When the movie ‘The Secret’ came out some years ago, it was an overnight success. All of a sudden there was this ‘breakthrough’ in new information that had the ability to change people’s minds and circumstances for the better.
But, of course, this was not new information, ‘The Secret’ has been in the Bible all along. Look at this verse found in Mark 11:24 ‘Whatsoever things you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them’.
The thing we have to be mindful of when we discover scripture verses like this, is to be careful our religious mindsets do not interfere with the truth we are reading. This verse is referring to a spiritual law. Spiritual laws work for anyone who works with them. You do not have to be ‘good’ or attend a certain church before a spiritual law will work, this is our religious mindset working. We have no problem believing that physical laws work for everyone – the law of gravity works for both saint and sinner – so why do we think spiritual laws are any different?
Now, there are a couple of points I would like to bring out in this particular verse of scripture. First of all it states that ‘whatsoever things you desire’. There is no restriction on this, it literally means anything. There is something very subtle here and it lies in the difference between the ‘things you want’ and the ‘things you desire’ So what’s the difference?
One example which demonstrates this difference concerns an individual who was quite ill and was being looked after by their family. They said they wanted to be well and they were prayed for but with no result. It transpired that even though they consciously wanted to be healed, they did not want to give up the attention they were getting from family and thus they had a subconscious desire to remain sick. Their desire overrode their want.
You want to have more money but if your inward thoughts tend to poverty then the ‘inner desire’ for poverty will supersede the ‘conscious want’ to be rich.
How we overcome this is laid out in the last part of the verse. We have to believe or see ourselves with the desired outcome. This means changing the inner image of our circumstances which then defines our desire.
So, on our journey towards manifesting this desire, when problems arise, the fact that we have a new image on the inside – a desire rather than a want – will carry us through until the desire we have  is manifested.