Creflo Dollar - The Revelation of Grace
Over the last four years, I have been blessed to counsel people on "Your World," real people with real issues from all walks of life, through their darkest times, and helped them celebrate some of their most inspiring moments. And all the while I have been fortunate to share the goodness and power of God's amazing grace to our thousands of viewers through our guests, example after uplifting example. Hello, I'm Creflo Dollar. My own revelation of grace totally revolutionized my life.
I used to beat myself up every time I wasn't the flawless, perfect preacher. If I said something wrong, I'd beat myself up. I thought in order for me to walk in the blessings I had to perform, so when my performance level was down I felt like God wasn't going to bless me or that my love for him was going to be in question. That things wouldn't happen or the anointing wouldn't happen. I knew that something was missing in our revelation of faith, healing, and deliverance. On today's show, I'm going to show you how to discover how to live this life that God talks about, a life full, not empty; healthy, not sick; full of joy and free from worry and stress.
Can you picture your life like this? This is called the grace life, where grace helps us live an abundantly blessed life and empowers us to do things we could never do on our own. Over the next 30 minutes, you may discover that what you've been doing could be the very opposite of what you should be doing to achieve success. You'll learn what may be blocking you from receiving the flow of this grace and, even more importantly, you'll discover the principles that will allow God's blessings to just pour into your life, how to attain true healing, have all of your needs met, and to finally live a stress-free life.
There was a time in my ministry that I hit a point of frustration because I saw people working real hard to try to get God to do something, sweating to try to get the promises of God to come to pass, but to no avail. Why didn't they see the results? I began to go before God and say, "Look, I'm frustrated, and you're gonna have to show me what's happening here, or I don't know if I can keep doing this, because people are suffering, and I'm telling them to do this, and they're not getting results".
And people were dying, and they were getting cancer, and they were getting divorces. And they loved God, and they were doing all of the right things, yet with no manifestation. I stayed up one night till about 3 or 4 o'clock, and I said, "I'm not going to bed until I hear from you. I need to know what's up". And I'll never forget it, a question that changed my life: "Will you become a student of grace"?
I didn't even know what that meant. I looked up every Scripture in the Bible on grace. I went to the bookstore and got all the books I could find on grace and it finally started making sense. I started seeing that this is about a person, Jesus, full of grace and truth, and Jesus who had already done the work, and Jesus who'd already won the victory, and Jesus who had already obtained the healing and the deliverance and what was lacking was my faith in the finished works of Jesus Christ. That's my journey from frustration to faith.
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DESPAIR
I've exhausted all my bank accounts now and the weight of all of that brought forth a level of depression, a level of anxiety, because I can't meet my obligations in the household. And it's just become so rough that I'm even, you know, thinking about, "Do I just check outta here, you know"? What would be better? And I'd just cry my eyes out. I'm carrying a burden and a weight of I don't know what to do, beating on the floor, crying out to God, "God, what can I do here"? And then, finally I just got to a place where I said, "You know what? Forget it". I just turned it over to him. "What am I doing? I'm not making it any better by doing what I'm doing right now," so I just turned it over to him. I said, "Lord, it's yours". But when I turned it over to him things started to turn around and that led to the next thing: 24 years of marriage and 3 wonderful kids. I'm happy. I'm joyful.
WHAT IS GRACE?
When many people think of the word "grace," they associate the word with a short prayer said before a meal, something done strictly out of habit, but it's truly a gift to us from God. And grace has the power to radically transform your life. Grace is the unearned, undeserved, unmerited favor from God. God gives you a choice for how you live your life, and you can either muddle through on your own or let him give you victory, abundant life, and salvation through the many promises he made to us in his Word.
There are three definitions of grace that can give understanding of exactly what it is:
1. Grace is God's unmerited and undeserved favor.
2. It is God's infinite love and kindness towards man.
3. It is God's abounding, increasing provision of love for those who depend on him.
Religion pushes the idea that we have to try to do something that has already been done, but this is the opposite of how God wants us to operate. We have to renew our minds to the truth about who we actually are in God's eyes and once you understand grace your life will be changed forever.
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DEATH ROW
At 15 years old I was hanging with the wrong crowd. I didn't do nothing, but I was charged with murder, and I was sentenced to life plus 90 years in prison. I was sent to Angola, one of the bloodiest penitentiaries in the world, and then Louisiana, you never come home. Like, you're sentenced there to die and here I was sitting in there, a baby cub in the midst of a jungle, seeing rapists, murderers, and all of these things, man. I stayed in that prison from 15 years old to 21 years old. A friend of mine, he come to me like, "Duncan, if we're ever gonna get out of here you gotta pray," but I didn't know how, but I understood what God love was about when you taught me about faith. Told me to pray for something that I could not achieve on my own. And so, I had my family reach out to Manny Perez, and he took my case for free and that's what's so great about God's grace, is that you don't even deserve it. So, that's how I ended up coming home and that was the moment in my life to where I understood how amazing God's grace was.
