OK, so guys, thanks for the thanks for that.
I want to go over this and explain today.
So when we talk about new every morning,
this is routine number two as a kingdom leadership.
For me, these are things I'm sharing with you are deeply part of my daily walk
with the Lord and how that helps me in my business.
So the spreadsheet we're creating has four columns.
Column one is what's the prompt?
Right. In other words, what's the cue?
What's the thing that causes me to use this?
Right. This one, when I wake up in the morning is the prompt.
What's the permission?
What permission is God giving me in that prompt?
And then three, what's what do I get to practice?
Right. What's the routine part?
What's the part I get to practice so it can become permanent part of my walk
with Jesus? And finally, then, if I keep practicing
it to the point that it does become permanent, what person do I become?
All right. So I hope that was helpful.
Now, we're going to do that every single
month and we will at some point put out that spreadsheet.
So you'll have literally an entire cheat
sheet with those four elements, the prompt, the permission,
the practice and the person you're becoming for all 12.
And I'll give you that and that will be your teacher.
And then you build your own.
That's the idea. But to start off with, let me let me give you the ones we use.
So when we're talking about the prompt.
So this is when I wake up in the morning
and I don't want negatives to compound in my life.
Right. So we know the enemy's on a budget and we have abundance in the kingdom.
So when you're on a budget, what the enemy has to rely on is you to compound
negatives for him and get a snowball effect going, because that's where he can get
to more people. But if every morning you cut the negatives off and you make him
start again, it's like he's building the Jenga blocks
of negativity and you pull the one at the bottom and it all collapses.
You start his mercies on you every morning.
So that's the permission part.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
It's relentless. That's a nice way.
The steadfast love of the Lord is relentless towards you.
His mercies never end.
His mercies are relentless.
His love is relentless.
And they knew every morning, every morning,
you get a full, fresh dose, fresh every day from the Lord.
And then then your only response is, Father, great is your faithfulness.
That's Lamentations 3, 22 and 23.
OK, so that's the permission.
My goodness, what a permission for a kingdom business leader
to not allow any negatives of yesterday.
Lord, you be the keeper of all that.
Don't you like the Lord being your keeper?
Lord, you be the keeper of that.
I'm putting that in storage.
And now I start fresh today.
Unless you're bringing that in for us
to talk through and talk about what possibility that opens up.
I'm not addressing that.
And you say, that sounds amazing.
You know, Britain and I were going through a scenario where we had to make a big
decision and there was a lot of conversation about this decision
and a business decision.
And so we finally got to a point and we said, OK,
we're giving it to the Lord to be the keeper.
He's got a storage facility and he locks it in there and he keeps it in safe place.
So, Father, this is going into storage.
Be my keeper, take care.
But by keeper, I mean, he'll he'll protect you, keep the stuff going.
It's an amazing thing that he does.
If the Lord says we're not dealing with that right now.
And then you say, well, Lord, you be the keeper.
That terrible situation, that relationship,
that incredible problem with that client who keeps doing whatever,
whatever that is, put it into into safekeeping.
I found this to be one of the most powerful things that I do.
Now, I learned another little hack.
Go to sleep in peace, you can wake up in peace.
So I close out every day.
I go to sleep in peace.
So I do this little handover routine that I do with the Lord.
I just go through my day.
You got that.
Be the keeper of that, be the keeper of that.
Then the Lord said to me, you know,
you can ask me to be working on stuff through the night.
Right. And when you wake up in the morning,
the three fathers and the Holy Spirit have been working through the night and you
wake up in the morning and they're like, ta-da.
Now, that doesn't happen every morning, but it has happened.
And so I leave yesterday behind.
My mind needs.
So I love the scripture that gives that teaches us how to do this.
Now, if I keep practicing, what will happen?
What kind of person would I become if I did this?
Right.
I become a kingdom leader that starts fresh every day and has the full
resources of heaven fresh every morning.
