Perry Noble, senior pastor of Second Chance Church in Anderson, South Carolina, recently used a bench press to show the importance of reaching out to fellow Christians for help when life’s worries grow overwhelming. Noble, who made a 135-lb barbell on stage by fixing two 45-lb plates on each side, said, “This represents the weight that all of us carry in life. Every single day that we wake up, we carry weight, whether it’s spiritual, emotional, or psychological weight. Everybody in this room is carrying a certain amount of weight.”
Noble went on to explain that carrying weight isn’t necessarily a bad thing because doing so makes you stronger, but he noted that life’s pressures and anxieties can become too challenging 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 try lifting it before saying, “Ain’t no freaking way.” 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.
He said, adding that even Jesus Himself asked His disciples to pray with Him during His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, “The main thing I want to teach today is God’s power plus God’s people equals winning the war against worry. 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 continued, “Because Jesus, [on] the night before He was crucified, in the Garden of Gethsemane, He didn’t go off and pray by himself. 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.
He said, “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.
Noble explained, “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. 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.