Christine Caine - Possess The Promise, Part 2
Nothing can stand in the place of you and your time with God. Let me just say, I need this to stay alive. I am one of those people that will sleep with the Word of God open by my bed and just kind of by osmosis, please God, please God, do something. I need the word, I need the word, as thy word is a lamp onto my feet and it's for my head, too. I will walk around and I will just confess it and I will remind myself, Christine, you are the righteous of God. In Christ Jesus, Christine, nothing can separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus. Christine, you are the head and not the tail. You are above only, and not beneath. You are a leader, and I will just do that. I hope my hair's okay.
I wonder, have you walked through a lot in your life? Have you ever felt broken, in need of inner healing, and yet, at the same time, do you feel like you were meant for so much more, that somehow, what you've walked through is meant to be a testimony for others? Well, I'm here to tell you, it's true. I'm living proof that God can use your brokenness as a mighty testimony. But I'm also going to tell you that there is a process of healing that has to happen first. I'm Christine Caine and I have a personal mission to Equip and Empower people just like you, to connect with your God given purpose and potential. I am so glad that you're joining us today.
Hey, I am so excited to be back. Thank you, once again, for joining us this week. We are diving straight into God's word, talking about the promises of God. I don't know what kind of week you've had, but I do know that God's word is full of promise, full of hope, full of life, and you've tuned into the right program at the right time to get a word from God. We're talking about how we need to possess the promises of God. The Word of God tells us that all of the promises of God are in Christ Jesus, yes, and amen, two of my favorite words, yes and amen. And if Jesus said it, we can have it. It is ours for the taking. This word is full of promises, relationally, emotionally, physically, financially, in every sphere of life.
That's what I love about this book. It is not dead, it is not irrelevant. It is living, it is active, it is sharper than any two-edged sword, sir. I love going to God's word to find out what promises he has for me and you know what, those promises are not gonna just drop out of the sky like fairy dust. It is up to us, as believers in Christ to go in and possess those promises. Now, we have been camping in Joshua chapter five and I hope you did not miss last week and you're gonna want to go and make sure that you caught last week, 'cause we talked about the fact that the children of Israel, right then, camped in Gilgal, that they had to go in and that they had to be circumcised before they went in to possess the Promised Land. Now, we laid the foundation that one generation had come out of Egypt, out of bondage, out of slavery. They had had their own cutting away.
Now, another generation that had risen in the wilderness, they were going in to possess the promises of God, but they could not go in, based on the price that was paid by the generation before them. They had to pay their own price. Here is the deal for every single one of us, and wherever you're watching this today, all of us have access to the promises of God, but we have to make a decision to cut away certain things in order to go in and lay hold of those promises. The truth is, what I do love, is after it's spoke about the sons of Israel being circumcised again and we did establish last week that that was without any anesthetics, so the mind boggles at what happened in the Old Testament.
You really need to read the Bible: it's fascinating. But the Bible says, in verse eight of chapter five, when the circumcising of the whole nation was finished, they remained in their places in the camp and here's the words, until they were healed. Until they were healed. Sometimes we wanna go in and we wanna possess the promises of God before we're healed. And a lot of us, and particularly if you've had a background like mine: I come from a background where I was sexually abused for well over a decade, I grew up in a very, very poor socioeconomic demographic, second generation migrant Greek, very marginalized because of my ethnicity, because of the fact that I was a woman. I grew up in a time where women were not encouraged or, to be much or do much.
In fact, you know, in the Greek orthodox culture in which I lived and I grew up, a woman was basically told that all you can do is get married and have kids and that I should not want anything else outside of that. Certainly, I was never taught to dream, I was never taught that a woman could do anything or certainly that a woman should not be educated in any way. I kind of had a lot of negative factors in my life and on top of all of that and as some of you would know, when I was 33 years old, I found out, out of nowhere that I had been adopted at birth. Now that's a story for another time, but let me just tell you, it's quite a freak out to find out that you're not who you thought you were.
