Clearing Out Your Mind Steven Furtick - Steven Furtick

When you are positioning yourself according to the peace and

the purpose of God, and when you are present in

the situation where he has placed you, God said, all

the other things that people run after, I'm going.

To bring it to you.

If you want in on this word, shout, God's going

to bring it to me. Come on, tell the person

next to you, I don't have to chase it, stress

about it, cheat to get it, violate my morality or

my ethics. God's going to bring it to me. This

is the covenant of grace. Watch this. I tried to

get to God.

I couldn't.

So he ripped open heaven, stepped down to come inside

of me so that the righteous requirements of the law

might be fully met in us. No, I cannot achieve

his holiness, but God's gonna bring it to me. Heaven's

gonna come to my house. Heaven's gonna come to my mind.

Peace is gonna come to my marriage. God's gonna bring

it to me. I want to shut the whole sermon

down for a minute and give God praise by faith

that he's going to bring it to me.

What you need, he's got it. God's going to bring

it to me. God's going to bring it to me.

When our praise and.

Blessings come down, God's going to bring it to me.

I don't have to beg him. God's going to bring it.

Peter wasn't looking for a vision for his life. God

brought it to him. All he did was go to Joppa.

Can we talk about Joppa for a minute?

Joppa. Everybody say Joppa.

I thought about calling this message the Jopper-tunity of a lifetime,

but that was corny.

Yeah, I scratched that one out real quick. You can

have it.

That's not a good title for a message but it

got me that he was in joppa because i was

like hmm joppa.

Joppa joppa joppa joppa joppa joppa.

Okay support city i know that they put the timber

there they would take the timber and the timber came

there when they built solomon's temple i think i think

they brought the timber from lebanon to joppa because it's

on the mediterranean coast They brought timber there and then

they sent it to build the temple. Oh, maybe Joppa

is something where God takes the raw materials.

Joppa. No, that's not it.

Joppa, Joppa, Joppa, Joppa. Why does it say over and

over again he was in Joppa? Go to Acts 10

Acts 10:1

verse 1. It says it a couple times. Because remember,

Peter got in trouble. He didn't have to go looking

for trouble. Trouble came looking for him. Well, y'all were

shouting a minute ago.

We just killed the vibe. I think we killed the vibe.

Peter wasn't looking for controversy, wasn't looking for conflict, wasn't

looking for problems.

He was in.

Joppa because there was a woman in the church at

Joppa who was very important to the believers there, and

he was in Lydda raising people from the dead, you know,

just the stuff you do. And when he was in

the middle of this crazy revival in Lydda, which wasn't

too far from Joppa, this amazing E-Kids volunteer died. Her

name was Dorcas. Her Greek name was Dorcas. Her name

was also Tabitha. And they asked Peter if he would

come to comfort them.

And he got there.

And he saw how important she was to all of

them in Joppa. And he started looking at all the

clothes that she sewed for widows. And she had a

ministry to the poor. She cared about people. She served

on the parking team. She cared about people. She worked

on production at Raleigh-Durham. They hated to lose Dorcas. And

Peter got kind of bored. You know, he was a

man of action. So he's like, this is cool, like

taking a tour of everything she did.

But y'all leave the room. Check out this scripture real quick.

I know I said Acts 10, but I want to

go back to Acts 9 real quick. I want to

give you the whole story. Because we know what happened

when he got to Joppa. How did he get there?

It's important. He went to Joppa to visit Dorcas. Give

me 940. Peter sent them all out of the room.

She's been washed and placed for burial in the upper room.

And as they're memorializing her, he got down on his

knees and prayed. And turning toward the dead woman, he said, Tabitha,

get up. Peter's like, we can have a funeral or

we could.

Have a resurrection.

Peter was bull. He tried it like Jesus one time.

Jesus did the same exact thing, but it was with.

A little girl.

This little girl was dead and Jesus sent everybody out

of the room because he knew that if they stayed

in the room, that their doubt might make it impossible

for faith to really do.

What faith can do when it is unencumbered by doubt.

What's the title of this message? Make room for the new.

And when Jesus sent them all out, he said something

in Aramaic, Talitha kum, means little girl, get up. Little girl,

get up. Now watch Peter imitating his master. He sent

them all out of the room and turned toward the

woman and said, Tabitha, get up.

It's almost like Talitha. It's just one letter different.

And he thought something, if he did it, if Jesus

did it, and if his spirit lives in me, I

came with a message for somebody. Make room for resurrection.

Make room for things in your life that you were

just about ready to bury, to breathe again. Tabitha did up.

And she did. She opened her eyes and seeing Peter,

she sat up. Well, I guess so. She sat up

and he stayed in Joppa a little while and they

liked him. He was very popular in Joppa.

Peter could have run for mayor of Joppa because he

demonstrated great power in Joppa.

Joppa. Joppa.

It's a place where you don't expect anything great to happen,

but something does.

Joppa. Joppa is like your job. Joppa. Joppa.

He was just doing his job, just going to see it,

and a miracle happened. He was just going to see

it and a miracle happened. He was just going to

see it and going to comfort them and going to

do what he did, and a miracle happened.

Joppa. Joppa. A place where God put stuff together.

Joppa.

While he was in Joppa. Joppa.

It's kind of familiar. Who else went to Joppa in

the Bible? I was trying to remember. I was talking

to the interns this weekend. I put them on the spot.

We had such a good time, didn't we? I said,

who else went to Joppa? They went through every character in.

The Bible guessing. Zacchaeus, Bartimaeus, Luke, Matthew, John. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It's somebody in the Bible. I'm going to give you

a hint. It involves a fish. Rhymes with Jonah went

to Joppa. But watch what he did in Joppa. You ready?

