Fight Back Against Negative Thoughts and Say Yes to God

On T.D. Jakes sermon series, Crushing, T.D. Jakes teaches how to fight against your own negative thoughts. Listen in as he encourages you to ask God to lead if you want to see real change in your life.

Maybe someone has tried to discount you, make you feel like you’re not attractive enough, not talented enough, not up to par. Don’t believe those lies. Let that go in one ear and out the other. They didn’t breathe life into you; they didn’t know you before you were formed in your mother’s womb. They don’t determine your destiny. Instead, you need to say, “Father, thank You that I have everything I need. Thank You that I am enough all by myself.”

Whenever you ask for change, you’ve got to be prepared for disruption.
If you plant an oak tree in the earth, it’s gonna disrupt the soil.
If you plant a peach tree in the soil, it’s gonna disrupt the ground.
There’s no way you can have growth without disruption.
But god said to me, when you say change, I send disruption, but don’t let
the disruption become a distraction. You won’t come out of this.
You’re not smart enough. You’re not bright enough. You waited too late.
You should have started younger. Those are the kind of voices that we all live with.
For me, our ministry was growing.
We lived in a nice house, nice house we’d ever had.
Bradbing a nice car, living from paycheck to paycheck, making it. Every night.
I lay down the night after she goes to sleep, I hear the voices.
Those voices are the kind of voices that stop you from buying into your own life.
Stop you from enjoying the good times and believing that they will last.
The anxiety and pressure and the strength that
it took to get from where you were to where you are doesn’t go away so you don’t really believe it’s yours.
You’re driving it, but you don’t really believe it’s yours.
And you’re scared to relax and really rest in whatever it is or whoever it is because everything else went away.
Maybe this will go away too.
We talk about faith for bad times, but but you also need faith in good times.
To actually believe the goodness of god is not going anywhere.
To silence the voices that keeps saying you’ll never make it.
You’re about to lose everything. Fear gets in your heart.
See, see, I know what it’s like to be poor.
And I know what it’s like to be without.
And I know what it’s like not to have dinner for my kids. Returning
to that, that the idea that that could happen
is terrifying. And the enemy always has some sort of tool or memory or a situation that he uses to terrify you even though the good times are here.
And and and the dream is there. The blessing is there.
And the goodness is there, but there’s always this haunting nagging,
defiance,
This says, don’t you relax, you’re not worth it. You don’t deserve it.
And it’s not going to last resting in what god has done.
Is often more difficult than receiving what God has done.
To rest in it, to believe that it will last.
To believe that you will last, and love will last, that that that life will last at that good times will come that things will be better.
It’s difficult because of the voices.
And you are what you eat and the voices are the food that feeds your faith or fear.
So if you want to change your diet, you can change your outcome, but you have to stop talking to yourself the way you do.
Because if you continue to talk to yourself
the way you do, you will always be where you’ve always been.
It is what you say within yourself that heals you.
The woman with ishma blood said to herself, If I can betouch to him of his garment, I’ll be made whole.
There was no scripture to validate that.
She can say she wasn’t quoting deuteronomy or new numbers or anything like that. It’s just something.
She said to herself
there was no doctrine around it.
We’ve never seen that happen before, but she said to herself, if I can but touch the hem of his garment, I’ll be made whole.
And all
the while she was crawling, she kept saying, over and over again, if I
can just touch, if I can just touch, if I can just touch, if I can just touch them, if I can just touch them, if they go, and without Jesus’ permission.
And without the support of the disciples,
She creeped up on him and snatched a miracle. Snatched it.
Snatch it because of what she said to herself. Yes.
You see those voices that say what you can’t do, what you can’t have, what
you can’t be, what’s not gonna last?
What’s not gonna work is how the enemy pulverizes the promises of god in your life.
And it takes word to combat word. That’s why when Jesus was
in the wilderness and Satan was throwing word at him, he was throwing word back.
And what we have to do is put word on word.
