If you desire and expect to succeed and experience much progress plus abundant prosperity in your relationships, home, family life, education, profession, ministry, leadership position, projects, travel, and other activities for this year and the future, then you must carefully and diligently prepare and organize properly for the achievement of your goals and objectives.

Prepare and determine to fight and win.

Battles are part of our destiny. If you are not having any battles, then probably you are not making much difference in the lives of the people around you. It is also likely that you are moving in the same direction as the devil, so he is not fighting you from the opposite direction.

EVEN THE PROMISED LAND OF CANAAN HAD TO BE FOUGHT FOR --- GOD TOLD THE ISRAELITES TO ARM THEMSELVES WITH THEIR SWORDS, AS GOD LED THEM TO THE PROMISED LAND.

Many of us have unwisely or ignorantly entered “the Canaan” of different relationships, courtship, marriage, parenting, friendships, educational and career pursuits, investments, projects, business, acquisition of property, politics, ministry, travel abroad etc. without “the appropriate sword” or weapon that we need to prepare and carry along to fight, conquer, and possess what we set out to pursue. 

“The Lord spoke to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ assistant, saying: ‘Moses My servant is dead. Now, therefore, arise (prepare), go over this Jordan, you and all these people, to the land which I am giving to them --- the children of Israel.”

“Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, ‘Pass through the camp and command the people, saying, ‘Prepare provisions for yourselves, for within three days you will cross over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God is giving you to possess”.

Joshua 1:2, 10-11.

In all battles, there is no substitute for victory. Someone said: “Be kind to everyone you meet because everyone has some battle that he or she is fighting.”

You may be knocked down as you fight, but make sure you are not knocked out!  To win any battle, you need a strategy, which comes through adequate preparation and planning.

Whatever you ask from God (or even ask from a good parent, guardian, boss, leader etc.), He has to prepare you for it. So, God will not just fulfil His promises in your life and give you the rich inheritance to enjoy without your cooperation with Him to be prepared for it.

Good preparation is a sign of seriousness for the pursuit of a true vision. It indicates faith and commitment to a dream, hope, or expectation, and is a sure sign of diligence. There are many of us who accomplish little or nothing and cannot be vessels or tools in the hands of God for His highest purposes because we are never prepared for any achievements.

IF YOU ARE PRAYING FOR RAIN, THEN DO NOT GO OUT WITHOUT YOUR UMBRELLA!

We desire to see great results, but then we do not fulfil the planning and preparation requirements involved. We want things to slide down the easy road of no-preparation, and wait to see accomplishments along the path of no diligent efforts on our part. That is not how God planned a normal, healthy, and happy life to be. 

Work, planning, organization, and preparation were a vital part of the normal, fruitful life that God originally gave to mankind. Work and other forms of preparation for success became more difficult when sin came into the picture. But, using His power and wisdom, God has rectified all the discrepancies and mishaps of all preparation and planning processes for us through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Plan Wisely Within Your Means --- Consider The Effects On Others

Your plans and organization for success should never be based on any comparison with the lifestyle or expectations of anyone, and worst of all, based on competition with someone else. You must wisely and humbly cut your coat according to your size, without assuming power and resources that you do not have, and might never receive.

For example, if you applied for a loan and graciously obtained it, you must make a wise and honest payment plan before you even go for the loan, and make such plans with the agreement of your fiancée (if you are courting) or your spouse if you are married.

The same principle applies to any leader of a business, company, organization, church, ministry, city, or nation that plunges into reckless financial deals and monstrous projects that look good only to the eyes without enough constructive appraisal of the viability of the project, plus intended as well as unintended consequences.

Even if your spouse is a housewife who does not bring any monetary income home, she is still a vital part of your income. This is because she plays an important role as a special domestic helper, spiritual support, social energizer, and romantic and sexual satisfier in your life that enables you to do your work effectively.

She also bears children and helps to train them for you, in order for the profits of your toils to have future inheritors. God says you are also “joint-heirs” in the marriage (1 Peter 3: 7), and should equally share the resources plus the burdens of the home and family without any of you cheating the other person.

If you are a single parent or unmarried individual, then you must make the plans according to your existing situation, resource availability, future projections, and your capabilities, in order to avoid being a future burden for your family, your community, the church, and the Government.

God categorically instructed Joshua to plan and prepare to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. The fact that God was leading, protecting, and providing for them did not guarantee success without preparation.

This is where many Believers have gone wrong over the years. They assume that if God has endowed, blessed, and promised them victory, then everything would be smooth sailing without any constructive planning or organized efforts on their part. But, the popular saying goes: “Fail to plan, and therefore plan to fail.”

Even God planned salvation from the beginning of creation, that one day when man sins, His only Son Jesus would be sent down to die and save mankind.

