TD Jakes - All Eyes On Him: A New Outlook (02/22/2022)
Reflecting on the Israelites' chronic complaining even after deliverance from slavery, Bishop T.D. Jakes warns that a pathology of murmuring dishonors God, invites destructive consequences through our words, but repentance and shifting our outlook—looking to the cross where Christ became the serpent that bit us—turns affliction into blessing and brings healing and breakthrough.
The Pain of Doubt and Complaining
How can God be so good and make such a way and then we doubt him. Our doubt bites at him; it bites at him. It is a painful thing to be doubted; your integrity disrespected.
It occurred to me that this doubting was not just about God; they had a pathology of doubting. These people had murmured and complained before. They had murmured and complained against Pharaoh—the same people who murmured and complained against Pharaoh that got God to come down and deliver them in the first place now murmur and complain against God.
Now, I can understand you murmuring and complaining against Pharaoh because Pharaoh was a slave master; he was abusive and he treated you like dirt and he made you make bricks without straw and he did not feed you and he did not care for you and he did not love you and he killed your babies.
And then God delivered you from this death-mongering man and brought you out from under his hand and gave you so much more than you ever had. But when you have a pathology of murmuring and complaining, you do not know how to be happy.
I mean, these are not powder puff people saying, "Oh, you know, the wagon ride was tough; I am getting a callous on my hips. Oh, you know, the food service was cold; it was late coming out."
Like, what are you talking about? You were slaves. You were slaves; this has got to be better than that.
The Pathology of Ungratefulness
But what gives us amnesia that we forget how bad it was before and we fall back into these patterns, these pathologies of murmuring and complaining? I guess because I have counseled people for 41 years, I am aware that if you have a murmuring individual, they will not be happy till they find something to murmur about.
I do not care if you put them in the Taj Mahal; they would say, "You know, it takes too long for the water to get hot. In these big buildings, you have got to wait too long for the water to get hot. In my old house, as soon as you turn the spigot on, the water got hot."
Some people are going to find something to complain about; I do not care what you do. That is why they are driving some of the rest of us crazy because we need their validation.
Have you ever been working hard to please somebody that is never satisfied? Come on, where are my real people at? No matter what you do, it is never enough?
They look past everything you did and find something wrong? "There is a spot on your jacket," and you just want to, well.
You know, I am human; I admit it; I confess. Sometimes when people disrespect your best effort, it makes you angry. When you have done everything you can do for them and they still complain, it makes you angry.
Do not make your love so expensive. Oh, that is a tweetable right there. If you make your love too expensive, people eventually give up; they get tired of working to please you and getting nothing but complaints in return.
This is not about God; this is about you.
Gratitude Unlocks Victory
Now, when you complained about Pharaoh, you had a right to complain, but some people, even if God led them, they would hate him too. "Sure is hot." You have been working in the hot sun for 400 years; this is a piece of cake compared to that.
When you have a pathology of complaining, you are only comfortable when you are unhappy. You have to give yourself permission to be happy, to say, "You know what? This is so much better than that; I am so grateful."
Yes, I have to eat the same thing every day—this stuff keeps dropping down from heaven they call manna. It is not exactly seasoned the way I would season it, but I am going to make it work for me because I know what it is to live in a life where nothing was dropping my way, and now I see something dropping my way.
Talk to me, real people. And I have learned that until you become grateful, you will never become victorious. You have to learn how to be grateful for where you are.
I am all for being ambitious; I am all for being aggressive, but do not let your ambition make you ungrateful. It is when you appreciate where you are that God takes you to the next level.
I told a friend of mine the other day, I said, "I feel funny giving my testimony sometimes when I tell people about how I came up and how they took my car and how I had to thumb to church and how I pastored over 10 years and did not have 100 members and how small and tiny my church was and how none of the pews matched and how I was working and pastoring at the same time—working a full-time job and getting off work and going to pastor when I got off work."
Appreciating the Journey
And they look at me and they feel so sorry for me, but what they do not understand is that when I was living like that and going through that, it did not look to me like it sounds because I was so glad that God had asked me to do anything.
I was so excited about that little church; I lit that place up. It was a little storefront, and I had a chandelier right in the middle of it. Yes, I did; I was fixing that thing up, had it all fixed up, put a wreath on the door at Christmas time.
It was rusty, but it was a wreath on the door—glory to God. Because whatever God gives you, until you appreciate where you are at, you are not going to get the release of what God is about to do in your life.
Oh, somebody ought to shout me down on that. They angered God with their disrespect, and he sent serpents to bite them, and they died, they died, they died.
The people he saved died; the people he rescued died; the people he brought out died; the people he fought Pharaoh for died, and they died beside the Red Sea because of their mouth.
