The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (3 page)

Assassinate Negativity

As an ordained minister and an entrepreneur, I have seen many people chasing success, trying to out-earn their peers and reach their goals and dreams in life. However, success has eluded majority of these people. The major problem for most of these people is that they delude themselves into believing that success will approach them without the audacity of God’s grace and their ability to strategically think and implement these hard-work-out-thoughts and powerful God given and Holy-Spirit driven ideas into action. Being proactive provides you a new horizon for earning power and the ability to undertake purpose driven tasks. The ability to doubt or disbelieve in yourself, neglecting to study and investigate success, being inpatient, and having negative attitude or mindset towards yourself, your set goal or towards others are key predictors of failure. That is why I want you to understand this: You cannot attain success or live a positive-driven life and/or have a positive outlook to life with a negative attitude or mindset within.

My major reason for saying that you learn to assassinate negativity and slay urgent but not- important things that yearns for your attention by all means is that you will never climb up in life unless you do so. Negativity will only take away from you, it will not add up anything positive to you if your dream is to live your best life now. It is in our minds that every action we exhibit takes their roots. Every attitude that hatches our faith, our perspectives and perceptions are formulated in our mind. They determine the quality control of or the products of our everyday lives both personally and professionally. The power to do, to excel and to win new levels of favors and victories when carefully branded in our minds keep us on track. It helps us to become higher achievers and performers. When the products of our thoughts are manufactured in the factory, powered by the audacity of God’s grace, God begins to perform the impossible and pushes us over to the top. That way, we become fruitful and finish rich too.

What Works For My Mind is Grace

Excitedly for me, the audacity of God’s grace is powerful enough to transform our minds and gives us a success warrant to live our best life now when fully conceived or embraced. The audacity of God’s grace can remake you and facilitate your ability to live your best life now. It can give you that direction you have sought for far too long, and yes—it changes lives, promote holistic development, and most importantly, it guarantees prosperity. But how can you experience what you don’t believe? It all begins with your mind to believe in the tenacity of God’s grace, and understand that the grace of God has every tool your lives’ success will depend on. This is why you must automate your mind to work success for you.

Think Successfully

While poor people and majority of the middle class think of “survival,” how to survive life now, how to meet up with the next month rent, the millionaires do not just think about or concentrate on what is before them now—today, they however think and plan in decades. How successful are you performing in the areas of your everyday life you deem to be the most important to you? To succeed, you need to strategically plan for now and what is next. I believe strongly that your ability to live your best life now is a product of how you planned yesterday. That yesterday plan is what makes up the next big, rewarding, and beautiful too. How much have you invested in the audacity of God’s grace to develop yourself, guide you and give you the success warrant—the ability to think successfully? Are you barely surviving or struggling? Are you living from pay check to pay check or living your life’s goals and dreams? I believe that what you believe and how you think yesterday has much to do with how you live now. Think Success and reap prosperity. You are a person with power and immense influence. You can make a lot of wonderful things happen around you and others.

Don’t Settle For Mediocrity

When Jesus taught his followers how to pray in the Christian Scriptures according to the 11
th
chapter of Luke (11:3 NLT), Jesus asked God to “give us each day, the food we need, some other versions says our daily bread.” By implication, Jesus was not trying to teach us how to keep on living in mediocrity, neither was the focal point of his teaching to stop us from strategically planning our lives now and the next. Jesus was rather teaching us the secret to higher living: to raise our expectations higher each day, to avoid mediocrity and to believe God that yes—by his audacious grace, God has the capacity to provide us with opportunities and daily life-necessities to help us live well and become successful, since men and women will not depend or live on food (bread) alone, but by believing and depending on the power of God’s every promised word (Matthew 4:4). The idea included daily overcoming temptations that could scuttle our destinies and asking God for the forgiveness of our sins and the sins others commit against us. This meant that those aspiring for a higher calling and who wants to remain relevant in solving some of world’s or human problems by becoming greater achievers must slay bitterness, for bitterness is the birthing place of mediocrity. The reason is this: an unforgiven person is a bitter person.

“Bitterness is the birthing place of mediocrity”

Such individual will not think or link success, rather they are programmed to think evil against others. When you cannot think good of other people, how do you expect good things to happen to you? A bitter person is unfulfilled and cannot function maximally. The model of prayer Jesus taught his followers here included that we ask God for unfailing provision of our material needs and opportunities that brighten our daily lives and that of others. These opportunities translate into the decoration of our daily lives with success and material blessings continuously. This is why Jesus poured his spirit in our minds if we believe. It is when we forgive each other that God forgives us. When we are forgiven, the Spirit of God will have access to our minds. It is when we teach our minds to refuse to be bitter that our minds become healthy in the power of God’s Spirit who enables us, to become productive and live for significance.

You Can Live For Significance

When we refuse to live in bitterness, our mind is able to function optimally. As it’s the case, one of the primary assignments of the Holy Spirit is to give us the ability to think successfully. This is why the enemy is principally interested in your mind in order to remote control your thoughts and actions to smallness. The good news is this: if you give your mind and your thoughts to the leadership of God’s grace, your life will remain beautifully powerful and influential. This is how you are able to live a life of significance. Those who live for significance make peoples’ day. They add fun and meaning to life. An individual who live for significance is not selfish. Such a person is unafraid of new challenges life and circumstances bring their way. A person who lives for significance is driven by set goals. The end product is greater achievements and accomplishments that brighten lives. This is why most people that I know who live for significance experience real joy. They are happier, wealthier; more successful, fulfilled and fun-filled too. I believe that you can live for significance by living with a vision that incorporate the well doing of others. It was Winston Churchill who once noted that, the moments we make our life the center of all lives, human and divine relationships are destroyed. Building a vision that incorporates others and refusing to live in bitterness will aid you to live for significance. This is why everyone who intends to live their best life now must resolve to do something every single day that moves them towards their major life goals because goals are like the fuel in the furnace of achievement.

