So, a quick recap; All good things come from God. Jesus promised abundant life and, as we’ll soon get into, the character of God is to be over the top generous. The flow intended by God is to give us good things so that we can be transformed by them, by the renewing of the mind, and so that we’ll overflow with these things into the world around us, this is often called reflecting his glory into the world.

Chapter 4

While we had to deal with pride/humility first because they blind us to the other constraints, by far the biggest reason we don’t receive the good from God is that we doubt His heart toward us. There’s a two-prong approach to changing your beliefs about how God views you.

We’ll need to examine the two big reasons we doubt God’s heart for us, and then we’ll deal with healing our view of God. However, before I go there I want to address the concerns of those who are thinking, “but I don’t doubt that God is good, so I can skip this chapter and move on.”

If you were raised as a Christian like I was, it’s pretty easy to accept that God is perfect as a religious fundamental belief. Even if you’re new to Christianity it’s pretty obvious that we all believe our God isn’t flawed like the gods of other religions.

Not that I’m slamming those other religions, but take the ancient Greeks for example. They had a pantheon full of immature, but ultra-powerful beings that were hard to look up to. They were often petty and lustful. If nothing else, this served the purpose of explaining why your fate might be fickle. By claiming our God is perfect Christians open ourselves up to a lot of doubt when things don’t turn out the way we think they should.

What do we make of stories in the bible? Take Daniel in the lion den. He survived, as a miracle, but what if he’d been eaten? Would that mean that God didn’t like him?

This is the real reason for such a lofty title for this book as, “THE PRIMACY OF GOD!” There’re three aspects to putting God first:

1. Understanding how to receive good from God in order to receive our identity from Him.
2. Learning ways to put God first in our lives.
3. Accepting God’s perfection and authority as a basis for our faith.

Chronologically, we’ll cover the second point last in this chapter, because the third point is the most pivotal.

It’s pretty easy to accept God is all powerful, all knowing, and ever-present as a religious doctrine. It’s not so easy to believe that he loves me personally when things don’t go as I thought they would. The Bible assures me that God is love (1 John 4:8), yet sometimes I don’t see what He does as very loving. How does he allow cancer, or a baby born with a birth defect?

I can’t answer those questions. There are other, wiser men than I who have better answers for them. I only have this answer.

Until the question of God’s authority in your life is a settled issue you’ll be like a rudderless ship.

When we accept that God is perfect and all powerful, that he knows the end from the beginning, then we have to follow a certain chain of logic.

• He knew man would fall before he made us. He decided to deal with the fall of man by sacrificing His own son in our place…again, before he made us.
• Jesus knew every sin you’d ever commit before he came as a baby.
• God understands suffering because he walks every path with every one of us every day.
• God is not surprised by your sin, in fact, the purpose of confessing our sin to him is so that we might have a changed heart about it–not so he knows them.
• That sin isn’t even an issue with God, it’s just a symptom of the separation between He and I.

We can go deeper into this when we deal with healing our understanding of how God sees us, but for now, let’s accept that God is not an angry faraway person. That because of the work of Christ, which was the plan all along, God’s perfection and my imperfection don’t create the rift between us—unless I believe that it does.

In order to let God be God in our lives, we have to forgive him as much as be forgiven by Him. The idea of forgiving God is antithetical to religion, but it’s vital to relationship. Every single human being I’ve ever met has a beef with God about something, even if it’s just the fact that sin exists. We’ve got a lot of book left and things will be easier to accept once we’ve taken a better look at God’s character, but if you want a shortcut through this material, just accept that God knows what he’s doing and stop limiting His work in your life to only those things you understand and agree with. By the time you’ve finished reading this book, I pray that you’ll be ready to let God be God.

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The Question of God’s Goodness

You may have noticed that I don’t differentiate between God’s power and His goodness. I have a whole section on God’s goodness coming up, but, for the left-brained among us, here’s a quick paragraph.

