So I want to just share a little thing that happens, it happened in my life. It happens in the lives of many people, and I want you to be able to tune in and pick it up, if it's happening in you. In Proverbs 23:7, it says: as a man thinks in his heart, so he is. So if you believe it, it's true. That's how it'll work out for you. If you believe it, then that's how it's going to work out for you - as a man thinks in his heart that's how he is, that's how his life goes. People learn to be helpless or powerless. People learn to be helpless or powerless. It's a phenomena they call 'learned helplessness'. Now let me just explain it, and then I'm going to just give you a few examples of it, and I want you to hear some of these ones which abound everywhere there are Christians. If you don't recognise it, you'll never change it; and I want to show you how God works to change our lives, so we move from being powerless, and being in bondage, and how we come to a place of being faced with Him, commissioning us to go into the world and change it. God wants to shift us from a life in bondage to sin and all kinds of things, into a life which is fully empowered and has victory - but there's a transition point between living in bondage, and beginning to explore all that God has got for you. I want to show you exactly how God takes us through a process to get us there.
If you don't understand the process, you're going to be blaming God, blaming the church, blaming pastors, blaming leaders, blaming your work. You're going to live in the blame game. You'll never be the person God wants you to be, and it won't be His fault; it'll be because you either didn't know what was going on, or you just made bad choices. You've always got a choice, doesn't matter what life dishes up. You've always got a choice. No matter how bad a hand you've got, you've got to choose how you'll play it, instead of looking back and blaming the past. So what they did is, they did an experiment with animals, and what they did was, they set the experiment up so no matter what the animal did, it could never have a good outcome. It didn't matter what it did, it could never have a good outcome, and the animals learned after a little while, you can never win. No matter what you do, you can never win, no matter what you do, it never turns out good. So once they got them so they were thinking that way, then they provided many opportunities for them to be able to escape, or get out, or get out of the situation, and even though it was obvious, they still never took it up, because they had learned: you can never win. No matter what you do, it'll never work. You know what I'm talking about?
Now people have similar things happen to them as well, and so past experiences shape how we believe; so before you come to Christ, you have many beliefs inside you, and they're not necessarily the truth, they're just what you believe. If you believe them, they're going to work out for you, just like you believe. If you believe: life is bad, man, it's really bad - did you notice? If you believe: life is good, man, did you notice how good it is? You get what you believe. Belief or faith, whatever you've got believing in your heart has a magnetic power, it pulls in around you exactly what you believe. If you're pessimistic, isn't it amazing how bad things are, how many negative things are going round. People who are positive, notice how many good things seem to come into their life - it's amazing. You seem to get what you believe for, so now what happens is, past experiences form belief systems, which can limit us. They can limit us, and those things don't necessarily change because you become a Christian. You have to make them change. They limit us.