Things Can Change

After spending a number of years in school through formal education, I thought I had reached success when I gained entrance into a career pathway. I was in the graduate school, my ‘now’ and future looked bright by my standards then, and with just less than one quarter away to the completion of one, out of my two Master’s degrees. It was about this time, in the winter of 2007 that my life was hit with such an unprecedented tragedy. Before this time, life was fun. My children were doing well. My wife’s nursing career blossomed. I had greater career prospects for upward mobility as I was completing that graduate program.

It was in Loma Linda University Medical Center in the earlier part of 2008, after a marathon of hospital admissions and re-admissions and medical procedures that begun from Park View Hospital in Riverside to the University of California Irvin Medical Center in Orange County during the early morning hours of January 8, 2007 that God revealed the audacity of his grace to me. However, it was not until after a surgery, performed by a renowned Nigerian-born physician, Dr. Okechukwu Ojogho, [the then Surgeon-in-chief of the transplant department of Loma Linda University Medical Center] which lasted for almost 12-hours in the April of 2008 that my life was changed forever. This health crisis came with a whooping health-related price-tag of almost $300,000.00 before, during and after the surgery. Beginning from the winter of 2007, I realized how fragile life could be, and the efficacy and inexplicability of the grace that restores and works wonders too! This was how things changed about my life. It was about this time that it dawn on me that we too often delimit the potentialities of God’s grace as well as his restorative power which is so powerful, and what God can accomplish in us when we believe.

I Was Working Because I Had to

About this time, my wife and I had a combined income of about $100,000 annually. We had almost no savings here or there. As my health conditioned worsened, I lost my ability to work and my ministry too, leaving my wife, a registered nurse to take two jobs and disproportionately carry the financial burden of our young family. All along, we had great ideas, business strategies and plans we have written and saved in our personal computer—the computer I have described to my numerous audiences as the “STUPID Computer” with the thought of setting them up “someday” (STUPID here is my acronym for—Standardized Timely Utility Processing Intelligent Department). It was this STUPID computer that featured my very first official business plan that I wrote myself and some, my wife, which has become part of our success story. With my health failing me steadily by the day and stress being the biggest trigger that causes my life to fall apart, I knew we had to set up a business that will work for my life, not something that I will have to work for.

For a long time I had dreamt of waking up in the morning and going to work because I wanted to, not because I had to. The reason is this: If you got out of bed today and went to work because failure to do so will equal to your dismissal, I perceive that you have two major problems you may need to resolve at some point in your life. First, money is significantly in control of your life, not you in control of money. The second problem is this: your work as well as your boss or organization that employed you is significantly in charge of the quality control of your everyday life and what happens to your overall well-being and financial velocity.

You Were Created to Control Money

The fact is that God created you in ways that your needs for money will be limited. That was God’s original plan for you. You were created to control material resources—money. Work was something to do to leisurely avoid unnecessary laziness and be productive. In order words, you were created to be the one controlling money and not money controlling your life. As a new immigrant to the United States who barely has spent five years in the US then, I recall that I was sparse with funds to set up a business—at best I thought. Just like every other person wanting to start a business, I mistakenly thought that people that own small businesses have to first have a perfect credit score and successfully secure a good big business loan or gather a handsome amount of money to venture into the world of business. But that whole idea was wrong!

The reason is this:

“It takes a vigilant person with a vision to start small and yet dream big to succeed in the world of entrepreneurship.”

The key thing is to have the will and determination, doing your market research well by assessing the industry of choice and scheduling your priorities by developing yourself. What you need to understand is that money always goes to developed people. When you develop yourself, a line of product, or a good business that is in demand, people will look out for you and pay you for your innovation or for your services. This is the magic behind the success of major business tycoons. This is also mostly true for many start-up business men and women, for it is a proven way to climb up in the ladder of success. Your ability to create wealth and control money lies in equipping yourself by investigating the success of the chosen business field that you want to venture into; plus a lot of exuberant praises to God—thanking him in advance for the power of his promised word of your success, and praying steadily to God for wisdom to start even with the littlest funds—this I will confirm later. Is this not one of the reasons why the Apostle Paul encouraged his audience according to the fourth chapter of Philippians (4:6 NLT) where he said: “Don’t worry about anything; instead pray about everything; Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he will do in advance.” Afterwards, isn’t that what the audacity of God’s grace is about; to extraordinarily make people something from absolutely nothing?

Investigate Success & Develop Yourself

Many years ago, I came to the United States with nothing much in my wallet than hope. I came with my young family as an international student with just a little over $250.00 left in my wallet after I had paid my first quarter tuition and fees [about $4000.00 something U.S. Dollars] for the graduate school from Nigeria. The good thing is that I came with loads of hope that God, through his grace will grant me the ability to succeed and do exploits. How amazing? When I arrived in the U.S., I had no mentors to look up to, so I decided from that Cold Fall in California to be my own mentor. At the first few months of my arrival to the United States, I was flabbergasted with the level of advancement that I saw in commerce and industry. At first, I hissed. I was overwhelmed. I was a little intimidated. However, I quickly reminded myself that a person on a mission must clearly reconcile their goal. For a goal-keeper or decision maker without a deadline will have no urgency to keep moving forward. So as Martin Luther King Jr. will say I reminded myself that: “If you can’t fly then run. If you can’t run then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”