Dr. David Jeremiah: Look to the Lord for Direction and Vision | FULL TEACHING | Praise on TBN

god doesn't want us just to survive he wants us to go forward and so no matter where we are in this pandemic where where it's touched us or hurt us or taken us through it's actually helped some people as you know depending on what they do the key is from this moment on look to the lord for direction find the dream he has for your life and go forward with it build on the things you've learned look in the rearview mirror and collect some of those lessons don't stay there use those lessons to incorporate in your new vision and go on with god [Music] praise comes to you today from southern colorado we are lovingly in the barn okay this technically is a barn there were actually cattle and horses and all that kind of stuff bringing them back in as soon as this program's we are moving forward from cattle uh and horses to the barn and now today a studio with dr david jeremiah we want to move forward yes okay we don't want to go back we don't want to look back at 2020 we don't want to look back at any of that we want to go forward how are you going to help us go forward today dr jeremiah well i'm going to talk about some of the building blocks to go forward okay there's actually ten of them we might not get to all of them but we'll get to many of them okay and these are things that i've learned in my own life and discovered in talking with other people and hearing them tell their stories these are the things that are necessary if you're going to get unstuck okay and a lot of people right now are kind of stuck so when you say stuck uh you know let's let's break that down have you felt stuck this year at all well i think there have been times when don and i you know we just stay home and then we go to church if we do anything i got to tell you a little secret of what we did and it was it was a good thing and a bad thing all at once we had heard a rumor that there were so many restaurants in san diego that if you went to a different one every day you couldn't go to all of them in one year so we decided to try oh how fun is that so we i came home every day at lunchtime and we went to a different restaurant and we visited so many restaurants most of them we had to sit outside and yeah but it was just donna would say like and i felt the same way we're going to do this she says i don't care what we do let's just go somewhere my goodness we couldn't find you know where do you go on vacation we went to coeur d'alene we heard that was a great place never been there before in our lives and we didn't really care where we went we just wanted to go somewhere because after a while when you get when you don't go anywhere and you do the same thing day after day after day it plays on your plays on your psyche plays on your emotional well-being and it's not good for you yeah we've heard that the kind of the solution can't be worse than the problem we've been hearing some of that and uh all i know is from a biblical standpoint there is a way forward yes there is okay so where do you want to start on this we want to start breaking it down we're going to be with you um here in the barn all uh all one hour and discovering god's presence and purpose in your tomorrow nobody in their right mind wants to go back we want to go forward help us do that well let me just tell you a little bit about how we got started with this project you know every i write a new book every year and i've been doing this for many years people think i'm crazy sometimes i think i am too but this year i had been thinking a lot about this theme of not getting stuck or not getting comfortable in your zone a lot of people find a comfort zone and they just they get there and they just never move they just vegetate for the rest of their lives and i know in my heart that's not god's plan for us god's plan is always for us to be moving forward well i had been thinking about that we had a guest musician by the name of tommy walker who came to sing for us and at the end of his concert on a sunday night he sang a song and the song was called forward and the lyrics were kind of like an expression of what i'd been thinking about and i turned to donna and i said that's the title of my new book i'm going to write a book called forward and that's how it started beautiful so when you wrote it though there was no such thing as covet 19 that we had heard of no so you were writing something when he started let's say almost prophetically let's say that it was it was a message that you weren't informed at the time was going to be so important people have been stuck loss of jobs all that kind of stuff and so uh let's help them well matt let me just tell you that to be honest this whole thing is probably a lot more about me and what i was going through than it is any other project i've ever done because there's this mentality out there that when you get to a certain place in your life you don't go forward anymore you just stop and you wait for life to catch up with you i knew that wasn't right i knew that wasn't god's plan i knew that god wanted me to go forward and in the process i realized how important it was for everyone to go forward and so i started putting down on paper the steps that you take when you go forward and the first was you have to have a dream you have to have a vision you have to have a purpose for for your life and that was the first chapter of the book unfold kind of the just you know almost preach it to us a little bit you know because we want to we want to we want to really uncover some of this stuff because if you're connecting this book so closely to what in essence you needed to hear for yourself that's kind of super interesting to me well you ask yourself this question when you're where i am do you still have a dream or here's here's another question are your dreams greater than your memories you know a lot of times people get to this place and they live on their memories and god wants us to keep dreaming and moving forward and that's my spirit that's how i want to be i don't have any desire to sit and just reminisce i don't think that's what god has for us there's too much work to be done there too many people to be won the gospel is