I’m blessed. I’m blessed in
the city. I’m blessed in the field.
I’m blessed in my uprising. I’m blessed in my down setting. I’ll be blessed into my old days.
I’ll be blessed when I’m an old man. My grandchildren will be blessed. My body is blessed.
My body is my mind is blessed. My head is blessed. I got this. I can handle it.
I can do it. Bring it on Here it is.
That kind of talk saying that to yourself drives back the other voices of negativity that we all have creep up behind us and tell us that we’re not capable and we’re not competent and we’re not gifted enough, and we’re not good enough, or we waited too late, or god is punishing us.
To talk back to those voices shuts the enemy down.
The pressure I was going through How was causing?
Because the pressure I was going through was coming from the things that I allowed to reverberate in my head.
And I’m wondering if there are things going in your head right now that are stopping you from living your best life because you will not silence them by speaking back.
You shall have whatever you say.
So says the word of God. You shall have whatever you say.
If it’s betrayal, you shall have whatever you say.
If it’s a life without love, you shall have whatever you say. It doesn’t just work positively.
It also works negatively you shall have whatever you say. She touched him and she was made whole.
And he says, who touched me? Which means he’s oblivious to what’s going on.
This is all happening in her head. Come on.
The whole thing happened in her head And the lord who is omniscient ask a question, who touched me?
Uh, yes. And the disciples wanting to be important to answer to him, so everybody touched you. Said, no. No.
No. No. No. No. No. That’s not what
I’m talking about. Everybody around me don’t touch me. Everybody around me don’t touch me. You been set.
Everybody around me don’t touch me. Just because you’re around me, don’t mean you touch me. Somebody touched me.
Somebody touched me, and she came out from
the crowd’s cheapest league. And see, it was me. It was me. She got a miracle.
Wow. Jesus wasn’t looking. Because of what she said to herself.
When I say excellent, you say excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. The problem is
we all said the same word.
But we don’t all mean the same thing
because what you call excellent, what I call excellent may be
two different things. Based on the lives we’ve lived, the things we’ve experienced, the places we’ve been exposed to, our ideas of excellence made very drastic basically based on how we define excellence.
The problem with the English language is that it is limited to interpretation
So how do you know when I say I love you that I
mean what you meant when you said you love me?
So we’re having a conversation, and I am making an assumption that your love is my love, and it may not be at all.
Or we’re planning a banquet, and I, and I make an assumption that your excellent is my excellent.
And it
may not be at all.
Because the reality about it is your definition of excellence rises us no higher than your level of exposure.
Whatever you’ve been exposed to, that becomes the new paradigm of what excellence is to you.
And it shifts from day to day. And the hardest thing in
the world is to have a conversation with somebody and all you have to use is words.
Because I’m not sure that
you mean what I mean when I say excellent.
I’m not sure that you mean what I mean when I say love.
I’m not sure you mean what I mean when I say loyal.
I’m not sure you mean what I mean when I say hurt.
Because all we have is words.
The reality is we have to make up in our mind that whatever our definition of excellence is,
it’s called change. It’s gonna get higher. It’s gonna get broader.
It’s gonna get better. It’s gonna be different. Or it’s gonna go down.
And a lot of it depends on who you hang around.
And what you’re exposed to, there are people that take you up.
There are people that bring you down. They bring you down to
their level of excellence. That’s what that’s what a job description for a hater looks like.
The job description of the hater is to bring it down to the level that
they are on. So that while they’re trying to pull you down, I’m trying to get up.
And if I’m going to get up, I have to know that there’s gonna be a cost in getting up.
I’m gonna have to put my back to
it, or it’s not gonna happen.
God wants somebody to work with him and give what it takes. To make it happen.
Is it worth it? Absolutely. I do not want to die.
Let me explain. I I I was born in between two dead babies.
The baby before me died, the baby after me died. I was raised by a dying father.
And I do not want to live my life and die.
And at the last moment of my life, ask this question, wonder what would have happened?
If I’d have pushed a little harder.
