The Power of A Crisis | Dr. Mike Woods, Sr. | 6-25-23

What God is doing is— I shared with the people in Jackson yesterday that God is trying to make us better humans. Say this with me. Say, say, God. God. Say it to him. Say, God. God. Make me. Make me. A better human. A better human. And I share with them how It's not God's will for us just to have great and wonderful church. I've been in church all my life, man, and I've had probably more church than most people in this room. If you add it up, I promise you, I promise, there's days I went to church every single day. Glory to God. And the tragedy though, in the church I ran into some people who were very good at church but very poor at showing up in the world. Very poor at implementing the things that church offers, the things that church brings. It's more than us just gathering. We have to have a balance in our life— hear me— that extends beyond this room, beyond this facility. There's got to be a balance that causes us to be a real light to the world. Say that with me. Say, Lord, make me a light. For real. To the world. So this whole thing, and I'm gonna talk today about balance through crisis. I believe, and I'm still talking about Life Without Limits. You can't live without limits. Here it is. If you're always in crisis, you don't use your crisis A lot of times God shows up in our life with a crisis to get our attention because we can swing too far out here on the pendulum and never come back center and be balanced. To be balanced means that both sides equal the same. So just as good as you are and worshiping, preaching, teaching, singing, whatever it is we do. We need to be just as good outside of this building and being a light to people and showing up in the world. Let me propose this to you: if Don Lemon on CNN called you and said, I want you to come on my show and give me a 5-minute talk on how you show up in the world. Millions of people are going to be watching without preparation. What would you say? What would your word— what would you— would you be, I'm a great worshiper? I go to church every Sunday. The world's watching you. What— how do you show up? How do you show up in purpose? How do you show up in assignment in a way that's going to affect others? That's something to think about. I want you to think about that because perhaps you may get that call one day, and if you do, what are you going to say? How do you show up for humanity? This whole thing— y'all hear me talk about this a lot, about being good in the world, but that's what Living Without Limits is about. Because the church a lot of times can limit us, and we'll be in here doing everything right, and we'll go out there and can't get nothing right. And reality is, I want to help you get it all right. I want to help you be balanced. I want to help you be effective in every aspect of your life. I'm not so much concerned about we singing the right songs, doing an A&B selection. I'm not concerned about all that. I'm not concerned about ushers. I'm not really— I'm not concerned about the traditional things that make the church the church, because again, most of those systems have failed us. Oh boy, I mean, it made us good at having order in the church. Those things are great, but let's learn also how to be great outside of here. Again, this whole thing started with the world. We learned the scripture in Sunday school, John 3:16: For God so loved the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't say he loved the church. I think I'm good now, G. Yeah, y'all know that didn't say the church, right? Right. Because all of us, before we became the church, we were the world. So he loved the world just as it was, with all his flaws and all. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. Guess what? He ain't quit loving the world. He didn't just do that one time. He still loves the world. He still wants people in the world to be affected by us. He wants to rule the seen world from the unseen world. How does he do that? He does that through us. He can't rule— hear me— in the seen world if you don't show up and be available. So I'm gonna give you some points about how God brings crisis into our life to create balance. Can I submit to you, the more crisis you have is proof of how unbalanced you are? God bothers us to make us better. Honestly, you can live without crisis because the more you grow and mature, the less you need them to bring you into balance. But God allows stuff. He'll allow someone to hurt you. He'll allow things to happen in your life to get your attention. He bothers us to make us better. I was at one point in my life, I was going through so many crisis. I said, God, would you please leave me alone? Because I knew at that point it wasn't anything but him. It wasn't the devil. It wasn't me. It was him allowing crisis to show up so he could balance me out. You gotta, again, you gotta love your entire life. So God sends crisis. What is crisis, Michael? Crisis is a set of circumstances that occur, which is beyond your control. Crisis can occur in nature. I go back to Hurricane Katrina, great example. So many people down in New Orleans lost their homes, lost their families. That was a crisis. Could they control that? No, they had no way of controlling Katrina and what it did. I submit that God could have stopped it, but he didn't. So because he didn't, you have to ask yourself why he didn't