Dharius Daniels - Accelerate Your Spiritual Growth

Many of us are wrestling with perceived obstacles related to age and assume that now I’m in a season of my life where I can’t do this. I’m not as hot as I used to be; I’m not as spicy as I used to be, not realizing that God included stories like Sarah’s in the Bible, not to tell 90-year-old women to have a baby, but to show you that I can inspire you to give birth to something in a season when others feel like it’s too late. Spiritual disciplines are in place to slow you down, and they actually speed you up. While others are straining and sweating, you can be stepping your way forward. Is there anybody here tonight who has made the decision that you want to experience spiritual acceleration? I want God to do it for me swiftly. We have our Head Start hours; we are at the Head Start, and the average person would feel like they are behind schedule. I know there are some people in this room—if you’re in ministry, you’ve felt that way at one point or another. You see people further along in their journey than you are, and you feel like you’re behind schedule. That experience can create anxiety because it can lead us to feel like we’ll never catch up. Many of us are wrestling with perceived obstacles related to age and assume that now I’m in a season of my life where I can’t do this. I’m not as hot as I used to be; I’m not as spicy as I used to be, not realizing that God put stories like Sarah’s in the Bible, not to tell 90-year-old women to have a baby, but to show you that I can inspire you to give birth to something in a season when others feel like it’s too late. I want to know, am I talking to anybody here who believes it’s not too late? When he engages in the act of self-care and practices spiritual disciplines, he gets further faster. I’m getting ready to start a teaching series at our church this Sunday called «Air Force,» and the series focuses on prayer. One of the principles I noticed as I’ve been studying this is that the enemy never directly attacks what he’s after. He never directly attacks my progress; he attacks the things that lead to my progress. So he doesn’t come after my strength directly; he comes after the things that make me strong. Jesus engages in this spiritual discipline of prayer, and you cannot read the New Testament without seeing the prioritization of this from the Gospels through the Epistles. Even in Acts 6, the apostles organized infrastructure to devote themselves to the ministry of the word and prayer because they understood something. You see this imagery primarily in the Old Testament. They understood the Watchman imagery—they recognized their responsibility not just to be proclaimers but to be prayers. They are Watchmen who watch souls, and they have been assigned to jurisdictions they are responsible for. If they aren’t covering their jurisdictions in prayer, who else is doing it? Do you know that the quality of your life is based on the quality of your decisions, and the quality of your decisions is based on the quality of information that you have? That means you need reliable sources of information, and the most reliable source of information in the world is the Bible. But you know what most people don’t understand? If you want to understand the Bible, God is enough, but Sundays are not. I want to help you understand; I want to help you interpret and apply. I want to help you explain the Bible better. This is why I’m inviting you to be a part of my tribe called Bible. Jesus spends hours in prayer and is able to get there in minutes because God redeems time. Did you hear what I just said? Family, God redeems time. Redeems means to buy back, right? To purchase. So when I say he redeems time, if it means to buy back, it doesn’t mean to release more; it means to buy back. So if he redeems time, it doesn’t mean he gives me more time; it means he takes the time I have left and says, «I’m going to do so much in the time you have left that it will make up for all the time you missed.» He says, «I’m going to give you one door. I can open one door for you in 2022, and that door can make up for five years of closed doors because I’m the God who redeems time.» Jesus catches up, right? He’s walking on the water, and the disciples say, «It’s a ghost.» I want to know where their theology is like, «What?» They say, «It’s a ghost,» and here are my questions. How have you eaten with someone, walked with someone, rode with someone, learned from someone, and been so close to someone for three years and not know what they look like? I walked through the airport in a mask, and people know who I am; they had no idea. How have you been so close to someone that long, and you can’t recognize him? Maybe it’s because God doesn’t always look like God in a storm, but I just said, I said—remember, because God didn’t show.