At 33, I was not looking to discover that my parents were not actually my parents, the people that I had called mum and dad my whole life, were not actually the people that gave birth to me, that my whole history was not what I thought it was, and that I had been left in a hospital, abandoned, unnamed, abused and adopted. The fact is, when I got saved, when I came to faith in Christ, I was a mess. I was a gaping wound. That's what happens, when you've been abused for year. That's what happens when you have a spirit of rejection and abandonment. I brought all of that dysfunction with me and you know, the fact is that I was just like this seeping sore, everywhere that I went. I didn't realize it but I was still, I was saved, but I was still toxic. Do you know that you can still be saved and have a toxic heart? And Jesus wants to come and heal our hearts.
Now, a lot of us, when you have a background like mine, you have huge empathy for people. You have huge compassion for people. You know what it's like to be hurt and so, you wanna go and help hurting people. But the truth is, hurting people hurt people. And so, unless I was healed, all I would be doing in my life is hurting people. My insecurity, my shame, my guilt, all of the brokenness that was on the inside of me, would actually come out of me in some way, shape or form and so I needed a time of healing. See, there are some of us and we wanna prematurely go out and lay hold of everything that God has for us, and God has promised it to us. We have a prophetic sense in our life that God has called us and that God is gonna use us mightily. And he's gonna use our past to give someone else a future.
And all that is true. But you have gotta make sure that you're healed in order to go and do that or at least, on the journey to healing. A lot of times, we will cycle in and out of one relationship. We will go from one church to the next, from one friendship to the next. Why, because we take all of our toxic, bad, insecurity and fear and negativity and doubt and hurt with us. We bring our past into our present, and we destroy everything around us when we're trying to help and we don't understand what that is. And that's because we've not given ourselves a chance to heal. Healing is very important. You know, when I had my throat surgery, after I had half my thyroid taken out because of thyroid cancer, the fact was this was very tender.
Now the devil came for my voice box. I had a growth in my throat, I had nodules. I also had cancer on one side of my thyroid. So the devil came for the one instrument that God uses the most in my life, obviously, and he did not win. So I'm giving someone some hope on the other side of this screen. But the fact is, I still had a healing process to go through. There was, my neck, it was quite disconcerting to have your throat slashed. But anyway, so I had my throat cut and it was very tender. Every wound, once it's been operated on, it needs a time to heal. Some of you have been under the dealing of God. Some of you have been under the hand of God where he's been bringing healing to broken and wounded areas of your life. I'm here to tell you, don't try to run ahead of God. Don't jump straight into another relationship. Don't try to run and start another ministry. Don't just run into another, just going with wounded bandages, seeping even the children of Israel here, they needed time to heal.
If you don't, you will try to anesthetize your pain in other ways. You'll just have that extra glass of wine. You might pop an extra one of those prescription medication pills. You might just stay watching and lingering a movie that you shouldn't be watching. It's amazing how we would try to anesthetize our pain because we won't give ourselves time to heal. I want you to know, today, that God wants you to heal. He understands that after a cutting away, there comes a healing time. I don't know where you are in your life right now, but I just feel, right at this moment, there's someone on the other side of this screen, and you have been bucking against this and you've been wondering why your wounds just keep gaping open all the time, and the stitches keep breaking all the time.
But I'm here to tell you, if you would just be still for long enough to allow the Holy Spirit to do a healing work in your heart and in your life, God will use you far more powerfully than you ever thought that you could be used. I am living proof that you can start bad and finish good. I am living proof that you can have a very broken past, but if you give God a chance to cut away, both weights and sins, and then allow a healing process, you will move past your past into the future that God has for you and he will use you mightily. So, what happened was, they had time to heal.
And then the scripture goes in, in verse 10, of Joshua chapter five, and it says, while the people of Israel were encamped at Gilgal, they kept the passover on the 14th day of the month, in the evening, on the plains of Jericho. I love that. They kept the passover. And so, if the first thing we had to do was cut away certain things, if we're gonna possess the promises of God, the 2nd thing we have to do is give ourselves time to heal, well, the 3rd thing that we have to do if we're gonna possess the promises of God is that we must fill ourselves with Jesus.
So here we are in Gilgal and the celebration of the passover right here marks a very, very major turning point in Israel's life. Immediately after this moment, they began to live off the land that they were going to posses. This passover celebration was gonna mark Israel's entrance into Canaan, and so, just as it earlier marked their exit out of Egypt, it was now going to mark their entrance into Canaan. The issue is Israel's possession of the land is the fulfillment of God's promise. This is where we've been moving towards the whole penticide: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. It's all been a move to this moment, that they're coming into possess Canaan, the Promised Land. Your whole life is a move, even as new covenant believers, we are going to faith to faith, from grace to grace, from glory to glory. There is our spiritual Canaan that God wants us to possess in every realm of our life. It's all about Jesus.