stop that crisis. Because he did it and allowed it to bring balance, to open the minds and the hearts of people in the city who are full of witchcraft, full of sin. It's okay, I'm gonna let this happen to create balance. The reality is when crisis occur, you can rebuke it. If it's from God, you can't stop it. If God allows it, you gotta ride through it. I'm gonna give you some points. I'm gonna, you know, put some scripture on the end and we'll be done today. Crisis can occur in your finances. You can lose your job. You can lose your source of income. What happens? What do you do when that happens? Glory to God. Your family could fail you. Crisis is an intense time of difficulty. It's hard, it's painful, it's dangerous. Anybody ever been in a crisis? I've had my share. But you know what? I love God so much. He has a way of using everything to get the glory out of our life. Crisis is a type of affliction. Affliction is distress, grief. I've been in situations in my life in the past where I want to close all the curtains, get it as dark as I could, put the covers over my head, didn't want to talk to nobody, didn't want to leave my room because I was distressed. I couldn't understand why what was going on was happening to me, only to find out again God was using this to make me better. Now I can look back over my shoulder and say, I thank God for the crisis. Amen. I thank God for allowing me to go through it. Here's the first thing I want to tell you: don't curse your crisis. When crisis shows up, there's no need in throwing a tantrum. There's no need in getting in the floor kicking. There's no need in losing it. Because watch this, crises are seasonal. Anytime a crisis shows up, it's temporary. Matter of fact, say this with me. Say, everything is temporary, everything is temporary, except God, except God, and his promises, and his promises. Come on, say it again. Everything is temporary, everything is temporary, except God, except God. And his promises. So now, no matter where you are and what you're going through, what you're dealing with, it's temporary. The only thing permanent is God and his promises. So if God allowed a crisis, you know what you ought to do when they show up? You ought to rejoice, because that means you're about to go through a season that on the other side You're gonna have great victory. Amen. Oh, glory to God. So you can't curse your crisis. Why? Because crisis is another point. You write down one too. Crisis is the incubator of creativity. You gotta learn to create in crisis instead of panicking when crisis shows up. A lot of times we freak out when a crisis come, not knowing that nothing is never as big as it first appears. I'm gonna say that again. Nothing is ever as big as it first appears. Think about the stuff you've gone through and how you reacted when it showed up, and then you got on the other side and realized that really wasn't as bad as I thought. Because nothing is ever as big as it first looks. What you should do when you get in crisis is find your creative niche. Watch this, you are a creator because God lives in you. It amazes me that we can be in the church serving the Creator and watch this, never desire to create nothing. Not just in here, but Everywhere you got church folk can speak in tongues, roll on the floor, prophesy, spit, blow bubbles. And I'm not against none of that. I mean, again, I, I love prophecy, I love spirituality, I love what we do in the church. But in the day, what I don't like is we do all that and then we can't balance the other side and be effective in our lives. So God has to keep sending Christ. So we get balanced. So you gotta find in crisis a place of creativity. See, what crisis does, it demands a new way of thinking about old ideas. See, when you're in a crisis, you gotta think, right? If you got a mortgage and your job is the source that you are using to pay your mortgage and you lose your job. Well, it doesn't change the situation. The mortgage still has to be paid. Amen. Are y'all hearing me? Amen. What you got to do now in the crisis is think of a new way to pay the mortgage. What saints don't want to do is think. We get in a crisis and we want God to drop it out the sky. Well, God says, I've given you every earth-bearing seed inside of you, and I've given you your mouth to prophesy to your crisis. See, we want to prophesy in church. I got a problem that you can give me a word of that God said about me, and you can't give me a word— give yourself a word of what he's saying about you. Oh, that's a problem. Charity started home, then it spread abroad. I can't— I don't follow— that's why I follow children. I don't follow prophets that have never been through nothing. I don't care how spiritual they say they are. If I'm looking at your life and you prophesying, you ain't got a car, you ain't got a house, you broke all the time, you're begging, what you gonna tell me? Because you got prophetic power, you— because we got to create it. And the prophecy ain't just me calling you out, giving you a word. Matter of fact, let me submit something to you. That's the lowest level of prophecy there is. Hear this: the more you mature, the less you need somebody to call you out and give you a word. That's right. Because watch this, I say this all the time, I'll say it again. Ain't no prophet ever got to prophesy to me. Never, because you know what? I spend enough time