Right, because what's happening now is that I've left all the.
They do, but behind I've put stuff in safekeeping with the Lord.
And then, you know, sometimes, you know, how things keep jumping back into your
mind. You start thinking about and then it jumps back, especially is really
negative. It keeps jumping into my keep jumping to mind.
That's what stops.
Now, how free would you be if that stopped in your life?
Just saying.
Right. That's amazing.
It's amazing. So you're living in his in his mercy and grace
every day. And so goodness and mercy are following
you all the days of your life.
Notice it's his days.
So goodness and mercy catch up from goodness and mercy.
If you screwed up yesterday's mercy will cover it.
If you did something amazing and goodness, you can build on that.
God will just these goodness and mercy will follow you and catch up with you
every single day.
There's no budget in heaven.
You start fresh every morning with full abundance.
You know, stress and worry and panic
and anxiety are just not required.
They are necessary when so much peace and rest
and grace is available.
It's like saying we really, really have to budget.
We're trying to buy this, you know, we're trying and you're acting like, you
know, you're counting pennies out of a little bag.
And God says, you do know you have the credit card, right?
The debit card, you know, the one with ten million dollars in it.
You don't you do know you can pay for groceries.
Right. And by the way, tomorrow morning, it's back to ten million and the next
morning it's back to ten million and the next morning it's back to ten million.
Just saying that that's a different mindset to how you tackle your day.
It sets a different expectation.
So I want to share with you quickly, if I may,
three keys that have really helped me make this a reality in my life.
Because these routines are the most pleasurable part
of maintaining a friendship and a fellowship with Jesus.
Jesus said, I no longer call you servants.
I call you friends. Why?
Because servants don't know what the master is doing.
But I tell you what I'm doing.
And I love that.
He's the same way the father taught me.
I'll teach you.
That's the Van Zyl translation.
And so in that mode,
you know, what happens is he's restoring your soul every morning.
And so we learn to walk in newness of life every single day.
We are a new creation.
All things have been made new.
The old is past.
And so what we're doing is we're learning routines of our new creation,
that we are a new creation.
We're learning routines.
Our old man, which good news is dead in Christ, taught us bad habits.
Which good news is dead in Christ, taught us bad habits, taught us routines.
What do we mean by routines?
What's the biblical word for routines is the ways of the Lord.
How to be with the Lord, more precisely, knowing how he wants to be with you now.
So thing number one, never allow yesterday's negative to cross over into today.
So Kingdom Key one, never allow yesterday's negative to cross into today.
You know, when we carry over a negative into the next day,
we actively deny ourselves the peace and rest of the Lord to our own detriment.
And you know, what really helped me was some neuroscience here
by a neuroscientist named Dr.
Rick Hansen, and he discovered anybody know Rick Hansen's training?
Yeah. So Rick Hansen discovered that the human brain has a natural bias towards the negative.
Right. And you can understand that, you know, so according to Hansen,
the brain is like Velcro and it keeps negatives that stick to the Velcro.
Right. And it uses Teflon and they just slide off on all the positive stuff.
So all the negative stuff sticks in your mind and the positive just slides off.
And because he was answering a key question, and maybe you can relate to this.
At the end of the day, are you more likely to remember
the 20 positive things or the one negative thing?
See, the one, the 20 just slid off Teflon and the one Velcro stuck.
So the idea there's some theories about, you know, you need five positives to offset everyone.
This turns out not to be true.
You could have 50 positives.
They'll all slide off. And the one negative is the thing that will stick.
It will capture it.
Now, that's OK, because we have the mind of Christ and we're learning to renew our mind.
We're learning. We're teaching our mind to live where our heart is.
Remember, your heart, your spirit person is shaping your mind.
Right. Your heart is by far the eternal part of you, is far more powerful.
Mind is one of your weaker functions. So, when the scripture says, okay, let me explain how this
works. The scripture says in 2 Corinthians 10 5, we demolish, not tinker with, not play around with,
demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against what? The knowledge of God. And
what do we do? We take captive every thought. So, an argument comes against us, we demolish that.