still not in some places there's all kinds of opportunities so the dream it doesn't have a shelf life got it the dream doesn't have a date on it this dream is good until you become 75 or 80. yeah and my dream was born many years ago to to to reach the world with the gospel through teaching on on the radio and television and and through writing and that dream is still alive and then i began to realize that without a dream without a passion uh without a vision the people perish that that's an interesting verse because we often think about the people perish because the word who is leading them doesn't have a dream but no the people without the dream are the ones who perish yeah if you don't have a dream you're stuck and i just wanted to make sure that i'm laid down this format for getting out of the status quo and back into moving forward for god did you find yourself slowing down was this something that i mean was this a shaking you know nothing had really changed so much in my life matt except what people were telling me i if i've had anything if if one more person asked me what is my legacy plan i'm gonna scream you know i i i know that everybody you need to have one everybody needs i understand all of that but sometimes i want to say you know god brought me here when this church needed me to be here and when i'm gone he'll bring somebody else here i didn't come here the whole thing is the in the mentality that people have today about getting older especially in ministry is that that there's some sort of special point in time where you have to turn in your bible wow you know say okay that's it i can't do this anymore when it makes no sense because now you have the greatest sense of wisdom you've ever had you know everything that you know somebody asked me how do you know what works because you know everything that doesn't work because you've tried it you've tried it all you know i'm sure there's a lot of that here at tbn sure you know what works at tbn because you know what doesn't work and you've had enough time to let that marinate and work in and so you're not quick on the draw you don't rush to judgment you take the time to think about things and yet you still make decisions and go forward one of the things i did um in the ninth chapter of this book was i made a list of all the things god allowed me to do after i supposedly should have retired and it was amazing to me i mean i went to i went to uh india and preach to the largest group of people i've ever preached to in my life i preached to a hundred thousand people in one day at the calvary temple where satish kumar is a pastor i did his son's ordination sermon i never have seen anything like that in my life we built a brand new building on our campus a 30 million dollar event center we did three christmas specials in new york city i wrote 14 more books all of this is stuff that happened yeah after after after the time went let's so everybody says 65 you should retire i was 79 in the 14 years between when i should have retired and where i am right now i had the most productive time i've ever had in all of my life if i hadn't come to grips with this whole forward concept none of that would have been true it would have all been unexperienced by me and i'm so thankful that god helped me understand it's not over till it's over right and god has a plan for our life all the way through to when he doesn't need us here he'll take his home he knows when to do that yeah and so that's just kind of how this all started you talk about rooting your dreams uh in history what do you mean by that well in that particular part of the chapter lori i was talking about how david had a dream for the temple and he realized he was living in this beautiful paneled house and on the the ark of the covenant was up in a rat an old tent and it wasn't right he wanted to build a house for god and he started making plans for that and uh god came to him one day and said no you can't do that because you've been a man of war this temple is going to get built but your son will build it you know the story the interesting thing is there's the back matter of that story is incredible he goes to this place to buy the ground for the building of the temple and he meets this dude named jeruna and he says i want to buy this property because i'm going to build a temple here and he says no don't don't buy it let me give it to you and he's no you can't do that i won't let you give me something i'm not going to do something for god that doesn't cost me anything well the interesting thing is that place the threshing floor of jerusalem was was a place where not only did the temple get built it's very near to where the cross was for the crucifixion and it goes all the way back in history there's a long story of that place it wasn't just any place it was a place with history and the point i was trying to make there in the book was this whatever it is that god asks us to do we don't just do it in a vacuum we stand on the shoulders of the people who went before us yes you're doing what you're doing today because your mom and dad blaze the trail for for you in this industry and you were a part of it but they're not here anymore but you're standing on their shoulders and your vision now is not just yours it's a and all of us are like that all of us we build our vision on the relationships of the past and if we don't understand that we lose out on god's direction in his in the symmetry of his leadership in our lives that's why it was yeah i love i love though you had pointed out the scriptures where where when david was dying he was telling solomon what to do and he was saying just do it right because god's with you have courage and do it you know and there's yeah it actually says do it you know what i do just do it yeah whatever be strong and do it you know i love that you know you can say that when you've already raised all the money for the project you know i always thought you know why doesn't anybody ever do that for me you know solomon raised all the money or david raised all the money for solomon's project right then you can say go do it you got all the money go do it yeah and he did it and of course god honored it yeah i love it did you write this for young people or for