Leon Fontaine - Programmed To Succeed
Hey everybody, it's so great to have you with me today on our program. Today is a very interesting message. I addressed our school, and all of the teenagers in the high school classes, and I did a chapel for them. So I want you to hear this message that we did for them, because I begin to just focus on and try to get into their minds and heads and hearts, about this issue of the autopilot deep in their being called the heart, and help them understand it. So I hope you enjoy it, maybe it will help you to have a conversation with your teenagers, your grandkids, or maybe even you've never heard this before but anyway, I think you're going to enjoy as I speak to the teenagers at Springs Christian Academy.
I want to talk to you about something that so few people understand. And that is that, as you are developing your mind, along the skills and the abilities that you've got, and just regular education which is crucial and important in our world. There is a part of you, that I had no understanding of when I was a teenager. At 18 years of age, I was looking around and just looking at the world and looking at church and just trying to think okay, God, I want my life to matter and I want an exciting life, I want a life full of risk, adventure, romance. I want it all. And so, I began to find out and learn about a part of me, called my heart.
Now, it wasn't what everybody says. Like in football, you've got to have heart. It's even a beer commercial I think. But, we talk about heart and we don't understand the term 'heart' in the Bible. And so you, have a mind that you need to renew. It's precious, be learning, be growing. Be open to learning, and be disciplined to educate yourself. You've got a body that you've got to control. But there is a heart, and this is the autopilot of your life, which means it is something that needs to be programmed. And when you program the autopilot on a plane, the pilot can sit back and that plane just stays on course, even if the wind blows it, autopilot corrects it. If the wind, you know, if the wind shears a little bit, the autopilot on the plane corrects it. That's what your heart is.
Now, it's more than just an autopilot. Out of your heart, comes something the Bible calls faith. And I'm not talking about, like you have to have, you know, what faith are you? I'm Lutheran, I'm Pentecostal. But there's a part of you called your heart, that is your autopilot for life, and it needs to be as well, it needs to be trained. It needs to be established is the word I like. And then, it also is what releases the supernatural power of God in your life. For your business, your future. For protection. For healing. For wisdom beyond what anyone else could have. We have this thing called, our heart. Now, how do you program this? Because this deep area of your heart, and I don't mean your physical beating heart. But this spiritual heart actually is if you can learn to establish it, if you can learn to literally like a re-education of it, then you are going to be in a phenomenal place.
I know tons of smart people. Really educated people. And they struggle so much with their heart beliefs. So, what you believe about yourself is buried in this heart, and so, when I was seventeen years old, when I first begin to seriously look at the Word of God and go, I don't like religion. I don't like dry and boring church services. I don't like all the stuff and the craziness that religion brings, and so, you know, years later, I really began to walk out something that I now call Spirit Contemporary, being spiritually alive. And, in the years ahead as I became a paramedic, and learned to prepare my heart to meet with medical emergencies, I would pray over people who were dying. I would pray over people who needed miracles, and I saw incredible miracles take place.
The miracles that began to happen didn't happen as I educated myself in the Bible. It happened as I begin to meditate. I begin to dream, I begin to look towards my future. And meditation is, where you use your imagination, and the Word of God, and they come together. And as you study the imagination, in the Bible, man you're going to find out that nothing you imagine can be withheld from you. Because imagination is powerful, but so few people use their imagination. And so, my challenge to you is, if right now, I mean, and this doesn't just work on learning Bible doctrine. You need a dream, if you want to get involved in sports, right now, you can begin to establish your heart, and get the heart working for you. The Bible compares your faith to a servant. And it says you've been given a servant who will work tirelessly, nonstop for you. And it's faith. And this faith according to the Bible in 1 John 5:4 I believe it is, it says this is what will give you victory over every issue in your life. Temptation, attacks, storms, et cetera. You have as an individual, have faith.
Now, so many people look at teenagers and see them as children. It's just true. And many of us, when I was a teenager, I felt like I was in a special place where not much was expected of me. But that's not what God is like. God looks at you as a complete adult. And the things you believe and the things that you say, and the things that you do at this point in your life, are going to have a tremendous impact on your life ahead. And so, I really want you in this short message today, to ask yourself a question. And that is, how important am I in my own success? And they say well you need to have an education. Yes. You need to make wise decisions. Yes. I need to have the right people around me. Yes. I need to be involved in Jesus' church. Yes. But, there's something that few people have understood, and that is you have this, this powerful, powerful thing on the inside of you called your specific heart. This spiritual centre of your life, where your identity is. And out of this, will come such peace that fear will never be able to overtake you. It will always attack you. But you will rise up with such a strong faith, and such strong love, and such strong courage, and everybody individually has to do that.
