I invite you to turn within, relax your physical body and allow your mind to begin drifting away from past thoughts and opinions of who you think you are. Now open your mind and heart to all the possibilities open to you when you begin to live in the awareness that you are created in the image and likeness of God. As an expression of God, you can move beyond any failure that you have ever had in your lifetime. Turn to God in prayer and ask God for a course correction and you will receive the guidance you need to transform your life, along with the incredible comfort of God.

You are a child of the living God.  You have within you, the all-creating power of the Christ. This power radiates through you to bless all you contact. Your life is God-life. You are filled with strength and courage. You know, without a doubt that God is with you, within you and living through you. You are not anxious about anything for you know that “It is not I, but God that is working through me.”

In this time of prayer with others of like mind, you experience a peace and a sense of well-being that comes from the Christ core of your being. This feeling will stay with you all the hours of this week and give you the power to climb higher in Christ Consciousness and in life. In everyday and in every way, you will express more of the qualities of God that you have ever expressed in the past.

Let the words that I now speak to close our time of prayer be your words. Slowly speak them after me, with all the strength of your heart.

“I know that the grace of God is working in me and in everyone.  I know that the grace of God is alive in all of us and is our assurance of all good things.  In the name and nature of the Christ we give thanks.  Amen.”


Today we’re talking about thoughts and how they influence our prosperity and success. This is a mini success seminar intended to give each of us new, prospering ideas.

Have you ever known someone who felt that they failed at something important to them? Someone who felt that failure so intensely that they felt damaged to the core of their being and so broken that they didn’t know how to go forward from that failure or even if they could survive it? Perhaps you’ve even had an experience like this.   Sometimes we try something, and it just doesn’t work and rather than praying and picking ourselves up to try again we say, “I’ve done that before and it didn’t work, and I promised myself that I’d never do that again.”  This is using our mind energy in a way that is called pessimism.

Helen Keller had disabilities that made her life very difficult.  Being deaf and blind from infancy, she had every reason to be a pessimist.  But we don’t know about her because she was a pessimist do, we?  We know about her because she was an over comer who played a leading role in most of the significant political, social, and cultural movements of the 20th century. Throughout her lifetime (1880-1968) she worked to improve the lives of people who were blind and deaf.  Helen’s approach to life can be summed up by her advice to a 5-year-old blind child in 1932: “Never bend your head.  Always hold it high.  Look the world straight in the face.” I’ve put something she said about pessimism on your program today. “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened the new heaven to the human spirit.”

People who are successful know that what we call ‘failure’ is merely the cost of seeking new challenges in our lives and succeeding.  Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb failed thousands of times before he succeeded. If he was speaking here today, he might say, “The reason you aren’t as successful as you can be is because you just haven’t failed enough yet.” He said, “Failure is merely the cost of succeeding.”

You just keep on keeping on and tweaking it until it works.  Most people don’t succeed because they either never begin and don’t try at all, or they give up.  To be ‘over comers’ we must come over to a new, higher level of consciousness. We must eliminate limited thinking and cultivate a prosperity consciousness.

We begin when we stop using the word failure.  We are co-creators with God and God is the energizer bunny that always keeps going until it’s done. Successful people don’t talk about their failures or morbidly dwell on them. They say things like, “Well, I’ve run into a glitch, or I’ve hit a bump in the road.”  Now, these glitches, these bumps in the road, might destroy an ordinary person and by ordinary, I mean someone who lives only in ordinary consciousness. Someone who is centered in matter - rather than centered in God. Someone without faith who believes that they’re doing it alone is stuck in a consciousness of lack.

Lack thinking is like having a lamp and holding the plug in your hand and then calling yourself a failure when there is no light. You gotta plug into the power. Contrast that kind of thinking with knowing, “I’ve got a power within me and I’m going on. God is making something beautiful and wonderful out of my life.  With God there is always a way.”

