Book Review: Crushing by T. D. Jakes

BIOGRAPHICAL ENTRY

Jakes, T.D., Crushing, Nashville, TN: FaithWords, 2019, 260 pp.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AUTHOR

T. D. Jakes is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than forty books and the CEO of TDJ Enterprises, LLP. He is the founder of the thirty-thousand-member Potter’s House Church, and his television ministry program, The Potter’s Touch, is watched by 3.3 million viewers every week. He has produced Grammy Award-winning music and such films as Heaven Is for Real, Sparkle, and Jumping the Broom. A master communicator, he hosts MegaFest, Woman Thou Art Loosed, and other conferences attended by tens of thousands. T. D. Jakes lives in Dallas with his wife and five children. Visit www.tdjakes.com.

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Bishop T. D. Jakes gives us insight into living for God and serving God while enduring crushing experiences at the same time. This book is divided into fifteen chapters. Jakes gives us examples of his own life experiences and show us how his life circumstances can be understood and explained by stories and experiences of people that are in the bible.

CHAPTER 1: “When Everything Falls Apart.” Jakes daughter Sarah, age 13, tells her parents that she is pregnant. His mother has recently lived with and died from Alzheimer’s disease. Jakes learns that even in moments of your greatest anguish, you often find unexpected blessings alongside and comingled with your loss. The crushing becomes the creation of something new.

CHAPTER 2: “Quality Control.” How do you function when feeling powerless? Jakes learns from his love for cooking without a recipe that quality takes time. One step in the right direction does not equal you seeing your future in all its glory. We are called to be fruit bearing branches on the vine (Jesus). The seed is planted in soil and dies before growing into a fruit bearing plant. The broken places in life become the soil that enables you to grow and blossom in ways you would never have experienced sitting in the safety of a greenhouse.

CHAPTER 3: “The Strategy of Cultivation.” We are forced to examine our lives and realize that God had a strategy in the ugly places because those were the fields in which He decided to cultivate us. God did not arrange every step of your life to this point to leave the weight of your future solely in your hands. We underestimate all that the Master has invested in us. We allow troubles to cause doubts in God’s abilities and doubts in our relationship with Him. Since Jesus is the True Vine, we too go through the same things He went through. Like Jesus we are planted in dirty soil so that we can grow into a fruit producing vine; the fruit yields additional seeds to be planted.

CHAPTER 4: “Pruning Is Not Punishment.” When we suffer, we seek answers. Perhaps it’s the desire to regain some semblance of control over circumstances that remind us of our utter powerlessness in certain realities. Grieving is not the time to look for answers, because rarely do we get the understanding or revelatory insight we crave in the midst of our suffering. Three men hung on the cross suffering. Two of them were being punished. The one, Jesus, was being pruned. When we suffer we ask God, “why me?” God ask us, “why not you?” Pruning is God taking away things not needed so that what remains is able to produce greater fruit and wine.

CHAPTER 5: “Blood of the Vine.” Jakes tells us that while he and his family are celebrating Independence Day, he could not shake the feeling that we should not be celebrating while so many people continue to struggle, suffer, and strive toward freedom so many take for granted. We celebrate even as they suffer. Crushing is not the end. We cannot celebrate the resurrection without lingering at the crushing of Christ on the cross as He is crushed in every way, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you choose to dwell on the fruit that has already fallen and spoiled, then you miss out on letting God redeem that fruit by making you into His wine.

CHAPTER 6: “The Price of Crushing.” When Jakes first hears God’s calling to preach he runs. Blessed by over 40 years of ministry, he is thankful, but if he had known the future, he would have kept running. Grapes must be crushed under pressure to get the juice to make wine. Some people wrongly believe that the acceptance of Christ into their lives equates to the absence of pain. Your crushing is nothing more than the beginning of a glorious transformation process that will reveal to the world and you who and what you really are.

CHAPTER 7: “Let’s Make Wine.” Jakes has known poverty. He is facing bankruptcy in the midst of a growing ministry. He continues with the faith of Job (Job 13:15) when everything around him is being crushed. In this crushing process, the enemy of your soul will send obstacles your way in order to convince you to abandon what God is doing in your life. You cannot be a Savior or a successful person and not have bloody feet. Like a seed, greatness lives inside you, but it must be cultivated as He guides you through the various seasons of change. And it’s in the changes of life that the costliest transactions take place. Christ knew that His suffering, anguish, humiliation, pain, and shame were necessary to obtain His bride, the church of the New Testament.

CHAPTER 8: “Power in the Blood.” Spiritually speaking, making wine requires bloodshed. The importance of blood throughout Scripture cannot be overestimated because, through it, we see that our position with God is changed. In establishing a new covenant with Abram, God’s first order of business was changing Abram’s identity through circumcision, the removal of skin with the shedding of blood. We are inundated with myriad examples of how blood acts as a covering for those who enter covenant with God. Our transformation into wine requires that we be signed and sealed by blood. The spilling of the eternal, blood-red wine of our Master was poured out like a drink offering on our behalf.

