TD Jakes - The Autopsy of a Decade
Drawing from the decade-long journey of Elisha serving Elijah through Gilgal, Bethel, and Jordan, the preacher urges believers to sacrifice, stay loyal despite offenses, perform an "autopsy" on the past decade to learn from losses, cut away old habits, and recognize that any place can become Bethel—direct access to God's presence—while understanding life has no "magic years" but purpose makes all things work for good.
Sacrifice and Loyalty
You cannot keep everything the way it was and go forward at the same time. You have to be prepared to boil some stuff and burn some stuff and do without some stuff, and let the other girl be cuter than you for a little while. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." You may have to do your own hair, you may have to cut your nails off. I mean, when you are really willing to sacrifice... Oh, you all do not want to hear me. No, no, no, no, no—you all do not want to hear that.
You have got to be willing to sacrifice and you have got to be willing to serve. And it was almost ten years that he walked with Elijah—almost a decade.
Some people will serve you for a weekend. If you get sick they will come see you for a few days. If you stay sick very long, even your kinfolks will get tired. You know, "I am good for thirty days—on that thirty-first day you better get well because you know I have a family at home, I have things to do, I cannot keep paying these babysitters. I am praying for you, I am believing, Father."
Ten years he served a man he knew little about, in the most personal ways. He took care of him for ten years—and the man was not particularly nice, we do know that, because Elijah kept telling him to leave.
Overcoming Offenses
Now we are living in a time today that people will leave your church over a member. "I left because somebody in a red hat said something smart to me. Back on the twenty-seventh row on the right-hand corner there was a fat lady in a red hat and she said something smart—and me and my kid left your church."
If you are easily offended you will never be awesome. You have to be strong enough to deal with different types of personalities to walk into your destiny. People who are easily offended will never be mighty. You cannot be mighty and petty at the same time. You have got to decide—am I going to be mighty or am I going to be petty?
He kept saying, "As the Lord liveth, I will not leave thee." As the Lord liveth, I will not leave thee. As the Lord liveth, I will not leave thee. As the Lord liveth, I will not leave thee.
What produces that kind of loyalty? Let us do an autopsy on this decade. What produces that kind of loyalty in an era where loyalty is hard to find?
The Power of Need and Passion
Is it just good character that does that? I do not think so. I think it is need. Elijah needed a prophet in his stead and Elisha needed purpose.
See, if you do not need to serve, the first time I offend you, you will quit. But when you need to serve—when you are called to serve, when you get a sense of fulfillment out of service—you can get your feelings hurt and still show up for work the next day and say, "What needs to be done?" Because you have got to have a need to do it.
If you do not have a need to do it you would not be able to do it. You could not work in our Creative Arts Department if you did not have a need to do it—because when they really go after something they rehearse every night, every night, every night, every night.
Now I want to sing but I do not want to sing every night—and that is why I am not in the choir, because I want to sing once a quarter. Once a quarter I will join the choir and sing. But if you all start rehearsing every night, every night—you have to need to do that, you have to enjoy that, you have to get a sense of fulfillment out of doing that, you have to really be into that.
It is more than being able to sing—because there are some people who can sing you crazy sitting out there in the pews right there but they are not really called to it like that. It has to be your daily bread. It has to be what excites you and what motivates you. You have to have a passion for it or it does not work.
If you do not have a passion, it is not enough to have a gift. I know some gifted people that are in prison. I know some gifted people that are sleeping under a bridge. You have passion to go with the gift—or I can offend you and you will walk away.
And let me tell you, God will always test your intent by insults. I am going to say it again—God will always test your intent by insult. Because if an insult can make you quit, you were not worthy of the job in the first place.
Autopsy on the Past
An autopsy is something they do to find out clues, to find out information that was not revealed another way. They do a forensic analysis to evaluate what is going on. And when they do that forensic analysis they learn from it—they learn from what is lost.
We keep having new experiences without doing autopsies on old ones. So we get married again without finding out what went wrong with the first marriage—and so there we are doing again in the second marriage what we did in the first marriage, because the truth be told we are still married to the first person.
So when the second person gets mad or does something that reminds you of the first person, you get mad and flip out in an uncanny way that shocks him—because they do not realize you are not really talking to him, you are talking to the other guy that you were married to before—because you have never done an autopsy on your past to figure out what needs to change in order to really walk in the newness of life.
You have got a new date, you have got a new dress, you have got a new house, you have got a new name—but that same old attitude continues to live because you have never had the courage to do an autopsy on the past to prepare for the future.
There are things you can learn from what you lost. There are things you can learn from what you lost.
Eschatology: Study of the End
In theology, there is a term called eschatology—and eschatology comes from two Greek words which mean last study. Let us do a last study—the study of the end of things: end of an age, the end of the world, the end of nature, the end of the kingdom, the end of an era, the end of a thing.
Look back over ten years in your life—what happened? What happened in your life over ten years and what have you learned from it? Because if you lost it and did not learn anything from it that means you have no profit from it—and one of the worst things you can be in the Scriptures is an unprofitable servant.
An unprofitable servant is somebody who has nothing left from what they lost. They are unprofitable. It does not mean that they did not do business but they did not have anything left from what they lost—they broke even.
If you do not learn from what you have lost you have no profit. Why would you have that much pain and no profit? To have gone through that much pain ought to demand that you get something out of it that makes you wiser, that makes you stronger, that makes you better, that makes you healthier, that makes you whole.
