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…….

I invite you to the Book of the Ages.
The best book of Wisdom, I have ever read the best entrepreneurial God.
I have ever read the Best Plan of Salvation that we have ever discovered in the Gospel of Saint Luke chapter.
Number 15, I will use a very, very extremely familiar scripture and only excerpt, a portion of it because it is so familiar that 90% of the people of the room would almost be able to quote it by her.
And yet indulge me if you will in the luxury of extrapolating from this text and additional thought for the benefit of the hearer as we discuss the protocol.
So not every man is a father, but all of us, our sons.
And if we become fathers, we do not forfeit our son for fatherhood.
That duality of roles is of paramount importance because in the oldest man in the room, there is still a child for that matter.
And the oldest woman in the room, there is still a little girl and at different moments and times you are dealing with both of them.
And this text is what I’m going to use to talk to all of the many different versions of you.
This is I told him yesterday, I said there’s so many people sitting in your chair.
Yeah. There’s so many versions of you, the happy you, the sad, you, the restless, you, the stable, you, the impulsive you that overlooked you, the curious, you, they’re repentant you, the you that is given to mischief and the youth that is given to wisdom, all of them are wearing your clothes.
This morning. Midway is the story we start in the 15th verse or the 15th chapter of the gospel of Saint John.
And it reads this wise out of the King James version.
And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, talking about the prodigal son left his father’s house and went and joined a citizen of this country who were not covenant, keeping people.
And when you join yourself to a different kind of person, they send you to do things you said you would never do.
And he sent him into his fields to feed swine.
So the prince has been sent into a field to feed swine and he it looked good to him.
He would train, have filled his belly with the husk that the swine did eat and maybe he’s hungry because no man gave unto him.
When no man gives unto you, it creates a natural appetite.
You cannot pour out what has not been poured in.
And when he came to himself.
Uh I don’t know what age that is.
They told me it was 18, but it’s not at 66.
I’m still coming to myself, divesting myself of all the recruitments that other people placed on me and finding out who I am outside of what you want me to be is a process when he came to himself.
He said, how many hard servants of my fathers have bred enough and to spare.
And I, I, I I perish with hunger. Anybody hungry?
I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him, father, I have sinned.
Nobody talks about sin anymore. Father, I have sinned. Everybody has their own opinion.
But he said, father, I have sinned.
His admission of his sin is what gives him access back to the father.
If you confess your sin, he is faithful and just to cleanse you from all unrighteousness, father, I have sinned, I have sinned against heaven and before the and I, I am no more worthy to be called our son.
I don’t even deserve to be your son. Boy.
You don’t hear that much make me as one of the hard servants and he arose and came to his father.
But when he was yet a great way of listen to his father, his father saw him.
Do you see your son?
I mean, really see him when he was a great way off.
Not when he’s doing what you want him to do.
But when he’s a great way off, there are a lot of young men who don’t feel seen his father saw him and had compassion, not rules, not mouth, not criticism.
There has to come a time that you shut up and have compassion and Ray ran and fell on his neck.
Yes. And he kissed his son because there is nothing wrong with being affectionate with your son.
And the son said unto him, father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight and I am no more worthy to be called.
I said, see when, when you don’t feel worthy, even when you have an opportunity, you don’t always activate because of guilt and shame.
This cataclysmic moment was something. The father waited a long time to see happen.
Anybody waited a long time to see something happen.
The Lord told me to tell you this and this is my subject.
It’s worth the wait. I want you to look at somebody and tell them it’s worth the wait, Father God in the name of Jesus as we approach thy throne, we do it humbly and submissively before you because there are God and beside you, there is no other release.
The kind of anointing that impacts people in definite ways that changes them eternally, that heals wounds that looses the bound that set to captain free.
I thank you in advance for what you’re going to do. Have your way.
Great God that you are I trust you for things I can’t even discuss.
Manifest yourself in the midst of your people today. In Jesus name. Amen. Rest easy.
The works on me. This is a very interesting text.
It is one of the few stories parables as it were and in the scriptures that is void of the presence of any woman at all.
There is no female character in this text at all.
If this text were taught today, it would be greatly criticized because now people quickly scan your page to see if they are represented properly in the text.
Yeah, you ain’t, you are not in the text at all.
This is a man’s story.
It is a story of three different men at three different ages and stages in their life.
All coalesce together to develop a truth about a God who is explaining his love through a story about men.
Now, this is not misogynistic by any stretch of the imagination.
Let us be clear because the Bible is full of women from eve forward.
