TD Jakes - Faithful Wounds - Part 1
He betrayed him with a kiss, so people who are carnal doesn't necessarily mean that you are sinful, it just means that you take things on a very surface level. You go by what you see, you go by how you feel, you go by what you can touch, that's carnality. Carnality, where we get carnivorous, meat, you are controlled by the flesh senses. People who are controlled by flesh senses have a tendency to buy into kisses, but just because somebody kissed you doesn't mean you can trust them, because deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss, and so people who are carnal will will cleave to Judas and say, look, oh, that's my friend, never understanding that the kiss is not the equivalent of love. Love gets tough. Love gets dirty. Love gets stressful. Love creates tension.
You wrestle with somebody you love. If I don't love you, I'll ignore you, I'll go around you, I don't have to be bothered with you, I don't have time to deal with that. Get on out of my face. But when it's somebody I love, I can't go around it. I gotta confront it. We gotta have it out. We gotta fight about this. We gotta talk about this. We gotta wrestle about this, because I love you, and I got too much invested on the line to let you go down. That's running out. You don't see much of that anymore, but real love will get its hands dirty. Anybody who says they love you will get their hands dirty before they'll let you go off a cliff. You can't say that you love me and see me destroying myself and not confront me because you're more concerned about being nice than you are about me being healed. You got to get up in my mug and say, wait a minute, you about to mess this whole thing up.
What I'm talking about is trusting God when it hurts. But what do you think trust is all about? I don't need to trust him in a promotion. I need to trust him in a downturn, in a layoff, in a crisis, in a problem. I need to trust him when I don't understand his method. I trust his outcome. In the short run I'm in pain, in the long run my kidney no longer has cancer. In the short run Abraham takes his son, Isaac, up on the mountain and offers him up, but in the long run he says, "Me and the lad will come back again". If you're going to have a real relationship with God, you must be taught about faithful wounds.
Tonight let's go deeper. Let's go to the Gospel of Saint John chapter 15, verse 1 through 9. Go to the Gospel of Saint John chapter 15, verse 1 through 9, and I want you to look at it. I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to look at it, because I use the word relationship. Somebody say relationship. So, point number one is gonna be about relationship, okay? And let me tell you something. If you don't get better at relationship, you can't get better at God. You can get better at religion and not get better at relationship and lose sight of the power of God. There are people who are very proficient at religion. They know how to administer sacraments, they know which cassock to wear, they know what all the elements mean, they know all the rituals and the routines, they know how to set up the table for the first Sunday, they know that Thursday night is women's night, they know all of the stuff about religion, but little about relationship. They don't understand relationship.
Let's get away from the spiritual. Let's go natural for a minute, since you don't understand me. There are people who will have sex with you, and they love to have sex, but they don't love to relate to you, and sooner or later lust gets empty because the soul craves love. Oh, y'all ain't gonna act like you know what I'm talking about. Just stand there and stare at me with your phony self because you know exactly what I'm talking about, but you're too religious to admit that you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth, and you can't sit here and be phony because I will call you out in front of God and everybody. You understand the difference between lust and love. People who don't understand that substitute more sex to compensate for the lack of love.
Sooner or later they might be 30, might be 40, might be 50, might be 60, but sooner or later you begin to recognize that more sex does not equate to more love, and after a while you get tired of people handling you. They're just handling you. Oh, come on, they're just handling you. They're just handling you. And at first you think that if they handle you, they like you. But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy, and sooner or later you begin to understand that you handling me does not equate to loving me, and you begin to know what relationship is all about. Now, relationship needs to be dealt with, and I don't know how far I'll get to this. I may have to do this in two sections. But relationship needs to be described because most of this current generation is having a better relationship with their phone than they are with people, because technology has replaced us.
You don't have to worry about Jews replacing you or Blacks replacing you or Browns replacing you. Machines are replacing you. All you got to do is look around your dinner table and look at all your kids sitting there playing with their phone and nobody's talking to each other. If they do, they text each other. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what happened to your mouth? And so, when we enter into things like relationship, we don't have a context for relationship because we are the generation that was left home alone with machines, and machines became our babysitter, and machines became our pacifier, and machines became our entertainment. If you don't believe it, look at how much time you scroll through Instagram, just scrolling, looking at people doing silly stuff.
I know, if you can't say amen, say ouch. And all the time you scrolling through Instagram, you're ignoring somebody in the house to look at somebody you don't even know. You're ignoring somebody who cares about you to look at somebody who ain't thinking about you. You lose your ability to communicate with people because the seduction of the telephone is designed in such a way that the longer you're on it, the more money they make. And you don't realize that this is a type of lust, and you never even noticed him because the phone raised you. Because we lived in a generation and an era where our parents went to work, and the TV and the machines became our babysitter. I could go deeper, but y'all couldn't handle it, okay?
