Dharius Daniels - Most People Don't Realize This About Spiritual Growth

So when the Bible says God wants to order my steps, it means He said I need you to let me guide your decisions. It means, now are y’all okay? It means God wants us to let Him be Lord, not just Savior. Jesus said this about plowing in Luke 9:62: «No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.» I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone plowing, but what happens when you let go? Sir, He said, come on here! A person who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom. And as I see all this, I think, man, there’s been this obsession with reaping and sowing, but I’m looking at Scripture and noticing this concept of plowing—that there’s power in the plow; sowing precedes reaping, but plowing precedes sowing. And watch this: sowing in Scripture refers to three distinct things. One, sowing refers to conversation. My words, the Bible says, are seed. Y’all better hear me now! Am I making sense? The power of life and death, yes sir, is in the tongue. Sir, they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. I’m eating what I’m saying, so if I’m saying negativity, then I’m internalizing and eating negativity. If what I’m saying is full of cynicism, then I’m going to be eating and internalizing cynicism. So I cannot have a positive internal state if my mouth is inundated with negative, cynical, and doubt-filled words. Come on here! I’ve never seen a positive attitude with negative conversation. Paul says, «We therefore having the same spirit of faith, we believe therefore we speak,» confession, homo lego, to say the same. What does God say? That’s what I say. Did you hear what I just said? I said, what does God say? That’s what I say. It means I don’t ignore facts—that’s denial, that’s not faith. Faith doesn’t deny reality. Faith believes God can change it. Faith says this is a fact, but the word is truth, and the fact doesn’t change the truth. But when I put this truth on that fact—the fact may be there’s lack, but the truth is He will supply all of my needs. So let me put that truth on the fact, and the truth will change the fact. So my words are seeds, and here’s the problem: some of us are trying to sow seeds of words in other people without plowing. That’s why the conversation isn’t yielding a harvest, 'cause there are rocks in the soil of their heart, and there’s rubble in the soil of their heart. Until that pride is plowed out, oh yeah, until that defensiveness is plowed out, until that hypersensitivity is plowed out, until that lack of self-awareness is plowed out, no matter how persuasive, how profound, or how well-timed your words are, there’s never a right time to speak the right word to a sensitive heart. It’s too quiet in this church today. I say you’re trying to have a conversation; you haven’t plowed enough yet. It’s the plow. So I sow words, so I sow conversation, but I also sow choices. My seeds are my choices, my decisions. My decisions are the way I partner with God in my destiny. I come into partnership with God’s plan for my life by my willingness to allow Him, either by promptings of the Spirit or the principles in His word, to influence my decisions. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord; He delights in his way. Though he falls, he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with His right hand. Steps are systematic, left, right, and sequential—one foot in front of the other, patterns of movement that get me from one place to the next. So your steps are actually your decisions, 'cause you get from one place in life to the next not by what you do here, but by what you do up here. Am I making sense? And so when the Bible says God wants to order my steps, it means He said I need you to let me guide your decisions. It means, now are y’all okay? It means God wants us to let Him be Lord, not just Savior—uh-oh, let me go over here. Wait a minute, okay, let me go back. I said He wants to be Lord, not just Savior. Lord means I let You influence me on the front end. Savior means I just want You to come rescue me on the back end—to be a deliverer, but don’t be a prophet. Let me do what I want to do on the front end, and if my decision-making gets me in a dilemma, then I’ll invite You in to rescue me from something that I got myself into. He said, but to get from where you are to where I want you to be, you’ve got to let me start influencing those decisions. You’ve got to let me order those steps! Woo! Come on! Every decision is pregnant with the potential to produce a season; a season is in a decision. I don’t know if y’all are enjoying this; I’m having a good time today! I’m just as happy as I can be up here! He says, «No, no, no!» So I want y’all to understand every significant decision you make is a seed, but you drop the seed in a moment—seconds. It didn’t take you that long to make the decision; it took you that long to plow. You see, there are some decisions we know we need to make—the hard ones—but you make a hard one in a moment. What’s hard is not just a decision; it’s all the plowing you did before.