Then Acts chapter 3 and verse 19 change your thinking therefore and return to what once was resulting in your failures being wiped away so that specific times of refreshing and revival will come from the presence of the Lord. Our year is coming to an end soon. I don't know about you but it's been a pretty busy year for us and while on the one hand it seemed to go very fast on the other hand it lasted a long time but it's nearly over and whenever we come to the end of a year we try to take stock of where we are.

I know it's not quite the new year yet. I should be preaching this closer to the new year but everybody's starting to wind down a little bit now. This may be the last chance I might get everybody's attention and I also have a very another important reason for sharing on this subject now and I think that you're going to find it challenging and inspiring and I hope it's going to be a blessing to you.

As you come to this end of this year here's some of the questions that you might be asking yourself. What have I accomplished in the past year? What has improved in my circumstances? Have I changed personally? Am I happy with my progress? Am I reaching my full potential? Now if all your answers on those are positive then you don't need to listen to the rest of this message because you've already arrived. I dare say nobody's in that category.

There's got to be at least one or two of those that you never had a positive answer for and so I believe I can help you. Before you can become fully who you are meant to be to become the real and the full the best you need to start by deciding what you want. Are you satisfied with where you are right now? And better still is the Lord satisfied with where you are right now? Well what can be improved? In the natural we have the three things that make for happy living, that make life real.

They are firstly our health and I'm not just speaking about physical health. I'm speaking about mental health and spiritual health but normally we kind of think of the physical health don't we? Are you healthy? Well depending on how old you are chances are you probably are fairly healthy. As you get older it becomes more difficult to stay healthy.

What's the state of your mind and of your soul and of your emotions and how is your spiritual condition before the Lord? All of these things combined together make for true health and then are you wealthy? You know I think even a person who has a lot of money would not consider themselves wealthy. Somehow we never seem to have enough can we? But again what does wealth consist of? Does it consist of money in the bank? Does it consist of the things that you possess or could it consist of a bit more than that? Of some of the resources that you have, the possibilities you have, the skills you have, the abilities that you have. All of these I believe can contribute to our wealth.

And then finally your relationships. Oh dear this is the one where we tend to fall down the most. Okay could you tell me how many friends you have? If you said zero you're not alone.

Trust me. What good relationships do you have in your life? Well of course we have the best relationship of all which is with the Lord. But what about your relationships with fellow human beings? Family we will not even talk about because that's a icy one isn't it? But all of these things make for satisfaction in life.

If we can confidently say I'm happy about the state of my health, I'm happy about the state of my temporal life, the things that I have, and I'm happy about the relationships that I have with other people, then I believe that you can come to a place of satisfaction. But I dare say these are all areas that most of the time we fall short in. So these are some of the goals that we may want to aim for.

Now included in all of this of course is our spiritual life and our relationships with the Lord, with one another in the Lord, with our ministry and our ministry involvements and all of these activities. There's a lot more to these areas of life than just the natural. Now if you are failing in any of these areas we should try to identify where you are failing.

Now I want to just make one simple little statement. Why is it that all of these areas of your life are not satisfactory and how can we improve them? How can we make our situation get better? Now I want you to think back on this past year and I want you to look at your condition at the beginning of the year. What was your situation then? Okay and then I want you to look at your situation now and I want you to honestly say what has changed? Has anything changed? I remember some years ago sitting down and writing down my goals of what I wanted to accomplish in the next five years and then I lost them.

And about five years later going through the old rubbish I found my my goals. Do you know how far I'd come in five years? Zero. I was still in the same place as what I was five years ago and I had these great goals and aspirations.

Well you know I heard them teach you if you write down your goals it'll help you to reach them. Don't you believe it? Why is it that we can have even great aspirations and desires to improve ourselves and get better and improve our circumstances and our situation in life and yet it's just so difficult to do? Here's a simple statement. If you want things to get better you're going to have to get better because if you don't change your outward circumstances are not going to change, your life is not going to change, nothing about you is going to change.

10 years from now when you look in the mirror the only thing you'll see is an older person with the same problems because until you are ready to change, you know change is hard. Change is very hard because we got used to doing things in a certain way don't we? That's a big subject this. I'm only going to give you an introduction today going to get you thinking and I'm going to prepare you for much more that's going to be available soon.

I want to look firstly at where we fail because of our temperament. Now each of us has a different temperamental mix. Usually we are mostly one temperament with some of the others in there.