For example: Years ago, there was a TV commercial with a man shaving with a Remington shaver. He held up the razor and said, “I liked this so much I bought the company.” The man’s name was Victor Kiam, an entrepreneur who started in sales at Playtex and amassed a fortune. In his book, “LIVE TO WIN” he told this story. “A good friend once came to me with an idea.  I listened to him, but I didn’t think I had it in me to take the idea and to run with it, so I told my friend to go and find someone else.  He did and turned his idea into a billion-dollar industry called “Velcro”. “If I would have allowed it, it could have destroyed my life and my friendship. It took time to just look at it as another bump on the road. I had to make the choice to “let it go.” I realized this for several weeks, even into months.  At first, I allowed it to depress the life out of me.  I couldn’t even get out of bed. Then I decided to use the wisdom from that experience to make a course correction in my life. I decided to look at it seriously and ask myself, ‘WHY?’” “Why didn’t I.”? What can I learn from this? I came up with 10 consciousness-changing ideas.” These are listed on your program.

1. Have confidence in yourself. Next time, and there is always a next time, have the confidence to take the action that you need to take at a given time.  When Remington came along, Victor had the confidence to buy the company and make it a success.  He ‘knew’ people would always want shavers.

2 Don’t take failure personally. He said that this is probably the most important lesson of all. We have a failure in our lives and say, “Well, that’s it, I am a loser and I’ll never be anything but a loser.”  Taking it personally is identifying our “I AM” with it and dwelling on lack. For example: If you are unemployed, do you think about it all the time?  Do you think that because you went out to look for a job today without success that you can never find a job?  Do you label yourself by saying things like, “I am unemployed?” Unity teaches that what you call yourself will become a powerful reality in your life.  The Law of Mind Action is “Thoughts held in mind produce after their kind.”

Have you ever said, “I’ll give you a Penny For Your Thoughts?” Ask yourself every day, “What if I had to buy my thoughts?” Imagine that you had to go to a store and reach into your pocket for money to buy thoughts.  What would you say? “Well, I’ll take 65 cents of worry, $2.00 worth of depression and really splurge on $10.00 worth of crippling anxiety.”

I can’t imagine that you’d do that.  You’d go into the store and choose to buy good stuff even if the negative thoughts were all on sale! But the truth is that you are making thought purchases. Every day you go to the ‘Convenience mind” inside yourself and decide what thoughts you’re going to buy into and when you add it all up, you’ll see that thoughts can become very, very expensive. In fact, hopefully you are making some wise thought purchases here this morning.

Let me share a story about this with you. When Ben Franklin was a little boy, his friends and family gave him 6 pennies for his birthday. He went to a store, told the clerk he had 6 pennies and the clerk sold him a toy whistle. He went home and whistled so much that he drove everyone nuts.  His family asked him how much he’d paid for the whistle, he said, “Six pennies.”  They said, “You paid 4 times too much.”  He never forgot that.  It changed his life.  Even into old age when men and women were spouting different philosophies and talking about anxiety and fear, Ben Franklin would say, “They paid too much for their whistle.”

I have two questions for you. “What is one important thing you want to achieve in your life?  Now the second question: “What has been your greatest disappointment or discouragement toward this goal?”  Now, putting our first two points into practice, the truth is, you are not that discouragement.  Even if it was totally your fault then, you are brand new person today and it is by the grace of God that you do not have to remain the same.  We become better human beings’ moment to moment, prayer by prayer as we become better receivers of God.

3.  Use your defects.  We succeed in enterprises, which demand the positive qualities we possess.  But we excel in those, which also make use of our defects.  Use your defects because what seems like a defect to you might be God’s answer.  It just might be the uniqueness that needs to come out. Often, you’ll find that people will love you more for your defects than they do for your perfections.  People love your little quirks, the little special things you do that make you uniquely you.  With God’s guidance, you can learn to use them to your advantage.

4.  You will get another chance. Affirm: “I will get another chance.” You will get another chance if you can accept it.  You must be willing to be open minded, accept new ideas, see the opportunity, the open door and go through & after it. In the Bible, it says that God never slumbers or sleeps. God may give you a new idea that can transform everything in your life as you are dreaming. Sometimes that’s the only time God can get a word in edgewise.

5.  God is with you, not to commiserate, but to co-create. Do you buy that thought? Do you accept the fact that GOD is always with and within you? God is your help in every need. There was a man who bought a barometer. He waited for it for a long time and when it finally did come, the needle appeared to be stuck pointing to hurricane. The man wrote a scorching letter to the company saying, “Everything I buy is defective.”  The next day he mailed the letter and went to New York. Later that day, he was informed that the barometer was missing, but then so was his house.  The hurricane had hit.  You have a barometer inside of you and the needle is stuck on GOD IS WITH YOU.  A lot of times you’ll shake the barometer and say, “My life is out of order. I can’t believe God could possibly be with me.”  But the needle will not move because God cannot be removed from you. “I will not be moved.”

