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00:00 What's up family? Pastor Darius here. You're about to watch a message. I love this one.
00:05 It's a little different, but it's a message called "There's a Miracle in this House."
00:09 Please don't miss this. Here it is. Here's some people's challenge spiritually.
00:14 You reduce your God down to the size of your reason. The challenge with that is
00:19 at some point you're gonna hit a season in your life where you need something
00:24 unreasonable to happen. So I want to help you expand your faith. It's a message I
00:28 taught our Congregation Changed Church during our Legacy Weekend as we prepare
00:33 for our miracle offering where we, once a year, go over and beyond our regular
00:39 giving and we give in faith. Not just sacrificially, not just generously, but we
00:45 give in faith. And I believe people's hearts were stirred and a miracle came
00:53 through us and I believe miracles are coming to us. Enjoy this message.
00:58 God bless you. Amen. Clap your hands for a God that always provides. I think we can do
01:08 better than that, church. As a matter of fact, why don't you go crazy? Let's
01:15 welcome in our New Jersey family. What's up, New Jersey?
01:25 Well, I'm excited about today. It's a special Sunday. We're spiritual family.
01:29 We're about to have some family conversation. As a spiritual family, we
01:35 need to talk a little bit, every location, about your faith. Let's go to the book of
01:41 Matthew chapter number 2, beginning at verse 9. Text says, "After they heard the
01:54 king, they went on their way and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of
02:01 them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the
02:07 star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his
02:12 mother Mary and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their
02:18 treasures and presented him with the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.
02:24 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their
02:31 country by another route." I want to stop the reading of Scripture there and talk
02:37 from this subject on this legacy Sunday. There's a miracle in this house. Clap
02:45 your hands every location. Change global. Drop some fire in the chat. There's a
02:50 miracle in this house. Family, I want to ease into this introduction by delivering
02:59 to you a diagnosis that your doctor may have overlooked. There is an undetected
03:09 allergy that many, if not most of you, have been impacted by but unaware of.
03:17 I'm not referring to an allergy as it relates to dairy or an allergy as it
03:25 relates to gluten. I feel confident in communicating that many, if not most of
03:31 us who are gathered in these locations, whether physically or virtually, suffer
03:39 from an allergy to average.
03:43 Yeah, there is an unexplainable irritation and this frequent frustration
03:53 that many of us internally wrestle with on the inside of us when we see our
03:59 actions are not aligned with our abilities and we are not performing in
04:05 accordance to our potential. We wrestle with this holy tension of not wanting to
04:12 be unappreciative for where we are because we realize and recognize that we
04:19 did not get to this location without some transportation. Is there anybody
04:24 here that knows that you didn't get to where you are by yourself? Come on, that
04:30 when you look at where you were, when you look at what you had to overcome, when
04:35 you look at what you had to fight through, when you look at the blows you've
04:39 absorbed, when you look at the adversity you've overcome, when you look at the
04:44 setbacks that could have been fatal but they were not final because you have a
04:49 God that's faithful. Come on. When we look at that, we are grateful and
04:56 appreciative and filled with gratitude for where we are, yet at the same time, if
05:02 you're emotionally honest, you got to admit that there's still something in
05:08 the recesses of your soul that senses there's more. And what if I told you the
05:16 desire for that is not greed? What if I told you it's not insatiable greed
05:22 always? Sometimes it's the imago Dei. It's the image of God. This is why I can say
05:28 with confidence, family, that most if not many of us share this allergy to average
05:35 because this allergy is hereditary.
05:40 Hereditary, yeah, it's hereditary. We all got it from our father. We don't all have
05:56 the same natural father but we all have the same heavenly father and we are
06:02 walking around with the DNA of our heavenly father and there is nothing
06:07 about our heavenly father that is ordinary. There is nothing about our
06:11 heavenly father that is average. There is nothing about our heavenly father that
06:16 is normal. He can do what no one else can do. He can move what no one else can move.
06:22 He can accomplish what no one else can accomplish. Let me see if I got any old
06:27 school churchgoers. Bridge over troubled water, lawyer in the courtroom, doctor in
06:34 the sick room, lily in the valley, wheel in the middle of a wheel. We are carrying
06:45 the DNA of our Creator. It's not always insatiable greed. Sometimes it's the
06:53 imago Dei. It's the image of God because our God is not ordinary. As a matter of
07:03 fact, there is a powerful term that is often used to describe the God
07:11 that reveals himself in the Bible and that is our God, our heavenly father, the
07:17 one whose DNA we carry, that God is sovereign.
