Steven Furtick - A Word For Your Insecurities
This is an excerpt from: Move In What You're Made For
The Lord told me something really interesting. Today, he wanted to give you a word for your insecurities, a word that would speak directly to your insecurity, but he doesn't want to deal with it on the surface level. See, the creation of mankind tells us something about the calling of mankind. The process by which God made everything I see tells me a lot about what he's doing in my life now. So, we're not going to study today whether God literally made the world in six 24-hour periods or whether it's symbolic of a longer period of time. I'm not a scientist. We're not going to study today the different species and the genome of the… I'm not going there, because I'll sound so stupid, and you'll Google me, and you'll know I'm wrong. Before the Internet, preachers could say anything, but now y'all fact check me in real time, so I have to leave that alone. Instead, I want to look at this process by which God made us as a pattern. The first thing you'll notice is that God doesn't speak to the surface. A real word from God will never speak to the surface of your situation. That's why advice can only help you so much.
When you ask a human being for advice, you only tell them the information you deem relevant. A lot of times, they give you good advice based on bad data. They don't know deeper down that the reason your relationship is in… What do you call it when it's shattered on the floor? In pieces. The reason you have no peace in your situation is because you are constantly critiquing, and you are constantly correcting. So they give you advice, "Well, you should just leave them," but what they don't know is if you leave them, you take you with you. Sometimes the problem is something you don't think to tell them. God doesn't give advice, because he knows what's beneath the surface. So, while you're praying about symptoms, God is prescribing a remedy and a cure for what is causing the sickness. That's what makes him the Great Physician. Is it just me or could we go home and we already got our gas money worth out of that?
I want to know what "And God said," because when God spoke… Remember, he has been busy. We jumped right into the middle of the creation story. We didn't even talk about all that God did in the first four days. I feel kind of bad skipping it because it's amazing stuff, when he said, "Let there be light," and light was like, "Okay". That's crazy. I thought that was amazing until I saw what he did on the second day. Actually, God just keeps one-upping it. After he created the light, he created the vault, and then he created the sky, and then he created the waters, and that looked pretty good until the third day. Then on the third day, God gets busy calling forth life out of the land he created and separating the water so they could sit in their place so he could create a setting for human life to begin.
That's on the third day. On the fourth day… I know you know this already, because you've studied this stuff all week, and you read your Bible, and you never watch Netflix, and you've been reading Genesis, chapter 1, too. You even read it in Hebrew. But let me tell you what I learned this week. He gave the sun and the moon and the stars, which he hung in the sky that he created on the second day, and then on the fifth day… That's why I picked up on the fifth day. The fifth day, God did something different that he didn't do any other day. Lean in for this. He made it, and then he blessed it. Study it for yourself at your leisure. Look and see that he didn't bless the light. He didn't bless the darkness. He didn't bless the moon. He started blessing on the fifth day.
On the fifth day, God started to create the living things. Raise your hand if you are a living thing. That means you're blessed. Touch somebody and say, "I'm blessed to be alive". I know you've been complaining all week, but it's in the past. Now look at them again and say, "I'm blessed to be alive". I'm blessed to have a breath. I'm blessed to still have the use of my body. I'm blessed to be here. I've had some good days. I've had some hills to climb, but I'm blessed to be alive. Come on. Let's rejoice in it. I'm blessed to be alive. He didn't bless the bean sprout, but he blessed the bird. I wonder why. To me, I'm thinking a bird is much less impressive than a star, but there was something about the bird, and there was something about the bass (fish…the bass and the bird; it's alliteration, people) that God blessed. And not only did he bless it, he directly created it.
Now watch this. Bible nerds, wave at me. You love this little stuff. You don't just need a cliché to rhyme, and you don't need it to start with all the same letter, but you really love the Word of God. This is for you. When God told the land to produce vegetation, the land brought it forth. When God told the waters to bring forth the fish, it said God himself brought them forth, but now I'm going to blow your mind even more. When he got ready to create you…you…messed-up you… When he got ready to make you, he did something he didn't do for the birds, the worms, the moon, the stars, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the octopus, the crabs, the lobsters. None of them did he do this for. He bent down… Up until this point, everything he made he made with his mouth because he spoke it. When he made me, he got down in the dirt and made me by hand. Who are you?
