The attitude of triumph - Part 3

In January I began a series of sermons that I titled “the successful life” or “the life of excellence”, and we began to talk about ways in which we can embody the abundant life that Christ has come to give each of us.

And for different reasons in the following weeks, I think it was in March, sorry in February, the first week or the second week, we had to suspend that series because a number of different things: we had many invited preachers, I was traveling, the fast that intervened, and many other things. Thank God we haven't wasted time. God has been a great blessing to us, we have had beautiful preachers and it has been precious, but we had to suspend that series for a while, which many told me was being a blessing to their lives. And I have always had in mind to go back to continue with it.

And there you have, by the way, one of the great secrets of success, what you start, finish it. As simple as that. Sometimes people believe that success is made up of great secrets and very deep truths, and look, sometimes it is simply doing the simple things in life: finishing what one begins.

And I decided 'Lord, I told the congregation that I was going to preach a series and every week I have had that in mind and the idea of reincorporating myself into this series of messages, and with The help of the Lord we are going to do so because there are many things that I want to share with you regarding the life of success.

And what I want to do this afternoon before I touch on any of this passage, because it's going to take us a little bit longer, is to do a rundown of some of the things that I shared with you in the previous weeks to update them and also for brothers who have joined our church in recent weeks, who know more or less and take the thread of what we have been sharing.

Why did I choose this series primarily about success? Some would think, well, that doesn't sound very spiritual to me. Me, I like to come to church and they talk to me about healing, deliverance, demons, angels, juicy things like that, appetizing, but that about success, that doesn't sound very spiritual.

Brothers, let me tell you one of the things that makes me fall in love with the Gospel is that it is practical. It is for practical life, it is for people of flesh and blood. It is for the necessities of life, it is for the situations we face. It is to solve problems, it is to advance. The Gospel is not up there in seventh heaven. The Gospel falls to the ground.

The Bible says that we are not of the world but we are in the world and the truths of the word God has given them so that we can use them to grow in our lives. And what makes me fall in love with the Gospel and as a pastor excites me is how I can make the truths of the Gospel real to the life of my people. And then help our young people to have successful lives in their school.

Some say that young Latinos are not learning anything in schools: the educational system is a failure. Well, brothers, I want to tell the young people of this congregation that God has good things for them. Amen. And that God wants to bless their lives. God doesn't want them to be just another failed statistic. My desire is to see every young person from León de Judá reach high school and continue on to a trade or continue on to university and reach the highest possible level, whatever it may be.

Our sister Roxana works as a beautician and is teaching and God is leading her to be a supervisor and God may lead her to own a school one day too, why not? Because the Gospel is power, says the word of the Lord.

The Apostle Paul says that the Gospel does not consist in words but in what?, in the power of God. That means power to live successful lives. And when I talk about these concepts, I talk about them because I believe that the Gospel wants to enter into all areas of our community. God wants marriages to be healed and men to be blessing their wives and spearheading healthy masculinity before their children. May there be women sure of themselves in the Lord, who are studying and developing their gifts and being a blessing to the community; may we have a thriving and financially blessed church with good stewardship and systems that bless the community.

And we can be an exceptionally blessed people if we put God's word into practice. And that's why I like to preach on these topics. How to live a successful life?

I told the brothers that one of the first conditions for a successful life is that we expand our mental panorama and believe God, believe that God can give us great things. Look to the future with optimism. Looking towards the next 10 years and hoping that they are going to be the best years of our lives and that the next 10 years after that are going to be even better, because we have a God who wants to bless us.

So we have to believe that God wants to give us the earth, that God wants to give us, as the word says, all the earth that the soles of our feet tread on. The Lord has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies, but many of us live as beggars.

They know that in many of us there is a tape recorder that is playing funeral music that says: you are a failure, you can't do anything, your mother was a zero to the left and your grandmother too and your great-grandmother and you, therefore, are also going to be the same. Your ancestors all divorced or committed suicide, or were miserable and poor and therefore you too are going to be the same.

Many times we don't tell ourselves that openly, but that's what it is... it's the program that's in us. And we see that we comply with the program. There are many young people who, even before they were born, are destined for failure because that got into their minds.