So, then when we come up for air and try to have a relationship, we don't know how to have a relationship because people don't respond to us like computers do. You can't just block me and I'm in the house. You can't just hit a button and shut me up. I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say, whether you want to hear it or not. You can't delete your child. So, when you take computer skills and bring them into human relationships, the marriage fails, the family falls apart, the kids are terminated, everybody's isolated, because you have never had the model of what it means to struggle through relationship, and the moment it's not romantic, you get out because you don't think that you could be friends with somebody who wounded you. But if you don't learn how to be friends with somebody who wounded you, you can't be a friend of God because God said, "Pick up your cross and follow me if you're really my disciple. I'm gonna take you through some painful places, and I don't expect you to give up on me just because the going gets rough and the going gets tough. You don't get to cut me off like I'm a machine".
Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. We're gonna get into this. And so, what you have to understand is relationship, relationship means what is the premise to which we relate? I am related, I am related. What is the thing through which we relate determines how well we relate. I wish I had time to go deeper. And look, for example, sometimes the way we relate to people is through pain, so if you're in the midst of rejection and I'm in the midst of rejection and we end up in a relationship, you don't understand the thing that we relate to is the problem. And when we get well, we have no premise of relationship because I've fallen in love with my nurse. And the biggest attraction was that you needed me, and as long as you were on cocaine, you needed me, and I need to be needed, and I fell in love with you because you were feeding my need to be needed, which made me feel significant.
And now that you're well, I don't know, have anything to relate to you, so if you tell me, me and this guy here are related, and they say, how are we related? I say, he's my second cousin. There has to be something that causes us to be related, or we're not related. That is the root word of relationship, is what causes us to be related. Without relationship, we cannot obey the biggest and first command that God gave us in scripture, which was to be fruitful. And you can't be fruitful without relationship. So, everybody except the mother Mary who got pregnant, they had a relationship. So, don't come telling me you fell asleep up under the cabbage patch and now the cabbage has jumped in your stomach. No, girl, get out of here with this. You had a relationship, why? I can tell there's fruit. There wouldn't be fruit without seed, and if there's seed, somebody had a relationship.
We have a gardener who planted us in time at a particular time for a particular purpose. If I were just wild growing wild, there's no expectation of a weed, but if I plant you, I have a purpose for you at a particular time. So when Jesus says, "My Father is a husbandman," I immediately know that nobody plants something without intention. Go all the way back to the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, the first thing God says is be fruitful. Nobody plants something they don't want to grow, so get out of your mind that God is against you. Get out of your mind that God doesn't want you to be successful. If the Father is a husbandman, wouldn't it be stupid for you to plant something that you didn't want to prosper? So, you don't have to spend your time on your knees asking God to prosper you, because if he planted you, he wanted you to prosper.
You don't have to feel bad about prosperity, because if he planted you, he wanted you to prosper. And the first thing he commanded you was to be fruitful. Before he said be holy, he said be fruitful. Oh God. Y'all don't want me to teach Bible class. I'm gonna mess this place up. You working on being a holy, you need to work on being fruitful, because this is the expectation of the relationship. You can't enter into a relationship without expectations. The very fact that you enter into a relationship means there are expect, please hear this tonight. You can't have a baby and there not be expectations. The baby didn't have itself. You can't be a mama and toss the baby everywhere. You had a baby, but you don't understand that there are expectations in every relationship. If you got a dog, you gotta feed it.
If you got a fish, you gotta change the water sometime. If you got a cat, you gotta take it to the vet sometime. You can't have a thing and not have an expectation, so stop being offended because I expect something from you because that's part of the relationship. So, God has a right to expect something from me because he's in a relationship with me. When he says give and it shall be given unto you, he has a right to ask me to give something because he gave something. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. So, once you set the benchmark that high, surely I can give you my carnal stuff, because you have given me your Son. Are you hearing what I'm saying? Somebody shout: relationship. If you don't get this first point, it ain't no need to go no further, because you can't take no wounding if you don't understand the premise of the relationship. "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman".
Now, "I am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman" means that he planted me so you would have somewhere to grow. Because a branch can't grow without a vine. Come on, somebody. A branch can't grow without a vine. You have to grow from something. You can't just start a branch out in the middle of the air and suspend it in space and expect for it to grow. That's why later in the text he says, "Without me, you can do nothing," because everything you're ever gonna get, that you're ever gonna be, that you're ever gonna do, that you're ever gonna achieve is gonna come through the vine to reach to the branches. If it doesn't come through the vine, you're not gonna receive it. You can't get blessed save he bless you. You can't grow save he allow you. And you can only grow to the extent that you have relationship with the vine. "Every branch in me that bear not fruit, he taketh it away". Are you hearing what I'm saying?
