TD Jakes - The Secret to Elevation (04/29/2017)
Drawing from the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, the preacher shows how encountering God's glory at higher spiritual levels reveals a deeper, more glorious Jesus than we knew before, leading to personal metamorphosis, humility, and the realization that we must stop trying to "build" or control what God is doing and simply listen to and worship Him.
The Transfiguration: Jesus Changes Before Their Eyes
The Bible says He transfigured Himself. When you get to a certain level, you see everything different. Everything looks different. It is so amazing. It is the same Jesus that you had down on the bottom, but up here He is now showing them the price it pays to see the kingdom, and now He reveals Himself with glimpses, and He changes. He changed.
Now, He changed before them, before His raiment. Do not rush to the raiment before you recognize that the changing of the raiment is a reaction to the changing of Jesus. That when you change, everything connected to you changes too. Yeah, you cannot have a change in raiment if you do not have a change in Jesus. The clothes did not make the man; the man made the clothes.
When the man changed, then the clothes changed. Everything that touched Him changed because it was connected to Him, and Jesus changed before their eyes. The Greek word is "metamorphoó." It is to go through a metamorphosis. It is me, but it is not me. I am the same, but I am not the same. It is going to be familiar, but it is going to be different.
You are going to recognize me, but you are not going to know me. Transfigured, metamorphosis—to go literally from the silkworm to the butterfly, from the caterpillar to the frog. It is a change in me. Biologically it is me, but it is not me. Genetically it is me, but it is not me. Same DNA but different presentation.
Do Not Judge Me in the Middle of My Metamorphosis
Some people will stop you in the middle of your metamorphosis and not allow you to complete your turn, and when people meet you in the turn they tend to define you by the twist. But they do not understand—do not judge me yet, because I am still spinning. I am still spinning. I am still coming out of my grave clothes. I am still wrestling with where I came from. I am still becoming what He called me to.
If anybody in here is still spinning, just spinning. "I am 40, and I am spinning. I am 50, and I am still spinning. I thought it would be over by now." "I am 55 years old, still spinning, still spinning, coming out of my cocoon, finding my wings, figuring out that I can fly in this dimension where I crawled in that dimension." I am becoming. I am becoming. I have not become.
I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do: I am forgetting those things which are behind and reaching to those things which are before. You will hear no more talk about the valley now that I am up on the mountain, because I am wrestling with what I see before me. I am not wrestling now with where I came from. I am wrestling with what is before me.
Jesus is not who I thought He was. He does not look like I thought He looked. He does not feel like I thought He felt. He does not care about what I thought He cared about. Oh, I apologize to all the people I killed with the religion I used to have. Yeah, I must apologize to all the people that when I majored on the minor and minored on the major I spoke it, because on the level I was on I thought it was true.
But on the level I am now I have realized that the Jesus I knew at the bottom is not the Jesus I know at the top, and He has transfigured Himself before me. He has changed before my eyes. I saw it but I did not understand it. It was a wonder. I thought I had lost my mind. It looked like Him, but it was not the Him I knew before.
A Glory Beyond Earthly Comparison
I knew it was Him, but it was not Him. I saw Him in His glory, in His essence. My juvenile eyes had finally acquiesced to more maturity. I put away childish things. I see another dimension, another facet of His glory and of His wondrous grace, and I apologize for arguing with people because the ushers did not have on white socks and that somebody did not bake a cake for Women's Day and all of that.
All of that stuff is for the valley, but now that I am up here on the mountain I see that that was not even important compared to the glory that is set before me. He is not who I thought He was—far more glorious. He has transfigured before my eyes. Ooh, glory. He has transfigured before my eyes, and whatever has changed Him is so awesome that it has peeked through the pores in His skin and touched the fibers of the fabric of His garment.
Until the fibers in the fabric of His garment have gone through a metamorphosis too, and the metamorphosis is so awesome, it is so all-engulfing that the writer stumbles over how to describe it, saying there is nothing on earth to compare it to. "It was a whiteness that I had never seen before." You see, in the Bible days, when they got ready to make something white they put it in the fuller's soap, and they started stomping on it with their feet.
But it never really became truly white because dirty feet cannot make white raiment. So, all of our earthly righteousness is as filthy rags in His sight. We made it better than it was, but we could not make it this white, not this white. I have never seen a white like this white. He said there has never been a white, not this kind of white. He shineth white. This white defies imagination.
