All right, thank you for tuning in. I just wanted to give you some encouragement, inspiration, wisdom on this day. If you will, let us pray.
Dear Heavenly Father, God, we just thank you for allowing us to be here once again. God, we just thank you for the opportunity. God, thank you for encouragement.
Thank you for wisdom. Thank you for knowledge. Thank you for allowing your Holy Spirit to be with us and allowing us to be able to be encouraged by you.
God, we pray that this message will touch somebody somewhere, wherever they are. God, we pray that you will encourage them, uplift them. God, allow them to know that it will be all right.
Whatever they’re going through is not the end and that you have the final say. So God, we thank you that you have all power to do anything but fail. And God, we just thank you right now.
God, we pray you’ll decrease me and increase you to your people who hear you and not me. In your son Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Today, just want to chat with you and talk a little bit about just superficial and supernatural, what it means superficial and supernatural. And this will be coming out of the book of Exodus. When you look at Exodus, of course, we know about the children of Israel.
We know how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. Now here we have where when you look at the 34th chapter around the 29th verse, it says, it talks about, this is where you have your Bible app or your book or while you’re riding or driving, you don’t have to turn with them, but there’s just some scriptures for you to look up later. And it says, now it was so when Moses came down from Mount Sinai and the two tablets of the testimony were in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mountain that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.
So when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone and they were afraid to come near him. Then Moses called to them and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned to him and Moses talked with them. Afterward, all the children of Israel came near and he gave them as commandments all that the Lord has spoken with him on Mount Sinai.
And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. When Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off until he came out and he would come out and speak to the children of Israel, whatever he had been commanded. And whenever the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone, then Moses would put the veil on his face again until he went in to speak with him.
And of course, now him being the Lord, because when you go back sometimes from this, when you go back a few verses from this and you go back up to 27, it says that the Lord said to Moses, write these words for according to the tenor of these words, I have made a covenant with you and Israel. So the hymn that Moses was talking about is the Lord. And so Moses does this where he had gone into Mount and Transfiguration.
He’d gone to Mount Sinai. And while he’s on Mount Sinai, he’s talking with the Lord. And while he goes before the Lord’s presence, his face changes.
He’s shining, his shining face. And I just want to let you know the transformation can be both a bad and a good thing. It can be good, but it can also be bad.
Because see, when we are transformed or we are changed, that means that we have changed from something. Some part of us has changed from what it used to be. And when we have, when we are changed or transformed, what we have can be turned into what God would have.
God does not deal with us on the ordinary level, as many of you know. And when you come in contact with God, you come in contact in the presence of God. And when you change, when you come into his presence, as some people say, for lack of words, you need to bring your A game.
You need to make sure that you got everything, all your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed. Because for decades, and we look at even in, when you even look back in Black History Month and things of that nature, where you have black parents, where they told their children that in order to succeed, despite racial discrimination, that you need to be twice as good, twice as smart, twice as dependable, twice as talented as your counterpart. Now, we know these were things that we were taught.
But now as the same thing, that when you go before God’s presence, not that we can be so good, because we cannot be good, because we can’t buy righteousness, we can’t earn righteousness. It’s given to us through grace. And as we look at this, Moses went into God’s presence.
He went into God’s presence to talk before God to the children of Israel. And here it is, like I said, superficial versus supernatural. See, some people can be superficial, and you can look like there’s a change going on.
But when there’s a supernatural change, there is no doubt in your mind, you know, that without a shadow of a doubt, that there is a change that has been taken on. See, there is purpose. There has to be purpose for these things.
There is purpose meditation, purpose answers, purpose for the things that you do. And when you look at this, now we look and see that, yes, that Moses was in here, and there was a purpose for him being in God’s presence. His purpose was to go back and be a mediator between God and the children of Israel.
Him being a mediator between God and the children of Israel, Moses was their leader. And if you’re a leader of any sort, you have to get encouragement. You have to get inspiration.
You have to get wisdom. You have to get knowledge. You have to do all these things to encourage yourself to lead your people.