Guess what? Christ says: 'break, throw away that program. I'm going to give you a new program. I have called you so that you believe that you can achieve great things.'

To the person of legal age, to the one who is 50, 60 years old, God tells them 'look, it is not too late. You can still do great things. You can go to college, you can develop a new hobby. You can learn to play an instrument. You can learn English, you can become a counselor in your church, or a refugee, or a teacher. God can do it, but it all depends on us opening our minds to the big vistas that God has for us.

The prophet Isaiah says “enlarge the place of your tent because you will spread out to the north and to the south, to the east and to the west”.

Another passage in Ecclesiastes says “cast your bread into the waters because after many days it will return to you”. He says "sow to seven and eight", inverts. Dare to do great things because God will bless you according to your ability to believe God, so will be the level of success that you achieve.

If you believe a little of God, God will give you a little. If the only thing you have to channel God's blessings is one of those baby leaks, then God's blessings are going to be like that in a leak. But if you prepare a pipe 8 feet wide, the river of God will run through it into your life and it will bless you greatly.

It all depends on you opening up your expectations. That's why it says "enlarge the site of your store." In other words, before putting up a tent, you have to prepare the space where the tent is going to fall. Before God can bless you with specific blessings you have to prepare a wide mental zone that believes God for great things.

Young man, I see a young man there who is blessing us. He's an electrician, he's up there on the balcony. They can't see it, maybe. But, I see so much potential in that young man. He is working here in our building next door installing all the wiring. Well, I can see in that young man in 15, 20 years a person who has his own electricity business and who is employing 10 or 15 more men or women is also an electrician, why not? That's part of expanding our store site. And that one day you have several trucks running around the city, developing contracts and earning 300,000 dollars a year, why not? Why not?

If we stay small, if I believe that God has only called me to put cables in a hole. Amen, Glory to God for that, but why not say, God has called me to set up the wiring for an entire skyscraper and have 25 people working for me. And if that person believes that and takes the plunge, they can do wonderful things. Everything is in that we believe God for great things.

As a child I have always been possessed by a belief that God can do anything in my life and that is why I have dared to apply to great universities and undertake daring things and that sometimes people see me and he thinks I'm going to break my head when I fall, but God never fails me. And when I believe God for great things, God always blesses me even beyond what I thought.

You have to dare, brothers, in the name of the Lord. Dare to believe. Dare to open big runways where the huge plane that God has for your life can land. Don't open a little runway for the Lord there for a two-engine plane. No, one of those huge jumbo jets that hold 800 people today, 4 floors and even a Jacuzzi inside. That is what you want for your life, so that all the blessing that God has reaches large quantities, industrial quantities. You have to open great clues to the Lord so that he can bring all the blessings that he wants.

The Lord told the widow through Elisha that they were coming to take away her house and put her in jail for debts. Elisha told her to look for vessels, he said, not a few vessels, because the Lord wanted to bless her with oil that she could sell to pay all her debts. Imagine if she could have brought a thousand vessels, she would have brought more blessing. According to the vessels that you present to the Lord, so will be the anointing of God in your life. Believe it in the name of Jesus.

One of the other things that is important for success is to believe exactly that God wants to bless you, that God actively wants to bless you. You understand, that is, you have to believe that when God calls you to the Gospel it is not for you to live a rough life, one day good, another day bad, one day you fail, one day you succeed, one day you gain 2 feet of land and another day you lose 5.

There are many people who if you look at their life is like this, one accident after another, one loss after another. They had a little house and then they lost it because they moved to another place, because they took it away or whatever. They could never accumulate. His life was never a cumulative life, but rather one of zigzags: starts and stops and starts again.

The Lord says: 'look, now that you are in my kingdom, now that you are in my administration I want to bless you.' We have to believe that God wants to bless us and the fact that you actively believe that, that too can transform your life.

Jeremiah, Chapter 29. The Lord says "... because I know the thoughts that I have for you, thoughts of good and not of evil." So no matter what happened in your life before you met Jesus, now that you are in the ways of the Lord, your destiny is a destiny of blessing. God wants to bless you.