When Simeon came to see the Child Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem, he declared: “My eyes have seen Your salvation which You have prepared before the face of all peoples” (Luke 2: 30, 31).

All of us can testify that considering all the projects and activities we have engaged in before, the maximum productivity and success resulted from those ones that we paid more attention to prepare properly, and took much time to plan the details.

AVOIDANCE OF PLANNING

Most people avoid constructive and detailed planning and organization for many things that they do. Some of the reasons are because:

1. Planning takes time

This is when we do not want to invest time into proper planning and organization. We rather have more time for criticisms, gossip, slander, grumbling, pleasure, and enjoyment of the fruits of other people’s labor. We want to invest very little time to obtain maximum results.

      2)  It demands patience

Patience is the most important part of faith. If your faith is weak or zero, you will not believe in serious planning and preparation. Just sitting down and having faith without any form of planning is foolishness. In that case, even if God grants you success by His mercy, you would make a mess of the products because you did not plan how to wisely use the success properly and profitably.

3)  It requires faith and courage

If you do not really believe in what you are going to do, or feel incapable to do it, and belittle it, you will not be moved to make any preparations, or you will prepare very poorly for it. Sometimes we are too scared to initiate it or get fully involved, and therefore run away from any planning for the project.

       4) Mental capabilities and skills are involved

A lazy and ignorant mind would not want to organize and prepare, since the processes task our thinking capacity, and compels all of our skills to be employed for good planning.

      5) It requires the spending of resources

No meaningful organization or preparation can be made without obtaining and using the right resources. Anyone who lacks the needed resources for a project, and is stingy, or selfish in making his or her resources available to others, will not be able to make preparations for success.

       6) We do not know what details to put into the plan

We may have a hazy idea of what the plan entails, and attempt to start some planning, but go nowhere with any further concrete inputs that would flesh out the preparation process.

      7) We do not know how to start the entire process and do the planning

This is where the individual does not have a clue as to how the entire planning and organization process should be constructed. Simply put, the person is quite ignorant about how to effectively make any meaningful preparations for the project.

In many of such instances, the person at the forefront might be the wrong person to be put in charge of the project or event.

There are many people who marry and have little or no clue about any definite planning to be a good wife or husband, and worst of all, to be a real parent when a child is born into the marriage.

8) We have the bad habit of being disorganized in our character

Some of us never take any form of proper organization and planning as a serious part of our life. We are habitually disorganized and haphazard in all we do and do not often take it to heart even when it causes us to produce shoddy work until it hurts us so badly with devastating consequences that spread to harm others around us.

             9) We create problems when we are to be contributors and not leaders of the planning

When we are gifted to be a significant part of a team of planners but force to become the main leaders or sole organizers and executors of the plan, we can get stuck in our tracks and unable to proceed with definite or complete plans for a project, because being gifted in one particular area does not mean you have the knowledge and expertise to handle all the different areas.

10) When we are outside of God’s will or have bad motives

Sometimes we force to do what God has not asked us to do, and simply wish to satisfy our ego or personal desires, trying to impress others, and may even be motivated by evil or selfish intentions. We, therefore, have no definite purpose or good intentions that motivate or guides to do any meaningful planning. Sometimes the event or project could be so far-fetched and unreasonable at that moment, to the extent that it is even impossible to conceive any concrete plan for its execution. 

Aim At Sharpening Your Skills And Developing Your CharacterSome activities demand serious and elaborate planning, in which case your spirit of perseverance, patience, faith, mental capabilities, and skills are really tested; and your resources are very much stretched and tasked as well. In all cases it is not only the final product that primarily pays off, or dominates in the end, but there is the immense benefit of the sharpening of your skills, development of enduring character, and the joy of a good job accomplished through toil and sweat. All of these go a long way to prepare you for greater success and honor at the next higher level more than what the first planning would have projected you to achieve.

I notice that in many cases we do not plan because we often do not sincerely know how to plan for a particular activity, and do not know what to really plan for in order to obtain the intended results, although we have the final product in our minds and hearts. That is where the factors of faith and time come in. We need to believe that we can do something and obtain reasonable success, and then take time to consider all the ingredients that we believe could make up the final product, how and where we would get those essentials, and how we would put them together gradually and appropriately.

For Christians, we have the privilege of meditating on scripture and praying to God who is our source, and who is the ultimate Provider of all things. The Lord will drop ideas into our minds and spirits as we wait upon Him in faith. He will then enable us to sift through everything and reject or remove all that is unnecessary or destructive, especially items that appear ungodly or are carnally oriented. Such items would usually taint the spirituality of the results, and some are even sometimes channels for the devil to infiltrate and hijack or destroy the end product.

