TD Jakes - Uproot It
Jesus commands forgiving a repentant offender seven times a day, prompting disciples to cry "increase our faith." Forgiveness is not optional but essential for spiritual breathing—inhaling offense, exhaling release—to stay available for God's next blessing, uprooting bitterness (sycamine tree roots) through faith and praise to break paralysis and generational curses.
Seven Times a Day Forgiveness
He says, but through your seed with Sarah, not Hagar, shall all nations of the earth be blessed.
So, Jesus goes on to this thing about forgiving, and then starts telling them if they do it seven times and repent, you have to forgive them.
I do not like this verse, I do not want to preach this either, I do not want to forgive you, I do not like you.
You hurt me seven times in a day, I do not like you, I do not want you to come on my property, do not come around me.
If you see my car, drive around the block, I do not like you.
In fact, I am going to get a set of license plates that says, "I do not like you," with your picture over in the corner so you will know I am talking about you.
Just because I am preaching it does not mean I like it, I do not like this, I do not want to forgive them either.
Do not judge me, I am not no worse than you.
But Jesus told us to forgive if they do it seven times a day.
Now I can love you once or twice, but seven times a day? That is a lot.
And when Jesus told the disciples to do it seven times a day, they said, "Increase our faith".
They said, "Increase our faith".
Forgiveness Like Breathing
Let me deal with the seven times a day.
The seven times a day is that Jesus is trying to get them to live like you breathe, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, if you ever stop doing that you are going to die.
If you ever inhale and do not exhale you are going to die, and Jesus is saying as soon as you inhale something, exhale it, release it back out as fast as you take it in; and as long as you have a system that allows you to exhale what you inhale, you will live.
The same way that it is in the natural it is in the spiritual.
You have to let it go, not for their sake, no, it is not about you boo, it is not about you, I have to let it go for me so that I am available to inhale again.
If I hold what you did in then I cannot get nothing else inside of me but anger against you, and in order for me to be ready for what is next, I have to let it go.
So I have to forgive you for not raising me and I have to forgive you because I never knew my father, and I have to forgive you because you left me and my mother by myself.
I have to forgive you so I can survive, because if I hold that in I do not have room for creativity and power and life and joy and strength and deliverance.
I have to let it go, you are not worth me dying over, I...
Oh my God, I do not know why God had me preach this this morning but somebody in here needs this word.
Big People Release Quickly
And I learned the bigger you are, the more life you have, the quicker you have to exhale, the quicker you have to release.
You cannot stay mad at somebody when you are a big person because they take too much energy, and in order for me to be available for what is next I cannot be upset for 20 years, that is too much of my life.
You cannot have 20 years of my life now, I do not care what you did, you cannot have 20 years of my life.
I refuse to give you, you cannot have it.
I must get over it so that I am available for what is next.
So when Jesus told them to develop a system of release, a system of release, a system of release, they said oh God, increase our faith, yeah, help me Jesus, help me Jesus, help me Jesus, help me.
But I am telling you, let me start out by telling you what I have noticed from experience.
People who do not do this never become hugely successful, never, never ever become hugely successful because they are unavailable.
The force it takes to get up does not allow you the energy to stay mad, it is too hard to climb up, you need your wind, you got to be able to breathe.
You need your creativity, you need your passion, you need your happy back, you need your happy back.
I know that is not good English, I know it is not a good sentence.
You need your happy back because you are happy back gives you your creativity back and your strength.
You need your strength back, and you cannot drink it down, you cannot sex it down, you cannot smoke it down, you cannot shoot it up, and you cannot dance it down, you have to let it go.
Increase Our Faith
Now, so when they said, "Increase our faith," I thought, first of all, I thought that was a weird response, that faith is a weird response to forgiveness, because I did not immediately see where faith had anything to do with forgiveness.
See, I am working on it, and suddenly I recognized that both faith and forgiveness live in the spirit realm.
Okay, and Jesus says to them, you cannot use not having more faith as an excuse not to forgive because, "If you have the faith as of a grain of a mustard seed".
And when he started down that road with, "If you have the faith as of a grain of a mustard seed," you know how small that is because we taught on that before, that is a tiny little seed.
I thought he was going to say you can speak to the mountain like you did before, but he did not, he said, "You can say to the sycamine tree," I said Jesus, I said Jesus, have you forgotten your own Scripture?
It is not a tree, Jesus, it is a mountain.
I read it over in the other verse, it is a mountain, now you to turn it into a tree, that does not make sense, Jesus.
We supposed speak to the mountain, the mountain supposed to move.
The Sycamine Tree
What is a sycamine tree anyway?
So I had to research a sycamine tree, and put my tree up on the board.
Yeah-yeah, there is the sycamine tree, let me go up here.
See, everything about the mountain is going up.
But everything about the sycamine tree is going down, it is going down, it is going down.
The sycamine tree was common in the Palestinian region in the times of Jesus, the top of the tree is not that big, it is almost like a big bush because most of the life of the sycamine tree goes into its root; look at how complex the root system is.
A sycamine tree is hard to kill.
A sycamine tree is as hard to kill as a mountain is to move.
The reason the sycamine tree is hard to kill is you can cut all of these leaves off, you can cut all of these branches off, you can cut the trunk off and it will still come up again because it has got such a strong root system.
Do you see that?
Your pain has worked so far down that Jesus compares it to a sycamine tree, and he says, "If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you can speak to the sycamine tree".
He goes, he mentions the root of the tree, give me my next slide.
He mentions the root of the tree because the root of the tree is where the problem is.
So what he is saying to you is do not just use your faith to wear crosses around your neck or ichthuses on your car, or one way with Jesus on your bumper sticker, or to wear long dresses and do not cut your hair.
