A friend told me yesterday her (now ex) pastor said, “You can’t manifest anything.”

Wow.

Maybe he was trying to speak into the “manifesting” fad that is trending on social media and use a shock statement to get attention. Or maybe he wanted people to fear God as the ultimate authority and make man out to be a puppet on His strings. Regardless of the motivation, he was wrong.

Here’s how I know: what one might call manifesting the Bible calls sowing and reaping. To say we can’t manifest anything because God is the ultimate decision maker is to have a very fatalistic view of God and to ignore every scripture that says He gave man authority, dominion, autonomy, and freewill.

Several years ago, when the book The Secret came out, Christians lost their minds. And recently a movie and documentary have come out, with Christians losing their minds all over again.

Meanwhile, non-Christians all over the world are successfully using the law of sowing and reaping that God wrote into the universe and not even knowing they’re doing it. And yet both the Bible and science (particularly quantum physics) back it up. We may not all use the same terminology, and The Secret may get some details wrong here and there, but manifesting is the Bible, whether we want it to be or not.

The truth is, made in the image of God, we are creators (Gen. 1:27, Psalm 82:6). We create futures. Our lives are the sum total of our past and present belief systems. We are daily reaping what we have sown (2 Cor. 9:6, Matt. 18:18). If we sow in fear we will reap more fear. If we sow lack, we will keep coming up short and even what we do have will disappear (Matt. 25:29).

In the same way, if we believe we have everything we need in the present, even when it doesn’t look like it (Luke 9:16, 2 Peter 1:3. Matt. 25:29), even more will come to us.

Some call it the Law of Attraction, others call it the Law of Belief. I personally lean toward the latter. When we believe there is a way out, we will find one (Matt. 7:8). When we believe we have everything we need to solve any problem (2 Peter 1:3) the solution will come, followed by the steps to get there. When we start with the basic belief that God is for us and not against us (Romans 8:31) and that He always provides a way out when we’re under duress (1 Cor. 10:13) we are sowing a seed. We are sowing a seed that begins with the truth and it will reap a harvest.

But as a seed, it only, ever, bears after its own kind (Gen. 1:11). It won’t bear anything else.

God has given you the ability to choose what you will sow and thereby choose what you will reap. All throughout scripture, He puts the responsibility back on man to decide what the outcome of any given situation will be.

Unfortunately, we miss endless possibilities of a great outcome because we think God is in control.

Nope.

He used His authority to give us authority. And He doesn’t lie or change His mind.

God is only in control to the degree that man gives Him control. And history proves time and time again (as does the present and as will the future) that man does a very poor job at giving God control.

BUT this is all incredible news for you today and every day after if you’ll let this sink in and put it to the test!

Here is my personal process of choosing my own outcome:

1. Look at the finished work of Jesus and decide what He died to give me:

   • Abundant life (John 10:10)

   • A healed heart and every wound relieved (Psalm 147:3 and Strong’s 2280, Isaiah 61:1)

   • Salvation from affliction (Isaiah 61:1 and Strong’s 1319)

   • Set free by any stronghold (limiting or lying pattern of thought/belief) holding me captive (Isaiah 61:1, 2 Cor. 10:3-5, Jonah 2:8)

   • An opening when I am trapped, bound, backed into a corner, or surrounded (Isaiah 61:1)

   • Healing from sickness and disease (Isaiah 53:4, Matt. 8:17)

   • A way out when I am tempted to fear or cave, have a fatalistic mindset about my situation, or tempted to sin in any way (1 Cor. 10:13)

   • “Yes” to all the promises above (2 Cor. 1:20)

2. Recognize God won’t violate my freewill (Jonah 2:7-8)

3. Confess (say the same thing) God has already said about my situation (review step #1) until I see His preferred outcome (for His preferred outcome see step #1) materialize in the natural.

There’s your manifesting folks. And it works if we decide to work with God to see it through to fulfillment, no matter how long it takes and no matter how bad things appear in the natural.

So happy manifesting friends!