Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.
– – Joshua 1:7-9
What God is doing here is laying out to Joshua His strategy for success. As Joshua takes over leadership from Moses God wants to ensure that Joshua will leader Israel into victory and live a successful and prosperous life.
God Wants You To Be Successful
But before we can look at God’s plan for success in our lives we mush first understand what true success is. The dictionary defines success as:
The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted
So putting this into God’s point of view, we are successful when we acheive what God has desired fulfilling the plan he has for our lives.
I don’t know about you, but I definately want to be successful in God’s eyes, so lets pull that verse in Joshua apart and look at 3 things that we can do to ensure that we are doing all that God has called for us to do.
- Guard Your Heart And Your Tongue
I love the Message version of Proverbs 18:21Words kill, words give life; they’re either poison or fruit—you choose.
Words are powerful. Think about it, God formed the universe with His words, He spoke and light was. This is why He says to Joshua: ‘Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth.’
God wants us to be speaking life into situations, into people and into ourselves. He wants us to confess His promises, His laws and His love. However His promises have to be in us before they can come forth from our mouths. They need to be ingrained into our spirit before we can speak them with authority.
I love Luke 6:45 where it says: ‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.’
How often do you hear someone says something that is hurtful, only to add ‘I was only joking.’ Maybe you have done this yourself. I know I have many times, which is why this verse really hit home with me. Usually when we say these things, they just come out, before we can stop ourselves we have already blurted out this hurtful statement – because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
Knowing this, I decided to make a change. But instead of trying to stop myself from saying these things, I went to the root of the problem – my heart. I had to examine what I was allowing into my heart, and put up walls and set boundaries to stop certain things from influencing my heart.
But stopping things from getting into your heart is only one part of seeing God’s heart flow abundantly out of our heart – and mouth. We need to make sure we are letting God’s word in.
- Meditate On His Word
The way we find ourselves constantly speaking positive statements of faith is by filling our hearts with the promises of God. In the passage in Joshua, God first calls Joshua to continually keep His Word flowing from his mouth, but then gives him the means to do so.meditate on it day and night
I love this, because meditation is so much more than just reading a section of Scipture over and over. Meditation is:
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
The way we see God’s Word constantly flowing from our hear, through our mouth is to be always reflecting on what what we are reading from His Word and what we are hearing from His Spirit. Notice how God doesn’t just say ‘meditate when you get a chance‘ or ‘ meditate once a day‘? He says, ‘meditate DAY and NIGHT‘.
His word, either written or spoken – whatever He has been speaking to you, needs to be in our hearts and on our thoughts, and we need to be reflecting on how His word relates to our life and our situation.
We cannot wait for circumstances to arise before we start looking at what God says about it. Otherwise we will be fighting on the back foot. God’s word needs to be branded on our heart so that when a situation arises we already know exactly what God says about it – and we are able to boldly confess His word to that situation.
- Do What God Says
The final thing that we need to do if we want to walk a successful life that God has called for us to walk is that now we have watched what enters our heart, and made sure that God’s word is constantly on our heart is to start to act on the things that God has said.Once again from the passage in Joshua, straight after God tells Joshua to meditate on His Word day and night, He adds,so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.
This is the reason the first two steps are so important is because, how can we do what God says, if we do not spend time learning what He wants us to do? How can we meditate on the purity of God’s Word if we are not guarding our heart and our tongue?
So let God speak to you as You meditate on His promises. So many people do not know what God wants them to do because they never take the time to just sit in His presence, to meditate on His beauty and promise.
God wants to speak purpose and destiny into your heart – are you putting yourself in a position to hear Him?
Psalms 37:4 says:Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.
A lot of people read this verse and think. ‘Great! If I delight myself in God and dwell in His word, then He will give me what I want – the desires of my heart.‘ But I want to challenge you to look at this verse in a different light.
The way I see this verse is that when we delight ourselves in God, as we spend every moment of our waking lives meditating on Him and his Word, then our heart will align with His heart and He will begin to birth His desires into our heart.
So instead of Him fulfilling ‘our desires’ instead we are aligning ourselves with Him and He is birthing the desire in our heart – His desire.
The reason I see this verse in this light is due to the following verse. Where it says:
Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, And He shall bring it to pass.
If God is has already given us the desires that we have in our heart as most people read verse 4 as saying then what is He bringing to pass in this verse?
However, once you start to see that as you spend time with God mediating on His Word that your selfish, worldly desires are replace with His self-less desires, your human, sinful heart with His pure and spotless heart.
AND THEN…as you commit your ways, your thoughts and your actions to Him, pursuing His desires which have now become your desires you will start to see God turn the impossible into possible. When you walk in His Word you will see the things that God has placed on your heart, the things that you know you could never do on your own, starting to come to fruition.
You start to walk in Godly success, without even intending too. You start to achieve things you could never dream and it all comes down to guarding your tongue and your heart, meditating on God’s Word and then putting into action what He is saying!
I hope this has inspired you to live a life of Godly success! I encourage you to walk in His promises and seeks God’s desires for your life.