BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

2 4 : B V O V But you know what's ironic? Once you do that, your reputation gets better. Funny thing. When you lose that desire to protect your image, your image gets better. Why? Because then the image of the Lord Jesus can come forth instead of that puny little image you had of yourself. "Certainly, I will be with you," God said. And He's said it to us just as surely as He said it to Moses (Hebrews 13:5). That's what we need to grab hold of. That's what will cause us to live in the supernatural and do impossible things. We've got to quit hanging on to our own idea of ourselves. We've got to do what Moses finally did—abandon our ways of thinking and start agreeing with God. We've got to stop looking at things with a natural perspective. Because a natural, worldly perspective will keep us from living the life God intends for us to live. It will keep us from being supernaturally healthy, prosperous and peaceful. Remember what I said a moment ago about fearing God instead of the devil? Believers who have a natural rather than a supernatural perspective get that switched around. Instead of walking in the fear of God, they walk in the fear of the devil and his work. In the fear of death. In the fear of sickness. In the fear of poverty. And those fears keep them from listening to and obeying the Word of God. Look again at what the Israelites did when they came out of Egypt. They had just seen a marvelous display of God's miraculous power. Yet as they faced the Red Sea with the Egyptian army at their backs, they turned on Moses and said, "Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that thou hast taken us away to die in the wilderness?" What could possibly have caused them to doubt God and make such a traitorous statement after all He had already done for them? Fear. They began to fear what the enemy could do to them, and they were overwhelmed by the drive toward self-preservation. Let me tell you something. That apparently innocent desire you have to protect yourself will cost you dearly when it comes to walking with God. It infected the Israelites to such a degree that they forgot the signs and wonders. Suddenly they saw themselves as just people again—not people with whom God dwells, but just people. If you don't watch out, Satan will try to give you that perspective too. When you start believing the promises of God and marching toward victory over sickness or sin or poverty, Satan will try to tell you you're just a natural person. He'll tell you that you can't trust the supernatural power of God to pull you through. Rest in Him That's why you need to learn to think with the mind of Christ. You need to learn to live with your thoughts on the things of God instead of the things of the world, to come to a place where you're resting in the power of God. God wants us to rest in His power. He wants us to know Him so well and trust Him so much that when Satan tries to threaten us, when he tells us we're going to go broke or we're going to die or whatever manipulation he uses, we just laugh at him. You and I need to come to a place in this world where we trust God with every detail of our lives. When we do that, when we're not trying to preserve or protect ourselves, but trusting in the living God to do that for us, we'll be in that place of rest we read about in Hebrews. Make no mistake though, that place of rest is not a place of inactivity. In fact, to get there and stay there, you'll have to take more aggressive action than you've ever taken before. The difference will be that your action will be based on God's plans and power instead of your own. When Moses and the Israelites were caught between the Red Sea and the Egyptian If you're going to march forward in victory toward your promised land... you're going to have to know what He's saying. You're going to have to learn to hear His voice.

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