And when you assume that, that God wants to bless you, that transforms because you no longer have to be making an effort there, squeezing yourself to see if God listens to you and... no. He says 'son, I already have a blessing for your life'.

I love what Deuteronomy says, Chapter 28. Look at that beautiful passage, it says “...It will come to pass that if you listen attentively to the voice of Jehovah, your God, to keep and do all his commandment that I am prescribing for you today – hold on to that for a moment, because the first thing that God wants is for you to obey him, pay attention to his word and live according to the principles of the word of God. There you can put that as another requirement for success. You see, you cannot expect God to bless you if you are violating the principles of spirituality and divine physics. God has constituted the universe according to laws. And you violate those laws at a terrible price.

Roxana was talking about... that's why I asked her 'well, how did you get to that position? She arrived obeying the word of the Lord. Look how that young lady thinks. She thinks 'I'm being put in a very responsible position and what does she do? I like it because it says 'I want my leaders to anoint me'. That is, she is using a very beautiful spiritual principle, which is to submit to spiritual authority. And how beautiful it is when a man or a woman submits to their leaders.

People believe that by subjecting themselves to the leaders that makes them cheaper, it makes them a clean sack, they say out there. No, it is quite the opposite, what you do is that you enter into a divine law that those who are in spiritual authority over you can bless you.

When you respect your leaders, when you seek the anointing of your leaders, when you serve your leaders in the positive sense of the word, when you are humble and teachable, that is wonderful. That gives blessing to life. One of the rules of success is that: submit to authority.

I'm going to be mixing something up.... Amen. We are going to make a sancocho with all the things. As the Lord directs me I will be speaking.

Submit to authority. That is a very powerful principle as well. I will mix the summary with new things.

You know, a lot of young people, let me tell you something. Young people of 17, 16, 16, 18, 20, 22 years. Look, there's a curse on this young generation. They don't know it, but there is. Do you know why? Because many young people are rebels against their parents, they are rebels against authority, they were rebels against their teachers and they made life impossible for them, even sometimes coming to church. They are rebellious with their parents and they make life difficult for their parents, and they have lived with the idea that you have to give me, they do not honor their parents, they do not thank their parents, they do not prefer their parents, they do not serve their parents. Parents, when they are going to tell them something, have to leave and entrust themselves to all the saints if they are going to correct them because that lion immediately appears, begins to yell at them and they rebel because they do not submit to the authority of their parents.

And you know what happens? That then there is a curse of failure on that generation. Because? Because centuries ago God gave a commandment, one of the 10 commandments that says 'honor'. Everyone say: 'honor your father and your mother', says the word of the Lord. So that? Look, it says 'so that all the days of your life go well for you and so that you may have long days in your life'.

That means that if you do not honor, you will not do well and you will not have long days of life, because God is precise in his word.

Young man, do you want to be blessed in your life, do you want to be blessed when you become a father? Honor your father and mother now. Make life easy for your parents. Submit to the authority of your parents. Bless your parents. When they are old, honor and bless them and accompany them. Do not throw them like garbage there, do not dispose of them in a place over there, but bless and honor them, and that will cause God's blessing to be on your life. God is going to bless you in your job, he is going to bless you in your school, he is going to bless you in your finances, he is going to bless you in your emotional life, he is going to bless you in your marriage, and he is going to bless you with your children when you have them.

There are many who are paying, I am not going to say all of them, brothers, understand me correctly, but there are many parents who are now paying for the bad acts of disobedience in their childhood with their parents, in their youth. If you want to be blessed, young people, bless your parents by submitting to the authority of your parents and blessing them, and that is a rule of success. We cannot succeed if we are breaking the Lord's rules.

That is why the Lord says here "if you listen attentively to the voice of the Lord your God, to keep and do all his commandments." See, young man? Do you see, adult?

We have to obey the Lord, we have to live in line with the word of God, which is why I search this word, I scrutinize it as the greatest treasure I have. This book, I subscribe to many different magazines, I read books of all kinds, I love to read everything, and I appreciate human truth in many ways, but there is no comparison to this book. This book for me, I would take it to Jupiter if they expelled me to Jupiter, I grab this book and take it with me, because here are all the treasures of human, divine, eternal knowledge. In this book.

