The Power of Right Believing: 7 Keys to Freedom from Fear, Guilt, and Addiction (30 page)

Although it was very challenging to make ends meet, this lady shared with me that even as a child, she always felt there was a God somewhere, a God who was watching over her, protecting her, and blessing her. She related that as a little girl, she used to “talk” to this God and even wrote to Him in a little diary that she kept. She also remembered praying a simple, innocent prayer to this unknown God, saying, “If You are the true God, please come and look for me so that I may come to know You.”

Today as she looks back, she is filled with gratefulness toward the Lord, whom she declares had known her even when she was in her mother’s womb. She knows that it is God who had brought the right people across her path and protected her from danger in so many instances even before she had gotten to know Him.

When I heard her sharing this, I was reminded of the promise
in the Bible that says God is a Father to the fatherless (see Ps. 68:5). Her own biological parents may have abandoned her at birth, but her Father in heaven had an amazing plan for her life. In the same way, He has an amazing plan for your life. Hold on to His promise recorded in His Word for you:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the L
ORD
.

“They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

—Jeremiah 29:11
NLT

She ended up doing so well in school that her vice principal encouraged her to continue her studies in Singapore instead as the opportunities in her hometown were comparatively limited. With her grandmother’s blessing and only ten Malaysian dollars in her pocket, she headed to Singapore.

Despite having to take on various jobs to support herself as well as her grandmother, she continued to thrive in her academic pursuits, went on to a top-tier local university, and graduated with honors in chemistry. She then landed a well-paying job at a multinational company. But after three and a half years, she decided to venture out to build her own business in 1989.

In the year 2000, God honored the prayer that she had prayed as a young child when a friend invited her to New Creation Church in Singapore. Having heard different things about God over the years, she remembers the freedom that she experienced when she learned for the first time through my preaching on grace that God loved her so much more than she could ever love Him.

She stopped seeing God as someone far away and instead had a personal encounter with the God whom she knew had been watching over her all these years. She shared with me that when she encountered the love of Jesus, she began to faithfully come for service every Sunday despite the long queues that she had to wait in to get into our auditorium.

Some time later, she felt the Lord leading her to take her business public to remain competitive. She approached a bank for its assistance to underwrite her company’s attempt to undertake an initial public offering (IPO). The bank manager to whom she had presented her business plan turned her down and explained that it was not the right time to attempt an IPO as market sentiments were dismal and the Dow Jones had been on a massive downward slide. As his parting shot, the bank manager said, “If the Dow Jones starts going up today, you can come back tomorrow and we can talk again.”

She shared with me that when she walked out of the bank, she remembered a message that I had preached on being bold and asking God for big things. She said, “You told us not to insult God by asking only for small things. You said, ‘Ask God for big things, compliment Him, and have a positive, confident expectation of good.’ ” So she went home and before going to bed, she decided to step out in faith and ask God to do a big thing for her. She believed that He could move the market in her favor and simply prayed, “God, You are Almighty. Surely You can influence the US market and make the Dow Jones go up in Jesus’ name.”

Now, Singapore is twelve hours ahead of New York, so the market opens when it is night in Singapore. At about 4 a.m., this lady
felt a prompting to get out of bed to check on how the Dow Jones was doing… and found that it had bucked the downward trend and was beginning to climb upward! In the space of just four hours, the Dow Jones had risen by an astonishing 18 percent because of an unexpected announcement by the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.

The Power of Having a Confident Expectation of Good

Pastor Prince, can God do things like this?

Of course He can. God did it for this lady, didn’t He? That’s the power of right believing!

Anything is possible for those who believe God and have a confident expectation of good. She had the boldness to ask God to bless her and turn things around for her, just like Jabez did, and God answered her request. Ask God for big things in your life and expect good. He is a good God.

This lady had a good opinion of God. In fact, she shared that one of the Bible verses that sustained her time and again was John 10:10, which says, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”

Even when her business was faced with challenges, she would declare that her abundant God would supply. She would stand on
His promise that she was the righteousness of God in Christ and whatsoever she did would be abundantly blessed. When times were hard and the economy was going through a difficult period of recession, she would maintain a confident expectation of good and look to the God who is good and who came to bring us abundant life.

What I want you to see is that not everything in this life will become smooth sailing the moment you start to hope in God. Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). There will be trouble, challenges, and issues to deal with in this world. But you can rest in Jesus, be encouraged in Him, continue to hope in Him, and know beyond the shadow of a doubt that He will see you through all your adversities. He has already overcome the world! On your part, determine to be of good cheer, rejoice in the Lord always, and keep on having a confident expectation of good.

The very next day, she marched into the bank manager’s office and showed him the incredible lift the Dow Jones recorded in just one day! The bank manager reasoned that this could simply be a temporary spike and listed further conditions that she had to fulfill. Undaunted and knowing that her God would surely bless her, she quickly called her former classmates and professors to canvass for support and was able to present to the bank manager a long list of committed investors that very day.

