Touré Roberts - Whose Son Are You?

Whose son are you? You know, one of the things that I love about Jesus is that He redefined man’s relationship with God. If you study Jesus, and you have to stay with me because I’m going somewhere, He called God «Father» more times than He called Him «Lord.» Study it when you get a chance. He basically redefined humankind’s relationship with God from God just being like a distant Lord—someone we’re afraid of—to Him saying «Father.» If you study Jesus, this is very interesting. There is nothing in His interaction with the Father that suggests He was afraid at all. There’s nothing in there. When you think about Jesus’s relationship with His Father, it was not based on fear; it was based on trust. No, no, no, study it because one of the things you have to understand about Jesus is that He came from God to teach us how to relate to God. Hello, somebody! He has the most accurate picture and understanding of what humankind’s relationship with God should look like, and He says the relationship is that of a father and child. I’m trying to help you—Father, Son—a completely redefined relationship. I was thinking about Destiny the other day. My wife and I were talking about Destiny, and one thing that Destiny needs is your potential. Just stay with me for a second: your destiny needs your potential, and your potential needs you to trust God. Here’s why: your potential is always beyond you. This means that if you never had God moving you forward and if you weren’t trusting Him, you would not reach your potential. Oh, I’m going to take my time right there. Your destiny mandates your potential; in other words, when God sees you, He sees more than what you’re seeing. You see, we are more wired to organically pursue survival and not potential. Let me make that plain. Let me say it again: organically, without God proving that He is trustworthy—and I’ll talk about that in a second—without God doing that, we are more inclined to survive than to thrive. We’re more inclined to just get by; we are very safe organically. We are not naturally those who are willing to be risk-takers, or at least what looks like risk. Let me put it to you this way: no risk, no potential. I cannot be what God sees me as; I cannot fulfill what my life has the potential of fulfilling unless I trust God, who is going to say, «Walk on water.» I want to show you something real quick that relates to Destiny. Stay with me; I’m going somewhere. We’re going to land this plane, have a Father’s Day dinner, and then we’ll be okay. This is how Destiny works; you almost have to look at it backward. Destiny needs your potential; Destiny needs the you that is beyond you. Are you hearing me? Where are my purpose people at right now? Let me tell you something: purpose will pull you out of your comfort zone. I wrote a book about it. It will pull you—matter of fact, it requires you to leave your comfort zone. Purpose is bigger than you; purpose knows you; it knows what’s inside of you, and it knows your potential. But here’s the reality: oftentimes, subconsciously, you only believe that your potential equals your experience. I’m trying to help two or three people. In your mind, subconsciously, what you can do equals what you’ve seen, and as a result, we miss potential. Potential says what you can do has nothing to do with what you have seen done before. It is a divine ability that’s bigger than you and bigger than anything you’ve ever experienced. See, potential does not ponder like this. Potential says, «I don’t care what you’ve seen done.» Maybe, just maybe, the reason why you haven’t seen it is that you are the one ordained to do it. You cannot base your potential on what other people have done. The reason why you haven’t seen it, the reason why nobody else has done it, is because it’s got your name on it. It is about your legacy; it is about your destiny; it is about the mark that you will leave on this earth. So potential is needed for Destiny, and trust is needed for potential. Trust says, «I’m over here,» and potential responds because potential understands that trust is trustworthy. Well, how do I get to trust? You need intimacy. I don’t trust anything that I’m not intimately connected with, particularly anything that is related to my destiny. I don’t—I can’t trust you if I don’t know you. Are we together? Destiny requires potential. Potential necessitates trust, and trust needs intimacy. Intimacy has to believe that God loves me and that God is for me. So if I don’t understand whose son I am, if I don’t understand who my Father is, if I don’t understand the character of my Father—that He’s not someone I should be afraid of, but rather someone I trust so much that I will obey even when He asks for the hard things—are we?