WHAT AM I MISSING?

Let’s have a great conversation… Well, sort of one sided but you can totally comment below!! If you haven’t heard yet, we have a little news! We recently became an Amazon International Bestseller with a new book called Creating Your Best Life: Discover Your God Given Potential. I am beyond excited as it has been a long journey of 14 months to get to where we are… but really the bigger story is I partnered on this book with a mentor, friend, and business partner, Bill Walton. It started as his book and it has been in the world for about 25 years.

God’s been on him to write this book and the origins of it. It was an honor for me to come alongside him and bring to life this book and help with the writing and bringing it all together.

We came into partnership right before Covid. And so we wrote this book during Covid, I don’t know what you did during that time, but I am pretty excited. We just launched it and it was a bestseller in seven different countries and it blew me away. We are thrilled to get the message out there, but let me start with this journey and how it all started 25 years ago for Bill.

And today, I’m going to specifically speak to Christian entrepreneurs, Christian business owners… if you are not in that category, trust me, you’re still going to get something out of this, so hang in with us! So here’s the question:

You’ll be able to read Bill’s story in the book, which you can totally get from Amazon. I’ll tell you something else, an opportunity for you at the end. Bill was doing many of the things many of you are doing: reading your Bible, going to church, praying, seeking God. You know helping old ladies cross the street, holding doors open for people… like why isn’t God blessing me? Why isn’t it working out? WHAT AM I MISSING?

If you’ve asked that question and feel like you’ve been doing all the things, can I just tell you that you are not alone, because every successful entrepreneur I know has had that moment. They’ve ALL wondered. What I am going to share with you today might help with some potential answers to that question. And while I could share Bill’s stories with you… I can also share some of my own because I have traveled that same journey and that’s why it was such a great partnership alignment for us to come together.

For my story, I was asking that question when I had been a pastor for about 16 or 17 years. I love people, love doing the work of God in ministry, love Jesus and I still work at the same church. But even so everything wasn’t working out quite the way I thought it would. I was not where I thought I would be; financially and otherwise. And we hit a rough spot… we weren’t putting it up on a billboard so it might be news to some of you. We went through a foreclosure… not once but twice. There was also a morning where I went outside and my car wasn’t there where I parked it the night before. And as I looked closer I could see the scrap marks on the driveway where the repossession tow truck had taken it out of my driveway.

It was a low point. And I have got to tell you, I might not have prayed the same way that Bill did, but the same question was there, “What am I missing God? Come on, I’m doing what you told me to do, I’m doing what they said I was supposed to do and it’s just not working?!?” And so I started the journey forward because I came to a place of desperation.

And some of you might be in that place of desperation, but some of the best things came out of that place of desperation. Instead you need to start asking yourself, “what can I learn from this? God, what are you teaching me?” And then once you know, get busy doing whatever God told you to do. And that’s what started this journey for me. I started asking new questions, having new conversations with people, doing some things differently, and in chapter 1 of this book (Creating Your Best Life: Discover Your God Given Potential), I’ll just give you a few things that we hit that were 100% part of my journey as well.

You Have the Keys!

God has given you the keys!

Matthew 16:19 AMP

I will give you the keys (authority) of the kingdom of heaven;

and whatever you bind [forbid, declare to be improper and unlawful] on earth will have [already] been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose [permit, declare lawful] on earth will have [already] been loosed in heaven.”

You have the keys, God gave them to you and me as Christ followers. When we were born again, He gave us the keys to the kingdom. He gave us authority and access but sometimes we’re just not using them. My daughter is going to be 16 next year and there’s going to come a moment when she is going to ask me for the keys to the car and I will throw the keys to her. But if I give her the keys and she doesn’t put them in the car, put it into gear and hit the accelerator… that car and those keys are going to be useless to her. And if you are wondering what you might be missing…

Maybe you haven’t been using the keys that God has given to you… you haven’t been binding, you haven’t been taking authority over situations, you haven’t been speaking and creating the life that you want to create.

Living on the Offensive

We were not created to live on the defense. I remember playing basketball for a whole lot of years. It was fun in high school, winning some championships. The games where we played the worst we were playing not to lose… we would get on the defensive, we got scared we might mess up our perfect record, we would get scared of losing the lead.

