Christine Caine - A Life Unleashed - Part 3
Hey, it's Christine. I believe it is no accident that you are tuned in for today's episode of Equip and Empower. I truly believe this is a timely word that God has given me to encourage you, to strengthen you, and to help you to give birth to the dreams that God has placed on the inside of your heart. So let's not wait another moment. I can't wait to get started and share this message with you.
Hey everyone, I am so grateful that you've joined me again today. I know that God has a word for you that literally could transform your life. I don't believe that you've tuned in by accident, but that you are here by God's divine design, because he's got a word for you, okay? In this series, which I am so fired up about, we have been talking about unleashing the God given potential on the inside of you, that you and I have been created by God for a relationship with God, that we are the workmanship of God. You are not here by accident, you are not a mistake, you are not a result of your failures. You are who God says you are, and you could do what God says you could do. And we are the workmanship of God we've been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand in eternity, that we should walk them out right here on planet earth during our lifetime. God has put the seeds of greatness on the inside of you. He has put potential on the inside of you, and you and I together, could grow to where we need to go for the glory of God.
So the first thing that we've been learning in this series that we have to do is understand that God dreams got to be conceived. I talked last week about what it was when I did my first pregnancy test and found out that I was carrying my firstborn child, Catherine Bobbie, who now is in college. But I remember in the wit Sundays in Australia, just sitting on the bathroom floor, freaking out, because I was thinking, I'm carrying a human being. But on the inside of me right then, was all of the potential in that little girl that at the time was smaller than a grain of rice. God had put all the potential in her to become what he's called her to become. We've got to conceive, it all starts with conception. Conception comes out of a place of intimacy.
If you and I are going to conceive the God dream, we have to have an intimacy with the Lord. It comes out of our prayer time with God, it comes out of being in the word with God, of continually building ourselves up in the Spirit of God, and I love doing that, I love walking outside with God and praying in the spirit and building my intimacy with the Lord, and being rooted and grounded in the Word of God to learn who he is and to know his ways, to be in Christian community in our local church, to make sure that we are building our lives around intimacy with the Lord. That's where we begin to conceive the God dream. And then you go from conception to the fact that you actually have to believe that you can do it in Christ. You see if you and I are going to give birth to our God given dreams, now there are certain things we have to believe. And the first thing is we have to believe that God is actually big.
Now I know this sounds simple, but after over 30 years of Christian ministry, the one thing that I have truly realized, is that most people have got a really small view of God. The God that they know is so small, so contained and so limited. He's so much smaller than he actually is described to us in the Word of God. When Catherine was little and of course you can hear a lot of Catherine stories because now I've launched her to college and so I'm missing her so much that I've got to talk to you about her all the time. When Catherine was little, she used to sing the song. Now, if I could sing, I would sing, but I don't want to traumatize anyone that's in the room right now. But she would sing a song that says, my God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing my God cannot do. That's true.
Some of you are singing that on the other side of the screen, you're like, that's true. The mountains are his, the valleys are his, the stars are his handy work too. My God is so big, so strong and so mighty. There's nothing my God cannot do. Now, she would sing it. Anyone that is a mother, you know that when your kid starts learning a new song, man, they are going to sing it morning, noon, and night. They want you to sing it to them again mommy, again mommy, again mommy. It's like, it just is the same thing whether they find a television show that they like, again mommy, it's like, what do you have amnesia? Like have you got the memory of Nemo, it just kind of like goes?
But I got to this point, I mean, she was so tiny, that I got so sick of singing it to her. And I was going to say, please, can we just sing another song? But as I was about to say that, I'll never forget this, right at that moment, as I was about to say it, I thought, Christine, don't say that because here is the deal. If this is all that Catherine ever knows about God, if this is all that Catherine ever believes about God, if all she knows about God is my God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing my God cannot do, that's true. I thought that's all she needs to know about God. I want her to know that her God is so big, that her God is so strong, and that her God is so mighty that there is literally nothing her God cannot do. I wonder though, if you and I truly believe that.
You see, I think all of us know and we use our big theological terms that God is omniscient, that God is omnipotent, that God is omnipresent. And the fact is God is as big as he is ever going to be. God is as big as he ever needs to be. You and I can't make God any bigger than he actually is. That's not what I'm talking about right now. What I am saying is the thing that Paul writes in Ephesians 3:20. "Now to him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in you". You see, God can do more than we contemplate, more than we hope for, more than we consider. But it is according to the faith, the confidence, the determination, the big thinking and the expectation that's in you. The God of the universe is made big or small in the hearts of his people.
