I wasn’t planning on it in advance, but I registered and signed up to attend the first ever “The Believability School” led by Paul Manwaring & Steve Backlund while my stay in Redding CA. I have never heard Steve Backlund speak and I was just getting to enjoy Paul Manwaring’s teachings. But, having heard Paul’s amazing teaching up close in one of Chad Dedmon’s group’s meeting on Thursday encouraged me to register for this school. But, I didn’t know what I was signing up for.

The believability School.

Steve Backlund and Paul Manwaring

A teacher of hope and joy

Steve begun the whole school with a quote by Francis Frangipane: “Every area in your thinking that glistens with hope in God is an area that is being liberated by Christ.  But any system of thinking that does not have hope, which feels hopeless, is a stronghold which must be pulled down” (Momentum: What God starts, Never Ends. p.91). He shared his stories of struggles and victories as well as the truths and revelations God has revealed to him. He quoted one of my favorite scripture verse, Rom. 15:13, which says, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” He was speaking a message of hope and joy. He was speaking to me and my HOPE Church.

• My hopelessness about a problem is the bigger problem than the problem.
• There is no hopeless circumstances but people who feel hopeless. Once people get true hope, the circumstances cannot stay the same. Someone got to begin to hope.
• We know we have good belief when hope is rising.
• Hope is the confident expectation that good is coming… based upon the character and the promises of God
• Faith needs to go into the soil of hope
• Faith is more specific, while hope sees more options.
• Hope is the beginning point of all changes.
• Our hope level determines our influence levels.
• Big lie: Be transformed by ‘trying harder.’ The truth: Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
• It is impossible to renew your mind and stay not transformed.
• Leaders are brokers of hope.

Steve talked about letting go of the lies that hold me in bondage through laughter. We are joy-impared because we have bad concepts and beliefs about God and ourselves. In His presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). The joy of the Lord is your strength. How often have I let my past circumstances & past experiences call and define who I am? Rather than defining and calling who I am by what God says about me.  God calls me by what He will do and accomplish in me… in the future. When the angel of the Lord came to Gideon who was hiding in a winepress, the angel called him who he was not yet but whe he will be in God. He called  him, “Thou mighty man of valor!” The agreement with my negative past experiences create the biggest strongholds for my life.

Steve pointed out the question God asked Adam in the garden, “Who told you that?” There are so many lies I believe in and the question is, “Who told me that?” Surely not God! I set my heart to agree with what God says about me, my loved ones, my church, my nation and especially who He says that He is.

High level leaders have high level beliefs of the people they lead. Angel would say to me, “You do not know Gideon. You just know the history and the past of Gideon.” I want to know no person according to flesh. I want to see people as God sees them and how God believes in them. What did David have that those 400 misfits of society who gathered around him became mighty men of valor? Prophetic ministry is seeing the treasure and gold in people. It is seeing people as God sees them and calling them forth to encourage and bring life into people. Prophecy is really an encouragement under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. People are just one encouragement away from their breakthroughs in their life. Withholding an encourament really is a kind of punishment. It is so true that every Christian must and should prophesy.

I want to be a great hope-er. I want to carry the anointing of joy which breaks heavy yokes.

Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Don not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord.” Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.”

Jeremiah 1:6-9 (ESV)

This week I borrowed some thoughts from another devotional that I have read and still read, Igniting Faith In 40 Days by Steve and Wendy Backlund (ideas taken directly from this devotional will be in italics). Great read should you ever get a chance to read it, you’ll be deeply impacted.

We know that our words have power and it’s very necessary to use our words to help guide our lives. The person who says “I can” and the person who says “I can’t” are both right. However, it is pride masked as humility that says, “I cannot” or “I am unworthy” when God has said you can and you are worthy.

Now is the time for us to take another look at what we speak, especially when we declare what we think we cannot do. Our words are either a rudder to direct our lives unto God’s prophetic will or a curse that puts fences around our potential. We must believe before we see (not the other way around). One of the main truths we are to believe is Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me!”

Faith is spelled R-I-S-K! We won’t have something just because we say it, but having it demands that we declare it first. Nothing in the kingdom happens without it first being declared. Speak it, then take a risk and do it.

Weightlifters build muscles by pressing against resistance. Faith muscle is increased the same way by pressing against old thought patterns.

Declaration: I renounce every curse I have spoken over my life through declarations of what I thought I could not do. I will not limit God, but will release Him by joining the Apostle Paul’s positive declaration in saying “I CAN!”