Gilgal: Cutting and Rolling Away
And so I thought we ought to do an analysis to begin to understand the journey that they went on—because there might be some clues. He took him to Gilgal. They had been in Gilgal. Gilgal is that place that stones and knives were in Gilgal. Gilgal is the place where the children of Israel gathered stones as a monument so that their children would know that God was with them when they passed through the Jordan River. So that is why I call it stones and knives.
Gilgal is the place that when this next generation got ready to cross over they took sharp stones and made knives out of them and circumcised their sons before they went into the promised land. And Elijah and Elisha went through Gilgal—the place of cutting, the place of separation, the place of rolling away.
That is what it literally means—Gilgal literally means to roll away: roll away shame, roll away anger, roll away disgrace, roll away hostility. You have got to roll some things away. You have got to roll them away to make sure that when they circumcise the men, that means some things did not cross the Jordan with them. They left something behind.
What are you going to leave behind? Are you willing to leave behind the way you talk? Are you willing to leave behind the way you think about your story?
Most people are not—and that is why they never have a new experience because they never have new language.
Planning in Decades
We think about our lives in decades. I was from the sixties—all the boomers will tell you right now, "I grew up in the sixties, child." Well, I grew up in the seventies, I grew up in the eighties. We think about our lives in decades but we plan our lives in days. Very few people have a plan for the next ten years.
So how can you measure how good was the day when you do not have the decade in mind? How can you measure the success of a year if you do not have a long-term goal in mind? Where do you want to be ten years from now?
You evaluate the year—not whether good or bad happens in a year, which is a message the church has been teaching for years, "This is going to be your year"—and you shout all over the church because you think that nothing is going to go wrong that year.
People are going to die this year, people are going to get sick this year, people are going to have car wrecks this year, people are going to get on your nerves this year, things are going to happen to you that are not fair this year. That happens every year—that is life.
No Magic Years
There will be no magic years where nobody dies. Death is a natural part of life—it is painful, it hurts, I am not minimizing it but understand that that is going to happen. You are not going to pray death away. It is your family today, it will be my family tomorrow, it will be that family the next day. Death is a reality—it always has been and will be.
There will be no magic years as it relates to life. There will be no years where everything goes right and everybody likes you and everybody treats you good and everybody treats you right and you get everything you are going after. There will be no years like that.
There is always going to be somebody getting on your nerves, there is always going to be somebody talking about you, there is always going to be somebody fighting you, there is always going to be something to solve, there is always going to be bad news, there is always going to be shocking news—and there is always going to be years full of good and bad.
So how do we monitor whether the year is successful? We monitor it by how close it got us to the decade and the goal we set for the next ten years. All those other things are distractions.
Bethel: Access to God's Presence
God said I will fight—in fact, I will take the bad things and make them work for your good if you have purpose. If you have purpose, "I will make all things work together for the good of them that love the Lord"—even the bad things, even the things you have cried over, even the people who died, even the people who left you, even the people who forsook you.
He walked him to Gilgal and said you have got some cutting to do, dude. You have got some flesh that has got to come off of you, you have got some things that need to be rolled away for you to be the person that you need to be.
And then he takes him to Bethel—and Bethel is a place where Jacob lays his head on a stone and the heavens open up to him because he wants him to know, "You always have access to God."
Bethel is the place where Jacob laid his head on a stone and the heavens opened up and the angels ascended and descended—and he called it Bethel because he called it the House of God because he literally thought he had found this spot that opened up to the heavens. He thought it was the spot. It really was not the spot—it was the space he was in.
Any spot is the spot if you are in the right space. You can go in the bathroom and shut yourself up in the stall and it can be the right spot if you are in the right space. It could be in your car—you could be in your car riding down the road and God will come in the car with you.
Bethel is the place where you learn you have access to God—where you learn you do not have to call your prayer partner, you do not have to call your prayer sister, you do not need your pastor to come by your house, you do not need the bishop to bless you, you do not need to kiss the Pope's ring. Wherever you are, if you stand still and call on the name of the Lord, God will show up in your life right there.
God Is Always Present
God does not have special people. You are just as much God's child as I am God's child. God will hear you just as fast as He will hear me.
God will come to you when your mouth is taped up, God will come to you with a tube down your throat, God will come to you when you are laid out on a stretcher, God will come to you in a nursing home, God will come to you in a homeless shelter, God will come to you wherever you are.
His name is Jehovah-shammah—Jehovah-shammah means I am present. I am not on my way, I am not coming, I am not fixing to come. Boom, I am there.
You cannot be my prophet if you cannot provoke my presence. You cannot be my prophet and lead the congregation to get in the presence of God. You have got to be able to bring Him about all by yourself.
Despise not the day of small beginnings. While you are working a job that is half paying you the wages you really want to be paid, God says I am still teaching you something.
I did not bring you there for the money—I brought you there to learn something, to be a witness, to be a testimony. I am getting you ready for something that is bigger than where you are right now.
Jordan: Consistency Tested
And so he comes down to the Jordan—and when it gets to the Jordan he says, If you see me when I am taken up—there are some things you cannot get from me in a week, you cannot be my best friend in a weekend. There are some things you cannot get from me early.
I have got to know you. I have got to see you mad, I have got to see you hurt, I have got to see you depressed, I have got to see you lonely. I need to know that I can count on you even when you are depressed, even when you are feeling low.
If you are going to be my prophet, you have got to be consistent.