TD Jakes - God Uses Imperfect People
When I was 17 years old I laid down and went to sleep, and while I was sleeping I dreamed I was reading a verse that I didn't know existed at the time. God was saying to a young man, before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee or I ordained thee and I sanctified thee to be a prophet to the nations. And when I woke that morning, I just took my Bible with childlike faith and just let it fall open. And it fell open on Jeremiah, and it said before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee, and I ordained thee, and I sanctified thee to be a prophet unto the nations. And all the sudden I remembered all the stories my mother told me about when I was born, I was born with a veil over my face and one of the neighbors came down and said look, the Lord has given you a prophet. And mama said, a prophet? She said, yeah, he had a veil over his face. Thin membrane born over some babies faces. I was one of them.
That membrane the old folks said was a sign you were a prophet, but I didn't know I was a prophet so I was a wild, crazy, foolish, ignorant, rambunctious, kid who got into everything and anything all the time, driving people crazy. And I was having a good time doing my own thing until God came along and messed it all up by bringing this stuff up about me being a preacher. And I ran from my calling. I purposely got drunk and went wild and got high and partied and did everything I could to convince him to go away. Get one of them people with the little doilies on their head and the long skirts and no make up who pray all day and talk in tongues all the time and leave me alone because I am not one of them. I'm crazy. I'm ignorant. I'm wild. I'm uncouth. I will embarrass you. I will disgrace you. Please don't call me. This is not going to be good for me and it's not going to be good for me, and we should not do this together.
But God didn't ask me to boat. He asked me to obey. And after several years of running and after several years of going to clubs and sitting on bar stools where one drunk would lean over to me and say, hey man, I had the craziest dream about you. I dreamed you was preaching in this church. And I got up and ran out of the club. And I felt like, if I make my bed in hell, thou art there, and if I take to the is wings of the morning and ascend to the uttermost parts of the earth, thou art there. And I'm not going to be able to outrun this, and I couldn't understand that God wouldn't let me go. I couldn't understand why God picked me.
If I get to heaven and we're only allowed one question apiece, I simply want to know, why did you call me? A boy from the hills of West Virginia. The son of a janitor and a school teacher. Why did you call me? And I had lots of excuses. Like Moses, I had a speech impediment. You can't call me. You can't, you can't call me. I didn't stutter but I had a lisp. I can't be a speaker because I have a lisp. But all of us have areas where we feel inadequate. And if you don't, you're disqualified because humility is framed from feeling inadequate. When you say I am not enough, it makes you pray harder. It makes you seek harder. It makes you ask for more grace. Beware of all the people who tell you they are enough. It's a sure sign that you're dealing with a fraud because the questions the world is asking are too complicated for you to answer with a degree.
The problems people are having now require divine intervention. And you have to have somebody who has heard from God, not from themselves. So it doesn't matter. In my weakness he's made strong. In my weakness, his strength is validated. So he chooses fragile, broken, limited people so you won't be confused where the ointment comes from. You know that the glory that we have is not of ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord that has given us glory. And it's him coming out of us. It's not our talent coming out of us. It's not our skill coming out of us. It is him coming out of us, both to do and to will according to his own good pleasure. That's the facts.
And what makes God all the more real is recognizing that he can work with such poor material, that he can be so masterful as Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel with a broken brush, and I am the brush, and you are the brush. And you are the brush. And he chooses broken brushes so there will be no glory to the brush. Only to the artist. When the master, the master vintner plans to transplant you, arguing will not stop it. He will not let you go until he's moved to you the place that he has prepared for you and you for it, and placing you in that place you begin to grow. And you will know you're in the place when like Joseph your branches reach over walls. When God plants you, your branches reach over every denominational, racial, generational wall that ever stood, and I believe he wanted you to hear this at this moment in your life.
Imagine being in the wilderness, miles and miles of sand, hot, scorching hot sand beneath your feet, blazing sun above your head. Imagine walking and seeing nothing but repetitions of what you're walking on, not just on the ground but in the wind, in your nostrils, in your clothing, all around you. This was the wilderness that Israel walked through to get to the Promise Land. Sand under your feet, sand in your nostrils, in your hair, heat in the day, freezing cold at night. The only cover they had was the presence of God. And they had to stay under it because he gave them heat in the night and shade by day. Thank you for the shade you gave me. Thank you for how you put a buffer between me and the things that I went through, and in the middle of the desert with the 12 tribes of Israel, God decided to have a date with man.
And he decided to have a date in a tabernacle, and the Hebrew word for tabernacle is "Mishkan", it means a tent of meeting. It's a rendezvous place. It's a place where divinity courts humanity. It's a place where the celestial dates the terrestrial. It's a place where the divine touches the mundane. This was the tabernacle. It is God playing etch-a-sketch drawing Jesus in the tabernacle, because everything the tabernacle was it shadowed Jesus was in reality. He is a place where humanity and divinity cohabitate. He is a place where the celestial touches the terrestrial. He is everything that the tabernacle embodies. He is triune in his being, the outer court, the inner court, the holy of holies, like man, body, soul and spirit, like God, Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
God shows us in the tabernacle glimpses of his grace, just inklings of grace, just drops and clues and elements for us to see how bad he wants to hang out with us. He preps us for thousands of years because the tabernacle is a shadow of Jesus, and he's trying to get us ready for his entrance because everything the tabernacle was in the wilderness, it was surrounded by the 12 tribes of Israel, and he was the one who sat in the midst of his people, and everything the tabernacle was in the wilderness Christ was in reality. That's why when the baby was born, they called him Emmanuel. God tabernacled with us. He is the "Dwell amongst us" God, not the "Dwell among you" God.