Do not substitute your time with God for anything else. And that is what the enemy is after. He is making us so busy in our life, busy with things that are not eternal, busy with things that do not matter. And what we're doing is not spending the time, nothing, nothing, nothing can stand in the place of you and your time with God. Let me just say, I need this to stay alive. I am like one of those people that will sleep with the Word of God open by my bed and just kind of like by osmosis, please God, please God, do something. I need the word. I need the word. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and it's for my head, too. And I will walk and I will just confess it and I will remind myself, Christine, you are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Christine, nothing can separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus. Christine, you are the head and not the tail. You're above only and not beneath. You are a leader and I will just do that.
I hope my hair's okay. But there's a point is that you need to do whatever you need to do to get this thing in you. What are you filling yourself with? What are you filling yourself with? There is nothing more important than this word. These are not like any other words. I need you to know that. This is not like any other book. This is better than any Stephen king novel you're gonna ever read. This is better than harry potter, believe it or not. I've never read it, but I'm just telling you. What this is is this is the eternal truth of the Word of God. These are God's words to us. This is God's, can you believe this? The God of the universe, he woke up one morning, burped, went earth, oops, look what I did. That God. He spoke these words into being and he says I'm giving them to you for you to possess my promises.
What are you filling yourself with? And maybe you're just too full of the world and you've got no room for the word. And that will take us back to point number one that we need to cut away some things to make some room for God in our life. If you are too full for this word, and you're not hungry enough for this word, then you're missing and you will never possess the promises of God in your life, you really won't. A lot of us, we are too full of the word, sorry, we are too full of this world and we are not full enough of this word and that's why we have no victory in our life. So what do you need to empty yourself of to make room for this word to come into your life so that you can walk in victory? Because if we're not having it, the problem is not with the word. It's that we don't have enough word in us to walk it out and for it to flow through us and out of us.
So I want you to fill yourself with Jesus, then I love, I love Joshua 5:11 and 12. It says, and the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. And the manna ceased the day after the ate of the produce of the land and there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year. So there we are, here, in verses 11 and 12, the emphasis is on the end of manna and the food that Israel ate in their new land. So this is what would happen. Can you even imagine what this would taste like? After 40 years of God dropping food out of the sky, all you ate was manna: breakfast, lunch and dinner, and there was just enough for today. Can you even imagine, after 40 years, what would it be like to taste milk and honey?
What would it be like, like on your taste buds, it would be the most awesome sensation, the most awesome sensation. You wouldn't even have, manna was a daily symbol of the wilderness. The food of the land of Canaan was what they were eating, and so as you eat in the Promised Land, that's how you take possession of the Promised Land. Some of you are so used to manna, you don't know how to eat of the food that's in the Promised Land. For 40 years, God did it a certain way. You know, you don't even need faith for manna, because God, they just knew they were gonna wake up, and there the manna was going to be. The Bible says that God provided for their daily needs, every day: that's how most Christians live. Not possession mentality, just barely get by mentality, just enough manna for today. God, just give me enough for today.
The point is God wants to move us from just enough for today to an over abundance, a supply of more than enough, 'cause that's the kind of God that he is. You cannot be a blessing if you've only got just enough for you. So what we need is the church that is blessed to be a blessing, which means you've gotta get into the overflow, you've gotta get into the abundance, you've got to get to the more than. And that's what God is, he is the more than God. We are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. We're not just conquerors, we're more than. He doesn't just fill, he doesn't just give us life, he gives us life more abundant. That's the kind of God that we serve. I wonder if your God's too small? I wonder if the God that you serve is too small?
So they're sitting there and they're having manna and the Bible says the manna has ceased because you don't need faith for manna. They just know this is how God's always done it. Famous seven last words of the church. We've never done it that way before. God's always done it this way. This is how it's done. The Bible says that for 40 years, they didn't even need to get new clothes or new shoes. How boring for a chick. Imagine that. Imagine no new shoes for 40 years. But anyway, that's what the Bible says. And so for 40 years, they were walking in the wilderness, and then the sign that your wilderness is over, is that the manna ceases and the Bible says they ate of the land of Canaan.