with God. My relationship with the Lord is tight, so he talks to me all the time. And if the prophet do prophesy, he's just giving me a second witness to what God told me when I went by myself. And watch this, this is how I know a false prophet. If you tell me something other than what God's been telling me, I ain't receiving it anyway. This is why people get hoodwinked by prophecy. Because they don't have no relationship themselves. Wait a minute, thank you, Lord. Prophesying shall cease. That's what he said. Yeah, he didn't say when, he said he's gonna see. There's a place of maturity, I promise you, where prophesying slows down in your life. I've been in the room with folk that call themselves master prophets and can see through walls and muddy water. And they prophesied to everybody in the building but me. And before I took offense, I'm like, they ain't give me no word. It's a prophetic meeting, I ain't get nothing. The Lord said to me, son, take that as a sign of your maturity. You didn't need no word. All right, see, you don't get a place where prophesy— watch this— but my word. See, we want the spooky, we want somebody to see our phone number and our Social Security number. And the number on your check. What? Why? First of all, you know all that. You know your name. If a prophet start calling names, you better look close, because most of the time they're really not calling names. Okay, they're okay. Most of the time they're on Facebook, they see the people in the church that's coming and all stuff. They already know your name before they get Okay, I mean, it's all a game. The reality is you got to get tight with God where you don't need the game. Are y'all hearing me? Good God Almighty. You know your social, you know your telephone number, you know where you live. You really want to give me some numbers? Tell me what the Powerball is. Yeah, I don't gotta say nothing. Tell me, if I give me a— that's the word I want. If God want to give me them billions like that, okay, that's the word I need you to come up with. The rest of the stuff I got covered. People be walking around with a sign on there, pick me. I'm a prophet, so I can see it. I go in places to preach, people sit in the audience, they know you're a prophet, pick me, pick the whole service. But what people don't want is prophecy that really edifies and builds, to tell you where you are. That's why it edifies, so you can grow up away from it, so it can cease. Prophecies shall cease but my word. See, we've made this— watch this— dreaming and prophesying, those are low levels of communication. Oh boy, somebody said the prophet is teaching that. Yes, cuz I want you to mature and get to hear him for yourself, cuz that ain't the only way he speaks. He will talk to you because he's real. Amen. He is. Oh God, he said my word going to stand forever, so you better get mature in this book cuz it stands forever. So watch this. I love this. Crisis is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to increase and advance over old ideas. So you get a crisis, you can examine how you did things that got you in that place in the beginning, and now you got an opportunity to retool. To relearn. Watch this, to do things differently, to start over. Glory to Jesus. So you don't have that crisis again. Remember, as you grow and mature, the less you need crisis to bring you into balance. You realize some people only pray when they're in trouble? Mm-hmm. Yeah. They call on Jesus in a minute when they're in trouble, but you ought to foster your relationship with God every day. See, and if, if you're doing that, you're getting clarity about who you are. Watch this. Crisis produces growth and development. You can write these down. It produces growth and development. You mature, you develop in Christ. You should use that opportunity to get better. Say, "Lord, mature me." Say, "Lord, grow me up." Again, the more you grow, the more you develop, the less you need crisis. And limits start coming off your life. Crisis creates new opportunities. Because again, if you lost your job— let's just say you lost your job, or you don't have a job, you don't have income— then you got to figure out a way to open up some new opportunities for you to live. Crisis ignites that passion inside of you to create something. It should. Glory to God. I won't bore y'all with this. We get right in the meat. Crisis— here we go— test and prove leadership. I will never follow a leader that hasn't been tested. We might as well put that little baby right there up here, let her talk. And if we're going to follow somebody that hadn't been tested— that's right. I'm not talking about just life issues, but I'm talking about crisis that God created to make you, and you survived it. I need somebody that been to hell and back with smoke on their close. So I can see, okay, yeah, they just come out. They can tell me how to get out. Again, that's why I'm following children. Again, because I'm— as beautiful as that baby is, and as precious as she is, she's not a leader. She has to grow into being a leader. Are y'all hearing me? She will. But if you sit that baby up here now and we gave her the responsibility every week to sit in, in however she can sit up and say, talk to us, we're gonna all be sitting here waiting because she's just gonna laugh. She get hungry, she gonna cry for somebody to come get her. I want you to think about