For six months the information has been coming in from all directions.

I have rediscovered old friends like W Clement Stone who’s ‘Success System….’  helped me to go from zero to hero almost 30 years ago at Encyclopaedia Britannica: old friends like Napoleon Hill whose ‘Think and Grow Rich’ has always been on the shelf and has been off it more than most, or like Og Mandino whose works have always been a staple but have never before been read with such fervency. MKMMA has raised the bar that’s for sure.

I have met some new friends too, like Ralph Ward Emerson (well he was new to me) and Peter McWilliams, both fascinating in their different ways and both taking my thoughts into new and exciting areas. The great weekly conversation with Charles Haanel has risen at times through debate to occasional argument but it has been nothing if not stimulating. My favourite book and the eternal benchmark has always been the Holy Bible (currently the NLT), and I am grateful to the aforementioned authors for their having helped open up new understanding to passages previously overlooked or confirmed and enhanced some which I had understood but maybe not completely. (That does not meaning I am claiming to understand them completely now, but I do have more light than I had.)

With information coming from so many diverse sources and with some opening up my understanding immediately and others taking time for ‘the penny to drop’,  there have been times of excitement and even exhilaration but there have also been times of confusion. So now it is time to take stock, organise and begin to apply the distilled wisdom. As Og Mandino said in Scroll I “Much has been filtered and tossed to the wind, only the pure truth lies distilled in the words that remain.”

It would be a great shame to live and die with so much insight but without practical application that would produce the fruit. The thoughts are the cause…we have discussed that at length… but the effect does not just appear by magic. The thoughts must be turned to action and it is the action that will produce the results. Thinking has taken up much of my time, in fact all of my spare time and there has been little left for action. Organised thought is a wonderful thing, I know most people have not experienced even that fully, but organised action is what will move the mountain. I have thought a lot about Jesus’s words and their implications…you can move the mountain IF…If you believe with all your heart, nothing doubting.  You may not know this but the Number One reason for His arrival on Planet Earth was to introduce ‘The Law of Forgiveness’ and make it possible for all men to give and receive forgiveness. Every man is forgiven every sin…it’s no use pretending we have no sin…if we do that the Bible says we call God a liar.  We have all sinned, we have all fallen short, but forgiveness is available to every man and woman on earth and it’s really simple to appropriate it.  The Mountain of Guilt and Shame that stands before all of us at times can be cast into the deepest sea never to be seen again and the rules for its removal have never changed…Only believe that Jesus came to give you forgiveness, paid the price for it so it’s completely free to you, believe nothing doubting, and unreservedly forgive those who have sinned against you. If you can manage that you can walk the earth as Jesus did.

OK. So I am a Pastor with a congregation. Am I to keep them mentally trapped inside some ancient hereditary dogma or am I to show them how Jesus came to give them a more abundant life. How He came to bring physical and emotional healing, to prosper them as they give into the lives of others. How God is always good and that he has provided enough for every single person on earth to have enough, no more than enough. There is no limit to what God has done, what He can do and what He wants to do for every people group on earth.

There is no lack in Gods house…when Jesus said pray “Your Kingdom Come on Earth” he was not proposing a rich ruling class and a great unwashed mass forced to live in poverty and slavery, that’s what men have done.

It’s time for us to organise our thoughts, to begin to Mastermind together, to plan the work and work the plan and to begin to see the Kingdom coming on the earth.

It needs a renaissance of thought and a revolution in action but if we are up for it God is able to do a quick work and He is ready to use a willing army of people who desire more than anything to see His Kingdom come.  If we ask anything according to His will we know He hears us and if we know He hears us we already have the things for which we are asking.

Our asking is the cause, so if we do our bit and ask the effect is on the way.

Prayer has been the tool used by millions of people in all cultures to bring about success in their chosen field of endeavour. Regardless of the belief of the individual great gain is made from a psychological viewpoint certainly in bringing clarity and directing a persons ideas, and in the development of stimulating internal forces towards the fulfilment of those ideas.

