Can You Trust God When He Doesn’t Answer? Sermon Series: Crushing

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…….

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 is doing. Only when we look back.
Then we see that God had a plan, but all we had was pain.
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 the crushing that gives you wisdom.
You cannot buy wisdom in a store, you cannot get it in a jar.
It is the 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 is.
It is the ability to endure the wisdom of the vitner for the vitner 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 it.
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 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 obe, if you obe 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 may be 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 would gradually have her mind peeled back like an onion until she couldn’t tell a banana from an orange.
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 weed. 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 right, 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 clothes.
Sometimes you dress up to hide so nobody can see how deep down inside you’re hurting.
Intimacy 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 perform for you.
And that’s the only reason I get tired of you because I yearn 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 and pressing and it pleased him to bruise him.
It please God to bruise us.
Not because he is sadistic, not because we are Mastic.
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, a 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 have been crushed are survivors when my church emptied out and we were going through COVID and I had to preach in an 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 plots.
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 super and might either had this final remark.
If Satan was smart, he would never push if he’s able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we may ask or think that means we have no idea of what he’s making when he’s making us.
And the seed doesn’t know what the is 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.
Hm Not by a long shot, nowhere close.
If you would have met me at 18 and told me that I would end up being this.
I would have laughed in your face if you’d have told me at 16, that I would end up here.
All of my neighbors would have laughed at 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, but 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 close from humble beginnings.
I, I mean, we were, we were, is when you cannot afford the ore.
My idea of rich people were people who had grass in their yards.
Rich 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 that 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&T then Randall Stevenson and have a discussion about equity is something that I can imagine AT&T that I would be closing on property right next to Tyler Perry studios that it, it’s got grass.
I mean, it’s got really grasp that, that I would write books that were translated into multiple languages around the world.
One that has been translated into 12 different languages. They, they say it’s Japanese.
I can’t read it, but I trust that that’s what it is.
It is Mandarin and, and, and in Chinese, I can’t read it, but I trust that 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 is 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 hurt. It’s not about embarrassment. It wasn’t about image. It was, it was 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 realize that if she hadn’t have gotten pregnant, she wouldn’t have been the person that she became.
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. And 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 self reliant and able to stand.
And when you got through crying about it, you woke up a tougher woman than you were a girl.
Does anybody know what I’m talking about?
The thing I love the most about him is that God never gives up on you.
Yes, 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 is 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 his back and found out something about you and said you’re a, nobody doesn’t mean that God is through with you because whatever they found out, God already knew, pastor had invited me to one of the biggest meetings he does during the year.
He’s huge all over the world. But in Africa it’s unexplainable.
And I was getting ready to go when I got a call, the phone rang.
My son, Jamar had, had a heart attack and the doctors were trying to stabilize him.
And while they were telling me about it, he’d had a second one and the airport was shut down for the evening and we had to pull all kind of strings to get out of there.
And I never got to preach to the crowd one because under battle, you always have to keep your priorities straight.
Don’t let the seduction of the crowd of the allure of the masses make you forget about the commitment to the few Jamal was my son and I had to be there.
And I wondered Lord, how in the world could this be happening?
They had rushed him into surgery and it didn’t look good.
And I said this is a 20 something year old young man who’s vibrant, healthy, in good shape, not overweight.
How could this happen? You, we, we want to understand everything but we don’t.
So I flew for hours and hours and all the while I stayed awake the whole time saying God, spare my son because I don’t want to know the pain of losing my child.
And we want to understand why.
And I got to the hospital, I came down the hall and he’s laying in the hospital bed and he said, I hear my daddy coming and I walked in the room, I shaved his chest.
I talked to him.
I tried to get him ready for this, this surgery they were going to do because they had to try to figure out where this was coming from.
And the first one had proven it and I wanted answers and I learned something.
You don’t get answers because you want them that God doesn’t explain himself for that matter.
The doctors don’t explain themselves. I would have took an answer from anybody.
They weren’t explaining much because they weren’t sure why he had the heart attack. They couldn’t give me answers.
And when I prayed and asked God, why did I have to go through this? He chose to be silent.
And the real issue becomes, can you trust God when he doesn’t answer?
Because we want answers and we’re raised in school to seek answers.
And then if you get the answer right, we reward you and it makes us think that there’s an answer.
But sometimes life hands you stuff where there is no answer.
Now, he recovered and I’m happy about that. He really recovered.
But my point in talking to you about seeking answers is that it’s a dangerous thing to seek answers while you’re suffering.
That’s like trying to diagnose a storm in the middle of a tsunami.
You have to get to the other side of it and look back at it and see it in retrospect because if you ask too many questions at the wrong time, you’re not gonna come up with healthy answers or no answers at all.
And the frustration becomes a distraction because what difference does it make? Why you’re still dealing with what?
And if you’re dealing with what you can’t worry about why.
So you’re dealing with what and surviving what must take preeminence over understanding why I grew up in a little Baptist church in the hills of West Virginia on the mountain top.
And we used to sing an old song. We are tossed and driven on the mighty seas of time.
Summer times and summer tempers off succeed the bright sunshine in the land of perfect day.
When the mist have rolled away, we will understand it better. Bye bye.
Sometimes you have to realize that you have to settle to walk in the dark, to walk by faith and not by sight.
Yeah. To not ask God to appeal to your intellect.
Because when you ask God to appeal to your intellect, you ask him to come down to your level.
When His thoughts are above your thoughts and his ways are above your ways.
