I am having a personal revival this month and I want you to have one, too! My series, Divine Favor: The Unseen Advantage has produced a renewed awareness and awakening within me. What actually happened is simply that I have looked back and had a new reminder of how much favor is working in my life. As always, I encourage you to recognize every place where you are enjoying divine favor as well as connect to favor in new areas.
I can remember a time in my childhood when it seemed that everything worked against me. From about the fifth grade on, if anything went wrong I knew I was going to be blamed for it. If someone lost something I was going to be accused of stealing it. If something got broken it would be assumed that I was the one who did it. I had some incredibly painful times in my childhood because of false accusations. It seemed that I drew that kind of attention.
Like all of life’s experiences, I passed judgments about myself and others that became the beliefs of my heart. Consequently, this syndrome that dominated my life grew and grew to monumental proportions. For years as a young adult it seemed that I could never get a break. No matter how much money I made something always went wrong. No matter what kind of opportunity came along someone always stepped in to try and steal it from me. Don’t get me wrong, I was a hard worker and never had a victim mentality, but life was just not working for me!
Throughout the years I had ideas that I wanted to take to the marketplace but either I could never find anyone to back me or someone else always got there with the idea before I did. I would spot an opportunity with all kinds of potential to make good money, but I could never afford what it would cost to step into the opportunity. In the late 60’s and early 70’s I realized that our old downtown would be renovated and houses that were selling for just a few thousand dollars would one day sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one believed me! I talked to businessmen about it and they looked at me like I was crazy. Opportunity after opportunity after opportunity came and went and I was never able to capitalize from them. Then I watched in frustration as houses that were once selling for as little as $20K sold for $200K.
Even though my life changed pretty dramatically after I got saved there was still some of this hanging over my head. It was like a dark cloud followed me around and rained on all of my successes. But I can remember the day I finally asked myself the right question to totally turn the tide.
The pastor where I attended church, as it turned out, had a moral problem. A woman came to me for counseling and told me that she was involved with someone but I never asked her who it was; I just helped her work on her personal problems. Unfortunately, it was the pastor and he thought I knew the truth about him. He set out to destroy me in every way possible. He wanted to make sure that if it ever came down to my word against his, no one would believe me.
He set up a meeting between me and the elders of the church. He told me the elders wanted me to help them understand how to make the church more effective at reaching the lost in our city. Of course, I was delighted because that was my passion. I was very actively involved in taking believers out on the streets for all sorts of evangelistic work. But what I didn’t know was that he told the elders I was critical of the church because it was not more involved in reaching the lost and that I wanted to meet with them. They came into the meeting hostile.
So I very naïvely went into the meeting hoping to be a blessing to my local church. The more I shared my ideas about effective outreach the more agitated they became. Eventually they pretty much unloaded on me! I was in a daze! I could not imagine what was happening.
That was when I learned one of life’s most important secrets: If you ask yourself the wrong questions you always get the wrong answers. That night I asked myself the right question. Even after I realized I had been ambushed I didn’t focus my attention on any of them. I had finally grown enough to realize that fixing the world around me would not really solve my life-dominating problems. The one question I asked myself that has forever changed my life was, “What is it about my life that made it easy for these men to believe the worst about me?”
Answering that question truthfully set me on a personal study that changed my life and has helped change the lives of thousands of people since. I looked up every Scripture in the Book of Proverbs about words, the tongue, or any form of communication. I learned from the Book of Wisdom that I communicated like a fool. I took all those Scriptures, read them daily, committed myself to the grace of God, and developed a new communication style that honored wisdom.
As I began to communicate with people based on God’s Word rather than what felt natural for me, I began to experience favor with people. For the first time I discovered that favor was not something God did to everybody around me to make them treat me differently; favor was something that worked in me that influenced everybody around me.
As you follow my series for the month of March you will discover things about Divine Favor – some of which I never fully realized until now. One of the most interesting things I discovered about New Covenant favor is that the word “favor” in the New Covenant is actually the word grace. We know that grace is something God works in our heart that makes us able. So, New Covenant favor is what God does in us to become able to influence the world around us. Consequently, favor is available to everyone; it is a simple matter of yielding to Christ in you!