So see if you can find yourself here. Okay the driver, the driver is the hard pushing one, the one who's got a strong will, the one who says I will make up my mind and do it and I will push until I do it. Sounds like the most likely person to succeed doesn't it? So you started off with a great big bang and a push and you said I'm going to do this, I'm going to change, I'm going to accomplish, I'm going to do great things, I'm going to do great things and you know what happened? You rode your car with the pedal flat until something went pow pow like just happened out of the other day and you came to a grinding halt.

You just burnt out because it can't be accomplished with natural power. I don't care if you're a driver who has that strong will and can push through, you will eventually reach a place you can't keep it up. You will fail.

Well let's take the expressive. The temperament most likely to succeed in life, right? The expressive doesn't even anticipate problems, they just run over them. The expressive thrives on chasing after dreams and new goals.

I got this exciting new goal and I'm going all out for that goal. Yeah, I'm going to reach that goal and if you don't, tell you what's going to happen, a few more goals are going to pop up along the way and after a while you're going to get bored with that first goal because an expressive hates routine, hates doing the same thing all the time. The expressive gets bored with going in one direction and ends up in going five different directions, one after the other.

Sometimes none of those goals are ever reached. So you may again have started out with a big bang and all it took was something new to excite you, a new challenge, a new goal and bam, you're sidetracked and off you go. You didn't reach the goal that you desired.

Then we get to the temperament least likely to succeed in my economy and that is the analytical. The analytical over complicates things. Okay, this is what we need to accomplish.

Now, we need to look at this carefully. Firstly, what if I do this and what if that happens? What if that happens? No, that's not such a good idea. Okay, how about we try that and no, that's not going to work.

I don't have enough of that and what about the analytical is like a tortoise. It just never gets going. See, the expressive is the hair.

You don't have to be a hair to win the race as we know in the old fable. But you see, the analytical procrastinates and puts it off because we got to get it right. We got to get it perfect.

We got to get all the pieces together. We got to get them all in a row and oh, it's so difficult and the more you analyze it and the more you look at it, the more you see how impossible it is for you to change. In fact, the analytical change is a swear word.

I hate change. And then we come to the amiable, the nice guy, the people person. The amiable says, I love people.

I will work with people. I need somebody in my life to help me accomplish this goal. So the amiable waits for somebody to do something and if somebody doesn't do something, the amiable doesn't do anything either.

You know, I don't like rocking the boat. I don't like getting there and upsetting people. I don't like pushing my way.

You know, I like to be the nice guy and just fit in and be friendly and help people. I need somebody to come into my life and help me organize me and push me and maybe start things off for me and I can get them going. Anybody identify with that? If you're an amiable, you know what I'm talking about.

So folks, which temperament are you and what are your chances of succeeding using your temperament power? That's sounding good, isn't it? So don't think that just because you've got a certain temperament that it's obvious that you're going to be able to change and grow and become what you're supposed to be. And then we have other problems. We have cultural problems and we have circumstantial limitations.

Well, you know, I'm in a cultural situation where if I were to do that, you know, it would just not be accepted. It's like it's just bad practice. It's out of the norm.

People are going to look down on me. You know, I need to do it according to what everybody else is doing. That's the right way to do it.

I can't do it the wrong way, can I? I'm kind of confined to a system. And if you're in the church system, you're confined to serving the Lord according to a system that's been set up by man, not by the Lord. It's so difficult to change when you've been programmed into a system like that, when you think like that group.

Now you've got to break out of it. And who wants to be different? Who wants to stick out? None of us do, do we? We're afraid to be different. And then we're afraid of being rejected by the rest.

If I were to step out and do this, you know, people of my culture have never done this before. You know, if I was in another culture or another group, that would be acceptable. But amongst my people, this is not acceptable.

You know, if I were to try this, they'll say, what do you think of them? You've got to get rejected. Difficult situation to break out because you're caught in a rut. And then the way you view yourself is also going to make all the difference in the world.

Because when you look at yourself and you see yourself too small, you say, but you know, I'm not capable of accomplishing that. It's just little me, you know. I mean, other people, they've got it.

I mean, they've got everything going for them. They've got all the abilities, they've got all the intelligence, they've got the financial resources, they've got the contacts. But me, I'm just a little nobody sitting on the outside.

I'm the little black sheep of the family. It's very difficult for me to change everything, become what I'm not. Besides, what will people think? See, that's your problem in the first place.