Declarations:

• I am a multi-dimensional leader.
• I thrive well in all situations.
• I have incredible ideas and strategies.
• I I can multitask.
• This session is gonna change my life.
• I’ll never be the same again.
• God’s raising me up.
• For something bigger than I know,
• He believes in me
• More than I believe in myself.
• I’m a strong finisher.

• Right now there are no limits on our lives.
• One of the things that separates people of great influence is that they are relentless.
• All of us are like boxers sometimes. We get hit from the side and we go out. But the reality is that every great leader goes through a lot of stuff but it becomes part of their story. It becomes a great part of who they are and how they live.
• I used to be addicted to the anointing. But the Lord said “steve I want you to be addicted to truth, because it’s the truth that sets you free”
• The people around you are not who their past experience says they are.
• The Lord is always training our beliefs.
• I’m one belief away from a tipping point. My beliefs are going to be the overriding factor of my life.
• The people in your life are like your training ground for what to keep your beliefs on.
• Danny says “keep your love on” in the same way, keep your beliefs on.
• One of the greatest things I can do as a leader is keep high beliefs for the people I’m leading because they will rise to the challenge.
• It can be easy to believe for people we don’t know very well and prophecy over them, but we need to be believing in the people we know well too.
• Every time we believe truth our hope increases. I know I’m believing a lot of truth if I have a lot of hope. My hope level is the indicator of whether I’m believing lies or the truth.
• A perspective of hope is the ultimate christian maturity.
• Character is great, but the kingdom of God is not moved foreword by good conduct, it’s move foreword by good beliefs.
• In the old covenant, it was conduct, but now it’s beliefs.
• A lot of christians accidentally pull the old into their now, but instead we need to be pulling the future.
• Romans 12:2 Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, not by trying harder, having new years resolutions or …
• Don’t ask tell me Lord what to do, ask tell me Lord what to believe.
• A lot of us ask when we’ve failed “what did I do wrong?” but we should ask “what did I believe wrong?”
• A lot of us have done the right things but we didn’t have the faith or hope to achieve it.
• If you clean toilets for a living, what if you attached great faith to that? What if you believed that the next person to sit there is going to be healed.
• We do great things by attaching great beliefs to small things.
• Have a plan to believe truth at a higher level.
• Lets laugh at this lie “if you renew your mind, you will not be transformed”. haha
• It’s impossible to renew your mind and not be transformed. I don’t care who you are.
• Renew your mind with truth.
• No limits.
• Renewing your mind isn’t just believing something new in your head it’s about your spirit too. It’s one thing to say “I believe in healing” it’s another thing to say that when you are standing in front of someone in a wheelchair.
• Faith comes by hearing. It’s not enough to just do good things, we want to get these beliefs deeper in our heart. So sometimes I have a declaration that I’ll say multiple times a day for a season so that I get it deep within me.
• I don’t want to have to wait until I have to use my sword to sharpen it.
• The word of God is called a sword for a reason: you have to kill something with it.
• Spend every day sharpening your sword so that when something comes to oppose your belief system, you can destroy it.
• My whole life has been transformed just by believing that I can choose to believe.
• A great revelation is that we can think on purpose.
• Whatever is true, whatever is noble whatever is right, pure, lovely, admirable.. think about such things.
• There are no hopeless circumstances just hopeless people. Once they get hope, they start restoring circumstance.
• I believe in standing in faith for specifics, but I have a bedrock foundation that says, even if this doesn’t work out, there is still more. I may lose this battle but I’ve won the war.
• There are people who will stand in faith for specifics but they don’t have a bedrock of hope and then they get weird. Some people get stuck in grief because they don’t know they still have hope even though something has been taken from them.
• God can make us feel fulfilled even when something comes against us.
• A person of hope believes that they have a lot of options.
• A person of faith might put all their eggs in one basket, a person of hope believes they have a lot of good options.
• The first life changing belief is: there is always a solution.
• I don’t care what’s happened, there is always a solution.
• Something shifts when you believe that.
• The brain will work against you if you are looking for a solution you don’t believe exists. Before you can find a solution, you have to believe that God has one.
• We just have to make God bigger.
• Even looking at the national debt, there is always a solution.
• It doesn’t do much good to pray for something you don’t believe God can do.