I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna get down to the end of the road and and wonder what would have happened if I’d have pushed
a little harder. I don’t want to wonder that. I want to get down to the end of
the road like Paul and say I fought a good fight.
I kept the faith.
I finished my course. And now later for me as a crowd of righteousness in there, I wanna get down to my last breath and wonder what would have happened if I went back to school.
If I took a course, if I worked a little harder, If I change the way I dress, if I change the way I talk to people, if I forgave somebody, if I release somebody, I don’t wanna wonder about nothing.
Because that
is excellence. Excellent. It’s to come out with the conclusion.
I have no regrets. The dying words of the thief on the cross was remember me.
The words of Jesus at the last supper
is as often as you do this, you do this in remembrance of me.
What does remember me? Remember, re put back together again, remember
me.
When we remember what god has done, that becomes the foundation on which we build our lives.
Now, a
house is not a foundation. And nobody can live in a foundation, but it has to have a foundation in order to be a house.
And I’m not suggesting that your life begins, ends, and all through the middle is nothing but Jesus Jesus Jesus.
Because you gotta take out the trash. You gotta brush teeth. You gotta comb your hair.
You gotta get your nails done.
You gotta get your feet, uh, or you’re gonna cut your blankets when you’re laying in the bed at night.
All of that happens. But I am saying that god is the foundation.
When god delivered the children and visitors out of Egypt, he did it as a foundation for them to remember.
And all through the old testament, he says over
and over again, am I not the god who brought you out from the red sea?
Am I not the god who brought you up by my own hand and my strong-arm.
It becomes a point of reference to which you face the future remembering what he did in the past, remembering it, putting it back together again, again, and again, and recreating it as a point of reference to fight from to stand from to drive from to to preach from to teach from.
What do you have to remember?
It’s important that you have something to remember, something on god’s resume that you know that you know that you know that he did for you.
And it tells you that if God would do that, he can do this.
If he can drive back the red sea and bring me across on dry land, then he can fight you off.
He can deal with the amalekites and the hittites and the jebusites and the garyshites.
God does certain things so you will have something to remember a point of reference to which you build your life upon and you stand on it and you say I’m not sure about this and I’m not sure about that, but this one thing do know.
You have to know this. You have to know this in your knower.
You have to know this when your girlfriend didn’t know it.
When your prayer warriors don’t know it, when your children don’t know it, when your mama doesn’t know it.
Something that you
know that you know that you know becomes a catalyst against the trials, against the promise, against the sleepless nights, against the virus, against the crisis, against the times that we’re living in, We have been living in the most perilous times that we have seen in a hundred years.
We are living in a
time where nearly seven hundred thousand people are now dead from something we can’t even see.
We are fighting an invisible enemy, and that enemy has friends that has created trauma and distress until we are overwhelmed even when nothing else is going wrong just the feeling that other people are going wrong gives us a certain degree of stress and trauma.
We how do we stand up against this unseen foe we fight right now. Of course, we need to
do everything we can to protect ourselves from the virus.
I’m not just talking about the virus. I’m talking about your mind.
I’m talking about your emotions, your will, your spirit, your fight, your drive, your tenacity, your sense of normalcy, your courage to get out of the house, your courage to get out of the bed, the courage to continue when there’s a threat
requires that there’s something about god
that you have to remember. For the children of Israel.
It was the blood of the lamb that was painted on the doorposts.
And that danger passed by and said, when I see the blood, I will pass over you.
It was walking out to the Red Sea and hearing six hundred chosen chariots coming with failure of chasing them down.
Saying I’m gonna get you back. He was gonna get them back, but let me tell you
a secret. He was also trying to
get back the wealth they take it.
For the wealth of the unjust had been laid up for the just, and they had borrowed all the gold and all the silver, and they had broken the GDP of Egypt It wasn’t just
the slaves he wanted. He wanted the money back. He wanted the jewels. He wanted the gold.
