I just have one verse I want to share with you in this chapter. John 10:10 says,

The thief comes to do nothing but steal, kill and destroy: I came so that they may continually have [zoe] life, and have it in far greater measure.

The original version of that verse says life abundantly instead of in far greater measure.

As you can see, the title of this chapter is planning an abundant life. How would you describe your life right now - satisfactory, average, semi-normal, could be a bit better, somewhat lacking, or just not worth going on like this?

Can you honestly say the following?

1. I am doing the things I love to do.

2. I'm satisfied that I am reaching my full potential.

3. Life is worth living.

4. I greet each new day with excitement and anticipation.

5. I have enough money to do the things I desire to do.

If any of these statements describes you, you don't need my teaching and what I am going to share with you here. But for the rest of us poor, unworthy people who struggle through life, I would like to share with you what I believe are some of God's answers for these problems that we face in life.

Your Plans and God's Plans

Firstly, above all other things, you need a plan to succeed.

You need long range plans. What are you planning to do or to reach in the next five years? What are you planning in the next year? What about next month?

You need short range plans like next week, tomorrow, or how about today? You might say,

"It is a bit late to plan for today. It is half gone."

It is never too late. There are still many hours left in the day.

If you don't plan, you will drift along without direction. Here is what else will happen. You will end up in somebody else's plan. You will be subject to chance or that good old thing the world calls luck.

If that is the way you have been living, the chances are you probably haven't been planning.

God has a plan for you, but sad to say nothing is automatic. You see, He has laid out some things like what they call Standing Orders in the Army. Standing orders are things that always apply and that you always must obey.

But then there are also orders that you need to get on the run. God has laid out Standing Orders for us. They are basic principles of life that we should follow. But while we are in the field, we need additional direction.

So, although God has laid out a general plan for us, our own individual plan will vary according to our circumstances and desires. So, we need to interact with the Lord along the way, to make sure we follow ultimately His plan, but also the things that we hope to accomplish in this life.

Planning to Meet Essentials

All our plans tend to revolve around the essentials of life. What are those?

Firstly, you must plan how to become healthy and to stay healthy. Secondly you must plan how to become wealthy. And lastly you must plan how to develop and maintain good relationships.

These three are the essentials to living an abundant, happy life. They are ultimately the things that we all desire in life. In this section I am only going to get through the first two essentials. Even that will take us a while to get through, so we will save the relationships for another time.

Planning for Health

Let's look first at making health plans. When you hear the word health, what is in your mind? People often have different ideas concerning what health is.

People who are great sports enthusiasts think health is the ability to just go out there and win every time. But there are sick people who can go out there and win.

There are often people who, though they are dying of disease, are very physically fit. They are in fact even able to perform in sports activities, but their health is bad.

What it Means to Be Healthy

I would like to give you a better definition of what it means to be healthy. Being healthy means being an efficient machine.

You see you are a machine and God created you to do something. God made you into a product like a machine that has things to do. And for a machine to do the best, it must run efficiently.

What is efficiency? It means doing things to the best of its capability and without restrictions.

Perhaps you have a nice big, fancy car, and you are always driving at 60 kilometers an hour. Well you should be driving at that speed if you are in a 60 kilometer per hour speed limit.

But what was the point of buying the big, fancy car if that is all you are planning to do?

You see that car has efficiency built into it and can do far better than that. When you can put your foot down and let it take its full power, then that engine roars. That is when that car reaches its full potential.

So how have you been driving your life? Has it been running on first or second gear? Maybe you have never even made it into top gear yet. And when you do make it to top gear you are a little bit cautious. You don't want to let out too much too soon.

I have had cars, where when you put your foot down flat the car coughs and stutters first before it starts to pull off. A car like that is not an efficient machine.

If you try to pull out the full throttle in your life and you start coughing, your machine is not very efficient. That means you are unhealthy.

So, do you now understand health from a better point of view?

Not Just Related to the Body

Here is another mistake we make. We think that health only applies to our body. But God didn't just make us a body. He made us a body, a soul and a spirit, so health applies to all three parts of our being.

It is no good having a body that is physically fit, and a soul or a spirit that is sick. You see each of these need to run at peak efficiency and in the fullness of power that God intended for them.

To get them there, we need to go through various processes. I just have four to share with you now as follows.

1. Feeding

2. Exercising

3. Purging

4. Healing

Feeding Your Body

Let's look at physical health first and start with feeding. This is something we love to do, usually at least three times a day. Some of us like to do it more.

We love to feed our faces, don't we? But what exactly are we feeding ourselves? Also, is the food that we are feeding ourselves producing the ultimate state of energy and physical health?

When you are young you don't think about these things. I remember my mom or somebody saying to me,

"You shouldn't eat that. It is unhealthy."

I used to say to her,

"I'm not eating it because it's good for me. I'm eating it because I like it."

You can get away with it when you are still young. You can eat junk and your body still seems to cope. But when you get a little bit older you find it is not quite as easy.

You find that health is no longer automatic, and now you need to start being a little bit careful. But if you had been careful when you were younger, perhaps by this stage you wouldn't feel your age so much.

For those of you who are getting on in years, you know what I am talking about. Those who are young think,

"They are old fuddy-duddies. I'm still full of energy. I can eat all my favorite foods."