Good and bad are generally relative terms. What’s good for me is good and what’s bad for me is bad. I’m not personally a big fan of any kind of moral relativism, but in this case, it’s true. If you’re all powerful then what you say is good/bad becomes the standard for anyone else who isn’t all powerful, which is everyone. If you are all-knowing then you know what is Good/Evil and can choose to abide by it or not. Therefore, if you are both you need only decide if you’re selfish or selfless. Will you act in your own self-interest or will you uphold a universal right/wrong even if it causes you harm? If you are all powerful then you can accomplish your desires despite any constraints, so why would you violate the right/wrong standard?

This dips a little bit into those unanswerable questions like, can God make a rock so big that He can’t lift it? Except, that in this case, we have an example that gives us an answer. Sin. So many people are angry at God because of the wages of sin when in fact the fall of mankind proves that God doesn’t force anyone to behave. The fact that He created humans knowing we’d fall speaks to His character also.

He’s willing to sacrifice himself, heroically, to restore things to what he intended. He doesn’t have to avoid making humans, because he has a solution. All knowing combined with all-powerful equals always accomplishing goals. Therefore, God has no motive to be anything but good because abiding by any laws doesn’t prevent him from doing or having anything. It does, however, cause him pain. He suffered to restore us because He loves us, and therefore He’s selfless. Therefore He is good.

_________

In reality, we can stop worrying about questions like why God allows wars and diseases. The bigger issues we suffer from are actually the smaller, more personal questions, like does God care about me in this or that place of my heart.

• Does He care if I get a better job?
• Does He care if I ever get married?
• Is He at all concerned with my weight problem?

People say they’ll never believe in God because children die of cancer, but what they really mean is, I’m angry because my dad died.

Let’s face it, most Christians have come to terms with the fact that God doesn’t prevent evil people from causing pain to others even when they’re Christians. He seems to intervene sometimes and not others. Are the people in third world nations just on God’s crap list? I say, no. And for the same reason God wasn’t playing favorites when he saved your uncle and not your dad. I’ll explain in a second.

Another place we struggle is where it comes down to things we feel like we ought to be able to influence and yet we’re somehow never able to find victory. Why can’t I pay off debt, get pregnant, fix my marriage, find a mate, and on and on?

Is God actually withholding these from me?

The answer is mind blowing—God knows what He’s doing.

I’m going to blow your mind a little further and remind you that everything is meant for our good. Why the hell am I suffering if an all-powerful God is trying to bless me? Because God knows what He’s doing!

Edited this far

A Closer Look:

More specifically there are two reasons for our struggle. First, the stoic reality is that this world is full of sin, we’re in the process of dying, nothing will ever be perfect. Second God’s blessing often comes in the form of redemption. He takes what was meant for evil against us and profits us (Gen 45).

If we try to figure out if God is good, or powerful enough to fix things, based on what we see around us we’ll come to all sorts of conclusions. If we start from a place a faith and accept that God loves us perfectly, and uses everything we’re going through to bring about the perfect answer for us, then we begin to see new opportunities in even the worst scenarios.

Like Superstitious Chickens:

B. F. Skinner was a behavioral psychologist. He created what is now called the “Skinner Box.” It’s a box with four shoots through which chicken food pellets might enter the box. He put chickens in the box and observed them, quickly learn when and where to expect food. When he randomized when/which shoot the food would come from, each chicken came up with its own explanation. Some only turned left when pecking, some stood for long periods on one foot. They became superstitious.

We do the same thing. We associate some things with certain results and we interpret them with all the accuracy of an ancient priest reading the entrails of a cow. Sorry for the imagery, but I do want to make a point. The only way to get an accurate picture of what’s going on and why is to ask one of the humans outside the box. In order to do that you’d have to realize that you are a chicken in a box and believe that humans are behind it all.

See we’ve got the cart before the horse most of the time. You must believe in God first and then you’ll find answers. That’s the Primacy of God. Not because God’s mean, or holding out on you, but because we lack the perspective to see what’s going on.

It’s a Process, not a Snapshot:

Here’s how Graham Cooke explains the process. In every circumstance, there is a promise, if we look around for it. Sometimes it’s just that God is moving in a different spirit than we’re perceiving. When we focus on our standing in Christ instead of our circumstance we can claim the promise and look for provision–God’s solution to things.

Ultimately, no matter how bad it gets we’ll come to a place where we’re thankful for it. We can claim a pearl from it.