07:22 Pastor, what does sovereign mean? A number of different approaches to describe
07:27 sovereign but here's the one we're going to work with today. Sovereign means
07:31 supreme power or authority. Come on church, supreme power or authority. So
07:40 this concept of sovereign suggests that other people, places, and things may have
07:45 power. It's just their power is not supreme. It suggests that some other
07:56 people, places, and things may have, listen to me, a say.
08:06 But because they're not sovereign, they don't have the last say. The fact that
08:15 God is sovereign speaks to God's ability to overrule and that means even if a
08:21 ruling has been made, a decision has been brought forth, God has the
08:27 ability to override and to overturn what someone else has decreed and declared in
08:35 our existence and I know I got some people, change Jersey, change Gwinnett,
08:42 change global that can look back over your life and say the only reason I am
08:47 here is because God overruled some things. Come on. The only reason, come on,
08:55 the only reason I'm saying in the membrane is because he overruled some
09:00 things that if the enemy would have had his way and if life would have had his
09:06 way and if circumstances would have had his way, there is no way I would be here
09:12 but God overruled.
09:18 He overruled my misery and wouldn't let me stay down. He overruled my mistakes
09:30 and redeemed my life from destruction, reminding my mistakes even you not
09:38 sovereign. I'm about to run y'all. Reminding my mistakes that even you
09:46 don't have the last say. Our God is a God that's sovereign and sometimes this, his
09:58 sovereignty manifests itself in anomalies. Pastor, what's an anomaly? It's a
10:06 deviation. It's a rule breaker. You've heard the term trend setter. An anomaly
10:14 is a trend breaker. It's when things would normally continue in a certain
10:22 direction but something intervenes and interrupts the trend and shifts the
10:30 direction and changes the trajectory. That's our God. I said that's our God. I
10:39 said that's our God. He's the God that orchestrates anomalies. We call them in
10:47 Christian context miracles. Come on. It's when God makes something happen that
10:54 couldn't happen, shouldn't happen, wouldn't happen unless he made it
10:59 happen and some of you are sitting thinking because you've got a
11:03 reductionist view of miracles to that which is grand and grandiose so some of
11:08 you are thinking you've never seen a miracle but what you don't know is you
11:13 sit next to one. You didn't hear what I just said. Some people are sitting
11:25 cynically and saying I've never seen a miracle. I've never seen anyone raised
11:30 from the dead. Look to your left. Look to your right. We may not have been dead
11:37 physically but our joy was dead and our peace was dead and our hope was dead and
11:44 our focus was dead and he raised us back up to life again.
11:50 You don't know you're sitting next to a miracle because you only see the finished
11:59 work. Wait a minute. You only see the work this far because the work not even
12:07 finished but if you knew where I had come from then you would know.
12:28 His sovereignty manifested itself in anomalies, miracles. They are minor to God.
12:37 I said miracles are minor to God. I said miracles are minor to God. It's not even
12:45 major work. It's minor work. It's not even hard work. It's easy work. It's light work
12:51 for him. It's all in a day's work. They require no strain, no stress, no
12:57 struggle. Jesus even said there are some miracles of liberation. Jesus said if I
13:03 by the finger of God cast out Beelzebub then you know that the kingdom of God
13:08 has come near you. He said there are some miracles of liberation that God performed.
13:12 He don't even have to move his hand. He just lift his finger. He said I do it by
13:17 the finger of God. He's a God that orchestrates anomalies. But I'm afraid of
13:30 something and this is what I want to talk to us about as a family in this
13:36 series called Family Matters. I want to talk about this for us as a spiritual
13:41 family and I think it applies to our natural family. I want to make sure that
13:50 we in this season of Advent where we are reminded of God's ability and
13:55 willingness to orchestrate anomalies and work miracles. I want to make sure that
14:01 we don't forget that wherever there is the presence of a miracle or the
14:10 potential for a miracle, excuse me, there's the presence of a Herod. Let me
14:19 say it one more time. Wherever there is the potential of a
14:24 miracle there is the presence of a Herod and how you handle the Herod determines
14:33 if you get the miracle. Pastor, who's Herod? Well in the Bible, Herod was a
14:44 literal governmental figure. Jesus is born in a period of human history where
14:53 Israel is under the oppressive leadership of the Roman Empire who
15:00 divided his empire, the Emperor divides the empire into sections and segments
15:06 and then assigns kings who serve underneath his authority to execute his
15:12 agenda for that region and area and one of those assigned to the Jews was a man
15:17 named Herod but Herod is here in rumblings around town. Herod goes on ATL
15:29 scoop and sees...Herod goes on the Trentonian and sees...Herod goes on IG and
15:39 sees a king of the Jews is about to be born and he's thinking a king of the who?
