Your No Determines Your Destiny

Tonight we brought to a close our series in the 6pm service called NO. I thought I'd share with you one of my thoughts from tonights message.

Before Jesus graduated into ministry... He had to have practiced His NO's. We see this when His parents brought Him to the temple at age 12. A few days into traveling back Jesus' parents realized that he was not with them and so they returned to Jerusalem to frantically search for Him. Finally they found Jesus in the temple astounding the teachers of the law. And as all parents do they freaked out and let Jesus have it. They wanted Jesus to follow their expectation... but He simply explained that He was about His Father's business.
Jesus said no to their expectation and yes to the call of God on His life.

Then just as Jesus is about to launch into ministry the Holy Spirit sends Him into the desert where He fasts for 40 days and the devil comes to tempt Him. 3 times Jesus says NO and quotes Scripture to the devil.

You see it was imperative that Jesus own a strong NO as He entered into ministry as many would try to lay their agenda's and expectations on Jesus. If Jesus was going to follow the call of God on His life He would need to own a strong NO. And its the same with us.

So who sets the agenda and values in your life. Is your life determined by others expectations of you? Or like Jesus, do you own a strong NO so that you can say YES to the call of God for you?

Let me know your thoughts on the subject : )

You Get What You Expect

So on my first day back at work I was whisked away to a one day conference... it wasn't Bill Hybels but Paul De Jong. I had a throughly great time!

I have just come back from a leaders life group. Out of everything we do... this is my favorite time... just getting to hang out and connect with our great leaders.

In our youth department staff meeting I really challenged our team about the power of our expectations. I love this quote that I got to share with them:

Both he who expects great things of others and he who expects little, will receive what he expects. Anon

A test on the power of our expectations was done using 2 sets of 36 rats and 36 students.
The first group of students were handed a rat and a maze. They were told that the rats were 'super-maze' rats. They were told that not only were these rats the very best, but that their parents had been champion maze rats. The students were then given the challenge to train the rats for 30 days to see how fast the rats could get the maze.

The second group of students were also given a rat and a maze each. However, they were told that their rats were 'maze-dumb'. They had always been useless and so were their parents. Although the researchers weren't expecting much the students were to train their rats and see what times they could come up with.

Now the 72 rats were all chosen randomly, and the information that the students were given about the rats was all fictional.
Can you guess after the 30 days what the performance difference was between the 2 sets of rats?

It couldn't really be all that great right... I mean, its not like the students could tell the rats that they were smart or dumb.
Well the result might astound you... the difference in performance was 200%!

The expectations that we hold... are so powerful! Are our expectations lifting people... or dragging them down?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.