Would you like to be a success for Christ?
I know you would.
From years and years of research, I believe there are five basic principles that can enable us to be that success.
Stay tuned. We're going to talk about those five today.
Five principles that can change your life forever.
Christian Family Video presents, Five Principles for Christian Success.
Featuring Christian Psychiatrists, Dr. Frank Minnorth and Dr. Paul Meyer.
These gentlemen, founders of the Minnorth Meyer Clinics, have dedicated their lives to the helping of others with sound biblical and medical advice.
Our host is Mike Frazier.
There's a question to consider. How do you define success?
That question may have more implications than you've ever realized, and that's what we'll be talking about on this videotape.
Welcome. It's good to have you with us.
Dr. Frank Minnorth, that's the first step, isn't it?
Coming to my own personal decision of how I define success.
You know, success is hard to define, Mike. It's an elusive quality.
By success, I think we would be wise to define it as success for Christ.
Because that's really all that counts in life is being successful for Him.
And we're going to talk about that today.
I have a theory that there are five major factors in being successful for Christ.
It doesn't have to be big.
They can be very small ministries or just individual ministries that are extremely successful for Christ.
And we're going to talk about success for Christ today.
But Dr. Paul Meyer, we get off that track of being successful for Christ.
I mean, that is my goal. That's what I want to achieve.
But there are all of these things that say, no, no, no, no, this is true success and that is true success.
Is that true?
Yeah. The world measures success in a hundred different ways.
But the Bible really measures it only in one.
We're going to focus on that today.
OK, well, let's start. Where would you begin in becoming successful for Christ?
Mike, I've done a lot of thinking about this, and I would start with number one, by being kind.
You think about 1 Corinthians. Love is greater than any other quality.
Let me give you my psychiatric background.
I came out of a psychiatric background where I was taught you say, I see. I understand.
Tell me more.
You did that very well.
I came out of that kind of background.
And that's what it fit with my own personality.
I was very shy. And so that fit.
And it seemed to work well.
And I used that. And actually, it was our first year of practice here in Dallas, Paul.
We were here. We just started many, many years ago now.
And I learned a good lesson.
I would come out of a session. Paul and I had offices next to each other.
And I was good at seeing things.
I had a lot of intellectual knowledge in my head.
And I really could see things in people very, very well.
But sometimes I was a little mean and let people see that.
I would stab a little bit.
I wasn't the most kind.
And we'd go out sometimes, the patient and I, and they would have this sort of sad look on their face.
And look sort of upset and melancholic.
And I wasn't even sure I'd even gotten through, though I knew they were visibly upset.
Paul would often walk out about the same time with the client.
And they'd be laughing and slapping him on the back.
And he had really gotten through his point.
And it dawned on me, if they can hear what you're saying, there's no need of saying it.
And one way they can hear it is to say it with kindness.
Kindness is probably extremely, extremely powerful.
I went in a little bookstore here a while back.
And it said, why customers leave.
And 1% died, 3% moved away, 5% went somewhere else.
67% left because of a lack of kindness in the people running the bookstore.
And that's probably true in success.
I think organizations for Christ tend to rise or fall on how they can communicate the love of Christ to the individuals they come with.
Many organizations start out very, very strong for Christ.
And then over time they become arrogant and proud.
And they lose that humility and that warmth and that love and kindness.
And they do themselves in on their own success.
Would it be appropriate actually to sit down with, whether it's my family or my corporate officers, and say let's concentrate on kindness in this system?
Especially let's have a Christ-like kindness.
It's just not a matter of having a good personality.
It's a matter of being the way Christ would want you to be.
As I study this more and more, the problem is what is desirable in man is his kindness.
I became convinced Christ really wanted me to come across the way he would come across, which is usually a loving, kind manner.
Are you saying kind people can be successful?
Oh, extremely successful.
I think it makes us successful for Jesus Christ because people see Christ in us.
Mike, on the radio shows we do, some of those shows I will literally read 20 books.
In fact, we're doing a series this week.
And I have literally read 20 books for that series.
Yet I have never in all the years we've been doing this had one individual come up to me and say, I really appreciate your IQ.
And I appreciate all the information you share.
I've never had one yet.
But I've had just countless people come up and say, I appreciate the kindness that I hear in your voice.
That's what stood out to them.
There have been a lot of whether your business is a Christian oriented business like ours is a Christian psychiatric practice.
Or whether you work for a secular organization or run a secular organization.
Most studies, when they've done studies on employees and why do they work somewhere and why do they want to work somewhere.
You know, pay is important.
The hours are important.
The benefits are important.
There's a lot of things that they list as important.
But really the most important thing to most employees is feeling significant.
We want to feel like we count for somebody and for something.
And if you can make your employees feel like they're important, they're significant, they count what they're doing is vital in contributing to the lives of others.
Then you've given them a great deal.
Most people would rather have a significant job and to be treated kindly than they would have pay raise.
In fact, in some studies that I've seen.
Paul said it very well, though I speak with the tons of men and angels and how not love and become a sounding breast.
Paul Toinei tells a wonderful story.
He tells a story of an elderly lady that every night you turn on a radio to hear a radio personality say, and we bid you a very good evening and a very kind voice.
And I was sharing that story.
She was so lonely that it's terrible to think somebody would be that lonely. They just want to hear a kind voice that would cheer them up.
I was sharing that in group therapy one day and a lady raised her hand.
She said, Well, I felt the same way.
I felt the same way.
And it dawned on me people hunger to be accepted and we ought to accept them in Christ.
Now that kindness doesn't mean that you become a masochist and lay down and let people walk on you.
I remember one secretary that we had a number of years ago who brought a portable TV and laid it on her desk and watched the soap operas instead of doing her work.
Not a bad job if you can get it, I guess. I don't know.
We were very kind.
The first time we saw her doing that, we said, I'm sorry, you can't do that.
We're paying you by the hour.
So you need to be working while we're doing it.
And she refused.
Yeah.
She said, I'm not going to miss my soap.
I'm going to watch that and stop my work while I'm.
And so we had to fire her.
And then she filed unemployment and all that sort of thing.
That's a good one.
And threatened to sue us and everything else.
