TD Jakes - Don't Let the Chatter Stop You (09/10/2018)
From Moses' internal conflict seeing Hebrew-Egyptian fight mirroring his identity crisis in Exodus 2, the preacher teaches that greatness crowns amid frustration when vision exceeds position; past failures surface as destiny nears, but God's calling overrides flaws—do not let exposed weakness or external chatter abort what He appointed, for He uses conflicted vessels for deliverance.
Moses' Privileged Yet Conflicted Life
Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ our King. I am so excited to have this opportunity to share the Word of the Lord with you. To be blessed of God and chosen of the Lord to present His Word to you is my highest honor.
Now Moses is a grown man. We are seeing him close to 40 years old. He is a grown man. He is blessed. He got things he would not have gotten any other way. Education. By the Egyptians. The Egyptian culture we are still studying. Their advancement in technology is still intimidating even to modern scientists today. Their architectural abilities have caused people to travel for miles to study the pyramids. Moses was exposed to that the way he would never be exposed. If he had not gone through the adversity in his house, he would not have opportunity.
Adversity. Every time he had an adversity he had opportunity. 40 years old and has the opportunities people would kill for. Opportunities other people would have died for. Got to go places, do things and understand things. Had he stayed in the house he started in, he would have never gotten. All he would know how to do is make bricks without straw. But God pulled him out.
Sometimes when God pulls you out of your natural environment, it is painful. You suffer a lot. He did not pull you out to kill you. He pulled you out to bless you. He is near 40 years old. And he is blessed. He is blessed. He is educated. He is articulate. He is intelligent. He is bilingual. He is blessed. But he is confused.
Lord, I wish I had time. You can be blessed but still be confused. He is all dressed up. And confused. He is a grown man with little boy issues. Struggling on the inside and walking around in all the Egyptian capes and all dressed up like he is a prince. He looks like a prince, but he is not. He is a Hebrew by blood but he is not. He is neither Egyptian nor Hebrew. He is stuck in the middle.
External Fight Mirrors Internal Conflict
And he looks out the window and he sees two men fighting. A Hebrew and an Egyptian fighting. What he sees on the outside is a reflection of what is going on on the inside. If I say nothing else this morning, I have said it all. Because if you can grasp what I just said, you will see what I see on the outside is a reflection of what is going on on the inside.
What you see on the outside. I wish I had time to really work that. I was sitting with a bunch of psychologists and they were counseling a woman contemplating suicide. And the counselor said, no, no, no, she is not going to commit suicide. How can you say that with such absoluteness? Her hair is combed. She brushed her teeth. Her clothes are pressed. What you see on the outside is a reflection of what is going on on the inside.
Do you hear what I am saying? Fighting on the outside because there is fighting on the inside. I will drill into that a little bit. Interesting point. 35 years of counseling people, I have counseled all kinds of angry men. I have counseled men who beat their wives. I mean beat them mercilessly. Hit them with wrenches and stuff like that. Threw hot oil on them. Stuff like that. I never saw a man who beat his wife and liked himself.
What you see on the outside is a reflection of the conflict on the inside. I could go home now. Because if you did that thought justice, you could spend the next 24 hours going through your life saying, what do you see? Going through the trunk of your car, garage, your house, what you see on the outside is a reflection of what you see on the inside.
If you are happy to live in clutter... I will not bother you. Now, we all have to live in it. But if you are happy to live in clutter. If you are comfortable and it does not bother you, maybe it does not bother you, because what you see... He sees the fighting on the outside. It is a reflection of the fight on the inside.
He raises his hand to stop it. He is trying to stop it in them so he can stop it in him. The fight on the outside forced him to confront the conflict on the inside. He has been conflicted for 40 years. But some circumstances arose in his life that brought to the surface the inner conflict that he has in his soul.
And he rises up, because now faced with Hebrew and Egyptian fighting, he now has to choose whose side are you on? 40 years has not demanded that he make a choice but one incident has pushed his emotions to the surface. Do you choose your conditioning or your pedigree?
Now he chooses his background, his heritage. And he kills the Egyptian. Kills an Egyptian. And buries him in the sand. Looking to the left and the right. He sees nobody and buries him in the sand. 24 hours later what he sees on the outside is totally different from what he saw yesterday.
He does not see an Egyptian and Hebrew fighting because he has made the choice. Only to find out there is still conflict. The Hebrews are fighting and he rises up to solve it. Now, this is what, when a woman is birthing a baby they call it crowning. When the head first comes out. You hear the nurse say, it is crowning.
His greatness is crowning. But he is crowning at a time he is not positionally a place to function on the level he is able to think on. So he is functioning like a king. But he is not a king. You got internal conflict that is now gone external.
Greatness Crowns Amid Frustration
Think with me, church. One of the things I love about preaching at The Potter's House is you are a thinking people. I cannot pastor people who do not think. I am allergic to them. They make me itch. Deliver me from stupid people. Pray deliverance from evil and stupid people. I will just insert it.
