Dharius Daniels - Get Off My Line

I want to tag a title to this text and talk about this subject today: get off my line. Let me move to this side because I’m trying to find something. I might have to go global. I said I want someone to say this to the devil like you mean it: «Get off my line!» Clap your hands if you’re ready for God’s word, family! Recently, I was spending time with one of my goddaughters, my newest goddaughter. Her name is Asher, and I believe they have a picture they’re going to put up for you so that you can see her. Her parents are doing an amazing job raising her—very wise, very prudent, and limiting her interaction with technology. However, whenever she comes over to Goddaddy’s house—it’s not just me; Pastor Shamika’s in on it too—we play with technology; we play with phones. It dawned on me a couple of weeks ago when she was playing a game on the phone. Her parents don’t allow her to do it, but Pastor Mika and I do. She has so much fun when she plays with it! Anyway, we’re playing with the phone, and it hits me: This is the only type of phone she’s ever going to know. You can talk on this phone, you can play games on it—that’s good with the picture. We can send emails on this phone; you can record videos on this phone, you can FaceTime with this phone, voice text with this phone, pull up a map on this phone, and so much more. I started thinking about the phones we had when I was her age. Come on, I know I’m about to lose some of you—stay with me! I started thinking that when I was her age, you could do one thing with the phone. It wasn’t an iPhone. Let me show you the kind of phone I’m talking about. Do we have that picture? Foreign Jesus! Well, anyway, the phone I grew up with—you couldn’t do this; you had to do this. Yep, there was a time, listen to me, young people, when you didn’t have what we called three-way calling. This means if you were on this phone and someone called you, they would hear a busy signal and wouldn’t be able to get through to you. It’s alright, come on back; they wouldn’t be able to get through to you until you got off the phone. Now, here’s how trifling some of us were: you put the phone down. This is when we didn’t feel like being bothered; we took the phone off the hook so that people who wanted to get in touch with us couldn’t until we felt like answering. I was calling you all night; your line was busy, child, for real! I started thinking about this, and it was almost as if I had this epiphany out of nowhere: not only was it that way back in the day when humans were trying to communicate with each other, but it is that way even today when God is trying to talk to us. God doesn’t use iPhones; He uses rotary phones. There is no three-way: He does not compete for our attention. There are times when He is attempting to communicate with us, get through to us, deliver a message, do something for us, help us avoid unnecessary disaster, assist us in making better choices, prevent us from experiencing some unnecessary agitation, and introduce us to the purpose for which we were born. He’s calling and calling and calling, but He’s getting a busy signal. One writer said, «When the devil makes you busy, maybe it isn’t that God isn’t communicating; maybe the issue is that we’re on the line with something else.» Listen, when the devil can’t make you bad, he makes you busy. When I’m busy with the wrong things, I can’t be busy with the right things. When I’m caught up with less important matters, I can’t focus on the most important ones. I am telling you, God is trying to communicate with you and me. We need to clear some things off the line because there are more important topics He wants to discuss with us. I am not saying we are occupied and obsessed with what is unimportant; I’m telling you God wants to talk to us about matters that are far more significant. If we are able and willing to address those more important things, then it will automatically take care of the less important ones. We continuously and consistently deal with fruit, and God is saying, «I want to talk to you about the root.» Because once I address the root, we won’t have to deal with the fruit of some of these issues. I’m telling you, over the next few weeks, God wants to talk to you about something very important.