Dharius Daniels - I'm About to See Something

I want to discuss this subject during our time together, family. I’m about to share something—clap your hands if you receive that. I’m about to reveal something. I always like to inform some and remind others that I was raised in a very small town in Mississippi called Kill Michael, Mississippi. During my time there, the population was about 800 people. We had one full-time police officer, his name was David Eldrich, and one part-time police officer whose real name I don’t know; we called him Doney. Doney was my bus driver during the day and the police officer at night. It was a very rural area, but it was also an under-resourced one. What do you mean, Pastor? I mean there were no Boys and Girls Clubs, no YMCA, no basketball teams, and no summer camps. This meant that during the summer, parents had to become very innovative and creative when it came to what they did with their kids. For most of us, our summer activity consisted of two words we got from our parents: «go outside.» That’s what generally happened. But one summer, my father got innovative and creative, and he said, «This summer, we’re going to make a garden.» We were like, «Okay.» Our family had land, so we thought, «Hey, he’s going to pick out a plot, we’ll make a garden, and we’ll figure out what this is going to be about this summer.» But my father had something else in mind. When he said «garden,» he wasn’t referring to a small or moderate amount of land; he took one side of the whole house and the other side of the house and said, «I want to make this side a garden.» I knew I would have trouble explaining this to you verbally, so I called him this week. I said, «Dad, you remember when you made us have that garden?» He said, «Yeah.» I said, «Can you take a video from that side of the house so the people can see what kind of garden we created?» He said, «Sure.» So I want you to see what I mean when I say we had a garden. In my mind, I’m thinking, «That’s not a garden; that’s a football field.» It was one of the most interesting and seemingly invaluable seasons of my life, but it taught me something. It taught me a critical life lesson: what may seem like agitation in one season, you may look back on and call education in another. Did you hear what I just said? Yes, God is literally the only one who takes you to school without telling you that you are in class. You don’t realize you are in school until you graduate. You don’t know He is teaching you something until He has taught you something. Come on here. This is interesting, family, because during that season when I was experiencing that agitation, it seemed unnecessary, and now that I look back on it, I see it was something invaluable. So I want to encourage you not to label something prematurely because what you name it now, you might have to rename later when God gives you a revelation. Am I making sense? So that season of agitation was, in hindsight, an opportunity for education because what that season taught me was the power of plowing. Did you hear what I said? Yes, I had no idea that that experience would have some exegetical value, and here I am standing on this platform, using that experience to open up the scriptures to help us see a principle that applies to our lives. I saw the power of plowing. When you look at that field now, that is how it looked before we created the garden. You cannot sow seed in a field like that; you have to till the ground to create rows so that you can sow in the rows. Am I making sense here? I said, am I making sense? Pastor, when you say «plowing,» what are you referring to? Plowing is the preparation and cultivation of a field to sow seeds that will yield future results. So before we could plant seed, he had to plow because the plowing helped remove the rocks and rubble that would get in the way of the results we wanted. Did you hear what I just said? I said, did you hear what I just said? The plowing is actually harder than sowing because when it came time to sow, all we had to do was drop the seed. Yes, sir! We didn’t sweat when we sowed; we didn’t get fatigued when we sowed. We got fatigued during the plowing because there was some stuff you had to plow through to be able to sow the seed that would produce the harvest. And this is what I see: the enemy is not just after the seed; the enemy is after the plow. He says, «I want them to give up while they are plowing. I want them to give in while they are plowing. I want them to walk away while they are plowing, because if they keep plowing, they’re going to overturn some things. If they keep plowing, they’re going to expose some things. If they keep plowing, they’re going to remove some things that are in the way of what I want to do.»