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The enemy fights anointed people differently. Put this in your notes and underline the word "enemy" because we are fighting a real devil and real demons. You are not just fighting haters or people who don't like you. There is a demonic force in this earth that has a strategic agenda designed for your demise.
If you are anointed, he's going to fight you down differently. Why? Because the greater your calling, the more strategic the attacks.
Think about a quarterback who can throw really well but can't run—you'll try to Blitz him. But if you have a running quarterback who can't throw, you'll sit back in a Zone and get a spy to watch him. You design the attack based off of the gift or talent of the person you're fighting. The enemy doesn't use the same attacks on everyone. He tailors his attacks based on your gifts, purpose, and weaknesses.
Here's an exercise for you: Write your name on a piece of paper and draw three lines from it. Label them:
When you get home, list what your gifts are, what you feel your purpose is, and what your weaknesses are. Then draw another line and write "enemy." Draw lines from "enemy" to each of those three areas—that's how he attacks you.
For example, if your gift is making people smile but your weakness is insecurity, the devil will make your struggle always be with people. If he can make people make you feel insecure, you'll be hesitant to use your gift because you don't know if they like you or love you.
He designs his attacks based off your gifts, purposes, and weaknesses.
Everybody's searching for purpose, but I want my church to discover your weakness for the next 30 days. You're so busy trying to figure out what you need to be doing when you might need to figure out what's broken in you that's hindering you from already doing it.
We must understand the difference between obstacles and opposition. A lack of spiritual intelligence will cause you to confuse what obstacles are with what opposition is, which leads to either unnecessary frustration or wasted energy.
Obstacles are challenges that test your ability to persist, grow, and develop. The source of obstacles is God, life's process, or natural circumstances.
Opposition is an attack specifically designed to stop or derail you from fulfilling your purpose. The source of opposition is the enemy, spiritual warfare, people used by the enemy, or systems set against your purpose.
You are not just dealing with people who don't like you. It's opposition, which means the source is either people used by the devil or systems set against your purpose. A lot of times you're so busy being mad at them when you should have been interceding for the spiritual force that's using them.
Some people aren't even worth arguing with—you should have been interceding about them. You ask them why they don't like you, and they still can't give you a valid reason. Their spirit didn't agree with your spirit. The spirit in them was either intimidated or convicted by your spirit, and the spirit in them convinced them that they had a problem with you when they never had one.
The response to obstacles is to overcome them through wisdom, patience, and discipline.
The response to opposition is to discern it and fight it with spiritual strategy, not just strength. You need to develop a spiritual strategy for your life over the next 30 to 60 days.
If you feel called to be an entrepreneur, you're going to have obstacles and opposition. Obstacles include costs, location, staffing, customers, and business models. Opposition is spiritual warfare.
While you're planning your business model, you need to also be planning your spiritual strategy. For example, if the obstacle is funding for your company, your spiritual strategy might be to sow into someone who's already winning, to speak by faith that God is sending resources through angel donors and investors. Your tithing and your ability to sow into others becomes a spiritual strategy for funding.
You want to know why I don't trip when I get bills? I had too much seed in the ground. I had helped too many churches get their church. I saw pastors who were believing God for buildings and would send checks to their church and say, "God, if you do it for them, you'll do it for me." I had prayed for too many people. I had been to too many housewarming and helped people get houses and didn't even have one myself. I knew any day now my spiritual strategy was going to trump my natural resources.
Put this in your notes: EQ, SQ, and IQ.
You need all three. IQ helps you think clearly. EQ helps you handle people wisely. SQ helps you move according to God's plan.
You can be smart (IQ) and emotionally aware (EQ) but lack spiritual intelligence (SQ) and still struggle in your purpose. Books and smarts can't help you when you walk in by faith and not by sight. The best educated example won't be accurate when the devil comes knocking on your door.
My goal for my church is that you be emotionally aware and spiritually intelligent so you don't struggle with what God is doing in your life naturally.
Natural Intelligence (IQ)
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Spiritual Intelligence (SQ)
Logic says if I take two more steps, what happens? I hit the floor. That's logical. But emotional intelligence should tell you that once you hit the floor, don't be in your feelings about it. You shouldn't take a logical step that doesn't make sense if you're not emotionally prepared for the consequences.
You knew you shouldn't have dated them. You knew you shouldn't have hung out with them. It made no logical sense for you to take your bill money and do whatever you want, and then get emotional when consequences come. You can't be mad about a decision you made and blame someone else.
I have a logical problem. I want to get from here to there, but logically I can't jump across—I might break something. My emotional intelligence tells me that when I hit the ground, I can't be in my feelings about it.