He has to come down to your level, to explain himself. And sometimes God is not interested in your intellect.
He is interested in your obedience.
Well, do you hear what I’m saying to you?
Because obedience is proven best. When you don’t understand.
If I tell my child clean up the room, you don’t get to ask me why I, I don’t have to explain to you.
We got company coming over and we got this. No, no, no. I said clean the room.
Obedience is better than sacrifice. Obedience is better than understanding.
And God is trying to teach us to obey Him and to trust in the fact get this, that pruning is not punishment, that you are not cursed because you had a bad day that God is not punishing you just because you’re going through suffering.
They feel the same, but they’re not the same.
The intention is quite different between pruning and punishment.
Pruning is a reward of having something of value is how God lets you know that you’re valuable.
He, he wouldn’t prune you if you were a dying bush, nobody prunes a dying bush.
He prunes you because you’re fruitful. But pruning feels like punishment.
And if you’re not careful, you will feel like you’re punished and if you will buy that you’re punished, then you will believe that you’re cursed.
God doesn’t cut to kill us. He cuts to heal us.
I had to trust God when they cut in my back. Four inches and operated on my back.
And I had to learn how to walk again.
I had to trust God as I preached on Sunday mornings and couldn’t walk.
I went to Washington DC and preached.
I had to lay on the floor in the back of the church. The pain was so great.
And then when they got ready to introduce me, I came out and I preach because when the anointing was on me and the spirit started moving and the energy got up.
It was like I had no pain. I only made one mistake.
I sat down after I got through preaching instead of leaving.
And when I sat down, I couldn’t get up and they’re in front of everybody.
They, they had to help me up out of my seat.
The one who preached power and anointing and glory couldn’t get out of his chair.
And this oxymoron between strength and weakness between victory and being paralyzed.
It’s a human experience, truth and trust whole hands. They hang out together.
We need both to see the, the crushing from God’s divine perspective.
We have to look at it from God’s perspective to avoid our limited view.
We cannot see what God can see, we can see to the corner, but God can see around the corner if Jesus went to the cross.
If Paul got locked up in jail, if Joseph got thrown into a pit, if the woman was there with the issue of blood, why not me?
So when you face a dilemma and you run into a crisis and you’re trying to figure out what in the world is going on in my life and it feels like you’re going backwards instead of forwards.
When you trusted the wrong person or you made the wrong decision or the business didn’t turn out like you think and you have a setback, you have to remember a setback is a set up for a comeback and you can’t go into the valley of despair and throw yourself a pity party and, and luxuriate in the pain of your own self indulgence and ask God why you, when God spared not his son, why would he spare you?
The question is never why me? It’s why not me?
I remember our ministry was thriving and then in 2008, the economy collapsed.
I had to lay off 40 people. I thought why me, Lord? He said, why not you?
Other people are going through the same thing, why not you?
The Lord was teaching me how to lead how to make decisions, how to make tough choices.
Anybody can make easy choices as a leader.
But in order to make tough choices and have the spine and the guts to be able to put, make a tough choice that people don’t like.
And they’re murmuring about it and they’re complaining about it, but it was necessary to do it.
And it felt my luck to be able to make those kinds of choices.
Why me, why not me? To him, who much is given much is required.
You can’t have the much given and then avoid the much required.
You have to make the tough decisions and sometimes they are not popular. It’s not popular, but it’s purposeful.
And in the midst of seeking God’s purpose, you have to understand that he has a plan for your life.
Trouble comes to us all.
But what I’m glad about is that trouble doesn’t last all ways.
Trouble doesn’t last always.
The art of life is to make sure that you don’t get out of trouble and be left with trauma.
Yeah, because trouble has an expiration date.
But trauma can last for 30 years when it gets rough.
We all want to jump ship when it gets tough. We want to get out of it.
We, we, we want to get out of it so to stop hurting.
But the ship was the solution to the problem.
And I know, I know, I know, I know, I hear you saying to me, oh, Bishop, you must not know your Bible very well because the ship fell apart.
Yes, the ship fell apart but the people didn’t because some on boards and some on broken pieces made it safely to the other side and had they gotten out of the ship there wouldn’t have been a board to hold on to.
So we have to make a decision every day.
Do you stay in the process and submit to the pruning or do you jump ship for your own comfort?
Only to fall into peril. Even Jesus had this choice.
He taught a lesson that opposed many the true meaning of the bread and the wine.
Many followers left. They were pruned from Jesus because he said, unless you drink my blood and eat my flesh, you will have no part with me.
And that was not a sermon they wanted to hear and they wanted to avoid the process, not even understanding what he meant.
And then he asked Peter, will you go away also?
Or will you stay in the process?
And Peter responds, where shall I go in your hands?
Are the words of eternal life for some of us quitting is not an option.
Yes, we may cry, we may whine, we may groan, we may fuss, we may bicker, but we cannot jump ship.
We must stay in the process.
What will you choose to do when your ship is tossed to and fro and the lightning is flashing and the sky goes black and the wind is high and you’re not sure what the next turn is going to bring when people are seasick and falling apart and men are screaming and women are in prayer.
Will you stay on board the boat or will you jump off and go for something that seems like it might be better?
But could kill you. How you respond to trouble determines your outcome, to embrace the sorrow of the season and to trust God to bring you out of it is what faith is made of.
You cannot be comfortable and be Christ.
Like in order to be Christ, like he always, always calls you out of your comfort zone.
And when you say yes, I will stand even though the boat is falling apart, there’s more power in the chips than there is in my disobedience.
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.