And here I search to know the truths, to understand how to live a successful life, how to live a life of peace, how to be a blessing to others and to our own family. The Lord says "if you listen attentively to the voice of Jehovah, your God, and put to work.....".

Look at what it says, because we are talking about the blessing that God wants to give you, to believe that God is going to bless me. Look, it says "also Jehovah, your God, will exalt you above all the nations of the earth". That was what he told the Hebrews before entering the Promised Land. He told it to a small group of people who were worthless because they had been in the desert for 40 years, and before entering the Promised Land he told them 'look, if you listen to my voice, abide by my ways, I will to exalt himself above all the nations of the earth'.

The Latino community that is represented here and other brothers from other communities, if you want to be blessed and want to become an exemplary people even here in the middle of the United States, you begin to put into practice the truth of God, adjust your life, your marriages, your way of educating your children, your way of working, your human relationships, your inner life, your mental life, your way of entertaining yourself, your way of resting, the day you dedicate to Lord, align all aspects of your life with the truth of God and I promise you in the name of the Lord that in 10 years our church and this community that is represented here, and all Latinos who join the word of God, we are going to constitute an unimaginable force of power in this nation. Because when the word of God incarnates in a people, brothers, that is more powerful than the strongest atomic bomb in the world.

Why did this nation become great when it was started by a small group of dying people who arrived from Europe on a ship? They had passed the Atlantic with all its storm, they arrived here. The first year a number of them died and only a handful of them remained, but those people came from Europe with the desire to honor the Lord and they said before getting off the ship on Cape Cod, they knelt down and said 'we are going to work for the spread of the Gospel and we want the town that we are going to found to be like a city set on a mountain for all to see and glorify the Lord.'

And 300 years later, look where the USA is. It is degenerating because they have strayed from those values, but this nation has been great because of those men who made pacts with each God, and women came to make a great nation. Because when a people sets out to live according to God's values, and be a people of excellence, God blesses them.

My dream is that León de Judá is a powerful and exemplary congregation, not only because we get inside four walls and make a lot of noise, but that when we go out into our streets, from our houses, a powerful people will come out , successful, with his sword in hand, with his staff of authority being blessed in all areas of his life, and people say 'what do these people have?'. Why do others fail and they succeed? We want to be intriguing to people and make them see 'oh, because they serve a God'.

That our young people walk, not robbed of their energy, because they were at the disco all night doing shameful things and the next day they are scarred and bled by the devil, but that they be healthy young people, young people full of life, young people who proceed according to the values of God and who have all their vitality intact and who are growing more and more because they live according to the values of the Gospel.

Then God says 'I'm going to bless you. Your nation, I am going to put it above all other nations. It says, "....and all these blessings will come upon you and will overtake you if you will listen to the voice of Jehovah your God."

I like that language “all these blessings will come upon you and they will reach you”. Thousands of years ago God with his mouth uttered blessings on those who fear and love him, and those blessings are reverberating throughout the universe, persecuting those who love the Lord.

You do not have to be bleeding for God to bless you, what you have to do is open and remove all obstacles so that the blessing that God has already declared can reach you. Because God has already declared it, it is a matter of whether you are going to let it come to you, or not. It's not that you have to create the blessings, the blessings are already on your head. The question is, am I doing something or am I not doing something that prevents God's blessing from coming into my life?

Because God, when he speaks of blessings upon his people, always speaks in past tense. The Apostle Paul says "God has blessed us-has blessed us-with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places." It is not that he is going to bless us, he has already blessed us if we align ourselves with the word of the Lord.

That is why I tell you, you have to believe that God is blessing you, is going to bless you and has blessed you. You are walking in the active blessing of God. Walk with that certainty that your God is here to bless you, because he knows the thoughts he has for you. And that is a precondition of success because when you know that God wants to bless you, then that encourages you to undertake ambitious and great things, because you know that you are moving in the wind of God's blessing.

