Are You Trying to Live Someone Else’s Life? | Sermon Series

On T.D. Jakes sermon series, Crushing, T.D. Jakes teaches that God designed everyone for a purpose. Listen as he encourages you to stop comparing yourself to others knowing that only you can be you.

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…….

The reason we go back to God is because he is the master and he put everything in the box.
We needed to be successful at what we were created to do.
So I don’t, I don’t have to wish for stuff that he put in your box because I’m not supposed to be you.
I’m supposed to be me.
I don’t have to long after things that he has given to you because he gave them to you.
So you could be who you were supposed to be. The wine press.
It’s a strip club of grapes.
It is a place where grapes dis rode and uncover themselves for it.
It’s not the skin of the grape. That is the most important thing.
It’s what’s behind the skin that makes it important. We know that about grapes.
I wish we would learn that about people in the wine press the grape strips itself and becomes vulnerable down to its soft parts so that it might become one.
Imagine what it must have been like to be an angel in heaven and suddenly hear God say that he’s going to strip himself of his glory and his honor and his preexisting glory and his omnipotence and his omnipresence and his omniscience and that he would humble himself down to his soft parts and find a virgin and become a man.
See you think that the real crushing was the cross?
But the crushing started when God became man, when God became man, he crushed himself from all of the benefits of being God.
And for the first time in all of the ages and all of the eons and all of time itself, for the first time, God took a nap.
As God, he neither sleeps or slumbers, but as Jesus, he will sleep in the bow of the ship as God, he’s in all places and at all times.
But as Jesus, he says, let us cross over to the other side, God never has to journey.
He’s already there. All of these benefits of being God.
Jesus surrendered that he might be encapsulated, incarcerated in human flesh.
God incarnate, incarnate, the staggering amazing reality that God would put himself in the jail of flesh.
The very thing he hated, the very thing he despised.
The very thing that Paul says is an enmity against God.
Jesus wrapped himself up in it and it was a crushing experience because it meant that he would have to be hungry.
And so after he fasted, the bible said, Jesus hungered.
But as God the father, he’d never hungered.
And now He knows what hunger is and now he knows what tired is.
And now he knows what betrayal is so that whenever you get ready to pray, you can’t bring up a feeling that He doesn’t understand.
He can be touched by the feeling of our infirmity, tempted at all points like as we are yet without sin, he couldn’t have done that before because he didn’t know what it felt like to be human.
When Adam fell into sin, God asked his first question, Adam, where are there?
That was the day the teacher went back to school because what Adam had fallen into God had never fallen into Adam had fallen into sin and God had never sinned.
So when he says Adam, where it is not just merely a geographical location, he’s trying to, to feel him.
So Jesus comes to find Adam in the sight of God.
There are really only two men, the first man Adam and the last man Adam and everybody else was born in one or the other.
And if I was born in Adam, I was born in sin and shaping in iniquity.
And I was born in Adam.
And that’s why Jesus told Nicodemus you must be born again because this time I’m being born in Christ and I’m being born outside of the curse of the law and sin and death and free and liberated.
Because in Him, I live, I move and I have my being and it was so important that he win me that he was willing to allow himself to be stripped of the royal diadem and the host of heaven and the command of angels and the moving of mountains.
And all of His Godliness was incarcerated in humanness. He humbled himself.
And in order to go through a crushing, you have to humble yourself, you have to give up on some of your power and some of your will and some of your influence and some of your opinions and you have to shut up and humble yourself and you have to be still and know that God is God.
He humbled himself and became poor that through his poverty, we might be made rich.
He humbled himself and became finite and died.
Can you imagine the shock of heaven when Jesus gives up the ghost and dies?
All of heaven stands aghast because they had never prepared the funeral for God.
Uh Maybe that’s why he didn’t buy Joseph two.
He only borrowed it because he knew he wasn’t going to stay there.
And the reason I wrote crushing was to tell you don’t believe the crushing that you’re in as if it is your final residence or place of abode.
You may have to live there for a little while. But borrow it, don’t buy it.
What is my purpose?
How can I say I’m successful if I don’t know why I’m here?
I can say I’m busy, but I can’t say I’m successful because I’m only successful when I’m doing the thing I was created to do.
Why am I here? The problem is most of the time we ask one another the question and you’re a, it’s like a blind man asking another blind man, which way should I go?
Because we can’t answer your question because we’re trying to answer our own question.
