by T. D. Jakes
God has promised that we will find Him if we seek Him (Jer. 29:13). From all my years of actively pursuing God, though, I’ve discovered that He loves to play hide-and-seek. He doesn’t always hide in the most obvious places, but He leaves a trail of spiritual bread crumbs for us to follow when He’s chosen an out-of-the-way place in which to conceal Himself. God is easily spotted during our joyous seasons, but it often seems as if he’s an expert at tucking Himself away in the most obscure locations during our trying times.
Could it be, however, that God hasn’t hidden Himself during our tumultuous seasons, but rather He has simply revealed Himself in a form we’ve yet to recognize? After all, even the disciples at first believed Jesus was a ghost when they saw Him walking on the wind-tossed sea. No wonder, then, that they demanded to see Him for themselves after He arose from the tomb. They couldn’t grasp how Christ could so dramatically change the course of nature as they understood it and still be the Master they knew and loved.
Before we criticize their reluctance to recognize Him, we might look first at our own ability to spot God in our lives. Tell me, can you recognize God in another form, or must He always reveal Himself to you through the construct of your familiarity?
The Vinedresser wouldn’t have gone to all of the trouble to develop us if He was going to destroy us. If the Lord wanted us dead, He could have killed us before we ever brought forth fruit.
Refinement
Have you ever desired something for so long that you resolved in yourself that it was never going to happen? Have you ever had to declare that your dreams were dead so that you would finally have a moment’s peace? It’s the delay in the fulfillment of the promises of God that causes us so much pain. When the Master gives us the vision of what He’s going to do in our lives, He shows us the mountain peaks while He hides the valleys. If you saw the climb you would have to endure to get to the mountaintop, you would abandon the entire trip.
It’s the passion we have for the fulfillment of God’s promise that drives us, but it’s the play between the pain and passion that He uses to refine us. It’s our passions we have to make peace with when we are confronted with the delayed realization of God’s promises because passion makes you dissatisfied with what you have as you wait for what you want. In the face of waiting to be paired again with God, we fight with putting our hopes to bed in order that we might deal with the agony of delay. So we cry our dreams to sleep because it’s easier for us to allow our passions to rest instead of allowing them to remain and go unfulfilled.
But the Master is not in the business of torturing His children through delays. Rather, it’s the hidden things in the valleys of “not yet” and “wait” that make us who we are. God gets our attention with the hidden things that lie in wait in the valleys—the things that happen that we didn’t see coming or expect.
It’s the problems that catch us off guard that are so alarming and amazing. During those times you have to decide how you’re going to react to what happens to you because you can’t control what life throws your way. But you do have a choice in how you will respond. Do you give up on God, put your dreams to the side, and make up in your mind that the promises of God will never come to pass?
Or do you trust the One that holds you even though the valleys of life threaten to claim your faith as their next casualty? If God uses our valleys to prepare us for the peaks, we must realize that we are not yet ready for the promises that reside at such a great height. After all, God hides His treasures until we can handle them. And since we can’t see the value of what’s coming, we don’t look for the incredible. It’s while we’re not looking that things are moving. It’s while we’re sleeping in the valleys that God does His best work because the Master does not need our help as He transforms us. He requires only our faith and humility.
I am thoroughly convinced that God made me who I am in the low places of my life. It’s the nights I cried myself to sleep and my tears crawled across the bridge of my nose that God most often used to develop me into the person I am today. It was the hidden things in the valleys that God used to kill off my fleshly desires and strip from me everything that would prevent me from being His wine. I had to learn not to fear my valley experiences but accept them—and that process continues. And I believe you must do the same.
We know God’s going to do something, but we don’t know when. We know God is going to bless us, but we don’t know how. We know God is going to connect us, but we don’t know through whom. God told you He was going to deliver you, but He didn’t tell you what He was going to deliver you from. God said you’d be together with Him again, but He didn’t tell you everything you’d endure along the way. All of this is preparation for your final pairing with the Master. You’re doing everything to avoid the hidden crushings in the valleys, but those are needed to bring you to the point of being reunited and paired with God. Don’t get lost by the distractions.
Just as Jesus experienced the turmoil, pain, and depression in the low parts of His life before His transformation, we will experience the same. If we were meant to reunite with Him in eternity, we must make the same journey through the valleys of preparation that He did. You didn’t simply tumble into trauma. You were led into it, escorted into it by the Master Vintner who so wants to be with you that He said, “Look. I’ll go first. I’ll endure the crushing to become wine.”