WHAT GRACE CAN DO FOR YOU?
Grace is your connection point to the abundant life Christ died for you to have and when you know your identity and settle on who you are in him, then you can walk in the healing, deliverance, prosperity, and good life that he has designed for you. Financial blessings, deliverance, healing, favor, a thriving marriage and family and more are accessed through the grace of God. Now, to receive all that grace has to offer you must simply believe and receive what Jesus did for us all by faith. The more you give your attention to hearing about what grace has made available to you, the more your faith in it will grow.
GRACE IS ONLY AVAILABLE THROUGH FAITH
Grace is available to everyone, but faith is required to take possession of what grace has already secured. Because of the blood of Jesus we have access to untold blessings that need only to be received by faith, and this is the key to walking in signs, wonders, miracles, and living a victorious, abundant life. But we cannot build our faith on our own ability, our own righteousness, or what we deem good behavior. Once you believe and receive that you are righteous not because of anything you have done but because of what Jesus has done, the sky is the limit. Maximize your right standing with the Father and do great exploits on the earth by receiving the truth about who you are in Christ, righteous as if you have never sinned.
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DENIAL
I was mad at the church because I got blamed for something I didn't do, and it just shocked me the way it was handled, and it really hurt me. I was just an angry man that would never go back to church, that would never give Jesus an opportunity. We have 12 kids, and I sat down my kids and my wife, and I told them, "In this house we shall not mention Jesus. We shall not go to church". My wife wanted to go, and I said no, and she began to pray and pray and pray and pray. I was working for a company making deliveries and one day I got into the truck, I used to drive a truck, and as I got into the truck the Lord's presence was there, and I began to cry and began to cry, and I asked, "Why do you pursue me? Why do you chase me? Why"? So, I called my wife hysterically. I was crying. She said, "What's wrong"? I said, "God is in this truck". She said, "Well, I'll leave you so you can talk to him," and she hung up and from that day, after that experience, I just began to ask God to forgive me for not wanting to do nothing with him. I didn't want him to talk to me. I didn't want him to pursue me. I just felt that it was over. That's it. The relationship is broken. Why would you pursue someone that's so angry at you, and I said, "Lord, I'll walk with you again. I'm so sorry". And that day I began to walk with God. That was very difficult. I didn't know how to receive something that he was giving for free. I felt you needed to earn that. "Let me work for it. Let me earn the thing," but that wasn't his plan. He wanted me, even though I didn't want him. It's hard to accept that when you feel that you have to earn his love and that wasn't the case. He wanted to just share who he was, and so the way that God works is just, it's amazing.
GRACE IS A SUPERNATURAL GIFT
The evidence of the grace of God was clearly demonstrated in my life. It changed me from the inside out. The fruit that I was trying to make happen in my life seemed to sweatlessly show up in my life because I was now trusting God more than I trust myself. It gave me the freedom to be who God made me to be. I discovered who I was. It was liberty. Not liberty to go and sin, but the liberty to walk down the path that would lead to holiness and to do it not trusting my efforts, but to do it trusting in Jesus Christ. So, I made a decision that as long as God needed me to preach this message, that I would preach it and that I would preach it as long as I was on the planet, and so I'm still preaching this grace. I'll never go back to religion.
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DOCTRINES
Being a Christian I thought it was about me being perfect and me being holier than the next person and when I started to look back and look over my life and realized it's only by the grace of God that any one of us are alive. Religion sets people apart. It makes people feel like they're better than others. We figure we need to pray five times a day. We figure that we need to fast. We think we need to go door to door, we need to do something to please God, and that's what religion is steeped in: something I can do to please God. But religion, I don't call Christianity a religion. I call it a relationship because it is the only belief structure on this Earth that God actually came and redeemed his people and the only thing we have to do is believe in him.
GRACE IS THE NEW COVENANT
When we are thinking according to the old covenant, we depend on our own self-effort to earn right standing with God, instead of trusting Jesus's ability and his finished works. The problem is that nothing we do in our own ability will ever qualify us for righteousness. There is only one person who accomplished this task, Jesus, and this is what makes Christianity so unique. Only Jesus has the ability to recreate a man's spirit and completely eradicate the sin nature. Through Jesus we can live free from guilt, shame, and condemnation of sin.
