I think many of the heartaches and stumbling-blocks that we experience in
Christianity today are not what we perceive them to be.  Many times it is our
perception of the problem that IS the problem.  This may not make sense
just yet, but by the end of this article I hope that it will.  
 Let me say that this is not psychology being preached as Gospel.  This is
Gospel that just happens to be so true that it is a prominent principle of
psychology and affects most everyone in some way or another.

Here is an everyday example of a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Mrs. Murdock: Honey, I think we ought to start a diet tomorrow.

 Mr. Murdock: Ah, we'll never stick to it, we'll be off of it by the end of the
week.

Mrs. Murdock: yeah, you're probably right... but maybe we'll try it anyway..
we really should try to be healthier

 Mr. Murdock: Well, we can start one, but it will end up just like all the rest...

 Now what do you think happened?   This is one everyday example of a
self-fulfilling prophecy.  You may have experienced this cycle during this very
day.  Did you perhaps wake up this morning with a sigh and said to yourself,
"this is going to be a looong day."  As you fought the clock and the traffic to
get to work, school, church, etc. you said, "I'm so burned out... I'm not gonna
accomplish anything today!"  So when you got to school/work/church or
some other destination your 'Oh-woe-is-me' mentality conquered what you
truly may have been able to accomplish, whether it was doing well on a test,
being proficient in your work, or being attentive in worship.  By your own
prediction {or prophecy} you told yourself your day would be long and
unfruitful and then by your own actions {self-fulfillment} you made that
prediction come true!

Are you getting the picture?  Let's look at one Bible example of the
self-fulfilling prophecy:

 Lets take a look at Moses and the Israelites as they were preparing to enter
into the promised land.  Their complaining in the wilderness (Exodus
15:23,24; Exodus 16:2,3;Exodus 17:1-3; Numbers 11:4-6) had set up the
attitude that failure was imminent , that they would die at any moment, and
they would have been better off left in bondage...   this continues as they
reach Caanan and send spies into the land, this is where the actual
self-fulfilling prophecy comes in...  Numbers 13:31-14:3:

But the men who had gone up with him said, "We are not able to go up
against the people, for they are stronger than we." {the prophecy is made,
emphasis mine JW} And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land
which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we have gone as
spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it
are men of great stature.  "There we saw the giants (the descendants of Anak
came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so
we were in their sight."  So all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried,
and the people wept that night.  And all the children of Israel complained against
Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, "If only we had
died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in this wilderness!  "Why has
the LORD brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and
children should become victims? Would it not be better for us to return to
Egypt?"

 ...and indeed they fulfilled their own prophecy.  The spies who gave the
bad report died by the plague.  The Israelites made a futile attempt to invade
the land and they were all doomed to wander the wilderness for forty years
and the vast majority would NEVER set foot in the land of promise.
 Such self-fulfilling prophecies are evident throughout the Bible.  The
example we just read is a self-defeating prophecy, but not all self-fulfilling
prophecies are negative.  You see at the same time this was going on,
Joshua the son of Nun was certain that they COULD and WOULD take the
land, and therefore Joshua was the very one to lead the charge 40 years
later when the land was taken!
 A self-fulfilling prophecy can come to fruition in many different ways.  Many
times it will be fulfilled because we work towards fulfilling it.  This often
happens in the area of business.  For example:

In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation (to whom, if you
are reading this on a computer screen at this moment, you most likely owe
something of that fact to Mr. Moore's company...) predicted that the number
of transistors on microchips would double every 18 months. Now initially, Mr.
Moore was just making an observation that he, as an astute businessman
had made about his industry.  However, it soon became known as Moore's
law and companies started setting their goals for new technologies to be
developed and released based on an 18 month time-line. Before long it
became a self-fulfilling prophecy in the microchip industry.  This is the type
that we see with Joshua... He made the prediction that because God said
they could take the promised land, then they certainly would take the
promised land.  He set his mind and actions on fulfilling that very thing, and
sure enough he was able to.

 A self-fulfilling prophecy can be negative as well, as we saw with the
doubter's among Moses' camp.  The business world can shed some light on
how this works as well.  For instance, if analysts predicted that the Intel
Corporation was headed towards bankruptcy, then this might cause
stockholders to panic and sell out, employees to seek positions with other
companies, and customers to look elsewhere to buy goods.  Through these
actions, the company may indeed be hastened into bankruptcy!