And the answer that is true for me might not be true for you because my purpose might not be your purpose.
So in order to get the answer, we have to go back to the manufacturer.
He is the reason that, that we seek him because he has the answer not to who he is, but to who am I see.
Really at the heart of worship, there is a degree of selfishness because I seek him that I might know me.
I don’t just seek him that I might know him.
I seek him that I might know me because he is the only one who knows me because I don’t even know me.
I have done things that shocked me. I have said things that shocked me.
I have reacted in unpredictable ways.
And the older I get, the less I know about myself because I have seen so many different sides of me that I think I might have a multi personality disorder.
But God knows why I am the way I am and he knows where the bolts goes and he knows where the screws should be and he knows where to put the vowels and he knows how to handle me.
Paul says, oh, that I may know him and the fellowship of his suffering and the power of his resurrection.
Then he says, oh, that I may apprehend that which I am apprehended of.
He said, I’m chasing God because he knows me. He knows what I can do.
He knows what I can build. He knows what I can handle. He knows what I can have.
He knows whether I’m supposed to be here or there or with this one or that one or connected here or there.
And if I don’t go back to the manufacturer, then I’m just playing with screwdrivers seeing what works only to spend hours building something that is dysfunctional and frustrated because it didn’t work.
The reason we go back to God is because he is the master and he put everything in the box.
We needed to be successful at what we were created to do.
So I don’t, I don’t have to wish for stuff that he put in your box because I’m not supposed to be you.
I’m supposed to be me.
I don’t have to long after things that he has given to you because he gave them to you so you could be who you were supposed to be.
He gave me everything in the box.
I needed to do everything I was created to do if I seek him.
No, no, no, this is not about self control. This is about God control.
Self control does not take grapes and turn them into wine.
The wine dresser has to do that.
And if you ever hope to be what God created you to be, you have to submit yourself into his hands and know that He knows exactly what tools to use to bring out the best in you men.
And I don’t want to die.
In fact, I refuse to die until he brings out the best in me.
And, oh, what fun it’s been to see what he brought out of me.
I didn’t know that was in there.
I didn’t know where to put the screws or the bolts or the nuts to get that.
I didn’t know I could be that. I didn’t know I could say that.
I didn’t know I could write that. I didn’t know I could have that.
I didn’t know I could become that. I didn’t know I could do that.
I could, I didn’t know I could withstand that. I didn’t know I could endure that.
I didn’t know I could survive that. I didn’t know I could overcome that.
I didn’t know I could make it through that.
Oh, how amazing it’s been when you go back to the manufacturer to understand what weight you were created to handle, what load you can stand, how fast you can move, how much you can accomplish.
He designed you for the life.
He wants you to live and if your life is unbearable, it might be because you’re leading someone else’s life.
If you, if your life is too much and too heavy and too fast and too painful, maybe you’re living somebody else’s life because you will find that you are perfectly designed to be you.
And when you surrender to him, he will show you how to best be you.
So strip yourself from all your pride and all your envy and all your competition and all your need to measure up to other people.
You were never designed to be.
And do you, have you ever wanted something so long that you resolved in yourself?
That this will probably never happen.
Have you ever declared death to a dream to have a moment’s peace to survive the torment of waiting to end the agony of expectation to just let go and give up.
Seems more peaceful. The master gives us mountain peaks visions but then hides us in valleys in dark places and lonely places and frustrated places.
And we can’t be so intent on our comfort that we forget our calling.
Remember the master is not in the business of torturing his Children through delays.
He’s not playing games with you. He’s not playing hide and go seek with you. He has not forgotten you.
He has a plan for your life.
He wants to seize our attention in the valley so that we will make it to the mountain.
You cannot control what life throws at. You know, can I, we don’t know from day to day.
The next text could change the next 10 years of your life, but you can control how you respond.
You can control that. Will you trust God or will you doubt Him?
God uses the valley to prepare us for the peaks in life?
In fact, if there were no valleys, there would be no peaks in life.
He hides his treasure until we are ready to handle them.
Because some of the things that God has for you, they are really yours. But the timing isn’t right.
It’s like God telling David that he’s gonna be king and then sending him back out there to feed the sheep just because God gave you a word doesn’t mean it’s for right now until you’ve been faithful over where you place you, you don’t earn the right to get the promotion and it wasn’t time for David to be king.
But he’s telling him, go ahead and deal with the sheep. I got big plans for you.