The blessings and transformation we’ve sought for so long have been promised to us by a God who did not free us from bondage just to be destroyed in the deserts and valleys of unbelief and unfulfilled longings. Do not retreat back to the familiar caves of abandoned hopes and deceased dreams. The eternal pairing we once enjoyed with the Father is coming in short order. And though you may be crying, “Don’t make me hope again,” the Master is showing Himself to you in a different and newer form that is proof that none of what you experienced is in vain. Even your delays are fitting into His plan to prepare you.
The new form God has taken is the one you will one day assume for your pairing when you and He are finally together for all eternity. Your wine will last for all of time. Don’t sacrifice the quality because you can’t see beyond your pain. Trust Him. He knows exactly—exactly—what it’s like to endure the crushing you’ve been through. God is committed to you through it all and beyond. Your pairing with Him knows no end.
How does it make you feel to know that God wants an eternal pairing with you? Spend time with God, thanking Him for the gift of eternal pairing. Recommit to trust in Him no matter what you are going through or where you find yourself wandering.
CHAPTER 10
Pressing On
The beauty of every ounce of wine we carry is contained by what our Lord Jesus did for us in the Most Holy Place. He was, in fact, the first to RSVP to God’s eternal invitation:
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. (Heb. 9:11–14 ESV)
Jesus did not arrive at the mercy seat through the temporary blood of animals. All at once, Jesus was both the sacrifice that was crushed and our High Priest. Therefore, the blood He sprinkled upon the mercy seat in the eternal tabernacle was His own and a foretaste of what we would become after He transformed us. In essence, Jesus brought His own wine to the intimate tasting at God’s table.
And seeing that what the Vintner does in our lives is patterned directly after what happened in Christ’s resurrection, the Vintner calls us to the secret chambers of His presence, too. It’s with the Master tha
t we finally see something we’ve not seen in the previous compartments of the tabernacle. We see that there is no more crushing, no more refinement or process, and no more struggle and strife. Instead, the process has been replaced by something altogether different. Instead of work, there is only relationship and being who we truly are—the wine of our King.
When it comes to what God has done in our lives, the transformation through which He has taken us, and what we are called to, it is important that we remove from our minds the stages of old. There is nothing wrong with remembering how the Father has carried you. However, we often have a penchant for clinging to the past at the expense of our futures. Now that we are wine, we cannot afford to continue thinking like grapes, remaining in the outer court and not pressing on to greater things.
As a result, the wine is brought to the last compartment of the tabernacle—the Most Holy Place. Here we step into the temple befitting the joy of God’s final harvest festival. Here in this Most Holy Place the Vintner invites us to a private communion with Him so that we might sample together what He has created in us along with His plans to share us with the world.
In this festival, it’s not only a reuniting of our Father with His children, but also a modern coming together of the wine and bread in a celestial upper room experience reminiscent of what Jesus did in that Last Supper with His disciples. This is a holy house party like no other. It all comes full circle now: the symbolic parts and sacred pieces of the tabernacle in the Old Testament; the reality of the Incarnation as Jesus became human in order to suffer for our sins, die on the cross, and rise again; and the crushing you have experienced in your own life in order to become the precious, holy wine fit for a King.
This eternal nature we carry within us directs us to the day when we will no longer need physical sustenance but will subsist only on the spiritual bread that Christ gave to His disciples in the upper room in the form of physical bread. If you remember, however, bread wasn’t the only thing Jesus offered them. With that bread, He gave them wine, a symbol of the blood that was spilled on our behalf and placed on the mercy seat.
Through the crushing brokenness Christ endured, His blood became the new wine after which our transformation was patterned. We were destined to become that same kind of wine by the same Vintner and His process of crushing us. In essence, then, the bread of life and wine of the spirit have beckoned us with glad hearts into God’s presence so that we would enjoy a higher, better, and eternal communion with Him.
Only in this new communion, we find one special difference. Now there is intimacy, a give and a take between one another. Where the Master would give, we would receive. Now that we are like Him as His wine, we offer ourselves to Him so that He would delight in what we have become. There is no need for us to be bread, because His body serves as that for us.
Like the most excellent host, God supplied for us what we could not supply for ourselves. And because His supply is never depleted, we needn’t worry about this feast ending soon. Seeing that the wine we embody is eternal and connected directly to Him, we, too, will never run dry. Therefore, this festival will never end, but continue unhindered between the Master Vintner and His new cask of wine—His new creation.
A New Creation
As we embrace being God’s new creation in Christ, as we grow accustomed to living as His holy wine, then we begin experiencing new levels of joy, peace, contentment, purpose, and satisfaction. No longer do we wonder why we are here on this earth. We know that everything we have been through is more than worth it because God has used it all, wasting nothing, to bring us to the point in our lives where we are now.
