Bishop Noel Jones - I Will Trust Him - October 21, 2020

job job chapter 13 and job in its setting in the bible is not chronologically in place because job is actually in genesis in the time of genesis and the reason we deduce that is job did sacrifice for himself which puts him in the time of the patriarch in the abraham's time and the significance of understanding the chronological order is to realize that it's been an age-old question as to why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and so the chronology of the job is indicative of the fact that mankind has always wondered why can i be so good and have to deal with so many negative issues it is particularly intense for the child of god or the person who is endeavoring to live a life of integrity and honesty and decency it's particularly intense for that person when you look around at people who aren't doing anything right and they still seem to be advancing david said my foot almost slipped and job is not only going through something he is facing his friends and of course they're putting salt in the womb because now one has called him a liar and others called him a hypocrite and it seems when things are going well everybody was in his corner and now that he's struggling because of some unknown affliction they have become theologians and moralists and they're now deciding just why job is in the situation he is in isn't it interesting that when god isn't speaking everybody else is and everybody knows why you're going through and god hasn't said a word so as he's wrangling as he's fighting to find a place to feel comfortable because no matter what's going on on the outside he's facing the catastrophe god's not talking to him his friends are mocking and jerrying and belittling him and he still has to live within the parameters of the difficulty and find peace within himself so as he responds to them in a sort of answer we pick up in verse 13 and he is now groping with the circumstance and the disposition of his friends he says lo mine i hath seen all this mine heir hath heard and understood it what she know the same do i know also i'm not inferior unto you surely i would speak to the almighty and i desire to reason with god but ye are forgers of lies ye are all physicians of no value oh that ye would all together hold your peace now we would have just said shut up and it should be your wisdom here now my reasoning and hearken to the pleadings of my lips will ye speak wickedly for god and talk deceitfully for him will he accept his person will ye contend for god is it good that he should search you out or as one man market another do you so mock him he will surely reprove you if you do secretly accept persons shall not his ex lindsay make you afraid and his dread fall upon you your remembrance are like unto ashes your bodies to bodies of clay hold your peace let me alone that i may speak and let come on me what will wherefore do i take my flesh in my teeth and put my life in my hand though he slay me yet will i trust in him but i will maintain mine own ways before him i want you to look at somebody and say though he slay me i will trust him the issue here surrounds faith and i have and we have actually dealt with faith these past few weeks and i'm discovering that the issues surrounding faith are astounding and multiple particularly when we grasp the significance of the truth that everybody in here has an idiosyncratic a peculiar and a very special faith faith i tried to get you to understand last week i think it was is like a fingerprint and no matter who is promulgating and expostulating faith nobody can literally teach you to believe you can teach believers but you can't teach belief faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of god it is god who has to speak to you stimulate and initiate contact and out of that contact you embrace the god you never see by your faith i can't duplicate your faith neither can i duplicate your concept of god because we can have the same teacher the same preacher read the same bible but everybody has their own concept of god and obviously he doesn't mind it because he has not shown up to give a description to all of us of himself but he has spoken to us in our own circle and in our own environment in our own history through the events of our lives and we have formed an idiosyncratic fingerprint concept of god i'm convinced then that because of that fact we marvel at each other's unique faith and it's not only folk who don't believe but believers look at other believers and they're astounded by the faith of their brothers and sisters simply because god has allowed you a faith that is so unique that he can declare your faith hath made you whole not creflo dollars not fred prices not mine but yours don't fool yourself you've got some faith folk talk about big faith little faith sow a seed get some faith but you already have faith when you got up this morning god gave you some faith uh it speaks to me then of a corporate relationship and i'm going to the mountain today my body is on the way that i have with god and i have with you we have a corporate relationship because we form the body of christ but having a corporate relationship does not deny the idiosyncratic relationship each one of us have with that same god because often times believers don't understand your circumstance and believers have a tendency to want to speak in the name of god because they feel certain things should not happen in your life if you have faith because they're judging your life by their life not understanding that i'm not supposed to be cloned by you i'm supposed to live within the parameters of my own history and find god where i am faith then must bring the qualities of god into the spirit of our souls there has to be a divine entrance into anthropological environments and god's got to come in here and give me that uniqueness to understand that he wants me to express him in self-understanding i want to talk a little bit today about self-understanding and self-identity in relationship to faith because if my faith in god is unique and if my relationship with god is unique then somewhere in the process i have to identify who i am in light of my relationship with god i have to know who i am now that he has turned the light on me and once i know who i am even though we have a corporate relationship i still understand where