The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 190,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.
Toxic Shame
Do you wake up in the morning feeling bad, feeling blue or feeling worn out? It could be sleep Apnea, but it could also be toxic shame. When you wake up feeling sad and your mind goes over failures and hurts of the past, that is toxic shame.
5 signs that you have toxic shame.
1. You see your failures as proof that you are a failure.
2. You forget what it means to be human.
You forget that everyone fails every day. That is just proof that they are human.
When we do something bad, we feel shame. But unfortunately most people are very good at feeling ashamed of themselves, many without even realizing it. The main point of the Christian faith is love. Another important point is forgiveness. Many don’t forgive themselves and live a life of quiet desperation. Many feel ashamed of who they are instead of what they have done.
This is an example of why it is important to focus on your strengths, not weaknesses.
I recently heard a lecture by Bo Sanchez. He said that a man in the Philippines applied for a job cleaning floors. He got the job, but when the HR person found out he didn’t have an email address, he decided not to hire the man.
The man was very disappointed. He left discouraged, but he had to do something to make money. He had only 300 Pesos (less than $7 US) in his pocket and a young daughter to feed. So he went to the market and spent all his money on tomatoes. He then went door-to-door selling them. After an hour or so he had sold all of them for 600 Pesos. He went back to the market and spent all 600 Pesos on more tomatoes, which he sold. He doubled his money again. Then he went back to the market again and doubled his money again. He had time for one more trip to the market and then back to sell the tomatoes. At the end of the day he had made 2400 Pesos.
He sold fruit and vegetables every day until he had enough money to buy a cart. The cart could hold more food so that he made less trips to the market. Later he was able to buy a used truck to sell his wares. After some years he had a whole fleet of trucks. By this time he was rich.
One day he was talking to a man who asked him for his email address. He said he didn’t have one. The man said “What? You don’t have an email address? Just think what you would be today if you had an email address!”
The man said, “If I had an email address, I’d be a janitor.”
Instead of focusing on his weakness of not having an email address, the man focused on his strengths. He had good people skills. He was hard working and persuasive.
Many times we focus on our weaknesses and think of the things we can’t do. We think of why we can’t do a certain thing. Maybe we tried in the past and failed. All our lives we are told about our mistakes. In school, we hand in our homework and see it come back with all our mistakes pointed out to us in red ink. At work most supervisors don’t compliment on work done well, they only comment when there is a problem. As parents we usually scold much more than we encourage.
We grow up being told what we did wrong and seldom told what we did right.
I sometimes think back over the mistakes in my life. All of them happened because of lack of confidence. I can’t think of any of the many mistakes I made that were not somehow related to lack of confidence. Probably you are the same.
Let’s encourage our loved ones and ourselves. Think about what you do well, not what you don’t do well.
Here is a good affirmation to help with this. Every day say “I am happy, healthy, wealthy, wise and good looking.”
Posts about affirmations. Click link and scroll down.
Pray like Jesus prayed
Prayer is sometimes more than just talking to God. Jesus told us to speak to the problem, to make a command.
You have to pray the way Jesus and all the people of God prayed in the Bible if you want results. Don’t do things the way you were taught by people, do what the Bible says. Faith is very important, as I have written about in many previous posts on this blog.
Speak it out loud
Jesus is our example. He was 100% man and 100% God. Since he was completely man he was our example. Our goal is to be like him. He prayed quite a bit differently than most Christians today pray. The disciples prayed like he did, they spoke out a command and people were healed. The prophets in the Old Testament also prayed like this, they spoke commands. He taught all his followers to pray this way, including you and me.
Matthew 17:20 Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” My note—it may take months to develop this kind of faith. Memorizing Bible verses on faith and repeating them daily helps a lot. I have written other blog posts on this topic. Click on the “Prayer” link at the right hand side under “Posts by category” for more information or click here https://bradstanton.com/category/prayer/
Notice that Jesus said you must make a command and say “Move from here to there.”
Jesus healed a leper by saying “Be clean.” Luke 5:13. Jesus commanded the illness to leave. He spoke out a command.
Luke 4:39 Jesus spoke to the fever “So he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up at once and began to wait on them.” Jesus was not talking to God, he was talking to the fever.
Luke 7:14 Jesus said “Young man get up!” and a man was healed. Notice Jesus spoke out a command, he was showing us how to pray for people. His followers did the same thing in the book of Acts.
In Luke 8:53 Jesus spoke a command to cause a child to come back to life. “They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!”
Some prayers are just talking to God, but the kinds of prayers the followers of Jesus prayed for healing were not just talking to God. They gave a command that sickness leave the body of the person they were talking to. Acts 3:6 “In the name of Jesus, get up and walk!” Acts 14:10, Paul told a lame man “Stand up on your feet!”