But how do I fix a logical and emotional problem with spiritual intelligence? I use discernment. God, I want to get to that next level. I feel you've got something for me over there. Logically, I'm intelligent enough to know I can't just step out here. Emotionally, I know I can't handle another downfall. So now I must discern who around me has the strength to help me get there.
I didn't practice this with those brothers, but I discerned they had strength. I asked them to help carry me to another level by faith. My discernment told me I had people who could help carry my vision enough to not let me fall.
You stay broken because you've got folk around you who don't have enough strength to carry you to where God is calling you.
You are one spiritual intelligent move away from everything shifting in your life. Spiritual intelligence is when you can walk in your purpose with authority. Some of you are waiting on a blessing that's waiting on you to take your authority and call it forth.
When your natural intellect tells you that you don't have the money for the bill or the vision, your spiritual intellect should say, "Money cometh to me." Promotion come to me now. Healing come to me now. Unity come to me now. Wisdom come to me now. New opportunities come to me now. Finances come to me now.
It's my money and I want it now. It's my paper and I want it now.
What your natural intelligence impacts is your work performance and academic ability. What your emotional intelligence impacts is your leadership, communication, and conflict resolution.
I honor every position in authority and pray for those in leadership to have emotional intelligence. Some of your bosses need emotional intelligence. Some of your spouses need emotional intelligence.
Some of you with your spouse shouldn't fuss for the next 30 days—pray, "Lord, give him or her more emotional intelligence." Why? Because some of you say things like, "You don't talk to me," but they did—they stopped because when they were honest, you became so emotional that you killed them because you didn't like how it made you feel instead of understanding what they were actually trying to say.
When you don't have emotional intelligence, it impacts your leadership and the people close to you.
Me and my wife have hard conversations. She checked me last week and said, "Pastor, I want to talk to you about so-and-so." I got in my feelings for two minutes, but then the Holy Spirit said, "Emotional intelligence." I said, "Wait. I hear you. One: I didn't know. Two: Let me listen. Three: Let me understand." Those are hard conversations.
Some of your relationships aren't as bad as they seem—you're just so emotionally unresolved that even when they try to be honest, you take it like a shot because you never healed from the last fool you were with. If I love you, that means I have the right to offend you and be honest with you. But you've got to have emotional intelligence to receive that.
Put in your notes: David. David was called by God, but outside of the anointing, his daddy didn't think he was worth nothing. When the prophet showed up to anoint the next king, his daddy said, "Let me grab all my boys." He didn't even call David. He said, "Surely he isn't it. If we don't think he's anything, surely you won't either."
Be careful, because sometimes proximity dilutes power. Sometimes you can't tell how beautiful something is because you're too close to it.
David got anointed—but not emotionally intelligent.
David was called by God, but his father didn't think he was worth anything. When the prophet arrived to anoint the next king, his father said, "Let me gather all my sons." He didn't even call David. He essentially said, "Surely he isn't it. If we don't think he's anything, surely you won't either."
Be careful, because sometimes proximity dilutes power. Sometimes you can't tell how beautiful something is because you're too close to it.
David got anointed, but he was not emotionally intelligent. Consider what could have happened: his father sent someone to get him, saying, "Your daddy wants you. They're trying to find out who the next king is, and he wants you to come."
What if David had been emotional? What if he'd thought, "Now they call me? After all this time, I'm out here and I see all of you. I watched you all in there with the whole ordeal, the whole meeting about finding the new king, and you didn't call me? No, I'm not coming."
If David had reacted emotionally, he would have missed his destiny.
Why did King Saul lose the crown? He was at home, relaxed, perhaps bathing. He looked at his slave and said, "Move the curtains. Let me see what the people are doing." He heard them singing songs about how Saul had killed his thousands, but David had killed his tens of thousands.
Saul couldn't change the narrative like a CD player. Instead of recognizing that something special was on David's life—something he didn't have—and aligning himself with what God was doing, Saul got emotional. He started trying to kill David. When you fight against who God has his hand on, it's like you're picking a fight with God.
Natural intelligence helps you think critically.
Emotional intelligence helps you manage your emotions.
Spiritual intelligence involves using faith and wisdom.
Weaknesses of natural intelligence can lack wisdom in real-life situations. Some of the most intellectually gifted people lack common sense. They may be so sheltered, so covered in prayer, and so surrounded by blessing that they don't realize basic practical dangers. They don't understand that not everyone is kind, not everyone wants to be their friend. Everyone has motives.
Emotional intelligence can be misused and manipulated. When you're so attuned to your emotions, you feel sorry for people you should actually be removing from your life. You understand their story, their reasoning, their explanation—and that becomes a problem.
Here's the key: Just because it's explainable doesn't mean it's excusable. Yes, they explained themselves well. Yes, you understand where they're coming from. But your faith and your life situation might require you to say, "I can't excuse that. It's too close to comfort. What you're doing, or what your name keeps coming up in connection with, is getting too close to my trigger. And I am responsible for managing my own reactions."
