to think that things are just going to happen, just going to get better, and just going to change. However, this is totally flawed thinking……….We experience God’s best based on our actions of obedience. Unless I know what to do and how to do it, unless I develop the five components of my soul, and unless I develop my thinking, I am not going to release my full potential and maximize my life, no matter how much I love Jesus and no matter how holy I live. Although many people do not wish to view life that way, you cannot argue with the Word of God. The Word says that you will prosper and be in health based on the way the five components that make up your soul prosper, thrive, flourish, or develop.

Dr. I.V. Hilliard

Today's Encouraging Word

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Whether due to poverty, ignorance, oppression, illness, spiritual blindness, procrastination, or just plain disobedience, multitudes of people either fail or never have the opportunity to fully become everything God meant for them to be. They take all their hopes and dreams to the grave and their glory dies with them……..As long as we are alive the possibility exists for us to reach our full potential. God has endowed us with gifts, talents, and abilities and He wants us to use them for His glory and for mankind’s good. We should strive to freely pour out all that is in us in unselfish service to the world. If we fully express ourselves in this life as God desires, we will not take any unfulfilled potential to the grave. Our goal should be to “die empty.”

Dr. Myles Munroe
(from The Glory of Living)

Today's Encouraging Word

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Earth’s unlimited resource is the gifts, talent, passions, imagination, and ingenuity of its citizens. You would think that we know this by now, but we often seem to miss the gift right in front of us. The world needs you to find the hero within you. The real battle is not between good and evil but between less and more. Most of us don’t choose the worst life; we just don’t choose the best. We can’t afford for you to sleep through your dreams…..The world needs you at your best. This planet is made better or worse by the people we choose to become. If you live a diminished life, its not only you who loses, but the world loses, and humanity loses. There is a story to be written by your life, and thought it may never inspire a graphic novel, it is a heroic tale nonetheless. Though you may not recognize it, there is a greatness within you.

Erwin Raphael McManus

(from Wide Awake)

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Today's Encouraging Word

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Don’t set your target low and aim for an inferior calling. Allow God to quicken His Word to you and push your thoughts higher. Let the fuel of His presence propel you toward His thoughts for your life. God wants to pour His Spirit into your heart and mind to give you high expectations. You are more than a conqueror. You can break bad habits. You can do great things……Rise up and take what is yours. Don’t sit back and allow life to pass by. Get up and take hold of the promises of God. Get up and pursue the vision God has placed in your heart….You may have forgotten the dream you used to have, but God hasn’t. You may not believe in the dream anymore, but He does. He believes in the dream, and He believes in you. He has been working on you and your dream the whole time. It may have been a long time. Many years may have passed since you first began to dream the dream. You may have lost many precious things. You may have lost hope. The dream may have faded from delay after delay. But mark it down: it is not over yet!

Frank Damazio

(from The Attitude of Faith)

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Today's Encouraging Word

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God has given you authority and power to take dominion over all things on earth. Your first responsibility, however, is to subdue and take dominion over the only enemy that can defeat you – YOU!

You cannot triumph over the external world until you subdue and take dominion over you! You will have to wage war against every argument within you that challenges what God has said about you.

You have been taught by the world to see yourself as inferior to what God’s original plan was for you. Your years of conditioning and indoctrination will cause you to doubt what the Almighty said about you. You will find yourself struggling against what God has said. Doubt and unbelief will be unrelenting in their challenge to influence you to believe what God says cannot be true.

It will take some time to undo the conditioning of years of misinformation, but God’s Word is sure and powerful. If you continue hearing the Word of God over and over again, your thinking will become aligned with it and your mind will be renewed. Then, because of our persistent and diligent efforts, your life will be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Bishop Jim Lowe

Today's Encouraging Word

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The United States is home to an increasing number of Revolutionaries. These people are devout followers of Jesus Christ who are serious about their faith, who are constantly worshipping and interacting with God, and whose lives are centered on their belief in Christ. Some of them are aligned with a congregational church, but many of them are not. The key to understanding Revolutionaries is not what church they attend, or even if they attend. Instead, it’s their complete dedication to being thoroughly Christian by viewing every moment of life through a spiritual lens and making every decision in light of biblical principles. These are individuals who are determined to glorify God every day through every thought, word, and deed in their lives.

George Barna

(from Revolution)

Today's Encouraging Word

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You are not just a bad person getting better. You are a new creature in Christ Jesus, and the old things are passing away (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). They’re on their way out, not because are working on them, but because there’s a new life principle working in you…Because you’re new, the old can’t last. The newness is replacing all that is obsolete. A new person is emerging, not because the old one is changing a little bit at a time, but because you are a new person. You are complete in Christ. Colossians 2:10 says, “You have been given fullness in Christ.” You’re fully who he wants you to be. And you’re in the process of becoming who you really are…..What God does is establish your identity and then pull you up into it. You’re in that process – of being pulled up! God deals with you according to your true identity: a new creation in Christ with a new power source, a new position, a new potential, and a new purpose.

