TD Jakes - Believing Matters - Part 1
The preacher emphasizes that believing in God is the core of what makes someone a Christian and the only true gateway to Him, far more important than intellectual knowledge, emotions, works, or church activities. Drawing from Genesis (the root of sin in unbelief), the examples of miracles like raising Lazarus, and Hebrews 11, he concludes that without faith it is impossible to please God, and everything God does is designed to help us believe.
The Enemy Attacks Our Belief System
I want you to see that believing is the pivotal point of what defines you as a Christian, as a believer, as a person of faith, as a child of the King. And so, if there is anything that the enemy wants to attack, he wants to attack what you believe. Now, intellectualism is extremely important, and research should never be discounted. You want to be as smart as you can be, learn all you can, read all you can, develop all you can, evolve all you can—that is very important.
But believing is our only gateway to God. Not intellectualism; believing is our only gateway. It is not baking pies, it is not paying tithes—you cannot buy it. It is not singing in the choir, it is not preaching the Word. Believing is our only gateway to God. And the first place in the book of Genesis starts with unbelief. The original sin is really unbelief. At the root of the forbidden fruit is unbelief: “Has God said?”
Unbelief Led to Expulsion from the Garden
Questioning what God says is an attempt to tear down the belief system that was constructed that allowed them to stay in the garden. So, the enemy does not try to physically move them out of the garden; he tries to move them away from what they believe. Because if he moves them away from what they believe, then he will automatically move them out of the garden—you all do not hear what I am saying.
So, he comes against what you know about God, trying to alter it. “Oh, you should eat of it because if you eat, you are going to be just like God; you will know as God.” Though now he is questioning God’s integrity, like God is trying to stop you from doing something because God is intimidated by you—what arrogance, what utter arrogance, what utter stupidity. And yet he is attacking. He is attacking not their bodies; he is attacking their belief system. The enemy is not after your body; he is after your belief system.
Now, he might attack your body, but he is only attacking your body to break down your belief system.
From Unbelief to Childlike Faith
So, if that is how sin entered into the world—through an ideology, an idea that comes against what God had said—then in order to fix how sin entered into the world, we have to go from unbelief to believing. So, God now fixes it so simple that a fool, though he be a wayfaring man, can still enter therein. So that the person—whether they are bright or not bright, went to school or did not go to school, intellectual or not intellectual—it does not make any difference whether they are 3 or 300.
God has fixed it that we all must become like children and have childlike faith and dare to believe Him. And while knowing is important and learning is important and growing is important, you do not want to lean to your own understanding. You do not want to lean on what you know, because what you know is always evolving—come on, somebody.
For a simple thing, when I went to school, Pluto was the ninth planet, and then they decided it was not a planet at all—it was a dwarf planet—because as they know more, knowledge is always changing; ideas are always changing.
Build Your Faith on the Rock
Your belief system has to be built on something that is solid and something that is stable and something that is proven and something that is true and something that you trust in. Your belief system has to be built on God—not church, not denominations. Oh, you all do not hear what I am saying. Not preachers, not televangelists, not small church pastors—it does not make any difference.
People make gods out of all kinds of stuff; they make gods out of their children. You can make gods out of anything. All of these things will shake; all of these things will crumble. But your hope has to be built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and His righteousness—not yours, His; not yours, but His; not mine, but His; not your mama’s, but His righteousness; not your grandfather’s, but His righteousness.
Your faith has to be built on something that is solid as a rock so that you become above being Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of God in Christ, Church of God in Prophecy, Church of God Got It Going On, In Jesus’s Name Incorporated—above whatever you might call yourself.
Believing, Not Emotions
If you are nothing else, at the very minimum you must be what they first called us: a believer. So, somebody shout, “I am a believer.” If I am a believer, what does a believer do? A believer believes. So it has to start with the belief system.
You can come up here to accept Christ and get slain in the Spirit; other people burst into tears, and some people get goose pimples. Some people feel nothing at all. It is not an emotion you are looking for; it is a change to your belief system. The Bible says Esau sought repentance with many tears and found it not. This is not about emotions. You cannot turn on the tear faucet and move God.
