Sarah Jakes Roberts: God Cares for the Broken!

Sarah Jakes Roberts shares an encouraging message on TBN’s Praise about knowing your worth in God’s eyes, and how He cares for the broken areas in our lives!

This world needs to see the power of what Jesus can do when we surrender our lives to him fully.
So I am hoping that you will no longer settle for safe for the safe zone that fear and insecurities create, but instead choose to be unstoppable with our Jesus.
I love it. I wanna go back to when you were thirteen years old and found out you were pregnant.
Yeah.
Can you ever imagine that day, that night, whenever it was, when you realized you were pregnant, obviously, everyone listening knows Well, the bishop is your father.
Yeah. Your mother, you’re you’re, uh, celebrity status wasn’t sought, but was there.
And now you’re thirteen years old, did you ever think from there you would get here and what was it like in those moments.
My goodness. I just remembered 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 whole 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 licked my wounds.
And as I began to see that I wasn’t in it by myself, I believe that that’s 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 the 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 life.
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 any 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 the time When you will look back and you will thank god, you will thank him for the tears that are currently streaming down
your alley. Wow. 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 TBN 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 our 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 children.
And I can tell you right now that it’s no parent’s dream that your child gets pregnant as a teenager.
So this isn’t something that my parents were wish or praying for.
Yeah.
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 importantly, 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 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 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 a pregnant see.
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 guy 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.
Wow. Part of what led to the whole, uh, making bad decisions and kind of a 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 in spite of the fact that, you know, I would call your dad to the world’s greatest preacher in one day.
Uh, but you struggled
Yeah.
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 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. Yeah.
And in that moment, when we’re stagnant, it gives us sidelined 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 broken this much sooner.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
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 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.
I really hope that people understand that when life happens to you, that we have a tendency to shrink and to shrink our dreams, to shrink the vision that we have to our life is something that meets the disappointment that we experienced.
Maybe you’re a teen mom like I was, and you say, well, the good husbands are for the women who did things the right way and the careers are for the people who did college a certain way.
When in reality, the only thing that’s keeping you from god’s best for your life is the idea that you can’t possess it.
I want you to break out of your comfort zone and to not settle for safe.
Don’t believe and the fear and the insecurities that exist within your own mind.
We rebuke that right now in the name of Jesus, and we decree and declare liberty over your life over your family, not just for you, but for generations to come.
Who’s gonna teach your children how to live outside of the box?
Who’s gonna teach your children how to walk on water? You’ve gotta do that thing.
Your mom’s life is depending on it.
Your father’s life is depending on it, but more importantly, this world needs to see the power of what Jesus can do when we surrender our lives to him fully.
So I am hoping that you will no longer settle for safe for the safe zone that fear and insecurities create, but instead choose to be unstoppable with our Jesus.
I love it.
God, we we thank you for the divine appointment that has taken place tonight.
Yes.
That you knew exactly who would be watching.
You knew exactly who would be in the audience, but more importantly, you knew when we were crying when My husband was shot and when I was pregnant at 13, you knew that this moment would eventually lead millions of people to you.
So, god, we honor your presence in this moment, and we ask that you would begin to touch people all over the world right now.
That people who are feeling alone, people who are struggling with depression will begin to feel the love of our father wrapping over them right now in the name of Jesus that hope would be restored, that faith would be restored, that love is coming back into their hearts, not just love for this world, oh god, but love for you, the kind of love that cannot be taken away.
God, we rebuked depression. We rebuked suicidal thoughts.
We decree and declare that that is over right now in the name of Jesus that they are new beings and you and we are thanking you in advance for what’s taking place in their hearts.
Wow. Amazing. Thank you, Megan. Thank you.