Are you ready to start Lesson 1 of the Poverty Riches and Wealth free class?!
I’m so glad you’ve joined me! Let’s dive right in!
As a reminder, all of the content for this lesson is right here in this email. No need to hop to another website. So grab a cup of coffee and I recommend having your journal ready.
Lesson 1: Facing your lack—Discovering the Roots of your Poverty Mindset
If you’ve been a part of my global community for a while then you’ve likely already heard me talk about a poverty mindset. But my prayer is that in the next three days you’ll experience even greater levels of freedom—beyond what you could ask or imagine!
As we begin this email class, I’m encouraging you to take a good look at your life and allow God to highlight the ways He wants to grow you.
The truth is that you can wish to be free and pray to have a wealth mentality, but until you confront your poor thinking or unhealthy beliefs, you will find yourself a slave to lack and perpetuating poverty in your life.
Freedom always starts with awareness, and you can’t overcome what you refuse to confront!
You may know this story of how God brought me to a place of confronting my own poor thinking, so here’s the short version… In a time when my family needed a financial miracle, a man I didn’t know very well wrote us an extravagant check for $30,000.00!
Can you imagine? How would you respond to a gift that big? You’d think that perhaps you’d celebrate! I did too! However, I found that whenever I saw this man, I would do whatever it took to avoid him because I felt so uncomfortable in his presence!
After going to great lengths to avoid this man, God spoke to me and told me that the reason I kept avoiding him is that I did not feel worthy of his love or generosity. The Lord revealed layer after layer of self-hatred and low self-worth that had plagued me since I was a little boy.
Then He said, “It’s time for you to love yourself the way I love you!”
I was stunned. My wife, Kathy, and I had owned nine businesses over the previous twenty years, and that night I was suddenly aware that I had a poverty mentality that was inoculating me from wealth. Although our businesses almost always performed excellently, my low self-esteem sabotaged our prosperity. Every time we would begin to prosper, I would find some way to siphon off our wealth into some worthless venture.
Perhaps you’re successful in certain areas of your life, and still somehow seem to struggle with the fear of lack in others? Or perhaps you’ve seen counselors, read books and prayed every prayer you can think of in order to see breakthrough in your life, but still get stuck in striving or feel like it could all fall out from underneath you any second? This is the fruit of a soul that is living in poverty.
The great apostle John addressed this dynamic in prayer with those he pastored. He wrote, “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 2).
What’s the takeaway?
The foundation of all prosperity and health is relegated to your soul-man’s prosperity. In other words, your soul’s prosperity determines the level of wealth and health that you experience.
Internal Causes of Poverty
This reminds me of a saying that I heard a long time ago that goes something like this:
“If you need money, don’t ask for money; ask WHY you need money.”
I saw this principle play out in my own life and perhaps you see it in your life too?If I had an external experience, like gaining favor or finances, that I perceived to be better than what I deserved, I would reduce that experience to match the value I had for myself.In other words, my inner world determined my external reality. And if my external reality surpassed what I believed I was worthy of in my inner world, I couldn’t handle it and would sabotage it.
So how do you determine at what level you’re loving yourself?
Here are 6 of the most common signs that you need to work on your soul-health:
- You get jealous easily. Jealousy comes in many forms. Maybe you’re envious of people who have more than you (more favor, more money etc.)… Or perhaps you get jealous when your close friends hang out with other people. Jealousy is a sign that you believe there isn’t enough love to go around.
- The most influential people in your life aren’t good influences. By choosing to surround yourself with unhealthy people who bring out the worst in you (or maybe they just don’t bring out the best in you), is a sign you don’t believe you are worthy of friends who love you well. Or maybe you believe that noble friends are “out of your league.”
- You feel like so many things that are going wrong in your life are outside of your control. If this is the case, you may be struggling with a victim mentality. Victims often feel like life is happening to them instead of being proactive in defining the world around them. If you blame others for your current circumstances and feel like you’re a child in a grown-up world, you may not be aware of the nobility you’re called to walk in.
- You always feel like something is about to go wrong. If you fear the future and have a hard time taking risks, it could be because you haven’t allowed God to fully love the hurting places of your heart that say you’ll always have to take care of yourself.
- You have a hard time receiving help from God and from others. If you don’t know how to ask for help and feel like you have to take care of everything by yourself, you may believe that you are not worthy of being helped. This concept applies to love, too. Again, you’ll only love others as well as you love yourself. And, reciprocally, you’ll only allow others to love you as much as you think you’re worthy of love.
- You reject or sabotage your success and God’s blessings. Whenever God wants to bless you, you may reject, avoid or sabotage His good work in your life. Just as I shared in my personal story above, this is a sign you need to love yourself the way that God loves you.
(Sidebar: If you have extra time and interest on the subject of soul health, I encourage you to take my free Prince and Pauper test HERE. It will give you greater insight into your belief systems on this subject!)
If you have cracks in this foundation and want to grow in soul-health, I’m going to give you some homework at the end of this lesson, so sit tight!
External Causes of Poverty
Poverty can come from a myriad of different places. Some causes are internal, like a mindset or poor belief system as we just talked about, while others are external, like a lack of resources or no education.
Once you have the solid foundation of prosperity in your soul, but still struggle to see abundance in your life, it may be time to take a look at some very practical external causes of poverty.
I’m not talking about blaming others for your circumstances, as I believe many people who don’t have a lot of money are still wealthy because wealth begins from the inside out. We will talk more about that in our future lessons.
Let’s take a look at the many layers of poverty. I put together this diagram as a visual to help you understand the ways that poverty could develop in your life.
Check out the image below and assess your own life as you move through the layers, starting with the inside circle and working your way out.
Jibbooo