Life will exact a high price from you, regardless of your belief system, but if you accept and believe that God is good and He loves you perfectly, you have the opportunity to have your hardships redeemed.

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Chapter 3

Of course, there’s more to developing our relationship with God than just, learning humility. When God talks about Christian development in the Bible he uses metaphors about construction or farming. My favorite is John 15:5, “I am the vine and ye are the branches.”

One of my mentors, Mike Galeotti, combined this verse with Isaiah 53:5 “by his stripes we are healed.” Pointing out that we are like orphaned branches, cut off from God by our sin. Christ is like a perfectly good tree that is cut in order to graft in a branch from another tree. By Christ’s wounds, we are grafted back into the family of God.

The path of the postmodern cleric is all about being a conduit for God’s glory. Taking the nutrients that God provides, being changed by them, and ultimately handing them off to others as fruits from our branches.

Here’s the metaphor as I see it. We are like a tree with branches, leaves, etc. Even a trunk, but not roots. Our roots are now in Christ where we are grafted back into God.

Our identity, by the way, that happens in the trunk. We can’t know who we are without being grafted. The other option is lying on the ground dying. Then your identity is more like a rock in a stream that used to be part of a big boulder. Sure we can use a name and characteristics to distinguish it from other types of rocks, but its still not a living object and it doesn’t have an identity. Your identity is about how you will shine God’s glory.

To do that you must receive it, that’s why Primacy comes first. If there’s no water coming out of your garden hose, first make sure the hose is turned on and the right hose is hooked up.

The next book, about identity, will cover how the good from God transforms you. That’s all about the wilderness. We actually can glorify the Kingdom before we know who we are, but the process is much more rewarding after we find our unique identity.

God desires to be worshiped in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). That means knowing yourself and being present to God as you are. By the way, in order to see yourself clearly, you’re going to need humility. It boggles the mind, huh?

The focus of the rest of this book will be on the constraints which hamper our ability to receive what God is handing us. You’ve already been exposed to the first constraint, pride, and in the appendix, you’ll get a better look at it.

But wait! Shame

We can’t leave the topic of humility without discussing shame. It’s pride that causes shame, not humility. That’s sure not what we grow up believing, huh?

God never shames us. In fact, he wants to shine his Glory out through us uniquely. Can he shine his own glory without us, sure, but we actually dream of doing this for God. In book two we’ll discuss this concept further, but for now, the short explanation is that bears like being bears and eagles like being eagles. There’s a great joy in simply being who you were meant to be. Most of our feelings of shame come from being a bear who believes in order to matter he must fly, or worse an eagle that believes in order to be happy he must be safe and that means he must never fly. To make it worse, we’re often motivated by fear of something that may not even happen. But more on that in book 2.

Shame is rooted in pride. When pride informs our expectations, our vision of who we are and what we want is skewed. So first, pride skews what we think we deserve by marring our vision of ourselves and the world around us and our relationship to God. Then pride lands on our failure to get what we think we deserve with a shame attack that says we didn’t try hard enough, or maybe God doesn’t love us as much as we love ourselves, or he’s holding out on us, etc.

Shame in Men & Women

As men, it generally comes down to feeling inadequate. We respond to not getting what we want by agreeing with Satan that we aren’t enough, that we don’t have what it takes.

As a response, because pride tells us we’re on our own to fix it, we lower the bar and try for less. Or sometimes we simply stop doing things at which we might fail. Without really saying it aloud we accept twisted ideas like–if I make enough money it won’t matter that my wife cries herself to sleep every night.

How can we enter a promised land—where we can’t go in our own strength—if we’re on our own to fix our situation?

Pride takes a different course with women, but it still blinds them. When women feel like they aren’t getting what they deserve they often feel like they are too much. They are demanding more from the people in their lives than those people want to give them, and that means they aren’t loved as much as they thought they were. They stop seeing the signs around them that they are loved.

The truth is that your situation isn’t anything compared to your standing in Christ. If God is working all things to your benefit (Romans 8:28) then your circumstances can never be bad. That’s another book entirely (written by my mentor, Graham Cooke).

I know we’re covering a lot of territory in this chapter. I’ll bring it back full circle before the chapter ends.

