TD Jakes - Let's Make Wine (05/04/2022)
Amid success and blessing, negative inner voices haunt us with fear of loss; we must combat them with faith-filled self-talk, remember God's past faithfulness as our foundation, and push for excellence without regrets to turn crushing into fine wine.
The Haunting Voices
This is the end. You are going to lose everything. You will not come out of this. You are not smart enough. You are not bright enough. You should have started younger. Those are the kind of voices that we all live with.
For me, our ministry was growing. We lived in a nice house—the nicest house we had ever had—driving a nice car, living from paycheck to paycheck but making it.
Every night I laid down at night, after she goes to sleep, I hear the voices. Those voices are the kind of voice that stop you from buying into your own life. Stop you from enjoying the good times and believing they will last.
The anxiety and the pressure and the strength that it took to get from where you were to where you are does not go away, so you do not really believe it is yours.
You are driving it but you do not really believe it is yours, and you are scared to relax and really rest in whatever it is or whoever it is because everything else went away. Maybe this will go away too.
We talk about faith for bad times, but you also need faith in good times—to actually believe the goodness of God is not going anywhere.
To silence the voices that keep saying you will never make it, you are about to lose everything. Fear gets in your heart.
Faith in the Good Times
See, I know what it is like to be poor. I know what it is like to be without and I know what it is like not to have dinner for my kids.
Returning to that—the idea that could happen—is terrifying. The enemy always has some sort of tool or memory or situation that he uses to terrify you even though the good times are here, and the dream is there and the blessing is there, and the goodness is there.
But there is always this haunting, nagging defiance that says do not you relax. You are not worth it. You do not deserve it. It is not going to last.
Resting in what God has done is often more difficult than receiving what God has done. To rest in it, to believe that it will last, to believe that you will last and love will last, that life will last, that good times will come, that things will be better is difficult because of the voices.
You are what you eat, and the voices are the food that feeds your faith or fear.
If you want to change your diet, you can change your outcome, but you have to stop talking to yourself the way you do because if you continue to talk to yourself the way you do, you will always be where you have always been.
The Power of Self-Talk
It is what you say within yourself that heals you. The woman with the issue of blood said to herself, if I can but touch the hem of His garment, I will be made whole.
There was no scripture to validate that. She was not quoting Deuteronomy or Numbers or anything like that. It was just something that she said to herself.
There was no doctrine around it. We have never seen that happen before, but she said to herself, if I can but touch the hem of His garment, I will be made whole.
All the while she was crawling, she kept saying over and over again, if I could just touch Him, if I could just touch Him, if I could just touch the hem of His garment.
Without Jesus' permission and without the support of the disciples, she crept up on Him and snatched a miracle. Snatched it. Snatched it because of what she said to herself.
Those voices that say what you cannot do, what you cannot have, what you cannot be, what is not going to last, what is not going to work is how the enemy pulverizes the promises of God in your life.
It takes word to combat word. That is why when Jesus was in the wilderness and Satan was throwing word at Him, He was throwing word back.
What we have to do is put word on word. I am blessed. I am blessed in the city. I am blessed in the field. I am blessed in my uprising and my down setting.
I will be blessed into my old days. I will be blessed when I am an old man. My grandchildren will be blessed. My body is blessed. My mind is blessed. My head is blessed.
I got this. I can handle it. I can do it. Bring it on. Here it is.
Speaking Back to Negativity
That kind of talk—saying that to yourself—drives back the other voices of negativity that we all have creep up behind us and tell us that we are not capable and we are not competent, and we are not gifted enough, and we are not good enough, or we waited too late or God is punishing us.
To talk back to those voices shuts the enemy down.
The pressure I was going through, I was causing it because the pressure I was going through was coming from the things that I allowed to reverberate in my head.
I am wondering if there are things echoing in your head right now that are stopping you from living your best life because you will not silence him by speaking back.
You shall have whatever you say, so says the Word of God. You shall have whatever you say.
