How to Ask God For What You Desire

Can you really ask God for ANY thing? The answer may shock you. 

Let's dive into what the Bible says about our desires and how to ask God for them, diving into topics such as Biblical manifestation and "why isn't the desire coming?"

Have a beautiful and blessed week! 

My Worship Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ymqW6Yjv7Iw5ZbTan2uuU

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, my beautiful ladies. Welcome into the Fruitful Feminine. I am so excited that you are here. I'm so excited for this topic, and I'm so thankful because I'm feeling 100% healthy this week. Last week I was sick. If you were listening to the episode, you know. Thank you, each of you, for your prayers. They worked. I'm feeling so much better. So, what are we talking about today? How to ask God for what you want. How do you ask him for the desires of your heart? There's a huge belief that even within Christianity, that we can't ask God for what we want. But then you read the Bible and it literally all over is telling us, ask for what you want. The Father wants to give it to you. So we're going to talk about what that looks like, how to do this, and we're also going to be getting into the manifestation side. I'm not talking about woo-woo spiritual manifestation. I'm talking about original manifestation that is rooted in the Word of God before spirituality ever touched it. So welcome into the episode. And if this is your first one, extra welcome to you. All right. My question for you is: do you ask God for what you desire? If you genuinely think about how your relationship is when it comes to asking for what you want, do you ask God for what you want? If you do, how do you do it? If you don't, why not? And I want you to just think about that for a minute. As I try to get Gus to stop licking his paws next to this microphone. So if you don't, why not? One of my favorite scriptures in the Bible, it's Matthew 7.7. Keep on asking and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking and you will find. Keep on knocking and the door will be opened for you. Love that. Remember that. We're gonna come back to that. Mark 9.23. There's a man that is talking to Jesus and he asks him, Have mercy on us and help us if you can. And Jesus responds to him, What do you mean if I can? Anything is possible if a person believes. At the root of asking and receiving for what you want is faith. And that's the side that we're going to be focusing on. A lot of us we ask for what we want, and then we feel frustrated. I asked God, it's not here. Uh, what's happening? Not knowing that our faith is actually divided. When we think about the place that we're asking God from, so if you have ever heard of the scripture, delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. I used to read that and think, amazing, like anything we want, we can have. And that is true to an extent. However, once I started reading the Bible, I interpreted that verse completely different. If we go to the book of James, which we'll be focusing in today, this is James chapter four, verses two. And it says, You want what you don't have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can't get it, so you fight and wage war and take it away from them. Yet you don't have what you want because you don't ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong. You want only what will give you pleasure. When I read that verse, and then I came back to Psalm 37, 4, where it says, Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart, I started to think about something. What if instead of, okay, I'm going to be happy with God, I'm going to spend time with him, and then he'll just give me everything I want? What if this verse is actually saying the longer you spend time delighting in God, building your relationship with him, seeking him, getting to know him, the more he will form the desires and put the desires in your heart. And when I started to break this down, my mind was blown because I always thought that the desires God was telling us he would give us were rooted from what I wanted, but they're actually rooted in what he wants for us. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and I would always ask my mom, Mom, can I have this dessert or can I have this sugary cereal? And my mom had this rule in our house. We always ate cereal for breakfast growing up. And she had this rule that we could not have a sugary cereal until we had a healthy one. If my siblings are watching this, I know they're triggered. And we hated it. We were like, mom, we don't want Cheerios, we don't want honey nut oats or whatever the healthy stuff is. Uh, special K. If this is hitting a sweet spot for anyone, I'm sorry. We don't want the healthy stuff. We want Fruit Loops. We want lucky charms. We want cocoa pebbles. My mom was strict, and thank God she was. Because if I had consumed a sugary bowl of cereal every day as a kid growing up like I wanted, I would have turned out not good. I would have been very unhealthy, maybe borderline, having diabetes, having an unhealthy mind, not doing well in school. My mom's decision to be disciplined, it caused a ripple effect in every area of my life. My mood, my health, my academics. And you just appreciate your parents as you get older, even though our parents aren't perfect, but you appreciate when they were strict and disciplined because they knew something that you didn't. And what my mom desired for me was very different than what I desired for myself as a kid. And I'm so glad her desires were the one that were given to me. It's the same with God. I used to think, God, but I just want love. Like I just want to be in love. I just want to experience this intimacy with men. And this is when I was a teenager and I felt so strongly God saying, save your body for your husband. And I could not understand it. I thought, but God, you don't understand that I'm not able to feel as much intimacy. I'm not able to go deeper in my relationships. Now, when I look back, I'm so thankful that I listened to him. And by the way, any single day you can wake up and decide to honor your body that way and to save your body for your husband, even if you're in a relationship. That's another topic. But