Rough Situations Happen

Sometimes our situations are serious. When someone dies, you need to grieve. We can’t live in denial of the pain around us. Living from your standing in Christ instead of your circumstances doesn’t mean ignoring reality, it means not reverse engineering your problems to mean you’re not loved.

Whether man or woman when we land in a situation that makes us feel unloved it’s our definition of love that must change. Being a grown-up means that being hurt by life, by a fallen and unfair world, by not getting what we thought we needed, doesn’t change a thing about how God feels about us. We are loved. Period.

Sure, God could have done something about the harm that came to us. Sure, he could give us what we believe we deserve. Our promised land doesn’t have to be filled with giants—but it is. I can only tell you what I know by faith, that God can redeem any situation. He can bless you for, and through any suffering. Heaven is glorified by your suffering, and Jesus always acknowledges your faith.

In Luke 8:43-48 a woman believed that touching Jesus robe would heal her, and it did. But Jesus felt it, stopped, and acknowledged her faith. That’s something He always does.

Again Pride Blinds

If we aren’t feeling God working in our circumstances it can be that our pride demands relief. When we beg God to end our suffering and he does for a time, we delay the redemption of that lesson which will bring the blessing he wants to give us. When we play the martyr, we aren’t waiting upon God to redeem the circumstances. Instead, we settle for half payment.

If we can just step back, humbly, into God, then we can have His solution to our problem and it will be accompanied by a huge blessing.

That is the next big constraint to receiving our abundance and entering our personal Promised Land. Our way of squirreling out of our situations in our own power is a major constraint on our ability to receive the Good that God is trying to give us. We pray without ceasing that God would stop the situation He created to give us what we couldn’t receive through any other means.

The Silver Lining

The good news here is that God isn’t saying you must be poor. He’s not demanding that you perform in certain ways in your own strength, even in response to situations where he wants to bless you through hardship.

What I’m pointing to is simply that we make agreements of self-concept that says I need X to feel okay. I need to make $X per month. I need to live in this neighborhood to be safe. I need to be married to be happy and secure. I need to be physically fit in order to be healthy and feel good about myself. We manufacture a list of circumstances in which we can feel okay and if God doesn’t come through with those then he doesn’t love us or we’ve blown it and he isn’t blessing us.

Sometimes God pulls one of these legs out from under us so that we’ll lean on him. That has the effect of moving us closer to Him. It builds intimacy. How can you enter the Promised Land and abide in the abundance due to Christ if you won’t live in a state of dependence on God?

Would you rather have the right situation or would you rather have a red phone to the most powerful being in the universe?

Put simply, Pride blinds us and leads to shame. Shame leads to a false self-concept where the situation we want becomes our source of feeling okay. When you humbly accept who God says you are and your relationship with him is all you need to feel okay. Then you become impervious to spiritual bullets and primed to receive good things from God.

This is a major reason to elevate God to first priority in our lives. A.K.A. Primacy.

 

 

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Chapter 2

I know I promised you the core reason for Primacy before Identity, and I’ll go there ASAP. One quick note though: If your response to the last chapter was any form of negative emotion, let’s deal with that.

The nature of this journey is from Glory to Glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). We will constantly be learning better ways to do this thing called life and there’s a tendency to be ashamed of where we’ve been. Our transition is eased greatly by humility. Or maybe more on point, it’s wounded by pride. If this is you, I recommend you take time right now to read the appendix entitled, “Humility: the secret to accelerated learning.”

Let me lead by example for a moment. God convicted me recently, of my own pride. I didn’t really think of myself as humble, but I didn’t think I was prideful either. I have a big perfectionism issue that I fight, which is why the last chapter went straight to the issue of needing to launch before you feel ready because if we wait to be ready we never will. We won’t feel ready and we won’t be ready. I’ll explain.

I was a slave in Egypt until my father died. I grew up a Christian and by that I mean I was raised to believe in God from childhood. In truth I never really knew Jesus personally nor did I really “grow up.” My earthly father sheltered me. He did his best and gave me tons of love and good advice (which a humbler man would have listened to).

After his death, I tried to cope, but nothing worked. When I realized my efforts were hopeless, I turned to God, said I wasn’t ready to be without a father, and asked him to be my father. What I didn’t realize at that time is that I was in a moment of humility. I had realized that I couldn’t do life without God and I asked for help.