My linguistical ability collapses on the floor, faints. I am paralyzed in my vocabulary to describe the dimensions of the whiteness I see. This is not a whiteness of the earth realm. This is a whiteness from heaven. This is whiter than the white on the snowcapped mountain. When you are so white that the white looks whiter than the snow that is surrounding it, that is a whiteness.
Because if it were just white as snow He could have said white as snow, but it was whiter than snow. It was whiter than white. It was brighter than bright. It was not from this kingdom. It was not from this world. The writer collapses and says, "I have never seen a whiteness like this white in all the world." And he says it about a snowcapped mountain, and the clothes Jesus wore were whiter than the white-capped mountains of the mountain He stood on.
The Celestial Conversation on the Mountain
His whiteness is so bright it makes our whiteness look dark. So I almost called this message "Contrast," because His white was so much whiter that it defied explanation, even though it is revealed on a mountain that is said to be white as snow. I will leave that alone. And so there they are on the tops of the mountain, and Jesus has turned white before them, and all of a sudden they see Moses and Elijah having a conversation with Jesus.
Now understand the conversation is up here. It is a celestial conversation. Moses is all that God was to Israel. Elijah is all that God will be, because he represents the coming of the Messiah. It was prophesied that before the Messiah came Elijah would come, so they were looking forward to the coming of Elijah. These are the days of Elijah. Okay, so they are looking at eternity past and eternity future, and Jesus eternity now, and they are having a conversation.
Now, Peter, James, and John must realize you are not even supposed to be on this level. It is a privilege to be in the room. See, I worry about the generation we raise today because we did not raise them like we were raised. We were raised that if your parents were in a conversation you shut your mouth. We did not raise our kids like that. They got an opinion about everything, and they will say it to anybody.
But my mother would greet your lips with the back end of her right hand in the middle of a sentence, and it would be like a holy kiss that reverberated all the way down your throat. Your tonsils would say, "Amen." She would slap you until your liver started to quiver if you commented in grown-folks' conversation. You stayed out of grown-folks' business. "Shut your mouth." This is grown-folks' business.
You do not have no business in grown-folks' business. So the conversation is grown-folks' business. It is heavenly talk. It is celestial beings talking to celestial being. Moses, whose body had been taken by Michael the archangel, is now revealing himself in this high place. Elijah the prophet that will announce the Messiah is now revealing himself in the high place, and all of these spirit beings are talking to Jesus on a very high place.
A Lesson in Humility: Shut Your Mouth
Peter, James, and John would have never been in the room except for their relationship with Jesus. The reason you have to see this is important is because when your relationship with somebody brings you into a level that you would not be in, shut your mouth. Come on. I want you to tell everybody that when your relationship takes you into a level that you would not have otherwise been, shut your mouth.
You do not get in grown-folks' business. Keep your mouth shut. You have not earned your stripes. You have not paid the price. These guys have been dead and resurrected from the dead. The other one has been caught up in a chariot. You have not been through enough to have an opinion. Shut up. You are there only to catch a glimpse of where you are going. It is a privilege to be in the room. Stay quiet.
You do not understand the level that this conversation is on. Keep your mouth shut. Now, Elijah and Moses are talking. I am going to bypass the fact that the second miracle is that Peter and them recognized them. I do not even have time to deal with that. I do not have time to deal with the fact that Peter, James, and John had to have a certain degree of revelation to even identify who it was, seeing as they had never met them.
I bypass that and go on to the fact that there they are, and they are privileged to overhear a conversation that they should have been in awe of, that they did not interrupt it. And here comes Peter. The text says, "Then Peter answered Jesus." Now, here is the problem: Jesus had not asked you nothing. Jesus did not ask you nothing. How come Peter got his mouth in this conversation, saying something in grown-folks' business?
Jesus had not asked him nothing, and here comes Peter answering Him. He is out of his element. He is out of order, and yet he says, "Oh, it is good for us..." Shut up! Peter comes talking about, "It is good for us to be here, Lord. Let us build three tabernacles: one for You and one for You and..." Shut up!
See, your comment says you are out of place. Your comment reveals that you have entered into another level where you do not make a contribution on a level that you have not really earned the right to speak in. You do not have opinions. "Shut your mouth, Peter." Well, every time I read it my hand goes up. "Then Peter answered." Jesus asked him nothing.
Peter's Mistake: Bringing Valley Thinking to the Mountain
He jumps into a heavenly conversation with an earthly principle and says, "It is good for us to be here, Lord. Let us build three tabernacles." Let us build what You have already forsaken. Let us build where You used to be where You are now. Here Peter has brought all of this stinking thinking up on the mountain with him, and he is trying to be important on a level that he has not arrived yet and make a contribution beyond his own intellect to build something that God has rejected on a level that God has not accepted.