it in the spirit. When babies are doing things, they have not been developed to do because they haven't endured the crisis. That's a dangerous piece, man. It's so many people who are suffering from false identity. I think they talk about identity theft in the natural. I think it's worse in the church and in the spirit. The devil has robbed so many people of their ID. You got people that want to be things they're not. Yeah, doing things they wasn't called to do. But if somebody— if another person tells me they're an apostle, I'm gonna snatch my head out. It ain't that many apostles. It's not that many. He gave some apostles. I know the hell it takes to wear this office. I, I'm trying to figure out how not to have it. And you got people running up, signing up for it because they think they've achieved something great because they said, I'm an apostle. Now go back and pray again because you don't want the crisis that comes with that office. Oh, I'm a prophet. Okay, if you're a prophet, again, let's use that prophetic power to shift your own life. Yeah, all right, come on, come on. Before you start trying to prophesy, if you're hurt and broken, the last thing you need to do is up before people prophesying to them. I drove from Mississippi to y'all. I didn't think it was going to be like this. Lord was giving me this on the road. He was— I preached a little bit of it yesterday. He was adding to it. But listen, yeah, come on, come on, you, you got to be ready. You're hurt, you're spewing your hurt on people, you're spewing your brokenness on people that's listening to you. What you have to do is be quiet until you get healed. Amen. I'm gonna give me a one of them old school tape recorders, y'all, and I'm gonna go and just record some people saying amen. So when I need some amen, I'm gonna get it. Crisis, again, is not to be cursed because it renews and reignites your original vision. Wait a minute, the Bible said before God formed you, he knew you, right? In Jeremiah 1. So if he knew you— if I know my wife in the biblical sense, but I knew her even before I knew her in the biblical sense, one of the first things I learned about her was her name. All right, are y'all hearing me? Amen. You don't know nobody definitely if you don't know their name. Here's the problem in the church. Most people keep going through cycles of crisis because what God's trying to do is introduce them to themselves. Because most people don't know their real name, right? Because most of our parents didn't pray when they named us. And what we don't realize, the word name in Hebrew means being as you are. So your name represents who you are. Glory to God. In Jewish culture, Hebrew culture, they would name a child based on what God said. That's why it could be weeks or months before they came up with a name. We'd be in books, oh, that's cute, that's nice. And some of these names we come up with these days, oh my God. We just throw stuff together. We like Barack and Michelle, we just throw their name together and name the child. Bar-Rochelle, come on, man. That's too much. We need to know who we really are. And what we've done, we've lived, hear this, under the auspices of a bad name. And we've been cultivated in culture that have taught us— Lord have mercy— to be something different than what God says. But there's a uniqueness, there's an authentic you that you're supposed to be. That's right. God knows your real name. That's right. So what we have to do is find out what our real name is. Even if you never— I ain't saying change your name to that, that's too far. But I'm saying, what I'm saying is, I'm saying find out who you are in God and be that. Because who you are is just as important as where you come from. That's right. I don't want you to stop your genesis at the hospital you were born in. That's not where you come from. You actually are on this earth on assignment from heaven. You came from heaven. Touch yourself. Say, I came from heaven. Say, God's my daddy, and he knows who I am. So we got to get our identity correct. Crisis introduces us to ourselves. Once you get to know you, crisis starts shutting down. Last week I went through something in my body. It was a crisis because I couldn't control it. It's out of my control. I'm like, what's going on with me? The Lord said, I had to slow you down a minute to show you how you need to take care of yourself. And if you don't take care of yourself, you can't be here to do what you got to do. A lot of times we're contributing to our own demise and don't even know it. Lord, remind me, man, you're not 30 anymore, you're 54. You'll be 54 this year, so you can't do things like you used to do. You gotta rest, you got to go to bed, you got to eat right. So God created crisis to introduce you to idiosyncrasies, issues that you got. But when you start knowing who you are, dealing with the issues, again, the crisis start getting smaller. They come few and far between. Yeah. Amen. Real quiet. One of my favorite playwrights is Shakespeare, and Shakespeare said this. He said, sweet are the uses of adversity, crisis when it show up. In other words, he's saying there's so many ways you can use crisis rather than accepting crisis as defeat, right, or it's over. Listen, Failure is not final. That's right. Listen, there you got to see the springboard in your crisis, in your adversity. Look at that word adversity. The root of