Touré Roberts - You've Had It The Whole Time

The thought I want to navigate around today is this: you’ve had it the whole time. Let’s pray.

God, thank you so much for these moments that we will spin together. We thank you for your Word; it’s a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. God, your sons and daughters need to hear from you today. Lord, you want to reveal to them who they are, and you want to reveal to them their potential and the possibilities you have set before them. So, God, I thank you for the spirit of wisdom, revelation, insight, knowledge, and breakthrough. And, Lord, may every spiritual gift be activated in this moment that I might reach your sons and daughters in a meaningful, powerful, and effective way, to the end that we would be changed, to the end that we would be better equipped, to the end that you would recolor the world so that we would see it through the lens of victory; that we would see it through the lens of being undefeatable and unstoppable. Do it in this house and in the lives of your sons and daughters. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. God bless you.

Do me a favor and reach out to someone before you sit down, telling them, «You’ve had it the entire time! You’ve got it! You’ve got what it takes!» Hallelujah.

You know, there are a lot of things in that text that are fascinating to me, and these accounts mirror, in many respects, the season we’re in. Personally, I felt compelled in this season to discuss champions and the processes that are normal for the great, but that would otherwise seem confusing and flat-out discouraging. In other words, there are processes that are normal for champions, but if you don’t have anyone to come along and tell you that they’re normal, they could actually suggest otherwise. They can discourage you and make you want to crawl up under a rock. One thing I’ve learned—and I hope it’s a significant takeaway for you—is that oftentimes, the attacks that come in our lives are more about an attempt to distract us from destiny and to draw us away from our identity and purpose than anything else.

What if, because we are in Christ, because we’re anchored in Christ, we already have the victory? What if the attacks on our lives are not even necessarily intended to destroy us, but instead to distract us? What if these attacks are designed to distract us in such a way that we become stalled from what God wants to birth through us because we’re consumed by battles that God is going to fight for us? I feel the Holy Spirit saying again, what if the main purpose of the attack was not even to kill you? What if you can’t be killed? I think that if you could be killed, you would already be dead. So, what if it’s not even about killing you, but about distracting you? What if it’s about having you be so consumed with trying to fight a battle that God says, «I’m already fighting for you; I’ve already gone ahead of you and subdued that»? Instead of birthing what God wants us to birth, we find ourselves in a fight, forgetting that something important is on our lives.

There are some in this room right now who have been so distracted by the battle that you’ve forgotten about the book inside you, the business that God gave you, or the script you were supposed to write. You’ve forgotten all this because right now it feels like your purpose is to survive. Oh, I feel the Holy Spirit—your purpose will never simply be to survive! We do survive, but is surviving our purpose? We survive because we have a purpose. So, I know I just preached, «Just survive it, ” and I say it again: there’s something on the other side, but surviving is not your purpose.

What often happens is that we can be hit with things and distracted by challenges. The goal of the one who is a destroyer (God is a creator; the other guy is a destroyer) is to keep you from birthing what’s inside you. A little backdrop about the children of Israel: as we know, they were God’s people who served as slaves under Egyptian bondage for roughly 400 years. Their cry came up before the Lord. If you study it, I encourage you to read Exodus all the way through Revelation, and you will get the point fully. They were in bondage, and there’s a passage that says they began to groan. Something inside them recognized they were not created to be in bondage, and that groan went up to heaven and into the ears of God. God raised up Moses, who was really the least of the people anyone would have suspected to lead God’s people out of Egyptian bondage. He struggled with stuttering, fear, and he simply was not the one many would expect. There are some people in this room right now who think that you are…