When you get triggered, you can blow everything up. That's why emotional intelligence is critical—so you can receive honest feedback and correction without falling apart.
Spiritual intelligence weakness can lead to over-spiritualizing without practical action. Some people say, "I've got to pray about that." No, you don't. Sometimes you just need to make a hard decision.
Can you risk losing everything? Can you risk being talked about? Can you risk people walking out of your life? Can you risk having to cut something off for a season?
I was raised in a church where we didn't raise offerings and we never had much money—just enough for what we needed. When real needs came up, we had to figure it out. We hit a rough patch, and I had to make a hard decision. I wasn't going to go back on what I felt the Lord was calling me to do.
I didn't over-spiritualize it by saying, "This is just a spiritual attack." Yes, it was a spiritual attack, but I also made a choice. I chose to stand with God, and now I'm being tested. So you know what I did? I called CarMax. I sold a car I'd had for years—that gave me about eight thousand dollars. Then I sold another car I'd had since we got married—that gave me seventeen thousand dollars. That combined seventeen thousand dollars carried us through the summer when giving dropped significantly.
Some people said, "Man, you're stupid." No. I didn't need to be in an emotional versus intellectual situation. My emotional intelligence was strong enough to handle what people were going to say about me. Some of you won't make hard decisions because you're scared of what your circle is going to say.
You don't want people to think you're falling off. But here's the reality: we're all struggling with something. One person struggles with a hundred-dollar bill, another with a thousand dollars, another with ten thousand. We're in a season where we're about to go through intense struggles. But no weapon formed against us will prosper.
Solomon had intellectual brilliance and leadership strategy. God came to him and said, "What do you want?" Solomon said, "I just want wisdom." God said, "Because you asked for the right thing, I'll give you everything else at the same time." But Solomon kept getting too many women. He was emotionally unbalanced. Just because something was referenced in the Bible doesn't mean it was permitted. There are things in Scripture used as examples because they happened in someone's story, but that doesn't mean God had His hand on it.
Joseph had emotional control and spiritual intelligence—he could discern dreams. But he lacked natural intelligence because he talked too much about his dreams to his brothers. When his brothers betrayed him and threw him in a pit, the Bible never records him complaining, "Why'd you leave me down here? I shouldn't have told you." He had the emotional and spiritual intelligence to endure without becoming bitter.
I need my church to move different.
The biggest mistakes I've made in my life came from taking things too personally that were actually prophetic. The opposition I faced had nothing to do with who I was—it had everything to do with who I was going to become. When you lack spiritual intelligence, you stay fighting against people who don't like you, when actually they're trying to hinder you from becoming who God called you to be.
I was recently in a Zoom call with people in different brackets than me—older, wealthier, more exposed, more connected. I'm the type of person who researches everyone on the call, so I was looking at this meeting thinking, "Why am I even here? I'm not qualified for this conversation."
But spiritual intelligence said: Be quiet. You aren't qualified enough to be in this conversation right now. The Bible says it's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
Everyone else on that call was working on billion-dollar opportunities. I'm sitting there thinking about the math—tens of millions, hundreds of millions. One person mentioned they were dealing with a billion-dollar idea. I had to sit there and use discernment: I said to myself, "I know what you're going to do, and I know the obstacles you're going to face. In the Bible, when Nehemiah was called to a specific meeting, he knew that the four-day journey would cost him momentum. Spiritual intelligence means understanding that mislabeling obstacles as opposition will make you bitter at God instead of learning from Him."
If you mislabel obstacles as opposition, you'll become bitter at God instead of learning from Him. I want to say something most pastors will never say: too many of us are bitter with God.
We didn't have the spiritual intelligence to discern what was actually happening, and now we're sitting back saying, "God, why did they get it and I didn't?"
Let's be honest: Have you ever seen someone get something and felt bitter for a moment? Have you seen someone get engaged and thought, "Now I know that's not real"? Have you seen someone get blessed when they owed you money and put it on Facebook saying God just moved? That bitterness comes from a lack of spiritual intelligence.
When I look back at my grandmother's church, they did everything in the spirit. They had prayer meetings, devotions—they were spiritual. My grandmother wasn't as intellectual as I am, but she was way more spiritual than I am.
Here's what I realized: She didn't have my intellect, but I don't have her peace. She didn't even own a car, but she got everywhere she wanted to go. I have a whole car and don't even want to leave the house.
Say this with me:
Lord, give me wisdom to discern the difference between obstacles and opposition. Give me the strength to endure obstacles and the strategy to overcome opposition, in Jesus's name.
Somebody say Amen.
