Stop Declaring Death. Start Walking in Your Destiny!

It doesn’t take a spiritual person to call things as they are. It only takes a person with physical senses to take the temperature of a situation or circumstance.

But the spiritual realm is where things must shift before you see a breakthrough in your circumstances. We are not told to call things as they are. We are told to call things as God calls them- and He is in the business of calling things that are not as though they are.

What does this mean? It means that we can take any promise from Him to the bank, but we must begin writing checks before we see the actual cash. In this way, we are walking by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

Faith clings to things unseen (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Faith is the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).

So we see that we are called to walk by God-given conviction if we want to walk by faith.

To go even deeper, the truth is that much of what God wants to do in our lives is through the channel of faith, and if all we are doing is being “diagnosers” of the hardships, problems, history, and disappointments around us, we are living with a chain tied to us and our past experiences. All we have to offer (or say about a situation) is what has already happened before and what is currently going on now.

Let me remind you, it takes no faith to talk about how bad a situation is, how unfair a person was, how unlikely it is to work out for you, or how things are currently going. Any human being can talk about the past or the present without faith.

It reminds me of the verse: “You have circled this mountain long enough” (Deuteronomy 2:3 NASB).

Eventually, the song “she’ll be coming around this mountain when she comes” should lead us to as “why is she still going around that mountain?”

In other words, how long will we look at the situation around us and continue to accept more of the same without evaluating how we are relating to that situation? What lies are we believing about God due to the circumstances which surround us? Surely something must be off if we keep on circling the mountain and all we can focus on is what someone did to us 10 laps ago?

How long will we continue to allow the disappointments of the past be our high-water mark for the future?

We are at least in danger of setting our expectations and hopes so low that we won’t have to be disappointed again. But I’m telling you, when we live this way, we will always speak about things without hope, in light of the past instead of with God’s plan for our future—believing what God has said over what we feel or have experienced.

Believing His Word and the conviction in our hearts which He has placed there. Believing God for what He’s about to do. Believing that He is a good God (Psalm 34:8) with an extraordinary plan and future for us (Jeremiah 29:11). Believing that He is a good Father (Matthew 7:11), He never gives bad gifts to His children (James 1:17), and He’s absolutely interested in fulfilling the healthy desires of our hearts (Psalm 37:4).

I think that Satan carefully crafts a plan to get us to stop believing the stuff above because of how things have gone before.

Then, we place our hope- not in our Great God- but in the past. Which makes us stuck in the past, or at least, stuck in a rut. Then, we begin to spew out those lies “it will always be this way”; “things will never change”; “this always happens to me”; “I’ll never see it come to pass”; “great things never happen for me” with our mouths…and guess what? The second you make those declarations, you have automatically welcomed more of the same into your life.

Why?

Because we are echoing the heartbeat of the enemy—we are coming into agreement with his lies. Are these things not obviously anti-Biblical to utter? And, yet, how we feel sometimes trumps what we claim to believe about the authority of God’s Word. And so it goes. Circling round the mountain, when the breakthrough could have been just around the corner, or in a more real sense, just at the tip of your tongue where the power of life and death lies (Proverbs 18:21).

Don’t make the mistake of allowing your circumstances, your past, or your feelings to determine your destiny. Don’t allow those things to make you stumble into agreement with the enemy of your soul. Instead, turn it around. Start claiming what God says through His Word (Hebrews 4:12). Start proclaiming the sureness you have about what He is promising you (Hebrews 11:1), and guess what? You will begin to align yourself with Almighty God who’s main way of creating is “calling things that are not as though they are” (Romans 4:17). Is it not true that God Himself operates in this way?

“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3 ESV).

So the question is, what are you allowing to become the focus of your thoughts and the expression of your words: What is seen? Or what is unseen?

May I remind you, “The things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18 ESV).

Start walking in the eternal power of our good and loving Father today by speaking life instead of death and taking a clear stand upon the Word of God. It will always trump your circumstances, your past, and your feelings- unless you walk just as any other man or woman can and live simply by what you see.

I have heard this from many sources over the years, but it’s never been truer than today: Anyone can take the temperature of the room, but we are called to be thermostats. Start setting the temperature instead of merely measuring it.

(Excerpted from 7 Signs that God has Someone for You (Extended Edition), Wes Raley)

God bless you,

Wes Raley