Pastor Steven Furtick Sermon Stop Comparing yourself: We live in a time where everybody wants to be a public figure we live in a time where even people who have a private account spend their whole lives posting stuff and commenting on stuff to create an image and a projection of a reality that may bear no resemblance.
Even Jesus brothers did not believe in him and since they didn’t believe they were trying to get him to perform. Any time you have unbelief in your heart it will cause you to try to perform, to prove something that you don’t really believe.
In psychological terms it’s called the fraudulence complex or some call it the impostor syndrome and it speaks about how many of us have an inability to internalize our strengths and our accomplishments psychologists call it the imposter syndrome because they say that many of us secretly deep down feel like we’re a fraud many of us secretly deep down feel like we have so much less to offer than what people expect and that even when people compliment us we figure that the reason that they’re complimenting us is because they don’t really see us for who we are and if they ever saw us for who we are, if they ever saw how stupid we feel, if they ever saw how inexperienced we feel if they really saw how nervous we really feel, they would kick us out the room.
It happens to fathers, it happens to mothers, it happens to leaders, it happens to teenagers, it is the fear of being found out to be less than they thought you were, it is the fear that keeps you in a performance mode, it is the fear that keeps you spending money to look like something important because deep down you’re afraid that you’re really not, it is the fear that keeps you overcompensating and you get in situations and rather than letting other people be the center of attention you feel the need to overcompensate to show how intelligent you are because deep down you don’t feel intelligent enough.
It takes the joy out of it, Jesus didn’t mind performing miracles he just wasn’t going to do it for the wrong motives Jesus was going to Judea, he just wasn’t going to make a public spectacle out of his power. Jesus was ultimately determined to show the world that he was but he wasn’t going to do it for the gram. The key thing that he says in the text is not now I’m going to Judea which is the region where he would ultimately give his life but not now and it’s such a weird world we live in.
Who are you trying to prove it to I mean whoever you’re trying to prove something to isn’t paying attention because they’re trying to prove it to somebody who’s not paying attention and they’re proving it to someone who’s not paying attention and so while we’re busy posting to each other our results to prove to one another what we’re worth, our purpose is dying in the place of our insecurities
Pastor Steven Furtick advises us to be ourselves, just like Jesus was himself, he said let us not do thing for the wrong reasons, let us make all our moves because it is accordance with the will of God in our lives.