“God’s kingdom is like seed thrown on a field by a man who then goes to bed and forgets about it. The seed sprouts and grows—he has no idea how…When the grain is fully formed, he reaps—harvest time!” Mark 4:26-29 (MSG) Are some people just plain lucky? Some business leaders always seem to meet the right people at the perfect time to solve their staffing problems. Other people seem to have all the relationship luck. The first person they meet is “Mr. or Mrs. Right.” How could they be so lucky? Actually, I don’t believe in luck. In our verses today, Jesus teaches us how things really work.  You have pictures in your heart about how the world works. Some of those pictures came from …

The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure [of virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you—and more [besides] will be given to you who hear. Mark 4:24 (AMPC) I’ll never forget a lesson I learned from a friend who was struggling with a major health crisis. He was claiming God’s promises for health and doing everything else he knew to do, but fear was beginning to attack his mind because nothing seemed to be working. As we were chatting during one particular visit, I suggested that it might be time for him to get back into God’s Word. He assured me that he had every healing scripture memorized and he spoke them over his life …

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you were a listener when you’re anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! James 1:22 (MSG) When you read the Bible or Christian books or you listen to teaching, you sometimes get “aha” moments. Suddenly it becomes clear that you’ve been handling something the wrong way or neglecting to do something that would make a world of difference in your life. But when this happens, it’s not the revelation that changes your world. You need to begin to act differently if you want that revelation to do something in your life. When you learn something new but don’t act on it, James 1:23-24 compares this to seeing yourself …

“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” Genesis 8:22 (NKJV) Nothing in life has been designed to plateau. God created things to multiply and increase. He calls this principal the law of seedtime and harvest, which will always be in effect. Take an apple, for example. One apple can have about five to ten seeds in it. Each seed has the potential to grow a tree, and each tree has the potential to produce thousands of apples in its lifetime. If you were to count the number of seeds produced by each tree, they would number into the tens of thousands. And each seed is capable of producing another tree, which produces …

For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. Matthew 12:34 (NLT) Do you limit your future with small thinking? Yesterday we read Mark 4:21, which talks about the foolishness of hiding a lamp under a bed. It can’t illuminate the room if it’s covered. It needs to be on a lampstand. In the same way, God’s Word has the ability to shed light on your life, but it can’t do that when it stays on the pages of your Bible, hidden in a drawer. It has to be brought up into your mind before it can do its work on your heart beliefs and really make a difference in your life. When you hold onto beliefs that don’t line up with God’s Word, …