It doesn't mean you don't set boundaries.
You just set them in a kind way.
You also say what you need and you say often how you feel.
But you do it with a Christlike discernment.
You set the boundary with a Christlike discernment.
If we would have let her get away with that, we wouldn't have been being kind to her.
No.
Because we'd be promoting her sociopathy.
We'd be saying, oh, well, you have a right to just do whatever you feel like doing and just go through life like that.
And that would ruin her marriage and her kids.
And so she needs to get fired a few times and to wake up to reality of her own narcissism.
A little experiment.
Think back about the three people that have had the most impact on your life.
For the vast majority of us, I would dare say it's people who were very kind to us.
They were genuinely kind.
Yeah.
Genuinely kind.
It doesn't mean they didn't set some boundaries and things like that.
They had a genuine love for us in Christ.
And that is a powerful, powerful force.
In any ministry for Christ, if you want it to be successful, be kind like him.
It's interesting, though, as I'm hearing you say this, you were defining success in two different directions.
One being successful as a Christian business person, but two being successful as inner success as a Christian.
I mean, that's what the message was all about, wasn't it?
Yeah.
The most important principle is to be successful for Christ.
Mm-hmm.
It's also true it has tremendous ramifications, even to the world of business.
Oh, yeah.
Even if your goal was financial success, which shouldn't be the primary goal, but a business you'd still want it to be successful financially, too.
Even if your only goal was financial success, which we hope it's not, then being kind to your employees is still the best thing to do.
Okay.
We hope you'll do it.
There's an old Chinese proverb.
For better motives.
There's an old Chinese proverb.
He who cannot smile should not open a shop.
And that's probably true.
Absolutely.
If that's true in the secular world, again, how much more should it be true for Jesus Christ?
Yeah, one more verse that comes to mind is, weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.
Mm-hmm.
And it's not always easy to do, but it's something that we should strive to do is to get behind the eyes of the people who are sharing their problems and struggles, including their job struggles.
Okay.
And then we just share two or three ways to go about being kind.
One, I think, is our ton of voice.
Mm-hmm.
I think two is in our specific actions as we relate to people.
Mm-hmm.
I think three is just the expression on our face.
Try to work on a kind expression.
Okay.
I've got one question.
What if I wake up in the morning and I don't feel like being kind?
I mean, this happens to Christians.
Maybe I'm the only one that it does.
Yeah.
Just hide in your office all day.
Exactly.
Do not disturb on the door.
But seriously, we all have bad days.
Days when being kind is the last thing that I want to be.
What do I do then?
I've always tried to hold myself responsible for my behavior because I think my behavior will relate to how others come back with me.
And even if it doesn't, I still think Christ wants me to be the way he would be.
So I try to do that.
Okay.
Step number one for success, to be kind, demonstrate kindness, perhaps even study kindness occasionally so I can learn more about what it is.
Step number two?
I think step number two is to utilize a team.
And this comes out of also a lot of studies that I did, Mike.
I came again out of a psychiatric background where the psychiatrist did everything.
Paul, you recall, you and I, when we started, we'd do the physical exam.
We'd do the social worker type workout.
We would do the counseling.
Group therapy, individual therapy, discharge.
We did it all.
We did it all.
A background where the psychiatrist did everything.
As I was going through that, I got thinking about Scripture.
And in Scripture, it's the body of Christ.
It's not so much the individual.
It's the body together that's effective for him.
And I thought, what if we could take that concept and apply that in our ministry for Christ?
We did that.
And that, I think, is why we have been successful.
There's some 20 odd, I think 23 you kind of probably go, clinics around America, Paul.
We have about 300 Christian therapists around.
The first one I remember many, many years ago, your sister, Nancy, had started the business here in Dallas.
Very astute business person.
She was moving to Chicago with her husband.
He was working with Sears and was transferred up there.
And they moved to Chicago.
And she wanted to start a clinic up there.
And we were a little reticent to do that because it was tough financially to start another clinic.
And we didn't much want to.
We finally said, all right, if you want to do it, then let's do it.
She did that.
And it became extremely successful.
Chicago is sort of the hub for the ministry for Christ and the radio of America today.
But it was based not on anything other than looking at a team member.
Every one of the clinics, they've all grown that way.
Paul, the clinic that you had up out in California, those other members that had that up,
John, Henry, Henry Cloud, John Townsend, those are former students.
I had them as students years and years ago.
Paul and I, Henry Cloud was an aide at the hospital.
We pulled him aside.
We said, Henry, do you realize God's given you a wonderful brain?
You're gifted.
And you're warm and you're kind.
You ought to think about going into psychology and then using that as a platform for Christ.
And he said, all right.
And John Townsend was a seminary student.
And took our group course and the other courses that we had.
And just always aced everything.
He was the top of the class and really had a heart for people.
And he didn't really feel called to be a pastor.
But he wanted to minister to people.
And I remember him coming and talking to us after class and saying, well, is there a way after I get my seminary degree
that I could use these desires I have and these gifts I have other than being a pastor?
And we said, yeah, you can become a Christian psychologist.
And which he did.
He went on to Rosemead and became a psychologist.
And now he's my buddy and partner out there.
Let me share a couple of other war stories.
It gets even more intriguing.
Because almost every one of them, almost every one started the same way.
Little Rock, which is a booming clinic today.
Years ago, we had a seminary student.
In fact, the seminary student and his wife took care of Mary Alice and I.
We were expecting our second child.
And Mary Alice had to be in bed a lot.
And they came and just took care of us.
And I noticed Bob was really smart.
We said, Bob, God's giving you a good brain.
Have you ever thought about going into medicine?
You're talking about kind.
Oh, and usually kind.
He's one of the kindest people I've ever met.
Have you ever thought about going into medicine and then using that for Christ?
He did.
Went into medicine, went into psychiatry, finished seminary.
And today he heads up the ministry in Little Rock.
I could give you story after story after story.
Many years ago, there was a janitor, a janitor that came to the clinic.
And he was a young man.
He was real bright.
And I noticed how bright he was.
And Paul, you may remember this guy.
He had an unusually humble spirit.
And he was in seminary but worked his way through.
