#3 Viewers’ Choice- Taught in Greenville, South Carolina: I loved this message and thought I’d share it here…

Change Your Life Through These 5 Biblical Keys!

This is from an email I received by a loyal subscriber to my “Biblical Prosperity” e-Letter concerning the popular phrase from the Bible, as a man thinketh!

Just wanted to share it here on my blog, along with my response, hoping it will help bring some understanding to the “much confusing” topic of the Law of Attraction…

(email)

Hi Dan,

I love your e-Letter! It comes at the best times:  right when I need it.

But oh, how I hate the law of attraction. I don’t believe it (mostly because if it’s true, then circumstances are the result of a bad attitude, which puts the blame squarely on “bad” thinking).

I also don’t believe it because I think there were probably a lot of positve-thinking Jews who ended up in concentration camps. I think there are probably a lot of positive-thinking people in Africa who end up contracting AIDS. Or a lot of poor people who are beaten down by life, who perhaps were very positive-thinking before reality set in.

The law of attraction is too “New Age-ee.” Biblically, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” might not mean “As a man thinketh in his heart… so he gets.”

It might actually mean, “so is he.” So if he’s a righteous man, and he gets shat upon, he is still a righteous man. He didn’t necessarily run into trouble because he slipped up and started thinking negatively. Job didn’t.

Therefore, in summary, I hate the law of attraction. Just sayin’….

But thank you for your wonderful e-Letter. I really mean it. I just love it, and your encouragement and teaching. You seem very wise, and I know it comes from experience.

(response)

Dear subscriber,

You are so right! I agree with you about the Law of Attraction… “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” does NOT mean “As a man thinketh in his heart… so he gets.”

The words “is” and “get” are obviously both verbs, or “action” words. However, the meaning for both of them are completely different! The word “is” is a static verb, which is used primarily to describe a state or situation, as opposed to an action or process like the word “get.”

Too many people misinterpret the Law of Attraction to imply that you can get what you want by some sort of mental manipulation. The fact is, the Law of Attraction really comes down to simply a description of a state of being. That’s why Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” not so he gets.

Don’t get me wrong though, I do believe a person can change his or her state of being, but they’re going to have to do it by using Scripture! In fact, the Christian should forget about The Law of Attraction the way the teachers of “The Secret” have brought it to us and focus on the “Biblical Law of Attraction!”

The Law of Attraction in itself is a biblical concept, but just like many other Godly concepts, it gets perverted through worldly practices.

Because much of what goes on in our minds are deep in the subconscious, it’s difficult to tell what exactly is controlling us, and what’s causing certain things to come into our lives we don’t want, or preventing the things we truly desire.

That’s why it’s so critical that we apply ourselves to “change,” and fully understand the biblical Law of Attraction. We have to read good, Christian-based material, shut off obvious negative influences that bring us down, and get around quality-minded people who are in positions we want to be in.

The greatest hurdle most people face is the fact that they cannot acknowledge they need to change. Each individual’s world is a mirror-reflection of the way the see themselves. Until they change the way they see themselves, they will continue to attract the things they already have!

The “worldly” application of the Law of Attraction will destroy the quality of our relationship with God. He wants a relationship with us more than He wants to change our circumstances. In fact, it’s our circumstances that he uses to get our attention. He wants our heart. We should “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto us” (Matthew 6:33).

Trying to change our lives by employing the worldly concept of the Law of Attraction will certainly lead to frustration, disappointment, and another trip through the “wilderness.” The only source of true peace in this life is Jesus. Nothing will put us further from that peace than seeking our own way.

Unfortunately, many believers in Christ fall victim to the worldly teachings of the Law of Attraction, which in fact does rob one of peace because it removes the element of trusting God. Isaiah 26:3 says, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee because he trusteth in thee.”

I love what you said about “a lot of positve-thinking Jews ended up in concentration camps, a lot of positive-thinking people in Africa ended up contracting AIDS, and a lot of poor people got beaten down by life, who perhaps were very positive-thinking before reality set in.”

I thought quite a bit about those situations myself. Bad things happen to good people all the time. It’s just the world we live in, because it’s actually Satan’s world (2 Corinthians 4:4). We can’t try to fake ourselves out and act like everything that happens is all our own fault. We are sometimes subject to the decisions of other people.

However, I do believe much of our misfortune is brought on ourselves, that’s why we must live responsibly. The world itself is bad enough as it is, no sense in making things worse for ourselves by being stupid and careless with our thoughts and actions.

Even though we can get bitter toward all the misrepresentation about the Law of Attraction, there is still validity in the fact that as a man thinketh, so is he; therefore, we must always make an intentional effort to increase the quality of our thinking!

Excerpt from Tony Evans’ just-released book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”

Every summer I go to the doctor’s office for an annual exam. I sit in his office and he asks me, “Tony, how are you feeling?”

Assuming that it was a good year overall, I answer, “I’m feeling fine.”

But that’s not the end of my appointment. The doctor doesn’t take my word for it and send me home. Instead, he begins a process of prodding and poking to see whether or not I am as fine as I say that I feel.

Of all of the things that my doctor does, the thing that I despise the most is the stress test. He attaches electronic probes all over my body. Then he sticks me on a treadmill. Next, he makes the treadmill go faster and faster up an incline because what he wants to know is the real condition of my heart.

My heart might feel fine to me but at the same time, it might not be fine. The doctor can only determine the strength of my heart when he measures it under stress. So what he does is create a stressful situation where I’m walking for a long period of time, huffing and puffing, climbing a hill that never seems to end.

He’s testing my heart to see whether how I feel is how I really am. Because it’s possible to have good feelings yet still have a bad heart.

Living the Christian life is no different. It’s possible to come to church every week, sing worship songs, memorize Bible verses, serve on a variety of committees, and assume that your heart, faith, and soul are strong. It’s even easy to say things like, “I love you God. God, you are so good. I’ll follow you, God. I’ll do whatever you say.”

But God doesn’t want to just take your word for it. He tests you, and me, because He wants what is best for us. He tests us because He is getting ready to do something amazing in our lives. The way that He tests us is by putting us in a stressful scenario. God puts us on a treadmill. He designs a unique treadmill test to measure and reveal the real condition of our hearts.

Of course, no one likes a trial. No one wakes up in the morning, stretches, and says, “Ah, what a beautiful day for a trial! I think I’d like to have a trial today!” That would be an unusual person who would do something like that. Yet, no matter how much we want to avoid trials in our lives, trials are inevitable. No one is immune to trials.

Trials are adverse circumstances that God allows in our lives to both identify where we are spiritually as well as to prepare us for where He wants us to go.

There is no escaping them. You are in a trial now, you’ve just come out of a trial, or you are getting ready to go into a trial. Trials are unavoidable realities of life.

But even though we all have to experience them, I want to remind you to take comfort in knowing that trials must first pass through God’s hands before reaching us. Nothing comes our way without first having received His divine approval. And in order to get His divine approval, there must be a divine reason for Him to approve it.

Much like the stress test my doctor puts me through every summer, God allows trials and tests in our lives in order to reveal where we are along our spiritual journey.

He does this for the purpose of correcting whatever happens to be wrong, revealing whatever needs to be revealed, and strengthening whatever seems to be weak so that we might move on to what He has in store for us.

by Tony Evans