Have you ever seen people that could just cry at will? And anytime they wanted attention, they start crying. God said, “I am not going to be psyched out because you cry. I am not looking at how you cry; I am looking at how you believe.” Esau sought repentance with many tears and found it not. The reason he could not find it: he was seeking change through his emotions. And repentance means to change your mind—metanoia, to change your mind.
So, you can change your emotions all day long, but if you do not change your mind—how many of you ever had somebody promise you, “I am not going to do it no more; I am never going to do this no more; I promise you I am never going to do it no more”—then they went right back and did it again? They had emotions; they might even have felt those emotions, but they did not change their mind.
A New Belief System Shapes Your Life
The Gospel then is designed to give you a new belief system in which you build your life around—not just your habits, not just going to church on Sunday—but you build your life around it. You make your decisions around it; you make your choices around it; you get married around it; you decide what I am going to do and what I am going to be based on that belief system, that sovereign, absolute belief system.
The Bahamas used to have London as a sovereign. Even though they were separated by miles with water, the rule of law in the Bahamas—if they were driving on the left in London, they were driving on the left in the Bahamas—because they were imitating their sovereign. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
So, when heaven becomes your sovereign, you want to imitate what is going on in heaven in your life. God wants you to believe Him. His integrity warrants your belief. To believe Him is to embrace God’s integrity, not my integrity.
Believing God’s Integrity
Abraham became—we are going to talk more about him in a minute—but Abraham became the friend of God because he believed God. He believed God’s integrity. Do you believe God’s integrity? God said, “I am not a man, that I should lie, nor the son of man, that I should repent. Have I not spoken it? Shall I not perform it? Have I not said it? Shall I not make it good?”
This is God’s Word. It is not contemporary ideology; it is not about embracing the culture; it is not about the latest fad they have going on. It is about embracing what God has done and believing that His integrity is absolute.
Why do you think Jesus performed more miracles than He did messages? It is because He did the miracles that you might believe. The miracles did not mean anything to God; it was the mechanism to get you to believe.
The Raising of Lazarus: A Sign to Believe
Oh, you all do not hear what I am saying. Let us take Lazarus for example. Lazarus is sick; Jesus waits and lets him die. Why does Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead in John chapter 11 when He knows that no matter how many times He raises Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus is still going to die? Healing the woman with the issue of blood did not stop her from dying. Feeding the 5,000 did not stop them from being hungry again.
He only did the miracle so that you might believe. So Jesus waits and lets Lazarus die and lets them bury him and shows up at the house when they are eating chicken. He even weeps with them while they are crying and says, “Show me where you laid him down.”
Now, Jesus knows that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Jesus is not sad because Lazarus died; Jesus is using Lazarus’s death as an illustration—He let him die. If Jesus had been worried about Lazarus dying, He did not have to go raise him up; He could have spoken the word only and Lazarus would have been risen from the dead. Lazarus dying was a setup.
And then He goes and raises him from the dead. Now, God knows that Lazarus dying—and even Mary and Martha knew they would see him again in the resurrection—so why did He let Lazarus die? He let Lazarus die and then came and woke Lazarus up.
This happens in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. But go to the Gospel of John, chapter 12. All this drama has happened in 11—the crying, Lazarus is dead, the tomb, Mary running out, hollering at Jesus, everybody freaking out, the family going crazy, Jesus rolls the stone away, Lazarus rises from the dead.
Now, in John chapter 12, Lazarus has been raised from the dead, and he is sitting at the feast with Jesus, and here come the unbelievers around. And the Bible says in John 12:9, “Meanwhile a large crowd of Jews found out that Jesus was there and came, not only because of Him but also to see Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead.”
So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well. Lazarus was the problem. “For on account of him many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and believing in Him.” So, the whole purpose of Lazarus—one of the purposes of raising Lazarus from the dead—was that they might believe.
The purpose of the miracle is not the miracle. If He gives you bread, you are going to get hungry again. If He gives you life, you are going to die again. If He heals your body, it is not going to stop death. All of this is just so that you might believe. Somebody shout, “I’m a believer.”