He is in the dilemma now and he is fighting. He is fighting his greatness is coming out. He is crowning. And when greatness crowns, it creates conflict because it does not crown when you have been placed in the position. It crowns before.
You are rich before you got the money. You were educated before you got the degree. You were a preacher before they ordained you. You are a leader before you get the job. You are a visionary before you become a CEO. You are a wife before you get married. You are a husband before you find a woman. If you are not that before, you will not be after.
So you have to go through a period of displacement where you have vision to function on a level and do not have opportunity. Which creates frustration. I feel this with everything I got inside of me. Nothing outside has acknowledged me on the level that I think on. And you do not feel appreciated because your thoughts are up here and your situation is over here.
And you are still trying to work out stuff from your childhood. But you are a grown man. Praise the Lord. And you are in this situation and you are trying to fix people around you while you are still conflicted on the inside. And you wonder how can the physician be sick? How can the healer be broken? How can I help other people and cannot help myself? How can I? O God, help me to preach this thing. Am I talking to anybody today?
40 years old and he is trying to get it together. He is trying to figure it out. And he is running out of time. He is trying to help and make a difference in spite of his background. In spite of his childhood. In spite of his conflict he is trying to make a difference. He is trying to make a difference.
There is something down inside of him. He cannot figure out what it is. Nobody is taking ownership of it. The Egyptians have not embraced it. The Hebrews do not like it. Moses does not understand it. Yet when he sees conflict he runs in there with S. On his shirt and cape and boots on. And he is trying to help people that do not even like him.
Have you ever tried to help people who do not even appreciate the help you are trying to give them? And there you are trying to make a difference in their life and the very people you are trying to help is giving you the most hell you ever had in all of your life? Because you have never been hurt until you get hurt by somebody you are trying to help.
I wish I had somebody who had been misunderstood. I wish I had somebody who was trying to do a good thing and every time you tried to do something good, things got worse instead of better. The more Moses tried to help people, the bigger mess he found himself in.
He has a dead man buried in the sand and out there in another fight. And before he can get out of this, here comes this, and before he can straighten out that, here comes this. Looks like every 24 hours a new fight breaks out in your life. Is there anybody in church today that every time you turn around, scared to answer the phone, scared to open up your own e-mail. You say, Lord, if another fight breaks out in my life. I got fighting on the inside. I got fighting on the outside. I got fighting in my personal life.
O God, I am talking for somebody. I do not even know who it is. And I want you to see the irony. These two Hebrews are fighting. Moses comes out to break up the fight and one of the Hebrews, he is not trying to kill anybody. He said do not fight. One of the Hebrews said, who are you to be trying to straighten you out? Who made you prince? Who did make you prince? The Lord made him prince.
But he was trying to do the right thing at the wrong time. Do not try to get there before you are there. Just because you can think there, you have not been placed there. You can be anointed and not be appointed. You can be anointed to be king over Israel, David, and then have to be sent back out there to shovel sheep dung because one of the tests of greatness is your ability to survive frustration.
So when God is getting you ready for frustration on the outside He lets you deal with frustration on the inside so you can learn to be frustrated and still be faithful. Frustrated and still be consistent. Frustrated and still be diligent. I am talking to somebody. I do not know who it is, but I am talking to somebody this morning.
Here he is. I feel something about to break loose in here this morning. I feel the anointing about to break loose in here. Here is how we express ourselves. When you hear people holler like that, that means truth hits you. When truth hits you in the face, all of a sudden you have a reaction to it. Because I am preaching to you about one thing but God is showing you different things in your life that fit what I am preaching about. That is a miracle of preaching the gospel.
God says to him, who made you prince over us? And then he says, this is where I want to hammer down. He said, are you going to kill me? Like you did the guy yesterday? Now, on one hand, he has just discovered that he is a prince and does not know it. Appointed and does not know it. Greatness that is not revealed yet. That is a wonderful thing.
In the next sentence he finds out that his past has come back to haunt him. What the first sentence should have made him say, yeah, I will be prince over you. That is right. God is just showing you what He already showed me. But the prince is a liar. And a murderer.
When Greatness Crowns, Conflict Arises
What do you do when you got holiness and freakiness? I will look right over top of everybody's head. Amen, lights. What do you do? It is a mess. It does not make no sense. That is when I get in the Word. I try to figure it out. It is crazy.
What do you do when you got so much strength in you everybody comes to you, everybody leans on you, everybody depends on you, everybody comes to you for answers? And you are a strong person, but you are equally a weak person? You are a powerful person but you are also a tired person. And people see one side and they do not see the other side. Am I talking to anybody today?
He is a prince over them. He will deliver them. He will bring them out from the hands of Pharaoh. He is all of that. He also just lied and killed a man and buried him and hid the body. Now ain't that crazy? I say all of this to comfort you. Aren't you glad you came to church this morning?
Now, watch this. The enemy will always send a terrorist's alert when you are close to your destiny.