You're worried about what people think. And that's why you see yourself as so small, because you're comparing yourself to everybody else. You're comparing yourself to those who appear to be succeeding in this world, and even in the spiritual life.

Those who may be succeeding in the body of Christ, those who are succeeding in ministry. And you compare yourself with them, and you say, I'm small compared to them. How can I break out of this? If I try to do what they do, I will fall on my face.

You've got a wrong view of yourself. In the end, you're going to end up with false condemnation, feeling guilty about something that actually you didn't do wrong, because you've been made to feel that you're not capable of this. And who do you think you are? Don't even try.

Become overwhelmed with guilt. You're not going to keep it up, are you? It's a matter of time, that great big plan, the goal that you had. It's going to fall by the wayside.

Well, how do we change things? Well, if things are only going to get better, when you get better, then you need to find out what it is about you that needs to get better. So you need to start by identifying all of your personal weaknesses. Oh, we need a large piece of paper for some of us.

All right. Sit down and make a list of all your weaknesses. And then make another list of your strengths.

I think for most of us, we can have a big list of weaknesses and a tiny little list of strengths, or the strength list may not have anything on it at all. But the truth of the matter is you actually do have hidden strengths, but you've never uncovered them. You don't realize that you have abilities and gifts that God has given you, that you're probably not even aware of, because you've been so busy majoring on your weaknesses and how small you are, that you didn't realize that these people out there would envy you.

Some of those things that you have, that you just pushed aside and thought it was not important, and you might need a bit of help to uncover those hidden strengths. Then perhaps you need to go about developing new abilities that you didn't have before. Because after all, you're not static, you're not passive, you're not a piece of wood.

You can change, you can improve, you can add to. You say, well, you know, I could have done that when I was younger. These young ones, they got all the energy, got their whole life ahead of me.

I'm starting to look down the barrel there. I'm starting to look down this road that's getting narrower and narrower. And one of these days, my time's up, I'm out of here, I'm over.

Well, I can identify with you because I'm there. You know, by the age of 68, if I haven't changed or grown or got better yet, you think I should give up? Well, I'm not giving up. I'm not satisfied with where I'm at.

I want to be better than what I am. And you know, I'm striving all the time. And as I look at myself now, at the end of this year, I believe I'm better than what I was at the beginning of the year.

And I believe I'm better than what I was the beginning of the year before. Well, it took me a while to get there. And God had to teach me a lot of principles on how to get there because they're not obvious.

Many people will go right through their life into their 90s and never identify that they could have broken free, they could have changed, they could have grown, they could have embraced the fullness of life that the Lord has. Only somebody's shown them how. Well, how do we go about changing you then? There are ways and means.

Let me first show you the difficult way. You could study harder, improve your intellectual capabilities, improve your skills. Do you know how much money people spend on study? Do you know how education has become such a thing in our life that people will go without food to get education in the hope that greater knowledge will automatically put them in a place where they will rise up.

If I could qualify in something, I would get a better job, I would get more money, I would have a greater career, I could improve my status in life. And that's not untrue. Certainly, the way this world is set up, those who know more are given more opportunities.

But you know what? At my age, you go on a big long study course and try and qualify. If I was to do this in the natural, they still wouldn't give me a job. They say, you're old man.

We don't want to employ an old man. We want a young person. But if you're young enough, you could study hard.

And it's going to take you years. And that's a good thing to do. And I'm not discouraging it.

I'm just saying that it's one of the more difficult ways of doing things. And there are easier ways, which I'm going to just give you an idea. I'm not going to give it all to you yet, because there's too much.

It would be all day. Now you could work harder. You could put in more hours at work.

You could arrive at work earlier and leave after everybody else has gone home. You could take your work home. You could set up your own business and do what happened to me when I first started my business.

I worked 18 hours a day. The rest of the time, I was sleeping. It's not a life.

I remember it was Christmas. And my family had all gone off somewhere and was celebrating. And there I was sitting at my computer trying to program.

But Daphne, she didn't quite know what to do with herself. She had to wait for me, sit and keep me company. But I had to get this job done.

I got to get this job done. I worked and I worked and I worked. And then I found there was actually a much easier way to do it.

And I'd spend months, hard work. I never produced. But I was determined.

Well, I benefited from the practice. I developed some good habits. But it didn't change my life.

Now you could join a program which somebody has set up that will help you. Somebody who can work with you. You might want to find a mentor or a trainer who has the knowledge and the experience who can show you what to do, how to do, who can stand behind you and kick your butt a little bit when you don't feel like doing it.