And as I say this, even as you get encouragement yourself to lead your people, it doesn’t matter whether you own a job or whether you’re, you know, at work or whether you’re a church leader, whether you’re a minister, pastor, preacher, bishop, apostle, chief apostle, presiding, prelate, it does not matter where you are. You need to get encouragement for yourself. Like Donald Lawrence always says, encourage yourself because you have to encourage yourself.
You have to get something from somewhere. And Moses is pulling straight from the source himself, which is God Almighty. And he gets this, and he says that when he goes in there, he’s, while he’s getting these commandments, he’s going to talk before the Lord.
He’s going to get the covenant renewed between God and the children of Israel. And while he’s doing this, that his presence being in the presence of God, he changes. Now, I want to let you know that back to where I was sitting back then, when you think about even in history, you know, you can get advice from everything.
You can get advice. You can get encouragement from anything. The thing is to get good encouragement, to get good advice.
You can get from literature, TV shows, day-to-day conversation. You can get inspiration from economic research. You can get all sorts of inspiration out there.
You have good inspiration and bad inspiration, but you have to be careful which one you get. But if you’re really serious about coming into the presence of God, sometimes your color needs to change. And when I say your color needs to change, see Jeremiah said in chapter 13, verse 23, he said, can a leopard change his spots or an Ethiopian change his skin? As we discussed that the fact that the original language of the text could read as would be caused to the biblical writer, the idea of a leopard or an or an Ethiopian wanting to change will make no sense to the physical, to the natural, but you have to look spiritually.
When you look spiritually, you look at the idea that color is not an Old Testament concept. Folks in the Old Testament were not concerned with race, but class and culture. And I want to let you know that see today, you would need to change your color.
In order to change your color, you have to know that, am I superficial or am I supernatural? And there are a lot of folks out there that are yellow. They’re yellow because they are afraid to even go to God. There are a lot of folks out there that are pink and they are soft and fear being real with God, what God has called them to do.
See, there are a lot of people that actually have colors on them, but these are spiritual colors right here. And I’m talking about spiritual color because there are a lot of folks playing white, pretending to be innocent and pure and don’t have a pure thought in their mind at all. But I’m telling you that I’m encouraging you that it’s time that we as Christians, we have to change our colors.
Time for Christians to get a color change. Time for Christians to change their colors, to change our colors. And when you are close to God, you know it.
Nobody else tell you this. When you’re close to God, you know it. You can feel His presence.
You can feel when the Holy Spirit is moving in the room. You can feel when the Holy Spirit is moving in the atmosphere. You can pick up on certain things.
Your discernment is high. You have a keen sense of discernment. You have a keen sense of your spiritual ear where you can hear what the says the Lord.
There’s a lot of things as a Christian, as a spiritual person, as a Christian, as a white believer in God, man and woman of God, child of God, that when you get close to God, you know it. When you step up into the level of God, when you make yourself ready for God, ready to approach God and prepare. And this is as preachers and ministers and pastors and those that stand before God, we have to get ourselves.
You may not know this. Your pastor does. But we have to prepare ourselves before we speak to the congregation.
We have to prepare ourselves. We have to go and sometimes lay prostrate. We have to go and get away from everybody.
We have to go so we can get in our secret place and talk with the Lord so that God gives us an ear to hear His word that He has for His people. And notice I say His people, not my people because they’re not my people. They’re God’s people.
And when He says this, He says that, okay, now you need to step up to the level where God is. And see, a lot of people when they’re thinking of you, seeing this is why sometimes that your friends, you wonder why your friends look at you funny, why your friends are acting strange about you because when you get saved, see, it wasn’t when you got saved or when you gave your life to Christ, it was when you got saved that your friends started acting funny or you noticed them start treating you a little bit differently because now you’ve gotten serious. You’ve gotten serious because everybody can almost tell you and you may not know the date, you may not know the year, you may not know the exact month, but you know that when you got baptized, you know a roundabout figure when you got baptized.