But that doesn’t mean today. I want you to spend a little more, more time in the valley working the kinks out of you.
So that when I put you on the mountain where everybody can see you, you don’t have to have the disgrace of falling down.
Uh I am convinced that God made me who I am in my low places, not my high places whenever I’m in a fight with the enemy.
I don’t tell him about my accomplishments.
I tell him about how I made it with no lights and with no water and how I made it when I lost my car and how I made it when I thought I’d never get up because my strength comes from my low places and I am afraid of people who have no low places.
I’m afraid of their friendship because they’ll run out on you in, in the middle of a low place.
I don’t believe them most of the time. That’s part of the problem.
When, when you haven’t had low places, your character hasn’t been established. The nights I cried myself to sleep.
The days I could not hear God’s voice at all. We trust him because we got no choice.
We don’t trust him because we’re good people and strong Christians and great people of faith.
We trust him because we got no choice. There’s nothing else you can do but trust Him.
If you can get yourself out of it, get yourself out of it.
The reason we trust God, we have no choice.
So whether you want to spend all of your time struggling or not too soon or later, are gonna have to realize that we are helpless without him.
We are as helpless as the clay is without the potter, as the grape is without the winter.
We need him. In order to direct our steps, we trust the master winter to bring out of us.
What he placed inside of us do not lose your hope because he took his time.
It is only an indication of how masterful the venter is that he is given to details.
You always know a novice because they skip over details.
But the more proficient you are at the artistry of what you do.
The more detailed it is I remember being a little boy and my mother taking me in the store and showing me how to determine when something was well made.
She said, don’t look at the coat check out the lining.
She said, don’t just look at the past, see how much material is in the.
Don’t just look at the drapery, see how deep the fabric goes and the curve, the deeper the fabric goes, the more they spin on it, the more valuable it is see, we have a tendency to look at the aesthetics of a thing and not the real value of what it is.
Do not lose hope because he put more fabric in you and he added more stitches to you and you don’t think you need all of that.
He is so good as a master venter.
He knows exactly what to give you in order to make you who you are to be.
Everything in this life is temporal, everything you got and everything you accomplish and everything you mastered, you will leave, you will leave here just like you came, you came into the world naked.
You will leave naked. Somebody will drive your car, somebody will wear your clothes. Somebody will live in your house.
Somebody will get your rings. Everything you attain will become totally irrelevant.
This is just a moment to train for what’s next to prepare for.
What’s better to prepare for what matters the reality is.
They live godly or suffer persecution and you don’t get to pick when or how or what the suffering is.
But it still happens. I’m building my church. My church is exploding this some 20 years ago.
Everything is amazing. I’m reaching around the world for Jesus souls are being saved and then the bottom dropped out.
It started dropping when my mother in law died and they kept dropping when my mother developed Alzheimer’s and she died.
And there I was preaching and ministering and helping and even healing the gifts of healing, operating in my life couldn’t help my own mother and she died.
And just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, my 13 year old daughter walks in the room and tells my wife and I that she’s pregnant, my wife collapsed in the floor and all the air goes out of the room.
And suddenly I begin to understand that there are times that crush the human soul that try your emotions that are not judgment or penalty, or God being angry or God hating you.
But God developing you that you don’t get everything just because you go to a class or hear a sermon.
You have to live these sermons out in your life, both the hearer and the speaker.
What gives you the integrity of the message is the things you suffer behind the scenes to have the conviction, to be able to declare them, to know that God has been proven in you.
I found myself asking questions that I had never asked myself. Where is God?
Why? Why aren’t you moving? Like you moved in the Bible move for me.
Like you moved for Moses and Joshua and Jacob and Israel move for me.
And I had to seek Him. And that’s a good thing. I had to search for Him.
I had to search my heart to understand what level of faith do you have? You?
You don’t need to search your heart when everything’s going right?
You need to search your heart when all hell is breaking loose and trouble is everywhere and you feel deep down, it’s not like you wanna die and you’re asking questions that you dare not allow, lets the church judge you.
But in your secrecy, in your private times, along with God, you say, where are you?
When are you coming? When is a happy ending?
And I didn’t understand that tribulation is a part of training.
They are crushing and suffering is a part of how God develops us to become what he wants us to be, I didn’t understand how to recognize him in trouble, but I kept preaching and I kept serving and I kept going on and I didn’t realize that I was earning my stripes by my battles.
You don’t get strips as a soldier.
