Dallas Jenkins
speaker
227 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dallas Jenkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he felt just as clearly as my wife had felt God putting her into the story of the feeding 5,000, he felt God putting it on his heart. Tell Dallas it's not his job to feed the 5,000. It's only to provide the loaves and fish. And he said, no, I barely know Dallas. That's a very condescending thing to say to somebody who's clearly— Well, and a strange thing.
Right, right. Contextless. Yes. So he wrestles with that and doesn't want to do that and thinks ultimately, well, God won't let me off the mat. He keeps pressing this into me, so okay. I'm going to share this with Dallas. It's four in the morning back there anyway, so he won't see it for a while anyway.
And of course, he gets this immediate response and informs me that God had been pressing it on his heart to tell me that. So two things happen. Number one, it all hit me in that moment. Like, I understood what he meant, and that's what you're asking. So in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus could have said,
Assuming you believe the story and you believe all the stories of the miracles that he performed, he could have manifested loaves and fish from nothing. And he could have fed 5,000 people, and the loaves and fish could have just emerged in their laps. But he says, I need food. Someone bring me some food. Bring me something. And a boy brings five loaves and two fish.
And Jesus takes those five loaves and two fish and he blesses them and then multiplies them to the point where we can feed 5,000 people. And so why does he do that? Why does he involve us, or in the case of this story, the boy, in the process when he doesn't have to? So the principle of your job is to not be responsible to feed 5,000, to not think of the results. I'm a results guy.
I'm a problem solver. The numbers didn't match. We didn't feed 5,000. It failed. And this gentleman is telling me, no, no, that's not your job to worry about. You didn't fail.
Correct. So in that moment, when I'm literally... analyzing what I did wrong, coming off of a day of wrestling with the story of the feeding the 5,000, this gentleman randomly out of the blue tells me, it's not that. It's not that you failed per se. It's not that you, we could argue about, did I make the best five loaves and two fish? Was the recipe a good recipe?
What?
It took a year, and I think it's still taking place today as you and I talk about this show, that, spoiler alert, has become one of the most successful shows in the world, and I have gotten some of those things that I used to pursue. but it's different now. So we'll put a pin in that. We'll come back to this moment. I don't know yet. I'm going, okay, so he's right.
The message is you did your part, but the reality Did I do a good job? Was the fish and loaves the best? I don't know yet. I don't know what the reason is for this because if the feeding, if the result, the miracle isn't a good result for the resurrection of Gavin Stone, the name of the movie, if it's still failing, if it's never going to succeed, then what is the, I gave my loaves and fish.
He's just saying to me in that moment, don't worry about it. Be okay, because I'm wrestling with, so what's the next step? And I don't know. And God's economy of time is different from humanity's economy of time. So I'm wanting the answer now. He's saying, you don't have that answer now. Just know, just stop thinking about the result. Think more about the five loaves and two fish.
And so for me, as someone who over 40 years of my life had always measured myself by the results, was seeking a particular result, Affirmation was my drug of choice. Legitimacy was my drug of choice. It was my voice, my vice. Narcissism was my struggle. In this moment, I think that the feeding of the 5,000 refers to many things. It refers to financial success. It refers to Hollywood legitimacy.
It refers to what people think of me, the audience. The audience rejected what I was bringing to them, right? So did Hollywood. So did... Anything that I'm seeking. So, okay, well, that's nice to hear. But in that moment, I realized from now on—and I became a different person that night, that morning, 4 o'clock in the morning. Okay. God—
as long as I am in your will, as long as I am providing five loaves and two fish that you deem acceptable, the transaction's over. No longer will I seek the feeding. I'm not going to be the boy who provides the five loaves and two fish, sees it multiplied, goes home to his parents and says, look, mom and dad, I fed 5,000 people today. That would be ludicrous.
So I'm not only not responsible for the failure, I mean, in a manner of speaking, of course I made some mistakes. Of course the movie wasn't good enough to achieve its correct box office. That's exactly what Job says. Yes. But now my focus is going to be on just the transaction, for lack of a better term, between myself and God.
You didn't say that. I'm saying... That's not how I'm going to measure ultimate success here. So what's interesting is I would conclude, and I think I concluded it in that moment, and I certainly conclude it now.
In fact, hundreds of millions of people around the world believe the conclusion I'm about to tell you, which is the resurrection of Gavin Stone, that movie was in a sense almost sacrificed at the altar of my own. The measurement of the success wasn't Gavin Stone's financial results, because those never went, those never improved. It maintained its failure. So then what's the success?
Well, it's not necessarily that Nitschke's book ended up, even though it only sold 200 copies, ended up still having impact. The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, that movie is not, in 50 years, people aren't going to say, even though it only did $2.3 million, it inspired people. Millions of people. That movie is the, again, I don't know if I have a better term for it, kind of sacrifice. Yeah.
Because the story that God is telling in this moment is, at the risk of sounding arrogant, my story. it's ultimately, again, skipping ahead for a moment, the chosen became the thing that was the outcome.
I actually wrote about it on Facebook a few days later. I did this long post where I just said, okay, I'm not going to pretend that I can convince you to go see this movie now. I've surrendered it. Here's what's happened. It failed. Period. End of sentence. Now what? Why do I feel—I actually use the word free—why do I feel more freedom right now than at any other time in my life.
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