And he will be starting a major ministry in St. Louis today.
An extremely gifted man.
He has his degree working toward his doctorate now in counseling.
Lanny McFarland.
I could give you story after story.
It's always the team.
The East Coast, the moving ministry on the East Coast.
The psychiatrist was with us for years and years, Walter Byrd.
He wanted to be a member here in Dallas, an owner here in Dallas.
We said, well, there's no way.
We've been going 10 years.
You can't be an owner.
He said, I don't want to be.
I want to go back East.
I want to go home.
We said, well, go.
He was from that area.
You understand.
You understand.
We said, well, go on home.
You want to be near the Red Sky.
So we said, go on home.
And we'll work with you.
And so he did.
And that's booming.
Christ works through his team.
He works through men and women together.
So if you want a successful ministry for Christ, then watch people real close.
Yeah.
I want to say something else about a team, too.
If you and I would have done just the way we were trained in our psychiatric residency,
then we could have probably each treated a few thousand people in our lifetime.
Because if we would have done all the therapy ourselves, everything, the group therapy
ourselves, and the workups, and the physical exams, and everything,
we could probably have treated a few thousand people in our lifetime.
And by developing the team concept, now we are able to treat hundreds of thousands
in a lifetime.
And over television, radio, videos like this one, millions are able to be treated,
and a lot of them, so that they don't even need to see a therapist.
And so they will get the confidence to see a therapist.
And somebody comes into one of our hospitals now, and an internist will do the physical
exam, and a psychiatrist will do a thorough evaluation and oversee it.
And they have a therapist that sees them four or five days a week for individual therapy.
They have a specialist group therapist that sees them seven days a week,
a couple hours a day.
And so there's a whole team of people working with them.
And the team meets together for a staffing and discusses that patient each week,
and says, what can we do to help this coming week?
And they get a game plan.
And the whole team are working together, praying together,
and the whole team are Christians.
See, what I'm saying, that application goes to any ministry.
And it also really even goes to business practice as well.
If you want to be successful, then utilize a team.
It's because those members will have qualities and abilities that you don't have.
God designed it that way so we need each other.
Interesting, when we look back at the scriptures, the fact that Christ formed a team.
He did.
He did his ministry accomplished.
And he could have done things perfectly if he would have done it himself.
He didn't need anybody else.
And yet now we say, well, the new management theory is the team approach.
Yeah, nothing new.
It's been going on for quite some time.
In fact, a lot of people say, well, Christ is sufficient,
so we don't need any other team.
We don't need any counselors.
We don't need this.
We don't need that.
And I said, yes, Christ is sufficient to meet all your needs.
So your wife doesn't need you.
She doesn't need a husband.
You don't need kids.
You don't need a pastor.
You don't need anything because Christ is sufficient.
And Christ is sufficient, but he chooses to show his sufficiency through teams.
All the one another concepts.
Exhort one another, rebuke one another.
Involve you to counselors, there is safety.
You know, we need pastors and therapists.
And we need people in secular work, too.
We need people.
It's a team.
It's the members, the body of Christ.
You guys are going to think this is a real crazy question.
But I'm surrounded by psychiatrists, so you're used to that.
I understand that.
I've got a business degree.
I know about the team concept.
I understand all of that.
I think Christ should be a part of my company team, too.
Now, is that far-fetched?
I mean, is it inappropriate to go to your employees and say, we've got a team here.
He's the chief executive officer.
He needs to be the chief executive officer.
He's the CEO.
He's what it all revolves around.
Without Christ, it's without purpose.
The team ultimately will have a real hard time holding together just in the secular world.
Without Christ as a head, it's tough.
Frank and I have gotten aside in the halls 10,000 times in the last 20 years and prayed
and said when we didn't know what to do in a tough situation and prayed that God would
help us make the best guess we could.
He doesn't write the answer on the wall either.
Sometimes it's still a guess.
Without Christ, you will reject members of the team.
I'm sure you and I would have split a long time ago if it hadn't been for Christ.
I'm sure that Henry and John and you.
Yeah, because we haven't always agreed on everything.
You're kidding.
Without Christ, without Christ, the binders together, it wouldn't hold.
It goes back to that point of what is true genuine success for the Christian.
That's right.
It's success for Christ.
One other, before we go on to the next point, one other point too is that the more abused
a person is growing up and the more pain they experience when they're a child, the more
paranoid they tend to become and they learn not to trust other people.
If you're hurt growing up by a lot of people, you learn, I can't trust, I've got to do
everything myself.
That person is the one that's going to be most likely to feel like they have to do everything
themselves.
They can't delegate, they can't do the team concept.
They do it all or it's not done.
They may have yes men that they tell exactly what to do, but it's not a team.
If any of you who are watching this video and listening to us right now have come from
that kind of background and you tend to have trouble delegating, then you need to work on
that kind of a problem.
Get some insight into that.
Maybe get some counseling and forgive those who have abused you and learn to like yourself
the way God loves you and in practice delegating, even if it's not done quite as well as you
would do it yourself, it's better to delegate.
The missionaries learned that long ago.
A lot of missionaries when they first went to foreign field did everything themselves.
The most successful missionary ministries have been the ones where they have gone to
the various areas of the third world and taught those people to become pastors and to read
and write and teach scripture and to do the evangelization and things.
When they teach them to do it themselves and then they move on somewhere else and leave
that behind, those ministries continue to flourish.
But also the point I hear is the fact that every team is going to be made up of imperfect
people.
I mean all of us are going to bring in our mistakes and our backgrounds and perhaps even
our abuse.
Lots of pride.
I mean everybody, what they thought would be fair, you probably wouldn't find anybody
that would think that they were totally treated fairly.
Frank and I try to do the best we can with all of our employees.
We have hundreds of employees now.
And if you ask them all, how much money do you think you ought to make, they probably,
most of them would say a little bit more.
Or how much this, how much that, what about these privileges and those.
But that's human nature and you still need to work with them.
That's what we need to take.
What's your next step?
The next step in the path to success, I believe, is to have a purpose.
I believe, Mike, we have an unbelievable computer.
That's a very poor analogy.