The key to fulfilling our dreams, the key to fulfilling our dreams is to make God bigger inside of us to make that power working in us greater, the key to making God big lies in Psalms 69:30, where the Psalmist writes, "I will praise the name of God with a song and will magnify him with thanksgiving". That word magnify means to enlarge, to make bigger. So if you and I are truly going to give birth to our dreams, we have to learn to make God bigger than any situation we may confront. We must make God bigger than our past, bigger than our mistakes, bigger than our disappointments, bigger than our limitations and bigger than our preconceptions.
When I was at Sydney University, one of our professors once did a kind of this lecture. And in this lecture, he had this big white screen and behind him on this big white screen, he had this tiny little black dot. And I remember he asked all of our class, he said, okay, what do you see on the screen behind me? And every one of us, we're all freshmen. We're all so excited wanting to please the professor, we're saying, well, there's a black dot there. And he just smiled. I'll never forget it, because he said yes, there is a black dot there, but the black dot is only tiny, the black dot is less than 0.001% of the white screen, the white screen is 99.98 or whatever it was percent of what is behind me. But you all chose to focus on the thing that was less than 0.001% of the whole size of that screen. And I would dare to suggest that most of us in our life, that's what it's like. That we make the little black dots of life, bigger in our life than what God has done for us. God is this huge screen, and we focus on the little black dots.
So we need to learn to make God bigger than what people have said about us, bigger than what people have done to us, bigger than our failures, bigger than our mistakes, bigger than our limitations, our failures, our mistakes, our limitations, the things that have been said about us, the things that have been done to us, they are basically like the little black dots of our life. And God's saying, I am much more than all of that. Would you magnify, would you make me bigger than those things? And that's how we enlarge God. That's how we make the God of the universe bigger in our hearts. We focus more on what he has done for us, than what others have done to us. We focus more on the goodness of God, the grace of God, the faithfulness of God, the comfort of God, the peace of God, the joy of God, than I do on all of the other things that are happening around me.
My first few months of pregnancy, they were brutal. Maybe some women on the other side of the screen, you know what this is like. I was sick literally all of the time. I have no idea why they call it morning sickness because mine was not morning sickness. Mine was morning sickness, mid morning sickness, lunchtime sickness, mid afternoon sickness, evening sickness, and then night sickness. All I remember is 24/7 sickness. That's all I had. I would be flying on planes from Australia and traveling to teach around the world. And I'm in a fetal position on my seat. I lost so much weight in those early months of my pregnancy because I could not eat anything, I was so sick. I remember the thing I probably said more than anything else during that time is, why did they call this morning sickness? It's not morning sickness, it's all day sickness.
But when Nick and I went and had an ultrasound and we saw that first ultrasound of Catherine, we were so overwhelmed with emotion. I just remember freaking out and weeping and watching in that ultrasound that inside my tummy was a living, breathing, human being, and this human being was growing on the inside of me. Can I just say, all of a sudden, I didn't care about the morning sickness anymore. I mean, up until the ultrasound, I'd been murmuring, grumbling and complaining like the children of Israel nonstop. But when I saw that ultrasound, I saw a vision of the future. And can I just say, it made my current discomfort seem worthwhile. See, when you get a glimpse of your future, I know that over the last few years, there's been a lot of discomfort. There's been a lot of pain, there's been a lot of loss, a lot of grief, a lot of disappointment, a lot of division, a lot of chaos.
I know that it has been anything but joy filled. And for many of us, we have felt shaken, we have felt nauseous, we have felt just swayed to and fro, it's like we couldn't get a break. There were so many things happening on the earth and there's political instability, and then there are fires around the world, and then there are earthquakes, and then there's what's happening in Afghanistan, and we've had racial injustice, and we've had a global pandemic, and there's been loss of jobs, and there's been loss of lives. And you're just feeling all of this sickness. And it is easy to just get caught up in it. But when you stop and you glimpse God, and you envision the God dream, all of a sudden, just like me in that room with that ultrasound, suddenly, all of the morning sickness, lunch sickness and evening sickness, it didn't matter because I got a perspective of what was happening, and what was growing, while I was feeling all of this upheaval. This is not a time for you and I to just focus on the temporal, we've got to focus on the eternal. This is a time when we've got to elevate our eyes and get an eternal perspective. And it is the only way we're going to make it through this temporal process.
