Listen For Your Breakthrough

Dear Lord,
Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week.. Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

In 2013, I had just gone through a divorce.
I moved back home to my parents house with now my two Children and I was going through some boxes in my parents garage and I see this Bible and I just figured it’s just another one of these random Bibles that were laying around my parents house.
And I opened the Bible up and they are written by sister Cheryl Tiner who’s from West Virginia was written to Sarah Jakes Vacation Bible school spelling bee first place.
And I think it meant so much to me that I found it at that stage in my life because I wasn’t exactly sure that God had a plan for my life anymore.
By this time when I found it, I was already breaking all the church rules.
I was doing all of the things that they said you can’t do and still experience the presence of God.
I figured that I was just one of those ones who would be discarded and right in this moment where it felt like I was at my breaking point, it’s like this Bible.
It’s like goodness and mercy was following me all the days of my life.
I wasn’t even looking for this Bible.
I wasn’t sure God had anything to say to me, but this Bible that had survived move after move.
And the disconnect after the disconnect, this Bible was like, I’m still here, I’m still available, I’m still open.
I’m still ready whenever you’re ready.
And let me tell you how good God is, is that he front loaded me with something before I knew that I would need it.
So that when it came to the point where I actually needed it, that Bible was already there waiting for me.
See, most of us are waiting for God to bring something to us.
And God is mostly saying to us, I wish you would discover that I already front loaded this moment with what you needed for your breakthrough.
You don’t need anything to come for your breakthrough.
You just need to take better inventory of what’s already in your world because what’s in your world has the key to the breakthrough that you’re looking for.
Stop looking around you and stop looking at what’s in you. The breakthrough is already there.
And so what most people call the breaking point is what I actually call the listening point.
Because when you’re at your breaking point, a lot of people think that that is the moment where everything shifts.
That’s not necessarily the moment some people go through a breaking point and they stay shattered.
Some people go through a breaking point and they never pick their pieces back up again, or they only pick up the pieces that they can bear to look at because everything else has so much shame connected to it.
But something powerful occurs when you see your breaking point as your listening point, that breaking point that becomes a listening point is actually where God begins to download his perspective, His wisdom, his vision for what can happen up from here.
Some of us need our breaking point because it actually gets us to our listening point.
I’m reminded of Hannah in the Bible who kept getting provoked over and over again by a woman who could bear Children even though she couldn’t.
And the woman kept provoking her and making her feel insecure until all of a sudden she got up from the table and it looked like maybe she had reached her breaking point.
But in said, she went to the temple because she understood that if I am at my breaking point, I have one or two options, I can let this thing win or I could get into the presence of God and say God, I need you to speak a word to me at this breaking point that changes the way I see everything that’s happening in my life.
I’m thinking about Jacob who started wrestling with God and he said, I will not let you go until you bless me.
It looks like a breaking point from the outside looking in.
But it’s actually the moment in which I insist on hearing from God. It’s not my breaking point.
It’s my listening point. I don’t know who you are in this room, but you feel like life is trying to break you.
But I want you to understand life is just trying to get your attention because God’s trying to whisper something in your ear that can only be whispered if you break down out of your ego and out of your pride and out of your shame and out of your insecurity, there is something that happens when we get desperate to hear from God.
And most of the time it only happens in our breaking point.
And that transformation that takes place is when I say this breaking point cannot break what God put on the inside of me.
You start praying stuff like God.
If you really hear me, God, if you really see me, God, if you really got a plan for my life, I’m ready to listen.
I’m ready to listen, I’m ready to obey, I’m ready to grow. I’m ready to move past this point.
You can call it a breaking point. But I hear God saying that’s when the tomb becomes the womb.
That’s when the breaking becomes the blessing. That’s when what you went through becomes the weapon.
That’s when the breaking point builds you up.
You looking at other people’s lives thinking that they were built into this moment. No baby.
I wasn’t built into this moment. I was broken into this moment.
I got broke down and I started listening and any time I started building and it was off filter, I’d get broken down again so they God can show me what did I do wrong?
There’s something powerful about somebody who keeps listening even when I keep getting broken because I’m crazy enough to believe that if God allows it to break down, it’s because he wants me to rebuild it stronger than it was before.
Breaking is not the end. Breaking is the point of transformation.
Breaking is not the end. It is the point in which you must become an active participant in the blessing connected to your life.
It’s when you stop hustling and stop doing and stop creating and stop manipulating and stop hustling and stop talking about other people and stop gossiping.