Notice Peter spoke out a command in Acts 9:40 “Peter sent them all out of the room; then he got down on his knees and prayed. Turning toward the dead woman, he said, “Tabitha, get up.” She opened her eyes, and seeing Peter she sat up.”
The disciples spoke out a command and a man was struck blind to help him understand the power of God. Acts 13:11 “Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind for a time, not even able to see the light of the sun.”
Matthew 21:19 Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.
Jesus commanded a storm to subside. Luke 8:24 He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. Jesus spoke to the storm.
Be like Jesus, not people
God spoke the world into existence. The spoken word is very powerful. Jesus is our example, when we follow him, great things happen.
The word “Christian” means little Christ, we are to copy him. Jesus loved so we love. Jesus helped people, so we help people. As a Christian, our goal is to be like Christ, which means to do what he did, pray like he prayed.
James 5:17 “Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.” What this is saying is that Elijah was a person just like us, and so were the Apostles. What this verse is saying is that we all have power in prayer. In fact, we have the Holy Spirit living in us even more than Elijah did, so we should be able to do more than he did.
John 14:12 Jesus said “I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these, because I am going to the Father.” What Jesus is saying is that we should copy him and we will do what he was doing, if we have faith. To copy him means to pray as he told us to pray, and pray as he did.
Luke 11:2 Jesus is telling them to say “Your will be done on earth as in heaven” which is a command that God’s will be done here on earth. The KJV shows this very well. I always thought it was strange to make the two commands “Your kingdom come, your will be done” when I was a child. We are not commanding God to do anything, that is for sure. But even in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells us to make commands.
God’s will
2 Cor 12:9 God may not answer all our prayers, if we pray for something God doesn’t want, it won’t happen. The term “thorn in the flesh” was used a number of times in the OT and every single time it was used, it meant bad people causing trouble to good people (certainly not sickness). Paul would use it the same way because he memorized much of the OT. So there will always be bad people being bad to good people. The problem is too many people give up and quit praying because they believe what they are asking for is not God’s will, but that may not be the case. God promised Abraham many descendants, but it too a long time for the promise to come about. Abraham could have decided children were not God’s will because it took so long to come about. Don’t give up when you pray! Luke 18:1 says that we should always pray and not give up.
Luke 22:42 So certainly we are supposed to ask or command only in God’s will. Jesus said earlier that he came to earth to die on the cross, so he knew God’s will. I am certainly not saying we should pray-declare anything against God’s will.
Phil 4:6, ‘Be anxious for nothing, but in everthing by prayer and *supplication*, with thanksgiving, make your *requests* known to God. Some might say that we only ask God for things in prayer, but when you read the four Gospels and Acts, you see this is not the case.Jesus taught all his followers to make commands in prayer, not just the 12 apostles. Even the 72 who were sent out were taught to pray this way, you can tell by what they said after they returned. I agree there are different kinds of prayers, sometimes we are asking God for things, that is for sure.
After visiting many different churches and seeing many different people pray, I have found that the declare-prayer gets much better results than saying “Lord if it is your will, will you heal somebody.”
If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. ~Sam Walton
Long ago Sam Walton (the founder of the huge Walmart chain of stores found in numerous countries around the world) worked at K-Mart. He worked and thought very hard and came up with a better way of buying things to sell at K-Mart. He carefully put together a pitch to sell it to upper management. They listened and chuckled and told him “Son, that’s not the way we do business here.”
Sam believed in himself and the idea so he took his idea out and started a business with it. Now K-Mart has a hard time keeping many of their stores open due to competition with Walmart.
Long ago an engineer realized that since crystals can be made to vibrate at a very constant rate when energized with a small electrical current, one could put a crystal in a watch and keep more accurate time than ever before in the history of the world. Swiss watches dominated the world market. So he carefully planned out a pitch to bring to the top leaders of the Swiss watch company for which he worked and told them about the benefits of crystals. . They listened and chuckled and told him “Son, that’s not the way we do business here.”
He believed in himself, so he brought his idea to Texas Instruments and Casio and the rest is history. Now it is hard to find watches for sell that don’t use crystals.
Alexander Graham Bell attempted to sell the patent for the telephone to the president of Western Union. The president sneered and asked what in the world he would do with a silly electrical contraption like that.
A few years later, writes Julie M. Fenster in American Heritage, the president of Western Union “told colleagues that if he could get the patent for $25 million he’d consider it a bargain. By then it wasn’t for sale.”
You have probably heard of other similar stories. Belief, or positive thinking is so important. Jesus called it faith. People are usually not open to new things. Some of the ideas in this blog are new to some people and they think the ideas are crazy, but the ideas I blog about have changed my life for the better. I try to only choose powerful ideas to write about. Unfortunately my book The Amazing Power of Prayer gets put in the category of “silly ideas” quite a bit but finding the ideas and writing about them really changed my life for the better. http://getprayerpower.com/i