The Bible is full of women from Eve to Bathsheba to ruth the Bible is full of women from J L to Naomi.
The Bible is full of women to the woman with the issue of blood to the woman at the well to marry the mother of Jesus.
The Bible is full of stories, powerful life changing stories about women.
It’s interesting to note in this particular case, this father has sons that he could not have by himself.
And yet the woman is not mentioned in the text at all.
I must admit that there is that the Bible is written in the midst of misogynistic times where women were not always valued.
Consequently, many of the women who premier in the text are often not even given names in the text.
They are just referred to as the woman at the Well, the woman with the issue, there is no discussion about what their names were.
Oftentimes, men’s names were mentioned more readily than women.
Because in the times of the scriptures, the birth of a man, child was considered to be more weighty than a woman.
Don’t tell me, I’m just teaching.
I am not saying that men are more valuable than women.
I am saying that was the attitude of the times.
And so we must put the text in context to understand the complexity of the text itself.
The interesting thing also to note is that one of the things that I love about scripture, this particular verse starts out saying a certain man had two sons that is not accidental.
We will see that all throughout the scriptures.
A certain man had two sons, a certain man like Adam had two sons, Kane and Abel.
And when Abel was slaughtered, Seth was born and still a certain man head two sons this and this half time.
And as a certain man had two sons, there’s Jacob and Esau, a certain man had two sons.
Does God who has the first man, Adam and the last man Adam, a certain man had two sons.
What I love about the word of God.
It does not show us just the grandiose ideologies of successful families that have no turbulence but from the very first family, he warns us that families will be complicated, conflicted, dysfunctional.
If the first family was dysfunctional, the apple couldn’t fall too far from the tree.
As soon as God put the man in the garden and pulled out of him, the woman and they started the first family murder hit.
The first family is a clue that there is going to be turbulence.
The rest of the book with families, the Law of first mentioned, the first family that’s mentioned is dysfunctional and all the way throughout the rest of the book, we see turbulence, we see rape, we see molestation, we see drunken fathers.
We see ungrateful sons. We see the impediments of people who dress themselves up like prostitutes and slept with their father in law to get pregnant to produce Children.
That if, if the Bible were to be cinematic, it would at least be rated R, at least rated R because God is honest and vivid about the fact that life is messy.
It’s complicated.
That’s why you ought not to covet your neighbor because you’re standing on the outside and on the outside.
Every family looks good and stable.
And solid and sane and part of your pain comes from your comparison because you wish that your family were more like them.
But if you went inside the house, you would find out that they are not everything that you thought that they were and maybe you better deal with the devil.
You know, then the devil you don’t.
Family is tough.
I would rather build a church any day than build a family.
I would rather build a business any day than build a family.
I would rather lay block then build a family because blunt, don’t have an opinion.
Black, don’t talk back. It stays where you put it.
Come on somebody but raising a family, see every block got a mouth and every mouth has an opinion and every opinion has to be expressed and it is your job to hold together all of these different opinions and personalities and attitudes and dispositions and mood swings and midlife crisis and menopause and adolescence.
You gotta hold it together for a long time.
There is no retiring from your family. There is no resigning from your family.
You will always be attached to them.
Don’t believe your divorce papers just because you signed the release.
Doesn’t mean you’re out of jail because the first time trouble rises, the first time they have a car wreck, the first time they get sick, the first time they get in trouble, they’re gonna call you and it’s gonna affect you I know you said you don’t care and they don’t bother you, but you’re gonna have flashbacks because you got a brain and you have a, how the, where are the real people at?
Are you all sitting in a section over here? Flash back. Have you ever had a flashback?
You broke up but you still got a flashback and you’re a little worried but you can’t call and you tell yourself you don’t care but you do and you’re walking around in the middle of the night with that little sick feeling in the bottom of your stomach because your stomach won’t listen at your head and disconnect from the fact that you are still connected though.
You are free on paper. You are still bound by experience and s are messy business.
We live in a time now that everybody wants everything.
Quick, quick, love, immediate gratification.
I’m gonna talk about some stuff you don’t know about because you grew up on instant grits.
But I remember when grits were an instant.
So what you call good grits?
I just call gritty because real grits are slow cooked. Come on, talk to me.
Somebody real grits are slow cooked. Take a long time to get the grits, right?
But that stuff y’all going in the microwave that you call grits is not really grits because if you want something to have real flavor, you got to slow cook it.
You gotta put it on a smoker. You gotta give it some time.
You can’t cook collard greens in 15 minutes. It takes time to cook green.