older people i don't think i wrote it for any particular group because i think forward is a is a time honored and timeless thing where i've had young people read this and tell me it's motivated them to go forward i've gotten letters from people that are older than i am telling me it's motivated them to go forward that's what we the the mentality of a christian is always forward yeah well i think there's there's several things um these ten points that you bring out i think your demographic age is just gonna you're gonna connect you know my age is gonna connect with this chapter this chapter this chapter in this chapter there's there's a chapter in there about risk you know uh and that that seems to be speaking to me more than than some of the other chapters at this point in life so it feels like whatever you kind of need is is really what we're we're doing but obviously what we're trying to accomplish here today in 2020 is to move people forward if you just tuned in we're here in southern colorado we're in the barn and uh david jeremiah pastor you're going to be with us all one hour okay i i'm kind of intrigued by how this has started so far because you've kind of connected this to yourself more than some people do and connect this is a this is a truth that that you're living by example you have written 14 books you've built three buildings you've written 14 books since he was that's what i meant since you were 65 years old and and so you seem to have this kind of you know i can i can attest to that your ratings are higher uh today than they've ever been okay so this idea that you are uh your your vision and your your purpose doesn't have an expiration date on it seems to be maybe the theme that's that's coming out speak to that a little more if somebody thinks uh this year's been too devastating this year's been too hard this year has i'm too old i'm too this i'm too that or i'm to the other thing uh speak to that well you know we're always going to be tested in this area there's always the idea that if you if you want to you can go and relax and live an easier life when you do what i do and what i've done all my life i i would never be happy and here's the thing i've noticed matt and maybe you've noticed this too i know a lot of guys who were really very productive still making a big difference for god and for some reason at the 65 they walked away from it i cannot tell you one of them that i know is happy wow because uh in in this book i tell a story about howard hendricks who said that when somebody retires they die between two and seven years after they retire not because they're sick but because they lose their purpose for living my goodness and the idea that there's a limitation on how long we serve is a man-made idea it doesn't come from god there's no evidence of this anywhere in the scripture the people in the scripture served god all the way through until their old age and then they went to heaven god left them here and and that's what i'm trying to communicate that i think one of the greatest wasted energy sources in the kingdom today are people who have bought into the early retirement and don't know what to do with their lives my goodness i have a story that i'd just like to briefly tell you about that there's a guy in our church named tom heyer i met him years ago he was a schoolteacher at helix high school he he was a godly man and he loved teaching school but one day god spoke to him and said tom it's time for you to do something else he and his wife prayed about it he retired he didn't go back and teach he'd been teaching 17 years he came to shadow mountain and he asked one of our pastors what can i do he started out teaching a bible class and then he was put in charge of our prison ministry he's been in charge of our prison ministry now for 18 years it's the largest church-related prison ministry in the world that i'm aware of we have teams that go into all the prisons in san diego county we we have 160 meetings a month we have constant people coming to christ both from the prison and from the families even from the guards and the people every christmas we have a what he calls the the the great christmas mail out and he brings people together volunteers from all over the city and they mail cards to people who are incarcerated last year they mailed 15 000 cards to people who were incarcerated and here's the deal that all started in his life after he retired my goodness he redeployed he he retired and then he redeployed he got out of what he was doing to keep a living and he began to do something that was strictly committed to the things of god that's the mentality we should be developing lord i finished my career here and now i'm going to take what i've learned and put it i'm going to i'm going to max it out for the kingdom yeah and if we did that can you imagine what that would look like unbelievable so this broadcast tonight uh is going to more than half of the prisons in the united states of america and it is going in via satellite and we have been a part of a ministry here at tbn called second chance that has uh put this signal and in lasse our spanish channel and and the hillsong channel and some of the other channels that we have into prisons and it's a very important thing we need to talk about that later um the the the book forward what if somebody is saying yeah but okay yeah i wanna i wanna have this mentality um so far you've done a good job uh pastor you've said this is the mindset we should have i've done more after 65 uh than i ever thought possible i've done but what if somebody is saying yeah but meaning yeah but you didn't lose a loved one to covet this year you didn't lose your job you're still actively doing your job it there could be some yeah buts going on sure how do you get them moving forward well you know everybody has to make a choice obviously and there are alternatives do you want to live where you are in the in the mentality that you currently have of defeatism because of what's happened in the world do you want to go back to even a more morose idea of what life is all about or do you want to take by faith what god tells you that if you will take the step forward into the future and be open to him holy holy devoted to his will