Another important element I said is that you have to be specific. Do you remember that teaching? That when God comes before you and you bring your requests, he says 'well, son, how do you want me to bless you?' We see the Lord always asking those who approached him, what do you want me to do for you? Sometimes a blind man would come up and he would ask him 'what do you want me to do for you?', as if it weren't obvious that he was blind and that he wanted his sight healed. But God likes to hear specifically what we want him to do.

Do you understand? He would say the same to lepers, 'what do you want me to do to you?' We have to live specific lives. you know what? The cultures that are successful in life, when I look at them, are cultures that are always able to think in concrete and specific terms. They don't go around with general and abstract ideas, but are people who think in concrete and specific ways.

And if I look, for example, I said to the brothers, the Asian community, for example, is a community that is so successful because they are people who work with concrete ideas. These Asians, for example, who are staying with the university of MIT, Harvard, all these elite universities. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese in these universities because they are cultures that have become accustomed to being disciplined, to being specific. Since they were 4 or 5 years old, these young people already know that they want to go to those universities and they work hard to get there.

And when I look at Scripture, I see that God honors things that proceed in concrete and specific ways. Why do you think that God praises, I was looking for him but I don't want to stop looking for that passage but, I have told you before that God praises the ant because it walks in gangs. Ants are disciplined.

Have you ever seen an ant on the grass how they don't stop? They are continuously working. Praise the ants, praise the rabbits, he says, because they live in the rocks, they make their homes in safe and firm places, they plan. One of the things that one has to do in life is to plan. He praises, he says, the spider because although it is a small and weak insect, he says that it lives in palaces, a poetic way of speaking of the cobwebs that a spider makes. Do you know the planning? They do not plan in nature and God has endowed them with a mechanical ability to build, but do you know the complexity of a spider web? Scientists have studied the complexity and the strength of a web and everything that a web makes possible, not only that the spider can move, but a web, one of the most important things it does is grab other insects so that the spider I can eat them.

In those National Geographic programs you see how complicated the ecology is that a spider builds to provide for its well-being.

So, brethren, we Christians cannot simply be content with 'oh, Lord bless me' in general terms. No, you have to set goals in your life. You have to decide what you want God to do in your life. You have to set specific goals, for example, the young person who is starting his career has to ask himself: 'well, specifically where would I like to be in 10 years? And then you have to start working and putting the pieces together until you reach that goal.

I was saying to the brothers this morning, it's not that I'm praising my daughter Abigail but it's an example that occurs to me here. Abi is going to turn 17 but she already knows what she wants to study. She wants to be a nurse practicioner, she is a type of nurse who has to take a master's degree and sometimes even a doctorate and is almost like a doctor, seeing patients and giving medicines and participating with doctors at very advanced levels. And she knows what she wants and sometimes I come home at night, after a meeting at 10, at 11 at night, she is having a soda, watching a woman there giving birth on the program Discovery Channel. And there's all the blood coming out and the woman screaming on the screen, and she's eating a very hearty sandwich because she wants to train in it, and she's studying and preparing for what she...... She already knows and she knows exactly who wants to go into obstetrics, wants to work with children and pregnant mothers.

I praise that kind of, shall we say, specificity in what one wants to do. And so you have to set specific goals. For example, you have to tell the Lord, 'Father, my marriage, and I have identified it as an area of need in my life. My marriage is not all that I want it to be. My wife and I don't have the intimacy, the rapport, the trust, the communication that there should be between a couple.' Well, don't settle for a long-distance marriage.

How many Latino couples after the first 3 months of passion and the woman gets pregnant and they start raising children, he goes his own way, on Saturday he starts washing the car, and she clean the house. They don't talk, they don't communicate. Children grow up seeing mom and dad estranged, each one losing their passion for each other. There is no love, there is no intimacy, there is not that intimate partnership that God wants marriage to be. And we get used to that because our goals are tiny. As long as we don't get divorced, we say, everything is fine.

What goal is that? Mediocrity is not a goal for a child of God. You have to tell him: 'Father, I want my marriage to be like a beautiful garden full of flowers where my wife and I love each other, where we can go to a good restaurant and spend 3 hours talking or not talking but feeling connected with each other. the other; that my husband, my wife be my best friend, that we can spend vacation time together; that our children see dad and mom loving and understanding each other. And if they fight, see them talking about the problem and reconciling.

