It Still Works | Pastor Steven Furtick | Elevation Church

Chapters16 sections

1. 0:00Exodus 4
2. 5:18Moses' Backstory
3. 8:28Sometimes, This Is Great FaithThe sermon reframes greatness in faith away from bold, emotion-filled declarations and toward simple, reluctant obedience. The pastor's personal story of dreading an assignment, doing it anyway with a bad attitude, and having God handle every feared outcome redefines the metric God uses: not the quality of the attitude but the fact of the action. This challenges a performance-based spirituality and invites listeners to stop withholding obedience until they feel ready.
4. 12:07Do It DoubtingThis section confronts the cultural Christian expectation that mature faith feels confident, arguing instead that doubt and faith are not opposites but travel companions. By confessing that every sermon, song, and chord he has ever produced for God was done while doubting, the pastor gives permission for honest, unpolished engagement with God's call. The deeper theological point is that God's power is released through availability, not ability, making doubt irrelevant to outcome.
5. 14:13"I'm Not Good Enough To Do It"Moses' objection about being an inadequate speaker mirrors every listener's internal narrative of disqualification, and the sermon insists God's response is not encouragement toward self-confidence but a redirection toward divine sufficiency. The pastor draws a sharp line between a speech class and a faith step — God is not improving the tool, He is simply asking the tool to be in His hand. This section calls listeners to stop waiting for personal competence before stepping into divine assignment.
6. 16:55Your Prayers Aren't PointlessThe four centuries of Israelite slavery are recast as evidence not of God's inattention but of His complex, multi-generational orchestration — the cries did reach heaven, and Moses in Midian was the answer already being prepared. This reframe is pastorally urgent for those who have prayed long prayers without visible results; it argues that absence of proof is not proof of absence, and that God may be working on a timeline and scale the pray-er cannot perceive from within their current suffering.
7. 19:30It Still WorksThe boombox and cassette tape illustration makes the theological claim tangible: the medium through which faith is expressed can fail, age, or seem obsolete, but the underlying power of the Word and the Spirit it carries does not degrade. The 30-year arc of the pastor's own preaching — from a tiny South Carolina church to a global broadcast — is offered as testimony that faithfulness to one message through changing methods accumulates into something God can use at any moment, including a decade-delayed sermon reaching a man with a gun on his coffee table.
8. 21:49Do It DelayedMoses' 40 years of exile are reframed not as wasted time but as the long delay between God's sovereign plan and its visible execution — and the pastor breaks the spirit of 'it's too late' directly over listeners who have disqualified themselves by the distance between where they are and where they should be. The theological weight here is that delay does not equal denial; God's timetable is not disrupted by human failure, fear, or detour, and He can accelerate His purposes once alignment is reached.
9. 23:58You Are Not Your MistakesMoses the murderer becoming Moses the messenger is the central identity claim of this section: God does not endorse the mistake, but He also does not let the mistake write the final chapter. The pastor insists that the worst thing a person has done — whether five years or five minutes ago — is not their permanent verdict, directly countering the internal voice of condemnation that keeps people from stepping into new assignments.
10. 26:44Stuck In The PastThe vinyl and cassette tape collecting metaphor becomes a parable about the difference between nostalgia that paralyzes and memory that empowers — revisiting the past is only valuable if it reminds you what has always worked, not if it traps you in regret over what is gone. The cassette of the pastor's own 20-year-old preaching functions as evidence that the anointing does not require polished performance, implicitly freeing listeners to act from where they are rather than waiting until they reach some imagined future competence.
11. 30:09It's Not WorthlessThe boombox that partially fails — the CD deck broken, the cassette still working — becomes an image of the believer who feels partly broken or outdated: not everything has to function perfectly for God to use what remains. The sermon insists that partial brokenness does not equal total worthlessness, a word of profound pastoral weight for those who feel too damaged to be of use.
12. 32:32The Message Is Still The SameThe 30-year continuity of the pastor's preaching on the same Scripture across radically different formats — tapes, CDs, podcasts, streaming — makes the case that the gospel's power is independent of its delivery mechanism, and that faithfulness to the core message over decades is itself a form of radical trust. For listeners, this section challenges the search for a newer, better, more sophisticated spiritual solution and calls them back to the ancient, unchanging word already in their hands.
13. 36:23It's Weird But It WorksThe 'Handle It' testimony — a man on the verge of suicide who plugs in an Apple TV and hears a 10-year-old sermon at the exact right moment — is presented as the quintessential example of God routing His word through utterly unexpected and 'weird' channels to reach a person at their most desperate moment. The theological point is that God is not bound by conventional delivery systems, and that a word preached in obedience, even with doubt, can travel years and miles to land with surgical precision on the person who needs it most.
14. 40:40Handle ItThe repeated call to 'handle it' — pick up the snake by the tail, the exact wrong way according to conventional wisdom — is presented as a picture of Spirit-led obedience that defies risk management and human intuition. God's instructions often appear counterproductive precisely because they are designed to transfer trust from the person's own strategy to God's power, making the act of handling the impossible thing an act of worship rather than heroism.
15. 44:45Exodus 14The Red Sea moment is presented as the supreme test of whether what worked in private (the staff at the burning bush) will work in the most public and catastrophic crisis imaginable. Moses' pre-battle speech — 'stand firm and you will see the deliverance' — is the culmination of everything the staff has meant throughout the narrative, and God's follow-up question 'why are you crying out to me?' signals that the tools of faith already given are sufficient for the new crisis without any additional divine equipment.
16. 47:58It'll Get You Through ThisThe sermon closes by collapsing the distance between the ancient Red Sea and the listener's present crisis, insisting that the same faith active at the burning bush — the same word, the same praise, the same staff — is not only historically sufficient but presently operational. The final litany ('it'll work when they hate you, when they lie about you, when they leave you') is a pastoral covering of the widest possible range of human suffering with a single, repeated claim: the faith you already have is enough for what you are currently facing.

Scripture referenced

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide, via the YouVersion Platform.