that desire of, I want intimacy, God, I want depth in my relationships. I want, I don't want my partner to leave me because I'm not giving him my body. That was rooted in my desire. And if I would have been granted that, my life would be very, very different. The closer I got to God, the more his desire for my body to be saved from my husband took root in my heart. So you must first delight yourself in the Lord, and then the desires that are in your heart will be from Him, not yourself. And they will always, always, always be better and more beneficial for you. Moving on to James 1. There's one scripture that actually we talked about last week or the week before that that I said, I want to make an entire episode on this scripture. Here we go. This verse, actually, it's three verses. It's one of those ones that I read it and I didn't fully grasp it. You know, when you read something and you just know you didn't fully get it. So, what did I do is I looked up another version of this verse, which I'll read in just a second. And I have about six different versions on the Bible app of my phone. So I have the New Living Translation, that's the version that my Bible is in. There's the King James Version, there's the Message Version, the New International Version. If you ever see NIV, NLT, all of those, that's what it stands for. If you are new to reading the Bible, why do we have all of these different translations, first of all? Okay, so something that this is a this is something that people say as a fact, but it's not true, is people say that the Bible is not accurate because there's different translations. That is not true. The original Bible exists. The Bible was written in Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew. However, rarely do most people speak any of these three languages, especially in the modern-day Western civilizations. And so why these different versions of the Bible exist is because when the Bible was translated to other languages like English and Spanish and French and Italian, the words in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, they don't translate perfectly over to English. If you're bilingual, you'll totally get this. For example, one of my friends, she speaks Arabic and English. And she told me, she goes, Alexis, I love you in English, doesn't, or I love you in Arabic doesn't translate in English. Like I can't fully explain to you what I love you means in Arabic. And I said, What do you mean? Isn't it just I love you? And she started to tell me, no, when we say I love you, it means something like your love buries me. Like your love is all consuming for me, and it suffocates me, but in a beautiful way. And I just thought this is so beautiful. I've so learned this living in the Middle East. Languages don't translate. And so I'm getting a bit off topic here. But what uh what scholars did is they took the original Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and they created all these different versions that that represent the different translation philosophies. So for example, there's a there's a philosophy that the Bible is supposed to be very literal, that when it was originally written, it's word for word literal. But if you translate certain phrases from Spanish to English literally, it's not going to make sense. And so they created these different versions to make the language make sense. Uh, there's other translation philosophies such as thought for thought. And so uh why I say this is just know that the Bible, it is so accurate and these different versions exist so that it's understandable for modern-day reading. With that being said, there's different versions that will pull out different meanings of the scripture, which is why I love when I'm reading scripture to read three to five different versions of it. With this verse, this is James 1, 5 through 8 that I'm about to read. I couldn't fully understand it in the New Living Translation. So I switched to the message version on my phone, and when I read it, I was like, oh my gosh, completely different understanding. So let's go through it now. Um, I wish that I had the Bible in the message version, but this is one of those ones that I've memorized because it is so life-changing. It says, if you don't know what you're doing, ask the Father. He loves to help and you won't be condescended to, or you'll get his help and you won't be condescended to when you ask for it. Ask boldly, ask believingly, without a second thought. People who worry their prayers, they're like wind-wipped waves. Don't think you're going to get anything from the Master that way. Adrift at sea, keeping all your options open. Whew! I love that one. If you can pull that version up on your phone, that's James chapter one, five through eight in the message translation. Because when we uh continue this episode, it's going to be so helpful to see as we break things down. Okay, so what does this mean? When I read this, I actually started to see that any ounce of doubt means you don't trust God. It means you're in control and you are going to be in a storm because of it. And this is also why biblical manifestation versus what manifestation has become, where it's rooted in uh these spiritual ideologies rooted in the universe, rooted in the laws of attraction. Because that is not how God designed manifestation to be, it's not going to work. And it's going to come with an impact that God never designed for us. Getting back to this, when we have a single ounce of doubt, we have one foot in the kingdom, believing God can do it halfway, our other foot is in the world. And I love this verse. This is also in James. It says, A person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. That's the NLT version of James 1, 6 through 7. So having divided loyalty, there's so many times in scripture, especially in the book of James, where God tells us, do not have divided loyalty. If you are a friend of the world, you are an enemy to God. You cannot have divided loyalty where you are living of the world and you're consumed by the world and you're following these worldly practices, aka law of attraction, the laws of the universe, you don't have loyalty to God. And if you don't have loyalty to God, you are an enemy of God. And so, um, not