TD Jakes - Breaking out of Spiritual Atrophy
Now, what is happening here is that Moses is leading people with motion sickness. I don’t have much motion sickness, but my wife has a lot of it. She can ride in a car most of the time, but maybe not in the back seat. She doesn’t do well on a boat, so a cruise is a challenge because motion makes her sick. It’s called motion sickness, and if she doesn’t take some medicine, she can’t take a boat ride because of it. Most of us are leading people with motion sickness. Moses is leading people who haven’t moved for 430 years, and now he’s got them living on the road.
The very fact that they have motion sickness makes it difficult to move them. Moses is a leader, and the only metric of leadership is movement. If he doesn’t move, he’s not a leader. But if he moves them, they’re going to have motion sickness, because they have not moved for 430 years. They have spiritual atrophy. Most churches have spiritual atrophy. Atrophy is when you haven’t moved something for so long that it ceases to move without pain. Most churches have spiritual atrophy. «No, we’ve always done it like that.» «You always sing the song before you read the prayer.» «Deacon Wilson always takes up the offering.» That’s atrophy! Anytime people start talking about «always,» and they worship normalcy more than they worship movement, it becomes difficult to lead them because they’re uncomfortable with change.
Moses has the dubious task of trying to move people who have spent 430 years being motionless. So, the Bible says that they were moved by God from place to place. Anytime God has you moving, you’re leading through uncertainty; you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Reading their journey is like watching a good movie. One moment they’re fighting Amalek at Rephidim, and the next, they can’t find any water. The next chapter introduces snakes that are coming out and biting them, and in the following chapter, God has covered them with a cloud of fire to keep them warm at night. Just when you get used to the cloud of fire, it turns into a pillar of smoke by day.
Then you turn to the next chapter, and they come to an oasis filled with palm trees and fresh water. You walk a little further, and they arrive at a dry place. Every time they keep moving, they keep blaming Moses because they have motion sickness. They have not moved for 430 years. Some of you listening to me right now have not changed in 20 or 30 years, and now this pandemic is driving you crazy because it’s forcing you to move. You’re uncomfortable because you have spiritual atrophy, and you keep waiting for God to make it like it was. Success for you is for God to take you back to what you’re used to. But I came to tell you that God has closed up the Red Sea, and you can’t go back to what it was. You must adapt to what it is—what it is, what it is, what it is—you have to adapt to what it is, not to what it was or what it will be. You must adapt to what it is. Am I talking to somebody today?
See, most of us are trying to manage people. You’ve got wives trying to manage husbands; husbands trying to manage wives; parents trying to manage children; and people trying to manage life. Most of us are trying to manage people. You’re upset with people because they won’t be managed. They won’t do what you tell them to do; they won’t go where you tell them to go. God does not call you to manage people; He calls you to lead them. Once God calls you to lead people, He will call you to manage procedures.
I was talking to a lady, Patricia Heyroyd, and she almost knocked me out of my chair with this point: You manage procedures; you lead people. We don’t spend enough time managing procedures. We, as preachers, are so busy making sermons that we don’t want to be bothered with procedures. Long after the sermon is over, the church has to live with the procedures, and now the pandemic has come to preachers who spent all their time studying for the sermon. They get the sermon to move people, but they’re not used to managing procedures. That means you’ve got to be willing to tweak your procedures. You have to be a person who stops saying, «This is just how I do it,» «This is just how I am,» and «This is just the way it is.»
You cannot fall in love with the procedure; the procedure must be willing to change so that the results can increase. Who am I talking to? The procedures must be willing to change so that the results can increase. That’s why you take your car for a tune-up: to adjust the procedures and increase performance. You have no more performance than you have the willingness to adjust the procedure. In other words, if you always do what you’ve always done, you will always be where you’ve always been—not because you didn’t have a vision, not because you didn’t want to go forward, but because you refused to change the procedures. If you don’t change the procedures, you can’t have the promotion.