These are good things, all of them. I don't think I'm putting them down. They're very important.

But you see, all of these things try from the outside to impose some kind of change on us. And unless you're the kind of person who has the willpower and the motivation to keep following through, you're not going to make it. Well, there is a way to improve your willpower.

And there is a way to improve your motivation. And there are ways and means to make it easier and better for you to use these ways effectively. And I will be showing you those in due course.

But there's a quicker way. And there's a better way. And we as believers have resources that other human beings do not have.

You see, instead of starting from the outside, you should be starting from the inside. You need to be tapping into forces and the power that are within you. Now, as a child of God, born again of the Spirit of God, you have dwelling inside of you the one who created the universe.

He's got all the wisdom and knowledge that there is to be had. If you could just learn to tap into that resource and draw out of it, you'd actually have more than what you can get from the outside and in this world. Now, you need to start working on your soul as well as your spirit.

That means you need to start working on the most vital part of the soul, which is your mind. You see, but I thought you said that study was not the best way to do it. See, that's the problem.

All we know about using our minds is to cram it with knowledge. But you see, it takes a lot more and yet a lot less to bring this change. I want you to look at the scriptures that we looked at at the beginning.

It says be changed by a total renovation of your mind. Second one says change. You know what's the biggest thing that's causing you to fail? It's the pictures that you have in your mind.

It's not your lack of knowledge. It's not how stupid or how clever you are. It's the picture in your mind.

The pictures that have been fed in throughout your life by your experiences, by what you saw with your parents, by what you saw with your siblings, by what you've seen at school and in the workplace and everywhere you've gone and the experiences you've had in life have built pictures into your mind. And those pictures, folks, most of the time are negative. That picture in your mind is what tells you you're small.

That picture in your mind is what tells you who do you think you are to be famous? Who do you think you are to be wealthy? Can't you see where you come from? Can't you see who you're made of? Can't you see what you look like? The pictures of your mind are speaking to you louder than words. But there are words also that have been programmed into your mind throughout your life. Words that were spoken over you.

Words that you believed. And now, every time you want to rise up and do something, these words come back and say to you, no, you can't do that. No, no, you're not capable of that.

You know what I'm talking about? See, all of these things are in our mind. Now, what God is promising us is a total renovation of our mind. Well, you're not going to do that with study, folks.

It's going to take a supernatural power to accomplish that. But God does not impose himself on us in any way. It's not going to happen automatically.

It's not going to happen by accident. And nobody else is going to do it for you. You're going to have to make a choice and say, I need this.

I am going to make myself available. You know, it's extremely difficult to study. If you sat in one of our classes for a couple of hours, it's hard work.

But you know, right now, if you were to close your eyes and see the pictures of your life, and I want you to do this as you go home today, I want you to sit and close your eyes and view the pictures of your life. Write down what you see. What do they look like? Because I'll tell you what, those pictures of your life are who you are.

And while those same pictures remain in your mind, you will always be who you are. And until those pictures in your mind change and become different, you will remain exactly who you are. So you're going to have to change those pictures before you can change your life.

You're going to have to improve those pictures before you improve and get better. And when you get better, your life will get better. Your circumstances will get better.

Your health will get better. Your relationships will improve. We're living in hope, aren't we? Is that amiable saying somebody's going to come do something? I'm sure they will.

Each of us has got our different methods, but at the end of the day, unless you can change those inner pictures, they will reflect outwardly in your life. You're going to need the Lord's help to do this. At the end of the day, it's not important what you do, it's important what you become.

You see, a dog doesn't have to work at barking. It comes naturally. For me to bark is hard work, because I'm not a dog.

If I started to think like a dog, barking would come without me thinking. Can you see the difference? You see, if we try it from the outside, we try and reprogram ourselves. And yes, we can.

But you know, how many years have you lived now? That's how long it took for you to be programmed to do what you do now. You have been programmed, and I will be teaching you this in much detail in the future. You have been programmed, and to get deprogrammed is not an easy process.

When you start to see yourself in a different way, when you tap into the supernatural power of God, He can take away the experiences of the past, He can take away some of those negative pictures of the past, and He can heal all those bad experiences. And that already is going to bring you to a place where you start to feel more positive. And why do you feel more positive? Because you see positive pictures.

That's the last time you listen to the news or Reddit, and got all excited about the future. Oh, this government of ours, they're just not going to change. The country's a mess.