You, you, you gotta put the meat in and let it boil down and let it thicken up and let it get a little flavor in it.
Come on somebody. You gotta cut your greens and wash your green and add them in at the right time and then cover them up and let it cook down.
Let all the juices cook down to.
You can’t tell the greens from the broth and see, we don’t have time for that.
We want instant sons and instant fathers and instant marriages.
Listen, it takes 30 minutes to have a wedding, but it may take 30 years to have a marriage.
And most of us if we don’t get what we need when we need it, like we need it in the style that we need it in our love language.
We’re out of there and all of these love languages sound like the United Nations to me.
How am I supposed to know what your love language is?
I’m still trying to figure out what my love language is and when your love language and my love language and then the kids love language gets in there.
It sounds like the day of Pentecost touch me.
No, give me space, acknowledge me. No. Don’t make me stand up in front of people. Shut up.
The family started before the church.
God knew he had to slow cooking because it was gonna take a long time to get that right.
He didn’t, he didn’t even bring up the church to The New Testament.
But he started the family way back in the Book of Genesis because he said this is slow grit.
We gotta cook it real slow because the brothers are going to get jealous.
What? And brothers do get jealous and they’re gonna murder and they’re gonna kill and they’re going to be envious some vocally, some silently.
But it takes a long time to have a family and we’re in trouble.
Our communities are in trouble. Our nation is in trouble and our world is in trouble.
But all of it is only because our families are in trouble.
How can you have a strong community and a weak family? Yeah.
You must understand that the community is made up of families.
It is in your family that you learn authority that you learn, order that you have protocol that you have used to anyway.
I’m sorry. You said I’m old folk used to have discipline.
That’s where you learn your art, your skill, your talent, your rules, your regulation. What time to go to bed?
It’s nine o’clock. Go to bed, go to bed, clean your room, wash your drawers, clean yourself up in case you have a wreck.
I never did understand what a wreck had to do with clean draws.
He dead. But he has mama.
I died but my drawers was clean.
They cut both my legs off but my jaws were sparkling white.
Hm.
This is messy. This is complicated. This is difficult.
This is tough. It is tough because the star of the story is seemingly the, the son, the biggest fool in the text has the lead role.
Yeah. The most selfish self aggrandized, aloof individual in the whole story has the lead role.
The father is a supporting cast and that’s what it means to be a father, to be the supporting cares.
It’s your job to support.
And nobody preaches about the father.
They always teach about the sun. They sing songs about the song.
They do sermons and poetry on the sun.
Nobody says anything about the father and the father is the one who held everything together, but it hurt, it hurt and just because a man doesn’t cry does not mean that he doesn’t hurt.
Yeah, this is how I look when I’m happy.
This is how I look when I’m getting ready to knock your head off.
This is how I look when I’m scared and some of our homes are busting up because you expect my face to radiate my emotions like yours does.
When in reality, I can feel everything you feel and go when they bring me bad news, I take it like this, when they bring me good news, I take it like this and just because the father didn’t cry didn’t mean he didn’t hurt.
And unfortunately, we live in a society that gives empathy and compassion to that that is visible.
So the more invisible you become with how you feel, the less compassion you receive.
Because they start saying that’s just how he is you built for this.
You can do it, you could handle it because I took it like this inside.
I wanted to die. I wanted to throw up and I took it like this.
The father doesn’t get the lead role because he’s not given enough drama. Now.
He probably did when he was younger.
But drama dries up with age. OK?
It’s like a, it just dries up and shrinks down and calms down.
The younger son said to his father give me the portion of goods that followeth unto me.
Who says anything falls to you? What entitlement that you think?
Just because you’re my son that something is supposed to fall to you that I owe you something I had you.
I did that I had you.
You here, Gloria, that’s your inheritance. You breathe.
Thank you for it.
My son said thank you for it.
He comes to his father with a spirit of entitlement in expecting his father to give him his inheritance.
Wait a minute. Inheritance is what you get when I die.
So you mean you’re in such a hurry to get what I got that you can’t wait on me to die.
You want me to get out the way because you would rather have the gift than the giver.
You’d rather have the seed than the sower.
You’d rather have the healing than the healer. That’s what you mean.
Every time you pray in the emergency room to a God that you don’t serve, you want him to heal you.
But you don’t want to have a relationship with the healer.
Don’t act like you don’t understand the powerful son because there’s a whole lot of powerful sons and daughters in this room who only come to God when they get in trouble.