But when you get saved, when you get saved, you know that you are saved. You know that you are sanctified. You know that you are Holy Ghost filled, blood washed, blood bought and going to heaven and on your way and trying to follow Christ because you know when you got saved because when it was just like the pastor may have been talking only to you and here it is that when you get close to God, you know it when you stand up on the level to where God is trying to make yourself ready for what he has prepared you to do and ready to approach God.
Yes, I want to tell you that and I am telling you that it’s time for us to get glowing, get shining for God. People should not have to see your church t-shirt, your Sunday school badge, your pin that you wear, your church t-shirt to know that you are a Christian. They should not have to see you carrying your Bible.
They should not have to see you quoting Bible scriptures to know that you are a Christian. They should know a Christian just by you showing up. Some people didn’t get that, but let me tell you something else because see here is where Moses showed up.
They saw that they knew it was something different about because of what their eyes saw. Their eyes saw that there was a different glow. There was something different about Moses from when he went up on the mountain the first time and come back down.
There was something different about him this time because now he had really been in the presence of God and see when you get in the presence of God, there is something about your glow. There is something about your presence. There is something about your character.
There is something about the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you move, the way you act, the way you carry yourself that people are drawn to you, but it’s because not by you, but it’s because of your experience with God and then God will allow you to be able to bless these people that are attracted to you, that are pulled to you so that now you can minister to them at the time God needs you to when they’re open for a ministry opportunity and here it is now. There are some keys to doing your best. There are some keys to doing your best, but like I said, we as Christians, we have to change our colors.
We should be shining. There should be something different about you. There should be a glowing about you.
One of the keys that we need to teach our children as Christians is how to do their best. When we go into the school system, we have all these children that sometimes are lackadaisical. They really don’t want to study.
They really don’t want to do this. They don’t want to do that, but they want to be on TikTok and they want to be content creators and they want to be on Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter and all these social media platforms, but they don’t want to do a study because they’re watching other people do this, but there has to be something that we have to teach them that you need more than be a content creator. You have to have some stuff that’s about you.
One of the persons that comes to mind like this, and I know sometimes, and this was really some encouragement that I was talking about, Black History Month. When you go in there, when you have people, when you think of even on the black history side of it, when you talk about Josephine Baker, where she was an American born French dancer, singer, and actress who came to be known in various circles as the Black Pearl, the Bronze Venus, and even the Creole Goddess. And she was known as the top of her profession.
No one else could do what she could do or dance like she could dance. She was sure to let the world know. And then she became a muse for contemporary authors and painters, designers, sculptors, including Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior.
And when you think about Moses, when he is interacting on the mountain with God, that you can see Moses acting in a worthy, in a way worthy of being in a holy place. And see a lot of times, see, God will tell us, God, we can make a lot of places holy. Doesn’t matter if what has been gun violence or whether you, you know, things have happened in your neighborhood, you can still allow God in and God will allow that place to be holy because now you’re consecrating yourself before God.
And now because you consecrate yourself before God, now God can move the way God needs to move in your life. And so I want to show you today that as we hear some ways that we can always be our best, we can be better in America today, not just in Mississippi, not just in Alabama, not just in Louisiana, California, Atlanta, or not. We can be better as a Christian anywhere in America today.
Number one, you have to come to cultivate a good attitude. There is a scientific research that positivity attracts abundance and success. So if you want to do your best at work, you need to cultivate and practice bringing in a positive attitude with your work.
And I know sometimes we say Monday, oh, it’s a manic Monday. Oh, it’s a terrible Tuesday. Oh, it’s a woeful Wednesday.
But you know, we have to change our way of thinking. We have to bring and cultivate a good attitude so that that way, because see, you can speak life with your tongue and the power of life and death is in your tongue. So we have to speak it.
We have to cultivate these things. So we have to create this energy by doing some very basic thing like even getting a good night’s sleep, especially doing the work we eat properly. Don’t overindulge.
You also do it by surrounding yourself with positive people, get you some motivational tech, get you something that you can encourage yourself and get motivational, get uplifted and do things and bring some positive ideas into your life. And now even as then a second thing you can do is you can feel your own success. Yes, you can feel your own success.