15:53 Yeah, the Jewish Messiah they say is being born right now. So Herod starts
16:01 thinking, well if he's gonna be the king of the Jews what's gonna happen with me?
16:12 I'm either gonna lose my job or I'm gonna lose my life because if I can't
16:20 keep this region stable the Emperor is gonna replace me. So Herod now allows his
16:30 insecurity, his instability, his entitlement to intoxicate him to the
16:36 degree that he says I got to kill this baby. I got to kill this miracle.
16:49 So Herod now represents anything that the enemy uses to stop anomalies,
17:02 miracles from coming to full fruition. He couldn't stop him from being born he
17:08 just wanted to stop him from growing up.
17:15 He couldn't stop the idea of him because the birth of Jesus had been prophesied
17:21 hundreds of years before his birth, right? I mean it was prophesied that he would
17:26 be born. It was prophesied where he would be born. So the idea of a miracle he
17:31 couldn't stop. What he was trying to stop was the possession of one. And such can
17:42 be the case with us. We sing about miracles, preach and teach about
17:49 miracles, but that's the idea of one. But to possess them we got to war with Herod.
17:56 And what Herod can represent is Herod can represent reason. Because even though
18:08 Herod's assumptions were wrong, if you're really going to be objective and honest
18:13 we can't say his assumptions were unreasonable. That the average person in
18:19 his position would probably think, "Well if this is the prophesied King of the
18:26 Jews, I'm gonna lose my job. I'm gonna lose my life." And it speaks to how
18:37 sometimes what God wants to do in and through our life is at war with your
18:44 reason. And God gives us the gift of reason. He wants us to use our reason. He
18:55 gave us reason for a reason. But you must keep reason in its rightful place. Because
19:01 you're going to hit seasons and circumstances in your life and in your
19:05 family and change churches hit a season and circumstance where what we need God
19:09 to do is not reasonable. We need him to do something that, come on, that goes
19:18 beyond the bounds of our reason and our limitation. We need him every now and
19:24 then to make things happen that don't normally happen. We need him to do for us
19:29 what he did for the children of Israel when they were crossing the Red Sea.
19:34 Water normally doesn't part. 99 times out of 100. 99.9 times out of 100. Water
19:49 doesn't part. But if the water is in the way of the where God has taken you, God
20:00 will say, "I know this normally doesn't happen 99.9% of the time, but this time
20:07 I'm getting ready to make it happen. And I'm declaring this over every family and
20:14 over every church location. We getting ready to experience of this time."
20:26 I said we are getting ready to experience a this time.
20:33 Please don't reduce God to your reason.
20:52 Because sometimes you're gonna need him to do something that's unreasonable.
21:00 Please don't reduce the divine to your data. We need data. God values data.
21:13 There's a whole book of the Bible on data. Numbers. So senses. We need data. But
21:28 don't reduce God to the data. The data gives you the facts. And now you got to
21:37 look at the facts and use your faith.
21:42 Because listen to me. Facts are true, but facts aren't the truth.
21:54 Facts don't change the truth, but the truth of God's Word can change the facts.
22:04 The facts are there was a little boy who had two fish and five loaves of bread.
22:09 That's a fact. And in that moment that was true. But the truth says, "I'm gonna
22:18 take that two fish and five loaves of bread and I'm gonna do something
22:22 unreasonable." And that's what our God can do. So this weekend isn't just about our
22:40 church and its expansion. It's about expanding our view of our God. And my
22:51 question is, have you reduced the size of your God to the size of your last season
22:59 of disappointment? Do you have tame faith now about what God can do in the future
23:17 because of what didn't happen in the past? Your faith is domesticated. You put
23:29 it in the zoo when it's supposed to live in the wild. "Why, pastor? I got to go."
23:39 Because the God you see is the God you get. Your perception determines your
23:48 reception. So we can serve the same God and not have similar experiences because
23:54 you have reduced your God to the size of your reason. And we have expanded our God
24:01 to what we see in the Scriptures. And the Scriptures show us He's a God that is
24:11 able to perform all types of miracles. We see four of them right here in Mary's
24:17 text. In this text regarding Mary, we see, first of all, the miracle of procreation.
24:24 This is the Christmas story, the Immaculate Conception. The birth of Jesus
24:30 in and of itself is not a miracle because of the pregnancy. The miracle is in the
24:36 process. This is the only time where a woman gets pregnant without going through
24:42 the normal process that a woman has to go through. She gets pregnant without
24:48 partnership with a man. It is a powerful picture of God's ability to say, "Hey,
24:57 I can do the same thing a different way." I don't know who this is for,
25:04 but I just pray you adopt the attitude of the old song that says, "Any way you
25:08 bless me, I'll be satisfied. I'm not caught up in the process.
