TD Jakes - Be Seated (02/17/2017)
The preacher teaches that believers are children and heirs of God by position in Christ, not fluctuating condition—Jesus, the Word who created all things, purged sins "by Himself," sat down at God's right hand signifying finished work, and now we can rest seated in faith while God makes enemies our footstool.
You Are a Child by Position, Not Condition
You are a child of God by virtue of your position, not your condition. Your condition will fluctuate. You will see good days and bad days. You will have moments of great victory and moments of great defeat. You will have moments that you can summon God into a room and you will have other moments like Job where you say, "I cannot find Him. I look for Him on the left, I look for Him on the right, I look behind me. I cannot find God. Where is God?" Or you will say, "God, You have hidden this from me."
Anybody know what I am talking about? But whether you see Him or whether you do not, He is still God sitting on the circle of the earth. Do you not know you can be an heir and not know it? Some people have been willed houses and did not know it was their house, because an heir does not require an action to be an heir. It is not by works lest any man should boast. An heir just receives. It is not a pay; it is just receiving on the basis of relationship. Do you have a relationship with Jesus? Or are you trying to receive from a God you do not know?
Knowing God Before Serving Him
Knowing Him is more important than serving Him. Because you cannot serve who you do not know. So some of you are trying to do God's service, but you do not know God. So here Apollos makes introduction and he says, "Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds." I cannot say that about the prophets. He has been appointed heir of all things, and then he says, "By whom also He made the worlds." He made the worlds. Through His Son, He made the worlds. Through His Son, He made the world. Through His Word, He made the world. Through His Word, He made the world.
The Power of God's Word
"What you talking about, Jakes?" I am teaching it, and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made." I am trying not to get into how words create because if I get into that I might get stuck into that and stay too long. The words have so much power that words create. When God got ready to create the world, He did not use hammers and nails, He did not use boards or committees. He did not use ballot boxes or toll booths. When God got ready to create the world, God stepped out and said, "Let there be," and it became whatever He said.
He stepped out on absolutely nothing and spoke something into existence and whatever He said, it became. I want you to understand that we serve a God who cannot lie, okay? He is the only one that you can say that about, that cannot lie. Some of us choose not to lie, some of us are still working on it. But when it comes to God, God cannot lie. And the reason that God cannot lie is not talking about His morals; it is talking about His nature. It is impossible for God to lie.
God's Word Creates Reality
If I call the pew white, I lied because I know it is red; but if God calls it white, as soon as He says it, it becomes whatever He said. Throw your hands up and say, "Say something, Jesus." Whatever He says, it is. If He says I am healed, I am healed. If He says I am blessed, I am blessed. If He says I am whole, I am whole. God will always have the last word. After everybody has given their opinion, God will always have the last word, God who at sundry times...
This thing about this word stuff, it is like, crazy, man. It is, like, crazy. God used it instead of hammers and nails and said, "Let there be," and it became whatever He said. He separated the firmaments that were above the waters from the firmaments that were beneath the waters, and they became whatever He said. It was so good that before there was anybody there to tell Him how good it was, He praised Himself and said, "That is good, right there. That is good, right there."
And then He said, "That is a good job, right there. Check that out. Do you see that? Do you see that? Do you see how I made the lesser lights to rule the night and the greater lights to rule the day?" He said, "That is good, right there," yeah. He spoke to the sea and said, "Bring forth," and the fish start swimming. "Bring forth in the air," and the birds started flying. "Bring forth to the ground," and vegetation started growing. He said, "That is some good stuff right there."
The Intimate Creation of Man
And then He got together, said, "Let us make man in our own likeness, in our own image, after our own kind." And He said, "This is the only part of the Creation that I will be this intimate with. Everything else I stood out from it and spoke and it became whatever I said. But in order to make man what he needs to be, I am going to have to touch him and shape him and mold him a little bit and be intimately engaged with him," and because man was created by touch, he has been needing touch ever since. You cannot change who you will not touch.
He breathed in him the breath of life and he became a living soul. And He said, "That is good and very good." So that is like God saying, "Can we bump them?" There you go. Double bump. Double bump. So now, Adam is running the garden. The ecosystems have all been set in place, a system that not only creates but sustains. He will not have to get up and say, "Bring forth," to the sea again, because each fish had a seed inside of itself.
