God Wants You to Recover

You must be convinced that God wants you to recover. You must be fully persuaded of God's unwavering love for you. You must know that God wants you to succeed in life. Faith begins where the will of God is known. How do you know the will of God? You study the Bible! Your Bible is a leather-bound copy of God's will for your life. Study it until you have no doubt about God's will for you. You cannot be wondering if God wants you to win or lose, succeed or fail, flourish or falter.

David said, "This I know...God is for me."³ Let me help you with these four words: God is for you! Just as any good father wants his children to succeed in life, so your heavenly Father is for you. He wants you to succeed in life. Here are some promises from God for you to meditate on that will help you to reorient your vision. Better yet, memorize them. As you saturate your thinking in these promises, the eclipse of faith that has cast you into the darkness of doubt will pass away, and you will again find yourself walking in the cheerful sunshine of knowing God is for you.

The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a successful man.⁴

And the Lord will make you the head and not the tail; you shall be above only, and not be beneath, if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and are careful to observe them.⁵

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.⁶

Let them shout for joy and be glad, who favor my righteous cause; and let them say continually, "Let the Lord be magnified, who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servant."⁷

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.⁸

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.⁹

Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ.¹⁰

For people facing hard times, these precious promises are like "apples of gold in settings of silver."¹¹ They are diamonds from the Word of God that will help you reorient your vision. Instead of allowing the crisis to dictate a bleak outlook, the Word of God has the potential to produce within you an alternative imagination for the future. It's like the sun bursting through the clouds after days of gray and overcast skies.

Vision is all about your perspective on the future, and your perspective on the future determines whether you will be energized or demoralized. We live almost all of our lives in memory and imagination-remembering the past and imagining the future. We encounter the past by memory, and we encounter the future by imagination. The present is so brief as to be almost indefinable. Now is nothing more than the infinitesimal slice of time between memory and imagination. It is memory and imagination that allow us to hear melody. We remember the note we heard a second ago and imagine the anticipated note, and thus we encounter melody. Without memory and imagination there would be no melody in our lives, just a stupefying preoccupation with the present moment. But when malevolent forces are allowed to dominate our memory and imagination, we can suffer severe mental torment. It's hell inside your head, and this is intolerable. In order to be happy, humans need healed memories and hopeful imaginations. God's Word is capable of accomplishing both of these tasks.

The truth that we live most of our lives in memory and imagination is undeniable. We remember the past and imagine the future. Our past is fixed (though our perspective on the past can change-more about that later), but the future is unknown. The only way we can relate to the future is through imagination. Imagination is indeed a legitimate way of knowing. Hope is the God way of imagining the future. A mind that is God-conscious, God-centric, and God-saturated will be full of hope. It's hope that energizes us for positive action.

Don't allow the malignant cancer of worry to dominate your imagination. Both worry and hope deal with an unknown future, and you have every right to imagine a bright future created by hope. This is what David was doing. Instead of allowing worry and anxiety to dictate his future, David, through a reoriented vision of victory, was imagining a future framed by hope. This hopeful imagination energized both David and his men to begin to engage in positive action-positive action that had the potential to change their situation.

Dr. Steve Greene is now sharing stories, teachings, and conversations with guests who lead with love on Love Leads, a new podcast. Listen now.

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