How to Succeed at Being Yourself Part Five

Forgiveness takes care of our sin, and mercy blesses us even though we don't deserve it. Forgiveness is actually a manifestation of God's mercy. He forgives us because He is merciful and long-suffering.

Mercy is another word that is in close relationship and even interchangeable to a degree with grace and favor.

I don't know about you, but I am extremely happy about God's mercy. I cannot possibly imagine where I would be today if it were not for it. I know for sure I would not be anywhere pleasant.

We all deserve punishment, but instead God gives us mercy. What an awesome God we serve!

I am sure that if I were perfect I would expect everyone else to be perfect also. When I have a memory lapse concerning my own faults, I sometimes find myself being too harsh with others. At such times, God is obliged to remind me of my own frailties once again. He has a way of hiding in the shadows and allowing us to get into enough trouble to keep us humble and therefore useable. He stands back and allows our weaknesses to surface so we must trust Him and not ourselves.

Under the old covenant, when people sinned, they had to make sacrifices to atone for their sins. Jesus became to perfect and final sacrifice for all those who would believe, and He now instructs us to receive mercy from Him for our failures and to give mercy to others who fail.

This does not mean there is no correction or punishment for sin, but God always tries to draw us into righteousness through His love and mercy before dealing more harshly with us.

It pays not to be stubborn. Repenting and receiving God's mercy is much better than enduring His chastisement.

Some people cannot appreciate the mercy of God until they have experienced a bit of His wrath. God is never wrathful against His people; His wrath is always against the sin in their lives. He hates sin, and we must learn to hate it also.

Like God, we must hate sin, but love the sinner.

If we do not receive God's mercy for our failures, we will not have any to give others when they fail us and disappoint us. We cannot lead people into powerful relationships with the Lord through harshness, hardness, rigidity and legalism. We must show them that the God we serve is merciful, patient and long-suffering.

God is love, and all of these things we are discussing are facets of His love. Walking in love is the high call on the life of every believer. There is no possibility of true ministry without walking in love.

In a certain sense the word receive is synonymous with the word believe. We cannot receive something if we don't believe in it.

The Lord is willing to take every negative thing that has happened to us and turn it into something positive, if we will only believe.

Believing is the key to receiving from God!

No matter what has happened to you in the past, if you believe, you can receive the good fortune that is set aside for you in Jesus Christ Who came to do the will of His Father in Heaven.

You and I can only realize and experience the glory of God in our lives because of Christ in us. He is our hope of seeing better things.

The glory of God is His manifested excellence. As the children of God, we have a blood-bought right to experience the best God has planned for us. Satan furiously fights the plan of God in each of our lives, and his primary weapon is deception. When we are deceived, we believe something that is not true. Even though it is not true, it seems true for us because that is what we believe.

When we look at ourselves and our own ability, we feel defeated, but remembering that Christ in us is our hope of realizing the glory. It keeps us encouraged enough to press on toward better things. We limit ourselves when we look to ourselves alone and fail to see Jesus.

We can be excellent people with excellent attitudes, excellent thoughts and excellent words. God's glory can be manifested in us and on us, but only as we believe it is possible.

God is looking for someone who will believe and receive. Start expecting more of His glory in your life. He is waiting to manifest His glory - to you and through you.

God asks you and me to put our faith in Him and to believe that we can do whatever He asks us to do. He is mighty to uphold us and make us stand. He will support us and keep us from failing.

God's strength is readily available to us. We receive it through believing in it, and the promise God has made to give it to us. If we believe we are weak, then we will only manifest weakness...When we can say we are strong with a heart of conviction, even though we are weak in ourselves, the Lord will be strong in us - we will experience victory in our lives!

Just because we don't feel strong when we think about a situation does not mean that we won't be strong when we need to be. God's strength comes to us by His grace, through our faith, but He rarely gives us the strength we need before we actually need it. In this way we must trust Him, which our part, God asks us to trust Him, and as we do, He does the part we cannot do.

When we awake on any morning, we don't know for certain what may happen to us that day. We all hope for easy days in which all of our desires are being met, yet we know from experience that is not always the case. We live in a real world, with real problems. Our enemy, the devil, is real and he is working through everyone he possibly can to bring discouragement, fear and failure to us because we belong to God and put our trust in Him.

When you and I need to be strengthened, we should spend time with God and with people filled with His Spirit. Spending time in God's presence is like sitting in a room filled with sweet smelling perfume. If we sit there long enough, we take the fragrance with us when we leave. It will be in our clothing, in our hair and even in our very skin.

We can receive from satan by believing what he says, or we can receive from God by believing His Word. We all believe something, it may as well be something good.

Always remember that it does not cost anything to believe. Try it, you will find your life changing in an amazing way.

When our strength is in God, even the difficult places in life can be turned into blessings. That's why we need to constantly keep our minds and hearts focused on Him and not on our circumstances.

I have discovered that when I am unhappy I have a temptation to start blaming my unhappiness on some circumstance or person in my life who is not giving me what I feel I need.

Most of the time when I am unhappy, it is because of some wrong thinking on my part. Even if I have negative circumstances, I can stay happy by having right thoughts toward them. If people are not giving me what I need, I can either be angry with them or I can look to God to meet my need.

Satan wants us to think that nothing will ever change, that things will only get worse. He wants us to inventory every disappointing thing that has ever happened in our lives and think about how mistreated we have been. We will absolutely never fulfill our destinies and succeed at being all God has planned for us if we don't think properly.

God has satisfaction, fullness and completeness in mind for us. Fullness only comes through being in the center of God's Will.

Those with a sad past need to be able to believe in a bright future. The writer of Proverbs says that where there is no vision, people perish.

A vision is something we see in our mind, "a mental sight" as one definition puts it. It may be something God plants in us supernaturally or something we see on purpose. It involves the way we think about ourselves, our past and our future.

Some people are afraid to believe. They think they may be setting themselves up for disappointment. They have not realized they will be perpetually disappointed if they don't believe.

I am challenging you to start believing good things. Believe you can do whatever you need to do in life through Christ. Don't have a "give up easy" attitude. Let your faith soar. Be creative with your thoughts. Take an inventory: what have you been believing lately? An honest answer may help you understand why you have not been receiving what you have wanted to receive.

Standing up on the inside does not mean being rebellious or having an aggressive attitude toward those who don't understand us. It means having a quiet inner confidence that takes us through to the finish line. It is knowing inside that despite what is going on on the outside, everything is going to be all right because God is on the scene, and when He's present nothing is impossible.