Jerry Cook
(from The Monday Morning Church)

Today's Encouraging Word

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If you attempt new things and make choices that stretch your horizons, you will embark on an exciting journey. You will begin to see the marvelous being God created you to be – a being filled with more capabilities than you ever dreamed possible. The journey begins when you gain an understanding of what potential is and how you can release it. For once you understand the wealth God gave you, to turn from consciously and conscientiously unwrapping God’s gift is to abort your potential and refuse to fulfill the purpose for which He gave you life. The knowledge of what you have failed to use to benefit yourself, your contemporaries, and the generations to follow will judge you on the great day of accountability. Potential is given to be released, not wasted.

Dr. Myles Munroe
(from Releasing Your Potential)

Today's Encouraging Word

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A man does not commence to truly live until he finds an immovable center within himself on which to regulate his life, and from which to draw his peace. If he trusts to that which fluctuates, he also will fluctuate; if he leans upon that which may be withdrawn he will fall and be bruised; if he looks for satisfaction in perishable accumulations he will starve for happiness in the midst of plenty…Be contented that others shall manage or mismanage their own little kingdom, and see to it that you reign strongly over your own. Your entire well-being and the well-being of the whole world lies there. You have a conscience, follow it; you have a mind, clarify it; you have a judgment, use and improve it; you have a will, employ and strengthen it; you have knowledge, increase it; there is a light within your soul, watch it, tend it, encourage it, shield it from the winds of passion, and help it to burn with a steadier and ever steadier radiance. Leave the world and come back to yourself. Think as a man, live as a man. Be rich in yourself, be complete in yourself. Find the abiding center within you and obey it.

James Allen

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Today's Encouraging Word

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By faith, call those things that are divine truth in the spiritual realm into being in the natural realm. It is not a magic formula or wishful thinking. It is operating within the laws of God’s Word. Remember: Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of your tongue. You can bring death or life into every situation you face. Do not use your words to conform or mold negative situations in your life. Use your words and God’s Word to change those situations. Jesus confirmed the power of the spoken word in John 6:63, “Every word I’ve spoken to you is a Spirit-word, and so it is life-making.” (Message)……God’s Word out of your mouth is filled with the same power it had coming out of His mouth. God’s Word never goes out without producing an effect. It is never powerless (see Isaiah 55:11). When you speak His Word, His power is behind it.

Duane Vander Klok
(from Unleashing the Force of Favor)

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Today's Encouraging Word

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Be silent and listen to God. Let your heart be in such a state of preparation that His Spirit may impress upon you such virtues that will please Him. Let all within you listen to Him….

Don’t spend your time making plans that are just cobwebs – a breath of wind will come and blow them away. You have withdrawn from God and now you find that God has withdrawn the sense of His presence from you. Return to Him and give Him everything without reservation. There will be no peace otherwise. Let go of all you plans – God will do what He sees best for you.

Francis Fenelon

Today's Encouraging Word

Life works by direct affirmation. There is no other way for it to work. This is why we are told to be still and know that all things are possible to God. We are told to affirm, positively to assert, to declare this truth, in the face of all apparent opposition; to proclaim abundance in the midst of poverty; to affirm health in the midst of sickness; to decree joy in the midst of sorrow; and to announce the kingdom of God here and now….Why are we told to do this? Because this is the way Life works. It knows nothing about discord or fear; It forever sings the song of Its own being. This song bursts forth from the joy of Its own inner wholeness. We, too, could become part of this celestial choir if we knew how rightly to affirm Life.

Ernest Holmes

Today's Encouraging Word

The moment one realizes he can use the creative power of his thought to free himself from bondage, that moment he starts on a new adventure. He is giving birth to a new possibility. In time he discovers that he has built his prison walls himself; that the cell in which he has been incarcerated was self-created. By identifying himself with the spiritual universe, these walls crumble and he sees himself as a free soul….Only as we give the best we have to every passing experience can we hope to enter into the joy of living.

Ernest Holmes
(from The Art of Life)

Wise Words for Today

It’s so easy to get distracted by all the things going on around you. If you resolve to live the life of your dreams, if you refuse to settle for a life other than the one God created you to live….you have to decide to focus and lock in on the direction God has called you to live your life.

The first step in getting focused could be described as concentration. Concentration is directing all of our energies and resources to a specific task, idea, and direction. So to focus, you have to make this adjustment – to concentrate all your energy and resources on where you are going. Set your eyes on where God is calling you and don’t look back (and certainly don’t look around).

Your potential becomes talent only when it is harnessed and developed. Your talents become strengths when they are focused and directed. It is here where you begin to discover who you are and the potential God has placed within you.

Without a destiny, you will diffuse your energy.
When you are focused, you are your most powerful.
A destiny is not something waiting but something within you.

When Jesus calls us to come, he is calling us out into a future we cannot walk without him….The power of focus brings not only the strength of concentration but also the power of convergence – it harnesses all your talent, gifting, skills, passions, intellect, experience, the whole of you and brings it all together to unleash your highest potential.

Irwin Raphael McManus
(from Wide Awake)

Today's Encouraging Word

Visions are born in the soul of a man or woman who is consumed with the tension between what is and what could be. Anyone who is emotionally involved – frustrated, brokenhearted, maybe even angry – about the way things are in light of the way they believe things could be, is a candidate for a vision. Visions form in the hearts of those who are dissatisfied with the status quo.

