Touré Roberts - Purpose Over Everything

It’s going to be less like a sermon and more like a testimony, if you’ll allow me that. I’ll leave you at the end with a passage of Scripture that I think is relevant to what we discussed today. I’ve been traveling, sharing the message of wholeness with anyone who will listen. In fact, let me ask you, if you have the book «Wholeness» and you’ve already started to read it, it’s changing lives. I’ll tell you the same thing I told the nine o’clock service: If you don’t have wholeness, there is warfare over your life. That’s the reason why you don’t have it, because if I were the enemy of your destiny and the enemy of your best, the enemy of the best version of you, I would fight you tooth and nail over wholeness. I would make you procrastinate. And if you have bought it but haven’t started reading it, that’s warfare too, because of what is in it. I’ve experienced my own warfare even in pushing this book out. First of all, the book is doing very well; it’s all over the place. God is just moving in ways beyond our understanding. The reason it’s doing well, I believe, is because God wants the message in that book to get out, and it is changing lives. I’m receiving so many reports. However, I also know there will always be an assault against the best version of you. One thing I’ve learned about the adversary is that he is not particularly worried about you and me finding Jesus; what concerns him more is you and me discovering who we are in Jesus. Are you tracking with me? He thrives—I’m digressing, but I feel it—he thrives off of his work still operating in your life post-encounter with Jesus. I can teach a little bit, just a little bit. There’s a passage I taught at the other campus that discusses the purpose of Jesus. It says, «For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.» So what are the works of the devil? The works of the devil pertain to the residue of what he did to you before you met Jesus. But it’s not about what he is doing to you; it’s about what he did to you. If you cannot recognize and see what he did to you, he can still do it because you don’t know the damage he caused. Let’s move past this; I just need to keep going. What the enemy did to humanity was traumatic. Jesus comes; now we’re saved. We embrace Jesus; we’ve got a place in heaven, and we have a relationship with God. All that’s great. The only problem is there are still broken things. If you never deal with the broken things, then you have brokenness that perpetuates brokenness while you are in church, clapping your hands, singing your song, and talking about how much you love Jesus. There’s still generational brokenness that, if it doesn’t die in you, will be passed down to your children and your children’s children. The enemy still has victory in your life because you didn’t deal with what he did. It’s almost like the movement for equality. The movement for equality fights for what is right—that’s only the first step of the battle. Next, you have to assess the damage caused by years of wrong. Oh, I wish somebody would catch what I just said! To make things equal doesn’t fix it; it simply returns it to where it should have been. The issue is that there has been damage for years and generations underneath that. So, equality is wonderful, but I want restoration. I want redemption. I want back what I lost as a result of the injustice. Are you tracking with me? Don’t take what’s mine; give it back to me and expect me to be happy. I should have had it from the very beginning. I want restoration; what did I lose? That’s wholeness. Wholeness says, «I’m glad you know Jesus now. I’m glad there’s justice now.» I’m glad that you have spiritual justice, but what areas of brokenness remain in your life because of the season of injustice? What am I missing out on because there is damage that I have yet to detect? If I were the enemy, I would fight you. I would never put that book in your hands because, as long as you can’t see me, I can exploit you. That’s why some of you in this room have the book but haven’t started it. I’m glad you bought the book; praise the Lord, it’s a bestseller—thank God for you! But I didn’t write it for you to just buy it; I wrote it for you to read it! Every one of those things has perfect Amazon scores. How do you achieve that? I mean, someone ought to be hating! Even my YouTube videos get thumbs down! How do you get thumbs down on good news? Anyway, just haters. And you know it’s a hater! I digress—see, I wish my wife were here; she would bring me back. But you know it’s a hater because the video will be 45 minutes long, and two minutes after it’s uploaded, someone has already thumbed it down. Yeah, just a hater. But anyway, if you don’t have the book, get the book. Who has read the book and found it life-changing? Seriously, it seems not enough of you! Who has the book? Raise your hands if you have.