If you don’t get in a fight, they don’t give them to you for longevity or how many years of seniority they give you the stripes because of the battles you’ve endured and the things you’ve been through and the crushing you’ve gone through and you find yourself in an emotional quick saying, and you wonder if you can get out.
Will this be the big one that takes me out?
Will this be the big one that brings me down to my knees?
Will, will I be able to stand it emotionally, mentally? Spiritually?
Do I really have what it takes or have I been selling wolf tickets?
We would say wooing, talking, talking at the big gate saying all this wonderful stuff.
And then when it comes down to trial, does it really work in your own life?
Not understanding that God is with you in the pain and in the suffering and in the trauma and the childhood trauma when the medical report comes back bad and the business comes back bad and, and you lose a loved one or you go through a painful moment in your life.
That does not mean that God has abandoned you.
We can sometimes feel aimless and lost and confused and uncertain and still love God.
We can feel like God has abandoned us. It’s OK. Even Jesus cried out on the cross.
Eli Eli is about that. My God, my God, why has God forsaken me?
And if Jesus had a moment like that, then, then we can expect to have moments like that.
I found out that the way God rewards you for passing, the last test is giving you the next test.
That promotion graduation. You kill the lion.
Let me see what you do with the bear. You kill the bear. Let me introduce you to Goliath.
That the way into your destiny is riddled with bloody battles and scars and bruises and hurts and pain.
So that when you get there, you will stand there and you will endure because you have been through something.
It was painful, it was tough, it was crushing and there were no demons to rebuke and no witches to rebuke and no Satan to come up against.
I was in the hands of the potter.
I have come to realize that in life, there are seeds and there are weeds and the seeds and the weeds come up at the same time, like the weed and the terror that you can have good moments and bad moments simultaneously to the point that you don’t really know how to enjoy the good moments because you feel the bad and I don’t know what it is about the human experience, but our attention seems to be distracted by the pain we go through to the point that we ignore the powerful blessings of God in our life.
You’ll scroll past all the good comments on your social media and find that one bad comment and focus in on that.
I’m a pastor. I’m an author. I’m an evangelist.
I’ve inspired millions of people around the world, but I’m just as susceptible as anybody else to life suffering.
Nobody gets a pass. Nobody gets an exemption.
I’ve discovered that my authentic experience requires that I have more than theology and more than commentary and more than rhetoric and more than analogies and more than artist that it has to come from a deeper place that it has to come from a bleeding place.
Jesus gives a parable about the weed and the tear and the most amazing thing about the wheat and the tear is that they both grew up together simultaneously and there’s not a person in this room that can’t see wheat and tear coexisting at the same time.
And if you remember the parable, they said, let us go in there and remove the tear and Jesus says, leave them alone, leave them alone.
The weeds have just as much purpose as the seeds do.
Let it all grow up together because Jesus knew that there was nothing in the weeds that could kill the seeds and you have to know that there’s nothing in the weeds that will kill the seeds, even though they’re threatening.
And even though they’re overwhelming and sometimes the weeds get so high you can’t even see your own garden.
You must understand that joy, coexists with suffering that, that is what the anointing is made out of that.
It’s made out of crushing and mir and bitterness and sweetness and Callum all mixed together that if you took away the suffering, you wouldn’t be annoying it.
You have to understand that God knows what he’s doing. Joseph told his brothers about his dream.
You intended to harm me, but God intended for my good. He allowed you to betray me for my good.
I am stronger because of your weakness. I am stronger because of your wickedness.
I’m stronger because of your strife. You taught me that I didn’t need you to be able to stand.
You taught me that you can’t vote on my favor.
You taught me that my glory is not in my coat of many colors.
And so I thank you for hurting me and I thank you for crushing me and I thank you for crushing my heart because you know what I am broken in all the right places, all the right places like a key that unlocks the door, I’m broken just right to unlock my next dimension of grace.
And you can only have that kind of faith, that kind of knowing that kind of reality when you agree with the Apostle Paul in Romans 8 28 when he says that all things, not just the good things, but all things work together for the good of them.
That love the Lord who are the called according to his purpose is working for your good, but it doesn’t feel good.
It’s working for your good.
When tears are running down your face, it’s working for your good when you’re up at three o’clock in the morning and you have to believe that it’s working for your good.
You have to understand that a breadmaker always needs the dough and needing it is what makes it rise, pressing it down is what makes it goes up, putting it up under pressure is the reality that proves that I am called according to his purpose and not my comfort.