• I’ve had God interrupt me and say “you’re praying out of fear not faith”
• Focus on Him until you’ve realized He’s bigger then the problem again.
• A perspective of hope believes you have a lot of options.
• My hopelessness about a problem is a bigger problem than the problem.
• Hope is the confident expectation that good is coming.
• Hope is an overall optimistic perspective about the future based on the goodness and promises of God.
• I ask myself questions when I want to find out what’s going on in myself.
• It’s time for us to stop living from miracle to miracle and start living out of the blessing.
• People who have a successful core value that they will succeed wherever they are have a lot of hope. A prosperous soul is key.
• People who have real money don’t think they are wealthy because they have money, they think have money because they are wealthy.
• When you know that you are successful, the good things that happen to you don’t just look like luck, you know it’s because you have quality.
• This is true in relationship too. Don’t be afraid that your relationships are just luck and if you lose them there isn’t something better. You have great relationships because the aroma of God blows from your life.
• Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will succeed because of what you carry.
• You cannot do what you don’t think you are.
• Sometimes we pray for unity in the church and the Lord came to me one day and said “if we could get unity in you, we’d see revival”
• God says “before you are in the experience of that, believe you are it.”
• Before you are an experienced writer, believe you are a great author.
• You cannot do what you don’t think you are.
• You are great.
• In all areas of life you’re going to get training, your going to learn from amazing people, but the greatest thing I’m going to do is believe that I am what the Lord says I am and I have all that I need in Him.
• We don’t try to make people act like Jesus, we lead them to believe like Jesus. If you are trying to get people to act like Jesus, that’s just a lot of work, but if you are teaching them to believe like Jesus, they will discover it themselves.
• It’s really hard to act pure.
• It’s much better to believe you are pure.
• 2 Corinthians 10:4-5
• We take every thought captive. That’s the phD of spiritual warfare.
• Often times the greatest argument is that our past says more about who we are than God does.
• Gideon thought he was who his past said he was, but the angel came to give him a word (not just to make him feel good) to tell him who he really was.
• One of the greatest natures of prophetic ministry is to speak into their identity.
• It is powerful to say I see you have a powerful healing anointing.
• No limits.
• The prophetic is to break off that argument of our limits.
• Many of the truths God speaks to us are going to be exactly opposite of our feelings. So we are tempted to take out our lists of arguments for why we can’t do what He’s said we are.
• “I’m too old, I’ve failed too many times, I don’t speak well, I don’t have the right corrections, I don’t have enough money, I’m not smart enough…” But those are the lies.
• That’s why I like laughter, it gives us the ability to let go of something to believe the truth.
• It’s really hard to laugh at certain things, we feel like “nope I’m not gonna laugh at that” but the truth is, we can laugh at it.
• Isaiah talks about Jesus in past tense. God sees things as they are, were and have been. The mountains we are facing now, God’s already seen us on top of. Just ask Him to show you what the end will look like.
• We have to put these things in perspective:
• I’m a great leader having a non-great-leader experience.
• I’m an organized person having a disorganized experience.
• I will not let my experience create my beliefs.
• Agreement with negative past experience creates the greatest problems that block us from God.
• Faith comes by hearing.
• Develop new strongholds of faith by making declarations over yourself.
• The most important person I’m sent to preach to is me.
• Your crazy if you don’t talk to yourself.
• I used to believe that if I told myself enough bad news, it would cause me to change. that’s not true. We need to admit things and assess our situation, but I will believer what God believes for myself.
• When you think about the bad, you lose motivation and energy, but when you think about success, that fuels you.
• It’s really important to be thinking about good things.
• Start wherever you have to start, but acknowledge that you have the spirit of God in you and you’ve done something right.
• Lets laugh at this lie “the best way to change yourself is to constantly focus on what you’re doing wrong”
• David focused on his victories over the lion and the bear in order to defeat Goliath.
• In Luke 1 Zachariah was muted because God could not trust him to speak around what I’m doing. He didn’t know how powerful his words were.
• Mute me when I need to be muted. When there is a dream being shared that is something from you and I have doubt, mute me.
• We need to be careful with the things that God has planted in me. I don’t want to abort the dreams He has for me, the words he has in me. I want to be pro-life.