But an unbelievable computer called a brain.
We have 14 billion brain cells.
Each brain cell has from 500 to 5,000 synapses.
We have more connections in our brain than stars in the galaxies.
I mean it's just unbelievable what it's capable of doing.
It tends to try real hard to do what is our central purpose in life.
I never shall forget, Paul, many, many years ago now.
I dated my Bible, Hebeka 1.5.
It was 12, 969.
And Mary Alice and I were in medical school.
And you and Jan were in medical school.
And it said, behold you among the heathen.
In regard, wonder marvelously, for I will work a work in your days.
And I hadn't been in seminary.
I hadn't been to seminary at that time.
And so I said, God, I didn't know it wasn't written specifically for me.
So I said, God, I really do want to see that come true in my lifetime.
I really do want you to work a work in my lifetime for you.
And that's been the guiding principle, heartbeat of my life.
What about it?
And I think what happened.
I think God took the brain that I had and He took all the energy and He directed it to accomplish that purpose.
People have all kinds of purposes.
Some people have the purpose to die.
Some people have the purpose to get even.
There's all kinds of purposes in life.
The brain will do all it can to carry out what you tell it to do.
Let's put it to work for Jesus Christ.
Yeah, most people, their purpose in life is just to prove their own significance.
And it is interesting the way that worked out.
Frank grew up in a farm area in Arkansas.
I grew up a carpenter's kid in Michigan.
And I never even planned on going to college.
I don't know if you did either earlier on.
And then Frank ended up going to pre-med, medical school.
When I was 16, I dedicated my life to the Lord.
And for the first time in my life, I really felt like God wanted me to go to college and even wanted me to go be a physician.
And somehow use that to have an impact for Him.
I didn't know how.
Maybe medical missionary or family practice doc that witnesses to his patients or whatever.
I didn't know.
And so somehow I ended up marrying a gal from Arkansas.
So I ended up going to Arkansas Medical School.
And Frank and I were cadaver mates.
We were next to each other alphabetically.
And I think that was God's design.
And neither of us knew the other one was a Christian.
And then we started witnessing to each other the third day of classes at the same second.
Had a good laugh and became best friends.
And together, through those four years of medical school, developed a sense of wanting to be a team someday.
Then we parted ways for our residencies in our early careers.
Then God brought us back together again.
And that verse that you claimed came true.
And Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 was the verse I claimed when I was 16 in a similar way where I felt like somehow God was going to use me in the field of medicine to have an impact for Him.
OK. And what I'm saying, application to the business world, is this.
I'm going to have as a purpose of this business to somehow glorify Christ through this business.
That's going to be the guiding principle.
When you have that as a big umbrella principle, then all the other details will eventually fall into place.
Because we have an extremely, extremely good computer to make the details fall into place.
So every employee who comes in with their own Christian purpose, like you both do, into your partnership together, they can be put into that purpose of the organization to achieve something for Christ?
For Christ. That's exactly right.
In fact, as we have hired therapists, 300 of them now, as we have hired therapists down through the years, we tell them that before they come their first day, we tell them, well, right now we need an outpatient therapist, or we need an inpatient therapist, or we need this kind, we need a psychologist to do groups.
But what do you feel God really wants you to do in the future?
How is he leading you?
And some of them will say, well, I'm willing to do that now, but really in the future I really would like to write books, or I'd really like to do more outpatient therapy, or I'd really like to mix it up, or I'd really like to do some teaching and some radio and some this.
I really feel God's calling me to do.
And they each have their own calling.
And we keep that in mind, and they start off doing what we need them to do, but then as openings open up, we allow them to migrate to do what they felt most confident to do and most called to do.
I think the number one purpose, maybe this is being harsh, maybe it's too harsh, but I think one of the major purposes in business today is to make money.
And I don't think there is a big enough purpose to gear the computer and marshal all the forces to hang in there over the years.
I mean, to make the brain organize and really hang in there with zest, it's got to be a big global purpose.
Anything as small as money won't hold it.
It will eventually lose it.
We're in tough economic times, and probably you could say that just about any time anybody's watching this tape.
For someone, it's tough.
My purpose is getting thwarted.
It seems like I'm falling flat on my face.
Yet, the big purpose is Christ, and sometimes he lets us go through tough times, even though it does hurt.
What do I do then?
He's looking at the big global purpose, too.
Romans H 29 comes to mind.
For whom he foreknew, he predestined to become conformed to the image of Christ.
God's goal for your life and for Frank's life and for my life is not for us to become rich.
It's for us to become Christ-like.
That may take us going broke sometimes, or going through tough times sometimes.
If that's what will make us Christ-like, then that's what he needs to do.
James 1 says that no matter what trials we go through, we need to rejoice and have an attitude of rejoicing.
It doesn't mean we put on a fake smile and say, oh great, I'm going bankrupt today.
It's not like a phony thing.
It's, hey, this is a tragic thing that I'm grieving right now going through a difficult time.
How can I learn from this?
What can I get out of this?
How can I benefit from it?
Job lost everything.
He lost his kids and he lost all of his wealth.
He was the wealthiest man on earth.
He lost it all.
He lost even his skin.
He had skin disease.
He said, when I come through this, I'm going to be like gold.
I'm going to be a vessel for the finer to serve Christ with.
Somehow, in spite of all that pain and all that loss, he said, this is going to make me a better person.
That's the maturity that only Christ can give.
That is true success.
So to hang in there, keep going, no matter what.
I like the way the group called The Navigators, a Christian group, puts it, to know Christ and to make them known.
I mean, that's the big purpose in life.
One author put it very well.
He said, God's not in the business of handing out gold watches.
He's more concerned with knowing Christ and making them known.
That's the big purpose.
We need to marshal all the power of the brain toward.
And if we do, it is quite capable of doing a tremendous amount.
Fascinating topic.
We're going to continue talking about how to be a success coming up on this videotape as well with Dr.
Paul Meyer, Dr. Frank Minrich, and of course, with you also.
Thank you for joining us.
Quick question before we do have to take a break.
Have you found success at one point in time?
And perhaps you're redefining what that success was.
It wasn't success after you brought it into your life.
