Dharius Daniels - Get Out of Your Way

Well, it’s the final message in our Bounce Back Season series, and so I want to read some scripture today found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verse 54. I don’t typically read a lot of scripture at the beginning of my lesson, but I want to make sure we wrap our heads around the context of this text. Here in the Gospel of Luke, 22:54 says, «Then, seizing him, they led him away and took him into the house of the high priest. Peter—watch this now, watch this—followed at a distance. And when some had kindled a fire in the midst of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat down with them. A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight, and she looked closely at him and said, ‘This man was with him.’ But he denied it, saying, ‘Woman, I don’t know him.’ A little later, someone else saw him and said, ‘You’re also one of them.’ He said, ‘Man, I’m not.’ Then, an hour later, another asserted, ‘Certainly, this fellow was with him, for he is Galilean.’ And Peter replied, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Just as he was speaking, the rooster crowed. Then the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word that the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’ And he went outside and wept bitterly.»

I want to stop right there; I want to tag a title to this text. I want to talk from this subject: The Final Lesson in the Bounce Back Season Series. Here it is: Get Out of Your Way. There is a reality that every human will have to wrestle with and overcome if they’re going to reach their redemptive potential. If a person is going to experience life as God intended, they will have to wrestle with and win over an emotion called regret. Regret, family, is a sense of sadness and disappointment over a season or a circumstance where you were the primary contributor to your own calamity. Don’t miss this, family; it’s when, if someone were to be arrested for a crime inflicted upon us, the person we would have to point out to the police would be ourselves. It’s when we are the perpetrator and the accomplice to the mishap of managing a season or missing an opportunity to the degree that we want to be mad at something or someone, but we realize the only person we can be mad at is ourselves—regret, an emotional response to a revelation that we got in our own way.

If anybody is going to reach their redemptive potential, they have to wrestle with and learn to win over regret. Because regret, family, listen to me, it’s what’s called amoral; it is not moral, it is not immoral. The morality of regret is dictated and determined by what you do with it and how it’s used. It’s not good or bad, holy or unholy; the morality of regret is based on whose hands it’s in and how they use it. God wants to use it for our education; he wants us to learn from it, heal from it, and move on. The enemy wants to use it to cause our stagnation, to revel in it, keep revisiting it, and stay stuck. The enemy, come here, wants to use regret in a way that it mutates and evolves into another emotion called guilt, and then guilt becomes the glue that keeps you stuck in seasons God has moved on from.

I want somebody to talk back to me now. As I said, the enemy wants us to mismanage regret so that mismanaged regret mutates into guilt, then guilt becomes the glue that keeps you stuck in a season God has moved on from. You are punishing yourself for a crime that God has expunged from your record, and the adversary understands that you cannot be the you you need to be in your future if you are still punishing yourself for the you you used to be in your past. I am coming to somebody today who is watching this message, and I want to tell you that this is your prison break. This is your day where God’s about to break you out of the jail that you’ve been serving a life sentence in because you’ve been stuck to a version of yourself that God has evolved you out of.

You see, I mean, I’m prayerful, but when I was praying for the service this morning, I prayed uniquely with a kind of fervency that is different for me over the message. Because as I started revisiting what I was going to share today, I began to think about what Paul talked to the church at Ephesus about, which was principalities. He says we wrestle not against flesh and blood, right? It mentions principalities. And I also started thinking about what Paul told Timothy about doctrines of devils, which produces principalities, social norms, trends that you see in regions, in people groups, and in family structures. I prayed uniquely over this because I felt like this message is a bit different. This message, family, is an act of spiritual warfare; this is deliverance. Okay, come here, am I making sense? I said when we think about deliverance, we think about exorcisms, and when we think about deliverance, we think about habits being broken. When we think about deliverance, we think about yokes and fetters being destroyed, as opposed to mindsets being altered. Because sometimes the only thing that has you stuck is not the enemy; it’s the enemy. And if you can get out…