to scare you, I'm not saying like God is gonna come and punish you and destroy you. No, but it's almost like a military battle because we are in a spiritual battle. If you are not loyal to the general, the general is gonna go, you are not a part of our troops. You need to leave. If you're not for us, you are against us. And so any ounce of doubt, one foot in the world, one foot in the kingdom, you cannot have what you ask for. The next part of that verse, the father loves to help, and you'll get his help, and you won't be condescended to when you ask for it. It's almost like God knew we would struggle to ask for help. Can I get an amen from an oldest daughter? He knew that we would struggle to ask for help. And I don't know where this comes from that we think we have to do life on our own. And that is actually so disrespectful to God. There's something that I've been wanting to do in my business, and I just kept saying, Oh, I don't know, but it's gonna be a lot. Can I do this? And I'm going for a walk one day and just talking with God, and I feel the Holy Spirit tell me, you forget that you're doing this, or you think that you're doing this all alone. You forget that I would be here, that I would be doing the work through you. And I thought, what have I been doing? Making myself so important that I would be responsible for everything that would go into this project. No, I'm not carrying this by myself. And you won't be condescended to. We think that God will belittle us. Oh, you needed my help. You're such a bad child. Would any loving parent do this? No, in fact, one time I was at the gym, this is when I was a teenager, and I was at the gym, I was working out. My mom and I would always go to the gym after school, and there was this really creepy older guy that kept following me around, and I could just feel him staring at me. And I would go to one area of the gym, he would follow. I would go and stretch, and he would pull up a mat right behind me. It was the weirdest thing. He pulled out his phone, he was trying to take pictures, videos. I was so angry. However, if you're from my YouTube channel, you know that I was such a people pleaser back then. I could not have the guts to stand up to this man. And so I just left and I told my mom what had happened, and she's like, Alexis, why did you not come and find me? I would have gone and said something to him. That's not okay. And she was working at this gym too, and so she goes down to the managers and she's like, I want to see the video footage. There's this man, I need to pinpoint him out to you. He's been following and stalking my daughter, being very creepy. I don't want this to happen to any other girl. And I just felt so loved by my mom and so cared for. And yeah, God does the same. So when we don't go to him, he's like, I was walking around the gym with you. I was like, why didn't you ask for my help? So the father loves to help. And a few times that I've asked God for help. Number one, when I'm fasting, when I'm fasting and praying, especially during my three-day fast in March, I went to God and said, I need you to help me. This is, it's not that it's hard, but it's uh it's tempting to want to go back into bad habits during that first day because I'm so used to checking my phone and pulling out a snack. And when I'm feeling tired or I'm feeling just a little bit more drained or slow, I go to God and I say, God, you are my daily bread. Please fill me. And every time while I've been fasting and praying and I've asked him to fill me, my energy comes back so strong. Not immediately, but a little while after, I'm like, wait, I'm feeling really good. Thank you so much, God. If you've ever prayed that one prayer, God, remove this person if they are not for me, you know he loves to help. Especially when it comes to relationships. The reason why I think every single woman that I know talks about this prayer working so quick, like within one to two days, the relationship, the friendship is gone. Is because when you are intimately connected to someone, your heart, your mind, your soul is being exchanged energetically with them. And that has the power to pull you closer or further from God. Who you surround yourself with matters. Just look at Jesus. He had many people following him, but he only called 12 of them, his disciples. He was very intentional about who he spent time with, who he confided in, and you need to be the same. I've also asked God to heal my mind. In 2024, when I was going through that battle where my mind felt that it was constantly attacked, I I finally asked God for help. I wish that I did sooner, but I didn't know that it was a spiritual battle. I asked God, God, can you help remove this anxiety? Because I can't even sit down to make a YouTube video without feeling anxious. And I've never felt this way before. What is going on? And there were a few steps involved here. I talk about this on my spiritual warfare episode. If you just type the fruitful feminine spiritual warfare, you'll find it. But when I was praying one night, God, remove this anxiety from me. I felt him say, you need to stop looking at negative comments. And that was my problem, is I was always looking for feedback. How can I improve? How can I be better? And I had to stop looking at any feedback when I would make content because that was feeding my anxiety. And I stopped for a while, I would feel so great, and then God and then I would fall back into it and I would feel so disobedient and be like, oh God, you told me not to do this, and I did. Please help me. Any content creator, if you are going through this battle, please watch or please listen to that episode, Spiritual Warfare, because I never thought that I would be free from attacks on the internet. Every single creator goes through it. But when you go through it and you do that inner work with God and He sets you free, you can never be attacked again. You can see negative comments, but they literally do not faze you. I never thought that that would be possible for me. It is. I had to ask God for help. I also asked someone at my church for help. Please ask for resources from your church. Ask from, you know how the Bible talks about consult consulting your elders. Well, that's what I literally