Pastor Steven Furtick Sermon You Can’t Let Others Control You: There is no worse feeling than that of invisibility, when you are doing your very best and it goes unrecognised, it makes it harder to want to keep doing it, when you feel unseen, especially by the people whose attention and approval you crave the most, it can create a compulsion in your life to start doing things that are not even really consistent with your character in order to receive from people a confirmation that can be taken away just as easily as it was given.
But we are not citizens of this kingdom, which celebrates and compliments all of the things that are seen; we are citizens of the kingdom where Jesus says things like this: “When you do something in secret, your Father sees it, and he will reward you according to what he sees.”
So Pastor Steven Furtick teaches us that if you have felt unappreciated, uncelebrated, unnoticed, and insignificant, in this kingdom, what is unseen is often what is most significant. In the world, we correlate seen with significant, but what is invisible is often what is most valuable Whether we will admit it or not, we are so good at celebrating the wrong stuff.
People will always, especially the crowd, celebrate the wrong thing Give us Barabbas!” when Jesus was right there. The crowd will always celebrate the wrong thing. People will always celebrate what they can see. Another thing people will always do is celebrate a gift rather than celebrating character, we celebrate the wrong stuff.
Now, if you do it in secret (and this could refer to anything in your life). If you do what you do according to your values, not according to external validation, then you understand the meaning of “The Father saw. The sacrifices you made that no one else really pointed out, the stuff nobody gave you a trophy for.
What would it be like this year for us to live with God as our audience and not our dysfunctional friends and family members, who are secretly so caught up in their own crap they can’t celebrate us because they’re waiting for us to celebrate them? everybody who was not appreciated, for everybody who was not celebrated, for everybody who was unwanted, even abandoned, you must know your Father saw who left you, He saw who should have been there, when my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.
When people mistreated me and I could have gotten even, but I put it in his hands, he saw it, and my reward is with the Lord! So, how good are you at celebrating the unseen? Do you celebrate those moments in your life where God is making you stronger but your biceps aren’t getting bigger? Understand that God is everywhere and knows all that is happening around us, so whenever we feel that we are going unnoticed or we are invisible, we should remind ourselves that the God who see in secret will reward us openly.