The world is wicked and getting worse every day. Sadly, in order to compete many of God’s people have stooped to the same tactics as the world. It seems impossible to survive in the “shark tank” without getting caught up in its game. But we really do have an unseen advantage that can work in our behalf without compromising. The Bible calls it the favor of God. I call it the unseen advantage.
For the last 30 years, if I needed money for business opportunities it has almost always been there. If I needed someone to stand with me there have always been people there to help. When I did not know how I would survive another day someone has offered me a helping hand. This is divine favor! I am living life better than I deserve, greater than my faith could produce, bigger than my imagination, beyond anything I’ve ever seen or heard! And that’s exactly what God wants for you!
I really hope you’re taking advantage of our weekly broadcast. For decades the number one question I was asked after I preached grace and peace in a church was, “Where will we go to hear this message?” That’s why we developed our Message of the Month program that we now call our monthly World Changers message. That’s also why we have CDs, books, DVDs, and all the other tools. These are designed to invest back into our World Changers and those who are making this journey. We know there are not many places people can go to hear a consistent message of faith righteousness, grace, peace, and the unconditional love of God. Plus, we know the internet is the number one way to reach the world at this moment.
This year I would like to see us start more than 1,000 new iGroups. If you have a church where you have good worship and fellowship but you’re not hearing the Word you need to hear I want you to consider beginning an iGroup. It may just be your family and a few friends or it may be something you use as your church. This is not about numbers; it’s about individuals who are hungry for God and have a desire to move beyond what religion is offering. Or, if you don’t have a church at all, you’re uncomfortable with church, or you just want something more, I hope you consider the possibility of starting a group. I’ll be sharing more about this as the weeks go on.
You might have noticed we just upgraded our website. Within just a few weeks we will upgrade our store and it will be so simple to use that you will not have the frustrations you had in the past. It will calculate your World Changers discount automatically and will have many other factors that I think will be a blessing and a help to you.
In our resources area we will finally be able to add all types of new information and materials that will be investments in your life. Plus, there will be new benefits accessible only to our World Changers Family. You will be able to log in as a World Changer and have access to all types of things that I believe will help your life.
Now we can finally add more resources for our iGroups. First, we will begin listing all of our iGroups and including contact information. We can finally allow people to search for iGroups and find them. This will help the many requests we get from all around the world about the locations of our groups.
Every year since we started this ministry God has given us new ways to reach far beyond anything we’ve done in the past. With this new website God has provided for us what I have been trying to make happen for the last 10 years. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.
Everything we do in ministry is designed to reach the world with this message and to see this message become a lifestyle. In other words, we are doing what Jesus told us to do: Make disciples unto Him. A disciple is someone who knows how to follow Jesus without the intervention, control, or excessive involvement of another person. The day will come in America as it has in so many parts of the world when the stark difference between a church-going Christian and a disciple could mean the difference between life and death!
This year we will continue to expand our efforts in Operation 1 Billion. Last year we started over 100 Bible schools all over the world and this year I would like to see us at least triple that effort. Everything that we’re doing now is about creating an infrastructure that makes it possible for us to create sustainable results in this new and changing world! We are ready to take this step up in quality and quantity. All this is happening because of you, our World Changers Family.
I know I say this often, but I have to say it again. There are not enough words for me to express my thanks. But one day we will stand before Jesus and millions of people will join us – people you’ve never met and many I’ve never met. They will be those we have won to the Lord. It will be the hurting that were healed and those crushed under the burden of religion that were set free. Some will be people we reached over the internet or Bible school students we trained all over the world. Others will come through the books we have distributed to millions. Many will have heard a CD or seen a DVD that was distributed somewhere in the world. And all of those people are going to thank you for what you did to make this all possible. And then we’ll lay this all at the feet of Jesus and He’ll, say “thank you” by rewarding us with eternal blessings. I look forward to that day!
Always remember: Every day, all around the world, together we are changing the way the world sees God!
Blessings to You!
Jim
