Dharius Daniels - Make It Make Sense

Here’s the topic of today’s teaching: make it make sense. Clap your hands if you’re ready for God’s word! Everybody, make it make sense. That is the case with every sermon in this Exit Strategies series. I want to ease into this introduction with a quote; it is a quote that I think is extremely important yet often overlooked. The quote, for my note-takers, is as follows: «Things that need to end don’t always end themselves. Some things don’t end until you end them.» I’m going to say it again to see if I can get an enthusiastic, faith-filled, and fervent response. Come on! Things that—let me say something. This is the kind of house where our enthusiasm is not tied to the preacher’s volume. We get happy when we receive a revelation from the word that’s going to shift something in our minds. The preacher shouldn’t have to scream for me to respond; I’m not screaming because he’s screaming. He should be screaming because he’s excited, and I should be screaming because I just heard from heaven. I heard something that made me excited, so let me read it again: «Things that need to end don’t always end themselves. Some things don’t end until you end them.» If we don’t have an understanding of this reality, we will be paralyzed with passivity, anxiously awaiting God to end something that He has given you the ability and the authority to end yourself. I want to tell some people, even in this introduction, that you have received divine permission to issue a cease-and-desist order to anything and everything that is disturbing your peace, disrupting your joy, and detouring you from your destiny. Come on, talk to me! You have the ability to put a period and an end to some sentences in the paragraph of your life. Stop putting a comma where God has given you permission to put a period! Am I talking to anybody who will say it’s period season? Yeah, it’s a period to anything that’s disturbing my peace; it’s a period to anybody who doesn’t mean me any good; it’s a period to any season that’s keeping me stuck and stagnant, keeping me meandering through a maze of mediocrity. It’s a period to anything that is not consistent with where I’ve been but with where I’m going. I need somebody that’s sick and tired of some seasons in your life to open your mouth and say, «Period! Period!» Although this may be easier to understand cognitively, it can be complex to execute practically. It’s one thing to say «period»; it’s another thing to accurately discern what I need to put a period behind. Sometimes it’s more difficult to discern: do I need to continue to press through? Come on! Is this opposition an indication that this is something that God no longer wants me to do? Or is this opposition an indication that this is Satan, who is afraid of me doing it? Because sometimes you can be dealing with a similar situation, but it’s coming from a different source. If you look at something throughout the Bible, like storms, you will see someone like Jonah who ran into a storm on a ship. Then you’ll also see Jesus who ran into a storm on a ship. They both were on ships; they both ran into storms, but the storms had two different sources. One of them needed to rebuke the storm; the other needed to be rebuked himself. Same storm, different sources. The storm that Jonah dealt with was allowed by God to get him to repent and change his direction. The storm that Jesus endured was a storm that came from Satan, who didn’t want Jesus to get to the other side. Because when Jesus got to the other side, there was a demoniac in a cemetery who had been cutting himself, which is an indication of engaging in self-sabotaging behavior. You don’t have to cut yourself literally to be cutting yourself metaphorically; anytime you do something that hurts you, you’re cutting yourself. This man was cutting himself in a cemetery; his proximity was affecting his activity. He was alive, hanging out in a place with dead people, but because he didn’t know who he was, he didn’t realize he didn’t belong there. I came to tell somebody who has been engaging in self-sabotaging behavior: you’re hanging out where you don’t belong. You are not dead; God is not finished with you yet! You are not at the end of your journey; you are at the beginning. You need to know that weeping may endure for a night, but joy is coming in the morning! I need to know, when do I know this is something I’m supposed to press through versus when I’m supposed to cease doing? Is this God sending me a sign to stop, or is it the devil who doesn’t want me to keep going? Do I give up on this because it’s my dream and not God’s dream for me, or do I keep pressing my way because it is God’s dream for me, and the enemy wants me to assume that it’s not? So, PD, how do I know? I need discernment! Not the discerning of spirits; that’s a spiritual gift. Discernment is not a spiritual gift; the discerning of spirits is a spiritual gift, and it is a part—are y’all here, right? So now, watch this! I don’t even have I’m going to have to do a teaching on spiritual gifts because here’s a problem: many people, when you don’t recognize the purpose of a spiritual gift, you will pervert its usage. So, people who have the gift of discerning your spirits but don’t know what they are…