Your Pathway to Abundant Living

By K. E. Clark

"A powerfully informative book and inspirational interpretation of the practical side of the Word of God. Too many Christians live defeated lives. You don't have to be one of them. Your Pathway to Abundant Living merges our practical, everyday actions with the spiritual teachings of the Word of God and delivers a powerful self-help guide to success. It will help you realize and obtain the natural and spiritual blessings God has for you. No longer will you suffer living beneath your privilege after reading and applying the principles in this book. God wants you to live life more abundantly. Enjoy God's best for your life through application of biblical principles. It provides instructions to live abundantly in every area of your life to include family, wealth, marriage, and spirituality. Filled with self-evaluations and recommendations for improvement, Your Pathway to Abundant Living can be used as a self-help for group studies or for individual self-improvement."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098081010

Book preview

Chapter One

Super Abundant Life

Objective: To develop a healthy understanding of God’s plan for your joy and happiness.

Scripture Background: Jeremiah 29:11, New International Version (NIV)

¹¹For I know the plans I have for you, declare the KING, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Is It Time to Make a Change?

If you are reading this book, you are probably not reading out of simple curiosity. You are reading this because you want or need a change. There is something deeply embedded within you, and it is calling you to make a change. No, not the Man in the Mirror as Michael Jackson would put it. It is something much deeper. You are fashioned and created to operate in a certain way. Your Creator intended for you to function in a certain fashion, so you can receive all His abundant blessings. You are called to reach a higher purpose. The question that you are probably asking yourself is how can God help you achieve this level and how can He help you reach your true goals and desires?

The Scripture in Jeremiah 29, verse 11 reveals that God knows our purpose and future. Through these beautiful words, we understand that first, God has a plan for you and that includes prospering and that He wants you to be safe in every way. Second, we understand that His plans are designed to give us hope for the future. I believe these words speak to the hopes and heart of every person everywhere in the world. The word hope does not mean wish; it means having an expectation of marvelous things. Hope also implies that the Father has a purpose for your life and that achieving that purpose would be a blessing to you and those around you.

It feels good to know that God has plans for us to help us advance and prosper our lives. The question He now presents us with is how can you know God’s plans for your life?

What Do You Want?

Most humans’ plans involve happiness and some form of prosperity in every area of their lives. Prosperity in some form or fashion is important to us. Prosperity not only describes what we want concerning money, but it is also what we want and need concerning family, community, the nation, spirituality, health, and everything that affects us. Equally, happiness cannot be measured by the amount of money you have. Happiness is the condition of being successful or thriving. Thriving is living in abundance and in God’s overflow. It is essentially a blessing that is of good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over. ² After all, what good is money without all the other things that make life joyful? Prosperity in areas of our lives such as family, security, good health, and community can bring us happiness.

Besides reaching prosperity and happiness, most humans want to achieve a level of success. We go to school and study to become successful and seek opportunities for success. We might study successful people to figure out how they achieved their goals. We all want to know the secrets to success. But all too often, success is elusive. It is a standard which can be hard to grasp, causing us to lose sight of the reason behind the drive for its reach. If your reason isn’t altruism, then you have lost the reason for what’s driving you. If your reason for making money is to enhance all the things that really matter like family, church, or community, and you are still having a hard time achieving success, then you will undoubtedly find some help in this book. What you will learn is that God also wants you to achieve prosperity, happiness, and success. He has plans for you to do so, as pointed out in Jeremiah 29:11. It is time now for you to redefine your vision of success so it aligns with God’s plans for you.

Historical Perspective: The Financial Success of God’s People

We can learn a lot from history. It affords us the ability to place a perspective on our current situation based on similar experiences of the past. Learning to be financially successful in life is part of the development of the skills for life. So let’s look at the past and present example set by some members of a special community that have excelled in gaining wealth. There is a group of people that have excelled above all other groups or individuals. While the national success is limited, the success of individuals within that national group has dwarfed other groups of people. The Bible and history give us the account of Israel’s lengthy journey to become a nation in 1948. In many ways, the Jewish people seem to have the secret to success. This is clear by the number of financially successful Jewish people in proportion to other nations. That not all Jewish people are rich withstanding, the number of Jewish³ billionaires are disproportionate to the size of their population when compared to other nations.⁴ Although they only make up approximately 2 percent of the world’s population, they make up 20 percent of the Forbes list of top fifty billionaires.⁵

As a people, the Jewish aren’t necessarily any more intelligent than anyone else, and although many of the very rich average a slightly higher IQ, evidence shows that their success has more to do with culture than mental ability. Financial success in this discussion has more to do with a culture that follows the Scriptures literally and produces a rule-driven society. This society is a testament of the importance of following practical biblical principles. Their success has more to do with a culture based more on Scripture than on a higher intelligence. Simply put, if you do it right, God will bless it right! If we embrace the Scriptures, we will meet success.

