Have Anything You Really Really Want!: A Christian Testimony

Have Anything You

Really Really

Want

A Christian Testimony

Charles Humphrey Muller

Writers Club Press

San Jose · New York · Lincoln · Shanghai

Have Anything You Really Really Want!

A Christian Testimony

All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Charles H. Muller

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Writers Club Press

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ISBN: 0-595-09153-9

ISBN: 978-1-469-77639-2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

STEP ONE :

VISUALISING A CLEAR GOAL

STEP TWO :

WORKING OUT A STRATEGY

STEP THREE :

SEEKING AND FINDING—USING FAITH AND INITIATIVE!

STEP FOUR :

TAPPING INTO THE SPIRIT

STEP FIVE :

LETTING GO TO GROW

STEP SIX :

SEEING BEYOND THE VISIBLE

STEP SEVEN :

REACHING OUT

Epilogue

About the Author

Joanne with the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow the author acquired during his sabbatical year in Scotland in 1984.

Have Anything You Really Really Want—A Christian Testimony is a thought-provoking study about the power of positive thinking and the Christian faith. It follows the author’s own personal journey of faith and discovery as he details how his Christian faith unleashed a positive power—in the attainment of personal, even material goals (including the acquisition of university degrees and a Rolls Royce!), but more significantly in the realisation of far-reaching goals: the discovery of his wife and ultimately the transition from university professor in South Africa to successful hotel-owner in Scotland. An important lesson in the experience of mid-life change is seen in the close dependence on God’s love and boundless supply for all needs, material and spiritual.

From establishing an objective, working out a strategy, and using faith and initiative, this detailed thesis explores the essential principles for personal success and achievement and guides the reader step-by step through the practical process of attaining his or her goals. In the final analysis, however, it asks whether it is the individual, or the invisible hand of Providence, which engineers the success—even to the extent of changing one’s original goals, and changing one in the process.

For Angus and Bruce

To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see.

(Hebrews 11:1)

Foreword

Have Anything You Really Really Want—A Christian Testimony is a thought-provoking study about the power of positive thinking and the Christian faith. It follows the author’s own personal journey of faith and discovery as he details how his Christian faith unleashed a positive power—in the attainment of personal, even material goals (including the acquisition of university degrees and a Rolls Royce!), but more significantly in the realisation of far-reaching goals: the discovery of his wife and ultimately the transition from university professor in South Africa to successful hotel-owner in Scotland. An important lesson in the experience of mid-life change is seen in the close dependence on God’s love and boundless supply for all needs, material and spiritual.

From establishing an objective, working out a strategy, and using faith and initiative, this detailed thesis explores the essential principles for personal success and achievement and guides the reader step-by step through the practical process of attaining his or her goals. In the final analysis, however, it asks whether it is the individual, or the invisible hand of Providence, which engineers the success—even to the extent of changing one’s original goals, and changing one in the process.

Preface

This little book is more than a ‘how to succeed’ manual! It’s a personal testimony, bearing witness to how my Christian faith opened doors and released the power of God—a God who loves and cares, who guides us to fulfil the special plan he has for each one of us.

On one level, it explores the essential principles for personal success and achievement. It’s a record of how these principles worked for me. How did I achieve my three university doctorates? How did I apply myself, what research methods did I use? On a superficial, materialistic plane, how did I acquire my Rolls Royce, or my hotel in Scotland?

More important, how did I reach out and grasp a dream—a dream which, while I lived in Apartheid South Africa, seemed impossible? The book is a record of survival in change. In mid-life, to forego, to let go, all one’s securities—a comfortable five-bedroomed home, a secure professorial salary and status, the Rolls Royce and other possessions—to reach out for an intangible, as yet unrealised vision of a life of spiritual satisfaction and service halfway across the world, certainly involves stress and crisis.