And as soon as the trouble is over, we don’t see you no more because you pray prayers like Lord.
If you just get me out of, can I go deeper?
Give me the portion of goods that followeth unto me and, and, and, and then it says something that is the most telling he divided unto them, both of them, his living his, his living.
How much is that he’s living his life?
See, see whatever he had accumulated, he had spent his life to get in.
So when he gave it to his sons, it wasn’t that he was giving him money, he was giving them his life.
He divided onto them. His living.
I have given you my life while you pick through it and tell me what’s wrong with the gift, how it should have been wrapped and how it should have been handled and what should have been done with it.
It was my life. I could have had it without you.
I could have had it without you.
I could have went to Paris and I could have went to France, but I sent you to school.
I could have went to Venice. I could have been in Italy.
I could have been in Rome. I could have went to Afghanistan.
I could have taken trips to Dubai but I paid your tuition with my life.
Bad hat on your head. It’s my life.
That ring on your finger is my life.
And he divided onto them.
He’s living and it’s ok because if you’re really a father, you should love your seed enough to invest your life.
Stay with me. I’m going somewhere.
Yeah, because if I’m gonna give my life to anybody, I should give it to my seed.
If I were gonna die right now and I had to pick out who I was gonna give my, my, my, my life to.
I would give it to my seed first. The problem is he divided onto them.
His living, not their living, his living.
And the prodigal son took his living and win a ho, he spent it on sluts and triumphs and parties and fake friends.
He’s spent it in strip clubs and hookah bars and having parties and drop it like it’s hot and making it rain up in here.
He, he made it rain, he made it rain.
You don’t get it he made it rain with his father’s life.
I gave you my life and you bought weaves to impress men who gave you nothing.
It’s Father’s Day, it’s Father’s day.
And I had to sit here and watch you waste my living knowing I would not get another one.
Knowing this is my last run, knowing that I’m running out of time knowing that I won’t get a do over again.
And I had to watch you blow it and listen, if you tell me what I should have done because even though you haven’t done it, you seem to know how to do it.
Thank If another childless person tells me how to be a father, I’ll scream.
I know this is gonna get me on tiktok for sure.
But here I go. If another woman tells me how to be a father, I will open my mouth and flat out scream.
I you can no more. Tell me how to be a father than I can tell you how to birth a baby.
I don’t know nothing about birthing a baby. I don’t know nothing about nursing a child.
You have to know what you don’t know. Shut up being the teacher and just be the wife.
How do you know how to be a father?
Not only are you not a father?
Most of you didn’t even have a father and yet you’re an expert on how to be.
But that’s alright.
I’m not gonna bother you. Because you’re not in the text. It’s all right.
I’m sorry, I got off the text. Let me get back to the text.
I’m not gonna bother you today and all your ideas and all the stuff you read in essence and woman’s today and all the things you heard at the beauty shop about what a man ought to be.
I’m not gonna bother it today because you’re an expert on something you have never done.
I know I’m gonna leave you alone.
I’m not gonna try to argue with you because you talk faster to me. Go ahead.
But just because you have taught me doesn’t mean you changed my mind.
That’s why I look at you like this when you’re talking and there you are.
I want you to feel what the father felt when the son walked out the door with his life and blew it.
It’s not like he went there and increased it and invested it and grew from it and multiplied it and did something with it.
He took everything I told him and everything I taught him and everything I gave him and everything I put inside of him and gave it to sluts that never appear again in the text, right?
Riotous. Living and to all of that, the father said nothing.
That’s amazing. He said absolutely nothing because he had, he had to uh he had to wait.
Yeah, he had to wait when it looked like it wasn’t gonna pay off.
I know that he had to wait when it looked like he was a failure.
He had to wait when it looked like it didn’t work.
He had to wait when it looked like it didn’t matter.
He had to wait while they went on without him. He had to sit there and wait.
He had to wait while he was running out of time. He’s running out of time.
The boy has more time than the father. It is not the oldest son. It is the youngest son.
He has the most time and the least sense and the old man with the least time and the most sense has to set back.
Judges help, help and just wait.
Waiting is so hard that the Bible says they, that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.
That means you expend energy. Just waiting. I’m just waiting. I’m just waiting. I’m tired from waiting.
I’m weak from waiting. I need revival. Just go away. It’s so good. Absolutely.
Yeah. And so he waited. Yeah.
Yeah, because good grits.
He waited while he spent his money at payday loans.
He waited. Ali made dumb decisions.
He waited while he got tied up with people that never met him. No good.
He waited while the young man.