Steven Furtick - Remove What's Blocking You
This is an excerpt from: Unlearn Your Limitations
He does comfort the downcast. He'll speak words of reassurance to you when everybody else is speaking words of condemnation to you. Be sure of it. But the same God who comforts the downcast also confronts the dysfunctional. He loves you too much to leave you in something that is limiting you. He's a confrontational God. I know that thinking of God as confrontational may violate our perception of him as it was handed down to us, but God is very confrontational. God will get up in the face of anything that will keep you from being all he created you to be.
Now before you take this as permission to just go off on somebody and say you're being like Jesus, that's not the point of this lesson. The point of the lesson is for you to realize God will break through any of the beliefs you've developed about you, about him, or about others. He's not scared to do that. So, if it means going to Pharaoh and saying, "Let my people go" and he has to send frogs and turn the Nile into blood, and if God has to send flies and locusts and plagues... Even if God has to kill off the firstborn of Egypt, he will see to it that his people are really free, because he's a confrontational God. If it means he has to put you in a lions' den and shut the mouth of the lion to show Nebuchadnezzar that he is the great God and there is none above him, he'll do that. He's not a conflict-avoiding God. A lot of us never experience the growth because we will never face the conflict.
One thing I love about Holly is when that switch flips and she turns from sweet Holly, Mrs. Betterhalf Holly, smiling Holly who y'all know and love and subscribe to her book club... Let me tell you a story about Holly. This was right at Christmas time. She was on with customer service. She is the most polite person. She's not nasty. She's not mean. She's balanced. She's even. She can defuse. But at a certain point... Y'all have a perspective of Holly. Right? She's so... And she is...usually. On this phone call, the customer service rep wouldn't put her through to a supervisor. I don't know what Holly said, but at some point, the lady said, "Ma'am, I'm going to go ahead and transfer you to escalations". Holly said, "That's exactly where you need to put me: escalations. That's the place for me: escalations. Escalate me". Holly said that. I'm like, "Who are you? I know you, but I don't know you".
When something got in her way... She's going to try it the nice way, and everything like that, but there comes a time... Now listen. It's okay sometimes for you to have that nice, gentle kind of faith about things in your life. There's a time just to be nice and "Okay. I'm just going to wait and see how this turns out". But when something really matters to God's heart and your heart... This is what I'm trying to say: there comes a time to escalate. There comes a time when people can't do it for you, so you have to go above the people and go to the one who has all authority, all power. Aren't you glad God's power doesn't need people's permission to operate, that if God decides to use you in a certain way...? You can speak to the supervisor.
If people aren't treating you well, you can go to your Father and say, "Do you see how they're treating me? Do you see how the situation is? Do you see how I'm trying? Would you please get involved before I lose my mind and do something I'm going to regret"? God will step in. God will confront it. God will tell Pharaoh. God has a mighty hand. God has an outstretched arm. God said, "I've seen the misery of my people in Egypt, and I'm coming down there". Not everybody likes this kind of preaching. It's not comfortable. But when you have an addiction that's robbing you of the daylight of your life... So, as the conflict is escalating...
This is one of five stories in Mark's gospel that's showing us the confrontational nature of God. It's an interesting one, because... I'll point out a few things to you. When Jesus is arguing with the scribes about the Sabbath, they ask him, "Why are you breaking the Sabbath"? He's trying to teach them. "The Sabbath is made for man. Man is not made for the Sabbath. You have this completely out of order". In other words, "You have turned a gift into a limitation". When he healed this man on a Sabbath, all they could say was, "That's the wrong day to do it". The Sabbath was given to people as a gift, but they turned it into a limit. This is a sidenote: Don't let your gift become your limitation. Don't let something God gave you in one season of your life to protect you become something in the next season of your life that prevents you.
Do you want an example? All right. I have a hundred of these. The way we deal with people... Sometimes we learn to deal with people in a certain season of our lives a certain way to survive because we have to. A lot of times, I've been swinging, like fighting, and I didn't even look up and realize my enemy was gone and I was still swinging at the air. So my style of doing things... The best example I can give to you of this from my own life is that the way I've seen myself in certain seasons doesn't apply in other seasons. God can give you something as a gift in one season... What am I thinking of? We wrote this other song we just put out called "Talking to Jesus". Have you heard it? Chris can tell you.
The whole time we were writing that song... We wrote that with our friend Brandon Lake. The whole time we were writing the song, it broke all of the rules of a worship song. Worship songs are supposed to be like this. You're supposed to only say about 30 words and just scramble them all around. We're writing this song, and I'm finding myself saying lyrics like, "Mama used to drag me to church Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, khaki pants and a polo shirt; boy, I put up a fight". I'm thinking, "Can you say 'khaki pants' in a worship song"?