See, we all have a little engine inside of us that propels us along our road in our career and in our life. There is something there, something is called drive that pushes you. It propels you doing along this road, along this career, along this thing called life.
But we have to fuel this engine or it starts to seize up on us. Sound familiar? It’s just like in your car. We have to put some fuel in this engine because if we don’t, it’s going to seize up.
It won’t move anymore. We have to lubricate the moving parts of this spiritual engine. And we have to do this by finding ways to introduce new ideas and concepts that we can strive to learn.
And see, that engine is sometimes called motivation. And while we can draw strength from outside to help us keep moving, 90% of it is about finding it inside of ourselves. And what do I mean by that? Because you have it.
You are stronger than what you think. You are stronger than what you think. You just have to lean and depend on God.
You just have to lean and depend on God. You are stronger than what you think. Spend a little time every day to find out, to find what fuels you, to find out what drives you, to find out how you can always strive to be your best.
And then even three, number three, you can actually plan your own growth. You can plan some growth. You can plan your own growth, just like what motivation does.
In motivation, you have motivation on your job. You have motivation in your career. You have motivation in your homes, in your life, in your relationships, in your finances.
There are motivations that you have to grow you. And so, this is about some opportunities that can come to you that you can take advantage of. But when you notice the people who get ahead quickly, and they’ll stand at the door even before it opens, you have to be there and you have to be ready and you have to be willing and open for these new opportunities.
And so, get ready. Get yourself ready. Shake yourself off.
Sometimes you may not feel like getting out of bed. Sometimes you may have worked all night long, all day long, and it’s your day off and you may feel like just relaxing and throwing the day away. But we have to motivate ourselves because, as they say, the early bird gets the worm.
And when you do this, you have to develop a plan of growth, a plan at work. Think about where you want to be in two years, three years, in five years. Where do you want to be in 10 years? And then write it down.
Write it down and make it plain. When you write it down and make it plain, the Bible says that without a vision, my people will perish for a lack of knowledge. And without a vision, see, you have to have a vision.
My people perish for a lack of knowledge. They also perish where there’s no vision. The people perish.
So, you have to put some type of vision in place so where you can write it down, you can look at it. You can do a dry erase marker. Put it on your mirror in the bathroom.
Put it right. You can write it. You can do something.
Put it where you’re going to see it. And when you write it down, you make some copies. Put it around your house.
Put it around your apartment. Put it around your living place. Put it in your way.
You can see it throughout the day while you’re at work. And then this will trigger your brain subliminally to start working on some things, to start thinking about how I can accomplish these goals. And not only will your brain start working to try to do this, but you’ll also be working and praying and talking.
You’ll start thinking and talking to your God about helping you and how you can accomplish these goals in life. And not just going through the run and meal of life. Just going through the everyday mundane life.
Just going through the motions. And sometimes we can get caught up going through the motion. But write it down.
Make it plain. And put your plan into action. Take a course.
You can do some recruiting. You can get a coach. You can get a mentor.
You can get inspirational. You can work to build your own success. You can make yourself better.
And then, here’s one good point. Number four is stop judging yourself. Stop judging yourself.
See, a lot of times we will judge ourselves. And as a writer says in a book that he says, sometimes, and I think this is Don McGill, that says that sometimes your best will differ depending on your physical and emotional state of mind. I’m saying it again.
Sometimes your best will differ depending on your physical and emotional state of mind. Yes, you will and can certainly do better when you are well rested versus being overly stressed. Doing your best does not mean that you have to overdo or keep overdo things.
It doesn’t mean you have to keep working all night on them in some desperate attempt to finally finish and rush everything through. No, it just means that when you do this, you put your all in. You give 110%, not just 100%, but don’t just give all.
Give a little bit extra than your all. Give a little bit more than your all. And when you do this, you put all your focus and attention while you’re working on it, and then you move to the next thing and keep it all moving.
And when you do this, you leave that first piece. You leave that first piece to God. You take that step, one step, and God will start to move in, and God will start to work, and you’ll see God start to move and start to accomplish things.