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DISAPPROVAL
I felt like I wasn't worthy unto God anymore because of all the sin that I had been doing, so I felt left out and not loved at that moment. And soon afterwards, I was disciplined for about two months, three months at church. My consciousness and the enemy has brought so much to my mind, saying, "Oh, you're not worth it. You're so not going to heaven. What you did was wrong, and he doesn't love you anymore". When you grow up they tell you this, "Don't do this. Do this. Don't do that. Do it this way. Follow God's commandments, and you'll be fine". The enemy was throwing so many things in my mind about myself, to the point where there was many times that God had helped me, spoke to me, told me, "You're worth it. I've given you grace. I've given you my forgiveness. I'm trying to pull you back into this, back into what you've been doing". And God himself has told me, "But I'm pulling you. I'm pulling you back. I'm pulling you back towards me".
GRACE IS NOT RELIGION
There have been many misconceptions concerning what grace is and what it is not. The gospel of grace is the complete opposite of what most of us have learned in church. Many people grew up in churches that preached a message of punishment for failure to do the right things, and you may even be burned out on religion as a whole because religion has told you there are multiple requirements to fill before you can please God. But God is already pleased with you. God isn't vengeful. He isn't angry with you and wants to punish you. No, he sent his grace, Jesus Christ, to take your punishment on himself when he went on the cross and no matter what your experience has been in the past at church, when you experience grace your life will truly change. God's not even in a bad mood where you're concerned. God loves you. He'll continue to love you. He just wants you to stop trying to do it on your own and realize that Jesus, who has already done it, just requires you to believe and all things will be made possible because you believe him.
BY GRACE YOU ARE HEALED
Rather than responding to what fear had made available: sickness, disease, and death, I made a decision to respond to what Jesus had made available: victory, healing, and success. When I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, I had to make a decision to either respond to the bad report or to respond to the finished works of Jesus Christ. So, by faith I'm healed, and I go from being healed by faith to the manifestation of that healing. I start off healed because of what Jesus has done, and you begin to recognize what Jesus has done for you and then you lay hold to it by faith, and you declare, "I'm not moved by what I hear, and I'm not moved by what I see, the x-rays. I'm not moved by the doctor's report. I'm moved by what the Word of God says and what Jesus has already done through his finished works. I am healed and the victory that was already made available I took it. It's mine now, and I'm cancer-free".
GRACE STORY: DELIVERED FROM DISASTER
I was exposed to a lot of stuff like the street life, drugs at a very young age, a lot of trouble. I was in school in and out. You're involved with a gang or two, you know, just surrounded myself around people that I thought, you know, was accepting me and when I was 17 years old I was facing 25 years in prison. I was in a dark place. I was always hurting others, hurting myself, and remember I was just careless and heartless and to the point where I received from God the peace, the grace, the love, and now he has me on a path to where I just wanna just impact people's lives with love. And God transformed me and transitioned me to this new life and now it's just that testimony to people, like, it can really be done. Somebody can really change. All this is purposely and divine, and he's in control.
WHAT'S BLOCKING THE FLOW OF GRACE IN YOUR LIFE?
Now that you understand that God has made everything you need available to you by grace, you may be asking, "Why am I not seeing these promises in my life"? I wanna share with you what may be blocking the flow of grace in your life and what to do about it. The answer simply is faith. Everything that we will ever need to live an abundant life has already been made available to us, but it requires faith in order to obtain those things in this natural physical realm.
Healing, deliverance, wholeness, and financial prosperity belong to us now, but receiving these things into our reality on a daily basis begins with accepting by faith that God has already given us everything we will ever need to live. Often we allow the devil to rob us of our faith and talk us out of what God has promised in his Word. The way to combat that is to position yourself to constantly be filled with the Word of God. The devil hates to see your faith strengthened, but you have to commit to persevere and as believers we walk by the Word of God, and we walk by what God says in his Word no matter what. Your faith is the key to obtaining what grace has secured for you.
What else can keep you from grace? Pride. Grace will never be found in the life of an individual who thinks his or her way is the best way and refuses to receive God's instruction and direction, but when we humble ourselves under the direction of God in any given situation we can escape the snares of the devil. To rest in the finished works of Christ, it means casting our cares on Jesus, knowing that everything we will ever need in this life has already been provided for.
Grace is the unmerited, unearned, and undeserved favor from God. He's willing to show this favor to anyone who trusts him. He loves and accepts us just as we are, mistakes and all. When we're hurting, he comforts and encourages us. The grace we receive from him strengthens us and enables us to reach out and encourage others. Watch this, and we'll be right back.
Thank you for allowing me to walk this lifelong journey to grace with you. It's a journey of reevaluating everything you've been taught since you've been a Christian. It's time now to renew our minds and further develop unshakeable faith so we may receive everything promised through grace. No more lack, no more fear, no more being in bondage to people, sickness, or troubled times. Get ready to receive a radical transformation through grace, his unmerited, undeserved, and unearned favor in our lives.