You can't have him and restrict me from getting him. The tabernacle was designed so each tribe was able to have access to him whether you were Benjamin or Issachar or Dan or Gad or Judah or Naphtali. We all had equal access to God. In the same way, God has so fixed himself that no particular people can restrict any other group of people from being able to access him. He is the "Dwell amongst us" God. It is this understanding of God that makes us realize how far he would go to date you. From glory to earth, from eternity to time, from celestial to terrestrial. The divine came upon Mary and said let me borrow a tent of flesh so you can see me walk.
So the voice of the Lord that walked through the cool of the garden in the book of Genesis didn't have a tent to wear, but the voice of the Lord that walked in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John was dressed up in the tent of Mary's flesh, and he is the tabernacle because he is the "Dwell amongst us" God, and he dwelt among us and we beheld the wonder of his glory, the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, and everywhere his feet trod we had seen God. Philip said show us the Father and it sufficeth. And Jesus said have I been so long time with you and you still don't know that I and my Father are one? I am God dwelling amongst you in the midst of you, in your camp, so I can hang out with you, so that you can get to know my daddy, so that you can see me, so that you can understand me. In fact, I am daddy loving you.
God is loving you through me, touching you through me, healing you through me, coming to you through me. I am so much him that when they ripped my flesh, the veil in the temple were ripped because we are one in the same. I am the holy of holies. I am the Ark of the Covenant. I am the table of showbread. I am the altar of incense. I am the pot of manna. I am Aaron's rod that budded. I am the commandments fulfilled. I am wood enough to be human. I am gold enough to be divine. I am carried amongst my people. I am God all by myself.
The table had been set. The water drawn. The hands washed. The meal prepared. The evening set in order. It was not unique or different or strange or odd or fresh. It was the Passover as it had been observed for years and years and years commemorating the lamb that was slain in Egypt. It was not any different from any other Passover until Jesus sat down at the table and took us from the ancient blood of a lamb that was sacrificed for Israel to saying it is no longer about the lamb. It is now about me and Passover slid over into communion, and law collapsed on grace, and dispensations collided together all at the dining table of the master, what we would call the last supper. Oh, and there will never be another supper like that supper because his supper stands in a class all by itself. It is not just a change, it is a paradigm shift.
The physical body of Jesus Christ sits down at the table to serve the memorial body of Christ. For the elements are the memorial body of Christ as often as you do this, do this in remembrance is of me until I come. So the bread and the wine is a memorial body of Christ being served by the physical body of Christ, being served to the mystical body of Christ which is the church whose blessed hope is to have the glorified body of Christ. So at the table we see four representations of one body. Is he the body, or the body, or the body, or the body. No wonder he told Moses who shall I say sent me? He said oh, you can't explain me. I must be revealed. You can't explain me because to the unbeliever, all they will see is bread and wine, and they will not know that this is a New Testament in my blood.
They will not know that the blood, that the wine is my blood and the bread is my body. They will not know that when they ingest the wine and the blood they are taking in me, and that each one of them will hold a portion of the mystery that only brings the bread together through their unity. That is the mystical body of Christ, and that is why satan hates for the church to be united, because when we all come together, and your piece comes together with my piece, and his piece, and her piece, and their piece, and we all connect, we become the loaf and become one again. Father, I pray that these may be one, even as you and I are also one.
Let's sit down at the table and see Jesus because there are some things about Jesus that cannot be learned from the pulpit. They can only be discovered at the table. And the table, the mystical body of Christ which is the church, beheld the memorial body of Christ being fed to them through the physical body of Christ awaiting the glorified body of Christ at the table. Later, when Jesus will be crucified and raised from the dead, he will meet two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and he will talk to them in a seven mile stretch and use all of the Old Testament in seven miles. That's a short walk for a big book. He discussed every shadow and every type that represented him. And when he had come to where they would depart, he made as if he would go further.
He didn't go further, he just acted like he would. Because God is an actor like as a mighty rushing wind, like as cloven tongues. Holy Spirit descend like as a dove. God is an actor and he made as if he would go on. Yes, he did. But they stopped him. And something that they did not learn from looking at his face, or the stains in his clothing, or the holes in his hands, or the piercing in his side, it's something that they did not learn from his preaching and teaching. Now that seven mile stretch they learned at the table when they sat at the table with him on the road to Emmaus.
Can I go deeper? When they sat down with Jesus, that's why you have to sit down with Jesus. It can't just be a Sunday morning experience. You have to sit down with Jesus. You have to sup with him. You have to connect with him. When they sat down with Jesus, he did a simple thing in their midst that was more profound than anything he did on the road. He did more at the table than he did at the road because God always performs miracles at the table. And he sat down at the table, and the Bible said he took the bread and broke it, and blessed it, and gave it to them, and they saw him in the order of the breaking of bread. They use the same phrase we see at the last supper. He took it, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them.
It is the same phrase that we see with the 5,000 when the little boy gave him the lunch. He took it and blessed it and broke it and gave it to them. It is the same thing that is happening in your life. He takes you and blesses you and breaks you and gives you to the world. You cannot be given to the world until you've been taken by the master, blessed by God, broken by life and then given to the world. And the more he takes you and blesses you and breaks you, the more he multiplies you so that you can meet the needs you couldn't meet before because the multiplication is in the breaking. It's not in the blessing. It's in the breaking. And if God didn't break you, he couldn't give you to them. But every time he breaks you, he multiplies you and increases you, and you become a little bit more than what you were before because you were in the master's hands, and he took you, and he blessed you, and he broke you, and he gave you to them.