The thoughts in our minds that come up, we take them captive and what do we do? We bring them and
make them obedient to Christ. Let's use Hansen's analogy. That means we're going to Velcro the
positive and Teflon the negative, the other way around. The natural mind does it one way,
the renewed mind, the mind of Christ, Velcros the positive, Teflon slides off the negative.
Because what the mind captures, it speculates on. Now, we know from basic neuroscience that
your brain has no emotional circuits, that your brain is literally speculates or predicts
something happening and then it generates an emotion to match that speculation. Are we going
to fail? Are we going to have this problem? I'm going to get fired today and the mind says, oh,
I know what goes with that, this emotion, depression, whatever. And so, it creates that
emotion in the moment. But if you stop speculating about negativity and replace,
here's the exchange. What if you exchange speculations with anticipation of goodness?
Instead of speculating negative stuff, this could happen and that could happen and that bad thing
will happen and we can't, you know, or we can take that captive and exchange it for anticipation
of God's goodness. So, Psalms 92 tells us where to get this from. It is a good thing to give thanks
to the Lord. It says this, to declare his loving kindness in the morning and his faithfulness at
night. So, we start off the day with huge expectations in God of goodness. At night,
as we're doing the handoff, we're saying, thank you, Lord, for your faithfulness today. Does that
make sense? So, as we're going through this process, goodness and mercy become very real
part and that's why they follow the days of your life. They don't follow you, they follow the days
of your life. I think that's fascinating. I'd love to get into that, but I'll keep it to the point
here. So, you're only learning to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by his goodness. Here's the
result of this practice. If you keep using this routine, the only thing that will overwhelm you,
because the negative will hit, slide off, positive will grab and you'll exchange speculating about
the negative to anticipating his goodness. When you exchange that, what will happen is,
instead of being overwhelmed by severe negative things, you learn to become overwhelmed by his
goodness. And so, the way Graham would say it is, you only ever learn to be challenged by his
goodness, not your circumstances. This life in Jesus is entirely possible. So, I ask you,
I ask you this question, what would it be like to work for a leader like that? Be that leader.
What would it be like to work with a leader that when something happens, the first thing
they look at is, how can I prosper from this situation? They take the negative situation,
they flip the coin. Every temporary problem has a permanent possibility from heaven attached to it.
Guaranteed. God, your workmanship created in Christ to do good works that the Father has
already prepared beforehand that you should walk in them. Now, if you know that,
isn't that something? So, you start off anticipating goodness. So, when the enemy
hands you something negative, or even if it's not the enemy, I think most of the time we think it's
the enemy, it's just people and stuff and life, whatever it might be. So, we don't take our
problems from yesterday into today. There's no requirement in the gospel for you to accumulate
negativity. I don't know about you, but that makes me happy. That makes me so happy, you know. It's
this constant invitation to start fresh. Okay, let's talk about key number two. Key number two,
I already touched a little bit, start each day with an expectation of his goodness. You know,
when the Lord first started teaching me this, I'm, you know, just a real talk here. I thought this
would be easy. I would like, okay, no negatives today. Good. So, my expectation of goodness,
and immediately I went to, I wanted
God to rescue me out of a situation. What was I doing? I was trying to pull God into my reality
to rescue me and fix stuff. What he was trying to do is draw me into his reality and live in freedom
and abundance. Abundance of peace, resources, his mindset. You see which religion teaches us to pray
prayers, begging prayers, desperate prayers, to try and pull God into our reality to address stuff.
What God is doing is trying to pull us up to his reality, come live in the kingdom
with him. You know at some point your head has to go and live where your heart is. Just saying.
So what I learned in this is, you know David put it this way, he said
I would have despaired, right? I would have despaired and he thought about it and he said
you know he would have surrendered his identity to despair because of all the credible things.