And you said, now what am I going to do with it?
And how do I find what is success?
We'll talk more about that right after this.
Welcome back. It's good to have you back with us.
We're talking about what is it to be a success, a genuine success, a true success.
And before we get back into our discussion, here's a quick game that I like to play.
You might like to next time you see an advertisement, which in this country could be in the next 15 seconds or so.
Learn how they are trying to trick you.
They say buy this, do this, become this, and you will become a what?
A success.
And my question to you is, has it ever worked in the past?
We're talking about genuine success today with Dr. Frank Minrich and Dr. Paul Meyer.
Let's recap where we've come from and then move on to our next step.
Five principles of success.
Number one would be that we need to be kind, just like Christ was.
Number two, we need to utilize a team.
Christ always utilized a team.
Number three, and probably the most important of all these five, is we need to have a determined purpose for Christ.
So we can marshal all the forces of the brain to accomplishing that purpose.
Number four is to have a comprehensive approach.
Physical, psychological, and spiritual.
You say, well, I'm not into the comprehensive approach.
I'm just running a business.
I think it applies, Paul, whether you're in business or ministry or wherever.
Physically, I think it's real good that any team member be in good shape.
Aerobic exercise is better we feel the more we can accomplish for Christ.
I wanted to spend most of our time talking about the psychological and the spiritual.
Let's start with the psychological.
There's many areas here, Paul.
It's sort of hard to know where to start in this, cover the whole area of the psychology.
But we're talking about success.
And I think if I had to focus in on one area that causes people not to be successful or that differentiates those that are successful from those that are not, it has to do with their thinking.
If we can control the thinking, if we can alter the thinking, then we can alter whether they're successful in their business or for Christ or whatever.
The thinking is where it is so important.
Now, if you would, try to picture in your mind a little parallel line that says A leads to B, lead to C.
I want to talk about the ABCs of straight thinking.
It's called rational emotive therapy.
I think it's consistent with Scripture.
Romans 12, 2, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Philippians 4, 8, it tells us even what to think on.
What we think on is extremely important.
In fact, that's the principle I used many, many years ago when I started memorizing Scripture.
I've memorized Scripture for years and years and years.
And the reason I did that was to alter my thinking to become more like Christ.
I'm still far from perfect.
Paul, you'll testify for that.
Yeah, that's true.
In fact, we're going to show you pictures we were bringing in a staff now, too.
I remember, Paul, I remember we were in medical school.
You remember the time that I wanted to become less legalistic and more gracious.
And I made you sit down when I quoted Galatians to you.
Oh, yeah.
What actually happened was Frank was such a workaholic.
And he had trouble living by grace instead of living by law.
And I remember telling him one time, and this guy, he went through four years of premed and three years.
I may give a little background here.
And so I said, Frank, I really think you ought to meditate on Galatians.
It's really a good book that will help you to understand living by grace instead of living by law.
You'll have more fun and enjoy life more.
And so Frank says, OK.
And if I remember right, it was about two days later or so.
And he said, Paul, do you have time to come into my office?
I said, yeah.
And I said, what for?
He says, I want to see if I learned it right.
And I said, learned what?
And he said, the book of Galatians.
And he quoted it to me word for word and said, and instead of but someplace.
And it felt bad that he got one of the words wrong.
But so he hadn't done the right thing yet.
He had learned it.
But then he meditated on it and dwelled on it.
And then over the years, I've seen him become more and more living by grace.
The scriptures are just replete.
They're just steeped with different verses that talk about the importance of other scriptures themselves.
I think it does alter our thinking.
What I want to talk about is a little bit the pattern of the thinking that I say that either means success or failure.
Events happen to all of us.
Let me give you some major events that will happen to all of us in life.
The death of a loved one.
Divorce.
Separation may happen in some of your lives.
Being fired at work is a common problem now with the economy.
Injury or personal health problems.
Getting married.
A change in the health of a family member.
Changes in finances.
On and on and on.
There's also many minor events that will happen to all of us.
Prices going up.
Having too much to do.
Losing things.
They did a survey of what bothered people the most.
Number one was misplacing things.
Not being able to find what...
When I get to heaven they'll all be there by the way.
I have deep faith in that.
Physical appearance is a major minor problem for many, many people.
Delay.
You're in a grocery line and you're delayed from where you want to go.
Weight issues is a minor issue that really bothers people.
So the A event is where reality takes place.
It's what's happening to you either major or minor.
Now if you would picture in your mind we're going from A to B.
B is where your evaluation of the event took place.
If your evaluation is not realistic it can cause simply tremendous inner turmoil.
And it will keep you from being a success for Christ and in your business.
It will also keep you from being a success in that arena as well.
Let's move to C.
C is the response level.
That's where I respond physiologically.
I respond emotionally.
And I respond in my behavior.
Physiologically I may feel tired.
Physiologically I can't sleep.
Physiologically I may have diarrhea, constipation.
Emotionally I may feel guilty, angry, upset, fearful, obsessed.
Behaviorally we may yell, scream, hit, bite or nails.
So there are many responses from A to B to C.
Now the question is does the event cause the response?
And I don't think it does.
I think what causes the response is my self-talk.
What causes me to be a success for Christ or in my business is my perception.
It's how I look at events.
Most people don't realize that.
No, they really don't.
Most people that I've met are like the comedian who says the devil made me do it.
You made me mad.
You made me hit you or you made me throw that at you like the kids say when they're little.
And it's not really true.
We have a lot more ability to determine the outcome than we realize we have.
Can I put this in a term that maybe all of us could understand, all of us I know have experienced.
I'm driving down the freeway.
I'm doing just fine.
Somebody's riding your bumper.
I'm reasonably happy.
They are right on my bumper or perhaps they've decided that my back bumper wasn't interesting enough.
They are now going to pass me, cut me off and take a look at my front bumper.
Inside I'm going this always happens to me.
No one is considerate.
I remember that person back on the job, that employee I'm having trouble with.
They're just getting on my nerves.
I'm ready to fire them.
And before I know it, you're banging on the dash.
You are doing things that might not be the most Christian response.
And you're thinking they made me do it.
If that person hadn't done that, I wouldn't feel this way.