See, I think it's focusing on our God dream that's going to keep us on track, and it will help us do whatever needs to be done to realize that. I think there's been so much shaking over these last few years, and people have said, Christine you've continued to lead a21, you've continued to lead propel. You guys have continued to stay on track. The fight has been to stay anchored in Christ, to fix my eyes on Jesus, to realize I'm not running a temporal race I'm running an eternal race, not to get pulled to and fro, and to be shaken by what's happening in the world, but to fix my eyes on Jesus. And what you do is you've got to keep seeing it and seeing it. I had to keep putting the vision of a21 in front of us, the vision of propel in front of us, the dreams that God had given me, put them in front of me and not just focus on the shaking around me, but focus on the call to me. When we saw those ultra sounds of Catherine, I remember putting those photos up everywhere and I was constantly reminded that my world was about to dramatically change.
I was so excited, the discomfort didn't matter to me because I could see my baby. I knew what was coming so that I could endure the short term sickness. I could endure the adjustments, I could endure the discomfort. Church I want to remind us he is coming back, there is going to be a new heaven, there is going to be a new earth, there will be no more crying. There will be no more pain, there will be no more loss, there will be no more suffering. All things will be made new. Let's keep that eternal perspective before us. And if we do that, we are going to sustain and maintain our temporal obedience. The Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist, he spent three years in a Nazi concentration camp and gave an anniversary speech, and this is what he said in that speech. He said, "There's only one reason why I am here today. What kept me alive was you". He spoke to the crowd. "Others gave up hope, I dreamed. I dreamed that someday I would be here telling you how I, Viktor Frankl had survived the Nazi concentration camps. I've never been here before, I've never seen any of you before, I've never given this speech before, but in my dreams, I have stood before you".
And I said, these words a thousand times. It was his dream of the future, that allowed him to endure his temporal literal hell hole. You see many of us we've given up on our God dream because we've looked at our current circumstances, rather than focusing on the future and the goodness of God. We've become paralyzed in the present or the past, and we've never learned to step into our future. We need to learn to look to the future through the lens of faith and through the lens of eternity. You see you and i, we walk by faith and not by sight. In Joshua 6:1, the famous story, we see that the city of Jericho was tightly shut up. No one came out, no one came in, but the Lord said to Joshua, "See, I've given you the city". It was one way in the natural, the city was tightly shut up, and it was another way in the spiritual.
See, I've given you the city. It took faith to see what God sees. It takes faith to go where God says to go, it takes faith to believe when God asks us to believe him. I unapologetically want to stir your faith up today. We are a people who walk by faith. Romans Paul writes, "The righteous will live by faith". Galatians 2:20. Paul says, "The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God". We walk by faith and not by sight, we are a faith people. We've got to see with the eyes of faith. And the fact of the matter is that we're not doing it just for us, we're doing it for the generations that are to come after us. We want to hold that baton of faith so that we can faithfully hand that baton of faith to the next generation. And so the dream is not ever just about us, the dream is about the generations that are going to come after us, that we would hold the baton of faith, and we would pass the baton of faith from one generation to the next.
Viktor Frankl endured what he endured in the Nazi concentration camps. It is inconceivable to me and he stood in that speech and he said, "I've never been here before, but I've seen you all before. And the dream of standing here and telling you that I made it, is what enabled me to endure the hardship in that concentration camp".
Brothers and sisters I want to ask you today, I know we have endured hardship, I know that the world around us has been cray-cray, I know so many have lost so much, but can you look ahead to the future? Can you look ahead to the race that you've been called to run part of an eternal divine relay, so that like Viktor Frankl, you can say, you know what? I'm here, not just for me, but for the generations that are to come after me. I endured that season and we came through a pandemic, and we came through so much loss, and so much upheaval and so much instability and so much chaos. But I stayed faithful because I wasn't just focused on the here and now, I lifted up my eyes, I looked up to the hills from whence my help comes. It comes the Lord God, I fixed my eyes on Jesus. I thought about the generations that are going to come after me. And I saw them. And because of them, I stayed faithful here, I stayed obedient here, I endured here, because I kept looking down the track to the future.
That's what keeps us going. I'm going to envision a future, not just for my daughters, but now that I've launched one to college, I'm thinking of my grandchildren by the grace of God, and my great grandchildren. I'm sure that's why that song by Cody and Kari Jobe and Cody Carnes and Steven Furtick about 'the blessing' has resonated so much with so many of us, because it's not just about us, but it's about our children and our children's children. So we've got to envision a future beyond us. And when you can envision a future beyond you, you make decisions not based about you, but based on the generations that are to come after you. So why do I want to see your life unleashed for the glory of God? Why do I want to see you fulfill your God-given purpose and your God-given potential? Because it's not just about you, but it's about the generations that are going to come after you in Jesus name.