I am called according to his purpose and not your opinion.
I am called according to his purpose and not my convenience that God didn’t come in my life to secure my convenience that he comes into our lives.
And often his will is disruptive.
And when it is disruptive, sometimes it feels destructive and you wonder and you’re oh my God, are you killing me?
When in fact, God is preparing you for something bigger than yourself and greater than yourself and stronger than yourself.
And it may be years before your questions are answered and you begin to understand why you had to go through what you had to go through to get to where you had to get.
And in the meantime, that’s where faith operates.
Faith stands in the gap between you understanding and you experiencing, you hold on with all of your might and you believe him in the storm and the hurricane and the tsunamis of life behind every major moment in my life.
There were periods of stress that I thought would kill me. To be honest with you.
I enjoy my accomplishments more in retrospect than I did in real time.
Because while people were seeing the outside, I was dealing with the kitchen, while you were eating in the restaurant, I was dealing with the employee that didn’t show up.
And the one who ran off with the money and the person who quit and the person who betrayed me and the person who sold me out for 30 pieces of silver and yet I had to walk out on the stage and remain the same.
And so do you, you have to walk out? You have to work. Welcome to J C Penny.
You have to do what you have to do. You have to do what you have to do.
You cannot allow how you feel to dictate how you respond.
When you begin to understand you, you begin to understand that your greatest successes are riddled with periods of stress, they go together and if the enemy could, he would break you with the stress but endure the stress because it means success is on the other side, Jesus said that he despised the shame of the cross, the humiliation, the pain, the degradation, the destruction.
But he looked beyond it and said, but for the joy that was set before him, he endured the shame of the cross.
And you have to begin to realize that these crushing moments are a sign that God is about to do something amazing in your life.
You have to understand that the the greater, the more intense the labor pain, the closer the baby is to coming and you can’t have the baby without the pain.
But no mother. Once the baby is born focuses on the pain.
She focuses on what comes out of it.
And I am telling you, success and stress cannot exist without each other.
No more than babies can come without labor. No more. The clouds can come without rain combined.
They help us to reach our full potential to bring us into our destiny and into our purposes.
The path to progress takes wild detours and breakdowns and unplanned stops and oil leaks and running out of gas and trouble everywhere.
And a a fender bender and crisis and pulled over to the side of the road.
But that’s part of the trip.
We feel the anxiety, we feel a threat, we feel loss, we feel, we feel we feel but we cannot go by how we feel.
We must go by what we know we must go by what we believe and we believe that God is with us, even though we can’t see him.
And sometimes he doesn’t hold our hand like we want to feel him holding our hand.
But we have to know that He is there is there more to our suffering than what we can see.
Absolutely. Absolutely. The very emblem of our faith is a suffering savior.
We don’t wear crowns around our neck to depict our faith.
We don’t have a throne around our neck as a, as an emblem of our faith.
The emblem of the Christian faith is a bloody savior stretched wide and hung high on a cross.
A old cross. That’s a big clue. When Jesus says, follow me, take up your cross and follow me.
He’s not joking that somewhere sooner or later you’re going to go through something that crushes you and He knows exactly where to hit you to get the oil out of you.
He knows exactly what it takes.
He knows a specially designed tool just for you, something that wouldn’t bother anybody else, but he knows exactly what it takes to bring you to the point that you begin to secrete the glory of God and the anointing of God.
He knows how to do it. This is crushing, this is crushing, this is pain with a purpose.
This, this is understanding that God has a future for you and this is how you begin to understand that He is the master inventor.
That as a he, he, he, he controls the pressure to accomplish what he wants done.
That he is sovereign, that he is absolute, that he is reigning, that he is in full control.
And the only way that you can withstand the crushing is to trust the hand that does it.
It’s not that you like the pain.
It’s not that you’re even sure you’re gonna survive until you know that God loves you too much to kill you in the process.
You can’t praise him in the process, but we praise him in the process because of the hand that is applying the pressure is not an enemy that’s gone wild in my life.
But a God that monitors how much I can bear and skillfully with the skill and the artistry of a surgeon.
His precision is so absolute that He knows exactly where to cut and exactly where to push, to get what he wants to get out of your life.
Our mission is to use every available means to reach as many individuals and families as possible with the life changing gospel of Jesus Christ.
Thank you for helping make the gospel of grace go around the world without you. We couldn’t do it.
God bless you.