You see it is not a sin to eat good foods. God made them for us, but not everything that we eat is good for us.

Unfortunately, in this world of convenience and instant everything, most of the cheapest and easiest foods we make lack the essentials that our body needs.

I don't need to preach nutrition to you. I'm sure you have heard it coming from all sides. But we need to eat good foods to maintain health in our bodies.

Exercise

The next thing you need is to keep active and to move around a lot. If you are sitting at your desk all day, you are not creating a very good environment for maintaining good health.

You need to avoid taking the lazy way. We have a park just up the way from our house. It is just a couple of blocks away, but I would rather take the car to get there than walk, because walking is an effort.

Come on, admit it. We are inherently lazy beings. We always find the quickest way.

When we go to find a parking spot at the shopping center, we usually look for a parking that is the closest. You can never get a parking close to the shops because everybody has grabbed it first.

Why are those parking places so popular? Because nobody wants to walk so far to the shops.

Well I am getting old and lazy, so I always look for the closer parking spots. In days gone by I used to exercise my faith and say,

"Angels, prepare a parking for me."

I got pretty good at it. As I got there someone would pull out right close to the entrance. But I think the Lord made it stop working for a reason. When we go to the shops now my family say,

"Dad, go and park in our usual place."

"But that is at the other end of the parking lot. Do you know how far we need to walk?"

There are plenty of parking spaces there because nobody wants to park there. I need to keep reminding myself and be reminded,

"It will do you good to walk a little bit further."

We will just never admit that we are lazy, will we? But we are inherently lazy creatures. Well if you want to remain healthy, try and get rid of some of that laziness and push yourself a little bit. You also need to do it often, not just every now and then.

Get Rid of Poisons

Apart from good feeding and exercise, you also need to remove poisons from your body. This is because there is always a by-product of digestion and bodily functions that produces a lot of toxins in your body. These are in fact the major causes of most of the diseases that we have.

I have done a full study on this, so I am not going to talk about it much here. If you want to study all that I have taught on physical health, I have put up a website called The Way of Health. Just click on the websites link on any of our pages and you will find it there near the bottom.

You can go and read it. I wrote some very good articles to emphasize all these aspects. The Lord showed me that there are seven factors involved in maintaining our health, and if we follow those carefully, we will remain healthy.

One of the major factors of ill-health and disease, is the inability of our body to get rid of the poisons that form in them.

God has created us to eliminate a lot of the poisons automatically. Guess how that happens? Through movement. So, every time you park your car a long distance away and walk to the shops, you need to think,

"Every step I take I am getting rid of toxins."

There is a system in the body that runs side by side with the blood system, called the lymph system. The lymph system is more extensive than your blood, but it doesn't have a heart to pump it. It moves by activity.

As your body moves, it takes all the poisons out. It passes them into the excretory organs, mostly into the bowels, and it goes out of your body.

So, if you want to get rid of toxins you must move more. A lot of people kind of go overboard on what not to eat, because some foods produce more poisons. That is a good thing. But if you moved a lot, you would be amazed at what you can eat.

A Personal Discovery

Some years ago, we spent a little time in a foreign country called Costa Rica. We had never been there before, and our hotel was a couple of kilometers away from town.

I was a shopaholic at that stage. I had to go to the shops every day. If I was on holiday, the one thing I loved to do was to go shopping. So, we had to walk a long way to the shops every day.

I had been suffering with a lot of different things and I was taking a lot of medications. I took all my medications with me. I had been trying to control my diet and not eat too much stuff, but the food at that restaurant was so good!

I found myself eating a lot more than I usually did. I was having three full meals a day. But do you know what? I lost a couple of kilograms while we were there. In fact, I hardly took any of the pills. I didn't need them.

My blood pressure remained good, my sugar stayed down, and everything was awesome. I thought to myself,

"It must be the nice atmosphere that is doing this."

No, it was the walking. It was the long walks we took every day, and sometimes we had to walk up steep hills to where we wanted to go. Sometimes we were in a hurry to get somewhere so we pushed ourselves.

I don't normally push myself on a steep hill because I get tired. But when there is an urgency or an emergency, you push yourself harder.

I discovered that just the extra exercise that we did while we were there, helped me to lose weight and improve my health. This was even though I ate more than twice as much as I normally do.

So, don't underestimate the power of exercise. It really is an important part of health and it helps get rid of all the poisons.

Eliminate Toxins

So, you need to eat well, to exercise, and you need to do your best to eliminate poisons. One of the ways you can do this is to encourage the movement of your bowels.

The best way to do that is to make sure that most of the foods you eat are not of the concentrated variety, like starches and meat. You need food that has a lot of water content, like vegetables, salads and that sort of thing.

If you have more water content in your diet, your bowels flow more freely, and you get rid of the toxins more easily. So, all these things interlink together don't they?

What happens when sickness strikes? You need to deal with it to restore yourself back to health.

You can take some medication, which doesn't heal you but it does treat the symptoms. Ultimately all healing comes from your spirit as I have taught elsewhere, but medications do help.

It is not easy to go for a walk when you are in pain. So, take something to get rid of the pain and then still go for your walk. Just change your eating and your exercise habits. You will be amazed how you can avoid sickness.