Listen we've all been through unbelievable challenges. You know our story and you know
how brutal our scenario was. When you've lost your net worth pushing for eight you know eight
figure net worth that year, losing all friends, losing our business, being made a public, you
know humiliation, being having relationships with all these profound leaders all over the country
and suddenly being seen in such a negative light. It was unbelievably painful
and you genuinely feel my life is over. I'm done. I got nothing more. I literally said to my kids
one night, I said I don't even know if I'll ever preach again or even teach again. I got nothing
left. I mean I'm done, right? And you see what happens is you give in to despair but you can be
like David and do an instead. Do you know what an instead is? The exchange store. Go to the exchange
store. Isaiah 61. So he gives you the oil of joy for mourning. So he replaces ashes with beauty.
He replaces you know this idea of you know complete humiliation. He gives you double portion
and he gives you your inheritance. Isn't that amazing? Now put that in real business terms.
Some of you are facing right now today some real real business challenges. I know almost all your
stories I think with these portions of them enough to make that statement true. Now you can choose
to believe in the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. That's what David said. I would have
despaired unless I'd seen the goodness of God in the land of the living. That's what you get to do.
So God is teaching us to live one day at a time with the Lord. You only have to have grace for
today. Did you ever notice that the Bible says pray for your daily bread not your weekly bread,
monthly bread, annual bread, gold bread, whatever the bread you want to have. He just says pray for
your daily bread. So goodness is designed to overwhelm fear. God's goodness the reason he
gives you that isn't some way of making you schizophrenic. He's saying I'm teaching you
because my goodness will overwhelm every fear. It will put you in a place of peace. Well we know
from neuroscience that when you're a place of peace and rest you're the most creative,
most present. You know it brings out your best leadership. It brings out your best ideas.
You are your best person when you're at peace. So if you're stressed out and threatened and
speculating about negatives and fears getting involved in that, you're shrinking down as a
person. God is expanding you making you into his image and likeness by teaching you to expect
goodness and not allow the compounding effect day to day of negatives. Is this helping?
So nothing can work against you when you are in that place of God's presence.
So look you're going to have difficult people, difficult problems, but they're all beautiful ways
of practicing his kindness in us. We're learning as business leaders to relax in God's love. Now
we have peace with God. No more fighting. I know where I stand. I'm right there. So for me
practicing God's pleasure of, see God it's not just I'm practicing, I'm not just delighting
in the Lord. I'm practicing the fact that he's delighting in me. My delight in him is just a
response to his delight. If you know God delights in you, well many of us are taught only delights
in you when you perform. No he delights in you because you're in Christ. Okay you know you're
you know you're approved, you're a complete delight. You know why? You're in Christ.
You just met all the criteria for God to delight in you.
You are in Jesus.
I love that.
So that's the lifestyle I want.
Okay, number three, key number three,
is God's nature is a ruling power.
Man, this took me a long time to learn.
Honestly, I wish, well, we won't wish,
but I wish I'd learned this earlier,
maybe I should just say it, right?
So, everything starts and is completed
in the nature of God, everything.
Everything in the kingdom starts with a gift,
we know it starts with the gift of Jesus, everything.
God's nature is a ruling power.
We know he said, let the peace of Christ reign,
so we know peace is a ruling power,
because the Prince of Peace is in you,
but more of which we learned last month.
So why did God put Jesus in you?
We know why he put you in Jesus, right?
Give you a new nature, et cetera.
You know, break the power of sin and death of your life,
you know, et cetera, seated in a heavenly place,
but okay, we understand why God put us in Jesus,
but why did God put Jesus in you?
And here's why God put Jesus in you.
I think on our church service on Monday night,
we brought this up.
Jesus is the nuclear reactor in you.
It's like God put this power source in you.
It's like God put a nuclear reactor in you,
like everything you need,
everything that you need for life and Godliness
is held by Jesus in you.