he will show you a life that's way better than anything you've ever had or could have in your current mentality to me it's a matter of choices people get to make the choice there's nobody going to tell you what to do god isn't going to reach down and jerk you into the future but what i'm trying to help people understand is this the future is better than where you are and i don't care where you are yeah okay the future is better than that god has a plan for your life that is beyond where you are and what you're doing and if you will commit yourself to him and uh and trust him in the risk chapter we talk about getting out of the safe zone and getting into the faith zone if you'll make the transition between those two things and move forward god will be there waiting for you to show you the new way and that's where the joy is and that's where the hope is and that's where the that's where the real life is you know i know sometimes we have taken those risks and stepped out in faith and there have been times that it looked like it was just a big failure and and i have actually sat and bawled saying god i thought that was that if that's not faith and i'm not sure that i know what it is you know and i can look now back at those times that even thought were failures that i thought was that where do you go from here yeah you know exactly what i've done well you know what laura you're like my wife my wife uh when you're married to an entrepreneur the words that you hear most often from your wife are like this you're going to do what donna yeah and then after the after you explain it to them then here's what she would always say you know i'm not really sure i understand this but if this is what you think god wants you to do count me in and we've had situations like that too i mean even coming to california from where we were in fort wayne we started a church back there in 1981 we moved out here was the biggest challenge and yet isn't it interesting how when you look back at those decisions that decision to follow god changed everything about our lives i know i know and i can attest to that probably what he has said more to me is i have an idea so if you could just do not say no and don't say anything until i'm done talking at least let me finish explaining let me finish explain before you say no you know and and but those risks you know have been some of the most amazing let me let me tell one thing that she's alluding to i said to her one time we made a movie it was called the omega code i remember that it wasn't very good admittedly it was a miracle but it was the best we could do at the time with the kind of budget we had at that time okay and that was look i would have a a lot rather had an academy award-winning actor and director and all these people we just didn't have the finances to be able to put that together and excellence is doing the best with what you have at the time okay so we made a movie it was called the omega code we're now 1999 and we're getting ready to put it into theaters well we had to sign a second mortgage on our house to get the amount of money to put into the movie to get the prints made to put it in theaters and so nobody else wanted to do that nobody else uh a part of the film we didn't want to do that yeah wanted to put any more money into the movie because it just wasn't that good i mean god breathed on it blessed it but thank you lord but i said this when we were sitting on a friday night the movie's getting ready to come out we don't know if people are buying tickets or not buying tickets at this time and i i said you know in one weird way hon this is a huge advantage because we've moved to hollywood we've tried to make a movie now we've finally made one it's now finally coming out in the box office yeah we mortgaged our kids and our dog and our house and and everything we could do to get money to buy prints to put it in theaters so we were out on a limb but i said hun being out on the limb sometimes is an advantage because we're either in the right or the wrong tree in other words we think god's called us to hollywood we think we're gonna know it here in a few we're gonna know it here by about monday morning whether or not we're in the right or the wrong tree and whether or not we need a whole bunch of new friends because most of the people we had consulted with about our move to hollywood and attempt to make a movie were behind us and said it was the right thing to do well we're going to know monday morning whether that was really the wrong move and we're not we're not just out on a limb we're in the right or the wrong tree and some people don't get to know that you know people that think they can sing and they really aren't that good of a singer you know everyone knows somebody that that lives a whole part of their life wondering if this is the right thing well we got to know by that weekend whether it was the right or the wrong thing to do it was by god's grace the number one independent film of the year it was really the first time an independent christian film had ever made money in the distribution system in history of hollywood so it was really a unique experience but you talk about being out on a limb and you never would have experienced that if you hadn't been willing to take the step into the unknown yeah we've only done that about a thousand today but that one that one was a big public thing 1400 newspaper articles got written about this little film that wasn't very good and it was something that got the i think got that whole industry started this is back in 99 and now christian movies come out with regularity and but they weren't at that time this is you know late 90s and so it feels like i understand what you're talking about but let me just be real honest with you that wasn't comfortable no it was scary as heck i had two little kids and for goodness sakes it was it was not joking we had our house on the line yeah you know and god came through and somebody bought a ticket and it's only as you live long enough to look back on it exactly that you see it when there's a story in that book about what happened in our church when we moved into our new worship center we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to stay faithful to