Be organized and save yourself from false hope and defeat

For example, if I do not organize myself properly with diligence and enthusiasm for an exam, and study well for it, I should not expect God to work miracles for me simply because I am trying hard to exercise faith in him for miracles as a child of God.

If, due to poor planning and organization, I leave for the airport or train station very late, it would be very difficult to catch my plane or train, and travel comfortably.  When I turn in my application very late after the deadline is past, and exercise great faith that somehow God would cause circumstances to change in order to make the people accept and process the application, I should except to be a loser and not a winner.

In all these instances, success will elude me, and God will not be glorified in the end.

We all know and agree that God does the impossible, and can change situations mysteriously for us to obtain absolutely unexpected results. But we also know that our God is not a capricious, dishonest, flip-flop, and unrealistic God. He trains us, disciplines us, and uses His performances to build character in us. In all of our undertakings, God expects us to prepare and organize properly for resounding success that glorifies Him.

We do not dispute the fact that God can do anything, including the production or creation of things out of nothing, as well as modifying or changing any existing thing to suit his purposes. However, God does not just work aimlessly and haphazardly in a vacuum all the time just because we have a need to be fulfilled, or simply because He wants to demonstrate His power to us.

You should always organize yourself properly as part of your faith process. True faith is also faith that believes in getting yourself properly organized for effective functioning. You do not just pray and quote bible verses to spiritualize your ignorance, carelessness, mismanagement of resources, and poor organization, all in the name of faith.

Becoming better organized while you exercise faith in God for productive results rather brings more glory to the Lord, because our God is very organized. Look at how He, for example, carefully organized all of his creation and salvation plan, and how he expects his church to become organized as well!

Balanced Faith Involves Good Planning And Preparation. It is often said: Fail to plan, and plan to fail. We know that this is true, don’t we? So then, where does faith come into the equation? Can I use my expertise and intelligence to plan and execute without worrying about asking for any help from God in faith, since God has given me the wisdom already, and on top of it all, I am sure of what to do for this particular project? On the other hand, can I just believe that God will do it for me, without the normal planning for a particular product that I anticipate for my life? No, not at all! 

Unless it is an expectation of the resurrection of a dead body that cannot think and move to do anything, then God expects any living human being to make some form of plans to receive every blessing or answer from Him. Even God planned our salvation before sending Jesus into the world. 

Even if you are instructed to sit and wait for God to drop your gift through the roof, you should have already planned to have a room to sit in and a roof to cover it, through which the gift will be dropped. You should plan how you are going to humble yourself and listen to God carefully, and sit where you are supposed to sit and wait. You should even plan how you would use bathroom facilities as you wait, eat some food, drink some water, and plan to wait long enough till the gift drops in your laps. And, above all, you must plan how you are going to handle the gift and make it very profitable in accordance with the directions and expectations of the Giver.

“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholds him with His hand” (Psalm 37: 23, 24).

“Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts (plans) will be established” (Proverbs 16: 3).

I have not yet come across a Noah with such big faith in a big God, who will believe God to bring a huge flood on the earth, without any planning and building of an ark diligently to save his household as a proof of his faith in God’s word and God’s instructions (Hebrews 11: 7).

Neither will I come across a mother of Moses who will not plan to weave a special basket and plan how to place baby Moses in it at the banks of the river Nile, because of her big faith in God’s big power and sovereignty, and faith in the future of her special baby whose destiny she discerned by her faith.

One important caution as you plan and prepare, is to ensure that you plan and organize things WITH God. Submit to his will and instructions, and work along with Him by faith.

“We then, as workers together WITH Him (God) also plead with you not to receive the grace of God in vain” (2 Corinthians 6: 1).

In conclusion, planning, preparing, and organizing of oneself constitute very important components of God’s purpose and faith plan for successful living on earth.

We pray and hope that God will help us to exercise balanced faith by believing God’s promises firmly, and simultaneously engage in proper planning and preparation, that will enable us to finally obtain the expected results. We need to organize ourselves adequately, and set the stage to maximize our talents and opportunities for resounding success this year.

By: Rev. Dr. Samuel Kisseadoo, Virginia, USA. Professor of Biology, International Evangelist, Ordained Licensed Minister, Marriage and Relationships Counselor, Conference Speaker. Obtain more from Dr. Kisseadoo’s books at Challenge Bookstores in Ghana, Baptist Bookstore opposite Anglican High School at Amakom in Kumasi, or at Fruitful Ministries office in Accra Ghana (233-208126533), or call 233-275353802 in Kumasi, Ghana, and places where books are sold.
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Email: kisseadoo@msn.com.     Website: www.fruitfulministriesint.com.

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