It is our unbelief that blocks our blessing, not others.
Some of us block ourselves by blaming others. We stay locked in prisons of offense,
and we miss blessings because we would rather blame somebody else than believe God.
Let me preach this. You cannot believe God and blame them at the same time.
You can't believe God and blame others. Either you believe that what people meant for evil God
means for good or you don't. If you believe God, it means there's nothing life can do to you,
nothing people can throw at you, nothing they can say about you, think about you,
or lock you out of that will keep you from receiving what God has assigned to your life.
So here's the announcement, Elisha. You can have your breakthrough or you can have your blame,
but you can't have both. When the king came to Elisha he said, "This is God's fault
that we're in this famine."
It wasn't the Lord's fault; it was the fault of the leader.
Sometimes we will not lead our own lives and take initiative for our own repentance,
so we block our blessings. Boys, do you hear me? We block our own blessings.
Not the Devil…our disbelief. God is going to do it. The other day, a great man of God was
encouraging me. If you made a list of the top five people in the world, he would be,
in my opinion, somewhere in the top 10.
I respect him so much. Why I respect him is he has longevity in ministry.
He was introducing me to speak. He had invited me to speak.
He got up to introduce me, and the things he was saying about me were so nice and encouraging I
thought he was talking about someone else. It was a kind of introduction where he wasn't just
speaking like "He wrote a book" or "He pastors a church." He was saying things he saw in me and
how God had called me and our ministry. A voice to the generation, a bridge to reconciliation.
At the same time that he was affirming me, there was another voice,
not on the stage but inside my soul… Have you ever had this happen? Somebody is trying to affirm you,
trying to love you, trying to validate you,
but you cannot receive it because your gates are blocked.
There is something in the way called you
that will not allow you to receive the love God is trying to give you through someone else.
While he was saying these things about me… It's almost like the more he said good about me,
the worse I felt, because what I thought was, "He doesn't know me."
The problem with you is you have too much dirt on yourself.
The problem with you is you think you know yourself better than God does.
The moment the revelation hits your life that the only one who knows you completely
is the same one who loves you unconditionally you will be unstoppable in the kingdom of God.
While he was sitting there affirming me and saying things about me,
the Devil, that old slithering Serpent that came crawling up to Eve,
talking about "Did God really say…?" He was placing limitations. It was my own
limitation. It's hard for you to take on giants when you see yourself as a grasshopper.
It's hard for you to come out of a famine when you are living in the depths of your own frustration.
Even when I preach sometimes, some of you play me off and hold me off and cross your
arms and close your heart and lean back, and it is your way of shutting the gates,
but you are missing the miracle
because you feel unworthy. God never predicated his blessing on your worthiness.
Perfection is not the price of admission to the kingdom of God,
nor to the great works and mighty things he has called you to do on the earth.
I feel anointed to tell you today imperfection has never stopped God from blessing anybody.
The only thing that blocks your blessing is unbelief. I dare you to shout right now loud
enough where that Devil can hear you, "I believe! I am the righteousness of God!" Elisha said,
"You'll see it, but you won't experience it." He doesn't say how. Have you ever noticed how God
doesn't give you a lot of the details sometimes? I wish he did. It'd be super nice, but he doesn't.
All he says is, "This time tomorrow the famine is going to be over." How's he going to do it?
What are we going to get? Some manna from heaven? A little Flashback Friday, famine flashback?
Remember when they were in the wilderness God dropped down the manna out of heaven?
What's it going to look like? How's he going to do it this time?
You might be surprised how God blesses and delivers the nation.
The Bible says…
Oh, I love this part right here. Can you tell that I love what I do to preach to you?
I really feel like I've been cooking this all week and we're about to eat something right now.
I mean, I smell it. Oh, it smells good. Verse 3: "Now there were four men…" Four,
the number of creation. The north, south, east, and west. Winter, spring,
summer, fall. Four represents creation, so there's a creative miracle on the horizon.
"Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate." Now
a contrast emerges. I have somebody in the gate who doesn't believe, and then we have
a group of men who are outside the gate, not because they're coming back from Whole Foods.
This is a gated community in the sense that these men…
When the white flaky spots started showing up on their skin, they had to go to the priest.
Leprosy was used to refer to a wide variety of skin diseases in this day, from the most moderate,
being a change in coloration to bloody sores, and since leprosy is a progressive disease,
eventually maybe your fingers start falling off, but it's also a contagious disease,
so when you start to see the signs and you are pronounced ceremonially unclean, they move you
and quarantine you and position you outside the gate.
Now your only hope of survival is to beg, because you can't even carry on a normal conversation.
If you approach somebody, you have to announce your condition before you engage. So to even get
into the gate, you would have to start hollering within about 10 or 20 feet, "Unclean! Unclean!"
Can you imagine if you had to announce your condition to people out loud before you met them?
You would have no friends. I'm serious. If you had to externalize things people don't know are
wrong with you… Some of y'all would have to announce, "Amazon addict!" "Huh?" What if you
had to announce everything that was wrong with you? "Lust, perversion." What would that be like?
"I talked bad about you the other day, but, hi, how are you doing? I can't stand you."
They had to announce their condition.
They're outside the gate, and they're isolated and desperate, and they're not welcome,
and they're starving, and the doggie bags have stopped coming
because the people inside the gate are going to take care of themselves first and foremost.
They're outside the gate, and there are four of them,
like those four men… You remember the New Testament, don't you? Jesus was preaching.
Maybe we'll preach about it in my next series. So many people were in the house nobody could get in,
but there were four crazy men who were friends to this man, so they got creative.
Don't you try this if you come to Elevation Church and it's full. They ripped the roof off
of the house and lowered… I promise security will wrap you up, but this was Bible times.
"I ain't sitting in overflow." Yes, you are. They ripped the roof, lowered the man down,
and the man got healed because of the faith of four crazy men. Now watch the crazy faith…
I'm just going to say this right now. I don't mean to offend you,
but some of you have way too many limits on what you will and won't do to obey God.
You have too many limits. You have too many conditions. You don't want to look weird. You
don't want to be different. You don't want to stand out. You don't want people to talk
about you, so you're starving inside. These men didn't have the option to stay inside,
and they couldn't stay where they were. The Bible says eventually,
after many days of this, they said to each other, "Why stay here until we die?"
What a question. In other words, it is complacency that kills us. It is our willingness to stay in
places where we are starving because we fear the repercussions of our obedience. We don't
join an eGroup because we're scared of being seen, so we stay in isolation.
(I'm going to push these eGroups today.) We die outside because we won't let anybody in.