Van Morrison says it like this in the song “Have I told you Lately that I Love You”

“There’s a love that’s divine
And it’s yours and it’s mine
Like the sun
At the end of the day
We should give thanks and pray to the One”

I don’t think an attitude of gratitude and a few words to express it has ever done anyone any harm no matter what the ‘One’ looks like for them. I am sure most people could tell of a time when they were helped out of a fix as a result of prayer even if only emotionally.

We all experience hard times and most people, when they finally come to the end of themselves, find the only thing left to do is pray: and they are rewarded with an unlikely deliverance even though even the source of their deliverance knows they will soon forget once the disaster is averted. Who things of phoning the fire brigade to say thinks for watching over us once the fire is out?…But if we want success in life why do we need to wait for the hard times to pray? What’s wrong with a bit of a leg up and some good guidance while we are enjoying the good times?

Miracles do happen I suppose, or at least that’s what we choose to call them, but as we have progressed through the Masterkey together I have become less convinced that they are actually miracles but more likely the kind of thing that an all-powerful God can and would like to do as normal part of everyday living if we will only stay plugged in to His frequency and draw on His power. Look what God can do when cry out to Him in desperation.

In 1940 the British Expeditionary Forces were broken and desperately fleeing under heavy Nazi fire towards Dunkirk beach. PM Winston Churchill expected that only twenty to thirty thousand at best would be able to make it back across the English Channel to safety. England was on the brink of defeat.

King George VI called the nation to prayer on Sunday the 26th of May…That did not trouble the German high command who the following day boldly announced ‘The British army is encircled and our troops are proceeding to its annihilation.”

History records three events, each one unlikely in itself, but all three together must surely convince even the most sceptical observer of the intervention of a powerful and good God.

First Hitler went against the advice of his High Command and halted the German advance only ten miles short of the fleeing British army…he believed his beloved Luftwaffe was capable of doing the job before the British could reach the coast.  His arrogance and his desire to showcase his airforce to the whole world as a sign of German might is thought to be the reason why he halted the ground forces, though nobody can ever really know his reason for sure.

But then came the second miracle and at just the perfect time. A storm of unprecedented fury broke over Flanders on Tuesday, 28 May, grounding most of the Luftwaffe squadrons.  The British soldiers, now only eight to twelve miles from Dunkirk, were able to move on foot to the coast under cover of the darkness and violence of the storm. Hitler had obviously not taken the weather into his reckoning, or the One who can control it!

Miracle three, most amazingly despite the incredible storm in Flanders, a great calm such as has rarely been experienced settled over the English Channel, and its waters became as still as a mill pond.

It was this quite extraordinary calm which during the days following, enabled a vast armada of little ships, big ships, warships, fishing boats, privately owned pleasure boats from English rivers and estuaries to ferry back and forth in a desperate rescue operation that saved over 300,000 men who would not die on the beaches of Dunkirk but live to fight another day.

So if we come together in desperation, join our minds, our thoughts and our prayers, God can whip up a storm, calm a sea, halt an army, ground an airforce and rescue a third of a million men….

So can God only operate in times of great disaster or would a people who are desperate for peace, unity, prosperity and equity be able to move Him in better times?  I think the Master Key agrees with the Bible in telling us they would be able and He would be willing.

One way I think Haanel’s Masterkey differs from the bible is in suggesting there is only one mind when clearly as proved by our illustration that cannot be the case. All the mind and will of the Axis forces was dedicated to the annihilation of the British Army, the Allied Forces and eventually mankind as we knew it.

One man, King George VI called a nation together to pray in unity and that engaged the mind of God and invoked His saving power.

Paul in the epistle to the Romans 15:4-6 saysFor everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had,  so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Great is the nation whose God is the Lord. Those who ask anything according to His will, know that He hears and that they already have the answer no matter how difficult or even impossible the outcome may seem. Nothing is impossible with the God who created the Universe with the words of His mouth and holds it together for His own glory.