Prophecy to Strengthen Belief
Finally, find John 14:28-29: “You have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If you loved Me, you would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for My Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, you might believe.”
He said, “I am telling you before it happens.” He said, “I have given you prophecies so that when the prophecy comes to pass, your faith will be increased and that you might believe.” He said, “The only reason I am telling you what is going to happen before it happens—so that when it happens and I get up from the dead and I rise again—your faith might be strengthened and that you might believe.”
Not so you can dance, not so you can beat your tambourine, not so you can start a choir, not so you can shout until your makeup drips on your face—no. God says what He wants from you above everything else is believing. And dancing and praising Him and beating tambourines are nice, but if it does not lead you to believing, you might as well drop your tambourine on the floor.
We Are in a Faith Fight
We are in a faith fight right now. And what you believe matters—not how you feel, not how you hurt, not how your emotions are, not what you would like to have, not what you would like to drive, not what you would like to live in. What matters most is what you believe.
I believe God. I believe His Word. I believe what He said. I believe that He is able. I believe that He loves me. I believe that He knows what is best for me. And if I hurt, then I hurt knowing that if You allowed me to hurt, it must work for my good. Therefore we glory in tribulation, for tribulation works patience, and patience experience, and experience hope, and hope makes not ashamed. Look at somebody; say, “Believing matters.”
Faith: The Substance of Things Hoped For
Hebrews 11:1-6 tells us again: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is confidence in what we hoped for and assurance about what we do not see. I do not need faith for what I can see; I do not need faith for what I can do myself. I need faith when I do not have any other evidence.
The Bible says in King James: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is my evidence. What is your evidence admissible in court? I believe. I believe. I believe it. This is what the ancients were commended for.
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. And most of what you are worried about is what is visible. Most of what you are praying about is what is visible. But what you need to understand: what made what is visible is invisible. And so, if you break it in the spirit, you can break it in the flesh. Glory to God.
Jesus found the woman that was bowed over for 18 years and could not lift herself up, and He did not heal her—He just gave her a new belief system. He said, “Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.” And the moment she heard that she was loosed, she immediately changed her behavior and straightened up herself.
What you think about yourself has got you bowed over. What you have going on in your head has got you tripping. The moment you get it: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
Without Faith It Is Impossible to Please God
I do not know who I am talking to today, but somebody is going to get a breakthrough. I do not care what you see with your eye; I care what you believe in your heart. This is what the elders were commended for—not their behavior, their belief.
By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.
By faith Enoch was taken from this life so that he should not experience death. He could not be found because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.
Anybody in here want to please God? If you want to please God, make some noise. I want to please God. I have not always pleased God; I have disappointed Him; I have let Him down—but I want to please God.
You have to have the desire to please God. “He that hungers and thirsts after righteousness shall be filled”—not he that is righteous, he that hungers and thirsts after righteousness shall be filled. You have to want it.
Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God. Without faith—I do not care what you give, I do not care how talented you are, I do not care how you can preach, I do not care how important you are to your church, I do not care how big the check is you write—the Bible says without faith it is impossible to please God.
Because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. Seek Him—I came here to seek Him. I live my life to seek Him. I have not mastered God; I am in pursuit of God.
The Bible says, “Seek and you shall find. Ask and it shall be given. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” Are there any God seekers left?
You Cannot Receive What You Do Not Believe
All of that is my setup. The more we start talking about this, doubt is being pushed out of the room, out of your mind, out of your spirit, out of your behavior. I believe.
If God raised Lazarus from the dead just to get people to believe, if God prophesied His own resurrection so that when we saw it we might believe—God has been working overtime trying to get your mind together. God wants to get your belief system together. God wants to get your head on straight.
When you walk in the room, faith ought to walk in the room. When you come into the hospital, faith ought to come into the hospital. When you come into the office, faith ought to come into the office. You are a believer—that is your contribution; that is what you add.
I believe. My eyes have not seen, my ears have not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has in store for me—but it has been revealed unto me by His Spirit. The Spirit not only convicts me; the Spirit convinces me. The Spirit informs me what is mine. The Spirit informs me what is possible.
How do you receive it? Believe it. You cannot receive what you do not believe.