Do not use your faith to dance and shout and run around in skinny jeans and fall on the floor and get slain in the Spirit.
He says use your faith to pluck the offense up from the root because the root of offense is bitterness.
Root of Bitterness
Can I go a little bit deeper?
Okay, give me Hebrews 12:14-15, I want you to see this, is this good?
Hebrews 12:14-15 says, "Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord".
Follow peace will find a way to get along with everybody, "Follow peace with all men," not just right men, not just good men, not just holy men, not just fair men, not just with just men, not with men who never cheated, not with men who gave you money to help you raise your baby.
"Follow peace," I am not saying you got to stay married to them.
"Follow peace," I am not saying you got to go to bed with them, "Follow peace with all men".
I cannot spend my energy in disappointment with your inadequacy, I got to find a way to be at peace with you, "Follow peace with all men".
I thought y'all wanted to be like Jesus, Jesus was forgiving people while he was dying, baby.
While he was dying, bleeding to death on the cross, he was praying for the people who nailed him to the tree, so if you seriously want to be a Christian...
Everything that went wrong in my life is why I am here today, it is all the stuff that hurt me that made me who I am today.
Oh my God, it is not the blessings of my childhood that brought me here, it is the trauma of my childhood that brought me here.
It was good for me that I was afflicted, it was good I was on welfare, it was good I lost my car, it was good I went through hell.
I have an image burned in my head that will never go away of you and me sitting at the top of the stairs in the house on Page Street, 600 Page Street.
Mama had put the bedrooms up in the attic and mom and daddy were downstairs fighting, and he had got the axe and chopped up all the furniture, and I was screaming as loud as I could, a little boy at the top of the stairs sitting beside you, I will remember that until the day I die.
I can hear me screaming and glass shattering and neighbors started waking up in the middle of the night because I would not stop screaming.
You remember that? I know you do.
I can still hear me screaming, I can still hear the glass shattering, I still remember being scared to go down the stairs for fear Mama was dead.
I have to show you that I am not just preaching from a book.
I have to be able... see, you cannot preach and not expose your own trauma.
I was screaming, I was screaming, I was screaming like a lunatic.
I was about seven years old and I could not stop screaming, "Stop", absolute trauma.
I shared with you because I want you to understand that I am not preaching out of a book, something I read in a commentary, I am telling you stuff I know.
All of that made all of this.
You do not hear me. All of that made all of this, all of that made all of this.
Uproot Bitterness
Faith, is it sensual? "It is the substance of things... it is the evidence for things not seen", sensual is senses.
Faith defies senses, my senses still remember that, if I talk about it long I am back on them steps.
"Faith is the evidence for things not seen," and when you use your faith, you are putting your faith against what you remember.
It is evidence that I would not die on the top of them steps, and my life would not end at the top of those steps.
I have never raised my hand at my wife in my life, in my life, ever, because I do not want my future to look like my past, and if it ever gets where we do not have no more between us but that, I would rather be by myself than to repeat in my future what I survived in my past.
No, it is not going to happen. It is the truth, it is the truth, it is the truth.
My sister is alive, she was sitting there with me, she always been my protector, she was sitting there with me.
Well, how do I increase my faith?
Number three, faith grows from Word, "Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God".
That is why you come to church, because I am treating somebody.
I am trying all I know how to help you get that thing by the root, to help you uproot it.
And in order to help you uproot it I got to show you mine too, because your little boy is not going to believe me till I show you my little boy.
Your child is not going to remember, you are not going to accept my evidence as legitimate because all you see is a preacher.
You have to know that everybody got a story, everybody got a story, everybody got a story, even the person you mad at got a story; my daddy had a story.
And sometimes you cannot forgive people because all you know is what they did, you do not know why, you do not know why.
When you learn the why you are far less judgmental about the what, you understand?
I am almost where I need to be, I want you to understand this morning that you got to get that thing out of you.
Put your hands on your stomach right now, both hands on your stomach.
The root of it, and I do not know about you, but when something gets bad in my life I get right here, right down in the pit of my stomach, I could just throw up, I just, it feels horrible.
Whether it is anger or rage or disgust, it gets me in my guts, right in the pit of your stomach.
I am challenging you to uproot it, I am challenging you not to lie to yourself, not to camouflage it and cover it up, I am challenging you to pull it up by the root like the Scripture said, to let it go out of you so that you are ready to receive what God is about to release in your life.
I want you to press into your stomach and holler as loud as you can.
Get it out of you.
All the rage, all the frustration, all the bitterness, all the resentment, all the torment, and there is nothing like raging men.
There are men in this room, you are angry, sir, you are angry, you are angry, you are angry, you are angry, you are angry.
You are little boy angry, you are little boy angry but you six-foot-two, you are little boy angry having a tantrum.
You got to get that out.
There are women in this room, you drive away everything you love because you are angry, and some of you are angry just like your mother was, and you hated it in her and you did it too, and we got to break that generational curse.
We have to break the generational curse because that is stealing your future, it is stealing your peace, and Jesus said, "Cast it into the sea".
My sea is praise. "With joy we draw water from the wells of salvation".
Hallelujah, I have got a river of life springing up in me, I am going to praise up a river and bury everything that was tormenting me in that river, I command a release in your life.
I command a release in your life, get ready to receive, I command a release, I command a release in your life.
I command a release in your life, I command a release in your life.
You are going to cast that thing right into a sea of praise and worship and adoration toward God.
I command a release in your life.
Oh God, I do not want it in me, I do not want it in me, if it is not pleasing to you take it out of me, take it out of me.