did. My church is amazing, and it has this time about once a month, where the pastor says, if you need prayer, please come down to the front. And they also have a prayer team after that. Literally, it's just a private room, and you can go in, and there's people that are praying for you. And so I asked for prayer. I remember this woman so clearly, and I just told her what was going on. I felt my mind is so attacked. I have this anxiety, I've never had anxiety before, like this. And she just prayed for me and she said everything that I needed. Something that she said was, you are acting like a child of the enemy. You are in the chains of the enemy. I break these chains in Jesus' name. You are the child of God. Your identity is rooted in God, not what the world says, not what the enemy says. Your mind is being attacked because you are in chains by him, and I break these in Jesus' name. And she just spoke so much over me, and I was just sobbing. And after that, I drove home in my car and I was listening to the song, and the song was Ah, I Always forget the name. It's by Bethel Music, and some of the lyrics go, The enemy thought he had me, but Jesus said you were mine. And when someone says I'm not worthy, I point to the price you paid. When someone is guilty, I point to that and or I run to that empty grave. And I was just listening to this song over and over again. I'm sorry I cannot think of the name of the song at this moment. Um, but it's by Bethel Bethel Music. And I got home, I was crying in my car to that song, and I felt something had broken off of my mind, and I felt so free. The next day I woke up, and that was the day before when I was at church, that was the last day that I ever had that anxiety. And so God healed me. It was like a year-long battle of getting to that one day and getting to that one moment, and just so much was in humbling myself enough to ask for help. So the father loves to help, and you'll get his help. Okay, so when we go back to Matthew 7:7, so switching gears a little bit, if we go back to that verse that we talked about in the beginning, keep on asking and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened for you. Three foundations of this verse that I'm seeing seek, knock, find. This is the formula to ask God for what it is that you desire. Let's start with seek. What does it mean to seek? Simply praying and asking, seeking out an answer, seeking out God's advice, God's word. It looks like having faith, but also doing the work. The work part we'll come back to when we talk about knocking. Faith and works. I believe it's James 2.26 that says, just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works. It's not enough to just have faith. Yes, faith faith is powerful, but faith without good works is dead. The two go hand in hand. So yes, you must ask and then you must do the work. And we'll talk about what the work is. It's not that you have to go and build the desire that you just asked for, it's something else. Um, so an example of seeking and doing the work, having that faith, but also doing the work. Growing up, I always had digestive issues. And I'm sorry, my girls that have been with me for a while, and you've heard the story a million times. You're like, we get it, Alexis, you were constipated. Yes, and I'm just still celebrating that that is a thing of my past. Um, kind of just spoiled the story. But I remember asking God, God, I need help. I cannot live this way anymore. It hurts to go to the bathroom. My skin is breaking out, my body is bloated, like I can't think straight. I have this buildup of waste because I cannot go to the bathroom. And I was just praying, asking God for help, and I felt him say, get a what is it called? Uh colonoscopy. So I was like, colonoscopy, but that's for older people. I don't think that's for me. I think I was like 22 when I was praying this. And thankfully, my insurance at the time fully covered it. I talked with my mom about it. I'm like, mom, I think that I should do this. Like, everything is just working out that I should. You've been telling me that colon cancer has run in our family, so we should probably get checked. Uh, I asked God, I found that this is free from my insurance. Like, everything is just working out. So, long story short, I got one and it changed my life because the doctor, when I woke up, uh, they were like, Yep, we know why you are constipated. It's because your colon is too long for your body. So, your body, the waist gets stuck. It should move very smoothly, but it can't because your colon wraps around and twists. And it felt like, finally, I have an answer. And so from there, I went to this holistic clinic. Uh, this was later, that could help me detox all the years of buildup of waste and learn exercises, learn eating habits, learn nervous system habits that could help keep my body flushing out its toxins regularly. So, thank God I am regular now. Every time that I travel, because that used to be the worst, like I could not go for two weeks. When I travel now, um it's so relieving to be able to just feel good in my body again and not be stressed out. So, yes, I bel I believed that God could heal me. I was like, you know what? Even when I got the colonoscopy and they were like, this is just how your colon is, I was like, I believe that I can still go regularly, even with this being the case. And I do. But I also did the work to find out how I could. And so faith and works, they go together and seek, ask and pray. God will give you hints, and for some uh for certain people, God will say direct things, or sometimes you'll just feel it on your heart. Like I was telling my friend this, we're talking about how God speaks to each of us, and how God speaks to her is very different than how he speaks to me. For me, I feel sentences and words in my body, like I feel, I just feel as if he's talking to me, but I don't really see the words, I more feel them. For some people, they receive messages from God through other people or through signs or uh their own unique ways. So, first step to getting what you desire, seek. Second step, knock. I love this. I literally picture knocking at the door. And it says in the verse, uh James 1, 5 through 8, the message translation that we were talking about