You guys are now teenagers, and that means you've reached the age of accountability. You are accountable for what you do. When I would make visitations into the, penitentiary, we'd go in there and some of our pastors still do that. I would meet teenagers in jail. And I mean like 16, 17. Who were deemed as adults because of the crimes they did. And, it was kind of stunning but I begin to realize that the Bible sees teenagers as adults. And, you're responsible. The decisions you make about Jesus, to accept Him or not to accept Him. Some of you, if you've been really turned off by religion, maybe because of the churches you attend or the things that have happened, or the way you've been raised. You need to make some choices because, just because religion, which is a bunch of man-made judgmental rules, you have to make a decision about Jesus for yourself.
Right now, your mom and dad's faith, is being exchanged for your own. They could believe God for you, protect you, bring peace into your life as a child, but as you become a teenager, and you know it, what you believe, what you think, even if your parents think they're in control, what you believe, what's going on in your head, your mind, your iPad, your computer, your phone. You are in charge of your own life already. And although we might not be able to see the results of that, as you get done grade 12 and you get done university, you're going to continue on a direction that has been established here in your own heart.
So, now, let's take a look at this thing because this thing called the heart is so spectacular, that it is what brings prosperity. It's what brings stunning marriages, great romance, and a sex life the way God's designed it. It's what brings adventure and life, and a chance to get up and really live a great life. It comes out of this thing called the heart. Now when Jesus talked about the heart, and He's the master teacher. He said, that your heart can be hardened. Your heart can have doubts, misbeliefs. You can be double-minded, and it comes because of what goes on in your hearts. He even said to one disciple why has Satan filled your heart?
So, your heart has to be protected. It can be weak or sick, the Bible talks about the hope being deferred. There is so much teaching on this thing called the heart, and you need to protect it. What you look at, who you listen to, what you think about, begins to establish heart beliefs. And so your identity, is in your heart. And that is where you think. Many of you, night time, whether you're going through a rough time right now or a good time, you know, in your quiet times, you'll meditate and think. Or if you don't, then you just absorb everybody else's thinking. And I want to challenge you, you're brilliant. Think for yourself. Do not just accept something that your best friend says, or that your group says, or even your church says, or even I say. You think for yourself. Thinking is really rare today. People who are free thinkers.
Now some people think they're good thinkers because they come against everything. And that's not going to help you. Great men and women have raised up great countries and governments and churches and ways of life that we don't just all throw out because we think we're so cool, we're against everything, and I'm a free thinker, so I'm against everything. No, that's, that's stupid, that's crazy. But now as we think about who we are, what kind of life we want, you need to anchor it in God's Word. Because God's Word is powerful. God designed you to succeed in life. Jesus said, I came that you could have a life, more abundantly than you could imagine. And that's in every area. Your career, your finances, et cetera like I have been saying.
If you don't take some time for yourself, every day, and maybe listen to a really good teaching from a pastor that you respect, or find a book that just teaches on God's Word a little bit, and begin to form the beliefs of your heart. I knew a lady, and she was brilliant. She had degrees, but when we got to talking because her life was such a mess, she would say things like, you know what? I just feel so stupid. I just feel so inadequate. I don't feel like I can, you know, and I'm looking at her and going okay. You're not. You are brilliant, and yet you, your identity is you feel stupid. Have you ever wondered why you've got feelings so deep you can't control them? I've discovered in studying the Bible, that emotions, like how emotional are you right now. It depends upon something that's happened in your life, and it depends on what you focus on.
So, if someone is a bully, and they like to terrorize people, the more you watch them, or think about them, the more attacked you feel. And so, emotions come from focus. Whether you're thinking about it, looking at it, listening to it, et cetera, that's where emotions come. And man, your emotions can be all over the board, up and down. But now feelings, are much deeper. And feelings rise up from deep within you. Feelings of inadequacy, feelings of I'm not good enough, feelings of no one cares about me. Feelings of being lonely. Feelings of fear, that rise up and you can put on a good face, and you can joke around and we all do to a certain degree put on a mask to protect how we really feel. But these deep-seated feelings I was talking with one person who they told me that when they came to our church that they weren't going to come back. And I said well why not? Well I just know I don't belong here. I said, I don't feel like I belong. I said well how come?
