The Six

Philip.4:^12-13 “I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.”

Yesterday, we established that a lot of people are running their lives, businesses, ministries by their hands instead of placing it in God’s hands. It is when you give it to God that God breathes on it and it multiplies. Then people look at the results of your life and they are shocked and wondering how it all happened. However, the challenge is most times we do not understand the phases of the dream. Every dream goes through phases. I have taught about Engineering Your Dreams and the resource is available for free on the GFH Podcast on iTunes. I encourage you to download it and listen to it. But I am going to just breeze over it like a refresher course.

There are six phases of God given dreams. The first phase is dreaming; you catch the vision, God gives you a dream. The second phase is decision; God gives you a dream and you make a decision to pursue the dream. You are fired up because you are going to set sail in Jesus Name. The third phase is delay and this makes us uncomfortable. Between the dream and its fulfilment is delay. When we experience delay, we think something is wrong with the dream, we think something is wrong with the direction, or we think something is wrong with us. Relax! Nothing is wrong. The purpose of the delay is, God is working on you while you are working on the dream. The faster you yield to God and what He is working on in you, the shorter the delay.

When you leave the delay phase, you will think the next phase is going to be the great phase, right? Nope! The fourth phase is difficulty. Every dream passes through this phase. The fifth phase is the dead-end. This is where you reach your wits end, you run out of ideas. You try everything. If you are in this phase today, congratulations because in the sixth phase, the dream delivers. And when it delivers, you are able to say, ‘If it had not been for God who has been on my side’. When you are saying, ‘glory be to God’ in the sixth phase, you actually mean glory be to God.

When people are in the elementary stages where they are dreaming, they are fired up, and they are getting resources. When they say, ‘glory be to God’ they do not mean glory be to God. They mean ‘glory be to God and me’ because they believe that they had something to do with the output. God will have to take the dream and kill it, so to speak, so that by the time they get to phase six they can truly say, ‘all the glory must be to the Lord’ and mean it.  That dream can be your marriage,  your finances or your career; by the time it delivers, you can give glory to God. Phil. 4:^12-13 “…I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need.” (paraphrased). Positive thinking is good, it is better than negative thinking. But it is going to take more than that, it is going to take God.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, I acknowledge that only Your power can bring my dreams to pass so I surrender my dreams to You, in Jesus Name. Amen!