The world's a mess. Oh Lord, do I even want to bring children into this world? What a mess! See, those are the pictures of your mind. And your life's a mess because of the pictures that you entertain in your mind.

But you know, we have the Spirit of God who can bring much better pictures in your mind. We have resources in your spirit, which if they are tapped into and can be brought up into your mind, will transform images that you see. The power of God will come in and He'll overcome all of those weaknesses, and He will pour into you new strengths and new abilities, so that the balance begins to swing.

And when you make that list of weaknesses and strengths, you can start scratching those weaknesses out. So well, that was one of my weaknesses, but it's gone. So I overcame it.

Now I never had the strength or ability, but God gave it to me. Now I have it, and I've been able to develop it. I've become a new and different person.

Lord willing, I hope to, in the near future, release a brand new series, a complete program, which will be made available, which embraces this subject in a lot of detail. I think it's a good time to do this as the new year approaches. I've seen unbelievers put together programs to teach you how to succeed in the new year, but God isn't in it.

It's all psychological and natural, but God's taught me some principles which are supernatural, and I'd like to help you to change your life in 2019. Let's start right now. And the way to start right now is to change the pictures of your mind.

So I suggest as you go home today, after you've finished watching this, you sit and close your eyes and examine the pictures of your mind. Write them down. Have a good look at yourself, and then compare your life as it is right now, and see how it links with the pictures that you have in your mind, and the visions and views that you have of yourself.

I believe that the Lord wants you to become not somebody else. Now it might help by copying somebody else for a while, because if they did something and it worked for them, some of that might work for you. But at the end of the day, you are a unique creature that God made.

God has given you a job in this world that nobody else can fulfill. Well, little me? Yeah, I'm just the one who sits in the back of the church there. Yes, you.

Every one of you. God has given you something unique to contribute to this world, and there are people out there who need what you have to offer. I'm sure I don't have to ask, do you want to change your life? Do you want things to get better? Do you want, we all do.

God wants you to. In the prophetic word that the Lord gave today, he expressed that desire. God wants to make you into something magnificent.

And I don't care how many bad years you've had in your life. I don't care how many problems, how many difficulties, how many losses and failures you've had. You can look to the future and say, I'm putting that behind me now, and I'm going forward.

I suggest you end this year on a high note, not on a low note. We find that when it comes to the end of the year and we ask people to give testimonies, most of the time, we hear all the bad things. The year most people say, I'm glad this year is over.

Sure. It's been a tough year. Come on, we've all done it.

And it's been a tough year. I'm just going to end on this little note. Change is tough.

Change is tough. Change requires pressure. We've been having that from childhood already when our parents forced us to do things we didn't want to do, but it changed us and made us successful in some areas of life.

So I'm just giving you a pre-warning that if you want to face this change, if you want to grow personally, expect to be a different person at the end of next year. That means it's not going to be a fun year. It means it's going to be a year of pressure, because it's going to be a year of change.

But you know what? Each change brings greater results. Each change brings you higher on the scale until you can eventually come to the place where you can look back in the past year and say, you know, my life now compared to then, there's no comparison. And people will be saying to you, you know, you've changed.

What's happened to you? You look different. You just have a greater confidence. You smile more.

What's happened to you? You seem to have changed. I want people to say that to me. I know I've been looking the same way for years.

Anything that changes is the signs of age. It doesn't need to be that way, does it? I don't know about you, but I'm excited about the future. And I want us to end this year on a high note in glorifying the Lord and thanking him for the change that he brought in the year that's been, and thanking him for the change that he's going to bring in our lives as we step into the year that is going to lie ahead of us, which is going to be filled with his blessings.

And I hope next time a new you is going to show up. If you stand up publicly, a different person. Kind of look the same.

They're going to be different. They're going to be confident. They're going to be successful.

They're going to be capable. Life's going to take on a new meaning for each one of us. Thank you for your word.

Share it as you gave it to me. And Lord, I ask you to reach out and touch your people. Inspire them.

Motivate them. Lift them up. And above all, give them hope, Lord.

Give them hope, for so many have lost hope because they tried, and they tried, and they failed, and they failed. Lord, you're going to show them how to try and succeed. You're going to show them to stop failing.

You're going to show them how to move from failure to success and to live the abundant life that you desire for each one of us. And so I place in your hands each one who's heard this message. I ask that you challenge them and inspire them.

Set a new fire in their heart, Lord. And I leave it now in your hands in Jesus' name.

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