He wanted the silver. He wanted the things that the tabernacle would actually end up being built by He was trying to get it all back.
He could have got some more slaves anywhere. He was trying to get what they had borrowed.
They had borrowed the whole economy of Egypt was running through the Red Sea.
For the wealth of the injustice laid up for the trust.
And when God brings you out, he brings out enough for your children.
The Bible says that God put so much wealth on them that their children had to carry on their the wealth that god placed on them.
I want the kind of blessing that affects my children and my children’s children and my children’s children’s children.
I I want my grandchildren to blow kisses up
my picture when I’m dead
and gone. I want them to
be able to say if
it hadn’t been for that whole man. I’d have never been able to go to college.
I’d have never been able to get a job. I’d have never been able to work for Google.
I’d have never been able
to work for Xerox. I’d have never been able to preach the gospel.
Would have never been able to do it. I want that for them. Yes.
So I have to have something to remember that I can count on that won’t break.
And I wanna ask you what do you remember when life get hard, when things get tough, when friends get few, there are how to be something in your life.
That you remember God brought you through or brought you from or brought you out of that feeds you That is the foundation that makes you to rise above the crushing and turns grape juice.
Into absolute mind.
The Bible says that we are a chosen generation.
A royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people
that we didn’t just wander in to him. We were chosen.
He said you have not chosen me. I have chosen you. I picked you out.
I chose you. We are chosen. We know this
from a biblical theological perspective that the reason that we are here is because he drew us.
No man can come unto the father, save the son draw him.
He drew us to him.
But we don’t think about this that we as a generation are chosen to go through a challenge that this country or the world has not seen in a hundred years.
Of all the generations, my
mother missed it, my father missed it, My grandmother missed it, my great grandmother missed it.
They had trials, they had tests. They didn’t have COVID.
They didn’t have mask all over their face.
They didn’t have people arguing and fighting about this data and the other. They didn’t have George Floyd.
They didn’t have racial combat like it is right now. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
It’s so crazy that there is enough stress in the world to take your sleep.
And then when you add to it, the stress of your own life, what’s going on
with you and the people in your house, and the people you’re related to, the people you love, and you take that stress and you put it on national stress, and then you add global stress.
It’s too much stress.
Too much stress coming at us from all directions leaves us with unsuppressed trauma.
Success trauma, trauma that has no way to escape.
That comes out in rage and self medication and and and over indulgences and excesses and and tempers and and flaring and people people jumping on stewardess and flight attendants and road rage and shooting people over parking spaces.
That’s too much stress. I’ve got good news. Jesus said my peace.
Give on to thee. Not the peace of the world.
But the peace which passive all understanding. This is the peace that you stand under.
You heard me. Yeah. This is the piece that you stand under.
You stand under a peace that defies logic, crazy peace, ridiculous peace. The kind
of peace that other people will call you a fool for, but you just got a peace in your spirit and in your heart that he
that has began a good work and you shall perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.
You’ve got the peace to understand that even though we are living through a crushing season as a planet, with global warming and everything else going on and people shooting and people fighting on planes and all kinds of
sickness and people dying on respirators. You’ve got to
know in the midst of all of this that god has not taken by surprise.
That he chose us to go through this.
And he wouldn’t have chosen us
to go through this if we didn’t have what it takes to go through this.
You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you And I have chosen what to try you with, and I have chosen what to crush you with.
And if I thought you couldn’t take it,
I wouldn’t expose you to it. I put you in
the middle of it for you to stand up to it.
And so today, it is very important.
That as we embrace our faith, we do it with a new tenacity.
We do it with a new tenacity because we have an enemy That is ubiquitous.
Absolutely everywhere, and yet invisible. Absolutely intangible. And we can’t touch him anywhere.
We can’t see him, and we don’t know who’s next.
But we have to know in whom we have believed and that he that has began a good work in us shall perform it unto the day of Jesus Christ.
And we have to know the difference between being crushed by the lord and being crushed by life.
I will not let life trust me.