CHAPTER 9: “A Vat Full of Wait.” Jakes accepts his calling, then, he must wait to preach while God is working on his under development. He says, “There was no way God was going to present to the world and unrefined, unfermented, underdeveloped product.” The earthquakes in our life leave us angry because you thought that you were doing the right thing by producing what you believed to be healthy fruit. Now, what you’ve labored so long to build has been squashed under the foot of the One who loves you. After the grapes are crushed there is the fermentation stage, a waiting period when the changes are not readily seen. During fermentation we must practice patience and trust His perfect knowledge of the time required for us to reach maximum potency and flavor.

CHAPTER 10: “Out of the Tomb and into the Bottle.” Jakes tells of his wife Serita’s pain that requires surgery. Serita endures the pain so that she can attend her son’s graduation from college. The surgery provides relief from pain that caused the surgery. It is replaced by pain experienced in recovery from surgery. Moving new wine from the vat into the bottle also requires time. The cross is an emblem of suffering and shame. It marked the end of the hopes and dreams of those who had given up everything to follow the Messiah. We must never forget that what we once were is nothing compared with what we are becoming. Jesus showed Himself to be alive because it’s important for people to see that there is something on the other side of poverty, shame, disgrace, suffering, and death. The process of transformation for all of us begins with each of us.

CHAPTER 11: “Spiritual Fermentation.” God, the Almighty Creator of the universe, traveled with Israel. He lived and moved among His children in the midst of the wilderness, guiding them in their wandering. The Husbandman recognizes the value of seclusion because He values the harvest and wine His fruit will produce. God moves and God will move us to accomplish His ultimate goal and purpose in and for our lives. In the eyes of God, He is not freeing us from; He is making us free to worship Him. Israel wanders in the wilderness because “For whom the LORD loves He corrects, Even as a father corrects the son in whom He delights” (Prov. 3:12, AMP). God’s aim has been to reclaim within the heart of every human being the place in which He rightfully resides as source. We have the Holy Spirit living in us. The Master moves with us today because He is in us, indwelling in our hearts and guiding us.

CHAPTER 12: “An Eternal Pairing.” Jakes begins this chapter telling us about his wife and him learning that pairing food with the appropriate wines enhances the flavor of the meal. Your relationship with God exhausts the length of all time because an eternal God cannot produce anything less than an eternal seed. Despite our attempts to escape our crushing, God is intent on converting us from one level of life to another. We cannot seek and worship a God that we do not trust; sometimes we have to experience God in new ways to know Him more fully. God makes us who we are in the low places in our lives. Jesus experienced what we experience; from being crushed on the cross to new wine for all eternity.

CHAPTER 13: “A Tasting with the King.” The children of Israel celebrated seven different feasts that commemorated something God had done for Israel. God also celebrates with us just as a parent celebrates with a child that receives His promised gifts. The veil that has stood between the Vintner and the grapes no longer exists between the King and His wine. In God’s presence, we fully grasp who and what we truly are through the resurrection of Christ. Now that we are wine, we cannot afford to continue thinking like grapes. God is satisfied with the wine that we are, and He wants us to offer hope to those that are being crushed.

CHAPTER 14: “The Wedding Planner.” The first miracle that Jesus performs is at a wedding in which Jesus turns water into wine. The families involved and the guests do not know about the problem, and they are spared embarrassment. The Vintner’s work in our lives addresses issues we didn’t know we had, and thankfully, He addresses some of our issues in secret. We must remember that our God sees the end from the beginning. The best that we could bring to the Master is our ordinary, customary, dime-a-dozen selves. God always saves the best for last!

CHAPTER 15: “New Wine.” Everything the Master does is for a distinct purpose. The Master Vintner becomes a part of the vineyard. He forgives our sins, and he also changed our nature by dealing with our hearts in our crushing and fermentation. You’re a sign that points others to the God who transformed you. Your crushing is not the end! It’s only the beginning.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Bishop adequately helps Christians to understand that experiences that crush us do not mean the end. Rather, these experiences are only the beginning of a process in which God is making us to be what we are designed to be. Jakes uses personal experiences along with biblical stories and scriptures to help us see that God is not abandoning us when we are faced with life crushing circumstances.

Jakes uses the process of wine making to illustrate to us that just as there are stages in growing grapes and making them into wine, the Lord takes us through the same stages to produce wine. The life, work, death, and resurrections show us that all stages are necessary if we are to become wine.

As I am reading this book, I am finding confirmation in my understanding of the things that have taken place in my life. Also, in reading this book I am gaining insight into some of my life experiences that have left me with questions about my life and the relationships that I have with people that I love. The stage of fermentation gives me hope even though I do not yet have answers for the reasons that events in my life take place. I find comfort in being affirmed in my hope that everything will turn out for my good according to His will for my life. I believe that this book can help all Christians to become more like Jesus, and they will be bolder in telling others about the God that takes our crushed grapes to make us into God’s wine.