I to gossip. But then I hit my breaking point and I realized hearing my story was more important than hearing somebody else’s story.
I used to talk behind people’s back until I realized I got a knife in my own back.
And because I got a knife in my own back.
Now I start listening for who I should be connected to and who I need to walk away from.
And it happened at the breaking point that became the listening point that changed the way that I see everything.
I’m listening again. I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m doing less talking so that I can do more listening.
I’m doing less celebrating so I could do more listening.
I’m doing less writing because I need to do some more listening. I know you’re used to counting on me.
But right now I’m in my listening season.
This is, this is my listening season.
This isn’t my speaking season. This isn’t my being there for everyone else season.
This is my listening season because life is trying to break me and my back is against the wall.
But I also believe that God is trying to make me while life is trying to break me.
And if I don’t listen, life might win, I might allow the depression to be the end.
But if I listen, I believe that no weapon formed against me. Well, if I listen, I believe that though.
He me that should I trust him. Listen. But listen.
Yes, but just break through the noise.
If I just, I’m listening, I’m listening because my family’s dependent on it.
I’m listening because I can’t break a generational curse, not by my nor by power but by your spirit.
Lord, I can’t hear your spirit unless I get to my listening point.
I can’t talk and listen at the same time, Todd.
What are you same about this? What are you saying about my car?
What are you saying about my identity? What are you saying?
You think you came to be preached and no, you came to listen.
We didn’t get dressed up to come to church so we could check it off our list.
Somebody’s in this room listening for something. I’m listening. Everybody else can come in here and be cute.
But I came in here because I got to hear from God. God, I need you to speak a word.
God, I need you to give me confirmation that I’m on the right track.
God, I need you to pull me back. God, I need you to change my position.
God, I don’t know how to raise this child. God, I don’t know how to build this business.
God, I don’t know how to be a partner. God, I don’t know how to be a grandchild.
What am I gonna do after retirement?
God, I need you to, I need direction.
Some of us start resenting the fact that we can’t move.
I says you can’t move yet because you need to create space to listen man and you can’t just put noise on top of noise.
One thing I love about God and sometimes he will break through the noise.
But then there are other moments where he will not compete with your pride.
I’m not gonna get in a screaming match with your plans.
So when you’re ready to listen, God says, I’ve got something to say, man.
My favorite part of the message is when the silence hits the room because that’s when you know it just got personal for somebody that’s the moment when they realize that I’m getting what I came forward, the heart posture of a listener makes all the difference.
I often wondered to myself, why is it that though I was raised in church and raised here?
I mean, here right here where you stand in this church, raised me.
Why did I still feel that distance from God?
Especially when we hear that scripture, that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God and surely the word of God was being preached here.
But then I realized that they’re using hearing in that context in the purest definition.
Really, it’s faith comes by listening and listening by the word of God.
That means that you can be immersed in a room where the word of God is being preached.
But if you are not postured to really come in as a listener, if you came in to judge whether or not something’s really anointed, you came in to make commentary, you’ll miss out on revelation.
If you came in to make a judgment, you’ll miss out on revelation.
But when you came in and you say, I don’t really care who’s preaching.
I don’t really care who’s singing and I don’t really care what’s happening in the room.
All I know is that I came in to listen, I may get my word in the parking lot, I may get my word when I go to the restroom.
But what I know is that my heart is gonna be positioned to listen.
I wanna hear what God is saying to me in this season.
And so if your prayer life is nothing but where you go, when you make requests and not the space where you are intentional about listening, you will think that God does not answer prayers where most of us have had to learn that God does answer prayers, but he doesn’t talk on top of us.
God answered my prayers when I stopped talking over him, God answered my prayers when I stopped insisting that it had to be my way.
God started answering my prayers when I started silencing the voices of everyone else and who they thought I should be and what they thought I should do.
That’s when I cleared when I broke through the noise, when I turned the volume down on them and created a space where I said, God, if you wanna speak to me, if I’m li I’m listening.
If you wanna speak a word here I am.
You gotta create space in your prayer life for God to talk back to you where you can receive God’s vision, God’s wisdom, God’s heart posture towards the situation.
At the end of the day, Jesus said, nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done, period, which means that from here, God, whatever you tell me to do, I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m listening.
The steps between watching and doing is listening, I’ll prove it to you.
In acts one, Jesus gives the disciples the great commission.
He tells them to go into all of the earth, to Judea to into all of the earth and spread the gospel.