But if you look at the Bible in Ephesians 6, it says, “Put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.”

Here’s the thing you and I do not put on the armor to be on the defensive, we put on the armor to go on the offence; to pursue, to overtake, to step into everything that God said you could have. If we are here sitting on the defensive and saything that the devil doesn’t hurt me, doesn’t take my business, and doesn’t take my money… you’ve already lost. Get on the offensive because you’ve got authority, you’ve got power and that is the same power that raised Jesus from the grave inside of YOU.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH IT? iT IS TIME TO FO ON THE OFFENCE and activate the creative mind that God has given you. It’s time to ask God, how are you going to create another stream of income? Alright, God, how are you going to accelerate the elimination of that debt? God, how are you going to use me to impact more? Truthfully God, you are for me, who can be against me.

It is time to go on the offense.

You Have to Do Your Part

This is the biggest thing I was missing by far. I wasn’t doing my part. God isn’t going to just drop the blessing out of heaven and not have you do anything. Just think, if God’s will automatically happened without any responsibility on our part, we would not have to pray for it. Ephesians Four has some things to say about this, pray for God’s will to be done, the answer is that God’s will being done thrives upon us doing our part. I’m paraphrasing but the point is there. He created many: apostles, teachers, you and I to take our part and do it. Our part is bigger than you think. The things I did… I continued to work at the church and then pray to God to drop money out of here and there and multiply it. Like there wasn’t anything to multiply it in my bank account… that wasn’t going to fully change it. I needed to do my part. I was in the red and here’s what changed. I started to do my part, I joined a mastermind, got some coaching, started reading books, diving into business and personal development. I started to devour things that would build me up, grow me, activate that creative imagination, and get me thinning on the offensive side of things.

At the end of that first year, I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife at a restaurant and I asked her what was the highlight of the year. She looked back and she said, “Watching you change, you’re not the same person you were a year ago. You’re a totally different person” and a little bit later, she said, “ Mark, what changed was you went from talking about it to doing it.”

She was right, I started to do my part. And listen I love you, I want you to succeed, I believe that there is greatness on the inside of you but some of you, right now, you’re not doing your part. And some of you, Christians, are not praying and you’re using the excuse to neglect the part that God has given you to do. He is not going to make your business prosper without you doing YOUR PART. He is not going to get rid of your debt without you doing YOUR PART. He’s not going to heal your marriage without you doing YOUR PART. He is not going to ZAP you and you are not going to lose 30 pounds, you have got to do the WORK: YOUR PART.

There are supernatural interventions from God, where He will intervene and do it. But the norm in the Bible is when God does a miracle, He gives us a part for us to do in cooperation with Him. And so believers if you are reading this and you are wondering what might be missing… you’re not doing what God asks you to do. The same way I wasn’t and I was wallowing in my misery and blaming it on other people. Here’s what you have got to do, you have got to TAKE BACK YOUR POWER and realize that you have the KEYS of the KINGDOM, and live your life in the offense. And say, all right, God, what’s my part?

And when you get those three working, you’re going to be able to do something that I think is really important, and this book equips you to do that: CREATE YOUR BEST LIFE. Not create a mediocre life, not settle for what you have currently for, but to create your best life so that you can leverage your life for God’s glory.

My mission in life is to make Jesus famous, everything that I do is to elevate Him, not me. We didn’t try to write this book so we could have a name. We wrote this book so that people could tap into their God-given potential and become everything that God designed them to be. That’s my prayer for you. I hope that this helped you to see some things differently and to have a new perspective. That’s what our prayer is with this book.

This is where you get off this and you should go out there and give your greatness to the world because somebody needs what is on the inside of you. So go out there and give it away. I love you guys and have an awesome week!!

I almost forgot, I wanted to tell you this week… we have some limited first edition book copies and we are getting ready to have the final version printed with an international bestseller stamp on it!! But we’ve got these… and we’ve got 100 copies signed by both Bill and I. This promotion also has the opportunity to get the digital course and some other opportunities!! Click this link to get your copy of the first limited edition signed by both authors!!