Now, there's a reason worship songs are supposed to have a certain focus. The reason is when we come in to sing with our church, we want everybody to be able to access it. Maybe you didn't wear khaki pants to church. So, you're worshiping God. "Lord, I love you". I'm talking to Jesus. "What a friend I have in Jesus. Khaki pants? Huh"? It pulls you out of it. It's like, "Oh, I thought that was my song, but I guess that's not for me". The crazy thing about it was that I found God trying to give us a song about generational faith, but my rules for how God moves in worship were trying to restrict the expression God wanted us to bring. Those rules were there for a reason. The scribes were there for a reason: to preserve the identity of God's people. But sometimes what was sent to preserve something begins to prevent something.
I wonder if that has happened in your life. I wonder if you need new rules. While we're at it, I wonder who built your roof to begin with. Who set the limit to say, "This is what God can do through you and no more. This is what you're gifted at and no more. This is what people from your background, your education, your age... This is what you can do and no more". I was talking to my friend who's 43 the other day, and he was talking like his career was over. Then I told him about the guy who is 59 who reinvented and became a millionaire. Who put that roof on you? Who put the roof on you that if you aren't married by 25 there's something wrong with you? Who put that roof on you? Who put the roof on what we think God can do in church that we think God has to be confined to a building?
The irony of my ministry is that everything God has done through me was something I told him he couldn't do. I'm stubborn. I need the Holy Spirit. I need God's help because I'm so stubborn. I have these rules, like, "Online church isn't real". Said me. Now do you see why I feel bad for these scribes? These guys I've been preaching about all of these years... "These scribes, these teachers of the law, these Pharisees"... It's like there was a Pharisee in me. It's what I'm trying to deal with. It's not the crowd blocking the door I have to worry about. I told our team, "I don't think church online can be real church," because I'd never seen it before. If you've never seen it before, you believe it can't be real. If you've never seen a healthy marriage... Verse 12: "This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, 'We have never seen anything like this!'"
The same thing they said in praise is also the problem. "We've never seen anything like this before, so this can't be God. This is not the image I had of it. This is not the imagination I had of it. He's not doing the rules we want him to do. It's not following the rules". At the same time Jesus is breaking the rules, the men are breaking a roof. I realized there were two roofs being removed in Mark, chapter 2. One was physical. It was Peter's house, by the way. No, it really was. It says, "When Jesus came to the house in Capernaum"... That's the one where they based out of. It was Peter's house. If it would have been John, he would have kicked those boys off the roof, because John had good sense. But Peter was like, "I like your style. That's like something I would do. Oh, we'll get a new roof. Let's break the roof. Let's get this done".
Peter loved a mosh pit. Peter loved a crowd dive. Peter doesn't care. He didn't give a crap and cut off an ear. Jesus can put it back. I told Elijah the other day... I said, "I hope I set a good example for you. I hope I show you how to treat a woman. I hope I show you how to maneuver through difficult times. I hope I show you something about how to seek God, be creative, make friends with your own creativity, don't let it turn inward, make sure you use it in service of others. I hope I show you a few things about Romanian deadlifts and Arnold presses and some things you can take with you the rest of your life. I hope I show you some good music, like Nirvana Nevermind and other classic gospel albums of the 90s".
Y'all have limitations on genres. I'm telling you, there's some good worship music you haven't heard yet. But I said, "If you discover something"... Listen to this. This is something I would say to anybody, but I said it to my oldest son. I said, "If you see something in me that limits who God has made you to be, don't be loyal to my limitations". Here's the example I gave him. I had a friend who used to train other preachers how to preach, and they would try to copy him. But they would copy not only the good things he did, because he was an amazing evangelist; they would even copy his mannerisms that were just incidental or glitchy. One thing in particular... He said they tried to walk like him when they preached. They were trying to walk like him, not realizing he had a bad back.
So, they're limping across the stage to be like their mentor. I thought, "That's crazy, man. They're imitating your injury. They're seeing you do something, and they are thinking that because you do it, it must be right". So I told Elijah, "Don't imitate my injury. Imitate me as I imitate Christ". This is what I told him: "I think my ceiling can be your floor". I don't mean in a pulpit as a preacher. I'm not limiting my kids that they need to be in the ministry. They are going to be in the ministry. It just might not be my style of ministry. It might not be a pulpit or preaching or an acoustic guitar. What if one of them leads worship with a track beat? What if that's the next wave of God's anointed holy music on the earth? What if they don't work at a church at all, but what if God uses them in a great way in the world?
After all, most of the miracles Jesus did were in the marketplace. Why do we try to confine God to the places we're most comfortable in? Why do we think the most important stuff God is going to do is going to be through a preacher? The only point of a pulpit is to empower you for your field...for your field. You need a new roof. You keep banging up on the things... Here's what happens through life. You learn lies and become loyal to them, and then those lies become limits.