Okay, now how do I alter that ABC?
That's usually not true.
It is true and Paul's getting on to me.
Sometimes it is his fault, but usually it's not.
Let's talk Paul, if you would, about the lies we believe, a therapist of ours wrote an intriguing little book called, The Lies We Believe.
Let's alternate.
I'll take the first series of lies we believe and then you take the next series.
I'm going to talk about some of the self-lies that we tend to believe.
And you see if you can identify with any of these in you.
Number one, and probably this is the one I use more than any other, is the lie, I must be perfect.
Now I don't mean mature in Christ.
But I mean going to a ridiculous level and pressuring yourself in specifics where you really don't have to.
I remember going through seminary.
I had all lies and I got one minus.
I thought and thought and thought about that one minus.
That is the command, I must be perfect.
That's going beyond what is realistic.
That's going beyond Christ.
Yeah, you know, people who are first born are a little bit more prone to be that way, right Mike?
Thanks.
I knew I was going to come into this discussion at one point in time.
I'm just here to be your illustration.
You can be that way no matter what position you are in your family.
But when parents haven't had any kids yet, they don't know what to expect.
And because of human nature, they tend to expect too much.
Plus we all deny our own faults.
And so we feel most anxious around the child who is the oldest child of the same sex we are.
So I'm going to be toughest.
I've got six teenagers.
I was toughest on the oldest boy.
My wife was toughest on the oldest girl.
Even though we knew that from our psychiatric research, we still ended up doing that to some extent.
And so that first child comes along.
No matter what they do, it's not quite enough.
And so they feel inferior.
They feel conditionally accepted.
And they develop this self-lie.
I must be perfect.
I'm not good enough.
And all A's is not good enough.
With one A minus.
They've got to get all A's with no A minuses.
Because it's a sin to do less than your best.
And how does this apply to success in business?
It applies because half of the deaths in America are related to heart disease.
Heart disease is usually related to the basic belief, I must be perfect.
It's that incessant drive that kills 500,000 people every year.
And I know there's medical factors too.
But it's that deep-seated belief that literally, while it makes you successful for a while,
will ultimately destroy you.
And if you impose it on those around you, it will destroy them.
It will destroy your team.
It will ruin your success.
Otherwise, otherwise.
Yeah.
I talked to you.
One more case study.
That's a hard one to link.
Yeah.
I talked to an employee who was a patient.
He didn't work for us.
But part of his job description was to write up some written projects, some written resumes
and things.
And he just was ready to get fired.
He was a straight A scholar, just bright as everything.
But he couldn't get it done perfect.
And I talked to him.
I said, try to do an average job.
Do it quick.
And just try to do a C job on it.
And he said, do a C job.
Oh, no.
I said, well, you're going to get fired if you don't.
I said, your boss is ready to fire you because you never get them done on time.
So do a C job and turn it on on time.
And come back.
We'll talk about it next week.
And so he tried to do a C job.
And when he tried to do a C job, he actually did a better job than when he tried to do
an A job and never got it done.
And so for a perfectionist, getting rid of that lie, I must be perfect, is very important.
And they actually will do better work if they don't have that lie.
Now, some people who are real lazy need to get a little bit more perfect.
But that's a different lie.
Other self-lies.
I must have everyone's love and approval.
And you may have that very specific.
You have to have some certain person's total love and approval.
And they refuse to give it.
And from that, you literally destroy your own success.
I got to say something quick about that one, too.
In the hospital and in our own business, there are certain patients who will just love you.
There are certain patients who will just love Frank and think he hung the moon and hate my guts.
And there's other ones that will love me and think I'm Mr. Wonderful and Mr. Teddy Bear,
and they'll hate Frank.
And it usually relates to what their own mother and father were like.
If they had a dad that looked like me or walked like me or talked like me, but he was mean to them,
then they're going to hate me even if I'm nice to them.
And the same for Frank.
Some people get along with female bosses but not male bosses because of their mom and dad, things like that.
One of the hardest things that I've experienced, and I know you have, too, Frank,
is that we want all of our employees to love us.
We want all of our patients to love us.
We want everybody that watches us on TV or listens to us on the radio to love us.
And we learned pretty early that we need to do what we think God wants us to do and let the chips fall where they fall.
And not everybody's going to like us.
In fact, Jesus was perfect.
We're far from perfect.
And look what they did to him.
They nailed him on a cross.
The next lie, self-lie, is I cannot be happy unless things go my way.
That will destroy your success in the business.
It will destroy your success in the ministry also.
I learned early on, Paul, that to let go of some things.
We work as a team here.
There's about 23 different clinics around America.
Everything doesn't have to go my way.
If I say that, then I think myself is just absolutely miserable.
My big brother is a former pastor of a 2,000-member church.
And now he's a therapist at our clinic.
And since he's first born, he tends to be more perfectionist.
You're picking on these first borns, aren't you?
His wife, Laurie, has told him dozens and dozens of times, which has really helped him to be successful,
when he says, well, this is the only right way to do it.
And I just can't get people to do it this way.
And she'll say, what difference does it make?
Let it slide a little.
It's an acceptable way.
You don't let it slide to get into some principle that would violate Scripture.
But when you have different options, it doesn't have to go your way.
Paul, we're going to run out of time here.
Would you share the worldly lies?
Worldly lies is that you can have it all.
The TV commercials tell you you can have it all.
Nobody has it all.
No business has it all.
No individual has it all.
And they also tell you that you're only as good as what you do.
And your value doesn't come from what you do.
It comes from who you are in Christ.
They tell you life should be easy.
One of the most important things that we can learn in life is that life is difficult.
And that God promises that we will have suffering.
Life will not be easy.
It will be difficult.
We need to make the best out of that difficult life and learn to be happy in spite of that.
We learn sometimes erroneously that life is going to be fair.
Life is not fair.
My kids have always said, that's not fair, Dad.
And I ask them, well, who ever told you that life was going to be fair?
Life is not fair.
You need to learn that pretty young.
Because we're so short on time here, Paul, let's move to the marital lies.
Success, nowhere more important than success in a marriage.
These are ones that will destroy your success in a marriage.