missions as we had had in the past and so we're in a business meeting and somebody stood up and said hey pastor since we ask everybody to tithe to the church why don't we tithe to missions from the church i said okay and then somebody else said if we ask people to tithe to the church why don't we double tithe to missions now what that meant was we were going to take 20 off the top of every offering and send it away from the church and we were going to live on 80 we were already having a hard enough time living on 100 at that point in time and i had no idea what that was going to be like when we started that way back in the early 90s our missions budget was like 250 000 a year this last year it's over four million dollars and in the time since we did that which was a real step of faith to right now we have given over 51 million dollars to missions so what i'm saying is when you take that step of faith you just wonder and every every week it was one are we going to be able to pay our bills are we going to be able to do this little by little god honors that if you live long enough if you're able to look back you see god was up to something and you got to be a part of the adventure and it's really pretty cool yeah that is i think what you're communicating very uniquely in this particular interview on this subject is that you're you're almost better at this in other words this book coming from you at your age now is better than if you would have written it 20 years ago if i had written it 20 years ago it would have been a lot of pontificating but not a lot of history there you go this is history what what's your favorite chapter in that book two chapters i love the chapter about get your mind right believe yeah and i love the finished chapter because that was really that really helped me answer those people who kept saying all of these things about well when are you going to do this or are you who's you're going to follow or are you you see every time i have a young preacher come to the church is he is he going to be your preacher when you're gone no yeah i don't know what's going to happen when i'm gone so funny that bugged me everybody would would ask us what's going to happen to tv and after your parents are gone you know what here's what i hear here's a real good answer to that for me when i was ordained my father preached the ordination service and he preached on acts 13 36 and here's what that says and david served his generation by the will of god that's all we can ever do i'm going to serve my generation by the will of god you serve your generation by the will of god and when god is ready for somebody else to do that he will show us what to do and provide but we everybody gets so bent out of shape over that that um you know i can't get over it so that's why i wanted to put this in writing yeah that we're responsible to finish what god has called us to do and and and go beyond where he where people think we should go um let me see if i understood what you just said in one way are you basically saying back off youngsters no i'm not really saying that what i'm saying is you're kind of saying that aren't you well i'm not saying so much that as i am saying you know let's don't put people out to pasture before god is done with them yeah you're saying back off yeah you're doing here you are he'll say it for you you remind me you're reminding me of my my dad a little bit my dad used that term out to pasture and you know they were they got a little chippy about it and in their in their late 70s they were saying hang on you know and and i think what you're saying is we have the wisdom and the experience to do things that is unexpected at at this time and we also know you know when i first started i used to get i used to get kind of hooked on some things people would say or do now i can smell them coming a mile away you know i know when someone's going to try to try to work you somebody's got some kind of scheme they're going to you can tell and you just say man you can try that on somebody else but i've been around the block a few times and i know it's come and i know what you're up to so don't don't run that stuff by me anymore i'm not doing that i mean isn't that true exactly now now you are reminding me of my dad he wrote us letters talking about stuff like that don't you ever let people you know let me tell you something the last six months of my dad's life were some of the most productive times that i remember i remember more about the last six months of my dad's life than the last six years prior to that just the last six months he had a very purposeful kind of impartation to laurie me our our two boys kailyn and cody and we were with him almost every day of the last six months of his life and it was profound yeah and it was meaningful and it was precious powerful well that wasn't just true between you and your father that was evident in his public persona too we talked about that in the past that god had really shown him the power of what he had done in his life and the importance of getting ready and helping you guys get ready what do you mean by diminishing your distractions you know there's a when we start out in ministry lori we have this idea that we can do all things that we can we can just what everybody i remember when i first started if anybody asked me to do something i thought it was god if i was invited to go someplace i thought it was god inviting me and i realized later that that wasn't true that god wasn't in all these requests and i remember in that section of the book i talk about coming to grips with your limitations and even to the point where i used jesus as an illustration that though he was the divine son of god jesus was limited while he was on this earth by his own volition the bible the bible teaches that he voluntarily uh refused to use his his attributes at their full at their full form so he could identify with man while he was on this earth his ministry was limited to to to israel he didn't he never he never went to any of the big cities of his time he ministered in a little place the size of a postage stamp not bigger than vermont he never left and yet in that particular place where jesus was limited he had an unlimited ministry wow ministering