Some people have a negativity being broadcast inside them practically all the time. Sometimes it is a conscious broadcast. At others it is subconscious. This negativity causes them to look at a scenario and immediately see the negative aspects of it. “Do you want to get well?” Jesus asks them. They don’t even hear the question. Like the crippled man beside the pool of Bethesda, their response is immediately a negative, “why it won’t work for me” type of response.
They are prophets of doom to themselves. “I’ve always been this way. It’s just the way I am. That could never work because . . . My situation is different.” They have a thousand reasons why things won’t change for them. They will say they wish thing could change, but then prosecute their own case by reminding themselves of all the reasons why things never will.
They are masters of imagining potential scenarios and superimposing a negative outcome onto them. Their tendency is to play out a scene in their mind that hasn’t even happened yet. It is borrowing trouble when none even exists at the moment. It is appropriating negative faith that things will turn out in negative way.
This kind of negativity is a sour note that will deeply affect any of us who hear it if we don’t change stations. Here’s how it happens: As the discordant background “music” plays in our minds, it creates a certain mood within us. That mood influences the way we think about things. When you combine the way a person both thinks and feels, together these create a certain paradigm on life – a negative one.
This negative paradigm determines our expectations when we face any situation in life. That expectation is nothing less than a reflection of our faith. Jesus said, “According to your faith, so be it unto you.” It becomes clear, then, that some of us are going through life expressing great faith – negative faith! Then we wonder why things don’t seem to “go our way.” According to your faith be it unto you.
What is the attitude you have toward challenges you experience in your own life? Some years ago I read the story of Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest. Of all the possible people to hold this distinction, Hillary was an unlikely candidate. He had lived a simple life as a beekeeper in Auckland, New Zealand. Deep inside him was an idea that most people would have considered ridiculous. He wanted to climb the mountain.
On May 29, 1953 he accomplished his goal, scaling straight up 29,000 feet to the top. Reaching his goal wasn’t something that came without its challenges. He had tried to climb Mt. Everest a year earlier but had failed to reach the top. His response to that failure is what set him apart from others.
A few weeks after his failed attempt a group in England asked him to speak to their membership. When he walked onto the stage, they greeted him with cheers and thunderous applause. They obviously recognized the value of the attempt he had made, but Hillary didn’t see it that way. He wasn’t content to stop at the place of almost seeing this goal realized.
Walking over to one side of the platform, he pointed to a picture of Mount Everest hanging on the wall. Then he clenched his fist and loudly cried out, “Mount Everest, you beat me the first time, but I’ll beat you next time because you’ve grown all you’re ever going to grow, but I’m still growing!”
Hillary had tapped into a truth that we all need to understand. Where we are today doesn’t have to be the final word on where we will be in the end. God does have a plan for your life and He will fulfill it in you. Do you believe that? Are you still growing in the area of faith or have you resigned yourself to the lie that reaching the mountaintops in life is beyond your potential. Understand that your mountaintop is nothing more or less than fulfilling the plan God has for you.
Why did Israel wander in the wilderness for forty years? It was because of their negative faith. The Bible says, “they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). Too many people have blamed God, other people, or just their own “bad luck” for not reaching their destiny, when the truth is that the fault lies squarely on their own refusal to believe in God’s basic goodness and in His desire to guide them in fulfilling His will. Are you waiting for God to act? Has it occurred to you that God may be waiting for you?
Have you been short-circuiting your life by appropriating negative outcomes in the situations you face in life? Is there an underlying AM (awful mentality) station playing in the background inside your head all the time? Change stations to FM (faith mentality)!
Faithless thinking doesn’t really exist because there is no such thing as an absolute absence of belief. Put any of us in any situation and we will begin to draw conclusions about our circumstances based on what we see. We will evaluate our situation and mentally predict how things are going to unfold as times progresses. In other words, we will come to believe that we know what our future will hold.
Those beliefs become our faith system. Once it is established, it becomes very hard to think outside the walls of expectation we have built around ourselves. We box ourselves in by our limited thinking, which developed through a human assessment of the details of our lives at a given moment in time. Functioning now from a negative faith, we begin to look for evidence in our circumstances to validate that our initial analysis of the situation was right. “See, I knew it!” we affirm when visible evidence tends to support our negative perspective.
The trap tightens its grip on us as we affirm again and again that “this is just the way things are” and as we appropriate hopelessness that things can ever change. Our faith, negative faith, grows by leaps and bounds. Every day seems to take us further from hope that things will ever change.
I’ve heard people say that we shouldn’t put God in a box. “Let Him out of the box!” they’ll challenge others. Let me tell you something: It’s not God who is in the box. It’s us. God is too big and too powerful to let our puny negative faith box Him in.
Let’s not flatter ourselves by thinking that we are squelching God. “Come out of your box and believe Me and I’ll do “great and mighty things like you can’t imagine,” says our Father of grace. (See Jeremiah 33:3)
Begin to expect things to go your way because God is “for you.” Recognize that God’s grace equals guaranteed success. Approach life with an optimistic expectancy, based on the goodness of God.
God once told Abraham, “I will give you the land as far as you can see.” There is an interesting principle embedded in that statement that raises a question: What can you see? Do you see life never advancing, never expanding? Maybe the only thing that needs to change for you to move boldly into the fulfillment of your potential is a change of focus.
(This blog is an excerpt from my book, Walking In The Will of God. For more information on the book, click this link: http://gracewalkresources.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=555
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