it is ad. An ad— hear this— is a marketing campaign that draws you into a product or business. So if it's the root of adversity, God uses adverse situations to— watch this— advertise his glory. He takes the crisis, brings you out of it like only he can. So when people look at it, they say, how did you get out of there? Oh, God did it. Yes, yes, because he wants you to come through. So your testimony is God brought me out, and you didn't bring yourself out. Amen. So when the crisis shows up, just look at it like this: this— God is about to get the glory out of my life. God's about to do something for me that has never been done before. He's about to take this situation, turn it upside down, and get the glory. You know what? People will will look at you, watch this, and they'll want to see you fail. They'll want to see you not make it. Glory to God. And they'll be rooting for your demise. But the moment you make it, I'm a witness, them same people will come up and congratulate you. Because the Bible said God will take the heathen and make him say, the Lord has done a great thing for them. Can I tell you something? God's gonna take your heathens And the ones that's talking about you, the ones that rejected you, and he's gonna make them say, "The Lord has done a great thing for them." I dare you to give God praise if you believe that. He's gonna make them say it. So you stay the course. And don't throw in the towel. One of my favorite entrepreneurs is John Huntsman. John Haussmann is a billionaire. His company is worth about $300 billion. He founded the company that makes 90% of plastic silverware. Hmm. Hmm. 90% of all plastic silverware made, his company makes it. 5 years into his business, his company went through a crisis. Oh boy, he had to file bankruptcy, lost everything. He went to his wife and said, I'm not doing this anymore. I cannot take the failure, I cannot take the pain of losing everything. He said, I'm going to get a job and I'm gonna do something different. Wife looked at him and said, You told me that God told you to do this. All right, so what I suggest you do is go and start over. That's right. And let God show you how to rebuild this company. All right. The testimony is this: not a year, but 6 months later He— well, that day, after talking to his wife, he went into a bank. After going to several banks that told him, we ain't fooling with you, he went to one bank, and the last one he went to told him, I see what you've done in the past, we'll take a risk on you. Gave him money. He started over. 6 months later, he had made $10 million. 6 months after bankruptcy. Watch it. 6 months after zero. 6 months after the crisis. What am I saying? You can't stop because of adversity. If he would have quit, he wouldn't be worth $14 billion himself today. The company would not have $300 billion in revenue. But because he looked adversity in the face and listened to his wife and he started over. I knew you was going to say that. Amen. Amen. Yes. Ah, glory to God. One of the things he said, and I quote, he said, if there's a silver lining in bad times, it is this. He said, when facing severe challenges, watch this, your mind is sharper than it ever is. Oh wow. So when you're in the severity of the problem, your mind is sharper than it ever is, even when you're doing good. Wow. Right, right. So don't give up. The only way you lose is if you quit. You got to decide, I'm going to keep going. All right. Y'all ever seen that Energizer commercial? That little bunny, he said he keeps going and going and going. He go through rain, come out soaking wet, still beating that drum. Go. He go through an explosion, boom, blow one ear off. He got smut on his face, smut on his body. He's still beating that drum, limping, still going. You got to keep going no matter what the crisis throws at you. Let me, let me let you in on a secret. Human beings have seldom created anything of a lasting value that wasn't born out of crisis. You look at the automobile, when they were making that first engine, it took them 6 years to perfect the design. They were having crisis after Crisis after crisis. The Wright Brothers with the airplane. Crisis after crisis. I'm talking about— watch how balance works. I was talking to Felicia about this when I was driving in. We talking about people that don't have half of the relationship with God some of us say we got. Creating engines, creating airplanes. Lord have mercy. I don't know what was on Franklin Graham's mind, but when he— what is that his name? The electricity man. Who's the electricity man? That's the phone man. Alexander Graham's the phone man. Talking about Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin, that's the electricity I said Franklin Graham because I'm thinking about Billy Graham's son. Okay. This man, I'm always thinking about flying a kite in electricity, in a lightning storm, but he discovered electricity. No, no. Fruitful relationship with God. But balanced enough to be free to create, because a part of the Creator is in all of us. Watch this. The reason why we don't create, because again, we're too dependent on external things to guide us. We have to become more dependent on what's internal. Watch this. The word of God— I talked about this last week— when you get totally immersed in it— yeah, I see that, Lord— and you allow your life to be totally ruled by God's word, nothing external