to his disciples and out of that of course is what we now embrace is the christian faith the point is nobody has unlimited um boundaries to do whatever they want to do we have to deal with our and we all have personal limitations there's some things as you get older that you can't do i mean let's face it yeah i i still have i always think about caleb who said he was as strong at the age of 85 as he was when he was 40. i don't feel quite that way but the question i ask people the one that's not 85 yet yeah and here's the question is how old would you be if you didn't know how old you were yeah oh there you go and caleb didn't know he was 85 he thought he was 40. yeah and he lived his life that way and that's the way we should live too so when you when you come to grip with your limitations you realize i have limitations i'm not superman can't do everything and again we're not called to do everything jesus said i have finished the work father that you have given me to do i have not finished all the work there is to do i finished the work you have given me to do so i think and that helps us yeah and when we come to grips with that there's nothing wrong with that's the right thing to do yeah so it's okay to say no it's all right to say no you a minute ago said that your favorite chapter or one of them was get your mind right so um maybe there are some that need their mind right because of pandemic situations or election results or whatever we you know how do you get your mind right well that whole chapter is about optimism okay and it's a really important chapter because there's a lot of folks who are christians who don't believe that you should even use that word in the vernacular of a christian discussion that that optimism and they identify it with some false doctrine and other things which we all know are not not to be discussed but what i try to do in this chapter is help people understand that a christian among all of the people of the world should be the most positive person who ever whoever walked here our sins are forgiven our future is guaranteed uh the savior is living within us he's given us his holy spirit we have the church we have the bible we have everything we need and and that's what uh that's what it says in the new testament we have everything we need for life and godliness everything yeah but many christians aren't that way and i actually talk about that in this book that when i was growing up i i went to good churches but the churches i went to i remember more about what they were against than what they were for and i knew a lot about what we didn't believe but i wasn't too sure what we did believe it took me a while after graduating from college and going to seminary to understand that god doesn't want that to be the image of the church nor the image of christians we have no reason to be pessimists i read a book maybe three or four times by a guy named seligman and uh the book is titled learned optimism it's not a christian book it's just a psychologist's book and in this book he made this comment he made this really interesting statement he said if you want to know whether you're an optimist or a pessimist a little trouble will help you sort it out and his point was when trouble comes people who are optimists aren't blown away by the trouble they analyze it they climb up on the trouble and they go on to the next thing pessimists look at the trouble and they think it's all about them it's permanent and it's never going to change wow he said so if you don't know if you're a pessimist or an optimist wait till the next trouble comes because a little trouble will help you sort it out my goodness and god doesn't want us to be pessimistic right i told you in an earlier conversation before we came on the air that one of the great positive statements in the bible is paul saying i can do all things through christ who strengthens me yeah that sounds like somebody who's gotten his mind right yeah he's thinking properly he knows there's a lot of things that can come against you but even those things he lists them all and he says but i am more than a conqueror through jesus christ our lord i'm a super conqueror that's the spirit that god wants to live in all of our lives that's the spirit i want to be known for i want to be known for that kind of a person we all have troubles but troubles come to help us sort out whether we are half glass full or half glass empty people and it's really interesting how that happens okay there i i don't recall as we're sitting here where the scripture comes let the weak say i am strong i'm quoting the bible i just don't remember exactly where it is yeah it's almost thinking of the song how do how do we balance that scripture because you can't just be optimistic for optimistic sake but you can't be just a bible preacher that doesn't recognize optimism in the world so help me with that things are pure you know if i should if i could say to correct you i would think we should say don't be a pessimist and don't necessarily be an optimist be a realist be somebody who sees life as it really is but then through the lens of the scripture see life as god tells you it is the lens of the scripture is what gives you the positive way to see life when you read the word of god and you see the word of god you realize that even the darkest things in your life god uses for a purpose and to build you into a better person nothing is wasted in the economy of god not even our difficult time not even covered 19. god hasn't wasted that we're going to learn as we look back i've i've heard a lot of people recently saying make a list of everything you learn from covet 19. and i've actually seen some lists some of it's not all that good but some of it is pretty good we have learned a lot we have learned that you can do a lot of things in ways you never thought you could do them when it's necessary and you have learned how important it is to be in fellowship with god's people whether it's through the internet or most or best being together as people um what i've learned in my church is the people there love jesus so much you tell them we're having church at midnight they're going to show up i mean that's really amazing to me yeah we have church outdoors and we change