POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON – The Power of Positive Thinking

POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON - The Power of Positive Thinking

Time Sensitivity: A Sunday before Easter

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Positive thinking has great power. Let us talk about the power of making deposits in your own mind that reap rich rewards. It can only return to you what you deposit within it.

Let me share a story with you. There was once a university professor who went searching for the meaning of life. After several years, he came to a holy man and asked to be enlightened. The holy man invited his visitor into his humble dwelling and began to serve him tea. He filled the man’s cup and then kept on pouring so that tea was soon dripping onto the floor. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. “Stop! It is full. No more will go in.” The holy man said, “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions, preconceptions, and ideas. How can I teach you unless you first empty your cup?”

In Greek mythology, there was a goddess of memory. She was the mother of nine sister goddesses who presided over poetry, the arts, and the sciences.

What if your safety deposit box at your bank was so filled with debris that you could no longer make good deposits, what if there was no room.

What happens when you are praying for healing, you’ve said your positive prayers, and then, in the middle of the night, those old thoughts about the last time you were sick bubble up? You say, “Oh, Lord, I pray this doesn’t happen again.” But the memory is so vivid. It is coming from your memory.

Let us say you are experiencing prosperity. It feels so wonderful; it is so good. Then, you remember so clearly about the last time you experienced lack. You remember what that felt like and how it was to deal with it. Suddenly, you are afraid because the memory is so vivid. It seems so much more powerful than your prayers of faith.

Or, you saw something with your eyes that hurt you a great deal. It was so vivid that you captured it forever like a photograph, and it keeps coming up to haunt you.

The inner mind is like a photographic plate, and yet most of us are carrying around images of lack of some kind.

Let us say you wanted to do something, but you couldn’t at the time. You felt helpless. That is so vivid in you, and it keeps bubbling up. You want it to bubble up once and for all, and come out, so this memory of this perceived failure will have no effect on you any longer.

Imagine, if you would for a moment, a God filled memory bank in your mind. Every time something unexpectedly bubbled up in you, it was beautiful; it fed you, gave you courage, and inspired you.

What is a memory bank? It is an investment place where many individual thoughts should work together for the good of the whole.

A bank is a place that gives loans and pays interest. It is a place you invest in for a bigger return later. A bank is a place you should be able to go to when you’re having a down day, and have it flood you with unbelievable good, joy, and exhilaration.

But many times, our personal bank has gone bust.

Many times, it works in the reverse way – negative memories come up and rob us of our present-moment peace of mind.

The memory mind is a “great gulfs fixed” between your present and the attainment of your highest desire, your good. The memory mind is your sensitive photographic plate of mind. Its true office is to receive impressions from God and to reproduce them upon the canvas of your conscious mind.

Right now, your conscious mind is looking out and taking in the world around you. You are filtering those things back into the realm of your memory bank. Sadly, this is especially true if something happens to you, real, or imagined, that is displeasing. It is almost like you make such an impression of that, that you just chisel a permanent statute to it in your memory bank.

In the Holy person, the memory bank exists to be flooded from God mind, and the daily perceptions of what God gives in life. Therefore, as a positive person, when you are facing something that is displeasing, your memory is filled to the brim with investments of God Mind for your well being.

The memory bank is pivotal. It is designed by our Creator to take images on its sensitive plate of God – to be filled with God’s good, and power. You can cleanse bad memories you have, by continually investing good memories, awareness, and gratitude of God’s good. Your life will take on spiritual power. A person is who he/she thinks, or eats, or reads, but more so a person is what he/she remembers within their own memory bank.

In the classic play “Macbeth,” Shakespeare said: “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow.”

I’m going to ask you a question this morning: Do you have any rooted sorrows in your mind? If you do, you don’t want them there anymore. You do not need them. As a matter of fact, not only do you not need the rooted sorrows, but they are blocking you from God’s good. You have this rooted sorrow between your conscious-awareness mind and God mind.

In our Bible, James 1:7, 8, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

You must go back to your Source, your original depositor, and let God’s clear light flood your whole being with Divine Truth. Your body CAN BE the Temple of the living God. You must lay aside, forever, the idea of serving two masters and must look to the one Master, Christ. Jesus said that He came not to destroy the law, but that the law might be fulfilled through Him. It is the mission of every person born into the world to fulfill the law of Being, to allow God to come through in all phases of her or his mind, perfectly.

The Bible says, “Be subject, therefore, unto God. Draw nigh to God and God will draw nigh to you.”

God thinks. God responds. God is omni-responsive. God never gets to the point where God does not respond to you individually. If you turn to God and ask God to do something, God is going to hear you. Don’t look to appearances of all the debris in there. Ask God to flood your entire memory bank with light. You ask God and God is omni-responsive. God responds and cleansing happens.

Do you remember the story of the prodigal son? Go a little way, and God will come the rest of the way to greet you. You do not have to figure out, in conscious-awareness mind, the formula, the magic words, the keys to open this up. God knows how to cleanse you from inside out.

In Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” the queen says: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Memory bank is supposed to work forward by letting your being with positive thoughts and feelings, to bless you, to comfort and strengthen you, to guide you around pitfalls in life, by helping you to remember your connectedness to the Source.

God is ever ready to pour forth a Divine blessing, quick to respond to the call of the conscious awareness. God is omnipresent, but humans have hedged themselves about by a world of illusion of their own creating, and through its mists, they cannot see God, or catch the light from God. Jesus came to give us conscious control of the intelligence and the power necessary to dispel these mists, where we think we are alone and that we have to do it all alone. Jesus gave us the ability to dispel the fog, just like an early morning fog lifts with the light of the sun. When it lifts we can see, feel, and perceive that God IS WITH US.

There is not one person who is not equipped in this way. Each person has God’s help ready and willing to help at any time. God will lift you up, regenerate your memory bank, and transform the memory bank into the true image and likeness of God. It will happen by your saying you want it, in prayer.

There is an old saying: “Don’t be a single-stringed harp.” Can you imagine if a harp had only one string? You would get tired of that one note pretty quickly. Imagine that conscious mind is only looking in one direction, and yet, worry and fear in the human being do just that.

Imagine memory that only looks in one direction and turns its back on God. We don’t have to. We can find God right where we are.

As the old, bad memories come up, those things that hurt you in the past, what do you do? You don’t buy oats for a dead horse.

It’s just a mist. If you look closely through it, you will see God’s help. And as you see God through the fog and the mist of the old memory that is rising, you have taken away its power once and for all. It will never again have power to disturb you.

In the Bible it says, “A new heart also will I give you.” In this section of the Bible, the heart refers to your memory bank. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.” The whole mind will be raised to a new consciousness. This is what I pray happens now.

I pray, like the Bible says, that you have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.

Let us pray:

Through the action of God, I ask and call forth a whole new spirituality in and through me.

I decree in Jesus Christ’s name that, in every level of my mind, I am being cleansed. I pray my memory bank is being cleansed by God. It is being cleansed through and through with the true light that lighteth every human. It lights the darkness in me now.

God’s light that does not allow any darkness to remain in me.

In Jesus Christ’s name … Amen

PRAYER / MEDITATION___________________

As you rest, think within yourself about your positive faith. You have faith in God. God is your instant, constant, abundant help in every need.

You have faith in God to open ways where to human sense there is no way. You have faith in God to guide, govern, and direct you in Divine directed service.

Rising up in you now is a faith in God to raise your human understanding to Divine higher understanding. You have faith in God. And because God is with you, you have faith in yourself as a child of God, eager to do God’s bidding.