T.D. Jakes: God Has a Plan in the Midst of Our Pain

Bishop T.D. Jakes shares a lesson from his book, Crushing, about having faith that God has a plan for our lives, even in the midst of our pain.

You have a great dream for your life, you know God has spoken to you, but you find yourself in a pit. How you see yourself in the pit will determine whether you stay in that pit or whether you come out better. God wouldn’t have allowed it if he wasn’t going to use it to move you into greater levels of your destiny. In that pit, don’t take on a victim mentality. Don’t let that bad break change your identity. You are a victor. You are an overcomer. You are more than a conqueror. You can do all things through Christ.

You don’t know what god is making while you’re aching.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re aching.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re crying.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re lonely. You don’t know what god is making while you’re suffering.
But I declare unto you he is making something. You may feel dislocated. You may feel dislodged.
You can’t always see what the master’s doing.
Only when we look back, then we see that god had a plan when all we had was pain.
You know, the funniest thing to me is that poor people think that rich people don’t get crushed.
They think that if they had money, they’d have everything.
But crushing is the one thing in the
world that you can count on to be totally unbiased.
It is not one bit prejudice.
If you’re white, you get crushed. If you’re black, you get crushed.
If you’re young, you get crushed. If you’re old, you get crushed. If you’re female, you get crushed.
If you’re male, you get crushed. If you make a lot of money,
you get crushed. If you can’t find a job, you get crushing is not prejudice.
It comes to every person’s life. We all experience seasons of death. And desperation.
Dreams dashed. Relationships crumble. Businesses fall.
And it seems like you’re going to die. Whether that business is
a big corporate office, bringing in billions of dollars reporting to a shareholders or whether it’s a mom and pop shop, a dry cleaning service or a
cupcake shop. You go through changes It is a crushing that gives you wisdom.
You cannot buy wisdom in a store. You cannot get it in a jar.
It is a crushing that gives you wisdom. It is Nelson Mandela, wrongfully in prison.
Shut up in a prison in the middle of an island for years.
Never knowing that while he was an inmate, having food shoved to him like a dog to eat off the ground that he would be the president of South Africa.
And if he had not endured the prison, he wouldn’t make the presidency.
It is the prison that created the presidency. That is what crushing he is.
It is an ability to endure the wisdom of the Vintner
for the Vintner knows exactly where to crush you.
I know Nelson Mandela would not have picked such an unsavory place to be president.
Most presidents don’t go to jail to be president. They go to Yale to be president.
But not Nelson Nelson went
to jail and he still got there.
You must believe that in spite of the suffering, you will still get there.
That God has a watch and it never loses time.
And he knows exactly when to raise you and exactly when to bring you out And when the stage is set and the time is right, nobody can hold you down when god gets ready to raise you up.
But the problem with
the seed is that it can’t think. So it doesn’t understand the suffering. And it doesn’t understand the pain.
And it can’t hear me. And sometimes the hardest part about being a preacher is that you want so much for the people to get And sometimes the people who need it the most, they really don’t really hear you.
That you’re on course when you’re off course.
That you’re planted when you thought you were buried.
That the only way up is to go
down. That everything in the kingdom is backwards. That if you exalt yourself, he’ll abase.
If you abase yourself, he’ll exalt you. Death is necessary to create life.
Jesus says I come that you might have life and then dies because the cost of life was death.
Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?
That right now, those of you that are watching and those of you that are listening at me maybe going through something that seems unbearable and painful and personal and difficult to articulate to anybody else because pain is always personal.
How wrong? It’s not right. It’s not right. It wasn’t right for my daughter to be pregnant.
I’m a bishop seen all over the country.
It’s not right for us to have a private moment in a public place.
It’s not right that my mother who was the smartest person I have ever seen in my life will gradually have her mind peeled back like an onion until she couldn’t tell a banana from a noise.
It’s not right.
Sometimes it is necessary in order to cultivate in the vineyard, you have to disrupt the soil.
You have to turn it over. You have to disrupt everything around it.
You have to pull some weeds sometimes You
gotta uproot some plants. You have to cause this evil in order to get where you wanna go.
And it’s messy and it’s dirty. And it’s not ripe. But it’s necessary. And we feel pain.
And sometimes with pain, we don’t even have anybody to talk to about.
Private secret pain, pain locked up behind your lips, pain behind your makeup pain, behind your nice coat, Sometimes you dress up to high so nobody can see how deep down inside you’re hurting.