i stand within the confines of my relationship with god too many people are trying to make other people understand and walk with god the way they do and what god is trying to do and is doing is causing each one of us to understand where we are and understand that i can serve god where i am and i don't have to move to where you are because he is really my god too uh it's true then that if i'm going to be unmovable in a world that is changing all the time if i'm going to have some consistency some sameness and some continuity in a world that is moving i have to have a touch of the immutable i have to have an unchangingness that can only come by my faith in god and i have to understand it i have to use it cognitively because if i don't understand it i would capitulate to everybody's view about me and everybody can pass their judgment and i will be jumping from judgment to judgment trying to please a whole lot of folk who don't even know me i have to become so solidified in my faith that my faith in god reveals to me who i am and once i know who i am i need to walk in who i am regardless of how other people feel about me uh i'm feeling like job today i guess a little like joe uh browning says this and i quote he sends he says since all cognitive processes are embedded in a self system they never operate independently from the self to maintain a spirit of continuity and sameness amidst the world of changing perceptions unquote i don't know if you have ever felt tired of going through changes and and wanting to move into uh interior a spiritual level where you're not tossed to and fro by other people's points of view some of us have spent too much of our lives trying to please other people and never walk in our destiny and our purpose because we have signed up to too many different viewpoints about who and what we are and because of that we have tried to please folks some came in our lives a couple of years and left and we tried to please them and put everything we had on hold trying to get them happy with us and then just when we thought they were happy they left and went about their business and and nobody ever sends us letters or cards saying uh are you in any kind of shape i know i messed your life up real good uh but i'm just calling to see have you recovered yet uh i wish i could talk to you here you see when you get tired of going through changes with a variety of vacillating vicious students changes you get tired of just going through from one thing to the other and you try to get the ambiguity out of your life to bring it into some place of serenity it's a place of peace and so now i want to understand faith in a way that we can grasp how it is that faith brings us to a place of solidarity no matter how the winds are blowing around us if i am connected to the right source i can relax whether things are going up whether things are going down i can keep my mind in perfect peace regardless of who comes and who goes i told you that faith is a series of feeling propositions that an individual holds with a great degree of certainty it is something that is projected in revelation i have faith i believe that this will come to pass and when i have faith i hold on to the proposition that it will come to pass with a great deal of assurance and certainty faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen and when i have faith i don't allow the circumstances around me to change how i feel about what i believe even though the circumstances challenge it my faith has brought me into a place where i have a degree of certainty about how this proposition is going to conclude but what i didn't tell you is that when a person has faith it does some things for him one is it helps the individual to understand him or herself when i have faith i understand what my needs are and i understand who can fulfill the needs that i have my faith is not a vacuum it has to be connected to something you have had faith in folk you shouldn't have had faith in because uh they weren't the source of the power or the deliverance you needed had you known yourself better you would have known who to connect with because often times who we connect with is not objective it is very subjective based on what's driving us instead of what's pulling us some things drive us into relationships with other people that we should never have had relationships with but we just didn't understand ourselves the next thing that it does is it indicates how we understand the person or the persons with reference to whom we define ourselves because oftentimes we think who we are not based on being in a vacuum i have received many feelings based on who i was around i have been with some people and they made me feel like i was somebody and i've been with others and they made me feel like i was nobody and i found oftentimes that very subliminally i judge myself according to who i have around and so faith indicates an understanding of not only who you are but the persons around you and the people or the group that has now become the object by which you define yourself if that is so then it must do a third thing faith must help me to organize or reorganize who i make significant because not only do i have powerful definitions from the reference i have little and partial self definitions from people i touch and leave everybody uh causes me to form a concept of myself oh god i feel it like the woman with the issue of blood faith was not subjective only it was not objective only but it had the mixture of them both because when i have an object of faith i have to define myself within the parameters of that object whenever that object comes around i have to look at myself and understand what my needs are based on who i think is important in my life and so now faith one writer says is neither a category which applies only totally to one's self-understanding but it is not uh nor a set of attitudes directed toward another person it's a little of both ah when i can't do it myself i have to have faith that someone else can do it and uh and whether or not they can do it like i would do it is not significant it's whether i believe in somebody and believe and put my life in their hands and and when you put your life in somebody's hands they got to know how to treat it because your life ought to be valuable to you and it ought to be valuable to whoever you have arrived and