Perry Noble urges ‘God’s power plus God’s people’ against worry

Perry Noble, senior pastor of Second Chance Church in Anderson, South Carolina, used a bench press last Sunday to illustrate the importance of reaching out to fellow Christians for help when the worries of life grow overwhelming.

“This represents the weight that all of us carry in life,” said Noble, who made a 135-pound barbell on stage by fixing two 45-pound plates on each end. “Every single day that we wake up, we carry weight, whether it’s spiritual, emotional, psychological weight. Everybody in this room is carrying a certain amount of weight.”

Noble went on to explain that carrying weight is not necessarily a bad thing, because doing so makes one stronger, but noted that life’s pressures and anxieties can become too difficult for one person to bear alone. After showing he was able to lift 135 pounds himself, he added enough weight to make the barbell 400 pounds and pretended he was going to attempt lifting it before saying, “Ain’t no freaking way.”

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In his sermon, which was titled “Winning the War Against Worry,” Noble stressed the importance of bearing the weight of this life with the Holy Spirit’s power as it manifests in the fellowship of other believers.

“The main thing I want to teach today is God’s power plus God’s people equals winning the war against worry,” he said, adding that even Jesus Himself asked His disciples to pray with Him during His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“I want to talk to the person out there, maybe you’re in the room or maybe you’re watching online going, ‘I don’t need the church. All I need is Jesus. It’s just me and Jesus.’ Well, I’m glad you’re that righteous, but not even Jesus was enough for Jesus,” Noble said.

“Because Jesus, [on] the night before He was crucified, in the Garden of Gethsemane, He didn’t go off and pray by himself,” he continued. “The Bible says he took Peter and James and John and said, ‘Please come and pray with me. My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death.’ So if Jesus wasn’t enough for Jesus, then how can Jesus be enough for you?”

Later in the sermon, Noble brought up three people to help him lift the barbell, which he repeatedly showed he was able to do easily. He noted that the spiritual principle of what he was demonstrating physically has been one of the major lessons of his life.

“If you take good people, but you don’t have God’s power, I can’t lift it,” he said. “If you take God’s power, but you don’t have God’s people, I can’t lift it. But with God’s power and God’s people, what was impossible for me, well, it actually becomes easy.”

Noble, who  established Second Chance Church in 2019, has been open about some of the struggles he faced in his past, such as his marital problems and struggles with alcohol.

In October 2016, three months after he was fired as senior pastor of NewSpring Church in South Carolina, Noble went public with what he described as his hypocrisy and unwillingness to seek help until his problems became destructive to his career and first marriage, which ended in 2017.

“I was a hypocrite — I preached, ‘you can’t do life alone’ and then went out and lived the opposite,” he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post at the time.

“I chose isolation over community. … Isolation is where self-doubt dominated my emotions, causing me to believe I just could not carry the weight anymore, and alcohol was necessary for me to make it through another day,” Noble explained. “I hated myself, literally HATED myself for doing what I was doing, but believed the lie that this was just the way things were and there was no way it could ever get better.”

He went on to encourage his readers to immediately reach out to someone if they find themselves in the state he was in. 

“Because, you are not the only one, people will not abandon you, and, believe it or not, more people will understand than you could ever imagine,” he wrote. “I chose to remain silent which propelled me with light speed toward the coping mechanism of alcohol abuse.”

“Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. I was weak — I did not ask for help, and the end result was a train wreck. What happened to me doesn’t have to happen to you — you can ask for help today,” he added.