There are many who, in mid-life, find their old life cloying and unsatisfying. A change of direction at this time, possibly into self-employment, can be traumatic, to say the least. But to venture and establish a closer, trusting partnership with the Creator, is to achieve boundless satisfaction. It may allow the Creator an opportunity to release his power and reveal his special plan for you.

The book was written in two parts. Steps One to Six were written in England, after I had embarked on my journey of faith and discovery. The final step (Step Seven) and Epilogue were written after the successful attainment of my dream—a hotel in Scotland. At the conclusion of Step Six I was still unsure and uncertain, and had reached a stage where a new dream had unfolded and had to be visualised and hoped for. The final section shows how a persevering trust in God’s promises and providence brought me home, and how God requires a practical application of faith—a faith which, metaphorically, may require one to walk on water!

God is as real today as he was when he spoke to Moses in a burning bush or parted the Red Sea to lead the Israelites across dry land. His power is as real today, and just as available to us, as when Jesus turned water to wine, walked on water, and appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus in a blinding revelation of God’s purpose.

Today we do have extra-biblical proof of God’s miraculous reality and power. My testimony in Step Four (‘Tapping into the Spirit Dimension’) is an example of such evidence. There was nothing more special about me than others that I should have been blessed with such evidence—apart from my special condition of need at the time: for a moment, God placed me into his intensive care, enveloping me with an outpouring of his love. He loves us all equally, though he may extend some special care to the lost sheep, just as we might take extra trouble to find a lost coin.

My prayer is that God will use this little book to reassure you of his abiding and abounding love and care, and of his ever-present guidance in working out his special plan for you. May it help you to tap into the Spirit dimension and realise the dream God has implanted into your heart!

CHM

Acknowledgements

Scripture texts are from the Good News Bible, ABS. 1976 by kind permission of the National Bible Society of Scotland.

Thanks are due to Kingsway Communications Ltd for permission to use an extract from Power in Praise by Merlin Carothers.

STEP ONE :

VISUALISING A CLEAR GOAL

It’s absolutely vital for any kind of success! You must have a goal, or, to use the scientific term, an objective.

And it is the first step. I’ve proved it. It’s the foundation upon which all your actions—all your consequent actions—will be established. It’s the first ingredient of a magic formula. There’s no magic about it, of course—it just works like magic. It’s the first step that unleashes—or begins to unleash—a creative force available to every and any human being.

You’ve heard of Jesus’s words about faith: ‘If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible to you!’ (Matthew 17:20).

It’s absolutely true. Faith is belief, and belief is based on something concrete—something clearly visualised—like that mustard seed. This metaphor of a mustard seed implies something that can be seen and touched and handled.

You must know what you want—and then you must VISUALISE it! You must identify your goal and see it clearly in your mind—in your imagination.

That’s the way I got everything I have—my university degrees and three doctorates, the various houses I have owned in prosperous residential suburbs, my Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, my professorship and headship of an English Department at a University, and—yes, believe it or not, even my wife!

And yet my English teacher once, in desperation, advised me to leave school. ‘For heaven’s sake, Muller,’ he shouted, ‘go to the tech where you can learn to do things with your hands, for you’ll never do anything with your brain!’

I was in the penultimate year of school, then. I was certainly heading for failure, since my previous report had about four red circles around my various subject averages. Mathematics was one subject where the average was always circled in red. I think it was my English teacher’s remark that shook me. I realised I would fail Standard 9—as the penultimate year of senior schooling was called in South Africa.

So, I dropped Maths. I took commerce instead—an easy subject because it depended simply on learning facts. Then I put my shoulder to the wheel, and, by the skin of my teeth, passed Standard 9—with no red circles in the final report. But this meant I no longer had mathematics as a subject, and it also meant I wouldn’t be able to go to University: in South Africa, matriculation with exemption—permission to go on to University—was dependent on having mathematics or a third language in your final Standard 10 year.

And I had no third language—and now no mathematics.

And yet—I visualised myself at University! I saw myself enrolling. I saw myself attending lectures. I saw the letters ‘B.A.’—Bachelor of Arts—behind