the time in coordination with the sun because if it's too early it's too hot if it's too late it's too dark i just i just say this i'm going to send you a note this is when we're having church you all show up and they do yeah because they want to be together yes i realized the power of the community during covet like i never have realized it before and i think there's just many lessons like that that we learn and we take those with us into the next part of our life the part i want to jump back on and and get more comment on is is this optimism that you have found in the get your mind right chapter of your book and i asked you about let the week say i'm strong you can't just quote that like a mantra how from from your seminary background how would that scripture have been taught and how would you have used the context well i would say i would say that scripture more is like let those who are who think they are weak take a look at who who jesus is in their life and realize how strong they are because in our in our weakness sometimes we forget that there are other ways to look at that but that would be the way i would understand that and i think this i think the scripture teaches us that when we are weak then he is strong what does that mean i have preached sometimes recently i'll tell you something i just uh i preached uh for a men's thing back in in southwest just a few weeks ago and you've probably done this i went to that meeting and by the time i got there i was so sick i didn't know if i was even going to be able to stand up and i got some medicine i got some antibiotics and i took them and i got up and my friend who runs this is a guy named phil waldrop there were 10 000 guys there or 8 000 or something it was amazing thing i preached i wasn't even quite aware of what i was doing i almost felt like i was in the pulpit and somebody was preaching beside me my goodness i was i felt so bad in that and and i really i had to leave right afterwards because they wanted to get us out of there and i wanted to say to phil walder please forgive me for coming here and not doing better than i did i felt awful i went home i told my wife how bad i had done the next week i got a letter from him an email and he said david i don't know what was going on but he said after you get on preaching i had men come up who've heard you preach over these years many many times and tell me that was the best sermon they ever heard you preach in your life he said what was going on i said phil i was on drugs he said what do you mean i said i had every kind of antibiotic and everything else i could put in my system but what i realized again and again and i've seen this over and over again sometimes when you feel like you have totally failed and you've given it your best that's when god moves in and in your weakness he is strong that's what i think that's all about yes is it isn't that is that what we're talking about absolutely look we're we're we're wanting your information i i don't i fully believe that i certainly believe but i like the fact that you've really drawn out this optimism thing because not very many people are optimistic well i don't think you can be negative and move forward you know what that is a very important thing i do not know very many pessimists who have made anything great of their lives pessimism does not move you forward right that is a very solid principle and that's certainly that's the whole nature of that chapter yeah i love how you give the the analogy of your windshield and then you have this little tiny rear-view mirror right you know that you look just glance up at but you can't focus on that no you know and paul so i love joel osteen was here last the last couple days and he was talking about paul the apostle didn't say this one thing i do i pray that i'm a better writer or that i'm a better preacher or that he said one thing i do is i forget those things and i press forwards and you can't you can't reach back and press you know somebody said god put eyes on the front of your head not in the back of your head because he wants you to see forward and the rear view mirror and the windshield is a really good issue it's about the right ratio yeah the windshield is made for you to look forward in your dreams and your visions the rear view mirror is what you glance at periodically to make sure you're okay as i said once before the past should inform you it should not control you yes because if you let the past control you it's the whole idea is are your are your dreams greater than your memories i want to make sure as i go forward in my life however many years god gives me i always want my dreams to be greater than my memories yes beautiful you know i i believe you can get stuck in failures in your past and i believe you can get stuck in your successes of your past you're absolutely right and god wants to move you on to to greater things he's he's always a god of more he's always a god of multiplication and so i think he wants to bring more into our that that that eternal everlasting life that just keeps get keep us on giving but i think you can get stuck in successes too and and it just holds you in a time and god wants you to let go of all that stuff it's like when uh it's like when an actor or actress plays a very iconic role and then they seem to have to dress like dress up like that for the rest of their life you see them 30 years later and they're still dressed up like you know that that character they did you know years ago and and they didn't move forward okay we have a few minutes left in the broadcast and and why don't we why don't we try to encapsulate a little bit of of if somebody tuned in halfway through what is your overarching message in this book forward it seems like it was a a message a a book that was prophetic in one sense meaning you were writing most of it prior to knowing that covet even existed but it feels like it's the message for a lot of people right here right now and that's why we're spending so much time on it this is a this is a important message for an important time for a lot of people that are having to start looking out the windshield and not continue glancing back no one in their right mind wants to go back but unfortunately a lot of