God, you can do whatever you want.
You can take me through whatever you will.
Order my steps in your word, dear Lord. I am chosen for this generation.
I was called to preach during a global pandemic with people dying and getting sick and people in the hallways of hospitals and more expect up in funerals delay for two weeks.
I was called I was chosen for such a time as if that means that god has given me something that’s stronger than the times I’m in.
Because we have been chosen.
And so have you and you and you and you and you and you and even you.
And god would not have chosen you if this were going to destroy you.
I’m always fascinated by leaders.
I read about leadership, corporate leadership, church leadership, spiritual leadership, family leadership, everything I can find about leadership because I am a leader.
And the more proficient I am at being a leader, the more impactful my life becomes.
Just because you’re upfront doesn’t make you a leader if the cars aren’t moving.
Leaders are determined by how much you move something from one place to another.
Are you quantifiable? You ought to have some metrics to which, not a title.
It’s not a title. It’s a metric. You’re a leader when we move.
When we move to the degree that you moved me, that’s the degree that you led me.
And so I’m fascinated about leadership. I’m fascinated that god says to Abraham before he puts him to sleep.
He says your descendants she’ll be
in Egypt for four hundred years, but afterwards they shall come out with great substance.
And Abraham dies believing a promise that he never got to see.
And god says when he looks at the children of Israel and how they were being crushed in Egypt.
The Bible says that God remembered his promise to Abraham. Gosh it excites me.
Because Abraham was dead. And if god kept his word to a dead man, This surely god will keep his word to a man that’s alive.
To a woman that’s alive. Abraham went to sleep trusting god’s character to honor his word.
Now, we have gone four thirty years.
Which is ten generations almost eleven, and Abraham has been dead, and god speaks to Moses And god says to Moses, I want you to go down there and tell Pedro to let my people go.
But before he tells him what he wants him to do, he describes to him who he is.
I am the god of Abraham. Isaac and Jacob.
That’s who I am. I am the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob I am the god of three of your ancestors that are dead.
I am their god.
And today I have become your god.
So take off your shoes, sign of covenant.
Take off your shoes for the ground you stand on
is holy ground. Because this day I call you into covenant. How do you know it was covenant?
Because he called
his name twice, Moses, Moses. And whenever god calls your name twice, it’s covenant.
That will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Once has he spoken it twice have I heard it, power belongs to god.
So whether he’s saying Moses Moses or Abraham or Abraham
or Abraham or verily verily
I say to you this day shall thou be With me in paradise, this is a bilateral covenant that god has made to Moses to get them out of Egypt.
God to the day had a stopwatch of when they would go in and when they would get out.
He knows exactly when it’s gonna be over.
He told Abraham that his descendants would be there four hundred years as slaves.
The reason they were there four hundred at thirty years is because the first thirty years, they were not slaves.
Because Joseph was alive. But then after Joseph died, a pharaoh arose who did not regard Joseph or his god.
And they began to afflict them and the more they afflicted them, the more they grew.
And all of a sudden, they have been in captivity four hundred years.
And Moses’s mama gets pregnant on the three hundred and ninety ninth year.
And verse a boy named Moses.
And there’s a hit list to destroy him, but god protected him not because Moses was Moses, but because Moses had purpose.
Yes. And all things work together for the good of
them who love the lord, who
are the call according to his So when you know you got a purpose no
matter who set out a
decree, they can’t kill you. So when he could no longer be hidden, they brought him out, and Mir Ferrow is raising in his house, the very one he is trying to kill.
And he does it. He raises Moses on Ferro’s money.
He educates Moses in Ferrow’s school.
He diversifies Moses to the point that Moses is genetically connected to the Hebrews but experientially connected to
the Egyptians which gave him the courage to be able to come back after he had been in Jethro’s house for forty years and face pharaoh and speak his language.
And he was not afraid of him
because he was raised in the palace and not in the slave quarters.
When you are chosen, god will take everything that you went through and make it work for your good.