Now when you say marital lies, my first thought is, you mean when we are telling each other untruths.
But that's not what you're saying at all.
I mean that we actually believe these in our marriage.
Number one, it's all your fault.
That's a great one.
I've heard that.
Number two, it takes hard work.
Therefore we must not be right for each other.
Therefore we ought to get a divorce.
It cannot be a success.
That's not true.
It always takes work.
Even when both the people love Jesus Christ, it still takes a lot of work.
You can and should meet all my needs.
In the body of Christ, it's a body.
It's a team.
It's not even one other individual.
We need to accept each other unconditionally.
If my mate meets some of my needs, that's a bonus.
Yeah.
Another one is, I shouldn't have to change.
And finally, you should be like me.
You should have to change.
The marriage would be great if you were just like me.
Well, it wouldn't be.
Let's continue on with the lies.
I'm applying each of these to that example.
Another set of lies that we fall into are called distortion lies.
That's where we make a mountain out of a molehill.
We make a big issue out of a minor issue.
Or we take everything personally.
If there's a change in the office and you have to move to a different situation.
Well, you walk down the stairs and there's a state down the bottom.
You hit it and you almost killed yourself so the kid didn't get even with me.
Or God must be mad at me.
God's mad at me.
Black-white thinking.
That's where you think everything's all good or all bad.
You think you are all good or all bad.
Your mate is all good or all bad.
People.
We tend to think people in our organization are either good or bad.
All good or all bad.
In reality we are all somewhere in between.
Even with Christ.
Without Christ it would be a disaster.
Even with Christ there's still good and bad within us.
Frank, why don't you share some of the religious lies that Christians tend to get into.
Yeah.
God's love must be earned.
Deep within it's hard for me to accept that he just loves me.
All I've got to do is just trust him and believe him.
They died for me.
There's a lurking belief back there I have to fight continually.
I really got to earn it somehow.
That's because none of us had perfect parents.
None of us are perfect parents.
Nobody will ever have perfect parents.
To some extent our parents accepted us conditionally.
Even though they may have loved us a lot.
But God accepts us unconditionally just based on faith in him.
It's just hard for us to grasp that concept because it's so different from the human existence.
Another one is because I'm a Christian God will protect me from all suffering and pain.
And clearly he will not.
Even Apostle Paul, one of the most godly men that ever lived.
He had a thorn in the flesh.
He will not always do that.
He'll give us meaning in the suffering and help us through it.
Another one is all my problems are caused by my sin.
I did a study and I came up with about 17 different reasons why we suffer.
Sin is one.
It's one out of about 17.
But to assume it's always sin is misleading.
We could.
I know we're running real short.
I'd like to go back to just a couple of these distortion lies.
I think they are so common.
Maybe it's because they're common in me.
But I want to go back to a couple of these.
Paul, you hit it real quickly.
Making a mountain out of a molehill.
If I'm driving down North Central to seminary to teach and I'm late.
It's just the end of the world.
And I had to tell myself, now wait a minute, Minnereth.
It's not the end of the world.
I'm just late.
That's magnification.
And yet many of us do that day in and day out.
It's such an easy one to do.
Another one is don't confuse me with the facts or emotional reasoning.
We just sort of got our mind made up.
And that's the way it is.
And that will destroy success.
Now let me see if I'm hearing this right.
I'm still driving down the freeway.
This guy is still on my bumper.
I hear all of these things.
And let's apply this to business situations as well.
Or marital situations obviously.
I start working on some of the lines that we've covered on this tape so far.
How does that change my beating on the dashboard?
What you do, you look at the event that happened.
You're thinking about it.
And then you go back and re-appraise it.
And say, well it's not the end of the world.
I'm just going to be late.
Or it's not that he's just totally a mean worthless guy.
He's frustrated.
And I've had a bad day perhaps.
Yeah, and it really has nothing to do with me personally.
And therefore I'm not so upset.
So I reprogram how I think.
What are you thinking?
I've got to say something.
I live in California.
Are you proud of that?
No, I live on the freeways.
Nine out of ten drivers ride my bumper.
And I drive fast.
They drive faster.
And if somebody rides my bumper, I think it's truthful to think most people are selfish.
Most people wish I didn't exist.
Because they'd like to have the whole highway to themselves.
And if I stay in his way, he's going to ride my bumper and endanger my life.
If I try to get even with him, that would be a sin.
And I would just get frustrated and depressed.
Why not pull over into a different lane?
Let him whiz on by.
And let God take care of him.
Sometimes even pray that God will take care of him.
And I turn vengeance over to God.
That's biblical.
Room is 12.
And I just go on and go back into the lane.
And the world's filled with people like that.
If I let them bother me, that's my problem.
And I have to realize sometimes I'm the person riding the bumper of someone else.
Let me give one more that will destroy your success.
It will run it.
It's called generalization.
It's taking something present in your business or ministry and saying,
Because this didn't work out, I will never succeed in this business.
And that is not true.
It's taking a minor event in the present and projecting it into the future and assuming that it will always be.
That will destroy success.
We can do whatever Christ wants us to do.
Well, when you said take a comprehensive approach,
I didn't realize it was going to be so comprehensive that it would go into my marriage and my parenting,
not just my management style.
What is your fifth and final step?
Well, before you say comprehensive, let me also include the spiritual.
Of course, most of all, physical, psychological is the spiritual.
And again, that's knowing Christ, walking with him.
And perhaps most important of all is learning to really enjoy him.
The last point, point number five.
Before you get to that point,
I think the best way to know Christ other than chatting with him, talking to him, sharing your feelings with him,
all that is meditating on scripture.
That's his love letter to us.
The best.
And you won't be a success unless you meditate on scripture.
In many, many passages of scripture we could share Psalm 1 and many others that
if we meditate on God's word,
we'll be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season.
God will make you successful.
Psalms 119 verses 9 and 11.
You will love those.
You ought to look them up.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way,
with taking heed thereto according to thy word.
Thy word have I hid or treasured in my heart that I might not sin against thee.
Point number five.
Do we have time for it, Mike?
Yes, we do.
Point number five is to have no plan.
