Toure Roberts - Glory to Glory

When you and I are going from glory to glory—and mind you, going from glory to glory is not just a slight change; it is a complete revolution. Oh, I need to say that better. You going from glory to glory is not just a part of you getting upgraded; it is the whole of you being upgraded. Hey, come on, somebody, don’t play with me! It is the whole of you. Every time I go from glory to glory, I complete a cycle of personal divine evolution until I look more and more like Jesus with every cycle of revolution. Are you tracking with me? This means that this is not an easy process; it is not just a trivial process. This is a very precise process that God induces, and God invites us into this process, and we surrender to it because we understand the process. In fact, if you walk with the Lord long enough, you’ll begin to expect the process and not freak out in the midst of it, because I’ll tell you right now, the process often looks like chaos. Hey, let me teach a little today! It looks like chaos because, watch this, you might not like this, but I have to say it, and I hope you hear it the right way: God has to destroy one version of you in order to produce and manifest another version of you. It’s kind of like the process. You know, in fact, when Paul talks about being transformed by the renewing of your mind, that word «transformation» is the same word that describes a metamorphosis—a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. And you know that caterpillar dies in the cocoon, right? Yes, bye-bye caterpillar! And yet, that caterpillar is sustained by the cocoon—dead but sustained. It’s almost like a resurrection, and that caterpillar comes back with wings on another level, possessing a different glory, a different brilliance, able to move and function differently. That’s how our process from glory to glory works. Can you imagine how chaotic that cocoon must feel? It’s dark and disoriented. Let’s take the process back and give it a personality. I was doing all right on the ground, moving about. I mean, I wasn’t moving fast, but I was still moving. My food was right there; it was low, and I was eating well. Then, next thing you know, I stopped moving, and there’s no more sunshine around me. Everything is dark. Watch this! How I used to connect with the universe, how I used to connect with my world—even how I fed myself—all of a sudden changes. Can you imagine how disorienting that process is? I share this with you because some of you are in a season where it feels like chaos. It feels disorienting, and you can’t do what you used to do to get fed. You can’t do what you used to do to feel comfortable, and you can sense that something is going on, but you don’t quite know what it is. It’s confusing, and I don’t know how it’s playing out. It might be affecting relationships, getting a little funny. It might be playing out in money getting tight. It might even manifest as sickness. No matter how it’s playing out, it’s chaotic and unsettling. Here’s the crazy thing—it’s much like the cocoon. You can’t really see a way forward, you don’t see your wings yet, and you’ve never seen a you with wings before! Hey, that’s a crazy process, and yet it’s a necessary one. So, we’re in a season right now of reorientation. For some of you, it might feel like shaking; it might feel like everything is shaking. Suddenly, everything feels unstable, and I’m trying to figure out what’s happening. Speaking of shaking, you know, if you read the scripture, oftentimes when someone is getting delivered, the scriptures say they convulse or shake. You’ve seen that before! Jesus came to heal folks—there’s a teaching I discussed recently—when the person starts shaking, it can look like something bad is happening to them, but that’s really not the case. They’re being reoriented; they’re going through this physiological process of redefining themselves. As long as they had that spirit on them, that spirit invaded the whole of them and determined how they moved, functioned, and acted. So when they’re getting delivered, they are actually becoming a whole new person all over again. That shaking, that convulsing represents a reorientation to what is now new. I had never seen that connection before—between an individual shaking and the fact that God says in His word that everything that can be shaken will be shaken so that that which cannot be shaken shall remain. So we recognize that shaking is actually a part of development; it’s part of being established. Oh, I feel the Holy Ghost! We need to be shaken because sometimes there are things connected to us that cannot go where God is trying to take us. We may not have the discipline or wholeness to let those things go, and so what I call an involuntary deliverance happens: God says, «Okay, since you won’t let it go, I’m gonna have…»