We got to see normal disappear right in front of our face.
It is not normal to preach in an empty church.
It is not normal to be afraid of somebody
when they cough.
It is not normal to be reluctant to shake a hand.
And we have seen the memorial of normal, which leaves us without a compass to understand How do we get back and what do we get back to and what does normal look like in this current environment?
And I hate to say this to you, and it might really upset you.
But once a grape’s been crushed, you can never get the juice back in the grape.
So from that moment forward, the traumatic experience of having the pulp shatter The skin lacerate and the juicy merge, it signifies that that grape will never be the same again.
And I suggest to
you, my brothers and sisters, that there
will be no normal to go back to. There may be a new normal.
But the normal that we grew up with will never be quite the same again.
It has changed the way we eat. It has changed the way we shop.
It has changed the way we travel. It has changed how we receive packages.
It has changed the way we do business, it has changed.
Every aspect of our life, it has changed the way we educate our children.
It has changed the way we go to the mall or don’t go.
It has changed the way we get Christmas gifts or don’t get them. It has changed everything.
And that’s what happens when you make it wine.
It changes everything.
All hopes of being a grape is gone if you’re gonna be wine.
If you’re gonna be wine, you gotta be willing to give up being a grape.
And the challenge for a lot
of is we have we have a difficult time accepting change because we are so in love with what was that we’re not willing to explore what he is.
And so there we are in a situation where God has allowed something to come and crush our normal and get us out of our normal and all of
a sudden we are afraid never realizing that what’s in front of
you is always better than what’s behind you. That it’s better to be wine than to be grapes.
When you are wine and not grapes,
you don’t have to worry about insects.
You don’t have to worry about weather conditions. You don’t have to worry about locusts. You don’t
have to worry about disease. You don’t have to worry about fungus.
You don’t have to worry about problems that whenever god disrupts you, it’s only because he’s got something better for you.
In the height of the disruption, he said something to me that I thought was very important.
He said when you pray for change,
I always answer with disruption
because you cannot have change without disruption.
You can’t have a baby without disruption.
And whenever you ask for change, you’ve got to be prepared for disruption, If you plant an oak tree in the earth, it’s gonna disrupt the soil.
If you plant a peach tree in the soil, it’s gonna disrupt the ground.
There’s no way you can have growth without disruption.
But god said to me, when you say change, I send disruption but don’t let
the disruption become a distraction. Because if you’re not careful, you will try to solve the disruption as if that were the victory when that is not the victory at all.
I did not call you to solve the disruption.
I sent the disruption
in answer to your request for change. Come on go with me. We’re going somewhere.
I sent the disruption
so don’t change goals and make it, uh, a distraction. In other words, nehemiah, You’re doing a great work.
Don’t come down to San Ballett and Tabaya and make changing their mind, your victory.
Because changing their mind won’t bill your wall.
So that disruption is a distraction. So the Lord says to me, and I’ll say this in rap.
He says, when you pray for change, I answer with disruption.
The challenge of your faith is not to allow the disruption to become a distraction because in every disruption there will always be an opportunity.
So rather than wrestling with the disruption, look for the opportunity.
And and in the midst of this disruption, the people who are going forward are people who see opportunity where we see distraction.
What do we need that we didn’t need before?
How do we serve that need in a way that we didn’t serve before? How do we get out
of the box in the way we think and how we function and how we deal with it?
What should we take in school? What how should we aim our children? What should we point them at?
Seeing as the world has changed.
And every time you go into a grocery store and you check out your groceries yourself through those machines and you go and get a plane ticket and you go through it and just flash your phone over it and going in every machine standing there is a job that’s gone.
So don’t fail to prepare for what’s next because you’re trying to get what was.
When the grape comes through the crushing, it knows it will never be a grape again.
But it will be wine.
It will be cabernet.
It will be
why. And the challenge of our lives
is to turn our crushing into mine. And you can’t turn it into wine.
If the goal of your life becomes to build back your grape.
Let the grape go and find the wine.