earlier. When we ask for what we want from the Father, it says, ask boldly, ask believingly, ask without a second doubt or without a second thought. And I love this because what does that translate to? Rule out all other possibilities. This is where true manifestation comes in. What is true manifestation according to the Bible? Asking God, having the faith, believing that God can do it, that it's already done, and living as if it's already done. How do you live as if it's already done? God, thank you that it's already done. You give him gratitude and you live your life knowing that it's already completed. This is true manifestation. And true manifestation is when God is the source of giving you the desire, not yourself, not the universe, not whatever uh the laws of attraction talk about. There is no other source besides God. So true manifestation, knocking at the door equals living as if it's already done. What does that actually look like? Okay, an example from my own life. We're gonna talk about my dating life for a second. So a couple years ago, I met this great, great guy. And this was a pattern for me. I would meet these guys, but they were not Christian, and I was like, ah, what do I do? Because I met a lot of amazing men at this time. One that really, really stood out to be like how we met, it was, it just felt like a movie. Our date, everything was so, so beautiful. And we're on the date, and I didn't know what his religion was, but the way he talked, I thought, okay, he's either Christian or I don't know. Um, but then the conversation of religion came up, and he told me that he's Muslim, and I knew in my heart, I'm like, ah, I kept that whole dinner, I kept going back and forth. I'm like, God, he's such a great guy. Maybe he will end up converting. Maybe this could work. And I was really honest with him, and we talked about it, and he also was so sad when I told him, I can't date someone who is Muslim. Not that uh I can't, but that I won't because I believe in being in equally yoked relationships. The most important foundation of my life, how could that not match with the person that I share the rest of my life with? What will happen when we have kids? And they ask, uh, why do we celebrate Christmas? And one of their parents says, because this is the day that Jesus was born, and the other parent is telling the child something different. I grew up in a divided faith household and I said I'm not doing this to my kids. I also was in a relationship where we didn't share the same faith, and when that ended, I was like, nope, never again. And so that is such an important value, and I oh I wish that I had learned this lesson sooner. Um, but, anyways, when we ended that date, it was so sad. We were both so emotional because we really, really liked each other, and we just kept driving around and talking, and when I got back to my place, I was so emotional, and I was telling my family and my girlfriends, and they were like, Oh, what do you do here? Like this guy was just amazing. But I knew deep down something that God had already told me, which is that my husband will know and love him, meaning God. And so when I was thinking about this guy that I had gone out with, I thought, you know what? I have to eliminate all possibilities. Because what God said, what I the desire that He's put in my heart is to be with someone that I share the same faith with, where we both are rooted in the truth. This guy, I kept thinking maybe I could convert him, let's just see where it goes. Like maybe he'll come to church. No, I don't know. When I decided to knock, that looked like eliminating all possibilities. God said my husband would know and love him. This reality that I'm seeing with this one date doesn't match the desire that God has told me. So I eliminated the possibility. I closed the door. And this guy was really great. He was like, Well, I am open to dating a Christian woman. And in that moment, I'm like, Oh, please God, help me, give me strength. I had to close the door, eliminate all possibilities. And the funniest thing after that, the next three guys that I met that I really, really liked, all of them were Christian. And before that, I felt like it was so hard to meet Christian men. So it's amazing when you knock, and sometimes knocking means closing a certain door so that you can actually open up another one. Live as if it is done by eliminating all possibilities that don't match. This is why on YouTube I talk about the dupe versus the desire. What is the dupe? It's like a test that comes to say, will you sacrifice your full desire? Will you settle for this? It's not a hundred percent of your desire, but it's close. That's the enemy testing you to see if you fully have faith in God. Because if you don't, you'll settle for the dupe. But the desire is waiting for you to close the door on the dupe so that you can open the desire or open up the door to the desire. So knock. It's already done. Find. I love this part here. So in Matthew 7 7, the last part it says uh knock and the door will be opened for you. I love that. Total soft girl life. The door will be opened for you. Not by you, for you. And using that word find, every single word is so intentional in the Bible. Find. That implies that you are searching for it, which also implies you believed that it was there. And I love when science confirms scripture because the uh the idea of confirmation bias, it's the study of how our brain will literally filter out what does not match our beliefs. So if we believe there's no good men in the world, our brain will literally put up a blindness to all the good men around us because our brain is way too scared of what happens if our beliefs are not true. And so you must capture your thoughts, as the Bible says, you must take control of your beliefs, and when your beliefs are rooted in, it's already done. It's already there. That is when you will find it. A couple of stories about this. One of my girlfriends and I were talking about this after church this weekend, and she had said that the day before her and I met, her and I met about two years ago, and she's one of my best friends here in Dubai now. And she was telling me the night before we met, Alexis, I was on the phone with my best friend, and I told