Don't hit me, Paul.
Hear me out.
Just explain it.
You think I'm being radical?
I've lost it all.
Not yet.
Yeah, because everybody else's way to have success is to have a plan.
Have a plan.
A one-year plan, a two-year plan, a five-year plan.
A minute-by-minute plan.
Yeah, all the books.
And what I mean by that is to put the emphasis on people and not on the plan.
People say, how many clinics are you going to start this year?
And I say, I don't know.
I don't look at it that way.
I look at people.
When people come forward and God has given them in some area
and they have a real heart's desire to do it, then I listen.
And that doesn't mean I do everything everybody comes with,
but that's what I really look at.
I look more at people than I do at a specific plan.
You know, when we were in residency in psychiatry,
we learned that pastors do 85% of the counseling in America.
And all the psychiatrists, psychologists, everybody else in the world
that are therapists put together only do the other 15%.
And so even though we both grew up relatively poor,
we made a decision that the best use of our time would be training pastors.
So we taught full time for $12,000 a year with a doctor's degree
and turned down over $100,000 a year to do that.
And we never even planned on having clinics.
We taught full time.
You got more than I did.
I didn't get 12.
Yeah.
We'll deal with this after we come to the tape thing.
You taught once, and I taught another.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
This could be a whole new tape.
Yeah, yeah.
And so anyway, we had a part-time private practice just to keep up our skills.
And we wrote books because there weren't any Christian psychology books
to teach from for our courses.
The books took off.
People called us, wanted to be treated by us.
We didn't have any time to treat them.
We'd say, I'm sorry.
We teach full time pastors to do counseling.
We don't have time to treat you.
And then it dawned on us, and we believe God led us this way,
why don't we hire people who have seminary training and psychology training
and go ahead and build a clinic here in Dallas.
And so we built that.
And then we never planned on having branch clinics.
But then one by one, like you mentioned earlier,
one of our therapists would say, I really want to return to my roots.
Can I form a branch clinic there?
Some student we'd have would say, I'd really like to go out to California and do this.
Can I form a clinic there?
My sister, who ran the business in the things, got transferred.
Her husband got transferred to Chicago.
She said, can I start a clinic there?
And so we didn't have a plan.
Our plan was to just teach pastors all our lives.
And now one thing led to another.
And some of our students went into TV and radio.
And now we talk to 2 million people a day on the radio.
We do these videos.
We write books that sell about a million a year, a million copies a year.
And God blessed us in ways that if we would have planned it,
people would have thought if I would have told you when I was 21,
well, my goal when I'm in my 40s is to have clinics in 23 cities
and talk to 2 million people a day on the radio
and write such and such books and all that.
You would have thought I was crazy.
I would have thought I was crazy.
But God, by putting him first, he worked these things out
and took care of the rest.
Let me reiterate that success is spelled differently.
For many of you, your success is you have a prayer, a ministry, a warrior for Christ.
You sit home and you pray for us.
That is just as successful as what we have done.
Success means success for Jesus Christ.
Frank, there was a lady in our church who was in her 80s.
She was single and had never been married.
She got to know me out of the blue in our church.
I don't know what it was, but she came up to me and said,
Paul, I'm praying for you every day.
That's when I never even planned on going to college.
I wanted to be a carpenter and work with my dad.
She said, I'm praying for you every day.
I'm praying that God will use you someday to have an impact on me.
When we get to heaven, she'll probably be the queen of some,
in the millennium, she'll be the queen of Texas or Michigan or California.
I'll probably be sweeping the broom on her doorstep.
We've got to wrap things up here rather quickly.
I know that you're going to give an overview and some very specific 1, 2, 3s,
but one final quick question for you guys.
After watching this videotape, and I apply all of it,
will I wake up the next morning and everyone will say,
Frank, you're so successful, and I'll say, I am a success.
Absolutely.
I'll order one of the videotapes now.
No, I'm just kidding.
It's not what others say.
It's what you say about yourself and what you know that you've been able to do
because of the power of Christ through you.
It's not even you.
It's the power of Christ through you.
Philippians 4.13, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
It's a process.
Frank is, when I've felt frustrated many times and have told Frank about it,
and I've said, well, should I let God take care of it or should I do it?
He said, well, Paul, if you were lost at sea in a rowboat,
then I would expect you to pray to God and row to shore.
So pray to God, row to shore.
It's a process.
We depend on God, but he says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
He still expects us to be part of that team.
And success is a gradual process in its measure in God's eyes, not in human.
I want to begin that process.
I'm intrigued.
I'm interested.
And I'll go back and review this tape again and again because we covered quite a bit of material.
But could you give us at least a brief overview?
If you want to be a success, number one, be kind to those that are around you.
Go out of your way to be kind to them.
Number two, study those people real well and utilize the team.
Number three, have an ingrained purpose.
Memorize one verse that gives you a purpose for Christ.
Say, I'm going to live and I'm going to die by that verse.
Number four, be comprehensive.
Take care of all of you physically, psychologically, spiritually, and take care of all of the people that are around you in a comprehensive sense.
Number five, don't worry so much about the plan.
Have no plan, but have people that you really watch for Christ.
Define for me as we wrap up this video tape what a successful Christian business or organization or ministry is to each of you.
Frank, then Rick.
A successful ministry or business to me means that I know Christ and that I'm reflecting Him to those that are around me.
It's to know Christ and make Him known.
Paul said when you become Christians, most of you should stay in the same career that you were in when you became a Christian.
Whether a person is in a secular job or Christian work, they are serving Jesus Christ.
A successful person or a successful business, secular or Christian, is one that is operating on biblical principles.
It's not perfect.
It's going to make mistakes.
People make mistakes.
Frank and I have made plenty of mistakes.
I'm sure we've offended people from time to time.
Because of sinful motives that we've had, not intentionally, but I'm sure we've made a lot of mistakes too.
But it's one that strives to make people utilize the gifts that God has given them as part of the body of Christ.
Dr. Paul Meyer, thank you for being with us.
Good to have you here.
Dr. Frank Middendorf, thank you for joining us.
Thank you for joining us.
We wish for you true and genuine success.
See you next time.
Thank you.