Interimacy is intimacy. And yet nobody sees into me.
And so I paint this face of who you think I am and smile the way you want me to smile and I performed for you.
And that’s
the only reason I get tired
of you. Because I yearned to take the mask off and be who I really am, and say I am confused and I am hurting and I am suffering and this crushing feels like death.
The death of my ideas is a birthing place of his purpose.
God works in crushing.
And it pleased him to bruise him.
It pleased god to bruise us.
Not because he is sadistic, not because we are masocratic.
It pleases him to bruise us because he knows that the end result will put us in a state where we can no longer ferment, where we can handle a setback of disappointment, where we can handle a hurt See, wine doesn’t spoil.
It’ll last for years and years and years in the dark, in the basement, in the cellar because it’s been through enough crushing to endure time.
And you can tell when a person has been crushed because they are survivors. People who
had been crushed on survivors when my church emptied out and
we were going through COVID and I had to preach
in a empty building by myself It was no problem because I started preaching in an empty building.
And I don’t need people in order to do what God called me to do. I don’t need parts.
I don’t need clapping. I don’t need shouting.
I don’t need dancing.
I don’t need an organ. All I need is what’s in me.
If God is inside of you, all crushing will do is push him out.
And might either have this final remark If Satan were smart, he would never push.
Because if you never pushed me,
I wouldn’t secrete the glory.
If you never pushed me, I would have never found out who I was.
If you never pushed me,
I would have never found out what
I could do. If you
never pushed me, I would
have never found out what I could be.
But the more we are afflicted, the Bible says, the more we grow.
So if you feel like you’re being inflicted.
And if you feel like you’re dying, and if you feel like he’s pushing
on you, hang in there. The best is yet to come.
Now, unto him that is able to do a seemingly abundantly above all that we may ask or think according to the power that works in us.
Simply means that the seed doesn’t know what it’s becoming.
If he’s able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we may ask or think, That means we have no idea what he’s making when he’s making us.
Wow. And the seed doesn’t know what the bit in the hearst doing.
He just has to trust him
constricted it to his methods.
Imprisoned by its purpose, locked up in a situation where you just have to trust him, I didn’t wake up the person you see today.
Not by a long shot. Now we’re close.
If you would have met me at eighteen and told me that I would end up being this, I would have laughed in your face.
If you’d
have told me at sixteen that
I would end up here, all of my neighbors would have laughed in your my classmates would have laughed in your face.
I was a ratchet little boy, but I didn’t know what god was making.
I thought I was gonna be a musician.
I didn’t know what god was making, but little by little step by step day by day, situation by situation, He was leading me into my purpose and destiny.
Not only by the doors that open, but by the doors that closed.
From humble beginnings. Uh, I mean, we were, we were Po.
Po is when you cannot afford the ore.
My idea of rich people were people who had grass in their yards.
Reach people were people who had air conditioning and a
doorbell meant you were wealthy. Just a doorbell.
I couldn’t imagine having a doorbell with the chimes, the ring, and the little things that hunt down.
It was amazing. I saw them on TV.
What I had was a raggedy screen door that was cut down at the bottom and a sunken porch where the concrete had rotted out of the middle of it and I had to step over to come into the house.
And if you didn’t fasten the screen door, it’d swing open.
And that’s where I came from, but I didn’t know what god was making.
And it was necessary that I come from there. Because of the heights he would take me to.
I would never have to question in myself
why I do what I do. Because I did it broke.
And I did it lonely, and I did it with no money, and I did it with no car, and I did it with my lights off.
And I did it in the crushing so that now as he begins to bring me into my senior years, I can see God doing things with me that I never imagined possible.
That I would be sitting across from Oprah Winfrey on her show.
Was something I never asked for that I would sit down with the CEO of AT and T then Randall Stevenson and have a discussion about equity is something that I can imagine AT and T that I would be closing on property right next to Tyler Perry Studios.
That it’s got grass.
I mean, it’s got really grass that that
I would write books that were translated into multiple languages around the world.
Women that I lose has been translated into twelve different languages. They they say it’s Japanese.
I can’t read it, but I I trust that that’s what it is. It is mandarin.
And then in Chinese, I can’t read it. But I trust it. That’s what it is.
That that would come out of a guy who was just writing short stories in the eighth grade
I can’t understand it. You don’t know what god is making while you’re aching.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re aching.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re crying.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re lonely.
You don’t know what god is making while you’re suffering, but I declare unto you. He is making something.