her her best friend had moved to another country, and she goes, I just pray to God that I find good friends. I really, really want good friends. And she felt that she didn't have any at this time out here. The next day, her and I met, and how we met is we were both going for a walk in the morning, and we passed by each other, and I didn't even have gus at this time. I'm just walking by myself. And we passed by, and I thought to myself, she's really cute. I like her workout outfit. And then we we just go our separate ways. Then we both end up in the grocery store in our neighborhood, and I'm like, you know what? There's something about her that's pulling me to her. So I go over to her and I tell her, I really like your workout set. And then we just start talking. We're talking about hiking and just where we come from and our countries back home. We exchange numbers and then we go the next week and we grab a coffee together. And as we're talking, she starts telling me about her relationship with God. I'm like, oh my gosh, are you Christian? She's like, Yeah, I'm like, you're coming to church with me. And so I pick her up the next weekend, we go to church, and from that point on, every single weekend, I would pick her up on my way out of the neighborhood and we would go to church. And then I introduce her to my other best friends that I had met at my church, and then we became this group. And now we hang out almost every weekend. She's such an important part of my life and of our friendship group, and it's just amazing how this works. And so she had prayed to God for God to send her friends, and the next day we became friends. How does this happen? Because I'm also someone who's very logical and very like I love seeing the science based for things. She was subconsciously in search mode, and I know what you may be thinking. Alexis, don't you always say that you shouldn't be searching, that you shouldn't be looking? There's a difference between being in search mode versus being in lack. When you're in search mode, you are in abundance mode. You are in the mode of it's already done. It's already there, somewhere out in the world. One day I'll find it when it's God's time. Lack is rooted in scarcity. Lack is I don't have it, I need it, time's running out. Um, okay, you look cool, I think we'll be friends. And it's like this desperate energy. No, if there is a genuine connection, then you move. So being in search mode is good. Being in lack mode is not good. Um, and yeah, we talked about the story with my colon, all of that. Um, yeah. So we talked a little bit about that gratitude earlier. Now we're going to come back for it or come back to it. Thanking God as if it's already done. Why is this so important? Ah, that one part of James 1, 5 through 8. This is the part that stopped me in my tracks when I was reading the message version. Uh, it says, if you don't know what you're doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help, you'll get his help, and he won't be condescended to you for asking for it. Ask boldly, believingly, without a second thought. Then it says this people who worry their prayers are like wind-wipped waves. Don't think you're going to get anything from the master that way. Adrift at sea, keeping all your options open. And I totally should have mentioned this part earlier. That last part, adrift at sea, keeping all your options open. What does that mean? It means, okay, God, I am believing for you to send, or I'm believing for you to give me financial breakthrough. I'm believing for you to give me security with my finances. What it means to be adrift at sea, keeping all your options open, means, okay, God, yep, I'm believing you for financial breakthrough, but I'm also planning my life in case things go wrong. I'm also going to start asking uh everyone around me for donations and help. I'm going to start taking care of business my own way. That's keeping all your options open. You cannot ask God for a desire and try to do everything in your own willpower. So either you trust God or you trust yourself. I'd rather trust God. So before this, when it says people who worry their prayers are like wind-wipped waves, I had to look up what this means. I'm like, what does wind-wipped waves mean? It means when the waves are constantly tossed in every direction by the wind. When you worry your prayer, what that means is, hey God, I'm praying for this. Hey God, I don't have it. Where is it? Hey God, do you remember that I asked you for this? Constantly, constantly, God, this is not happening, this is not happening, where is it? That's worrying your prayers. It's going to God with anxiety. And it's kind of disrespectful because when I think about if I'm worrying my prayer, it's saying, God, I don't really believe you can do it because I need to keep asking for it. Um, and I don't believe that it's already done. So what does the Bible tell us to do? It says to go to God with thanksgiving. Colossians 4 2. This is the New King James Version. It says, continue earnestly in prayer, be vigilant, meaning alert, be vigilant in it with thanksgiving. So, yes, we should constantly pray, but not from a place of worry and anxiety, but from a place of it's done. God, thank you that it's already done. Thank you that I'm in this waiting season because you are preparing something for me. You are preparing the desire for me. God, thank you that it's not a not yet, or thank you that it's a not yet and not an immediate yes. Do you remember in last week's episode? Please watch that one if you have not. We talked about something so important where when the Israelites, when God says, go inside your promised land, and the Israelites they're fighting the enemies and they're taking the land. This is in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy. Well, they only conquered the north and the south region of the promised land first. And when I was reading it, I was like, why didn't God have them conquer the East and the West? Isn't all of this promised land supposed to be for them? Well, then when we read, I forgot where in Deuteronomy, God says, I didn't have you conquer the entire promised land all at once, because if you did, the wild animals would multiply too quick for you to handle. And I