If it is betrayal, you shall have whatever you say. If it is a life without life, you shall have whatever you say. It does not just work positively. It also works negatively. You shall have whatever you say.
She touched Him and she was made whole. He says, who touched Me? Which means He is oblivious to what is going on.
This is all happening in her head. The whole thing happened in her head, and the Lord who is omniscient asked the question, who touched Me?
The disciples wanting to be important answered Him, everybody touched You. He said, no, no, no, no. That is not what I am talking about.
Everybody around Me do not touch Me. Just because you are around Me do not mean you touched Me. Somebody touched Me.
She came out from the crowd and said, it was me. It was me.
She got a miracle while Jesus was not looking because of what she said to herself.
That is what I want you to see and stop letting those other words crush you.
Defining Excellence
When I say "Excellent," you say "Excellent." Excellent. Excellent.
The problem is we all said the same word but we do not all mean the same thing because what you call excellent and what I call excellent may be two different things based on the lives we have lived, the things we have experienced, the places we have been exposed to.
Our ideas of excellent may vary drastically based on how we define excellence.
The problem with the English language is that it is limited to interpretation. So how do you know when I say I love you that I mean what you meant when you said you loved me?
We are having a conversation and I am making an assumption that your love is my love and it may not be at all.
Or we are planning a banquet, and I make an assumption that your excellent is my excellent and it may not be at all.
Because the reality about it is your definition of excellent rises no higher than your level of exposure.
Whatever you have been exposed to, that becomes the new paradigm of what excellent is to you.
It shifts from day to day. The hardest thing in the world is to have a conversation with somebody and all you have to use is words because I am not sure you mean what I mean when I say excellent.
Exposure Shapes Excellence
I am not sure that you mean what I mean when I say love. I am not sure you mean what I mean when I say loyal. I am not sure you mean what I mean when I say hurt because all we have is words.
The reality is we have to make up in our mind that whatever our definition of excellence is, it is going to change. It is going to get higher, it is going to get broader, it is going to get better, it is going to be different, or it is going to go down.
A lot of it depends on who you hang around and what you are exposed to.
There are people that take you up, there are people that bring you down. They bring you down to their level of excellence.
That is what a job description for a hater looks like. The job description of the hater is to bring you down to the level that they are on.
While they are trying to pull you down, I am trying to get up. If I am going to get up, I have to know that there is going to be a cost to getting up.
I am going to have to put my back to it or it is not going to happen. God wants somebody to work with Him and give what it takes to make it happen.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. I do not want to die.
No Regrets at the End
Let me explain. I was born in between two dead babies. The baby before me died, the baby after me died. I was raised by a dying father.
I do not want to live my life and die and at the last moment of my life ask this question, wonder what would have happened if I had pushed a little harder.
I do not want to get down to the end of the road and wonder what would have happened if I had pushed a little harder.
I do not want to wonder that. I want to get down to the end of the road like Paul and say I fought a good fight. I kept the faith. I finished my course.
Now laid up for me is a crown of righteousness in heaven.
I do not want to get down to my last breath and wonder what would have happened if I went back to school, if I took a course, if I worked a little harder, if I changed the way I dressed, if I changed the way I talk to people, if I forgave somebody, if I released somebody.
I do not want to wonder about nothing because that is excellence. Excellence.
It is to come out with the conclusion I have no regrets. I have no regrets.
The wine He is producing is greater than the pain you are experiencing, and if you allow Him to take you through the process, when He says excellent and you say excellent, they will mean the same thing.
Remembering God's Faithfulness
The dying words of the thief on the cross was remember me. The words of Jesus at the Last Supper is as often as you do this, you do this in remembrance of Me.
What does remember mean? Remember. Re—put back together again. Re-member Me.
When we remember what God has done, that becomes the foundation upon which we build our lives.
Now a house is not a foundation and nobody can live in a foundation, but it has to have a foundation in order to be a house.