I can look at even in my own life at how God has worked and how God has moved and how God has brought me from a long way. And when you do this, you put your full attention and focus on it. And you can say, Lord, I don’t know how I’m going to do this.
I don’t know how I’m going to accomplish this. But that lets you know that God has to be in it because when you don’t know how you’re going to accomplish it, when you don’t know how it’s going to happen, when you don’t know how it’s going to work out, God has all of the tools to make it work out and make it happen. All we have to do is trust in God because God gets the glory because God wants to see something.
God wants somebody else to see, this is what God did for me. This is how God brought me through. This is how God brought me out.
And when you do this, God will make a way. Again, this was talking about Christians as we change our color. We have to get to that color of shining where people don’t have to know that people know just by the color we are spiritually where we stand.
And see, sometimes even in the Super Bowl, people know where you stand when you play. When you look at the Super Bowl, people know where you stand. When you watch a football game, a basketball game, and your team is playing, whether it’s the Cowboys or whether it’s the Saints or whether it’s the Chiefs or whoever it might be, whether it’s the Celtics or whether it’s the Lakers, whether it’s the Bulls or whether it’s Green Bay, it does not matter where or who it is, who your team is, people know where you stand just by what they see.
They’re going to see who you stand with because when your team is playing, it doesn’t matter what sport it is, but when your team is playing and you’re rooting for your team to go, they know who you’re going for. Same way as Christians. We have to know what team we’re playing for.
If people don’t know that we’re playing on the same team, they might think we’re on the opposite team, but when they see that you’re playing on the same team, they can get some encouragement from you saying, look, I know you’ve been going through a lot. I know you’ve been going through a struggle. I know you’ve been going through some pain and hurt, but I see how God has blessed you.
I see how God has kept you. I see how God is taking you through this, and because he’s taking you through this, I know he’ll take me through and take care of me too. So as we look at this and we look at how that when we see where Moses went up on this mountain and he goes up to the mountain, just like when the disciple went up to the mountain with Jesus and on the day of the tree of transfiguration, the key thing is not about staying on the mountain.
It’s not how you go up on the mountain. It’s how you come back down, and when you come back down, it’s how you change the lives of the people around you. Moses, like the disciples, were, as Martin Luther King said, making the job of God easy by spreading the message, and when you go and go to God and you have been with God and God has given you something to work with, God has everything in his hand, and God will give you things to work with.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re white, black. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Hispanic. It does not matter whether you’re Indian.
God will give you something when you’ve been with God. God gives you something new. I don’t care what it is.
He’ll give you something new, and you might say, well, all I got is—I don’t have anything. He’ll tell you to look in your—what do you have in your hand, Moses? He’ll tell you that the balm still works. He’ll tell you when you go in there, he’ll give you things that will work that you didn’t think would work.
He’ll allow you to use things you didn’t want to see being used. He’ll ask you, Ezekiel, can these bones live again? And then see, when you do this, God has something in mind. He has a plan, and God’s plan is not our plan.
His thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They’re so much higher than ours, so we have to trust God and trust the process.
See, a lot of times we don’t trust the process, but we have to trust the process and change for God. We have to shine for God. We have to glow for God.
We have to be as though—and we have to let everybody know God gets the glory, not me. God gets the glory. And see, when you look at us being Christian and changing our colors, and then not just changing our colors, but also, you know, being well with superficial, because some people are superficial, and their colors don’t change.
They just look like they changed. Superficial, see, it means this. It means that I’m concerned with or comprehending only what is on the surface or obvious, shallow, not profound, or thorough, apparent rather than real.
Have you ever been only concerned with the obvious? For me, that could be, okay, the floor is dirty, so I must clean it. And see, if you understand that, even though the floor—and see, some people only get that surface dirt that’s on the floor, but when you do a deep cleaning, and you go and you clean, do a spring cleaning at your home, there’s all sorts of stuff that comes out because of you now. You’re not just going on the surface.
You’re going below the surface. You’re going and getting stuff. You’re going and doing a deep clean, a deep dive on this.
So every day—see, sometimes it’s in our face as
