Touré Roberts - Inspired

What it means to be inspired is new, and I’m still wrapping my head around it. I know it’s true, and sometimes God gives you a word that you have to grow into. You can either say, «This word is so far beyond where I am living that I disbelieve it,» which means you exalt yourself and your experience above it, instead of exalting or elevating yourself to it. Are you tracking with me? Sometimes you’ll receive a word so high that you might think, «Since I’ve never seen it and I’ve never seen myself in that light, then I don’t believe it.» When you say, «I don’t believe it,» it means you are exalting your current finite position over a place that God is trying to bring you to. So, are we tracking together? Sometimes God gives us a word, and we have to grow into that word. What you do when you get a word like that is to wrestle with it. Don’t let it go; hold on to that word and let it fight you. I feel like preaching and teaching tonight! Let that word fight you, and you better let it win.

Are you with me? It’s like Jacob in the Bible. I’m so distracted, I’m sorry, but it’s like Jacob—remember how he wrestled with the angel? When he was prevailing, he was in trouble; but when the angel won, he prospered. Anyway, God started speaking to me about being inspired and what that means. I want to read a passage of Scripture and talk to you a little about inspiration and being inspired. I want to show you something that will be encouraging, and I think we’re going to be better as a result. Let’s go to Luke chapter 11, very quickly, verse 9, and we’ll read through verse 13. I’ll say a few things and then we will come back to that.

This is Jesus speaking. He says, «So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.» Hmm! For everyone who asks receives; this is good— the word is good. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? If he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion? He says, «If you, then, being evil”— He’s not calling you evil necessarily; He’s talking about how compared to Him, He is so good that anything else looks evil in comparison, right? He’s not saying that. I just want to clarify that.

„If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?“ The Holy Spirit—those are interesting words because we won’t even talk about the Holy Spirit. He is saying, „Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened up to you.“ And then He goes on to say, „If you, as an earthly father, would give good gifts to your child, you wouldn’t give a child a bad gift.“ He goes all the way down and says, „How much more?“ All of a sudden, it gets reduced down to one thing: the Holy Spirit. How much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

So God has been dealing with me about being inspired. When we think of being inspired, we often think of someone who has accomplished something great. You might ask them, „What inspired you?“ And they’ll say, „I saw this, or this inspired me, ” or whatever else. Most of us look at inspiration as something cyclical or seasonal; we’re inspired in a moment to do something, and then that inspiration is gone. When we think of being inspired, we don’t think of it as a full-time thing; rather, we see it as something that comes and goes. That’s why, sometimes, if you’re creative—or all of us are creative, really—we recognize this phenomenon called writer’s block. Has anybody ever struggled to feel inspired? Let’s keep it 100 in here today. Sometimes we think of inspiration as fleeting; we have moments and splashes of inspiration. We might wake up and feel inspired one day, and that implies we didn’t feel inspired yesterday. Has anyone ever been there? Am I in the right room? I just want to make sure you’re with me. You rarely hear someone say, „I’m always inspired.“ It’s almost…