 There is also a third type of self-fulfilling prophecy which comes about
because we were trying to defeat it!  This one is a little trickier.  To illustrate
we'll use an ancient Greek tale.
 In this old, old Greek story, we read of a character called Oedipus.  Before
Oedipus was born, his father, the king of Thebes was told by an oracle (or
prophet) that his son would kill him (the king) one day and marry his mother
(the queen).  The king, not wanting to endure such a fate, therefore took
Oedipus as a baby into the wilderness and left him there to die.
 One of the king's servants followed, however, and rescued the child.  
Oedipus was taken by this servant to another kingdom where he was raised
by foster parents who never informed Oedipus that he was not theirs from
birth.  The oracle found Oedipus one day after he was older and told him the
prophecy too... that he would one day kill his father and marry his mother.  
Oedipus thinking this meant his foster father (the only father he ever knew)
fled the kingdom to avoid the prophecy.  
 As he fled, he traveled through the land of Thebes where he killed a
stranger in a roadside argument... He then went on to perform some heroic
feat and won the heart of the nation and the right to marry the widowed
queen!  It was only later that the oracle caught up with Oedipus and
revealed that the stranger had been his father, and his new wife... his own
mother!

 Perhaps the best example of this type is from the Bible in a prophecy
concerning Satan and Jesus.  In fact this is the most cataclysmic, earth
shattering, life changing, self-fulfilling prophecy that we could ever study!!!
 It begins at the Garden of Eden where God hands down the prophecy to
Satan:

(Genesis 3:15) And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And
between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall
bruise His heel."   

 Satan did not wish for this to happen.  Although he could not know God's
full plan of redemption through Christ, God revealed to him in this prophecy
that:

1) Satan would have an enemy on the earth.

2) This enemy would be born of an earthly woman.

3) Satan would be able to bruise his enemy's heel (which as we all know, is
hardly enough to slow a person down)

4) This enemy would bruise Satan's head (which we all know can be a very
serious and perhaps fatal injury)

 From that day forward, Satan began plotting how he could defeat this
prophecy and keep from being crushed underfoot.  When Jesus came to
Earth, Satan had to know he was in BIG trouble!  Here was Jesus... son of
God AND seed of woman.  He tried to defeat the prophecy by enticing Jesus
with various temptations (see Matthew 4:1-11)   
 When Jesus easily defeated this tactic, Satan began pulling strings among
the Pharisees and Jewish power-brokers to have Jesus killed (It is my
contention that God used Satan to allow His will to be carried out)  
 To Satan, it must have been a great thrill to view the events of Golgotha!  
To hear his would be bruiser cry out "My God My God why have you
forsaken me! (Matthew 27:46) To see him mocked and scorned, beaten and
spit on, crowned with thorns and nailed to a cross...   Satan must have
yearned for Jesus' final breath and He and his angels must have given a
great shout as Jesus muttered "it is finished" and breathed his last breath...
"finally," Satan thought, "I have won."   
 Little did he realize that the events of the cross would be the very stroke
that would crush his head!  The events that he put in place to keep the
Garden prophecy from happening, were the very events that would finally
allow people to have real freedom from his wiles and power over his
temptings!!!  The nails that caused him joy as they pierced Jesus' flesh
would be the nails that would make it possible to seal the door on his own
prison...
 We can see the power of self-fulfilling prophecies is such that God used
this very device to bring about the event that changed the world, that divided
covenants, that made it possible to be forgiven through the power of His
blood.