Your crushing is not the end—it’s only the beginning. It is where you are planted for purpose—God’s purpose. One’s crushing always gives rise to something wonderful in someone else’s life. Jesus was the first example and we now follow His example.
I’m far from perfect, but I have experienced the blessing of being holy wine to those around me. And lest you think I boast, please understand that what I’m called to do humbles me on a daily basis. There is no way I can do anything on my own. But through Christ, I can do all things.
Jesus took for us what we would never be able to handle on our own, but the Master was not content with just saving us. No! He wishes for us to be like Him so that we would be intimate and commune with Him. And, though He bore the punishment for all our transgressions and sin, He endeavored to take us through the process of preparing us for the face-to-face meeting we would have with the Father.
Hence, our crushing. Hence, our planting or replanting.
Having survived and thrived in the crushing and fermentation, though, we can now hear the heavy locks of the eternal doors to His presence release, because on the other side of the thick veil stands the Almighty God who wishes an audience with us even more than we do with Him. For during the conversation we would have with Him, our Father desires to partake of a vintage He has on His Son’s authority is “a very good year”!
You may struggle to see yourself as God’s holy wine now, and that’s understandable. But the truth of the matter is that you are not what and who you used to be. You are not what you did. You are not your lack. You are not what people have labeled you to be, and God will continue confronting you to make you understand who you are.
You are not a grape. You are not even the crushed hull and flesh that remains after being trampled. You are something far better. You are wine. When God sees you, He sees you as perfect. When God’s eyes rest on you, He doesn’t see who and what you used to be; instead, He sees the fully developed you in Christ. He sees the righteous you. In the Bible we’re told that we are the righteousness of God in Christ (2 Cor. 5:21) and that in this world we are as He is (1 John 4:17). God’s Word tells the truth about who you are—so believe it!
I realize it can be challenging to accept the truth about who you are. If the Bible has been telling people the truth about themselves for thousands of years, you would think that people would have gotten the message by now. That would be the logical conclusion, but you would be completely taken aback by how arduous it is to get people to simply walk in what they believe. Just think about it. The ramifications of walking in the faith we profess are immense.
Do you understand that Jesus has already done everything for you?
You must accept this truth because God is more than satisfied with the wine He has produced in you. He is elated with how you have turned out, keeping a cask unto Himself as a trophy proudly displayed in His personal winery. But He has a plan for the rest of your bottled vintage that entails you being offered to the world as a sign for what He wants to do with other grapes.
The Vintner wants others to taste the masterpiece He has produced in His new creation. You have His power within you. You have full access to all the riches in Christ. He wants you to offer hope to those being crushed and struggling to understand. He wants to work through you to comfort the desolate, heal the sick, strengthen the weak, and reveal the light of His love in a dim world.
You are God’s trophy, and He wants to show you off.
Remember, God has designed, equipped, and called each of us to accomplish many great things. He has given us a vision, promising that He would bring it to pass. Why, then, are we so prone to lose sight of the fact that the Master is the one who gave us the idea and not the other way around? Probably more than anything else, the one message I have to tell people that I mentor and counsel over and over and over again is that God’s timing is flawless. His clock is perfect.
Over and over again, I have to thank God for sticking with his timetable for my life and not bending to my will. I can look back over my life and see where God could have answered me right then with what I thought I wanted and allowed it to destroy me. With the utmost gratitude, I salute Him for keeping from me what I considered the best thing for me at the time.
If you’re anything like me, you realize the folly of begging God for something, and when He gives it to you, you murmur
and complain about what you got. We have the craziest habit of wanting what we want until we get it. Whereas if we waited for the fullness of God’s timing to come to pass, we would see that His ordained season carries within it an unforeseen amount of grace and protection.
We must remember that our God sees the end from the beginning. There is no problem for which He doesn’t already have a solution.
Everything God does is strategic. Never do we witness God making a mistake or running late for His divine appointments with us. Though I might be taken by surprise with the situations that befall me in life, there has never been a moment when I ran to God with the words “Lord, I didn’t even see this coming” and He responded, “I didn’t either!”
Throughout this entire book, we’ve been discussing how the Lord develops and transforms us. Across these pages, you’ve repeatedly read the word process. This word, in and of itself, denotes the passage of time. For the most part, transformation isn’t an event, and it’s definitely not something that happens only once. As I continue to grow in my relationship with the Lord, I am appreciating the fact that He takes His time with me. He doesn’t rush with any of us because anything valuable is also something worth waiting for. After all, excellence is not produced in haste.