That’s when God said, “I’ve been waiting your whole life for you to ask me that. Yes, I will Father you, but know that things will change.”

In a flash of brilliance or more likely desperation, I told God I would follow his instructions and withhold nothing from him if he would just be my dad.

My Journey into the Wilderness

That started my journey into the wilderness and its been a great, though often difficult experience. I am guilty of being upset with my own progress. I have to repent often of grumbling at the challenges in the wilderness and at God’s unwillingness to just march me straight to the Promised Land. However, when I’m seeing/thinking clearly I don’t regret a second of my time in the wilderness.

A friend gave me a book called “Wild at Heart,” by John Eldredge, and it was the first time I saw a way to be a Christian and not turn in my man card. The way I was trained to do religion made my masculine heart cry out for mercy, but now I had a way to transverse the desert. It felt great. The purpose of wilderness time is to die to the slave mind. A big part of my slave mind was religion.

I met a great group of people to fellowship with and we journeyed together through all manner of challenge, from heartache to jubilation. I learned some key tools that I’ll discuss in future chapters.

Pride (& Being Blinded)

The big reason I catch myself resenting my time in the wilderness is pride. When I stake my self-concept on being right then I’m not looking for any reason to doubt my position on things. My interactions with others happen only to try to convince them of my truth, and that includes my concept of God. We actually turn down greater revelation from God in the hopes of not feeling ashamed of being wrong about something.

Pride blinds us. One season’s truth can be useless in the next season, like wearing an overcoat in the summer. There’s a time for everything, reaping, planting, tilling, pruning, everything (Ecc. 3:1-8). How can we be in sync with God if we’re camped out in last season? The fire cloud moves on and we must break camp and follow it.

Here’s a brief example: When I went to a retreat based on “Wild at Heart,” they correctly pointed out that you shouldn’t rush the field. But in chapter one of this book, I said that you must enter the Promised Land wildly unprepared. Which is correct? Both, it depends on where you are. How do you know the difference? You walk with God.

Put more cleverly:

“The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

We live in a paradox where our Spirit is reborn our body is still dying and between them lies the battlefield of the soul. We must ‘lean not on our own understanding’…and so on.

If you’re starting to get the picture that your relationship with God is the key factor in living as a Christian then you are ready for the reason I had to write Primacy before a book on Identity.

Let’s do some definitions. I’m big on definitions. How do you know you’ve succeeded for example, if you haven’t defined success? So here’s a couple definitions I consider important.

Definition 1: a successful day is one spent with God, learning to bear His image.

Definition 2: the Promised Land is a place God wants to give you that you can’t enter in your own strength.

The Promised Land is not necessarily a physical place. It could be losing 100 lbs. It could be finding a spouse or having a child. It could be getting a dream job. The point is that God is dreaming this for you and it’s been on your heart for as long as you can remember. The Promised Land is a state of flow, where you daily reflect God’s heart for you, and it transforms you into that reality.

If you can’t think of something like that, just remember pride blinds.

Fear and Trembling, and Grace

If what you thought of as your Promised Land scares you, perfect. That’s probably it. For me, I was aware of my Promised Land although it was shrouded in fog. What I couldn’t do is conceive of getting there in my own strength. Well, if I could get there myself it wouldn’t be my Promised Land, would it?

I also didn’t feel like it counted if God just gave it to me. How’s that for a demonic agreement? We can’t work out our own salvation (Phil. 4:12 really means “continue to live from your salvation”). Salvation is a gift through Grace.

So why would God say, I saved you now go slay the giants yourself and maybe you’ll amount to something? No, all of this is an adventure of relationship. We never stop needing God and the moment you think, “it’s okay God, I’ve got this,” well, you can imagine how well that works.

Remember, it’s a journey from Glory to Glory. From Justified by God and sinning heavily to shining God’s love into the world, but still sinning and being justified by God. If we despise our status as dependent on Grace we not only resent God’s way of providing salvation we can’t receive the abundance that he set aside for us in His favor.