introducing the interns, Levi, Elisabeth and Heidi.

• Every person in this room, you’re a leader. If you think nobody is following you, you’re wrong. There is at least one person following you and it’s you. You lead yourself.
• Luke 16:10 He who is faithful with very little, will also be faithful with much. If you can lead you well, you can lead the masses.
• Sometimes we get lost in the big things, but lets do the little things with greatness. There is a grace to do that now.
• 1 Samuel before the fight, David looks at Goliath and says “I’m gonna cut off your head” but at the time he was not holding a sword. When we go to battle, one of the first things we need to do is declare things before the weapon is in our hand. Our declarations are violent. That Goliath can be a lot of thing, and if you look them in the eye and say “I am going to cut off your head” and God is going to give you a sword.
• Look at the giants in your life and declare “I’m going to cut off your head” and then write down the results, make your victories memorial stones.
• God is going to give you creative solutions today to tackle strongholds where you haven’t seen breakthrough to do things well.
• 2 Corinthians 10:4
• God is going to destroy strongholds in your mind today.

Steve’s teaching on hope and joy is a powerful message that is essential for renewing our mind in the finished work of the cross. He teaches that lies lose their power when we laugh at them. “Heard any good lies lately?” is a commonly asked question and is often followed by a “Let’s just laugh at that.” After getting to hang out with him for a week, I witnessed that his personal life is full of laughter and joy, so when he’s teaching in front of hundreds of people he is truly sharing his life message. “It’s more important to live the message than to give the message,” he said to the team one day. 

In the meetings we ignited hope by prophetically encouraging people and releasing words to them. It was beautiful to see the encouragement and joy radiating from faces by the time each session was over. 

On top of all the amazing hope and encouragement, one morning we held a small healing meeting in our host home. We saw legs grow out (healing back/disc problems), back pain leave, shoulders loosened, and people loved and encouraged. One ladies leg grew out before one of the team members even started praying. No more pain in her back! She also had shortness of breath because of a lung removal. After prayer she said, “I haven’t breathed this deeply in years!” Another lady who had tightness and scoliosis in her lower back was healed. She said that when she sat up straight she felt “something change” in her spine. All the pain and tightness left and she said she felt enormous peace. 

Another testimony written by a team member: “At last night’s meeting a young lady who seriously injured her spine in a severe car accident was healed by Jesus. As the few gathered around her laughed at the ‘S’ shape in her spine and the pain, she felt two hands go inside her back push the spine into alignment. As she checked her spine with her own fingers she could feel perfect straightness and the pain left.” God is so good.

During this trip a question arose in me: when I pray, what about when I can’t measure it? When a scale of pain level on 1-10 doesn’t work? The truth is thatit’s impossible to pray and not have something happen. Something ALWAYS happens whether we can measure it or not. Our prayers are bigger than we know. I still believe God is Healer, God is Deliverer, God is Comforter, when I don’t see a result right then. My joy comes from God’s nature, not my circumstances or experiences. 

The most stretching yet fun experience on this trip for me was when Steve asked us to give prophetic words to people in the congregations. This was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to give a prophetic word to one person in front of 250 people….let alone in front of 20 people. Through this experience, I learned how to rest in His confidence in me to speak in front of that many people. “Without God I can do nothing” (John 15:5) but “with Him I can do all things…” (Phil.4:13). In Greek the words “all things” means “all things.”

At first this task to speak prophetically in front of so many people, and that quickly and concisely, seemed so scary — such is the nature of risk. But I discovered that just stepping over the line and going for it wholeheartedly removed a place for fear to tell me what to do. Ministry is simply an overflow of the heart, so when you just want to love people, risky things become the very natural and fun. By the end of the trip I couldn’t wait to get the microphone.  

Lastly, what most impacted me on this trip was being trusted and believed in by Steve and the team. Steve and our whole team took time to get to know each other and personally encourage and affirm each other every day, just like the Father does. “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres, and never fails.”  Our hearts know when they are being trusted with something. We have been trusted with the presence of God, and intimacy with Him creates passageways to release the Kingdom that’s inside of us. Being trusted and being believed in by our leaders empowers us to actually live from the heart. And living from the heart is the best place to be. 

Many people, myself included, think that our experiences make us who we are. We can’t deny that our experiences have effected us for better and sometimes for worse. Sometimes we go through things that aren’t in our control. Sometimes we cause the things we go through. My point is that to believe that our experiences make us WHO we are means that we are living a life controlled by our experiences thus we don’t have any power to become who we want to be, ultimately.

The truth is that our identity creates our experiences. Why is it that two people can go through an almost identical experience but come out being affected two completely different ways? It’s because our experiences only expose what our character is. Our identity will continue to create experiences that reinforce what is already in us. If two people get molested as children and one grows up to be a child molester and the other builds a foundation for victims of child molestation it shows the same experience created two separate identities that those two people had no control in making (according to our logic). There has to be a foundation of beliefs that made one person a facilitator of the cruel experience and the other a deterrent to the cruel experience.

Here is the punch line: Your identity is incomplete if you don’t seek Jesus. How can you fully know who you are without knowing your creator? You can’t. Your identity creates your experience (as in whole lifetime experience). Naturally, you can see the traits you get from your parents to know who you are; likewise you need to know the traits you get from God to know who you are. The more you know Jesus the more you know yourself.