now can i take it further i hope you're with me i'm going to the mountain my identity then is built it's built two ways on the one hand who i think i am is built by the people that i have around me and how they recognize me uh that's how i begin to know who i am by knowing of the people some people don't like you and they have opinions of you when you know they don't like you well the opinions don't bother you because you know they don't like you some people you think they like you but they really don't like you and you take their opinions as significant and you try to recognize who you are through their eyes and and you feel good when they feel good about you and you feel bad when they feel bad about you because you were recognizing yourself through the process of building who you are is by being around them then on the other hand you come to know yourself when you recognize how other people are you come to know yourself in knowing other people and you get to see who you are based on how they see you and then you have to see them in the right light before you take what they see seriously i feel it here it'll either strengthen you or discourage you i'm feeling like job i'm telling you i'm going through something and i'm listening to you guys and and i'm trying to figure out should i identify with you because when i was doing well you were all right with me now that i'm going through something you guys are changing your tune and if i'm going to have any peace in what i'm going through i better find some self-identity in other than what you and you are saying to me oh i'm taking it higher just just stay with me here you see the object that you have faith in uh has a lot to do with how you think about yourself and the folk that you listen to and the folk that you give authority to to speak into your life better be the right people because if they're not the right people you're going to end up almost losing your mind because you have placed your self-identity in people who don't know you i feel it here anytime you tell somebody who has decided you are a certain way and have decided that you aren't any good when you look them in the face and say you don't know me it's because you have another reference somewhere that has convinced you you are not like what they say you know people look at you on the surface and come to all kind of conclusions because they don't know what god is doing in your life and if you abort the process of what god is doing in your life by listening to folk who don't know you then you're going to lose out with the god who is moving in your life i feel something pushing me here uh bootman said this he said he defines faith as a matter of self-understanding and is aware of the fact that the self-understanding carries within it knowledge that with reference to which one defines him or herself do i define myself with folk that are changing every day or do i define myself by a standard that is not changing because if i'm going to have peace i got to find a place somewhere where folks opinion don't change who i am and my attitude i'm searching for that place i'm sure you are too it's a place of tranquility where they can say what they want because i know who i am and i have received who i am from a relationship with somebody who really knows me and i'm sure cares about me i feel it here i feel it ah and so now faith then as a form of self-identity it integrates the subjective with the objective and it becomes one whole when i believe in god god enters me and so god and i can work out who i am i'm sick and tired of being worked out by folk that just want to use [Applause] amen you know you just want to just want to manipulate you know so just want to orchestrate and and you know and and hold you like a puppet on a string and they change their disposition in order to keep you from getting to a place of peace because they understand if you ever identify with some strength they will lose their hold over you ah that's why they want to keep you from thinking differently and and why are you reading that now and why are you listening to this now because maybe i might just get some identity with something that has the power to deliver me from your frivolity and your foolishness i feel like preaching in here and so faith then as a form of self-identity is always fashioned against a background of doubt you will always have to form who you are with everything around you because nothing around you is going to change until you change it i feel it here i feel it when you have faith you'll shuffle the deck of your friends when you have faith you will say no you're not that important you got to go here no you ain't that significant you go here no no you come back up you you closer to what it needs to be faith brings you out of being handled to the place where you now handle what goes on in your life this is my space i feel the holy ghost uh the moment of uncertainty no matter how certain and how stable our identity becomes i want to tell you we never move beyond the necessity of making partial alterations but when you have faith in god you ain't making no big changes because he gives you the solidity and the solidarity you need that no matter what is happening around you i still got my joy i still have my peace because i don't identify with the changes that's going on i can have the changes and still be who i am in god i don't lose my integrity because money's tight i still do what's right when money's tight i don't lose my integrity because i'm alone now and ain't got nobody with me i still do the right thing when nobody's watching because it ain't about you it's about my relationship with who i have faith in i feel it here uh there is always however a moment of uncertainty because the uncertainty comes when i'm making the transition between what you think about me and what god is pulling me to become and everybody in here has been at the place of sickness moving into healing and the question jesus asked the man was wilt thou be made whole because there is a new life that i want you to have there's a new life that i want you to walk in and it's called the abundant life and i want you to have abundant life and in order to have it you've got to transition from that negative life that you used to have you have switched your faith from that that is finite to that that is in finite you have shifted your faith