And right, when I’m sure they were ready to take off and do exactly what Jesus told them to do.
He says, but don’t go yet. You’ve watched me now, I’ve told you what you can do.
But the in between stage between watching and doing requires that you wait for the promise of the Lord.
And so he sends the disciples into a waiting posture, but he doesn’t tell them exactly what they’re waiting for.
He doesn’t tell them to wait until the angels come, wait until someone else.
He doesn’t give them specifics on what they’re waiting for.
They just, he just says, wait for the promises of the Lord.
So they stay in the upper room and they’re praying and they’re waiting and they’re listening, they’re listening for the moment where the promise of the father is revealed.
And what I loved about when the disciples are in the upper room and they’re waiting for the promise of the Lord to be revealed is that they had to be sensitive enough to listen for something that could only sound like God.
Mhm. That’s why the Bible really will always be relevant because it is the only full book that gives us insight into the heart posture of God.
When we see the way God has shown up in the lives of other people throughout history, literally thousands and thousands of years ago.
And we realize that he is the same yesterday today. And forever more.
I recognize that when that same heart is turned towards me, I can expect the same level of covering, I can expect the same level of results.
I can expect the same level of strength.
I can expect the same level of pieces, the same today today and forever more.
That’s why a shepherd boy thought he could take on Goliath.
And you think you could take down the criminal justice system.
It’s the same God that whispered in his ear that is telling you couldn’t break that generational curse.
It is the same God that rose Jesus from the dead that says I can raise you up out of the death of what you’re going through.
I can raise that child up out of the death of what they’re going through. That same God.
And so they’re waiting in the upper room for the promises of the Lord to be revealed.
And they’re waiting for that moment and they knew that moment had come because there came a sound like a mighty rushing wind.
It was a sound that broke through the atmosphere. It was a sound.
They knew it was God because the sound disrupted the atmosphere.
That’s how, you know, it’s God because when God sends you a word, it disrupts the atmosphere, they were waiting in the upper room and they were listening for something.
They didn’t know what they were listening for, but they knew that it was the moment that they were waiting for because it disrupted their atmosphere.
You see, there’s gonna come a moment at some point in this service where somebody gets a breakthrough and it’ll be because they receive the sound that disrupted the atmosphere.
I was feeling depressed and hazy. But all of a sudden there was one word that disrupted the atmosphere.
You wanna talk about disruptive thinking that disruptive thinking started with God, the disruptive thinking that said, I know what the enemy is trying to do in the world.
But because I will not let the enemy have the say, the final say, I’m gonna disrupt the atmosphere of doubt.
I’m gonna disrupt the atmosphere of anger.
I’m gonna disrupt the atmosphere of pride and when I disrupt the atmosphere, you’ll know it’s me because all of a sudden you will receive power when the atmosphere is disrupted.
I don’t know whose word this is, but I feel like the wind is about to blow in this place.
I feel like God is about to release a sound in this room that disrupts the atmosphere that has been disrupting your peace, that disrupts the atmosphere that has been disrupting your confidence, that disrupts the atmosphere that has been disrupting your ability to move in the things of God.
And I hear God saying, I need you to listen for the sound because all of a sudden there’s gonna be a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it’s gonna change everything that you’ve been thinking.
You better listen for it, you better listen for it.
If you’re listening to the rumors, you may miss the sound.
If you’re listening to the she say, she say you may miss the sound.
If you’re listening to the news, you may miss the sound.
If you’re listening to your past, you may miss the sound.
But I dare you to get quiet enough to listen for a sound that disrupts the atmosphere.
All of a sudden, I couldn’t pray the way that I was praying because there was a sound like a mighty Russian wind.
And all of a sudden I felt power and all of the sudden, I felt strength and all of a sudden I felt vision all of a sudden, I didn’t care that there was a target on my back because I knew there were angels backing me up.
All of a sudden nervous. Didn’t matter.
All of a sudden shame didn’t matter because I got a word that disrupted the atmosphere. You’re right.
I shouldn’t be up here preaching but the sound disrupted your opinion. The sound disrupted my fear.
The sound disrupted my anxiety. The sound disrupts, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up, shake it up.
You better watch who you’re sitting next to because if they mess around and release a sound, it may disrupt your atmosphere.
You might get a breakthrough because of who you’re sitting next to.
You better watch out when you get to sit next to me because I’m listening for something and you’ll know when it hit me because I’m gonna praise God for the generations that does save because I got disrupted.