Touré Roberts - You Are Covered

The thought that I want to reinforce today is really a declaration that I pray means something more deeply to you upon leaving than it has in your life up to this point. What God wanted me to make certain you knew is that you are covered. You are covered; you are covered. I want to talk about that as I focus on Jesus, and we are wise to focus on Jesus because the Scriptures say that Jesus is the express image of the invisible God. No one has seen God, and when you look at Jesus, you must understand that He came to be a perfect expression, not from a physical perspective, but from a spiritual perspective that would bring you not only into the heart of God but also show what a relationship with God should look like. Jesus was the model. Are you tracking with me?

There are a lot of reasons we can deduce for Jesus coming, of course, to become our sin, among many other things. In fact, one of the things I appreciate most about Him might be the only Scripture that speaks to the word purpose as it relates to Jesus. In 1 John 3:8, it states, «For this purpose the Son of God was manifest, that He might destroy the works of the devil.» I taught on this in a message called «Identity Crisis» in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and it says, «For this purpose the Son of God was manifest, that He might destroy the works of the devil.» This makes you wonder what He is referencing when He talks about destroying the works of the devil. He did not destroy the work of the devil, which did happen, but He destroyed the works or the residual effects of the enemy.

So, what are the residual effects of the enemy that Jesus came to destroy? Essentially, they are his lies. One of the identities of the enemy that we often miss—perhaps due to intentionality on the part of the other guy—is that he is an accuser of the brethren; he is a liar. Therefore, the greatest threat of the enemy is not him killing you; he cannot kill you unless the Lord gives him permission; he doesn’t have that type of power. Instead, it is him lying to you and causing you to subscribe to his lie, thereby allowing your identity to become distorted.

When it talks about Jesus coming to destroy the works of the devil, it refers to Him coming to tear down the strongholds in your thinking that are the byproducts of the lies that Satan fed you and that you ultimately accepted. If you stay with me, I promise it will make a lot of sense. That’s the issue Paul mentioned; he put it this way in 2 Corinthians 10, around verses 3-5: «For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they are mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.»

The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they are mighty through God for the pulling down—notice this word—of strongholds. If you look up that word «strongholds, ” it has the idea of a castle. Just to assist you, when it says the weapons of our warfare are mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds, the stronghold is a fortified argument in your mind. So, the warfare is really over what you think; it’s about your perspective, how you perceive things. That is why Joyce Meyer wrote a wonderful book called „The Battlefield of the Mind“ because that is where the battlefield actually is.

The works of the devil are what he caused you to believe, and as a result of that belief, you created a fortified argument in your mind. Your life now moves in a particular direction because you move according to how you think. As a man thinks, so is he. I cannot separate how I move from what I think; I am what I think. Are you tracking with me?

So, one of the primary purposes, indeed the only place in Scripture that articulates the purpose for Jesus coming, is to destroy the lies that have shaped you. If you ever got a revelation of who you truly were, and if you could see that clearly and consistently, your life would look radically different. You would experience no fear, move in power and victory, and understand that you were created in the image and likeness of God, and that God is for you. If He is for you, who can be against you? We would all be so much further along, and we will go so much further as we begin to understand what our weapons are.