will get you off course because you'll depend on that word. So instead of cursing your bills when you see them Jesus, I got another bill and you mad because you can't pay it. Prophesy to it in Jesus' name and speak the word on it. God, you said you will supply all of my needs. Yes, according to your riches in glory. All right, are y'all here? Amen. Amen. Yes, you want to create something that lasts, overcome the crisis. Find the Creator in you in crisis. Now let me give you these verses and we're getting out of here. Go to 1 Peter 5:10. I told you I was gonna put some scripture in the end. I'm done. I hope y'all got something out of this. Amen. I've been up since early this morning. I just got to give it to you like it came to me. Amen. 1 Peter 5:10 says, after you have suffered a little while— say so. The word 'suffer' is a Greek word, pathémos, which means there is a planned course of distress or pain. Again, God bothers you to make you better. So what does God do? He'll set you on the left. This is my left. So he'll sit you on the left so you can get right. A lot of times he'll give you a left experience so you can get accurate and right in him. Touch your belly and say, sometimes, sometimes I gotta get left so I can get right. So a lot of times the Lord will set you on the left. Watch this, we're gonna see why he does it. He said, after you suffered a while The God of all grace. The word grace is charis in Greek. It's not just to be empowered to righteousness after you sin or to take care of your sin. Grace does do that, but I'd rather use the grace given on the flip side. I don't not sin because I'm scared of hell. I don't sin because I love God. I don't sin because I want to experience heaven on earth. My works don't save me. The cross saves me. Okay, all right, here we go. So, and I know the reality is a lot of stuff is legalism, and most people don't feel like they're saved unless somebody's gonna tell them don't, don't fornicate, don't lie, don't cheat. Oh, listen. The word sin is harmisia in Greek. It means to miss the mark. So you can not be sleeping around, not be a lesbian, not be a homosexual, not be a liar, all the big stuff, and not walking out your purpose. You're still in sin because you're missing the mark. Yeah, okay. So I don't want to use my grace just for forgiveness. The flip side of the word charis is a gift where God empowers me to fulfill purpose, to walk out his plan. Touch your brother and say, I'm empowered. I'm empowered. Come on, say it, say it louder. I'm empowered. I'm empowered. To walk out. To walk out. God's purpose. God's purpose. God's plan. God's plan. God's passion. God's passion. For my life. For my life. I need you to believe that. That. Yes, amen. And grace empowers you to do that. Yes, amen. But you got to get set on the left sometimes, right, in crisis, so you can get right and move in that purpose. So he sets you on the left so he can— watch this— restore you, confirm you, strengthen you, establish you. Let me say it like this. The scripture say it like this. So he sets you on the left Say that again. Say, he set me on the left so I can get right. So he'll let people walk out of your life that need to be out your life so you get on the right path. He'll remove connections and, and covenants that are not ordained for your assignment so you can get right. He sets you on the left first so he can season you. Christ has come to season your life. That's right. Oh boy, my wife is a great cook, and my mother-in-law has gave me a word. I don't know whether it's from God or from her, but anyway, I love my mother-in-law, but I don't receive it, right? Because she said all of her son-in-laws, when they came into the family they were slimmer than I am. And then she said, look at all of them now because of how the family cooks. I said, Mom, I love you, but that ain't gonna be me because I'm gonna keep exercising some discipline. I fight every day because my wife can cook. But what makes her a good cook? What makes Miss Morton a good cook? Is seasoning. That's right. What makes it palatable is seasoning. Anybody throw a piece of chicken in the pan, but what you do with that chicken before it gets in the pan is what makes the difference. So God will set you on the left so he can season you so that when you stand up before people What you're saying is palatable. I don't mind sitting at the table when my wife has cooked. There are some people I know, when they cook, I have to pray a little longer and a little harder to sit at the table so I don't be disrespectful, because I want to honor them because they invited me to eat, right? But at the end of the day, I know what I'm getting. That's right. That's right, that's right. Because of the season in your purpose, when you show up in the world, people are going to want to encounter you because you're seasoned. And you got to be willing to allow God to season you in crisis. This ain't an easy message, is it? But he sets you there to season you. Watch this, to settle you also. All right, he gets you on the left side to settle you down. You can't be effectively balanced and move things in the world and be effective in the kingdom if you running like a wild horse, a wild donkey. I remember going to the country when I was little, and the neighbor next to my family house had a dog. Every time we would go down there, that dog— the fence, the little front yard