I bet you at least 50% of the troubles you have gone through in your life have come as a result of things that have come out of your mouth. When are we going to learn that once you say something, you cannot take it back?
When are we going to learn to shut our mouths? Their mouths got them in trouble; the power of life and death is in the tongue.
They said things to a God who is a speaking God; their words bit him; he bit them back. He sent serpents, and they bit them, and a lot of them died because of their mouth.
The Power of Words
I want that to sink in. We are killing our marriages with our mouth; we are killing our children with our mouth; we kill our ministries with our mouth; we kill our careers with our mouth.
We lose our jobs with our mouth; we fall out with people that God sent in our lives to bless us with our mouth. God opens doors that we close with our mouth.
God wants to put you in places that you are going to have to be quiet when you get there, or you are going to lose those opportunities like you lost those other opportunities.
I know that does not make you shout, and I know that does not get you excited, but somebody has got to tell you the truth.
Some of that stuff you lost—it was not the devil; it was because you could not handle it. It was because you said stuff to change the way people treated you, and now you are upset with them like a demon was fighting you, but you have been snared by the words of your mouth.
And if you would shut your mouth, the devil would not have nothing to work with. Touch your neighbor and say, "Shut your mouth."
But then there was another group—they got bitten but they were not dead. They got bitten; they swelled up; they got sick; they threw up, but they were not dead.
And they went to Moses, who they had been talking about, and they said, "I know I am in trouble because I spoke against God and I spoke against you."
The Path to Healing Through Repentance
We do not have that anymore. I told you a few weeks ago we do not have revival because we do not have repentance. You cannot have revival—I do not care who you bring in to preach—you cannot have revival until you have repentance.
When you have done wrong, sometimes you have got to go to somebody and say, "I have been running my mouth, and I am sorry. I said some stuff I should not have said, and I recognize I am a better person than that, and I want you to forgive me."
See, what I am trying to tell you—if your mouth got you in trouble, it is going to take your mouth to get you out. Do not let your mouth get so arrogant that you cannot change.
If you are bold enough that you just have got to keep it real, well, keep it real when you are wrong and really bring yourself in here and really apologize and really get yourself together.
Now, that is keeping it real. Keeping it real does not work just because you flip out on me; keeping it real is when you flip out on yourself and say, "I have been running my mouth, and I am sorry, I am sorry."
That is why you are having trouble with your children—because they learned it from you. That is why they will not apologize to you—because you never modeled it in front of them.
They went to Moses and they said, "Man, look, we have been talking about you, and we have been talking about God, and the reason I am confessing is I am sick of getting bitten."
What is happening in my life is a result of how I see my leadership. What is happening in my life is a result of how I see my God.
How dare me insult the one who delivered me—and all you are guilty of is trying to pull me through the wilderness, and I am making it hard to be saved.
The Grace of Forgiveness
And Moses now has to pray for people who were talking about him. This is why you have got to be a big person to be a leader; you have got to be a big person to be a leader.
See, because if you are not careful, you will get bitter over what they did to you, and then when it is time to pray for them, you will be saying, "Bite them again, Lord; I hope they get them again; get his other foot; bite him in his other foot"—because you are human.
And sometimes you have to be the bigger person. Just because you are right does not give you the right to be evil.
You have to be right enough that you can help people who got it wrong. So love always has to keep the door cracked.
That is why you get to be Moses—because you are big enough to let a brother come back. That is how you get to be Moses.
And sometimes you will be acting in your Moses-ness, and somebody you are connected to is talking about, "They are making a fool out of you. That is why I hate to fool with you because you just let people make a fool out of you."
Do not listen at them; do not listen at them. Their inability to forgive will always stop them from being who they were meant to be.
The bigger person is always big enough to forgive and create opportunities for them to make a comeback.
They are coming back in your life because they are in the kind of trouble that only you can pray them out of, and you have got to be prepared to do what God called you to do—glory to God.
You cannot let your feelings control this conversation; you have got to open up your heart and open your spirit and pray for the very person who tried to sabotage your life, tried to wreck your marriage, went after your finances, tried to get your position—and now they have got cancer, and you have got to go in and pray for them, and you have got to mean it when you pray.
And every time you do it, God is going to make you a bigger man and a bigger woman and a bigger person, and he is going to open up the windows of heaven, and you are going to have more capacity to receive what he has for you.
God is getting ready to enlarge you and strengthen you and build you up.
Bitten But Not Beaten
Who am I preaching to tonight? Well, if I am preaching to you, I have got good news. You have been bitten but you have not been beaten; you have been bitten but you have not been beaten.
I want to talk to people who have had setbacks—you have been bitten but you have not been beaten. I want to talk to people who made mistakes and got themselves in trouble and hooked up with the wrong folks and said the wrong thing and got in trouble, and it looks like you are not a real Christian, but you really are; you just did some dumb things and you got yourself in trouble.
