Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
T.D. Jakes
Read between
December 31 - December 31, 2018
The very key to knowing your purpose is discovering and celebrating your personal identity.
To fulfill your purpose, you must first know and celebrate your identity! In this age of social media, we are bombarded with images that constantly
Every moment spent envying another person is a moment spent living outside of your life purpose. God did not create you to be jealous of anyone else; He created you uniquely to fulfill your destiny.
You will discover why it is so important to invest your time, resources, and energies into good soil that will ultimately produce a harvest in your life; this is about finding your place of deposit!
Celebrate your unique identity in Christ. Fulfill your purpose and be the solution the world is waiting for!
YOU HAVE a purpose. You were created on purpose. You were formed, fashioned, and knit together by a skilled Craftsman, not by some arbitrary cosmic explosion. You are not an accident. You are not an incident. You are not a mistake. You are not just a glob of protoplasmic material that is the result of a reckless night or a weekend between two passionate lovers. You are not just a mere mixing together of DNA. “Your hands have made me and fashioned me…” (Job 10:8). You have a divine purpose. You were allowed access into this dimension of life by the nod of the Creator Himself, that you would be
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Purpose is priceless, while purposelessness is very costly. You can live in this world and make all the money you could ever dream of and be beautiful, highly educated, and accomplish whatever you want, but if you die without accomplishing your purpose, you are a failure, a reject, and a fool.
The fools who say, “There is no God” have essentially said, “There is no purpose.” To divorce our perspective from the reality of a Creator, a Master Designer, and a Purpose-Author, we are rejecting purpose and meaning as a whole. This is no small statement because it is no small action.
Purposelessness abounds when Genesis 1 becomes a fairy tale and we are disconnected from the fact that we were created in the “image and likeness of God” (see Genesis 1:26), that we were in fact handcrafted in the image of the perfect Craftsman.
When you don’t know your Creator, you don’t know who you are. Pray to see yourself as God sees you—His perfectly designed creation.
Pray that your purpose will be revealed to you and that you will step into it wholeheartedly.
There are secrets inside you that God has planted—secret talents, secret gifts, and secret wisdom—that have been divinely orchestrated. These gifts, talents, abilities, wisdom, solutions, and creativities are uniquely yours. God the Creator is multidimensional enough to create you uniquely. Trust His design. The moment you start to embrace how you have been formed and fashioned is the moment you step into the very purpose for which you were created.
STOP, STOP, stop wanting to be somebody else. Do not insult your Creator by insulting His creation. You were fearfully and wonderfully made. Can you even fathom what the psalmist is expressing by using those words—fearfully and wonderfully? (See Psalm 139:14.) You were created with awe. God didn’t just throw you together, stand back and say, “This looks good.” No. Because God fashioned you in His very image and likeness, He has a right to stand back and actually awe His own creation. Why? It’s simply God standing in awe of His own handiwork; God awing God. This is how He looks upon you.
People don’t miss their purpose and bypass destiny because God decides to take it away; they miss purpose because they fail to invest in their purpose.
THE DESIGNER made you a certain way so that you could accomplish a certain purpose.
If you understand your purpose, you will live in that purpose and you will discover your gifts and your talents and what you were put here to do.
do not allow those weaknesses to abort your mission. Everyone has failed. Everyone has messed up. Everyone has slipped, fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten up again, maybe wandered around in the dark for a season, moved on, etc.
W.O.R.D
Remember, it’s not your weaknesses and failures that have the potential to abort your mission; it’s how you see and respond to them. Nothing—absolutely nothing—can separate you from God’s purpose for your life unless you start agreeing with lies.
Don’t dare exalt your plan over the power of a God-ordained, destiny-defining moment. One divine moment orchestrated by the Master can shift things that have taken you a lifetime to change.
More than focusing on a moment, keep your eyes fixed on the Master.
“This is your moment, son. This is your time, daughter. Run after that prophet.”
when those moments will happen when God’s power collides ...
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IT IS important to understand that destiny-defining moments take place in ordinary, everyday circumstances.
we need to be good stewards of the unique moment we have been given right now. Consider Elisha. He was simply being a good steward of where he was at his unique moment in history.
How we spend the sum of our everyday moments determines how we will respond to those life-altering, desti...