was just a little yard, but he go barking crazy when he see people. Because again, they were down in the country in the middle of nowhere. Hear me? One time we went down there, somebody messed around and let the dog out. We thought the dog was gonna come at us. That dog wasn't thinking about us. That gate opened and that dog took off running. I thought he was running so fast we couldn't see him after a while. I don't even know the dog ever came back. Here's what I'm saying. God will put you on the left side. He'll set you here to season you, to settle you down so your feet can get planted, so you can have stability on both sides of the pendulum. Yes, Lord. It's not enough again to have stability out here in spirit, and then that doesn't translate to your natural life. Let the crisis create the translation so your season is simple enough to be effective in the world. Watch this, he set your life to season you, settle you, watch this, so you can soar. That's the establishing. So, so watch this, whenever crisis come, they don't affect you anyway because because you're soaring above them every time. The whole key is to fly above the issue. That's right. The whole key is to be eagle enough that the people around you could be going through, but you're able to extrapolate yourself from their issue and still serve them. Oh God, because you're seasoned, you're settled. You don't allow the burdens of others to pull you down. Let me tell you something, when you're an eagle, you cannot run with chickens. All right now, I'll say it again: eagles and chickens don't run together. If you hang out with chickens and you're an eagle, Understand two things. One, the chicken has no ability to fly at your altitude. That's right. So in order to deal with the chicken, guess what you must do? You gotta condescend to hang out with the chickens. You gotta decide, are you gonna soar with eagles? Or are you going to peck in the dirt with chickens? As good as a chicken is, and I know church folk love chicken. Church folk love chicken so much they named a restaurant after us, Church's. I'm telling you right now that we love it. I know I do. I eat chicken all the time. But the reality is a chicken is one of the nastiest animals. That exists. He worshiped a pig. Are y'all hearing me? Yeah. Can I tell you something? Yeah, we got to become so focused like that eagle. See, an eagle has microscopic vision, so that eagle can see something small and it looks huge to him. See, when you got microscopic vision, you can see what God sees. And you can see— like, I look at this church every week, I look at the things we're trying to build and grow. I got microscopic vision. I don't just see y'all, I see what God is building, I see where God is taking us, because that's my— you got to see it bigger than what it looks like to your natural eye. See, when an eagle's eyes tell him is that it's more than what you see. He can be— oh my God— 7,000 feet in the air and watch this— look down in the ocean and see a fish 7,000 feet deep. That's serious. And it looks huge to him, and he just swoops down. And guess what he does because he's an eagle? He doesn't even eat on the ground. He goes back up and eats his dinner. Are y'all hearing me? Yes, God. Yes, Lord. Watch this. When eagles mate, they don't come down to make love. They meet in the air and they stop flying and they have a free fall while they make love. And when it's over, they take off again. You cannot land Are y'all hearing me? Okay, go to Proverbs 11:1. We— I'm almost done. Proverbs 11:1 says, a false balance is an abomination to the Lord. Ooh. So in Jewish times, Hebrew times, Hebraic times, you had a lot of thieves in the marketplace, kind of like now, who would adjust the weight to make it look like everything was in balance to rob people, and it really wasn't. In other words, they was trying to represent something that was not as though it is. They were trying to prove that something was something that it was not. When you— your life is out of balance, the Bible says that's an abomination. Watch this, but you can show up for everybody else but can't show up for you. You're out of balance. And the Bible said that's an abomination. So God says, so I can get your attention, I'm gonna send a crisis. I'm gonna let you know you are all wrong with this, so then we'll turn this into a crisis, right? So you can understand your value. You know, he puts this in the same category with a man lying with a beast, man lying with man, woman lying. He says that about those acts, that they're abomination, they're detestable. That's a bad— that right there is a bad thing when we don't handle balance correctly and handle crisis correctly. False balance is an abomination. He hates it. As full of love as God is, this thing he hates. Because he understands, I've given you enough where you can live a balanced life. And his love is so perfect, man, that you ought to be able to show up for you. How can you give somebody all of you and not give you all of you? Somebody watching, you've been giving yourself to everybody. But God says you got to find out how to give yourself totally to yourself. That's true. That's out of balance. That's true. Watch this, it's perversion in its biggest form. Perversion is just to— watch this— deviate from the authentic. Per-inversion. Per— for— version, the authentic way. So if you don't do it the right way, you