Well, I don't know. This is just how I feel. I said, but, you feel that way and as I begin to talk to this person, they told me that they felt that way with their neighbours, their family, they felt that way with any friendship group, they felt that way with anything they tried to join. That they just didn't feel like they belonged. Well that feeling comes from a belief deep inside. And so, you can control deep-seated feelings that just keep rising up. And you know what? You don't even have to focus on anything. This feeling of just being lonely will just rise up. This feeling of life sucks, will just rise up. I worked with suicidal people, and their deep-seated feelings, and they can't even point to why they feel that way. But they've never on purpose, established their deepest feelings about themselves, about God, and about life.
And so, I've watched these feelings grow stronger, and stronger. And I've had to go in and deal with people about to commit suicide, the RCMP put me on their call list, in the first church I was involved in as a youth pastor because of so many people that, you know, they just were messed up and they weren't breaking any laws, but the police knew that they were probably going to take their own life or do something. And when I would speak with people, I would recognize that they couldn't figure it out with their head. They couldn't even find why this incredibly deep-seated feeling keeps wafting up, and controlling their lives. And it would get worse and worse until I introduced them and explained to them, that you are a three-part being, body, soul, spirit, but your heart is an overlap of your mind and your spirit.
And we can't explain it real well other than the Bible begins to speak to this area called the heart, that controls your future, it controls what can happen to you, and none of us have really been taught to program that area of our heart. If I was sitting on a plane, and towards the front, and the pilot decided to go to the bathroom, and some 12-year-old runs into the cockpit and starts touching the autopilot, I would be freaking out because where is he sending this plane? Into the mountains? Into the ground? Into the sky until it just stalls and crashes? You don't want anybody touching the autopilot who is not a trained pilot on a plane that you're on. And yet, the Bible teaches us in Proverbs 4, that what you see, listen to, think about, and allow to continually waft into your five senses, that it begins to create, deep, deep, deep beliefs. And out of your beliefs come feelings that you can't control.
So if you can't control feelings that are rising up into your core, then we need to control beliefs. And so, therefore, if you look, for example. If you listen today to the news, mainstream media, over and over and over again, as they pound fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. You won't be able to control the fear. You say well Leon, I'm strong enough. No. The wisdom of this is cut off, what is feeding fear to you. And then begin to feed God's Word and His truth, get around people who are filled with faith and courage, and be listening to how they think, and how they talk. You, as a teenager, have an autopilot inside of you that's going to decide how successful your marriage is, it's going to decide even who you can attract and you can't attract into your life.
When you get married, what your sex life is like is going to be determined by this area called heart, and the deepest beliefs of your heart that you have about sexuality, about romance, about the opposite sex, et cetera. Then about money. You can have all the training in the world, but if you have wrong beliefs about finances, then wrong beliefs about Jesus, wrong beliefs about God. So many teenagers feel like well He's just going to stop me from having fun. And that's because religion has taught us that. But yet, He's the one that brings incredible joy and the most amazing friendships and the perfect spouse. He's the one that makes your life an adventure. He's the one that invented this ability to take risks, not gambling, and to get up and live this life so excited, so full of adrenaline and relationships, but yet we have a belief that to serve Jesus, it means to go to Bible theory, go to church, carry a great big six inch thick Bible, and you can't do anything. It is so far from the truth.
And so my challenge to you is simply this. You have something called a heart. Not your, your muscle the heart. But it's a deeper part of you. This is where the power of God flows out of you, is the heart. The power of God doesn't flow out of your mind, if you feel like it, or out of your body and I mean it's got to flow out of it to a certain degree. But the heart, is where blessing, and prosperity, and healing, and health, and joy, and peace flow out, and it's the heavenly kind. So it can't be stopped. Did you know that you can have joy, even when everything around you's depressed? You can have peace when everybody around you is afraid. And so when we talk about you know, our school is speak life. It literally means that speaking is a part of the meditative process.