people are stuck and we need to go forward so just kind of the overarching again if you had to kind of almost a new intro to the subject and then maybe your final thoughts in regard to that maybe pray for the audience a little bit when i was president of our college years ago at in san diego i remember reading a book that was written by the president of southern california university after he had retired and he made a statement in that book i went and wrote it on the blackboard one day in a meeting and here's what the statement says never give to survival the attributes of success in other words a lot of people today think that success is just to survive just to get through this and you hear people say that all the time what are you doing i'm just trying to get through this well that's good you need to get through it but you cannot give to survival survival is not success survival is staying in the safe zone i want people not to give to survival the attributes of success i want them to go on i want all of us to go on from where we are i was with a pastor if i mention his name you would know him as a pastor of a big church and they've been they have been back in church since may and he said to me the other day david we only have less than 50 percent of our people back in church he said my my mantra used to be we need to go go forward now he said it's got to be we need to grow you know even barna said in one of his writings about covert 19 that in major churches that have been successful in the evangelical church 30 of the people who were in the church before kovit will never return what does that say they found a comfort place they've they found a place where no risk is they found a place where they've taught themselves that they don't need to go to church and so we're facing some real challenges as we restart we're trying to keep track of that we're doing a little better than 50 percent but not much better at this point in time because families with little children won't come back yet and older people are afraid to come back so what i'm saying is this we can survive this but we must not let our survival of this be the ultimate answer god doesn't want us just to survive he wants us to go forward and so no matter where we are in this pandemic where where it's touched us or hurt us or taken us through it's actually helped some people as you know depending on what they do the key is from this moment on look to the lord for direction find the dream he has for your life and go forward with it build on the things you've learned look in the rearview mirror and collect some of those lessons don't stay there use those lessons to incorporate in your new vision and go on with god that's my prayer for myself and for my church for turning point for all that we do we want to go into the the zone of trust and risk and and serve lord that's where the adventure is yes that's getting up every day and you don't know what god's going to do but because you're walking holy with him you know he's up to something in your life and it's going to be something you never dreamed beyond anything you could ever imagine pray that pray that over our audience if you would please father there's so many people who who have just been so intimidated and frustrated and discouraged by what has happened to our country through this terrible pandemic we don't pretend to understand it we don't pretend to understand why it was allowed but lord here we are we're kind of in the middle of it trying to come out of it and get our life back together help us not to ever settle on survival but lord help us to realize you have created us for the future build into our hearts great dreams of great things accomplished in the future both for the kingdom of god for our families for our own lives give us a vision not of what has been done but what you can do help us to focus on your power not on our own strength help us to believe in your holy spirit not in our initiative or energy and most of all lord god keep our eyes on the goal even as paul prayed that he would um forget those things which are behind and focus on those things which are before him and that he might move toward the calling of christ in his life this we pray for our listeners our viewers this we pray for those who've tuned into this important telecast this we pray that we will not stay where we are but by your grace we will go forward in jesus name amen amen you know i love the fact that your life is mirroring your own book and your own title more people are tuning in to your broadcast here on tbn than have ever tuned in your broadcast is more popular than it's ever been it looks so beautiful so good you've gone to another level uh we appreciate everything that you've done the programs that i'm seeing on the air now when you have that big screen and everything just so beautiful and so well done and you do it so well so classy great job you're living your own advice when our boys say wow that is a good looking show you know one of those one of those people that i think has advantaged because of the pandemic is amazon and by the way you can get this book by uh by going to amazon they'll have it they'll get it to you real quick uh and we want you to get it yes uh david jeremiah you're living forward you're doing a great job we love you thank you very much we'll see you next time [Music] at tbn our mission is to use every available means to reach as many individuals and families as possible with the life-changing gospel of jesus christ thank you for helping make the gospel of grace go around the world without you we couldn't do it god bless you [Music]

Channel: TBN

Views: 372,953

Keywords: dr david jeremiah, david jeremiah, pastor david jeremiah, david jeremiah sermons 2021, david jeremiah sermons 2022, david jeremiah revelation series, david jeremiah revelation, david jeremiah sermons 2020, david jeremiah sermons 2021 today, david jeremiah 2022, david jeremiah heaven series, david jeremiah romans 8, how to move on, god's direction, tbn, trinity broadcasting network, trinity broadcasting network live, tbn live, matt crouch, t8b2n6, 8t2b6n, tbn826, 826tbn, forward, pray

Id: DxQMuz6amyM

Length: 54min 48sec (3288 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022