And then you have to set yourself a big, ambitious goal of a blessed, fruitful, productive, intimate, communicative marriage, and tell him: Father, here is my request now. 'Bless me in the next three years to create a marriage that honors you and sets an example for my community.' Specific. You have to tell him exactly what kind of marriage you want and then the other thing is, you then have to start taking specific steps to make it happen.

You already said to the Lord 'bless me', so when I say to the Lord: 'Father, bless me', do you know what I immediately assume? That God says: 'son, you gave me a recipe. There you have the blessing' and..........he throws it at me, he throws a ball of fire at me that falls on my chest and fertilizes me and impregnates me inside and impregnates me with the life of God.

So now I say 'well, I already have the authority of God, I have the resources of heaven. Now I am going to start managing and working so that that happens. And then I begin to take specific steps.

Yes, for example, in the case of people who ask that their marriage be blessed. Well, start reading good books. A young mother came up to me between the two services and said: 'Pastor, I want to learn how to be a better mother, educate my son, discipline him, how to discipline my son.' , I gave him the name of James Dobson, I gave him books that he can look up, I said 'make an appointment with my wife to talk about it.'

Then you have to start giving the request feet. . We have to give it hands, we have to give character to what we are asking of the Lord. we cannot be flattened there, opening our mouths for the Lord to bless us. No, you take the blessing and run with it in the name of the Lord and you make way for the glory of God to be manifested in your life.

You have to start acting on the blessing that God has declared, because God does not create parasites. God delegates his power and then he says 'well, now, run with it and negotiate, trade, make decisions. I'm going to back you up.’ God delegates authority but then he expects you to do your part.

To Adam and Eve he said 'be fruitful and multiply, have dominion over creation', he said to man. He didn't tell her how they had to do it. A great executive never tells his employees how specifically to do the job. What he tells them is 'I want my business to be profitable at the end of the year and for you to work according to the principles of the corporation. Now, use your creativity and see how you do it. Only that they don't arrest you or that they come looking for my prisoner to take me away. Just bring me money.

The parable of Jesus says that a rich man gave his servants a potion of money to each one and went to a faraway place and told them 'do business while I come back'. He did not tell them how they had to negotiate, but told them 'negotiate, invest, there you have the money. Now go ahead.

You have to understand that there is a great responsibility that rests on your life. God already blessed you, and God told you 'I agree with what you are asking of me and I want to push you forward, but you have to get up and get to work and start step by step.'

The person who wants a blessed marriage, start reading about what a good marriage is. When there is a workshop somewhere, at a church that is offering, attend that workshop. That's why I told the brothers a couple of Sundays ago, I was disappointed when we gave a beautiful workshop here on the family and there weren't many of you. I don't want to be negative, but if you want a blessed marriage, don't think that a fairy with a magic wand will come and open the window of your house and touch you and your wife and for now you will be a paragon of matrimonial virtues.

That's not how God works. God wants us to make an effort, to invest. Instead of spending Saturday sleeping until eleven in the morning, get up at 8, eat a good breakfast and go to that blessed workshop and learn. And even if it's stay 3 hours, 4 hours. If you can't stay all day, leave at 12, but invest.

"Seek first the Kingdom of God and other things will be added to you" says the word of the Lord.

It also says “the sow bountifully will reap bountifully”. You have to sow in order to reap. You have to work hard to receive God's blessings. That person who wants a fruitful marriage, has to read, has to attend classes, has to start talking with his wife or husband, and sometimes brothers, we are going to have to get the words out with incredible pliers because we are not used to talk, but you have to make an effort. You have to ask her out for a walk one day, and perhaps you won't be able to say anything because you're not used to talking, but the second time the machine oils up a little and the words begin to flow.

You have to make efforts. You have to talk about the hard things. If you have to apologize, ask for forgiveness. Don't worry. That is a blessing. If you have to humble yourself, humble yourself. If you have to forget about past hurts and clean slate, do it like this. If you have to fix something in your character or in your way of speaking or in your way of disciplining at home, or if there are injuries from your past, things that your parents did to you, or models that you had, analyze them and get to work on that. and seek advice from someone. Find a man, find a church couple that God is blessing, and tell him, 'We want you to mentor us and help us.' You have to make an effort, brothers, do you understand me?

