Renowned pastor Joel Osteen encourages people to discover their innate strengths and abilities on the road to success.

Having started Lakewood Churchís television outreach ministry, Pastor Joel Osteen has taken a message of hope around the world. Now, in Your Best Life Now, Osteen continues his mission to help others to go higher, rise above obstacles, and live in health, abundance, and victory. Osteen believes fervently that our self image should mirror exactly what God says about us, not what we feel or think. And he encourages readers to be people of faith, for when one can see the invisible, God will do the impossible.

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Books > Religion > Christian Life - Character & Values

Moving on up

Joel Osteen's book Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, offers an outline for a higher level of existence in the here and now. Osteen is the young, enthusiastic pastor of the diverse, Houston-based Lakewood Church, which has more than 30,000 members, and his inspirational television program is viewed in 100 million households worldwide. Clearly, Osteen's outline for a life of "health, abundance and victory" comes from a Christian perspective. He believes that while God wants to help us, we must do our part to allow God to "promote us, to increase us, to give us more." The seven steps he describes are a means to opening that path. Like Ford, he encourages us to "dream big" and move beyond the mundane. Osteen recognizes that life can throw everything from disappointment to disaster at us, but his outlook remains optimistic. Our human tendency, he writes, "is to want everything easily." But "without opposition or resistance, there is no potential for progress. Without the resistance of air, an eagle can't soar."

Linda Stankard continues to be her own "work in progress."