Finally the Answer

The theme Glory to Glory will come up repeatedly, but I promised you an answer so let’s get to it…

You can’t know who you are, your identity, without knowing the one whose image you’re created in. Whether you’re wandering the wilderness or abiding in the Promised Land your dependency on God doesn’t change.

So, is there a difference between the two? Oh yes! Though we always live in a state of dependency, the purpose of the wilderness is to die to who we are not, while the purpose of the Promised Land is to live abundantly with Christ as who we are.

In Matthew 16:18 Jesus calls Simon Peter by his new name, Petros. He establishes his new identity, and with it, he gives him his life’s mission. Your identity is much more than a name, or who you’re related to, or what you do for a living. It’s a way in which you’ll shine God’s glory into the world.

Definition 3: your identity is the unique way God wants to shine His glory into the world through you.

Peter was the disciple who declared Christ as the son of God when asked, “who do you say I am?” Christ said, “upon this truth (rock) I will build my church.” Of course, he meant that He is the son of God, but more than that. Christ built his fellowship, his church community upon our personal answer to the question, “who do you say I am?”

The “Primacy of God” is a book about that calling and our response. Jesus asks you, “who do you say I am?” Your response to the question will reveal much about who you are, and scary as this may be, your answers will change some with each season.

Who is Christ being for you in this season?

That’s a question you must answer before God shows you who you are in this season. In order to see who God is for us clearly, we need to humble ourselves before him and pray. (2 Chronicles 7:14)

 

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The Primacy of God

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights…” James 1:17

Chapter 1

By now hopefully, you’ve deduced how important it is to discover your real identity.

Finding your authentic self is key to:

• Accomplishing everything you’re hoping and dreaming
• A big shortcut to lowering your stress
• A major cornerstone for the entire Path of the Postmodern Cleric

Let’s call ‘real identity’ Secret #2, even though I’m misusing the term “secret,” because no one is hiding it from you. I’ve seldom talked to anyone who wouldn’t admit that identity questions need answers early in your life and often need to be redefined repeatedly throughout your life.

So why didn’t I start there? I purposefully wrote Primacy of God first because it’s even more foundational and even more overlooked as a secret to an abundant Christian life. Without understanding the secret of God’s primacy you’ll quickly hit a glass ceiling in your pilgrimage toward the Promised Land. For lack of understanding God’s primacy the children of Israel circled the wilderness for 40 years before getting another attempt at something they wanted—and God wanted for them.

Let that sink in. What can possibly hold back a blessing that God wants to give you and you want to accept? How heartbreaking to march in circles when everything is lined up and ready for the big win.

I’m going to get right into Primacy in this chapter, but I have to first tell you how I stumbled into this secret.

I came across secret #1 because I was frustrated by conversations I had with local institutional Christians. For every authentic person who loved the Lord with all their heart, I found two who had a religion instead of a relationship with God. I started having tough conversations with God and, of course, He started talking about something else entirely. I notice in my conversations with God that he doesn’t stick to my agenda. Like when the disciples asked Jesus the theological question of the day regarding a blind man, “whose sin resulted in his blindness from birth, his own future sin or past sins of his parents?” Jesus responded, “you’re asking the wrong question. All that matters is how can the Kingdom be glorified?” Then he restores the man’s sight. (John 9).

 

Quick side note here—the disciples aren’t shamed by Jesus. It’s not wrong to take whatever I’m thinking or feeling to God. In fact, it’s exactly the right thing to do. It’s being childlike. I think we’d heal much faster if our response to “negative” emotion was to drag it in front of God. Pretend for a moment that God isn’t shocked by your anger, hate, disappointment, lust, impatience, etc. He actually understands sin, and He’s kind of over it. He gave his son to fix it, and I think we’re often throwing all this in his face by trying to clean up our own mess before we bring it to him. Nothing says thanks for Jesus, but no thanks, for trying to handle your own problem.

 

So I’m having this conversation with God, telling him how frustrating people are, and he says, “They don’t know me.”

That was an eye-opener. Did God really just boil sin down to simply not knowing him? I didn’t quite know what to do with that, so I let in compost in my brain for a while.

A day or two later another ingredient came from God when I read a book about process management titled, “The Novel,” by Eli Goldratt. It’s a good read. The author treats processes according to the laws of fluid dynamics and draws an interesting set of principles out of it, creating the Constraint Theory of Management.