Are you trying to bring something old into something new? That is what I want to ask you. Are you trying to bring something outdated just so that you could make a contribution? Sometimes you ought to just shut your mouth. What I love about it is Peter is up here trying to shine on the mountain like he did in the valley.
Now, let me show you how he shined in the valley. If you go back a chapter, Peter was a star. Just one chapter back Jesus was asking them down in the valley, "Who do men say that I am?" And they said, "Some say that Thou art Elias and some say that Thou art Jeremiah and some say that Thou art a prophet come back from the dead." Then He says, "Who do you say that I am?"
The eleven of them said nothing. Peter says, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the true and living God," and he was right. Jesus says to Peter, "Flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto you, but My Father which is in heaven. And upon this rock I will build My church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
Peter was bad on that level, but then Jesus takes him up to a higher level, and now the guy who was wise on the floor is a fool on the mountain. That is why Peter wants to say something, because down in the valley he was important. So he got up there and said, "Yeah, Lord. You know, like I said down there, you remember what I said down there in the valley. It is good for us to be here, Jesus. Let us build three tabernacles up here, Lord."
Wait. First of all, you do not put Jesus on the same level with anybody. Jesus is in a class all by Himself. That is number one. Number two, look at the arrogance of you suggesting that Jesus enter into a building project with you. Who are you that you are going to tell Jesus what we ought to build together?
The Father's Voice: Hear Him Only
And then the Father speaks from a cloud. The cloud comes down and engulfs them. I guess God said, "Let us get some privacy over this, because I do not want to make a fool out of you in front of everybody, so I am going to send a cloud down to cover you up and tell you how stupid you are. This is My beloved Son," not Moses, not Elijah. "This one right here is My Son. Hear ye Him. Do not talk. Shut up. Hear Him."
"I am not talking to you. I am talking to Him. Shut your mouth!" This is only the second time in the New Testament that we hear the Father speak from heaven. He rolled back the clouds to say, "Shut up. This is My beloved Son. You hear Him. You do not talk to Him. You hear Him. You do not tell Him what ought to be done. You hear Him. You do not assign a project for Him to do. You hear Him."
"I did not send Him to fulfill your vision. I sent you to fulfill His vision. Shut your mouth!" And so I called it "A Lesson in Humility," because in the valley Peter looks big, but on the mountain he looks small. There are levels where you must humble yourself and become like a little child and be still and know that God is God.
There are levels where you do not interject your opinion or tell God what ought to be done, but you hold your peace and be still and know that God is God. This is a moment of worship, this is a moment of humility, and besides, the Bible said that Peter did not know what he was talking about. It comes right out in the text, and Peter wished not what he was saying, which was a way of saying he does not know what he is talking about. He is stupid. Shut up.
The truth of the matter is you have come to a level where you do not know what ought to be done. You do not know what ought to be said. You do not know what ought to be built. You knew down here, but you do not know up here. You should shut your mouth and be still and let God accomplish what He wants to do.
He did not show it to you for you to build anything. He showed it to you for you to catch a glimpse, just a glimpse, a glimpse. God is a flasher, and every now and then He flashes His glory before you, and He will let you catch a glimpse of where you shall be and send you back down where you are—just a foreshadowing of your destiny.
You are not supposed to make it happen. You are not supposed to force anything. You are not supposed to build anything. The battle is not yours. It belongs to God. Whatever God showed you, He will bring it to pass. You do not start laying block. You do not start building footers. Shut up and let God just flash His glory before you.
When You See Jesus Only
I do not know who I am preaching to today, but I am talking to somebody who is trying to carry the load of building something on another level. You do not have to build nothing on that level. This is God's doing. He is going to be your Alpha, He is going to be your Omega, He is going to be your beginning, He is going to be your ending, and all you have to do is be still and know that He is God.
Because He has finally brought you to a place where you are not smart. He has finally brought you to a place where you do not know what to do. He has brought you to a place of humility. He has brought you to a place of submission. He has brought you to a place where you begin to recognize that your thoughts are not His thoughts. Your ways are not His ways. Your ideas are not His ideas.
You do not have a contribution to make. Shut up. And when the cloud lifted, they saw Jesus only. When the cloud moves, you will see Jesus only. Everything you saw around Him will move, and worship begins when you see Jesus only.