6. With God at your side be brave. Don’t be afraid to take a new look at an old problem. Don’t be like the old man who said, “It’s not easy taking my problems one at a time because they refuse to stand in line.”  Whatever position they are in, examine them one at a time, not with human consciousness, but with God. Close your eyes for a moment and ask God for illumination, guidance, inspiration and understanding in solving the individual problem.  Use 4 sheets of paper:

1.  On one piece of paper, write exactly what the problem is.  Define it.

2. On another piece of paper, write, “What do I think about this problem? What is its cause?”

3.  On a third sheet of paper, write, “What are my feelings about this problem?”

4.  On a fourth sheet of paper, take the following steps to help you to solve the problem:

• Agree to stop worrying, fretting, blaming, or feeling guilty, angry, or afraid.
  

• Re-establish joy, excitement, and faith in your life.
  

• Discuss a plan of action with a friend who supports you.  Someone who will listen unconditionally and then pray with you.
  

• Write: “I will go into action in the following ways.”  Then wait in the silence for God to give you ideas. God will never let you down.  God will give you more ideas than you can write down on a single page.
  

• Give thanks to God for the perfect answer that is already there. As you “do these things,’ say, “God is with me.”
  

7. Don’t just wonder what your purpose in life is.  Ask YOURSELF, “What do I love in life?”  Do what you have a passion for doing. There’s a big difference between living and having a passion for life. It’s like the difference between a song that you dance to and a song that makes you dance; one that compels you to move. There’s an illustration a prosperity teacher shared with me once. He demonstrated the way many of us pray.  He got in the back seat of his car and said, “OK God, if you love me, you’ll drive me to Unity Village.”  He sat in the back seat, waiting for God to take the wheel and drive him to Unity Village, and nothing happened. He said that’s because God, who is waiting to give, willing to inspire, just shrugs.  God says to back seat drivers, “I can only give to you what I can get through you.  If you’ll get in the front seat and take the wheel in faith, I’ll give you THE DESIRE to get to Unity Village.  If you start to move, I’ll tell you where to turn, how fast to go and when to stop. Get out of the back seat and take the wheel.”

8.  Have Lasting Power.  There was once an auto racer named Micky Thompson.  He created fast cars.  In the 29 races he started, he had the fastest car, starting . . . however he never finished a race. His cars always broke down.  They didn’t have lasting power.  You must be willing to finish the race.  God will inspire you if you don’t quit on God.  When we say, “Oh, God, why did you quit on me?”  The truth is just the reverse.  We must believe and finish the race.

9.  You have only one product to sell, one product to improve, and that product is yourself. MARKET A BRAND NEW YOU. The person you see in the mirror today is a vast improvement on last year’s model but not as great as the model that’s coming out in this New Year. The 2022 model of you is going to be the best one yet!

In every part of your life, become that which you admire and want to be.  You must believe in yourself before others will believe in you. You must become what you’re seeking. You must create first in mind. Then, like a magnet, it is drawn to you.  The possible exception is when you ask your minister or prayer partners to ‘see’ it for you and help you to believe.

10.  Become the success you were created by God to be. We each live according to our self-image, the pattern of thought we create daily & we project it on into tomorrow.

Remember.

1.  Stop using the word failure and don’t take failure personally.

2. Have confidence in yourself.

3.  Use your defects.

4. You will get another chance, so be open and receptive to new ideas.

5.  God is with you, not to commiserate, but to co-create.  Accept the fact that God is with you, your help in every need.

6.  Be brave.  With God at your side, take a new look at the old problem and take the steps outlined on your program this morning.  If what you’re doing isn’t working, it just makes sense to do something new!

7.  Don’t just wonder what your purpose in life is. Ask yourself, “What do i love in life?”  Do what you have a passion for doing.

8.  Have lasting power.

9.  You only have one product to sell and improve, and that product is yourself.  Market a brand new you.

10.  Become the success you were born to be. Become what you seek, and it will come through you into your life.  God bless you and have a great week!