Momentum is like a snowball rolling down a mountain of success.
When a snowball is rolling down a mountain, that snowball can quickly become a snow boulder. What you want is to get a success ball rolling so that it can become a success boulder. Momentum is a source of power than cannot be easily replicated; there is nothing that can replace recent success. When you have recent victories, you have recent confidence, which means you have confidence in something you achieved not twenty or ten or even five years ago but something you have achieved in the past few weeks or months. When too much time slips by, it’s only natural to wonder if you still have it in you. That’s why you need a recent victory; if you don’t have any recent victories, then you just have to go out and get one!
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Newton’s first law of motion states that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion. It would be very difficult to try to pull a seven-ton elephant off the ground that is sitting quite contently. At the same time, it would be very difficult to stop a seven-ton elephant that is running at full speed. Establishing momentum is getting the seven-ton elephant off the ground and running at full speed. How do you do that? Maybe just put something in front of the elephant that will entice him and get him interested. It’s not easy, but a professional elephant trainer could do it somehow. Where there is a will there is a way.
Whatever your seven-ton elephant is, you have to find a way to get it off the ground and get it running at full speed. Once you do, it will be hard to stop! Once you start losing weight, it will be hard to stop because being lighter will feel so good. Once you start paying your debts off, it will be hard to stop because you will feel the burden of debt lifting off your shoulders as the months go by. Once you start praying and fasting, you will feel the spiritual oppression lift and the blessing and favor of God pour down like a rain. Once you and your spouse fall in love again, you won’t be able to spend enough time with each other. But it has to start with something.
Establishing momentum requires faith.
If you are trying to establish momentum, that means you do not have it yet. Once momentum is established, things get easier, but until momentum is established, things can be difficult. It takes faith to believe you can do something if you have never successfully done it before or haven’t done it for a very long time. Once you have successfully done something, then you don’t need faith anymore. At that point, you have seen it. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things NOT seen (Hebrews 11:1).
Once I lost a few pounds, I didn’t need faith anymore to believe I could lose weight, because I saw it, and faith is the evidence of things not seen. If I could lose a few pounds, then I could lose a few more, and a few more, and few more… To be honest, when I first started to try to lose weight, I wasn’t sure if I could really do it. My goal was to lose 36kgs/79lbs—that is not an easy feat! I had to start with no recent success, no momentum, and only faith.
Even after you achieve momentum, you still need to have faith that you will be able to see the goal fulfilled to the end, but you no longer have to have faith that you can do it at least to some degree, because you have seen yourself do it. When you are first starting out, all you have is faith! Therefore, you must do things to keep your faith strong (more on building your faith in chapter seventeen). You must look to God for strength and keep the word of God in your heart and mind. The word of God will help you build your faith. Prayer and hearing other people’s testimonies will also build your faith.
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Romans 10:17
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