from that that is mutable and changeable to that that is immutable and if you shift your faith then something's going to enter into you that's going to make you a powerful entity not a pawn but a powerful entity not a pawn but a queen not a pawn but a king uh-huh it's going to change you into something that you need it to be but i gotta ask you which thou be made whole because you're still trying to hold on no no you got to let go you got to let go some of them folk and some of those opinions you got to let go some of that stuff that shaped you you got to let go some of that stuff that has not done you any good and you seem a little uncertain because i'm not going to give you the power overnight i'm going to give it to you in a process but while you're processing keep your vision so that you don't go looking back because i'm going to bring it to the place where you can't go back because you're too big to fit where you i'm feeling it oh god i feel your presence in this place it's critical to understand this that faith has taken you now to another level and the reason you didn't lose your mind was because your faith gave your trust where you didn't trust before i want to take it further you see uh all my appointed time i hear job struggling i will wait till my change come he was talking about dying and that wasn't god's intention but the pressure he was receiving from around him because he's got to form this self-identity in the middle of crisis and it's crisis that has caused many of us to find somewhere else to put our trust i have trusted you and now that you have let me down that does not mean i'm going to quit trusting what it means is i'm just going to trust somewhere else and where i trust the next time i'm going to have information and i'm going to assent to trusting when i have information because faith is a rational act it ain't just some mystical subjective imaginative thing but i need to have the history in order to put my trust and i found out that i need not trust in man because man is fickle he's changing he can before me today and against me tomorrow i need to put my trust somewhere that when the winds blow and the storms come that trust will still be holding to the unchangeable hand of the mighty god i might look arrogant but it ain't arrogant thank you in god oh i feel like preaching here today i have i told you touch your neighbor yet all right hold it it's coming it's coming you've got to understand now that faith in christ then makes christ an invariant source of the affirming and justifying love does not just transport the person of faith from crisis into self-definition because now i am finding out that in order for me to feel good about myself i have to feel like i'm loved are y'all with me i gotta feel like i'm loved and what i do now is when i believe in christ what i have now is an invariant and a divine authoritative love that comes from jesus christ because most of us have found our difficulties in defining ourselves in seeking love approval from other people and some of us have gone down to our knees and literally begged somebody to love us if you just love me just love me please and they love you until they get what they want and then they're through with you but when i have an authoritative love and i can identify my core in that unconditioned source of recognition and that is he recognizes who i am by his love for me so he doesn't see the weak but he sees the strength and his love identifies with my strengths and what he does is he reaches down into me and pulls my strength out so that i can rise from the ashes of my own weakness and stand in the power of who he is making me and have peace while everything is going to hell around me i don't have to lose my mind because i lost my house because my mind was not connected to my house it was connected to the god who can give me another [Applause] i don't lose my mind because i lost some woman or some man because really i'm gonna need my mind when the next one shows up amen things come and go but god remains the same and i don't need to be connected to finite stuff that's moving i need that connection because i know when i'm connected to him he's not going to change he's going to be the same and when i'm connected to that kind of love then what i realize is that i am lovable because if he loves me always i am adorably lovable and when i know i'm lovable i don't give myself to anybody i wish i could preach this and see how i have been abused is by folk telling me i'm not lovable and because i'm not lovable i release myself to anybody and everybody because i don't think much of myself and that's why folk don't want you to think much of yourself because they know the day you think a lot of yourself some of them got to go i feel something pushing me uh you just gotta give somebody a high five and say love under new management i'm identifying with a new source uh i i've switched you from being a necessity and i've put you in the category of being a benefit when you cease being a benefit move out the way because you ain't necessary my god is necessary but you are beneficial so don't get it twisted i don't have to have you i have to have i feel something here it is clear then that it can be said that god is immutable in the sense that he invariantly affirms man in humanness and in the sense that nothing outside of god can qualify his capacity to do this the reason we have been limited is because we have allowed other folk to determine our outcome and you cannot let other folk determine your outcome you have to have an attitude that's embedded in a god who says all things are possible if you believe it's other people's limitations that you have picked up and have defined yourself but now god says there's a new definition for you and that is whatever i define you to be and that's faith i feel this thing pushing me and so my faith helps me to put all else in order and understand that you don't have the last word in my life but it's god who has the last word and since we don't see god you're going to see me moving and see me moving against your opinions and against your dictates and against your demand because if you don't know me like you ought to know me then you're forgers of lies and i preach like i feel it that means most of us have lived our lives believing the lies that folk have said about us and when you live a lie you'll