Following is the full transcript of TD Jakes’ speech or sermon titled “The Power of a Thought”.
Note: There are some instances in the transcript where we couldn’t discern the terms correctly. If you know the right words for them, please do notify us. Thank you.
TD Jakes – FULL TRANSCRIPT
I was teaching some young men the other day. Can I just give you a 5-minute little seminar?
I was teaching some young men the other day and I was teaching them about the power of a thought. THE POWER OF A THOUGHT. And how I evolved into teaching them on the power of a thought is that I was teaching them about corporations.
I said a corporation is not a building. IBM can move to another building and they’re still IBM. A corporation is not a person. The founder or the president can die and the company can still exist.
So if a corporation is not a building, and it is not a person, the third thing it is not, it is not a product. It is not a product, it can exist without the product. It can change from one product to the other and continue to exist.
So if it’s not a product and it’s not a person, and it’s not a premise, not property, what is a corporation literally? It’s a thought.
A corporation is so real that if I set up a corporation and you enter into that corporation with me, the very fact that I set up a corporation means that you can’t sue me — you have to sue the corporation because the corporation is an entity unto itself. But a corporation is a thought.
And then I took it a step further. I said The Potter’s House is not a building. We could leave this building, they can have this building but they couldn’t have the church. The church is not defined by a building. The Potter’s House is not a building. The Potter’s House is not a man. I can die and The Potter’s House could continue right on. The Potter’s House is not a man. It’s a thought. It’s an idea. It’s a conviction. It’s a premise.
I said that to say to them: can I take it a step further with you? For the last 300 years, if you would imagine yourself 300 years back from where you are right now, you would be about in the 1700 or so, how many things would disappear out of your life? Car’s gone, television gone, phones gone, electricity gone, refrigerators gone, microwaves gone, cellphones gone. Look at all the fabrics that would be gone, polyesters gone, [bullions] gone, look at all the stuff that would be gone.
In 300 years, almost everything you call normal happened in the last 300 years which is a short time out of the thousands of years of our existence, it all happened within the last 300 years, it was ideas bursting at the scenes, ideas and concept creating fabrics and concepts that maybe we take this seed and this seed, we can produce a hybrid and here come subpoena and here comes the phone and here comes electricity and here comes all of this stuff born out of fertile minds. Are you following what I’m saying?
What scares me about this generation right now is that we are going into a dumbing down of ideas. We don’t feed our minds anything. We don’t invigorate ourselves anymore with everything in every genre music everywhere else television, it’s gone down enough to — just reality TV we sit up for hours to watch people like [Faasil].
So the people who studied to do the arts and to do dance and to do drama are searching for a job, while [Docoo] they sit up in front of the camera… we got people in our generation who are famous for nothing. They don’t do anything, they don’t produce anything, they don’t have anything; they’re just famous — famous because you’re cute.