25:14 I want the result. So you don't have to take me their way.
25:19 You don't have to take me that route." Miracles of procreation remind us that God
25:26 can do it another way. But that's not the only one I see in the text.
25:32 I see miracles of partnership because the Bible says when she gets pregnant,
25:39 she has an exchange with someone else who's experiencing not the same type
25:46 of miracle pregnancy, but a miracle pregnancy. And this person was her cousin,
25:51 Elizabeth. He says, "You're carrying something that requires partnership with
25:58 somebody you couldn't meet on your own." Y'all missed it. So God arranges this
26:09 connection between Mary and Elizabeth, and Elizabeth is further along in her
26:15 pregnancy than Mary. Y'all missed it. She's further along,
26:19 and miracles of partnership is when God connects you with someone who is carrying
26:25 something similar to what you're carrying, carrying a vision similar to what you're
26:30 carrying, carrying a life similar to what you're carrying, and they're further along
26:35 than you. But because they are, watch this, because they're carrying something and
26:41 they got character, when they meet you, they're not intimidated by you,
26:46 they invest in you, they baby leap. The Bible says that the baby start leaping
26:54 in the womb. May God send you Elizabeth. Everything this church has done,
27:15 God sent some Elizabeths. It took some Elizabeths, some supernatural
27:22 partnerships to get deals done. I don't have time. Maybe the next service,
27:31 but I need y'all to catch this maybe next week, maybe the week after that.
27:37 I don't know. We'll see when we circle back to this. But one of the things I
27:41 realize is this, miracles of partnership require the faith, watch this,
27:49 to walk away from that which is not Elizabeth. It means you get to a place in
28:00 your life where you realize, "I can't carry this and compete with you.
28:10 I'm carrying too much and it's taking too much from me."
28:19 May God send you Elizabeths, people who are carrying visions similar to yours but
28:25 are further along than you, who will partner with you to help you birth what
28:30 you're carrying because they're willing to invest in you, not because they're
28:36 intimidated by you. And I'm not even going to bother this. Yes, I am a little bit.
28:42 But what Elizabeth gave birth to, John, was more prominent for a season.
28:55 But understood the theology of decrease and got to a point and say,
29:00 "I got to decrease." See, Elizabeths don't mind you outdoing them.
29:20 Some people want you to win. As long as you're not winning so much,
29:26 it feels like you're outwinning them. But Elizabeth wants you to be all God's
29:32 called you to be. Then there are miracles in the text of protection.
29:43 You need that, I need that, your family needs that, our church family needs that.
29:50 Herod literally was trying to kill Jesus. And every way Herod tried to use to get
29:55 in, God kept him out. Herod found out from the Magi, the wise men,
30:02 that they were following the star to get to Jesus. He said, "Hey,
30:07 when you all get there, let me know so I can come and worship him too."
30:12 And God said, the Bible says God warned the wise men in a dream, "Don't do it."
30:19 Joseph is literally getting ready to be...Joseph, Jesus' dad,
30:22 is getting ready to have his family right in the proximity of Herod.
30:26 And while he's asleep, God comes to him in a dream and says,
30:29 "Joseph, take the child to Egypt. Herod's trying to kill it."
30:34 Every way Herod tried to get in, God kept him out.
30:41 Now, the miracles of protection are the miracles that get the least credit
30:45 because these are miracles most of the time you never get to see.
30:50 - That's good.
30:51 - Thank you.
30:52 - You get to see what you were protected from. You don't get to see all the ways
31:03 Herod tried to come in. And God kept him out.
31:18 Can I say something to you lovingly but sternly? I admire you.
31:25 When I hear some of your stories and hear what you have gone through and are going
31:28 through, I'm inspired by that. I see your strength. I see your resilience.
31:36 But I've been around long enough to know that you are where you are not because
31:42 you're that strong, not because you're that tough, not because you're that
31:51 resilient. You are where you are because when you couldn't carry yourself...
31:57 You say, "No, Pastor, I was strong." I'm not debating whether or not you
32:08 were strong. You just need to ask yourself, "Where did the strength come from?"
32:15 Come here. Be strong in the Lord. God was like, "That wasn't your strength.
32:26 That was me. I have an inexhaustible supply of strength." And last but not least
32:37 in the text, there's a miracle of prospering. I know extremism in Christian
32:46 camps and bad theology and greed have made many people uncomfortable with that
32:51 word. And there are certain words I'm not going to fight for if the word's not in
32:56 the Bible. But if it's in the Bible, it's worth fighting for.
