This is what will happen when you personalise and speak the word of God over your life on a daily basis; it begins to change what you believe about yourself, and as it changes what you believe, you begin to change. You've got to do it, personalise it, take scriptures, speak them; I'm accepted. Today I Thank You Lord I have acceptance.
See a lot of people don't know how to pray and make their prayers personal. Thank You Lord, I'm accepted in You today. My sins are forgiven. I walk in freedom today! I thank You I can boldly come into your presence today! Now that's just taking scripture and declaring it over my life. Now what happens when you keep doing that is, you begin to change on the inside. You hear your own words, you hear yourself speaking positive, encouraging, life-giving, spirit-filled words, and you get lifted up, and you change. Your inner man changes.
Finally the last thing to do is to place with that - the Bible talks about meditating. Now non-Christian meditation is about emptying yourself until there's a vacuum all kinds of stuff can come into, but Christian meditation always means picturing, imagining, visualising, seeing God's word over and over and over. When we say we learnt our tables by heart, it meant we memorised them by repetition. In Joshua 1, Chapter 8, He said these words that I speak shall be in your mouth, shall not depart our of your mouth He said, but you'll meditate on them day and night to do them, and then you will make your own way prosperous. This is what you need to do. I'll share this in more detail in another thing. I'll just make a focus on it, and show you how to do it. We have done this overseas with large numbers of people hungry for God, and got them meditating in the word of God, and they began to encounter and experience the reality of God. Meditation opens the way for you to begin to experience the reality of God, so meditating. So what do I meditate? The Lord is my shepherd, so I need to picture, and see that as a reality. What would it look like if the Lord was my shepherd?
See for many people [recites speedily in monotone] The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want - it's just a prayer. It's never actually become an experience for you. It's never become your reality. Until it becomes your reality, it's just a prayer in the Bible, a nice prayer. Pray it when you're dying - but what I want to do is pray it now and live by it, see? So I took some time, probably for the best space of six months, praying that prayer. Sometimes I'd go through the whole lot, sometimes just one. Lord, you're my shepherd. The word shepherd is a friend and companion. I'd begin to picture and meditate Him being near to me, very near. If He's a shepherd He's near me, and meditating means you're declaring, you're speaking, and you're picturing what God's word is being true. I imagine what that would feel like, He's my friend, because all I really could imagine and feel was being alone - so time spent with the word of God, confessing it, declaring it and meditating in it, it began to find root in my heart, and I knew it changed one day, because one day I suddenly encountered the experience of God's love for me as a personal friend. I wept and wept when it become that real.
Before that it was a little hard going, I didn't feel a thing. I was doing it because I knew this was somehow going to get me to change on the inside. Afterwards, for about three months afterwards, any time I'd sit with anyone and pray the 23rd Psalm with them, they'd all break down and cry, because what I had experienced of the reality of God started to flow to touch them. Now you have to make the decision, whether you'll accept life at this level in the next year, or whether you will walk with yourself to grow and enlarge in your faith, your capacity, your mind, your way of viewing things, if you'll let the spirit of God and the word of God renew your mind and your inner man. The Bible says don't let the world shape you, and push you down into it's mould, but be totally shifted and changed, so you become quite a different person, by renovating your mind, renovating what you believe, renovating your inner man.