You can't just say, 'Lord, bless my marriage. We rebuke all demons who are against this marriage. What kind of cheap spirituality is that! The demons will always be with you. Maybe the devil is you and you need to be released. So, we have, brothers, to be concrete. We have to be specific. You understand?

Many times we blame the poor devil and he is perhaps a thousand miles away, he doesn't even know we even exist, because we don't want to look this way. I am the problem. I am the one who has to go to the psychiatrist or the psychologist or the counselor and seek help. I'm the one who has to read the book. I am the one who has to pray for the Lord to do the work in my character and who has to ask the wife for forgiveness for everything she has done, or the husband, whatever. You understand? You have to be specific.

I haven't even gotten into the text. I'm going to leave it like that because it's okay, it's a summary. It brings us to this point. But in fact what I wanted to touch on in this passage from Hebrews, I simply give you a little intimation there so that when we take it you can know what I am about...

This morning I was talking, I I really wanted to talk about the importance of visualizing. Visualization is one of the most powerful things for success. Visualizing in your mind what you want and creating a whole series of specific images of the type of life you want to achieve, or the goal you want to achieve.

For example, athletes use visualization a lot. Many studies have been done on how important it is to visualize in sport. But also in all areas: an artist has to visualize, an architect has to visualize. All successful people have a screen in which they can see what they want and what they want, they can see it in three dimensions and even in colors many times.

For example, a karate fighter who wants to break 10 boards that are stacked on top of each other is told, 'Visualize your hand, your fist going through all the boards when you hit them.' That is to say, if when you are going to hit those boards you think that you are going to break your hand when you hit them, you are not going to do it. But if you visualize before you hit, your hand going through and breaking all of them, then that gives you the power to do it.

The boxer is told 'visualize your opponent continuously when you are training, visualize your fist smashing his head and that body falling, knocked out by your punches.' opponent. Cultivate hatred, cultivate aggressiveness against your opponent. He sees it destroyed, he sees it overwhelmed by his power and when he enters the ring, he enters with all that aggression there that he unleashes against his opponent.

That is, you have to visualize in order to achieve success. The person who wants, for example, to have a great career, has to visualize himself there. Since he was a young man studying at the university, he has to visualize himself driving that beautiful car, arriving at the headquarters of his corporation, opening his car with a suit of 400 dollars and an 80 tie, with very shiny shoes and entering, and the person who is in front of the desk saying 'Good morning, Mr So and So. Yes, come on right in'; and you have to visualize yourself walking into your office suite and your secretary telling you there, handing you the worksheets for the day. You have to think that way.

You have to think about college being successful. You have to play with it, like children play with dolls and get into the character of a soldier or a fireman and live it. You have to live your dreams in three dimensions and colors in your head. You have to celebrate things.

I always tell my daughters that it is important that they develop the ability to fantasize, in the most positive sense of the word, because that is so important: one cultivates the ability to see inside. We only live outside.

Sometimes I play with it, for example in recent years I have been training myself to do things with my eyes closed and in the dark. For example, if I'm going to open the door of my house, I don't look at the lock but put the key in and try to learn to feel things with my brain instead of my eyes. And if I enter a dark space I have to go..... I want to memorize the stairs that go up to my apartment and be able to open...... That is something that I like because I have learned that visualizing is something precious .

Why can a pianist play keys quickly while looking at something else, looking at sheet music without actually looking at the keys? How can a blind man play the piano, like Ray Charles, for example? How could a musician, like Beethoven, compose the Fifth Symphony when he was already deaf and conduct it while he was deaf? They say that when he finished the Fifth Symphony and he was conducting the musicians, the audience erupted in deafening applause and someone had to come and turn him around so he could see the people applauding because he couldn't hear them. Yet he developed and conducted one of the greatest symphonies ever conceived, because these people have developed the ability to visualize in their minds, to imagine sounds, colors, images, visions.