Jonah 1.3 says, Jonah ran away from the Lord and

headed to Tarshish. He went down to Joppa where he

found a ship bound for that port. God called him

to Nineveh, but he resisted it. He resisted going to

Nineveh because those were not the people he expected God

to bless. He resisted what he did not understand. He

resisted what he could not conceptualize. He resisted what he

had no frame of reference for. He went down to

Joppa and boarded a ship heading away from the Lord.

So now I've got a contrast and I want to ask, what.

Will you do in Joppa? Will you be like Peter?

Who when he got to Joppa and God sent him

an opportunity to say, Peter, I want you to make

room for something new. I want you to believe that

I can break a barrier in your life.

I want you to believe that I'm.

About to do something that your mind has not conceived.

Will you be like Peter who went with it? Or

are you going to be like Jonah who ran from it?

Peter went. to Joppa.

While he was in Joppa praying, he saw something amazing

that he didn't expect. And he looked and he saw

a sheep from the four corners. Four corners representing the

four corners of the earth. God's like, I'm about to

break all of your barriers. I'm about to break through

your unbelief. See, we talk about making room for the new.

You want to go have a yard sale or something

like that or put everything on.

It's not about closet space.

It's not about clearing out your closet. It's about the

transformation of your mind. Do you have room for the

new in your mind?

Because they didn't. Peter didn't. When God showed Peter.

What he was about to do, like this is the

way it always is. When God shows us something, we

compare it to our previous point of reference.

And then we start consulting.

Our resources and God wants to bring us new relationships.

But watch this.

If you're not ready for new people in your life,

you will bring the same patterns to the new relationships

that you brought to the old relationships. And we literally

keep people out of our lives that God wants to

send because we are holding on to the hurts from

the one who have already left. I feel the spirit

of God breaking barriers as I preach right now. Because

you're like, what does this message have to do to me?

I'm not getting on an airplane and going to preach

to somebody in Caesarea like Peter did.

You don't have to.

All you have to do is dare to believe. That

God is making room for the new in your life

right now.

And even sometimes when it was painful.

For me and I thought I was losing things in

my life, I wasn't losing it. God was moving it.

Who is this for? I just need to know. Probably

about 20 people. You didn't lose it. God moved it.

He said you will still be eating last year's harvest

when you have.

To move it out. Somebody shout, move it out, God.

Anything that is in the way of me being who

I need to be in this season.

Get it out of my heart. Get it out of

my mind. Get it out of my habits. You can

have it, God. I don't want it. I want what

you've got.

So you can't receive new miracles with old mindsets.

Make room for the new. It looks like this. Emptying yourself,

humbling yourself.

And asking God, what do you want to do in

my job?

Or you can run from it and resist it.

You can keep remembering when the kids were so cute.

They are 43 now. They stopped being cute quite a

while ago. The church was trying to figure out, how

do we protect what we loved while we embrace what

is new? I don't know.

I think there are at least three lessons in this text.

Do you all have a minute?

Make room for the new. Number one, God says this.

Don't limit yourself by labels. The first thing God told Peter,

he said, you've got your nice little neat categories. Because

when the sheep came down, Peter saw all kinds of animals.

And y'all need to know, in this culture, they respected visions.

This was not like Peter's hallucination or you know how

some people now are so weird and they're like, well,

the Lord showed me a vision of us walking on

the beach. It's like, bro, you need to ask her

out and stop trying to embed it in this weird spirituality.

So Peter actually saw something, but remember, there's sometimes a

tension between what you thought God showed you.

It's a tension. And that tension is a real gift

because that's where growth happens.

Where it's like, God, I thought I thought I was

going to be married to her the rest of my life,

but I'm not.

We're not married now. And that's painful.

But what you do with it becomes your Joppa, which

determines do you run from God's purpose for your future

or do you run toward it?

That's Joppa. And the word God gave me was don't

limit it with a label.

Because the first thing he told Peter, he said, Peter

said in verse 6, Acts 11, I looked into it

and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles,

and birds. And then after he saw the pigs in

a blanket, he said, I try.

To keep y'all awake.

Then I heard a voice telling me, get up, Peter,

kill and eat. Now, when I read that, I said,

God was trying to get Peter to go hunting? No,

it wasn't about the animals. He was about to send Cornelius,

who Peter saw as an unclean Gentile. So he was

using this. It wasn't about bacon. It was about barriers,

mental barriers. So when he said, get up, Peter, kill

and eat, it wasn't that God wanted Peter to kill

a pig. It was that he was trying to kill

Peter's categories. In this season of your life, God is

trying to kill your categories. He's going to use people

you did not even like.

To grow you up and mature you. There was one

person the other.

Day that shared a Bible verse with one of my kids,

and they left our church years ago. They didn't even

like me when they left.

But when they gave a.

Bible verse to my kids, I said, God, I don't

care who hands them the Scriptures. Yes. I'll take a

cold cup of water in the pit of hell from anybody.

I don't care who hands it to them. Use who

you want to use, God. Do what you want to do.

Kill my categories.

As a matter of.

Fact, when we say all things work together for the good,

what we mean when we quote Romans 8.28 out of context,

because Romans 8.28 is connected and conjoined, incidentally, to Romans 8.29,

which says, according to his purpose. So what it means

by good is it's going to fulfill his purpose, not

my preference. Y'all can shout right now. What it means

is I can't categorize. That's God's job. It is God's

job to know what's best for me. It is God's

job to know what needs to happen. It is God's

job to know what experiences I need to get. So

God says, stop.

Limiting it by labels. Hey, thank you for watching.

Make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't

miss a single video or live stream and share this

video with a friend.

And don't forget, you can join me live every Sunday.

Thanks again for watching.