You may feel dislocated. You may feel dislodged. You can’t always see what the master’s doing.
Only when we look back, then we see that God had a plan. When all we had was pain.
God had a plan. I had no idea that my daughter getting pregnant. I hated it.
I it hurt It’s not about embarrassment. It wasn’t about image.
It w it was just my baby girl.
It was about her future, about her destiny. And I thought this is a mistake. This is wrong.
This is wrong. This can’t happen. This can’t happen to us.
And now when she stands up in the pulpit and preach, I realized that if she hadn’t have gotten pregnant, she wouldn’t have been the person that she’d been aim, and that going backwards is what drove her forward, and that god was smarter than I was.
And he knows exactly what to take.
To bring you to the place that he can get out of you what he wants out
of you, and he doesn’t care whether you’re embarrassed or not.
He doesn’t care whether people talk about you or not. He doesn’t care what they think about you.
He only cares that he gets out of you what he put inside of you.
He will take you from seed to bearing fruit.
And you don’t get to choose the method he uses.
You don’t get to pick the tool that he cuts you with.
It may have been your first relationship.
It may have been a rape It may have been childhood abuse, but it shaped something in you as horrific as it was.
That made you suffer lying and able to stand.
And when you got through crying about it, you woke up a tougher woman than you were, girl.
Does anybody know what I’m talking about?
The thing I love the most about him It’s that god never gives up on you.
He doesn’t wait till you’re in the bad place and then walk out like people do.
Because people are great when you’re up, but when you’re down, they’ll run out.
When you’re weak, they’ll run out. When you make mistakes, they’ll run out.
And the church It’s masterful, masterful at killing its wounded.
It’s masterful of that.
We have no real method to really restore our wounded, especially when they’re talented.
So we shoot them for being too much like us.
And there is no place to recover.
But just because man is through with you does not mean that god is through with you.
And I don’t know who I’m talking to
today, but I feel like I’m talking to somebody just because man has turned this back and found out something about you and said you’re nobody doesn’t mean that god is through with you because whatever they found out God already knew.
Yes.
You have never surprised.
God, you have never shock god. You have never left god scratching his head.
So stop being frustrated because he
never ever gives up on you. And that is crushing.
The uniqueness of being a human is the census that god has equipped us with to be able to be in touch with the world.
I know I am alive because I see a smell. I touch I feel my senses.
And the very thing that he equipped me with that is unique that makes me able to survive even in the jungle of life is also the thing that gives me discomfort when my situation changes.
And we talked about dirty places. And we’ve talked about disruptive places.
And we’ve talked about discomfort, but we have not talked about smelly places.
I wanna talk about the discomfort of dung.
The things that god uses to fertilize you smell, and they smell bad.
The rubbish, the refuse, the dung, it’s what the vinedresser uses
to make mulch.
It’s what he puts all around you when he really wants you to grow tall and strong and fruitful.
He puts stink all around you.
And you can’t buy enough cologne to cover it
up because when it stakes it stinks. A marriage that stinks.
Stinks. A bad relationship with your child stinks. It stinks in public.
It stinks with the principal It stinks in school. It stinks in prison. It stinks in jail.
It stinks in court. It stinks.
God uses stinky stuff.
You must realize that god uses those things so that we will become what he has created for us
to be. That out of that, the nutrients that are necessary come from the stink we’ve been in.
And if you can endure through your senses, the discomfort of the aroma.
Eventually, god is going to get something fragrant out of the funk you’ve been in.
That fragrance would come from fuck.
It’s hard to explain, but it’s true. It is true nonetheless.
There’s some kind of way that stability would come out of being stuck. Stuck.
Stuck. I love the commercial where the woman falls down on the ground.
She’s an old lady, and she says help. I’ve fallen.
And I can’t get up because somebody watching me right now, you’ve fallen and you can’t get up.
But if you holler help, God will get some glory out of the fuck you’re in.
The pain you’re in, the disgrace you’re in, the discomfort you’re in, the crisis you’re in, the turmoil you’re in.
You will rise again. In the words of Maya Angelo, I’m still Look back over your life and how many things tried to crush you
and still I rise. We don’t clap for ourselves.
We are so busy complaining about where we have not gotten to that we don’t acknowledge where we have come from.
And every now and then you
need to throw yourself a party and put a hat on your head and blow a whistle and bake yourself a cake and put some candles on it and light it and celebrate the fact.
That you have survived the funk.