Yesterday, I shared with you about how reading the Scripture is part of my morning routine, along with prayer and meditating on a passage of the Bible. Today, I’m going to tell you about how I spend the next few minutes of my time every a.m. — writing down my goals.

Believe it or not, I think that this exercise, although not traditionally considered part of a devotional time, may be the most important step in the process. You see, what I’ve found is that when you write down your goals, it enables you to see Jesus in the light of a helper and not as One who is disinterested in getting you to where you want to be. When you understand that God is for you and that He wants to empower you to live a fruitful and abundant life, writing down your goals becomes a spiritual process that is a natural outgrowth of prayer and Bible study.

First of all, it’s important to note that when I write down my goals, I do it as though they’ve already been accomplished. This is because science has proven that doing so will bring my mind and heart to a place of expectation, which means that I am that much closer to my dreams becoming reality. Secondly, I write in sequence, starting with my Spiritual goals, which in essence are about who I want to be as a believer. Then I write down my family goals, or what kind of dad and husband I want to be. I follow this by recording my church goals, financial goals, and my personal health goals, with the whole thing being about a paragraph.

Here are a few of my goals, just to give you an idea about what they look like. For one, I want to have about ten million viewers for Hour of Power; we have about two million right now. So I write down: Hour of Power has ten million viewers. We also want to have 5,000 children in our church, so I write down: Shepherd’s Grove has 5,000 children. After I finish writing down my goals, I plan my day, think about what I want to accomplish and pray for any meetings I have. I finish up with one final step, which we will talk about tomorrow.