There is always a moral element to vision. Vision carries with it a sense of conviction. Anyone with a vision will tell you this is not merely something that could be done. This is something that should be done. This is something that must happen. It is this element that catapults men and women out of the realm of passive concern and into action. It is the moral element that gives a vision a sense of urgency.

Vision is a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be. ..Vision is a preferred future. A destination. Vision always stands in contrast to the world as it is. Vision demands change. It implies movement. But a vision requires someone to champion the cause….For vision to become a reality, someone must put his or her neck on the line. Vision requires visionaries, people who have allowed their minds and hearts to wander outside the artificial boundaries imposed by the world as it is. A vision requires an individual who has the courage to act on an idea.

Andy Stanley

Today's Encouraging Word

Often we allow ourselves to accept limitations in our lives that have no business being considered, much less accepted. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, let me just say that as Christians we need to “dream big.” The God we worship is a big God and he places dreams in our lives that reflect the mission he has given us to accomplish. And it stands to reason that a big God is going to plant big dreams. Scripture tells us that with God, all things are possible. With the preceding thoughts in mind, never discount a dream just because it seems too big. At least take the time to evaluate that big dream, talk to trusted friends about it, and above all, take it to the throne in prayer.

And please, keep two more thoughts in mind when evaluating your dreams. First, God will never give you a dream and not equip you to realize it. He is not in the business of planting empty fantasies in our minds. If you are dealing with a dream, vision, or mission from the Holy One, he will give you the talents and spiritual gifts to bring that vision into manifest reality. And secondly, also consider this. If a dream seems too big to be possible, there is a good chance that God is giving you that dream. Why do I say such a thing? It’s simple, really. God only plants dreams that are impossible to accomplish under our own power. Scripture teaches over and over again that we are to depend on God for all things, so it stands to reason that he will only give us dreams that require his partnership in order to realize.

Erwin Raphael McManus

(from Wide Awake)

Today's Encouraging Word

He who is within us urges, by secret persuasion, to such an amazing Inward Life with Him, so that, firmly cleaving to Him, we always look out upon all the world through the sheen of the Inward Light, and react toward men spontaneiously and joyously from this Inward Center. Yeild yourself to Him who is a far better teacher than these outward words, and you will have found the Instructor Himself, of whom these words are a faint and broken echo.

Thomas Kelly

(from A Testament of Devotion)

Today's Encouraging Word

When you set yourself in agreement with His command, God will work in you to assist you in accomplishing what He has commanded. Furthermore, He will command His angels to assist you in being successful. God, His universe, and everything He created in it work together to propel you toward a life of extreme fruitfulness and productivity. You have the seed of productivity in you. Allow it to take root and begin to produce fruit…..Decide today that you will make every effort to understand and speak the Word of God with regard to your life. Meditate and delight in it because His Word is your life. As He stated in Deuteronomy 32:47, His words are not idle. By them you will live long. So, stay close and serve God through obedience to what His Word says about you. You will be transformed into His image, and you will develop strength and courage to fulfill the mission He has set apart for you.

Bishop Jim Lowe

(from Achieving Your Divine Potential)

Today's Encouraging Word

The greatest secret to living effectively on earth is understanding the principle and power of priorities. Life on earth holds no greater challenge than the complicating daily demand of choosing among competing alternatives for our limited time. Our life is the sum total of all the decisions we make every day, and those decisions are determined by our priorities. How we use our time every day eventually defines our lives. Life was designed to be simple, not complicated, and the key to simplifying life is prioritization.…The greatest tragedy in life is not death but life without a purpose – life with the wrong priorities. Life’s greatest challenge is knowing what to do. The greatest mistake in life is to be busy but not effective. Life’s greatest failure is to be successful in the wrong assignment. Success in life is measured by the effective use of one’s time.

Time is the true measure of life. In fact, time is the currency of life. How you spend your time determines the quality of you life and death. You become whatever you buy with your time. Always be aware that everything and everyone around you is vying for your time. Your time is important because your time is your life. And the key to effective use of your time is establishing correct priorities. First things first!

When your priorities are correct, you preserve and protect your life. Correct priority is the principle of progress because when you establish your priority according to your purpose and goals then your progress is guaranteed. Correct priority protects your time. When you set the right priorities, then you use your time for intentional purposes; your time is not abused or wasted. Correct priority protects your energy. Correct priority protects your talents and gifts. Correct priority protects your discipline. Correct priority simplifies your life.

Failure to establish correct priority causes you to waste your two most important commodities: your time and your energy. When your priorities are not correct, you will find yourself busy with the wrong things, majoring on the minor, doing the unnecessary, or becoming preoccupied with the unimportant. Incorrect priorities in your life will cause you to invest in the less valuable, engage in ineffective activity, and abuse your gifts and talents. Ultimately, it will cause you to forfeit purpose, which results in failure.

Dr. Myles Munroe

(from Kingdom Principles: Preparing for Kingdom Experience and Expansion)