thought, there we go. That is exactly why God will answer prayers with either a yes or a not yet or a no, I have better. Because when he's saying not yet, if you were to have the desire that you want, there would be wild animals, not actual wild animals, unless that's related to your desire. Um, but there would be wild animals multiplying on the land and not enough time, not enough um capacity inside of you to go and manage those and hold the desire. So God always knows what he's doing because he can see the whole map. Don't be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. That's Philippians 4, 6 through 7, the New International Version. So in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving. And this is a little bit of a bonus one. We're coming to the end here. Uh, I love, love, love the message version because it's so poetic to me. And it's just very easy for me to understand. The NLT and the message version, I very much understand. The other ones I'm still working on. So it this is Philippians 4 4 through 5 message version. It says, celebrate God all day. I mean every day. I mean revel in him. Whoever wrote the message version was writing for the girls. It's Just so beautiful. I love that. Celebrate God all day. I mean every day. Revel in Him. And that's what it means to delight yourself in the Lord. And that is how you get the desires that are supposed to be in your heart. And they will always, always, always be better. When I was younger, I used to love the bad boys. Now, completely different story. I'm not attracted to the bad boys. Even when I watch shows, I'm like, is this supposed to be attractive? So back then, when I was a teenager, I couldn't understand the excitement in a good guy. I was like, there's no thrill, there's no passion. Now it's a completely different story. Because when I delighted myself in God, the desires that He put in my heart were for a different kind of man. And thank God that He did. Because now I think, oh my gosh, there's nothing better than healthy love. There's nothing better than good, healthy masculine energy. But I couldn't see that before because those desires, they were from me. Because I wasn't fully delighting in God. This is Philippians 4, 6 through 7, also the message version. I just wrote it out because it's so, so beautiful. It says, don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. That last part I needed. So this is the same verse that we read, don't be anxious about anything, uh, but the message version. And that last part is what stood out to me. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. I was just writing about this this morning. I was talking about how something that got me over that anxiety with YouTube was when I would sit down and think, oh, but is this okay? Like, how is it gonna land? How do I look? How is how are people gonna take this? And I said, Stop. How can I serve God's children that He has blessed me with as my subscribers? And immediately the worry was gone because at my heart, I took out myself and filled it with being a servant for Christ. And that's exactly what it says. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. Sometimes we're full of worry and anxiety because we're full of ourselves. Harsh truth had to save that for the end. Only the real ones can handle that without clicking off the episode. All right, conclusion. So, three conclusion points. Eliminate all possibilities that don't align with the desire. That is how you truly manifest. That is how you ask God for what you want and receive the desire. And remember that after you ask and you're in that waiting season, sometimes you will get your desire immediately. Sometimes you do not get your desire because you thought that's what you wanted, and then God shows you something else that you would actually want more. Or God will say not yet. And there's a delay in that process. The reason for that, you most likely will never know until you look back, hindsight. So God answers prayers, yes, not now. No, I have better. Um, my mom, she used to always back on this point of eliminate all other possibilities. She would always tell my siblings and I no saying try. You're not allowed to use that word try. And I used to hate it. I'm like, but you don't understand, mom. I can't carry this laundry basket up by myself. I can't finish this math problem. I'm gonna try to do it. And she'd say, Nope, you're not allowed to say try. You say I will do it. And I didn't know this back then. This is also why it's so important how our parents are rooted in their faith. But my mom was teaching me to eliminate all other possibilities with my language. And my language was controlling my thoughts and my beliefs. So when I said I can't or I'm gonna try, what was that doing? One foot in the world, one foot in the kingdom, like we talked about earlier. But when I said I will do it, it's full faith. Uh, next conclusion point. Remember to ask God to align your heart and to align your desires to his will. Jesus is the perfect example of this. When he is about to go to the cross, he says, he prays and cries out to God, God, if it is your will, Father, take this burden away from me. But if it is not in your will, let it be done. Let me be crucified and go to the cross. And so anytime we are asking God, first before we even ask, we must ask God to align our heart and our desires to his will. Because if it's not in his will, it's not his desire. How do you know your purest desire? How do you know the actual desires that God wants for you? Spending time with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is different from God and Jesus. The Holy Spirit is God, but it's a it's a different uh representation of God. The Holy Spirit is our helper, it's our advocate, it's our friend. It is someone that we must intentionally get to know and spend time with. My church right now just did a sermon or a series on the Holy Spirit, and it was so, so good. Like the Holy Spirit out of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is probably the one that I'm working on growing my relationship with the most. So if you feel uh I don't have a strong relationship with the Holy Spirit, a great thing to do would be to find a sermon either online, like on YouTube or