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How you handle the everyday shows God how you can be trusted with the extraordinary. Jesus notes this in His parable of the talents (see Matthew 25:23). The “few things” Elisha handled well was his plowing. What are the “few things” you handle well?
He was faithful with what was before him, and this faithfulness positioned him to be in the right place at the right time when his moment came.
TOO MANY of us want to chase after a destiny-defining moment; and as a result, we spend our entire lives running after something that should be running alongside us, ready to collide with our path.
Do not despise where you are. Do not look negatively upon small beginnings. You are where you are for a reason.
it is the sum of everyday moments that prepares a person to receive and run after their moment. Again, this should bring peace to our minds, which tend to f...
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steward the life they have been given before He promotes them into greater levels of glory, anointing, and power.
Keep in mind, it’s everyday moments that prepare everyday people for extraordinary exploits. Character is developed in the moments. Integrity is cultivated in the moments. The fruit of the Spirit grow in the moments. Christlikeness, godliness, and holiness are birthed in the moments. God is examining your moments, for they gauge your preparedness for the moment.
and integrity in all circumstances—in preparation for any God-encounter He may have in mind for
something radical, the most important rapid, radical responses must always be to God—the One who authors your moment. Our rapid response always belongs to God first. He will reveal the specifics. He will provide direction. His Spirit will lead us and guide us. In order to position ourselves for divine guidance, we must offer a rapid, definitive “Yes” to what God is asking of us.
Remind yourself, you were created by a God of Purpose. Nothing He made was created by accident—it was all sculpted with great skill and precision.
we are confident in His nature as the One who is strategic and purposeful in all that He does,
Trust Him! His Word holds true, and everything He says and everything He does can be trusted. He knows what He’s doing.
Mockers could not keep Noah from building an ark and saving the world. Egyptian armies could not keep Israel from leaving bondage and crossing the Red Sea. Insults could not keep Hannah from believing for her son. An insult-hurling giant could not keep David from securing a supernatural victory over the Philistine army. Persecution could not keep the Gospel of Jesus Christ from spreading throughout the known world. The seed of each monumental victory was everyday people trusting the God of Purpose in spite of what everything and everyone else was saying or doing.
enemy’s attempts to distract you from purpose. The more you contemplate the negative things people are speaking against you, the less time you have to consider the greatness of the God of Purpose. He will surely bring His plans to fruition in your life and complete the good work He began.
desperate to distract you right out of stepping into your purpose by keeping your eyes off the God of Purpose.
You know now that he delights in trying to veer you off course by reminding you of your past, your sins, your setbacks, your failures, your issues, your obstacles, your bondages, your addictions, etc. Here’s the truth—the God of Purpose will walk with you through each of these. God brings hope, healing, forgiveness, cleansing, deliverance, freedom—every solution to every obstacle.
lie. Sin, hell, and death itself cannot prevent Almighty God from reaching down into your mess, invading your life, cleansing you with Jesus’ blood, filling you with the Holy Spirit, and setting you on a course for victory.
does not use us because of us; He uses us in spite of us.
IF YOU have walked with God at all, you have come to discover that God uses you in spite of you—not because of you!
He asked me, “How do you stay humble, Bishop Jakes?” I said, “Because I know me. I have no choice but to be humble. It is by God’s grace that I stand where I stand. He uses me in spite of me. There are things that pulled me out of my comfort zone, that pulled me out of my insecurities and out of my inhibitions. I didn’t come because I was wonderful or better or perfect or superior or anything else. I came because He drew me by His right hand. He stretched forth His hand and said, ‘I call you unto Myself, and I’m going to use you right there.’”
Don’t try to become someone else in order to fulfill your purpose. Why? As long as you strive to be someone you’re not, you will never fulfill your purpose.
God is elevating your perspective concerning your purpose, for there are seeds of fulfilling your purpose in every waking moment.
DON’T SETTLE ON A HIGH
REMEMBER, GOD’S vantage point includes so much more than human eyes are capable of capturing. It’s tempting to coast on yesterday’s victory, when in fact, God has bigger prepared.
anoint his successor, Elisha. Your Mount Carmel victory should not be the end-all. Why? Because your purpose is not wrapped up in a single event; rather, it’s your active participation in an unfolding, lifelong process.
