God Is Greater than YOUR Struggles

Sarah Jakes Roberts joins Phil Munsey on TBN’s Praise to discuss how she’s experienced redemption in her life after becoming pregnant at 13. Listen as she teaches to never compare your story to someone else’s, and to always have hope in your own story and how God will use it.

God is saying to you today:
“Don’t give up. I know you’ve been under so much pressure. I know you’ve felt overwhelmed. You are so close to your breakthrough. My word is final, so get up and stand in faith. It’s not over.”
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Stop making God the same level of the people who disappointed you and dare to believe that He is bigger and greater than what your mom did than what your dad did and what your ex husband did.
You’re not in this by yourself. You are not the only one facing what you, what you’re currently facing.
Stop comparing your story to what’s happened in other people’s lives and start to decide right now in this moment that I am not gonna allow this stone to be rolled over my destiny.
I just remember it as you were speaking that and I don’t even think that I’ve shared this with you when I found out I was pregnant, it was on Easter, on Easter.
So the day that we’re celebrating the resurrecting of our savior, I felt like a tomb had been rolled over my hope over my destiny.
Like the stone had just been rolled over every dream that I could ever have.
And it was in that moment that I really felt like that the goodness of God, the grace of God was reserved for people who did everything the right way.
And it wasn’t until I started connecting with other people and really just realizing that we all have a story.
We’ve all gone through something that I felt like the stone began to roll away a bit.
But I felt, um, useless. I felt dirty.
I felt like there was no promise for my life and I felt like my role would be to see everyone else in life win while I sat there and looked to my wounds.
And as I began to see that I wasn’t in it by myself, I believe that that a trick that the enemy plays on our minds is that he makes us believe because of our issues and because of our struggles that we have to live life in a prison.
And so we go about our day and we look like we’re free and we’re still in our homes and our marriage is on our workforces and it looks like we’re free, but on the inside we’re hurting, we’re broken.
We don’t believe anymore. But what helped me and what I hope my story does for other people is just reminds you, you’re not in this by yourself.
You are not the only one facing what you’ve, what you’re currently facing. The.
As a matter of fact, the thing that you’re currently facing someone has already overcome and because they’ve overcome, there is hope for your story.
People have had it worse. People have had it better stop comparing your story to what’s happened in other people’s lives and start to decide right now in this moment that I am not gonna allow this stone to be rolled over my destiny, Jesus died.
So I don’t have to get on the cross.
I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hanging by my own failures and my own mistakes because he lives in me.
I have been resurrected too. And so God, what do you wanna do with my life?
What do you wanna do with my Brokenness?
What do you wanna do with this pain that I felt because I serve a God who makes all things work together for our good.
But that working feels like crushing.
Sometimes it feels like pain and disappointment but it also on the other side, I mean, look at our lives now, it’s restoration that you can imagine and there’s a time when you will look back and you will thank God, you will thank him for the tears that are currently streaming down your hallelu.
If your parents were here, I would ask this question and uh I’m gonna ask you to represent your parents because you know I’ve, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been around TB N for nearly 30 years.
I know I have a lot of uh grandparents, I have a lot of parents.
I have parents that have faced this with their Children, uh maybe will or even grandparents who uh have or will face, you know, your daughter is pregnant.
What did they go through and how can a parent reconcile when their parent, when their Children make decisions and things happen?
Uh What would they be saying to those that are facing this as parents? We, we’re a blended family.
We have six Children and I can tell you right now that it’s no parents’ dream that your child gets pregnant as a teenager.
So this isn’t something that my parents were wishing or praying for.
But I tell you that what they did was they did not allow their disappointment to strip me of their love of their support and more important family of God’s grace.
So I would encourage you if you’re at home. Maybe, you know someone, maybe you’ve experienced this yourself.
And you’re wondering, you know, I put all of these things in this child. Where is it?
And, and what did I do wrong?
I wanna comfort you in saying that everything that you put in that child is still there and sometimes the seeds are life ha seeds of life have to be covered in dirt and sometimes that dirt looks like teen pregnancy.
Sometimes it looks like an addiction.
Sometimes it looks like dropping out of school and it’s normal to feel like what am I gonna do?
But trust that what you begin in that child Christ is gonna finish what you begin in.
That child Christ is gonna finish. You cannot control their destiny and everything that they do.
But what you can do is be a river of love in the driest seasons of their life.
You can remind them that they’re never facing anything alone.
And what made me feel so much comfort during my season of, of pregnancy and, and all of the other things that I went through is that I got so curious about how my parents could still love me, that I wanted to know about their God.
I wanted to know about this source of love that just seemed to run unconditionally and I had an encounter with their God and it changed my life.
I wanna go back to uh uh uh an, an element that I think is important.
Sarah about uh people growing up in the church.
And uh the statistics are pretty staggering that a lot of people that are, are raised in church, reject the church.
Um You, you uh part of what led to the whole uh making bad decisions and kind of uh the, the, the whole dynamic of where you’re at was kind of rooted in the fact that you really kind of struggled with the church.
Uh in spite of the fact that, you know, I would call your dad the, the world’s greatest preacher on Monday.
Uh But you struggled with the church with what you were seeing from your perspective.
Yeah, I think that I really took church and made it God.
And so whenever I saw something happen in church that didn’t look like God.
I was disappointed, not just with the people, but with God as well.
And so my relationship with the church became complicated because though there were these powerful moments, there was also so hypocrisy, there were also people who were making mistakes and and I thought that that meant that God wasn’t good the way they were saying that he was good that he couldn’t transform your life, the way that everyone says he could.
And then I think as I’ve grown older and really evolved in my knowledge of life in salvation is a process.
You know, you, it’s not like you just get saved.
And then all of a sudden you have no more issues. You have no more struggles. It’s a process.
And so sometimes we can be so consumed with critiquing other people’s process that we become stagnant.
And in that moment when we’re stagnant, it gives us a sideline view of watching where everyone else is messing up.
But I really think that had, I stopped looking at other people’s lives and focused on my own that I probably would have discovered my own Brokenness much sooner, but you wanna believe something is real.
And so um I decided to share my testimony, not just the good things, but the difficult things, the the divorce, the the teen pregnancy because I didn’t want someone in the pews to think that you made it to the stage without any struggle.
And so we all have our own journey to walk out.
It may not be a stage like mine is, it may be an office, it may be uh a medical practice.
It may be a, a lawyer’s office.
I don’t know what the destiny God has for your life is, but I just wanna plead and, and just ask you to stop making God the same level of the people who disappointed you and dare to believe that He is bigger and greater than what your mom did than what your dad did than what your ex husband did.
He has nothing to do with that. He’s greater than that.
And if you would trust his plan, he can do a better, a better job with your life than you ever could.