create another version, it's perverted. Charity start at home. So if I start out of my dysfunction, create another version of that, trying to make myself feel good because I'm giving myself to other people and, and I'm not getting anything in return. We got— we— even though we give— watch this— without expectation of something back. We can't forget about ourselves. Thank you, thank you. You're important. I've seen people get unhealthy, kill themselves trying to take care of somebody else. Watch it, they took care of them so good they kept living and they died. That's a problem. Yeah, that's perversion. It's perversion if my wife and I are married and my wife is the head of my house. That's false balance. The scripture says God is head of the man and man is head of the woman. I know a lot of women don't like that, but that's scripture. A good woman wants a man that's a leader. That's Not, I'm so great, I'm going to teach this man to be everything I want him to be. A lot of times— watch this, y'all— when I have married people over the years, and when I'm counseling people, I tell them, you have to make sure you leave this wedding that two people go home and get into bed. And not 4. Because oftentimes what happens, people leave the altar and instead of 2 people going home, 4 people go home. You got the 2 real people, and then you got the other dude that the wife is trying to change the man into, and then you got the other chick that the husband's trying to change the wife into. All right, all right. It's a mess. It's perversion. And what you're doing is you're creating chaos because there's an order, there's roles that people have. And, and men function better in their role. Women function better in their role. That's right. A husband should be priest, which means he's an intercessor. He has the ability to pray for his family. He should also be provider, which means he takes care of his family financially. He should also be a prophet for his family. First, watch this, if I'm an intercessor, I should be able to come back to the family as a prophet, and I do it all the time with my wife. God said this, and this is what we're doing. A man should be able to do that. And guess what? If the wife is praying too, it's going to automatically be a check in her spirit. He should be a king. He should be the governing authority in his house. Anything else is perverse. And we have to correct the order. Say, we got to change the order. Change the order. Why? Why? The false balance is abomination to the Lord. Watch this. But a just weight is his delight. So I want to do things that delight him, that make him happy. Whoa, we be so busy trying to— the Bible said if I delight myself in the Lord, he'll give me the desires of my heart. Same text here, it's just saying it a different way, making sure that my actions bring delight to God. And I'm not living out of bounds. I'm almost through. Go to Psalm 34:19. This is the last one. Glory to God. Y'all getting anything out of this? Amen. I don't know, I feel a weight in here, man. He says, many are the afflictions, the crisis of the righteous. I can attest to this scripture. I've had my share. But I also can attest to this B clause: but the Lord delivers them out of them all. Listen, there is nothing you going to go through or going through Watch this, that God won't deliver you from. So again, crisis come to bring out the creative nature in you. They come to push you to another dimension. Crisis comes to prove what God said about you. That's right. So although the afflictions may have been many, you can rest assured in this: the Bible says here that the Lord delivers us out of everyone. That's right. I told you earlier that every trial that shows up in your life is temporary. Temporary. That's right. Everything in life is temporary. The only thing that's perfect and I'm done, hear me— is God and his promises. This is a promise that God will deliver you out of whatever you're going through. But you got to trust him. You got to lean into him. Again, my whole goal for y'all, whether I'm here in Atlanta, I'm in the church in Jackson, I'm in DMV, wherever I'm at, my whole goal for humans is to make you be better out there than you are in here. This— you know what the church should be? And I'm done. It should— you can play something. It should be Kingdom University. All that other stuff we do to open the heavens and to do the stuff we do, that's great, but At the bottom line, we need to come to church and learn how to do the kingdom. That's right. I promise you, most of the people that say they're in the glory ain't in the glory. You know what happens when real glory shows up? One, it's glorious. Kavad in Hebrew is the weight of God. So when the glory comes in the room, the the weight of God comes in the room, which means it diminishes every human thing. So when the weight of God walks in the room, if sickness is in the room, healing is supposed to happen. That's right. But you got people around saying, I'm in the glory, in the glory, and they're still broke. Provision happens when God shows up. That's right, man. Are y'all hearing me? I, again, I'm gonna keep saying this till y'all get it, because Because I love y'all enough, I want us to be good in the world. I don't want us to have holy hands and empty pockets. That ain't God's plan. Say that with me, say, there is more. Everybody stand up. Hallelujah.