So I meditate. And what I do, is I'll find promises in God's Word that I know this is how He wants me to believe. And I'll take that promise, and I'll just begin to speak it. Thy Word have I hid in my heart. That I might not sin against Thee. As I take God's Word, and I just speak it out loud to myself in my prayer closet, and I think about it, there's a power that rises up. Because as I hide God's Word in my heart. As a man thinks in his heart, so he is. And so then, I begin to take God's Word, and I begin to realize I think on God's Word. Now, to sin against God means to miss the mark for God's best, that's what sin means. I've missed the mark for God's best. I'm compromising my life, and I'm settling for a mediocre life. I'm settling for a life that I think I'm in control of, and I'm so smart and sharp. But if I really submit myself to God's Word and to Jesus, all of a sudden, and I begin to think that way, then all of a sudden, my life begins to get exciting as I believe truths about Him.
You have a heart. You have a deep, deep, deep, central part of you where your identity comes from. It's who you believe you are, what you believe you can do with your life. If I ask you, you know, when you really think about it by yourself. How do you think about your future? Most teenagers will tell me, I don't. I don't know if I have a future. All I see is all the fears and the frustrations in the world today. And are we even going to have a world that's here? One group is saying it's going to blow up, with bombs and other Christian groups says Jesus is coming back to save us, and so no one's dreaming about the future.
And I want to challenge you. There's been problems around this world for hundreds of years, for centuries. World War I, World War II, the bubonic plague killed 40% of the planet. There has been such horrible things, and life goes on. And so life's going to go on. But we need you. We need the gifts and the abilities in you. And so, you protect this area called the heart. You recognize your eyes and your ears aren't just for your entertainment. Okay? They, it is and it's fun, but you need to be cautious what you feed on. That's why Jesus is called the bread of life. As you feed on what Jesus did for you on the cross, and that you are forgiven. You don't have to struggle with guilt, that you can serve Him and have the most amazing life. Better than David, better than Solomon, better than Ruth. Better than Moses, better than Esther. We have a new covenant as Christians. You're in a Christian school because somebody is paying for it and believe, it's probably a parent or a grandparent, that you need to not just have an education, but we need to really help you establish your heart.
As I begin to do that as a teenager, I begin to lay hands on the sick and see diseases leave. I saw bones move into place. I saw incredible things, and as I begin to believe and say okay God, what is the direction for my life? He led me in a direction, where I begin to recognize we need a church that's not religious. We need a church that encourages people to be who they are. Hey, we need TV stations. Hey, we need radio stations. Hey, we need to get out there and print. We need a video-on-demand, and all of these things begin to come into our world because I begin to think about it, I begin to look ahead at my future, and I begin to dream. And I would just find some alone time, and I would just dream. What do I see us doing? What would I like for the future?
And then I begin to see, and do you know what was interesting? That as I begin to meditate, and then I begin to speak and pray that way. Prayer is not begging God, prayer is declaring God's Word. And out of this, I've been able to travel the world and see things, and meet with world leaders and some of the great business minds and church minds, and see God do remarkable things. And I want to challenge you, you're special. You're wonderful. God's designed you and made you, but He's handed you your life. And the first thing you need to be aware of, as a follower of Jesus Christ, and I'm just expecting you all are born again. Given your life to Christ. If not, do it. Your mommy can't get you saved, your daddy can't get you saved, your preacher can't get you saved. It's your decision if you give your life to this Jesus Christ.
Some of you know something wrong with me pastor, deep inside I, that's just your heart and the beliefs that your parents, grandparents, your church, your upbringing, your schools, your own thinking. You have put beliefs in your heart that are absolutely controlling you. And they will stop the incredible success, and that God wants for your life. Think about this thing called the heart. And recognize, as a man thinks in his heart, not as a man thinks in his head. That's important, that's a start. It's as a man thinks in his heart, these deep beliefs are controlling you right now. And if you don't change them, all you're going to get is the same thing the rest of your life. Well, it's just been great to be talking with you guys.
I pray this message would go deep into the hearts and minds of every teenager, and that Father, they would guard their heart with all diligence. That they would keep Your Word in the center of their heart. That they would, Father, go to Your Word, because Your Word is alive, and it's powerful. And it goes in, and it begins to examine the heart and push out wrong beliefs, and establish right beliefs. As they serve Jesus and as they meditate in His Word. So I just pray Father, starting today, there's someone listening to me right now, this is going to change their whole life. Touch them I pray in Jesus' name, amen.