At Sunday School, they were teaching how God created everything, including human beings. Little Johnny, a child in the kindergarten class, seemed especially intent when they told him how Eve was created out of one of Adam’s ribs. Later in the week, Johnny’s mother noticed him lying down as though he were ill, and said, “Johnny what is the matter?” Little Johnny responded, “I have a pain in my side. I think I’m going to have a wife.”

Today’s lesson is the third in a series based on Catherine Ponder’s book Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. And we are defining prosperity as more than money. Being prosperous means having all of the peace, wholeness and abundance you need to fulfill your life’s purpose. Unity minister and author, Eric Butterworth, said “Prosperity is a way of living and thinking, and not just money or things. Poverty is a way of living and thinking, and not just a lack of money or things. Prosperity is not just having things. It is the consciousness that attracts things.”

  1. Two weeks ago we talked about the beliefs we have surrounding prosperity and the fact that God wants us to have all that we need. In fact if we have a desire – we can be pretty sure that that desire is the result of Spirit’s prompting. Our job is to listen and understand that prompting because, after all, ideas are Spiritual tender.
  2. Last week we talked about creating room in our lives through giving and through forgiving. Did anyone join me in creating a vacuum and making room for the blessings to flow in your life, because the Universe abhors a vacuum?
  3. This week we are talking about the creative laws of prosperity.

If God, the creative intelligence of the universe, universal mind, our higher power… wants us to be prosperous, how do we cooperate with Spirit? The first step is to figure out what you want and admit that you desire it.  All creation starts with desire, a wish. “The ancestor of every act, is a desire.” If you don’t know what you desire, today you might want to sit down and spend at least 10 minutes making a list.

I suggest that as you write, you divide things in 3 categories: Write down anything and everything that you want to be, to do and to have. If you are like me, sometimes you don’t know what you want. Then before you spend 10 minutes writing down the things that you want, spend 5 minutes writing down what you don’t want. That might help prompt what you do want. For instance, I don’t want us to have another rainy season where we have leaks in our building. Changing my focus that becomes a desire for a roof and windows that are waterproof. Another instance, I don’t want to be tied to my notes when I give a talk. That translates into a desire or a goal to be able to speak note free. Remember: Only spend about 5 minutes focusing on what you DON’T want. Spend the larger portion of your time focus on what you DO want.

Why? Because according Unity’s co-founder, Charles Fillmore, “What we focus on, grows.” In other words, “What we think about, we bring about.” This is the essence of the Law of Mind Action. After we make these lists of what we want to be, what we want to do, and what we want to have, we need to review our lists and begin to prioritize our desires. We need to select the items we want to do, be or have first. Yes, we can have multiple items manifest in our life, but because of the importance in how we focus and concentrate on our desires, it is best to select those things that are our highest priorities.

The next step is to establish these priorities as our goals. To begin to take them out of the realm of thought and establish them in the manifest physical world we write them down as goals. Remember goals are specific. They can be measured, and they have a date assigned to them. The process of writing our desires down as our divine goals, helps us to clarify them. As we write them down as goals, we translate them into things that we can accomplish with the time we want to accomplish them by. Something as vague as ‘to grow spiritually’ might translate then into these goals like:

  • Spend 30 minutes every evening doing forgiveness work
  • Call 3 people a week, and tell them how and why I appreciate them
  • Write at least 5 things in my gratitude journal every day
  • Attend Sunday Services 3 times a month instead of 2
    • Some of us, because of our belief systems or because of our personality types balk at this step. Some of the reasons, we balk:
      • because we don’t want to limit ourselves
      • we don’t want to be tied to something
      • we don’t want to commit to just this
      • or maybe we don’t know for sure that this is what we really desire

But here’s the truth: If I can’t commit to my goal on paper, there is no way I can commit to that goal in life. Sometimes God sneaks up on us and helps us commit our goal on to paper. We find ourselves writing our resumes, or writing out an application for a job, for college or ministerial school and there it is – our desire is down on paper. It begins that process of moving from the heart, through the mind,  through our fingers and onto the paper.

This is part of the creative process – an easy way to move from an idea, to a goal, to manifestation – from the abstract with no form right into this physical world with lots of form. For those of us that are reluctant to enter this process, the good news is that the next thing we do is begin to live with these goals.

