I had, I would not say positive attitudes, and now God's called me to go to minister to them! Now clearly you can't do that unless you change your mindset, so the Lord had to help me to shift, and let go the things I'd come into agreement with, and begin to form new things. I said to Him Lord, I don't know what to do. You've opened the door for me. I've got no idea how to connect with a culture that's so different to what I'm used to and I said, how would I do it? He gave me three keys, and I've just followed the three keys He gave me systematically for the last 20 years, and everywhere I go I get favour.
Now you see my thinking was lower than His thinking. He had the answers on how to think, how to behave, how to speak, how to respond, that changed everything around my relationship with the Chinese people. Now I love them, and I was away in Taiwan for about three weeks I suppose, ministering one time, came back and had to go into a chemist to pick up something. There were two people there; there was a young New Zealand boy, there was a young Chinese boy. I felt drawn to the Chinese boy, and I looked at him and I thought man, I know what that draw is. That's the spirit of God drawing me. I said you're from Taiwan aren't you? He said how did you know that? See, because God had done something in my heart to connect me, when I changed how I viewed Chinese people. Think about this.
Some people have got it towards women. There are many men sitting here, and you have got mindsets about women, and that affects your capacity to grow and develop deep and meaningful relationships. There are women here who have mindsets about men, and that affects your ability to enter into and have a long term relationship with men. You're carrying baggage, and if you want your future to be better, to you've got to - well God, what do I do about this? How can I change what's inside me? Most times, when I hear people talking about what the problem is, it's always the other partner. It's a shame really, because you can't do anything about them, you can only do something about yourself, see, because you're not responsible for them. You're responsible for yourself. Oh, gone real quiet now. Those elbows are getting out, I can tell it! [Laughter] I hope you're listening.
Okay and of course expectations are a part of our inner life, what we expect, what we're looking forward to, what we're anticipating. I had a negative outlook, very negative, expected things to go wrong, and to break, and to go wrong for me. Terrible isn't it? It's very, very bad really. Judgements is another thing, you know, where you've actually formed an opinion about someone, about men or women or life or whatever. So these are some of the things that get in our hearts, and we've got to shift, so if you're going to change what's on the inside, you have to identify the issues. You have to know what it is I need to change, and fortunately the Holy Spirit will help us. You ask Him show me what I need to change. Don't go saying: show him what he needs to change, or show her what she needs to change. Show ME what I need to change to grow to another level and enlarge my potential and capacity, see. Show me what I need - He loves to answer that kind of prayer.
Okay then, now what kinds of things He will help you see, and I'll put them in two categories, then I'll show you just a strategy for working on some of these things. One group of areas that affects how we see ourselves, and how we speak, are the issue of past trauma that we've had, painful experiences, so I'll give you three areas; one, broken relationships. If broken relationships are not resolved through forgiveness, the pain that we feel tends to cause us to lock up with certain mindsets, and so you can try and change the mindset, but if you don't deal with the root issue that's feeding it, it doesn't shift easily. So I've found, for example, when I was coming to deal with myself, I had come to the point of a situation of forgiveness of perceived unfairness I'd felt towards my own father, see. But I had to deal with it, in order to break free from the past, to be able to be changed by the word of God to go forward. So many times, to move forward, we have to actually release or identify issues of broken relationships, and release forgiveness. If you don't, you'll lock into mindsets and you're speaking negatively, you speak destruction over your life.