 It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that can push us onward and upward in our
Christian lives and duties today, but it is also the self-fulfilling prophecy that
can hold us back.
 One prophecy that plagues many of us individually, is rooted in DOUBT.  
We often tell ourselves that we cannot live up to God's  expectations, that we
cannot truly know his will and even if we can know his will... we can't truly live
by it...   this is our self-stated prophecy.
 Because of such prophecies, we slack off in our studies, we cease to pray
as we ought to, and before long sure enough we fail to do God's will.  This is
very general, but this type of thing can happen with any aspect of our faith
or with our faith as a whole.  If we begin to doubt our faith, then sure enough,
our faith fails.  (see Peter walking on the sea,  Matthew 14: 29-31)
 Sometimes we do this with just one aspect of God's word, or just one
command, but it is just as damaging to our spiritual lives.  Look at the story
of Naman the Leper:

(2 Kings 5:9-13)  Then Naaman went with his horses and chariot, and he stood
at the door of Elisha's house.  And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go
and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored to you, and
you shall be clean."  But Naaman became furious, and went away and said,
"Indeed, I said to myself, 'He will surely come out to me, and stand and call on
the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place, and heal the
leprosy.'  "Are not the Abanah and the Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better
than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean?" So he
turned and went away in a rage.  And his servants came near and spoke to him,
and said, "My father, if the prophet had told you to do something great, would
you not have done it? How much more then, when he says to you, 'Wash, and
be clean'?"

 Luckily, Naaman had an intelligent servant who convinced Naaman to do
God's will before this could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  But we can
easily see Naaman's attitude in our own lives...  We all too often think, "well
that part of God's word isn't all that important, surely I can do something
different in that area"  We choose the Abanah and Pharpar over the Jordan.  
We doubt God's word.  Because we doubt God's word, then sure enough,
God's word fails us (in our perception of things, that is)

James speaks of this danger in James 1:5-8:

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and
without reproach, and it will be given to him.  But let him ask in faith, with no
doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the
wind.  For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord;  
he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

 If we carry around Doubt in our ability to do God's will, or doubt of God's
word itself, this doubt will become a self-fulfilling prophecy... we will fail God,
or his promises will fail for us, which will cause more doubt and round and
round it goes...

 There is a single self-fulfilling prophesy that I believe holds us back and
bogs us down more than anything else in our Christian lives.  If we can break
out of this cycle and cease to let this self imposed prophecy be fulfilled, I
really believe that it can change us and the work that we can do.  We have
let this defeatist prophecy hold us back for far too long....   Here is the
command:

Matthew 28:19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit..."

...and here is the self-fulfilling prophecy that has held us back from doing our
duty as Christians:

 The people are hard hearted these days...  Society isn't willing to listen to
the church anymore... they won't listen to the Gospel...  they think we're
backwards, fundamentalist, too strict, too exclusive, too this too that....  
they're never going to obey the Gospel!!!
 ...Therefore we don't bother trying to spread the Gospel and you know
what happens?  People don't obey the Gospel...   
 Do you see this?   This is a vicious cycle.  It's been so long since many of
us have seen new converts (and I mean ones that are still in the pew a year
after they've been converted) that we get in the mindset that we're never
going to have new converts, so we don't go out and try to get new converts
and then people aren't converted!
The truth is people aren't any harder of heart than they ever were.  Just
read the hardships endured by Paul and other early evangelists if you want
to see hard-heartedness.  The people don't need the Gospel any less than
they ever did, yet we evangelize less than we ever have.  

WE MUST BREAK THIS CYCLE OR WE WILL NEVER GROW!!!  IF WE
NEVER GROW....IF WE NEVER BEAR FRUIT,  WE ARE IN DANGER OF
BEING CUT OFF!!!        

Read and Understand:

Matthew 7:19 "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown
into the fire.

Luke 3:9 "And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every
tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

Luke 13:7 "Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, 'Look, for three years I
have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it
use up the ground?'

John 15:2 "Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and
every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

 I sincerely hope this is enough to put the fear of the Lord back into us.  To
re-ignite our zeal, our sense of urgency!  We know the Lord does not sit idly,
that even His patience grows thin (2 Peter 3:9), that the day of His coming is
ever growing nearer.  Let us awake from sleep (Romans 13:11) and become
profitable servants!

Let us carry these verses in our hearts and minds and banish all doubt:


What then shall we say to these things? If God is for
us, who can be against us? Romans 8:31


For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is
the power of God to salvation for everyone who
believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.
Romans 1:16

 With this mindset and without doubt in our minds that God is able to do just
what he has promised, then this too can become a self-fulfilling prophecy!  
Because we do not doubt the power of the word, we WILL share it, because
we share it, people WILL obey, and because folks are converted, we'll be
convinced that MORE will obey.  Now is the time to fulfill this prophecy in
your own life and in your own congregation.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Christian