Well, God did not let it kill you because he has got a plan for your life. And the Lord sent this word to you tonight because there is going to be a mighty resurrection going on in this place.
And some of the very people that you thought would never get back up again, God is going to raise them back up again. And he told me to tell you, just because you have been bitten does not mean you have been beaten; God is going to raise you up.
If you look up, God is going to bring you up and heal you and deliver you. And I want 30 seconds of crazy praise in this place. Yes, Lord; yes, Lord.
Healing Through the Serpent
So God tells Moses, he says, "I am going to fix them." Now this is tough; catch this. "I am going to fix them, but I am going to fix them through what bit them."
They got bitten by a serpent, and they got healed. This is the only time in the Scriptures where anybody got healed by a serpent.
A serpent is a symbol of evil, but God said, "I am going to use what bit you." Now, this is good anytime you heard it, but if you have heard this message this morning, then this is even better—because the very thing that bit you, that broke your heart as a child, that made you need more than others, that made you more insecure than other people, that made you more vulnerable than other people—the very thing that bit you is the very thing that God is going to use to heal you.
You remember this morning when I was talking about your board members and how you have things that drove you to do exceptional things, and it was not what you were running to; it was what you were running from?
Yeah, some of you ran to great things because you were running from horrible things, and the thing that the devil meant for evil, God made it good.
Yeah, if you had not been exposed to that, you would not be as tenacious as you are. And so your ministry is made out of your misery, and the very thing that bit them is the very thing that God used to cure them.
And he said, "I want you to make a serpent out of brass," and in order to make a serpent out of brass, you had to take brass and beat it.
And when he was beating the brass, he was acting out Jesus who was wounded for our transgressions and was bruised for our iniquities and was bitten, and he became sin—he became sin—who knew no sin; the dove became a serpent on the cross and epitomized everything I did wrong so that when I looked up at the cross, I would look up at him and find life.
And the Bible said, "Even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so shall the Son of man be lifted up in the earth."
Changing Your Outlook for Breakthrough
In that same way, God will take what was working against you and use it to work for you. He will use it to work for you to the point that you are going to say, "It was good for me that I was afflicted. If I had never been afflicted, I would have never seen the glory of God."
It was good that it happened to me; it was good that I was afflicted; it was good that I was hurt; it was good that I was broken; it was good that I lost my job; it was good that I went through that scandal; it was good that I went through that test.
God is going to take the very thing that worked against you and make it work for you. The only thing that he needs from you is to change your outlook.
Now, it takes faith when you have been bitten by a serpent to look to a serpent. You cannot trust the emblems of your past to determine the emblems of your future because God is going to use the thing that bit you to bless you.
When I was on the front page of the paper in Charleston, it bit me; it bit me. For a whole week my house was on the front page of the paper; they talked about me like I was a dog; it bit me.
They shot gun holes through my church; they tried to scare me out preaching the gospel. They bit me; they ostracized me; my mother could not take her walks; my sons could not go to school.
It was a dark day in my life; I was bitten. The woman who wrote the first article—if I could find her, I would take her out to the finest restaurant in Dallas because she blessed me when she bit me, because I never would have found you.
Now, all of you folks who have not been bitten, you do not have nothing to get happy about, but if you have been bitten, you ought to get happy because you have got a blessing coming your way.
I wish I could meet her; I hope you, lady—if you see this tape—I will take you anywhere in Dallas you want to go. I will buy you a steak so big you will need two plates to hold it; I will treat you like gold because what you meant to kill me gave me the greatest lesson I have ever had in my life.
Somebody help me praise him tonight.
I am trying to tell you your blessing is on the way; I am trying to tell you your blessing is on the way; I am trying to tell you your blessing is on the way.
This was the trick: God said, "I am going to use the same symbol that bit you to bless you, but this is the trick—you are going to have to look up at it; you are going to have to change the way you look at the snake."
He said, "Your mouth got you in trouble, but your vision is going to get you out." I want to spend my last few minutes talking to people that have got a vision—and you have been bitten but you have got a vision; you have got some setbacks but you have got a vision; you have had some swelling but you have got a vision; you do not know where the money is coming from but you have got a vision.
Well, you are in the right place tonight, and you are here at the right time, and you are standing in the right year because this is going to be the year for people that everybody thought was going to die.
You are getting ready to change your outlook, and God is getting ready to give you what you never had before. I am looking to Jesus; I am looking to Jesus; my eyes are on him; my hope is in him; my trust is in him; my vision is in him.
I am ready for it; I am ready for it; I am ready for it; I am ready for it; I am praising for it; I am dancing for it; I am shouting for it. If you mean business, give God a praise. Yes, yes; I feel a breakthrough; I feel a breakthrough.