The psalmist said, "What is man that God is mindful of him, or the son of man that you would visit him"? That God would stoop down in the dirt and that divinity would touch dirt. God didn't leave it up to the land to bring you forth. He got his hands dirty. God rolled up his sleeves. I need everybody who has a messy situation in your life right now to know what your Maker did when this whole thing got started. He rolled up his sleeves, and he said, "I'll make the moon with my mouth. I can hang it with a syllable. 'Moon.'" And the moon said, "Yes". The Lord said, "Hang," and the moon said, "Yes". The Lord said, "Shine," and the moon said, "All right". But when it got down to you…
So, it seems to me, if we believe Genesis 1:26, that I was made from a mess in the image of my Maker, that there is no mess in my life right now that I cannot bring to my Maker and expect him to say, "I'll bless it anyway". I'm blessed because God said I'm blessed. Hey, let me throw this in, in case some of you have any haters: what God blessed no man can curse. Even your haters are the PR department. God is going to use the people who don't like you to fulfill Genesis 1:26. Not everybody liked Jesus. If everybody had liked him, they wouldn't have crucified him. If they didn't crucify him, he couldn't have died for your sin. If he didn't die for your sin, he couldn't have fulfilled his mission. Is God using the dirt in your life to create and bring forth? That's what he did in Genesis 1, and I think that's what he has been doing in me. Some words God gives you as a preacher are not meant to be shared, and that's frustrating.
When the Lord speaks to me, I get excited. You can ask my family. This isn't a show I put on. I'll grab the kids in the middle of video games. "Come here. You've got to hear this". I'll start preaching to the kids. Then sometimes the Lord will give me something that I think is just for me, and that's what happened to me with Genesis 1. Okay. Let me tell you something about creative work. I consider myself a creative person. Well, I mean, in this area of life I'm creative. Other things I'll never do. I can't do arts and crafts. I don't like arts and crafts. Some people go through the supply section of Walmart and stuff, and they get all excited in the craft section. "Ooh, glue sticks"!
I was taking Abbey through Barnes & Noble the other day. She was getting excited about colored pencils. I never in my life got excited about a colored pencil. All of my kids are different, all good at different things. It took me a while to realize that as God reveals your assignment in life, it will surface your insecurities. There's that word again: surface. Remember, when God started… Genesis 1:2 said in the beginning, before God spoke anything, the Spirit of the Lord hovered over the waters. Look at what it says. "The earth was formless and empty…" That doesn't just mean there was nothing there. The connotation of these words in Hebrew is that it was chaotic. It was not just formless and void; it was chaotic. It was empty, and it was futile, frustrating, like your life sometimes. Not all the time.
I know right now you look amazing, but that's your surface self. That's your Sunday self. Aha! I will put a Nest camera in your house this week, and then I'll come preach to you, not based on what you showed me on Sunday but what you dealt with on Wednesday. Don't make me bring a Wednesday word in this church this week that I saw you on Wednesday in the Spirit. The Lord was hovering over the surface, and he brought forth something out of that. So, I was going to Genesis 1, because I'm trying to understand, not only in my professional life but as a parent, as a husband, as a man who wants to be like Christ… Some people said it's a midlife crisis, but I don't really look at it that way. I just think it's the process we all go through of trying to figure out, "How can I know that God is my Father, know that he's my provider, see him do so many miracles, so many things, and still be insecure"? How come it even seems like success creates extra insecurity, because now I have to sustain it? Now I have to throw the dart another time and hope I didn't just randomly hit the bull's-eye. How do I keep this going? How do you do that? As my assignment is revealed, my insecurities surface.