Every promise God gives, it gives to Jesus in you,
and that's why it's safe and it doesn't go anywhere.
And it's an extraordinary place of comfort, that.
So being in Christ means that we have exactly,
exactly the same relationship with the Father
that Jesus had,
because what worked for Jesus was designed to work for you.
Jesus showed us how to walk with the Father,
and the Father showed us how He wants to walk with Jesus
so we could do exactly the same thing.
But to make sure it happened,
God put you in Jesus and put Jesus in you.
He put this double-linked situation and locked you in
and hid you in the safest place in the universe
where you'd be guaranteed His favor,
His delight, and His goodness.
You're locked in.
No one is safe from the goodness of God.
No one.
Everybody's susceptible.
Okay, so here's what happens.
As we learn and this practice
becomes a practice of abiding,
over time, abiding will become a habitation.
It becomes permanent.
It gets to be the place we live.
We go to live there.
We don't just visit this idea.
We're not just doing a transactional thing.
We're doing, we're practicing this every morning.
And so the first thing out of my mind,
I'm not reaching for my phone.
I'm not reaching for anything that could be a negative.
I'm not responding to texts or whatever.
What I'm responding to is the goodness of the Lord.
I start my day, thank you, Lord.
Today, I'm gonna be overwhelmed by your goodness.
Do you wanna talk about that?
And the Lord says, as a matter of fact, I do.
You know, I've heard the Lord.
I've woken up some mornings and the Lord says,
you know that problem you were working on
the last few days?
Here's what we're gonna do.
Or can you give that to me?
Can you put that in safekeeping?
Let me be the keeper.
Lord, you got it.
You got it, be the keeper.
What are we doing today, Lord?
Okay, what's the goodness you expect from me today?
What gifts are you?
Every time God gives you a gift,
it's not just to experience his goodness
because that gift changes your personality.
That gift upgrades you into the person
you're becoming in Jesus.
So simple question then is,
Father, what does this situation mean for our relationship?
Father, how can I prosper from this situation?
And the third question I love is,
what must I do to partner with you?
Or another way of saying that is,
I like to ask the Lord,
how do you wanna be with me in this?
Part two is my response, help me even with that.
Father, how do you want me to be before you in this?
I want you to be at rest.
I want you to be joyful.
I want you to be whatever.
So this week, I started the week
with a tremendous amount of content
that had to be created.
And we just launched a new program
called Ministry Leadership and Church Governance.
It's an eight-week program, some of you are on it.
And there was that, it was a lot of content.
I'm traveling next week.
I had a lot of videos, a lot of content to create.
The school, the Brennan School of Leadership,
we had a church service, et cetera, et cetera.
So I was just looking at the sheer amount of content.
Now, normally my mind would be in all those.
details on Monday morning. I woke up and I learned never to let that come into
today. That's not how I start my day. I don't start with my to-do list. I start
with the one who loves me more and knows me best. So I said, so Father what are we
doing? The Lord said we're gonna be at complete rest and we're gonna be joyful.
I said today or the whole week? He said the whole week. That's what we're gonna do.
Honestly guys, by the end of last night I'd done almost everything. I have no
idea how. It's like I put three, four hours aside for this, got it done in 90
minutes. Put 90 minutes aside for that. You see Jesus is a quickening
spirit. He compresses the time frames. I just love, I just love our partnership.
And one day I was sitting talking to the Lord and I'll see if I can get through
this without crying. I was just sitting there, you know, there was a lot going on. The
Lord said okay let me keep that and I started handing this and then I just sat
waiting and I thought he was gonna give me some instruction or he was gonna tell
me something and I just heard the sweetest, sweetest voice saying, hey Dion
I love our partnership. And then I just cried. It was so sweet. I love our
partnership. When the Lord said that to me I was like, I mean it just undone me.
You know, it just undid me rather. So simple question. Father for the next 24
hours I accept the honor of being one with you in all things today. I love our
partnership and he loves his partnership with you. Okay.