And our ability to dream has been killed. Our parents when we came to them with a piece of paper that we had drawn something 'Boy, get out of there, what is that? That is useless. I'm busy.' They killed our ability to visualize, to dream, to believe big.

You have to go into your dreams and live your dreams, and live in light of it. What does that have to do with the passage in Chapter 12? Look at what it says here, it says "... the Lord Jesus says, let us run with patience the race that lies ahead of us", and it also says "... fix our eyes on Jesus".

Do not set your eyes on the vicissitudes, the problems, the obstacles, the struggles of the moment. Keep your eye on the goal. Keep your eye visualizing what is in front of you. Put your eyes on Jesus. He is the source of power.

When Peter kept his eyes on Jesus, he was able to walk on the water. When he set his eyes on the storm, he began to sink. You have to keep your eyes on the goal. Keep your eyes on the source of your power. Keep your eyes on the word of God that gives you success, that gives you power.

It says “... fixing our eyes on Jesus the author and finisher of faith, who for joy what? set before him." Same thing, the Lord knew how to live in light of the goal and how to visualize the goal and let the goal, as he visualized it, take him where he needed to go. The great men and women of success can visualize the goal.

The Lord, when the moment of the cross was approaching, visualized such a great blessing for humanity that his death would be and then he could see congregations like this one. He saw our congregation two thousand years before and when he was on the cross, when he suffered the sufferings of the cross, he saw the blessing that was to come, the joy that was going to result for humanity from his sacrifice. He could see the joy of the Father, he could see Satan trampled down and defeated. He could see the devil's accusations neutralized by the grace he was going to unleash.

Then he says, that we imitate Jesus “.... who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the reproach and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God”. You see? He despised present suffering in light of the glory to come.

If you want to be successful in your life you have to fill yourself so much with the image of what is coming, that what you are going through at the moment is totally secondary. Young man, if you want to be successful, this means that when you are peeling your eyelashes at two in the morning reading a book for the exam that you are going to have the other day, while your friends are watching television or at the movies, or making little embarrassment, you say 'no,'; but when they're out there selling sneakers in a factory, I'm going to be in my big office and making $300,000 a year. "The joy that comes...." You put joy before you. You visualize the blessing and then you get to work hard, you discipline yourself, you make an effort, you pay the price now, but you keep your eyes on what is coming, the blessing that God has for you.

But that future blessing has to be so real that you can taste it and taste it in your mouth so that then the moment of the present suffering, the present discipline doesn't taste so bad.

Many of us are so overwhelmed with what we have to go through now that we can't think about what we have next and it must be the opposite. The joy, the triumph that is coming must be so powerful and so real in our life that the momentary suffering is totally secondary. Do you understand brothers?

That is the difference of a successful person. I'm going to talk a little more about that. By the way, I'm not going to be there next Sunday, it's the last commitment I've had in a long time like this, but then we're going to continue with these studies and it's going to be a great blessing in our lives. God wants to give us the secrets of the kingdom for the glory of the Lord.

Stand up and receive the blessing this afternoon that God wants to give your life. I have not been hitting the air this afternoon, I have been giving the word of the Lord. Receive it and believe it in the name of Jesus. Believe great things, expand our expectations. Believing that God is for us. Be specific and visualize the glory to come so that it encourages us and leads us to the final triumph. Receive the blessing.

Father, I adore you. Father, I bless you, I thank you for your word. We receive your truth, Lord. We align ourselves with your truth this afternoon. Create yourself a powerful people. We have declared a successful town, sir. We have declared a town that works. We have declared a town of exemplary people. We have declared a town of people that people see them and say 'I want to be like them'. We have declared that your word falls to earth and incarnates, Lord, incarnates in concrete blessings.

And this afternoon we receive the seed of your fullness and your glory in our hearts. Father, I throw that seed of your word on the families represented here. I throw your word on young people, on adults, the elderly and children. And I declare that we will see your glory, Lord, realized. Bless this people, Father, and create us a mighty people for your glory. Enviable, Lord, that we provoke jealousy in society by seeing our successful and excellent lives. And to you we will give all the glory and all the honor, Lord. Thank you Jesus. Give the Lord a round of applause this afternoon. Thank my Lord. We adore you. We bless you, Lord.