Unlocking The 3000 Year Old Secrets of Abundant Life

Jonathan Cahn outlines essential, timeless principles from Psalm 37 for believers seeking to unlock and live the abundant life promised by God. This journey requires radical shifts in perspective, conscious choices, and active application of faith, enabling believers to overcome negative emotions, defeat the enemy’s short-term tactics, and fulfill their spiritual inheritance.

1. Stop Fretting: Defeat Anger and Envy

The very first key to abundant life is recognizing what not to do: Do not fret. The older versions use “fret not,” while newer ones translate this as “do not get upset because of evildoers” or “don’t be envious of wrongdoers”.

• The Meaning of Fret: The Hebrew word is try it (pronounced similar to charah), which literally means “to glow” or “to get hot” (angry, incense, jealous, or burning). It translates today as “don’t get bent out of shape”.
• The Consequences of Losing Peace: Fretfulness leads you into trouble. Losing your peace makes you more likely to fall into temptation, say things you cannot take back, hurt people, and hurt yourself through negative thoughts.
• Peace as a Sign of Faith: Losing peace is inconsistent with faith, as peace is a defining characteristic of a life reconciled with God (salvation). Since the Gospel is a gift you received, your life should produce joy and thanksgiving, not anger.

2. Choose Victory: Act Like an Heir

If you are a believer, you are on the winning side; therefore, you must act like you are on the winning side. Constant negativity, upset, fear, and anxiety are signs of someone who is losing, or who thinks they are losing.

• Avoid the Mirror Effect: If you react to every bad thing, you become a “mirror to evil”, reflecting negativity and receiving evil as the final story. Fret over evil leads directly to evil.
• The Heir’s Identity: The meek shall inherit the land/earth. Believers are heirs of the Kingdom. An heir is rich because they know what is coming, regardless of their current poor circumstances. You must live like an heir of the King, loved by God, even when surrounded by rejection.
• Reject the Spirit of Poverty: Do not live life as a beggar. Living as a beggar means living in a spirit of poverty, desperation, or lack, constantly seeking approval, fixes, or joy from external things. As a child of the King, you live from blessing, not from the lack of blessing.

3. The Power of Disbelief: Reject the Liar

Just as important as believing the truth is the conscious act of disbelieving the lie.

• Faith and Disbelief: Faith is believing what you don’t see, which requires you to disbelieve what you do see if it is not the final story. To believe the truth, you must disbelieve the liar (the enemy).
• The Enemy’s False Message: The enemy works through mistakes, problems, situations, and people to send you a false message, and you must choose to disbelieve it.
• Biblical Example: Joshua and Caleb succeeded not just by believing God’s promise of the land, but by disbelieving the threat of the giants (the obstacle).