Reading that book, which is in no way a Christian inspirational book, put an idea in the compost pile of my brain next to God’s comment.

Later a mentor of mine spoke about the concept in James 1:17. All good things come from God and nothing good comes from anywhere else. This was the third item in the compost pile that really brought the heat.

Part of my identity, my superpower, is smashing things together unrelated things and seeing a new thing created in the mess and destruction.

So God began drawing on threads in the back of my brain. I realized that, if I wanted more good things in my life, and God was the source of good, there had to be one or more things constraining my ability to receive those things.

Over the course of the next five years I journeyed with God pushing for more about this topic, and it opened up so many amazing things that I could write for the rest of my life just on the topics I’ve already explored.

Imagine for a moment that you want to pick tomatoes from your garden, but they never seem to grow. They get plenty of sunshine and fertile soil. You decide they aren’t getting enough water. So you drag a hose over and turn it on. A trickle of water comes out. You double check that the water is on, and it is. Then you start looking for kinks in the hose. You find about ten. Even when you straighten them out, nothing seems to be coming out the hose. The more time you spend with it the more frustrated you get. You’re throwing good time after bad, and even if you get the water on you still need the tomatoes to grow. You feel powerless. You feel discouraged.

Then it hits you. You had this problem last year and decided the hose was beyond repair. You bought a new hose. In fact when you check you find water flowing out the new hose into the street and down the storm drain.

You didn’t throw away the old hose. Why on earth would you keep the old hose? I’ll tell you. Because part of you still identifies with that hose. It’s the only hose you’ve ever known.

Alright, I’m not talking about hoses anymore. Clearly, I’m talking about a human life. We get a new life in Christ, this shouldn’t be news to anyone. But when we’re stuck in the wilderness it’s about letting go of our slave identity. Leadership in Egypt (the world) is about doing the work and receiving just payment. As in just the minimum, they can give you to sustain you. It’s an abusive have/have-not relationship.

Leadership in the Kingdom is servants leading and leaders serving. It’s counter-intuitive to the mind stuck in slave mode. The wilderness is about literally dying to a mindset of slavery. God isn’t being a jerk when he doesn’t let you into the Promised Land as an imperfect human. It’s not about your perfection at all. It’s not about anything you do or fail to do. That’s slave mindset right there. You actually can’t enter the Promised Land with the mind of a slave. It’s a new Kingdom. You must submit yourself to the King or you can’t be received into the His Kingdom.

I’m not saying you won’t go to Heaven for lack of figuring this out. Not at all, remember the Promised Land isn’t Heaven. It’s abundant life. It’s being the real you by living as the restored person not the old hose, er, I mean the old dead sinner who can’t be a conduit for the glory of God.

The Promised Land isn’t Heaven. It’s abundant life.

That’s a rough statement and I’d get yelled at if I left it there. I know God uses broken sinners to do amazing things. Absolutely! In fact, that’s a big part of entering your Promised Land, launching imperfect and unprepared.

It’s not about your being prepared. It’s not about your status as a sinner. It’s not about how long you’ve been walking with God, who your mentors are, or even of which truth God has convicted you, or how well you can convince others that your truth is the “real truth.” It’s not about any form of religious sophistication or achievement. You can’t earn the Promised Land. It’s a gift.

Whew! Seriously Andy, what are you on about? Stop telling me what it’s not and tell me Secret #1 already!

The very first constraint preventing abundance in your life is using the wrong hose. It’s realizing that your new life is an intimate partnership between you and God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. You enter the Promised Land when you can carry the presence of God with you into the face of what you know you can’t do in your own strength.

Sweet! There it is. Either you feel elated because you’re recognizing something you already knew but seeing it in a new light, OR you’re a little underwhelmed that I made such a big deal about something so obvious. Maybe you knew this but hadn’t thought about it in a while, is that really such a big deal? Why all the fuss?

Because when you read Chapter 2, I’ll tell you the number one reason people aren’t able to consistently remember Secret #1.

P.S. also you’ll discover core reason why Primacy comes before Identity.

 

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Expected update 4/13/2018

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