I am no good at sales or self-promotion. I never was a success at network marketing, though I tried off and on for many years. Twelve years ago, I was introduced to a way of inviting people that was nonthreatening, and generic. It didn’t matter if they ever joined my company – in fact, I wasn’t even supposed to tell them what company I was in. It was free training that would help them in any network marketing company, and hopefully they would eventually want to join mine.

The problem is, the training program was permeated through and through with new age thinking. For example, each week we would read a chapter in Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, and write down our thoughts and application, to share on the weekly call. The primary theme of the book is that “thoughts become things”, and we can get anything we want by positive thoughts and speaking only positive. The key chapter is called “Autosuggestion”, which is a fancy word for “self-talk”, or what we tell ourselves. We were to come up with our own self-talk, and say it out loud, with strong emotion, hundreds of times a day. Thus we would attract to ourselves what we really wanted… i.e. the Universe would bring the good things our way.

There were plenty of professing Christians in the group, and I wondered how they could reconcile what we were being taught, with what the Bible teaches.

“Oh,” they would say, “you just have to understand that ‘the Universe’ is really God, only if Napoleon Hill actually used the name ‘God’ it would discourage non-Christians from reading the book. In Mentoring For Free, the focus isn’t winning people to Christ – it’s a way of doing business.”

Now, it is true we have a lot of self-talk going on in our minds all the time, and it will certainly have a positive or negative effect on us. We can even bring good or bad into our lives, depending on what we continue to tell ourselves. But that was a real problem for me, because the emphasis was on ME as the captain of my own ship, the lord of my own life. I had never heard of the prosperity gospel, or “name it and claim it” at that time, but I knew there was something wrong with what we were doing. I found myself doing all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to filter it all through God’s Word.

What finally killed it for me was when the two head guys told us we needed to include “I AM” in our self-talk, because, “Remember Moses and the burning bush? ‘I AM’ is what gives you the power to really change your subconscious and get what you want in your business.”

But it wasn’t Moses who said, “I AM.” It was God! No amount of mental gymnastics could get me past the feeling that this was the height of audacity. It was blasphemy! Enough with the twisting of scripture to make it fit Napoleon Hill’s flawed philosophy. I quit, and I’ve never looked back.

This past Tuesday at Prairie College, the guest speaker in chapel was Dr. Charlotte Bates, who was the Dean of Women when I was a student there. She said we often try to be our own little ‘I am’ and let our personal agendas and ego rule our lives, rather than really journeying with our Lord.

This is her challenge to the students at the end of her talk…

“Are you committed to loving and learning from Him in much deeper ways? Is ‘to know Him and make Him known’ only a Prairie saying, or is it the passion of your heart and your life? Are we diminishing our Lord by arguing, by superficially agreeing, or trying to be our own little ‘I am’? By God’s grace, may each one of become image bearers of Christ, that He intends us to be, and to be part of His instrument in fulfilling His purposes.”

Fresh in my mind when I watched the chapel video was something Oswald Chambers had said in a recent reading in My Utmost for His Highest.

“The little ‘I am’ always sulks when God says do. Let the little ‘I am’ be shriveled up in God’s indignation – ‘I AM THAT I AM… hath sent me.’ He must dominate. Is it not penetrating to realize that God knows where we live, and the kennels we crawl into! He will hunt us up like a lightning flash. No human being knows human beings as God does.”