33:01 You don't fix wrong teaching with non-teaching. You fix wrong teaching with
33:08 right teaching. And when I read my Bible, I see a God that is committed to addressing
33:19 every area of poverty in the lives of his people. Spiritual poverty,
33:25 which is the worst kind. That's the worst kind. Because when you got spiritual
33:32 poverty, you got poverty of purpose. So you got cars that will take you everywhere
33:40 and you still don't know where you're going. Because the compensation for
33:50 spiritual wealth is fulfillment. You get a new job, it gives you temporary
33:58 satisfaction until it's not new anymore. New house, temporary satisfaction until
34:04 it's not new. New boo. Because I want to prosper you spiritually where you're
34:18 flourishing. I want to prosper you emotionally where you have peace,
34:21 shalom, joy that overflows like a river. I want to prosper you relationally where
34:26 you're not confined to toxicity and abuse and neglect and damage.
34:31 Am I making sense here? When John writes his epistle, he greets by saying,
34:38 "I wish above all things that you would prosper and be in health even as your
34:48 soul prospers." And there are times where we need a miracle to prosper.
35:00 And we see it in the text. When these wise men get to Jesus, we read it,
35:04 they didn't come empty-handed, they opened up their treasures to him.
35:12 And I don't know if you know this, but my life, your life, your family,
35:17 and our spiritual family changed church. We need all four of these miracles.
35:22 We need procreation. We're going to need God to do stuff another way.
35:28 We need partnership. We're going to need Elizabeth to come alongside and to help
35:33 bring this vision to pass. We're going to need protection. From what?
35:40 We don't even know. And we're going to need to prosper.
35:49 I was praying last night at my kitchen counter. I was praying over this scripture
35:57 that I read in New Jersey. Some of our New Jersey family,
36:06 if you were there yesterday, you heard this. And I prayed something,
36:12 and I'm going to tell you what I prayed. I think it was a prophetic prayer.
36:16 We're not in this season yet. Because I saw something in this story.
36:22 We need all...I think we all, personally and corporately, want miracles of procreation,
36:27 partnership, protection, and prospering. But the text teaches us something.
36:33 The way to get a miracle is to live a life where you're willing to be one.
36:43 Mary got all of these miracles because she was willing to be one.
36:48 What did she do? She was willing to release her seed, her child,
36:58 and let her child, her seed, be used to bless someone other than her.
37:08 Is that the book? She literally had to watch her seed suffer on a cross.
37:16 Because she realized, "Every seed not for me." That God's going to use this seed
37:27 to bless some other people. And that's what we're getting ready to do
37:32 right in this moment. As we give today, we're like Mary.
37:37 We're saying, "God, I'm going to release a seed, not a child,
37:41 a currency that can be used to bless other people, that'll be used to bless people
37:50 you'll never see." See, I'm talking to a New Jersey family and our Atlanta family
37:56 right now, but right here, Change Global, Change Atlanta, or Change Orlando,
38:01 everything that we've done was because 18 years ago, a group of people in New Jersey
38:07 said, "I'm going to release a seed that will bless people I'll never see."
38:15 Come on. A group of people said, "I'm going to give to a building I'll never go to,
38:24 but I know God who changed my life in this building is going to change somebody else's
38:30 life in that building. So I'm going to say, even if I never sit there,
38:35 I'm going to seed into that as a way of saying, "God, thank you for the miracle.
38:41 You've already worked in me." That group of people said, "There's no way.
38:51 I'm going to sit here and let God use this house to bless me in this way,
38:59 and I'll not do everything I can to say, 'God, spread it all over the world.
39:05 Make the earth be like a sandwich and spread change like peanut butter and jelly
39:10 all over the world so that people in Africa and so that people in London and so that
39:17 people in Philly and people in New York, so that people in Mercer County and
39:26 Burlington County and people in Gwinnett County and people in DeKalb County can
39:33 experience what God is doing here." I want to release a seed.
39:44 And as we do so, I'm reminded of the scripture in 2 Corinthians 9,
39:48 "Whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly. Whoever sows generously will
39:52 reap generously. Each of you should give what you've decided
39:54 in your heart, not reluctantly under compulsion, but God loves a chill
39:57 forgiver, and God is able to bless you abundantly so that in all things,
40:04 at all times, having all you need, you will abound in every good work."
40:11 You know what Paul is saying? I'm going to read it again.
40:15 "God is able to bless you abundantly so that in all things, at all times,
40:26 having all you need, you will abound in every good work.
40:32 He always provides." I wish I had somebody in the service today
40:40 at every location that believed it.
40:43 ♪ He always provides every single time. ♪