Let’s talk more about the Jewish culture, shall we? How do they have it right? Here are people that, according to Bible Scriptures, disobeyed God and lost their right to be a nation on their God-given soil. They were banished into foreign lands for approximately two thousand years until 1948. But what is amazing is the fact that despite all of that, they remained a nation without their own physical address and kept their way of life. People who lose their country are normally assimilated into whatever host country that takes them in. They eventually end up losing their identity. This did not happen with the Jewish people. It was as if God preserved them until 1948, when they became a nation by the United Nations. How could they survive as a people so long with their own unique way of life? The fact that the Jewish people have a culture that was created and supported by their belief in God and the Tanakh (Jewish Bible), which encourages strict obedience to the letter of the Word, accomplished this.

When one takes away the history and ceremonies of the Old Testament, what it leaves are life principles. Additionally, the principles in the Old Testament and the New Testament are the same. The principles in the Tanakh encourage prosperity in every aspect of Jewish life, not just money. The results over time are a people that loved family, community, worship, business, education, and being productive. Without going into too much detail, the Word of God has been the greatest motivating factor that has led to the success of the Jewish culture.

What’s Good for the Goose Should Be Good for the Gander

So the next question is, if it worked for the Jews, why is it not working for so many Christians in the same way? After all, the Christian religion is an offshoot of the Jewish religion. We are Judeo-Christians. The answer lies in a more modern Christian view of the Bible. Because of grace and forgiveness, many Christians view many of the commands of God as optional. The reason is that we Christians have this optional viewpoint for God’s commands that causes us to miss the wisdom of the Word. We operate with the attitude that obeying the Word of God is an option. It is as if the rules do not apply to us. We have believed the lie. Most blessings are predicated on some action required by the principle, to activate the promise. In other words, if you save money, you will end up with savings. But if you don’t save, you will not have savings. So many Christians believe the lie that if God wants me to have money, He will touch someone’s heart to give it to me. The truth is, He does want you to have money, but He wants you to use the wisdom of His Holy Word to get it. And once you get it through hard work and wise savings and investing, you will probably not abuse or misuse it. This is the wisdom of God. When we do not align with this principle, we miss our blessings.

The Word, therefore, does not have the same cultural effect in Christendom. We do not seek the purity of the Word of God and do not align enough with the Scriptures that say, God will write His Word in our hearts (Jer. 31:33). We often approach the Word of God from the place of seeing how much we can get away with without offending God instead of a willingness to obey all the Word of God because we love him and because of the blessings associated with the Word. We think that as long as we are not outright committing blatant, grievous sins, we are just fine. But what about our unhealthy ways? Or our misuse of our own finances, or how we treat family? What about our integrity or our generosity? There are many things that define our level of holiness. The little foxes (smaller sins) are important; they change the culture of Christendom. The Word of God will always ring true. The promises and the warnings are there to direct us in the right path, and to ensure the blessing of God in our lives. Grace covers sins through forgiveness, but does not ensure blessings that come from doing the right thing. Disobedience shows a lack of love for God and a disrespect of His wisdom. It’s like touching the stove when your mother told you not to. Obedience is not for God’s sake; it’s for our sake!

But all is not lost for Christendom. What works for the Jewish people can work for us too, if we take the Word of God as the literal truth. The Bible is more than a simple guide. It is the infallible Word of God. If we would take a more serious approach to God’s Word, as something that we should obey always, we would experience the blessings of God in a more powerful way.

The Gospel vs. the Kingdom

Genuine joy comes from understanding God’s Word and the divine connection between His Word and His blessings. The blessings come through obedience to His Word. To understand that is essential to viewing your world in a whole new light. First, I ask you to acknowledge that God has a plan for your life, as in Jeremiah 29:11. It does not matter that you may not know fully what that plan is. Just trust that He is moving you in His divine directions.