God's Finished Work and Rest
You do not want to bother me today. He will not say to the land, "Bring forth," again, because He put a system in place of recycling that in the process of growing and living and dying it is always recycling itself again. He is finished. "Bring forth," and the birds begin to fly. He will not have to do that again, because He gave them the ability to push out eggs and keep them warm and nurture them until they hatch, and the next generation is the derivative of the first experience.
It is absolutely so awesome. It is so finished, it is so cool, it is so complete, that He sat down. Oh, Father, be seated. He sat down. His work was over. It was done. Everything was in place. The systems, the cycles, were all in place. The earth is still spinning, the sun is still moving, the galaxies are still turning, and everything is held in balance by the Word of His power.
Satan Challenges the Word
His system was so complete that He sat down to rest until Satan creeped up in the garden and challenged the word Eve knew. Since the Word created it, he said, "If I can challenge the Word. God hath not said the day that you eat of this tree you shall surely die," remember that? He is challenging the Word, because when you change the word, you change the results. And when this false doctrine found its way into the first family, it contaminated the process. Can I go a little bit deeper?
And when it contaminated the process, God broke His rest. If you miss that, you miss everything. God broke His rest because man had fallen and could not redeem himself. So God says, "If you are going to be redeemed, I am going to have to do it." It says it this way: "The voice of the Lord walked through the cool of the garden." The voice started walking through the garden. The voice that had been seated has now started walking through the garden. Shh, this is the first mention of Jesus. A voice walking? A voice walking? I did not know a voice could walk. "The voice of the Lord walking through the cool of the garden." Is not this: "And the Word was made flesh"...
Redemption Through the Word
So anytime the Word starts walking, it is through creating. It is going into redemption. "Adam." Let me stop, let me stop. Are you all with me this morning? "Adam! Where art thou?" "I heard Thy voice. I was naked. I was afraid. I hid from the Word." If you hide from the Word, you are going to stay where you are. And here He comes with the substitute. "Now, Adam, you made a mess. I am going to patch this up. It will not fix it, but I am going to patch it up. It will not fix it, because I am going to use the blood of an animal which will not purge sin, it will pacify sin. But this blood is representative of another blood that will come later that will fix it forever." Stay with me. Stay with me.
So when the writer gets down into this text and he starts talking about how God has made Jesus in His express image and that he goes on to talk about that He has purged our sins once and for all, and he says, "By Himself." By Himself. It means... you all want to know what it means? Okay, it means that of all the millions of people, billions on the planet, all contaminated by sin, that when Christ came, like the voice that walked in the garden, the voice in the garden came to salvage one man. Christ came for us all. And carried all sin, all sin.
By Himself: Complete Redemption
He said, "Since I see you, devil. You like to play some tricks. I am going to fix you good. I am going to fix you. I am going to fix you so good. I am not going to sit down like I did before and leave you with the possibility of messing with the future. So when I have come this time, I am going to fix everything they did and everything they will do and everything they are doing and everybody around them if they will come to Me." He said, "They have laid on Him the iniquity of us all."
So in your text right there, it says that "Christ by Himself, by"... Oh, let me stop, let me stop. What am I doing? Can I show you this one little thing? "By Himself. By Himself." Does not just mean Him alone, though that is true. But it also means that He redeemed us by Himself. See, I came to church this morning by a car. Somebody else came to church by a bus. When you say "by" something, it means the vehicle through which you accomplish something.
So when it says that He did it by... Everything He needed, He had. Everything He wanted, He supplied. Everything that was demanded, was within His power. He did not have to use an angel, He did not have to use a prophet, He did not have to use a priest, He did not have to use a method, a recipe, an incantation or spell, but by Himself He had purged all sin. Now, I know it makes some of you uncomfortable when I went into future sins, but might I remind you that your past sins were future when He died. Two thousand years ago you were not a twinkle in your daddy's eye. You had not had time to mess up. The blood cannot just reach backward. It has to reach forward.