I am not suggesting that your life begins, ends, and all through the middle is nothing but Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, because you have got to take out the trash, you have got to brush your teeth, you have got to comb your hair, get your nails done, get your feet done or you are going to cut your blankets when you land in the bed at night.
All of that happens, but I am saying that God is the foundation.
When God delivered the children of Israel out of Egypt, He did it as a foundation for them to remember, and all through the Old Testament He says over and over again, am I not the God who brought you out from the Red Sea? Am I not the God who brought you out by My own hand and My strong arm.
It becomes a point of reference to which you face the future remembering what He did in the past—remembering and putting it back together again, again and again, and recreating it as a point of reference to fight from, to stand from, to drive from, to preach from, to teach from.
Something to Remember
What do you have to remember? It is important that you have something to remember—something on God's résumé that you know that you know that you know that He did for you.
It tells you that if God would do that, He can do this.
If He can drive back the Red Sea and bring me across on dry land, then He can fight you off—He can deal with the Amalekites, and Hittites, and Jebusites, and the Girgashites.
God does certain things so you will have something to remember—a point of reference to which you build your life upon, and you stand on it and you say I am not sure about this and I am not sure about that, but this one thing I do know.
You have to know this. You have to know this in your knower.
You have to know this when your girlfriend does not know it, when your prayer warriors do not know it, when your children do not know it, when your mama does not know it.
Something that you know that you know that you know becomes the catalyst against the trials, against the traumas, against the sleepless nights, against the virus, against the crisis, against the times that we are living in.
We have been living in the most perilous times that we have seen in a hundred years. We are living in a time when nearly 700,000 people are now dead from something we cannot even see.
We are fighting an invisible enemy, and that enemy has friends that has created trauma and distress until we are overwhelmed—even when nothing else is going wrong, just a feeling that other people are going wrong gives us a certain degree of stress and trauma.
Standing on God's Deliverance
How do we stand up against this unseen foe we fight right now? Of course we need to do everything we can to protect ourselves from the virus, but I am not just talking about the virus.
I am talking about your mind, I am talking about your emotions, your will, your spirit, your fight, your drive, your tenacity, your sense of normalcy, your courage to get out of the house, your courage to get out of the bed.
The courage to continue when there is a threat requires that there is something about God that you have to remember.
For the children of Israel, it was the blood of the lamb that was painted on the doorposts and the death angel passed by and said when I see the blood, I will pass over you.
It was walking out to the Red Sea and hearing 600 chosen chariots coming with Pharaoh chasing them down saying I am going to get you back.
He was going to get them back but let me tell you a secret—he was also trying to get back the wealth they had taken. For the wealth of the unjust is laid up for the just.
They had borrowed all the gold and all the silver, and they had broken the GDP of Egypt.
It was not just the slaves he wanted. He wanted the money back, he wanted the jewels, he wanted the gold, he wanted the silver, he wanted the thing that the tabernacle would actually end up being built by.
He was trying to get it all back. He could have got some more slaves anywhere. He was trying to get what they had borrowed.
They had borrowed—the whole economy of Egypt was running through the Red Sea. For the wealth of the unjust is laid up for the just.
When God brings you out, He brings out enough for your children. The Bible says that God puts so much wealth on them that their children had to carry on their backs the wealth that God placed on them.
I want the kind of blessing that affects my children and my children's children and my children's children's children.
I want my grandchildren to blow kisses at my picture when I am dead and gone.
I want them to be able to say if it had not been for that old man, I would have never been able to go to college, I would never been able to get a job, I would never been able to work for Google, I would never been able to work for Xerox, I would never been able to preach the Gospel. I would have never been able to do it.
I want that for them. So I have to have something to remember that I could count on that will not break.
I want to ask you: what do you remember when life gets hard, when things get tough, when friends get few?
There ought to be something in your life that you remember God brought you through or brought you from or brought you out of that feeds you.
That is the foundation that makes you to rise above the crushing and turns grape juice into absolute wine.