Keion Henderson - I Owe It to Me

This is what I want to talk about, but it’s for you to repeat after me: «I owe it to me.» That 's what I want to discuss today — I owe it to me. Let us pray.

Holy Spirit, we thank You for Your saving grace and for being with us, Jesus Christ, for being the propitiation for our sins. Thank You, Father God, for overseeing the whole matter. Thank You, Trinity, for being one in essence. Thank You, God, that You are a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. We pray that You would open up this word today so that those who hear it- no matter what continent they are on, no matter what city or state- will rise up through this message and share it with those in need of it. We pray that we would hit the reset on our lives. In Jesus' name, we pray, Amen.

Now, this introduction will probably resonate with everyone aged twenty-five, thirty, and up. Those of you who are teenagers may have no clue what I’m discussing. Just the other day, my daughter’s phone froze up, and she gave it to me, saying, «Dad, can you reset it?» If you have an iPhone, you know you press the volume up, volume down, hit the side button, and then swipe it off, and it will reset the device. It’s the same for an iPad- that’s how most of us reset our devices nowadays. However, for those of you who are not Kindle users or tablet users, and even before the Mac computer made its resurgence, most of us were on PCs, whether it was a Dell, Hewlett- Packard, or something like that. We all had our computers, and to reset them wasn’t done by touching the screen. You couldn’t just press volume up, volume down, and then the power button. That 's not how it worked.

To shut off a computer that wasn’t responding to commands, in order to shut off a computer that was buffering or had a frozen screen, you only had one option. Every '80s baby knows exactly what I’m talking about. '70s babies, of course, know what I mean. The combination of keys you needed to hit to reset a computer was Control, Alt, and Delete. Everybody knew that when that computer started acting crazy, if you needed to shut it off and it wasn’t responding, you had to control it by pressing those three buttons simultaneously.

The reason I wanted to bring this into the conversation quickly is that it relates to resetting a computer that wasn’t responding. It’s like resetting a computer that had frozen, or what we call in technological terms, buffering. If you’ve seen a smart TV that doesn’t have a strong internet connection, or your phone while using Instagram or whatever app, and you see that little spinning clock, it’s because it’s buffering. The signal isn’t strong enough to keep up with the stream, so it stalls to buy time for the downloading process to catch up.

This is what Paul’s life is like because, up until now, everything has happened so fast. First, he was murdering people, and then, all of a sudden, he’s on the road to Damascus. The Bible says he was struck down immediately, and then God got his attention. In three days, he was back singing again, and then guess what? He was building churches. Everything was happening so quickly; his system was operating at breakneck speed. But just like a computer, Paul’s life is synonymous with the fact that the more you download onto it, the slower it becomes. The more programs you have on the computer, the more energy is directed to the background and the forefront, affecting the screen and the apps. Consequently, you lose speed due to the excess memory being used.

This is what has happened to Paul. In the beginning of his journey, all he knew was that he was on fire for Christ. But then the expectations of the people weighed heavily on him, and the church 's expectations piled up too. Now, his past has confronted him. He is now a preacher, and people will remind you of what you did before coming to the Lord. So now, he has all of this competing for his attention. To add to this, he wrote the book of Philippians while in prison. Now, Paul is in prison, and his life is buffering. Nothing is working as fast as it used to; nothing is functioning the way it once did. He is not encouraged like he used to be, and no one is writing to him as they once did. He is nearing the end of his life, and he feels as though his life is buffering. He has aged and is facing a midlife crisis, wondering whether he will achieve the goals he set out to achieve or if he will die in this state. Some of you are right there in your lives, in such a situation.