We review them daily, and we can change them – we can adjust them so that they truly do reflect our heart’s desires. As we consider our goals we begin to develop the steps that are required for us to achieve them. By focusing on our goals daily and looking at them and thinking about them, we are placing our order with this creative universal mind we call God. We are co-creating with God.  All of the processes of writing our goals, our mission, and our vision are ways that we invite God’s desire for our highest and best into our lives.

In Do Right with Lou Holtz, coach Holtz proclaims, “I’m a firm believer in goals. Take a good look at me. You’ll notice I stand five feet ten, weigh 152 pounds, wear glasses, speak with a lisp, and have a physique that appears like I’ve been afflicted with beriberi or scurvy most of my life. The only reasons why I can stand up as head football coach at the University of Notre Dame are I have a great wife and I am very goal oriented.” Being chosen to coach the Notre Dame football team was one of the 107 lifetime ambitions Holtz listed on a piece of paper in 1966. Unemployed at the time, Holtz dreamed of dinner at the White House, an appearance on the “Tonight Show,” jumping out of a plane, and other aspirations befitting this over-achiever.

Chuck Givens would agree on the importance of writing down goals. As a kid, he wrote down 181 goals he wanted to achieve in his life. First on his list was writing a song that would hit the top of the Nashville charts. At age 22, his hit song “Hang On Sloopy” earned him enough to start a recording studio. A few weeks later it burned to the ground, yet Givens believed that if he could do it once, he could do it again.

Catherine Ponder says to write a plan and to vision that plan every day. This plan that she is talking about is our roadmap to our goals… it’s the steps we take, and it’s the vision of what it will look like when the goal is met. As we spend time with our goals and picturing them as complete, we draw what we need to complete them to us. As we focus on our goals we begin to actually make the choices and take the actions we need to make our goals a reality.

Henry David Thoreau said the secret of reaching our dreams is to “Keep moving in the direction of our dreams.” The more we work with our goals, our plans, our picture or our script, the more committed we become. The clearer our picture, the stronger our commitment, the greater our intention to achieve our goal, and the more passionate we become. As we spend time with this picture of our goals, the picture gets clearer and clearer. It gets bigger and bigger. It becomes almost real. This investment in our focus reinforces us so that problems that crop up don’t stop us, they become opportunities to prove to ourselves that we can overcome any obstacle in our way.

Slowly but surely our minds are so impressed with the picture that it has to manifest as our reality. All of us know about goal setting and visioning. The business world has certainly latched on to these spiritual principles of creating prosperity. So what could be the problem, if all of our dreams and goals aren’t being manifest? If we aren’t able to move toward a goal, we can ask ourselves these points to ponder:

  • “Is there anything that I am afraid of, that is preventing me from reaching my goal?”
  • As we review our goals we can ask ourselves, “Is this truly my goal for myself – or is it someone else’s goal for me?”
  • Another question we can ask ourselves, “Do I really think it is worthwhile?”

If our dreams and goals aren’t being manifest in our lives, what are we letting get in our way? Here is another Eric Butterworth quote, “The exciting Truth is that God will make us prosperous and successful in all our ways, if we do not make it too hard for Him.” Goal setting and visioning our goals is how we make it easy for God.” Butterworth goes on to say, “Infinite Mind will put ideas into our minds, words in to our mouths, creativity into our hands, boundless opportunities before us, and guiding light on our path. All that is required is that we keep ourselves centered in the creative flow, keep in tune through positive thoughts, and stay responsive through our faith.”

A third step in this creative process is not only spend time each day seeing our goal accomplished, and actively affirming that with God it is becoming a reality, but to keep all of our thoughts positive. To keep looking forward, not backward. To look up, not down. And finally, we have to just trust the process and know that the Universe is responding to our every need.

Why are we talking about how to achieve goals and manifest things in our life? Why are we doing this in our spiritual community – after all this same information is in the business books in just a little different language? Prosperity is truly not about material riches. Prosperity is about being free from worry about what we need – it’s about learning to trust God.
The reason we talk about prosperity is so that we can learn that we can trust God to take care of us. So that we can proceed to spend time on fulfilling our life’s purpose, so that we can be in service to others – all the time knowing the everlasting truth – that we are co-creators with God.

  1. Our spiritual tender is Divine Ideas that flow from the Universal Source of All Knowing.
  2. We make room for the blessings to flow our way.
  3. We turn our thoughts into things by writing them down, setting goals, and working the plan every day.

Remember: Prosperity is not just about material riches. It is about being free from worry about what we need. May it be so for each one of us today and in the days to come.