If you go through an experience that tries to teach you that you are not loved and you build your identity from that lie then your experience makes you believe you are unworthy of love. But when when you know your identity as a loved child of God you create experiences of love. And if an experience of worthlessness befalls you you’ll be able get through still knowing your foundation of love is true and the worthlessness experience is a lie, thus not who you are.

We must base our identity on a solid foundation. Christ is that solid foundation and our identity is nothing but goodness because we were created in God’s image.

LIVING INSIDE-OUT / DECLARATIONS

Hey Guys,

Today is the first day of lent, although we are not bound to fasting, it is good to join in with other Christians around the country (and world) and give something back to God that we might otherwise put in front of him.

Personally I really love watching movies and TV series, so for lent, I will be giving these things up for the next 40 days and using the time I would otherwise spend watching these things to focus on God.

In addition to fasting something, I will also be making daily declarations over my life, I will explain declarations and their importance in a moment, however I just want to discuss something briefly about living inside out…

It is our mission at Bath City Church to live inside-out, but what does this mean? This basically means storing the things of Heaven up in our internal worlds and living from this reality, seeing Heaven manifest in the natural world around us, literally seeing Heaven invade Earth and the impossibilities of life bend their knee at the Name Jesus.

What is our internal world? Essentially, it is the set of core values, beliefs and assumptions we use to interpret the world around us. The problem is we were born into a society and culture that is built on lies, unconsciously in our every day lives we are drawing conclusions about how the world works based on this society that we were born into, these assumptions have therefore become our (false) mindets as to who we are, who other people are and about the meaning of our lives.

In order to develop Heavenly mindsets in our core, we need to break off false mindsets, to do this we need to make declarations into our lives, if we hear ourselves say something enough times we will begin to believe these things, essentially it’s a bit of biblical brainwashing, but that’s ok because this is what Romans 12:2 (NIV) says:

“2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

So if you’re willing I invite you to speak the below 10 declarions into your lives daily for the next 40 days because there is power in speaking the written word of God, this is made clear in Job 22:28 (KJV);

“You shall also decree a thing, and it shall be established for you, and the light shall shine upon your ways.”

The Lord puts it plainly like this in Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV);

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Our part in making a declaration is to align our value system with the Lord’s, and to speak it out.

When we make a decree over certain areas in our lives, we are putting a mark, or painting a target on those areas and inviting God to come into them.

The declared word invites God in, nothing happens in the Kingdom until first there is a declaration, when we boldly decree God’s word into situations, it points to that situation and causes God to say ‘Amen’.

Our words become a doorway into situations for God to enter into, for the Kingdom of Heaven to come and invade, when we make declarations over them that are decrees of His word, we are coming into agreement with the good plans the Lord has for us, to prosper us not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future.

Below are 10 foundational declarations I introduced to some of you back in January, as a DG it would be great to do this together and share testimonies about how God has used the changing of our mindsets to transform our lives for His good.

[sourced from Steve Backlund]

1. My prayers are powerful and effective (2 Corinthians 5:21; James 5:16b).

2. God richly supplies all my needs (Philippians 4:19).

3. I am dead to sin and have a victorious DNA in me (Romans 6:11; Romans 5:17).

4. I walk in ever-increasing health (Isaiah 53:3-5; Psalm 103:1-5).

5. I live under a supernatural protection (Psalm 91, Hebrews 8:6).

6. I prosper in all my relationships (Luke 2:52).

7. I consistently bring God encounters to other people (Mark 16:17,18; Acts 3:6).

8. In Jesus, I am 100% loved and worthy to experience all of God’s blessings (Colossians 1:12-15).

9. Each of my family members is wonderfully blessed and radically loves Jesus (Acts 16:30, 31).

10. I uproariously laugh when I hear a lie from the devil (Psalm 2:2-4).

I look forward to seeing you all soon, be blessed

Dan

But before going to bed, I’d just read several pages from Steve Backlund’s book, Victorious Mindsets.

So while I’m lying here thinking about the obstacles still in my way, the thought suddenly occurred to me that that is exactly what Satan wants me to think. He wants me to discount the progress I’ve made. He wants me to believe that nobody could possibly understand what I’m going through. He wants me to believe that I’m a failure and can never change.

And I can assume that there’s a fairly good chance that none of that is true simply because my enemy wants me to believe it. In fact, some things that I thought hadn’t changed may actually be taken care of and only appeared to still be present because of Satan’s lies.

I know a big part of this Shabar integration process is learning to change my thinking. I think maybe I just got a lesson in how that works.