So, I want you to write down, "Stay connected". That's all you gotta worry about, stay connected. You don't have to bless yourself, you don't have to fix yourself, you don't have to strain yourself, just stay connected, because everything you need in order to be fruitful, he is going to handle if you stay connected. As long as I stay connected, I cannot die. If I get disconnected, I'm going to die. If I tie a string real tightly around my finger, my finger is going to die because it is not connected to my hand. It is only alive because it is connected. If it separates from my hand, it will rot and die. Though I am alive, without me, it can do nothing. Cut my whole hand off and lay it in this pulpit and watch it rot while I live because my hand cannot do nothing save it is connected to my arm. And Jesus is saying, "You are the branches, and I am the vine, and apart from me, you can do..."
So, the focus tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is relationship. And in order to have relationship, I must stay connected. Paul is out in the storm, and the storm is terrible, and the winds and the waves are breaking, and the ropes that they put up under the boat to hold it are starting to come apart, and the people are starting to come apart as the ropes come apart. And Paul says to the people, "Abide in the ship. Stay connected". And then the ship fell apart, but even when it fell apart, everybody that held on to a piece made it safely to the other side because all you had to do to survive the storm was... oh, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, somebody. Somebody's in a storm tonight, and all you have to do to survive the storm is stay...
And that's why the enemy wants to separate you. I can't get off it. Lord, I can't get off it. I'm gonna be stuck on this one point all night. That's why the enemy wants to separate you. It's the same trick he used with Eve in the garden. He wanted to separate her, he wanted her to disobey God, he wanted her to give the fruit to Adam, because the moment that Adam partook of the fruit, he was separated from God. And the Bible said the day you eat, you shall surely die. Well, he was still alive. Well, guess what? You can cut my hand off, and it will still be alive for a minute, but it has started the death march process. Can I go deeper? Now, what Jesus is teaching them is how you relate. Your objective then is to stay connected. The enemy's intention is to separate you. So, he wants the wounded place you're in right now to separate you from the source.
Can I go deeper? God says to the ocean, "Bring forth," and the fish begin to swim. He says to the air, "Bring forth," and the birds begin to fly. He says to the earth, "Bring forth," and the grass begins to grow. When he gets ready to make man, he says, "Let us make man in his likeness or his image". What do they all have in common? The grass can't grow if it doesn't stay in the thing that God spoke to. The fish can't live save it stay in the water that God spoke to. The bird can't fly save it stay in the air that God spoke to. And man can't live save he stay in the God that said, "Let us make man in our likeness and in our image". So, if I get disconnected, I act in the spirit like a fish does out of the water. I start flipping and flopping and going crazy and doing my own thing and get spastic because I didn't stay.
Now, Jesus says, "Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you". The word, "You are clean through the word I have spoken unto you". I have spoken a word to you that has cleaned you up. Nothing that he says has dealt with morality. Everything that he said has dealt with stability. And you are over here wrestling with your morality, but you're not wrestling with your stability. So, you are really moral, but you're emotionally unstable. God will fix your morality if you can anchor your stability. God will sanctify you. And the Bible said, "The very God of peace will sanctify you holy". He said, "I'll sanctify you holy. You can't do this up yourself. I'll sanctify you holy. But you gotta trust me when I'm cutting. You gotta trust me when I make an incision. You gotta trust me when you go through a reduction. You can't just trust me when you're going through a promotion and say you're a believer and you believe God and you trust God".
I take my wife out in the car, I got a surprise party planned for her, and she said, "We dressed up now. Where are we going"? And I say to her, "Trust me". Because you got to shut up and ride when you don't know the outcome because you know the driver. Come on, come on, somebody. Somebody holler, trust me. My mother who had dementia and Alzheimer's, I came home one night from a trip, and she said, she always knew me. Even when she didn't know anybody else and couldn't hardly talk, she said, Tommy, she said, "I can't see". She said, "I can't see, and I'm scared". And I got in the bed with her with my clothes on and wrapped my arms around her, and she said, "I don't know where I am". I said, "If I'm there, it must be okay". She laid her hands on my chest and she laid her head on my chest, and she said, "That's the truth".
If you're there, it must be okay. I don't know where I am, but I trust you. You don't have to give me all the details, but your presence is comfort to me because I know that if you're there, you're gonna be my protector, my provider, you're gonna be my company, you're gonna be my friend. Come on, somebody, come on. That's why I keep teaching on trust, because God is taking us through a period right now that we gotta be able to trust him while plagues are coming and chaos is coming and it takes a bag of gold to buy a loaf of bread. This ain't no time for you to get out of the ship. You gotta be able to trust him. Give me five seconds of crazy praise.