Dharius Daniels - Crawl Before Your Walk

I’m so excited to have the opportunity to share God’s word with you! We’re in a series of sermons here called «Walking.» We’re going to be in this series throughout the year. I’m excited about some of the things that we’re going to learn and how I believe God will meet us and grow us through this series. I want to read one scripture that’s going to be the launching pad for us to leap into today’s lesson. It’s found in Matthew, chapter number 6, verse number 33. I want us to read this together. If you’ve got a Bible at home, I always keep an old-school Bible with me when I teach. Sometimes technology gets possessed by demons, and so I can make it without the iPad; I can’t make it without the Word, though. So I want to look at Matthew, chapter number 6, verse number 33. These are the words of Jesus: He says, «Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.» I’m going to read it one more time, not just emphasizing what Jesus did say, but I’m going to read it one more time emphasizing what Jesus did not say. He said, «Seek ye first his kingdom.» He didn’t say, «Seek their kingdom.» He said, «Seek first—watch this—his righteousness.» He didn’t say, «their righteousness.» «And then all these things will be given to you as well.» I want to tag the title of this text for our time together today: «Crawl Before You Walk.»

I feel it’s important to inform some and remind others that our God, our Sovereign Savior, is strategic. In other words, he has carefully and intentionally crafted a plan to carry out his agenda for your life. He is so meticulous in his methodology that he has benchmarks, timelines, and preventive measures in place to ensure that we are escorted to his intended end for our lives. He’s strategic—so strategic and detailed that he says the very hairs on your head are numbered. They aren’t just counted, because counted speaks to how many you have. He says they are numbered, meaning he knows the order they are in, and he is so consumed and concerned with your well-being that if one of them is out of place, he knows it. He’s strategic; he doesn’t play UNO, he plays Spades. He’s strategic; he doesn’t play checkers, he plays chess. He is strategically and methodically moving the pieces of our lives to the right place at the right time to carry out his right plan for us. But being a strategic God, he accomplishes his strategy through steps. I’ll say it again—because he’s a strategic God with benchmarks, timelines, and set opportunities that exist in specific seasons and right doors that he knows will open at the right time. You see, God’s doors don’t open with knobs; God’s doors open with sensors.

Do you understand what I’m saying? See, some doors, doors with knobs, open when you get there and you use force to turn the knob. Doors with sensors, like some of the supermarkets you attend, are doors that open when you get to the right place. All you have to do is get close enough and doors will open that you didn’t even touch. Is there anybody that can look back over your life and say there were some doors that opened for me because God put me in the right place, and when I got close, doors opened and I stepped into some things I could not have stepped into if it wasn’t for a strategic God? But we step into—we step into—we step into God’s strategy, God’s plan for our life one step at a time. So watch this: When we intentionally or unintentionally skip steps, we are sabotaging the plan because every step is strategic. When I skip steps, I’m sabotaging the plan; every step is strategic; every season is necessary; every experience is educating us in some way so that the accumulation of that education contributes to the person that God has called us to be. However, we live in an age, an era, a culture where it’s customary to skip steps. It is socially normal to put things together before we read the instructions. It is socially normal to get into a relationship before I get myself together, and sometimes it’s not until people get together in a relationship that they see they aren’t together. So the relationship ends up being called a broken relationship when, in actuality, it’s not a broken relationship; it’s a relationship that has broken people in it because it’s socially normal to skip steps.

Okay, come here; it’s socially normal—listen to this—to learn the antics of worship before we learn and get to know the object of worship. So we learn when to lift our hands, how to respond at certain times of the service, when to sit, and when to stand without getting a revelation of the goodness, the graciousness, and the person of God. And listen to me, ladies and gentlemen: There are areas of our lives where the consequences for skipping steps are not detrimental. You may put a shelf together without reading the instructions and it may work for you, but you cannot treat your life the way you treat a shelf. Am I making sense so far? Because when we skip steps, people end up in places of authority and they abuse it. When we skip steps, people get in crisis and then they cave and crack under the pressure.