Psalm 37:23, the Lord Orders the Steps of a Good Man: and He Delights in His Way

Second, understand that the Bible gives instructions to us on how to live, and those instructions are absolute. These two acknowledgements will help us in achieving abundant life.

It is important to understand God’s original plan and the design He had for the earth. His plan was for us to govern God’s Kingdom here on earth while being led by God. As with all things, God’s Kingdom had to have some rules or laws for man to live by. Those laws would provide for an orderly, peaceful, and abundant life for its citizens. Concerning His Kingdom here on earth. Sometimes I feel that I, as a Christian, was not taught to complete truth about righteousness and holiness coming up as a child. While the Bible taught that Jesus came preaching the Kingdom in all its truths, Christendom has been preaching the Gospel, which is the good news that the Messiah has come. The Messiah is of course Jesus Christ. What is amazing is that the Messiah came preaching the Kingdom, but we Christians continue to preach the Gospel! Christians have spent thousands of years preaching and declaring that Jesus is the Messiah. It is time to preach the Kingdom as declared in the Word of God. The Kingdom addresses both the spiritual and practical aspects of God’s Word. It’s about walking in righteousness (correctness) of the Word of God. The Kingdom is all about living the way God wants us to live, and that Jesus is our savior and our example.

It is about knowing God and allowing Him to be your savior through Jesus Christ, but it is also about living a dedicated life that aligns with the design God provided. Just as in the natural world we live in, there is a rule of law. The Kingdom of God is no different. We have many types of laws that dictate what we can and cannot do. But there are also schools of thought that teach wisdoms, concerning many things: children, health, money, investment, etc. It is time we teach what the Scriptures says about every aspect of our lives…even sex. God left no stone unturned concerning how to live holy. His goal for you in the Kingdom is not only to have salvation, but also to have joy.

The Blessing Plans of God

Do you want joy? We describe joy as perpetual happiness. In the Bible, they define success as happiness. Obviously, God wants all of us to be happy. There are few Scriptures that explain this, like the book of Deuteronomy 28. In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 28 gives us the blessing plans of God. In Deuteronomy 28 God says, that if you obey all the words, I give you, you shall be blessed. He says, you shall be blessed in the city and blessed in the field and bless when you go out and blessed when you come in. He continues with the blessings, to say that "I shall bless the fruit of the ground and the fruit of the cattle and the fruit of your body."

This Scripture of Deuteronomy says that every aspect of your life will be blessed if you obey the Word of God. It can’t be any clearer. The Scripture expressly says that if you embrace His Word and make it your way of life, you will be blessed in all that you do.

Let’s look even deeper into Deuteronomy 28:4: Bless shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine [cows], and the flocks of thy sheep.

Now, most of us are not farmers, so we must interpret that Scripture and see how it might read if they wrote it today. What it is saying is, blessed shall be your children and your job and those things which you do that yields income. The writer says, blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. In other words, you won’t go hungry.

Deuteronomy 28 tells us, Blessed [happy] shall you be when you come in and blessed shall you be when you go out. This means when you go in and out to conduct business, those activities shall be blessed (prosperous). It goes on in the seventh verse to say, The King will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before your face; they shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways. Your enemies will flee before you and be defeated.

The King will command the blessings on you in your storehouse. This means in your bank accounts, and in all to which you set your hand, and he will bless you in the land." This means that when we endeavor to make a living or work, we shall be blessed. If we walk in the lifestyle, which God intended, we shall be greatly blessed.

But Deuteronomy doesn’t stop there; there are so much more blessings in Deuteronomy 28. One could see that the people in which they gave the Scriptures would be greatly blessed if they obeyed the commandments and followed the rules and guidance which God gave them. Deuteronomy continues with more blessings. The twelfth verse says, The King will open to you his good treasure, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in season, and to bless all the works of your hands. It targets this blessing at your labor. Verse twelve promises that He will lend divine help to us and our labor or efforts. He promises that you will lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. The thirteenth verse says, And the King will make you the head and not the tail; you shall be above only, and not beneath, if you see to the commandments of the King your Father, which I command you today, and are careful to observe them. The fourteenth verse says, So you shall not turn aside from any of the words which I command you this day to the right hand or to the left to go after other gods and serve them. As you can see, the Bible is setting out a path for the