Be Seated in Christ's Finished Work
Ah, it reaches to the highest mountain. It flows to the lowest valley. You fell right in that, did you not? Oh, yes, it did. It is so efficacious that that blood is effective against diseases that were not even discovered at the time that the blood was shed. Before there was HIV there was the blood of Jesus. Before there was cancer there was the blood of Jesus. You all do not hear what I am saying to you. He did it, show all. He did it so good, Emmett, that when He got through dying on the cross, He got up on the third day, He took a walk for 40 days, showed Himself alive with many infallible proofs, say, "Yeah, I am back. I am the one. I am the one. Thought you had Me, did you not? I am back right now."
And at the end of 40 days, He whistled for a cloud, stepped up on a cloud, and ascended into the heavens, and said, "I will be back one day." And so Apollos is telling us in between the Ascension and His return, way beyond the clouds where you cannot see Him, Apollos is telling us what He is doing and Apollos is saying, "He is seated, like, cool." He is seated because He is finished. He is seated because the work is done. His seat is a sign that the old account has been settled, that the blood has hit the mercy seat, that He has rectified that which the first man Adam destroyed. He sat down.
Wait a minute. Hold up a minute, Apollos. Ain't no chair in the tabernacle. I remember the furniture in the tabernacle. There was no chair in the tabernacle and why was there no chair? He said, "Because the priests could never cease bringing in sacrifices day and night, shedding blood and washing and cleansing, because they were working with substitute blood." But when the blood of Jesus hit the mercy seat, the priest got a chair. I said the blood of the Lamb.
Oh, I wish I had some Bible folks in here this morning. So let me quit. Let me quit. Let me get to this point. I want to show you one more thing. Take me down in this text. Yeah, "And, Thou, Lord," verse 10, "in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth; and the heavens are the works of Thine hands." Keep going. "They shall perish." Everything else shall perish, "but Thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture," like you fold up your clothes, He said you are going to fold it all up, "and they shall be changed: but Thou, O Lord, art the same, and Thy years shall not fail."
C'mon, c'mon. "But to which of the angels." See, he is showing the supremacy of the Son over the angels. "To which of the angels said He at any time, Sit on My right hand." Oh, wait, He is sitting. He said, "Until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?" You are not going to have to get up and fight the enemy again. Tell your enemies to go ahead and shoot your best shot. I am not going to be walking the floor, I am not going to be nervous, I am not going to be upset, because when you see me seated, it is because I know who I am. I know my position. I know where I stand with God. And the Lord said all I got to do to whip you is be seated.
Be Seated: Rest in Victory
Hey, touch somebody and say, "Be seated." So all of you who have been walking the floor and pacing around and having conniptions, trying to respond to every little problem in your life, the Lord sent you to church this morning so that I could tell you, "Be seated." When all hell is breaking loose and the enemy is threatening to destroy you, your voice does not have to walk, because His voice has already walked. All you got to do is be seated.
When the enemy comes in like a flood, trouble is knocking at your door, pain is wracking your body, and you are trying to figure out what you ought to do, do not do a thing. Just be seated. Because when you sit down, God stands up. When you sit down, God takes over. I heard Him say, "Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord." Slap three people and say, "Be seated." It is your time to rest in what God promised you. It is your time to rest in the Word that has been spoken over your life. It is your time to let God fight your battles. It is your time to rest in His promise over your life.
If God said it, that settles it. If God said it, it shall come to pass. If God said it, it will happen. Take three minutes and praise Him for His grace. So the next time the devil says, "What you going to do about this, what you going to do about that, what you going to do about the other, do not you see this bill, did not you hear what she said?" just look at the devil, tell him, "I am sitting on it. I am sitting on it. I am sitting on it." And when I sit down, every devil better run. When you see me sit down, it means I got another power on this that is over your head, that every one of your enemies will become your footstool. Shout "Yes!"
Sit down just for a second. Be seated. Touch your neighbor and say, "Be seated." You are never going to sit down the same ever again in your life. Any time a priest sits down, that means the blood has hit the mercy seat. Be seated. I feel kind of churchy right now. I feel the Spirit of the living God right now. I do not want to mess you up this morning, but when I think of the goodness of Jesus and all that He has done for me, my soul cries out, "Hallelujah." Thank you, God! Touch three people and tell them, "I am going to sit on it. I am going to sit on it."