a podcast, and just start seeking out information about the Holy Spirit, reading about the Holy Spirit. I believe it's 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, and then also in the books or the book of Acts, that is when you will really get to know the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us, I'm leaving you with a gift, a gift of peace of mind and heart. And the peace that I give, it's a gift that the world cannot give. So don't be troubled or afraid. Where does this peace come from? It comes from a relationship with the Holy Spirit. When you ask Jesus to come into your life and you confess with your mouth and you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, it says that you will be saved. When you ask for Jesus to come into your heart, the Holy Spirit enters your heart. That is why you start changing and having these convictions. You have desires that you never had before because it's not just your spirit in your body anymore. It's the Holy Spirit with your spirit. That's also why fasting and praying is so powerful, because when you fast and pray, you starve your flesh and your spirit gets filled. Because your body is not holding and consuming all of these things from the world. Your body is empty and can now be filled and sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit. So remember to ask God to align your hearts or align your hearts, your heart and desires to His will. And last point, remember that asking with doubt is useless. If you're going to ask and still be double-minded, still have one foot in the kingdom, one foot in the world, might as well not even ask. Asking with doubt, useless. And I think this is because one of our purposes in life is to find and to know God, to be in relationship with Him. How can we find and know God if we are filled with ourselves, if we are the one in charge of receiving our desires, and if we're the one that gets things done, if we're the ones that opens the door and knocks and does all of the work? Why would we need God if we only need ourselves for a desire? So when God designed us, he did not design us to have our desires only by our own will and our own strength. We must run to him. And so this looks like building your faith and trusting that he will provide rather than trusting yourself. When there's something that you really, really want and a dupe comes along and you're tempted to settle, remember that settling means trusting yourself more than God. It means doubting that the full promise can be yours. And that's why it's also so important to know your worth and be rooted in your identity in Christ. Because when you know that God chose you to be his daughter or his son, that he gave his baby boy for your life to be saved, that when God created you, he numbered every hair on your head. It says he knit you together in your mother's womb. He knew every page in your book of life before you were even born. God loves you and wants to know you, and you are so extremely worthy to him. When you read the Bible and you finally realize that you stop seeking approval in the world, uh, you stop trying to find validation and purpose in the world. You're not designed to find validation in the world. It's an empty well. John 4, I believe it's John 4, talks about this. The woman at the well, Jesus goes, if you keep drinking this water, you will be thirsty. Same thing goes with your desires. If you keep trying to ask and create desires from you being the source or any other source outside of God, you're going to keep on having to ask. You're going to keep on having to draw and drink the water. It's not going to satisfy and it's not going to come. So our purpose is to know and to love God. And when we say, okay, God, I'm dreaming for this, I'm desiring this, and I let go of trying to do it in my own strength. I trust you to do it. That's when God comes in, gives us the desire, and we go, Whoa, that was so cool that you did that. Can we do it again? And you just get to know him. I think the greatest points of, or some of the strongest points that you will build a relationship with God is when you're suffering the most, because you cannot recover fully from suffering without God. And when he touches his finger on you and you heal so massively from his presence, that is that builds your faith so much. That's why my suffering, I love every moment that I've suffered in life because it's when I've drawn the closest to God. And that's the purpose of our life. And also those moments where I ask God for something and then he gives that desire or he gives way more than I was desiring. I think, God, you're so good. I couldn't have done this on my own. And it strengthens your belief and your faith in him. And also what you ask for, it's also a testimony for other people because when you can tell other people, I asked God for this, this is what he did, this is what he led me to. The desires that God gives you, they are so powerful, and most of the time they are for more than just you. They are to serve the kingdom and to serve his children. And God wants to spoil you. He loves to give gifts. It talks about this so much in the Bible where God loves to give gifts to his children, he loves to take care of his children, he loves being a father. Do you see those people online who they say, you can just tell this man loves being a girl dad? That is how God is. He loves being our father. So ask God for what you desire, believe 100% in your heart, and seek, knock, and you will find it. I hope that this has helped you. I love you so much. You know, the funny thing is, I said, yeah, there's only one verse, James 1, 5 through 8, that I want to talk about. I hope that this is longer than 10 minutes. I need to just realize by now it's never just going to be 10 minutes. Anyways, ladies, thank you so much for listening. Thank you also so much every time you rate this podcast. When you take the time to put that little star or leave a comment, it means so much to me. I love reading what you write, and I just love seeing how helpful and how impactful this is for you. So thank you for sharing the podcast. Thank you for being here. I already miss you for next week, and I hope that you have a beautiful and a blessed week. See you in the next one.