Having lived on planet Earth these 65 years I have learned that not much is new but that so much is misunderstood. If you are like me some things you will have seen quickly, you ‘get it’ straight away but with some other things, it may have taken years for the ‘penny’ to drop

The mind is a funny thing…remarkable…unfathomable…the most wonderful thing ever created…but funny: you have to treat it right.
In the physical world there are Laws…one example being The Law of Gravity, try explaining how that works sometime, not even the cleverest scientists can explain it adequately, but you have to admit it does work… every time, for rich and poor alike.

There is the Law of Averages, Thermodynamics, Sowing and Reaping…the list goes on but we should thank God for these natural laws because without them there would be chaos. Can you imagine putting your keys down on the desk and not knowing if they would be there when you went back or whether they might just float off. What if the desk followed suit… chaos!

So if there are physical laws might there also be parallel spiritual laws? Maybe not something many people think much about but I believe they should at least investigate the possibility. Whilst the aforementioned law of Sowing and Reaping clearly works in the physical, for example if you plant onions in a field you are not going to harvest potatoes are you? But all truth is parallel and so the same law works over in the spiritual world in exactly the same way.

If you plant thoughts and therefore words of love and hope and joy and kindness wherever you go then you will find that people return the same kind of fruit into your life and you will harvest good things… but if you plant bad seed your harvest will be thorns and thistles spiritually speaking.

So we are talking about the mind since that’s where thoughts originate…as I already said, it is a funny thing the mind, you have to treat it right if you want it to work well and serve you. It is governed by laws in exactly the same way as the physical and the spirit and maybe it is central and the link between both so that’s why it is going to be the centre of this post.

Did you ever think about the way you think? For most people the answer would be probably not…many people do not actually think at all. Not really, choosing what clothes to put on or what to have for breakfast doesn’t count. What sets you apart from the silent majority, (and if you are still reading you have proven me correct) is your willingness to think seriously, to investigate…to seek after truth knowing that only the truth can really set you free.

There was a very well educated man called Paul, I never knew his last name but I know he wrote a big chunk of the New Testament and one stand out thing he wrote was this…”Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

That interested me in a number of ways.
Why would Paul, or God for that matter, want me to become a new person, what’s wrong with the old person?
Why would God even care about the way I think, how does he know me from Adam in all those millions of people
Why does Paul suggest I LET God transform me…does God need my permission? If He is all powerful and He wants to transform me why can’t He just do it?

Actually asking the questions was quite enlightening even in itself. It seems that God does want me to be best person I can be, He wants me to fulfil a potential I didn’t even know I had before I started this six months of concentrated thinking I have been doing. It seems I am capable of doing so much more than I could previously have dared to ask or think.

And God does know me, he knows my name, in fact I heard somewhere that my name is written on the palm of His hand, and not just mine, yours too, so He must have a pretty big hand.

I thought I would check that out if I could and it seems the Hebrew prophet Isaiah (40:12) said “Who has measured the waters of the sea in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens by the width of his hand? So yes that’s a pretty big hand. And a pretty big heart too if he knows you and I by name and even the hairs on our head are counted.

So what about question 3? Why does God not just do his stuff and make us all like He wants us to be? It would be easier wouldn’t it? But it is our privilege to play a part in our own transformation. The material I have had access to these last few months, Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World, Charles Haanel’s Masterkey, Earl Nightingale, Emerson. I am just reading W. Clement Stone’s The success System that Never Fails, all the contributions from Mark and Davene and the MasterMInd Group, my guide Steve Earl. It all adds up to a perfect whole and God is using all of them. Some passed a century or more ago, some are young compared to myself, they are scattered all around the globe and yet we are one. God is love and faith works by love, His love, our faith and maybe that impossible DMP is possible all of a sudden.

One thing I have learned above all else…there are people who can’t believe in the whole DMP yet because they have not walked this path with us. I expected them to see it and that was so naive of me. What they can see is the first step, what would the person I expect to become do next? When they see that first step done they will believe for the next step. The only person who needs to believe for the whole thing right now is me. That is the most important thing I have learned in all of the six month journey.