never gain what god would have you to gain but he shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free i feel like preaching right now this is the power of job because here is a man who was not identified with the riches that he had because his self-identity was not in his cattle was not in his house not in his children and satan made a mistake because satan believed that his identity was what he had i wish i could preach your identity is not your clothes it's not your car or your house it is not what you have in your bank but your identity is who you are and when you know who you are you don't let changing material things stop you from being who you are i feel the holy ghost let's have church pat give somebody high five and say i will have joy if i don't have a dollar i will have peace if i don't have a house my house does not dictate my attitude my spirit dictates i feel like preaching here a folk can come in and out of your life and a whole lot of folk feel if they leave you that they will mess you up and so here is job in the biggest fight of his life can i preach to you for a minute sometimes when you're in the biggest fight of your life that's when the folk you thought who were close to you would rally to your support only to find them sitting and picking their teeth after they ate half of your back off i wish i could talk to you folk who you thought would rally to your cause because you thought they understood who you were but no they only understood what you had and when you lost what you had you lost their attention i wish i had some folk closer to me than my money talk to me somebody i wish i had somebody closer to me than the cars i drive i wish i had somebody closer to me than the way i looked i wish i had somebody closer to me than the things that i will give out i don't need you close to my house i need you close to me because things are changing and folks are going through changes and what you need when nobody's with you is to hold on to something that'll keep your mind together i feel like preaching in here i'm talking to somebody because if you let them they'll use words to break your back i'm already hurting and if you come over here at least bring some medicine out of your lips but you think you know god but you really don't know him because god is the one that's holding me together and if you've got some discernment you would understand that it ain't about wickedness it's about testing can i preach like i feel it every now and then you've got to be tested so that god can say to the devil it ain't about his money it ain't about his honey it's about who he is i feel the holy ghost in here so he literally told them y'all need to shut up touch your neighbor say neighbor tell them to shut up because they don't know you they don't know how many nights you laid before the lord they don't know how many nights god visited you in the cool they don't know how god thinks about you and how much love he has for you they're going by their tradition i feel like preaching in here but i know how god feels about me and if i don't know who should know can i preach to you a minute give somebody high five say i know i'm supposed to know because he been with me and i've been with him and the way you all are talking it's like i don't know god but i have just reduced your importance in my life i have just put you a little further down because i found out that to identify with you is to lose my mind and i don't intend to go crazy listening to your opinion so you can shut up and let me tell it i once was awesome but now i once was blind but now i see i used to have failure but victory shall be mine i feel like preaching today i feel like lifting him up i don't know why i'm going through what i'm going through but i know my redeemer liveth shake somebody's hand say i've lost some stuff and i don't know why but one thing i do know i got a redeemer and my redeemer will give me double for the trouble you to identify for yourself you've got to lean on them for yourself and you've got to hang up the phone and tell them folks shut up i need a word from the lord because this is god doing this ain't man doing it's god doing it so now i can say will he slay me yet will i trust him can i preach to you look at somebody's neighbor that's words to shut folk up though he slay me yet will i trust him you're trying to tell me he's not on my side and i'm trying to tell you i praise him every morning i worship him every day i lift him up every night and if i lose everything i got i'm still gonna praise him i'm still gonna trust him i'm still gonna lift him up i'm still gonna hold him in the power of my mind i'm still gonna tell the world no matter what i go through he is my god and i will bless the lord [Music] god bless you today god bless you today touch two people real quick do you have that kind of mindset through it all i learned to trust in jesus through it [Music] it's coming [Music] [Music] oh look at somebody say i'm getting ready to change some stuff i'm getting ready to move some people [Music] around [Music] at the end of the exercise his identity yourself identity is self-understanding and definition move to a whole nother level before i finally heard him say i didn't even speak of you with the strength that i should have ha yeah go on and praise him honey [Applause] [Music] even my concept was not big enough because if i had a greater identity i would be a greater person don't allow folk to limit who you are by their negative opinion shut them up and if you can't shut them up shut them out [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh i feel it god's calling somebody today somebody's in this house pass me not oh gentle say hey yeah here my uncle cry while on others somebody come on you will not walk alone somebody will meet you do not do not pass me by come on i'm singing come on that's it savior come on it's time to be safe it's time to say i want to give my life to jesus christ [Music] yes i need to identify with a love that will not change come [Music] do not on ask me bye bless come on [Music] yes yes come on [Music] i'm telling the world [Music] it's time come on do not do not pass [Music] oh [Music] you

Channel: Official Bishop Noel Jones

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Id: 8x3WfBWKgdI

Length: 54min 45sec (3285 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020