Touré Roberts - Lay Hold of It

I’ve been preaching about alignment and what alignment is. This is important; if you missed that series, alignment is when your life on earth begins to align with what God saw before He put you here. Does that make sense? The Word says, «Before I formed you in your mother’s womb,» here’s what God says: «Before I put you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.» He speaks in terms of completion. God doesn’t bring us here in a random context, and we just have to figure out life. It’s not that; God is a God of specificity, and He knew before He brought us here what He wanted our lives to look like. If we can discover that and continue to uncover it, then we begin to model and represent that image, which the world needs and is waiting for. Alignment is about seeking God, praying, and pruning when necessary, and really pressing into the image that God continuously shows you until you, on earth, begin to look like what Heaven knew about you.

In other words, Heaven has an identity concerning you right now, and when you begin to align with it and live it out, you become unstoppable because there is nothing in this world or this universe that can stop what Heaven has ordained. So, what we have to figure out is what Heaven has ordained concerning my life so that I can start winning instead of losing or winning without guessing. I talked about that in a whole teaching over five or six series. Anyway, this is the year of alignment, and if we’re honest, we’re stepping into the second half of the year, and it’s been kind of tough. Somebody said, «Hallelujah!» Telling the truth, and here’s the tricky thing: I have a bone to pick with God about this, but God leaves out details. Some of those details are real, pivotal parts, like here’s the promise, but you’ve got to go through hell again. If you understand what I’m saying, don’t you wish He would just tell the truth? Just talk to me, but He doesn’t. He gets us all excited about where He’s taking us; He says things like, «For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope.» And you’re like, «Yes, yes!» But He doesn’t tell you about the journey required to get there; He doesn’t tell you about the preparation. I’m trying to figure out why He doesn’t. I think that if He told you what you’d have to go through to get to what He showed you, you would be like, «Am I cool, right? I’m just going. This is me in video four; we’ll just hang.» You know what I mean?

Some of you have embraced this word about alignment; you’ve been pressing into alignment, but if you’re honest, you’ve looked at your life, and there seems to be this whole universe of activity, situations, thoughts, and just things that appear to be completely unrelated to the promise you’ve been given. Here’s the promise: you start moving towards it, and then all this stuff breaks out over here, and there seems to be no connection between the bomb that went off over there and the promise that God made you over here. Have you been there before? If you’re not careful, you’ll begin to think that the promise isn’t real, not realizing that God has strategically connected both things. The thing is, there are always the seeds of preparation before the promise. The season of preparation is the forerunner to the promise. The challenge is that the forerunner often looks nothing like the promise, and we’re over here saying, «What in the world does that pain, that heartbreak, that craziness, that strain, that stress, that struggle, that awkward random job—what does that have to do with what you promised me?» And I hear God saying, «Everything, especially the struggle, ” because there has to be a place prepared for what God promised. When God makes you a promise, it is on its way, but there has to be room made for it. Some of you walked into 2017 with certain friends, and now you’re halfway through the year, and your whole lineup is different. That’s God making room.

I usually don’t like messages about people because they don’t seem positive, but I have to address this for a minute. There are certain things that God cannot, will not, and absolutely will not bring into your life if you are aligned with the wrong people. I promise you it’s true, and it doesn’t mean they’re bad; most people aren’t bad, but they’re bad for your future. When God is dealing with you, He’s looking at the entire landscape of your life and what He wants to do. There are certain people that are good for your social life—they’re humorous, they’re funny, they laugh—but when it comes to your destiny, they could mess the whole thing up entirely. What happens is, because of our desire for relationships and companionship, we will keep things around that are actually clogging up and cluttering the runway that God wants to land what He promised you.