TD Jakes - How Are You Talking to Yourself? (05/24/2024)
Negative inner voices—predicting failure, loss, unworthiness—stem from past traumas and fears, undermining enjoyment of blessings and fueling anxiety even in good times. Counter them with faith-filled self-talk rooted in God's promises, remembering His past faithfulness as foundation; what we repeatedly say to ourselves shapes outcomes, turning crushing doubts into victorious wine.
The Tormenting 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 waited too late. 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, 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.
Faith in Good Times 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. See, I know what it is like to be poor. And 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.
And 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. And 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 you are what you eat, and the voices are the food that feeds your faith or fear. So 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. 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.
Snatch Your Miracle
And 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, and 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.
That is what I want you to see and stop letting those other words crush you. 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.
Remember God's Faithfulness
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? So 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. And it shifts from day to day, and 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. 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 gonna get higher, it is gonna get broader, it is gonna get better, it is going to be different, or it is gonna go down. And 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.
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, and 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 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. 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.