The manager was eventually won over, impressed that she could garner such tremendous support and interest in a single afternoon. Of course, he didn’t understand that this was the favor of the Lord in action! The bank proceeded to make a firm commitment to underwrite the IPO and to help her take her company public.

At the very time that she launched the company’s IPO, the Singapore government launched an initiative to highlight the importance of recycling wastewater into drinkable water and released news of a big tender to build the nation’s first wastewater recycling and treatment facility.

The news media was thus abuzz with the value and strategic importance of water for the nation of Singapore. Nobody could have orchestrated this. She had no idea that water—her very industry—would be the talking point the very year she took her business public when she followed the prompting from the Lord to do so. She knew absolutely nothing about this project and was just keeping her eyes on Jesus. But God was working behind the scenes. Nevertheless, people began speculating that she must have known all along about this big government tender, and interest surrounding her company’s IPO kept on mounting.

With all the media hype, publicity, and excitement over water, her company’s IPO became a sensational hit and was oversubscribed seven times. Her company, Hyflux, became the first water treatment company to be listed on the Singapore Exchange.

She shared with me so many other amazing testimonies of how the Lord continued to open doors of favor and blessings for her in China, India, and the Middle East after the public listing of her company. When she submitted tenders for multimillion-dollar infrastructural projects to build wastewater plants or some of the largest membrane-based seawater distillation facilities in the world, she would be the little David among the Goliaths in the industry. Yet she came up tops, and many times was awarded the projects. That, my friend, is called the
favor
of God. His favor is
undeniable in her life, and she continues to be conscious of the good God who is watching over her, no matter how tough, adverse, and challenging the business climate might be.

In 2011, Olivia Lum, in a competitive field with close to fifty top-notch entrepreneurs from around the world, was accorded the prestigious Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year award in Monte Carlo. In her acceptance speech, she thanked her Lord Jesus Christ. Unbeknownst to her at that time, she was the first woman to be recognized with this honor in the prestigious award’s eleven-year history.

How does a young girl who was abandoned at birth go from weaving rattan bags for a nickel to building a billion-dollar, public-listed company? My friend, that is the power of right believing. Olivia’s story is an amazing one, which tells of the goodness, favor, grace, and power of our God.

I pray that you will be encouraged to see that nothing is impossible when you believe right in the person of Jesus and in His love and goodness. Ask God for big things. He loves you, and He has a track record of doing exceedingly and abundantly above all that we can ask, think, or even imagine (see Eph. 3:20).

S
he had heard so many wonderful stories of the carpenter from the little town of Nazareth. How He walked all over Galilee teaching about a God whom He affectionately referred to as His “Father.” How He taught about the love of this Father-God. How miracles were performed by His hands. How He healed all who came to Him.

The blind left His presence seeing. The lame, leaping. The lepers, whole. Those held captive by demons, completely freed.

Eyewitness accounts of meetings with this Man were told and retold in vivid detail: how His eyes and voice carried such warmth, tenderness, and humility that even the despised tax collectors, unclean lepers, disdained criminals, and scorned prostitutes—in fact, all who usually hid in the shadows—would venture out to follow Him wherever He went.

Like them, she knew what it was like to be an outcast. She knew what it was like to receive harsh rebuke and condemnation whenever she was out in public—particularly from those who taught legalistically about God and His laws. But the other outcasts
seemed to all agree that this carpenter-teacher was different. She observed how their faces would glow whenever they spoke about this Man.

She remembered how one of them had exclaimed, “He talks about a God who cares even for the birds and flowers, a God who loves us so intensely that He even tracks the number of hairs on our heads!” She watched their eyes gleam as they shared excitedly about how He made them feel human again. And she listened with a strange warmth in her heart as they told of how the dignity, affirmation, and grace He afforded them had transformed their beliefs about God and changed their lives forever.

Who was this Man, whom they called a friend of sinners?

She devoured story after story since she was an outcast just like them. For twelve long years, she had been suffering from a hemorrhage that had ravaged her body, bankrupted her finances, and banished her from pretty much any social interaction with her own community. And even though she had spent all her money seeing every doctor from Jerusalem to Galilee, her condition continued to deteriorate.

But everything she heard about this Man refreshed her and filled her with something that had previously been foreign to her—hope. For the first time in many years, she felt confident about her future. She knew that at last, things were going to turn around for good.

When she heard that this Man, Jesus, would be passing her street en route to Jairus’s house to pray for his daughter, her heart leaped. After more than a decade of being driven away each time she tried to appear in public, she had grown genuinely afraid of
crowds. But she said to herself, “If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well” (Mark 5:28).

This thought fortified every step she took searching for Jesus until finally she saw Him in the midst of a crowd that was thronging Him. She pressed in from behind, refusing to be daunted by the jostling mass of people. She stretched her arm toward Him, felt her fingers graze the hem of His garments.

And a miracle happened. The moment her fingertips made contact with the microfibers of His linen prayer cloth, power immediately infused her body. The incessant bleeding that had been her constant companion instantaneously ceased, and she was completely healed.