Now my husband and I, we spend a lot of time traveling and ministering in churches, and it's astounding to me how many churches I will go to and because God once moved on some song 40 years ago, every Sunday, they're going back to that song, looking for the same move of God, looking for the same anointing of what God did way back then. The problem is the manna ceased. So they keep going back every week, picking up stale manna, no nutritional value. It's moldy and they're trying to suck nutritional value over something that is dead, week in and week out. So many of us do that in our life. God once blessed something. God once moved on something. God once did something a certain way. So our whole Christian life is we keep going back to that thing, trying to get God to do the same thing, and in the words of John Wayne, "If the horse is dead, honey, dismount".
And so, the point is that it is finished. God's not doing it like that any more. God himself gets bored. I need you to know that. I haven't got a scripture and verse, but it is true. God, he says, behold, I do a new thing, in the book of Isaiah. I do, do you not perceive it and many of us, we don't perceive it because we're too busy looking at the old thing he once did and he says, can you not see I'm doing a new thing. U2 once wrote a great song called stuck in a moment. I do think they are one of the best worship bands that ever existed, but anyway, so they wrote a song called stuck in the moment, and in the chorus, this is what they said. You've gotta get yourself together, you got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it.
I wonder, on the other side of the screen, whether, somewhere in your life, you got stuck in a moment. And you're watching me right now, but the truth is everything about your life is stuck in that moment of hurt or offense or bitterness or anger or shame or divorce or failure or guilt or condemnation: that moment that happened 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. I was abused for 12 years, there's no doubt about that. But the truth is, I turned 50 recently, which means, if you do the math, I have not been being abused for 38 years. So why would I allow the devil to have any more than the 12 years he already had? Some of us, you're giving the devil all the time that he has not even actually been hassling you because one moment, one chapter of your book, not the whole book, but one chapter, you've defined your whole life by that one chapter. You've defined your whole life by that one moment in your life and you keep going back.
And although you're not in that moment anymore, physically, everything about you is in that moment, every day. You keep reliving that divorce, every moment of every day. You keep reliving that loss, every moment of every day, that failure, every moment of every day, that offense, that bitterness, that betrayal, that hurt, and at some point, you must make a decision that you're going to move on. The Lord said the manna has ceased. We're going into the land of Canaan. And some of you have not possessed the promises of God in your life because you've refused to move on from your past into your future. You have got to move past your past and this is the big key.
I speak with great love and tenderness to you because I have walked this road, but you must get to a place where you make what Jesus Christ has done for you bigger than what anyone else has done to you. You must make what Jesus Christ has done for you bigger than what anybody else has said to you. Someone, a teacher once said, you're dumb, you're stupid, you'll never amount to anything. A parent said, I wish you were never born. An ex-lover, an ex-spouse, they walked out on you, they forsook you, they rejected you and Jesus is saying, will you trust me? I am in your present and I am in your future. Will you make what I did for you bigger than what anyone else did to you?
You have been stuck in that moment way too long and God had you turn this broadcast on, right at this moment, right where you're sitting, to find out it's time to move past your past. It's time to get out of that moment that you're stuck in and in and through a relationship with Jesus Christ. He can give you the power to move past your past into the awesome future that is waiting for you. I am living proof. You do not have to be defined by what was done to you but you can be defined by what Jesus did for you. Make what he did for you bigger than what anyone else did to you. And you can walk in victory.
And let me tell you, no demon in hell and no person on earth can stop you from possessing the promises of God in your life. And let me just say, some of you, you feel weak. You're going, but Christine, I am barely making it. I want you to know, the fact that you're still watching this, that you're still here is a huge sign. The devil on his best day didn't take you out on your worst day. You are still here, you are still alive, God's still got a plan. He's still got a future and he's still got a destiny for you in Jesus' name. Let me pray for you as I believe for bondages to be lifted of people's lives today.
Father, thank you for you word. I thank you that you've promised us that all the promises of God are in Christ Jesus, yes and amen. And I pray, Lord, in the name of Jesus right now, that people would be set free from their past to move into the fullness of the future that you have for them, that even right now, God, people will move past their past and make what you have done for them, Jesus, bigger than what anybody has done to them. I declare and decree freedom over people's lives, in Jesus' name. Amen, amen, and amen.