Christine Caine - Take A Risk, Part 1
And life is but a vapor, the Bible says. Like this, it's just a vapor. All that stress. Is my kid going to get a four point oh? Vapor. You know, what's going to happen with all the stocks? Vapor. Who's going to be in government? Vapor. All the things you're losing, is that guy going to like me? Vapor, vapor, vapor. Are you a risk taker, or do you prefer to play it safe? Growing up, I was a play it safe kind of girl. But when I met Jesus, that changed. I realized that to follow him, you have to be willing to take some risks. To dare to dream big, to do things that others have said were impossible. So do not let fear hold you back from your destiny one day longer. It's time to step out and to be courageous. 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. Let's dive straight into the word.
Hey, everyone. I am so glad that you've joined us today. Thank you for tuning in, I know that God has a word for you. We are going to have a fantastic time over the next couple of weeks as we're going to talk about taking risks. That, for me, is very exciting. You know, God never called us to a boring life of just merely existing, a life of safety, or a life of comfort. God has called us to a passionate, purpose-driven life full of risk. That actually is the essence of faith. You've got to take risks. And you know, in our world today, there is so much fear. There is so much terror. People are pulling back and kind of looking for some sort of safety and security, but we are going to talk about the joy and the adventure of stepping out in faith, laying a hold of the purpose of God for your life and for your generation and understanding that God has so much more for you than where you are right now.
Well those of that don't know me, you know, I am a Greek Australian girl, and so I grew up speaking Greek, I didn't speak English until I was five years old, and so if you have seen my big fat Greek wedding, that is my big fat Greek life. Every part of that is exactly the truth. I had columns in my house, I wore taffeta, I had very big permed hair because I'm that old, and I would eat lots of baklava, lots of feta cheese, you know, that's kind of just how it was. Greeks are fatalists. It really doesn't matter, you know, how bad life is, it can always get worse. If you hang around my family at all, things can always get worse. You got people like that in your life? Where you just go, you know, things are happening, and they'll say, "But let me, I can top it, I can tell you a better story of how much worse it was for me".
We've all got those kind of people. I grew up with my mother for years. Always said, Christine, you should never go skiing. There was lots of different things she said you should never do, because, you know, it's very, very dangerous. Well, I went skiing one day, snow skiing in my 40s, and my mother's premonition came true. She always said, if you ski, you're going to have a big accident. Well, I did. I ended up snapping my ACL, tearing my MCL, tearing my meniscus, and, you know, they had to put me in the ski patrol, I went down the mountain, everyone was laughing. Who's that nerd? It was me. And they had to put me into the back of an ambulance and then I had to go to the hospital. So it was very, very serious. Well, the fact was, before that ski injury, and I snapped my ACL, can I tell you the truth? I did not even know that I had an ACL. I didn't even know what that thing was. I didn't know it was even connected to my whole body. But I learnt a lot that day, I learnt a whole lot about my body and all the different bits.
But the funny thing was, when I went back to Australia to have surgery, I had the accident in Colorado, they flew me back to Australia, after I had surgery, my mother in her nice, like, Greek positive way said, "See, Christina? I'm so glad that happened to you because it proved that I'm right". And you know those kind of people that are like, even if you nearly died, I'm glad it happened, because I told you, you were nearly going to die. Well anyway, in the nation of Australia, we have this thing called the tall poppy syndrome. I don't know if you have that here in America, but basically we like to pull down people. We don't want anybody to come up out of the crowd, anyone to seem like they're going too far. If they think that you're a little bit too big for your boots, they're going to pull you down to size.
So not only did I grow up in a family that was all very, be careful, you're going to have an accident, don't step out, you might die, you know, I also grew up in a culture that was, don't stick your head up out of the crowd. Don't try to achieve something that anybody else has done. Just stay with the status quo, normal is nice, normal is good. So in Australia, I grew up with these kind of sayings, and perhaps you can finish the sentence if you know what they say, because basically we're programmed to stay safe. So there's sayings like, you can't have your cake and. Eat it too. If it is too good to be true. It probably is. If it can go wrong. It will go wrong. Everything that goes up (must come down). Keep both feet (on the ground). Don't count your chickens (before they hatch).
See, you all had a negative Greek mother as well. That's what I'm convinced about, and I guarantee you everyone at home answered every one of those as well. Because that's what we're brought up with. We're brought up to believe you've got to stay safe. You know, don't get too excited. Don't believe for too much. The sad thing is when that comes over into our Christianity, where people are, you know what, don't expect God to do too much. Don't believe God for too much, just stay safe, stay in the boat, just stay with status quo. But the fact is that so many of us live our lives in fear. We live our lives just in what we perceive to be the safety of this little world that I can control, and we never step out and up and into the purpose of God for our own lives.
Because faith is all about risk, faith is actually doing something that we can't do because we need God to do it, and the enemy, if he can't take our souls, so if we are saved, and he can't get us, what he's going to try to do is make us live safe so that we never step out in faith and do what God has called us to do. Without faith, the scripture says, it's impossible to please God. And I want to please God, so I want to live a life of risk, and I want to live a life of faith. If you're going to move forward, then you're going to have to step out of your comfort zone. For some people, me even starting like this is making you nervous. You're like going, where's the remote control, where's the remote control? You're like freaking out going, what do you mean I've got to leave my comfort zone? Because fear paralyzes us. Fear cripples us.
And you know in the world today, with what's happening economically and politically and morally, socially, people are freaking out left, right and center, and what that does is causes us to pull back. But in this series, the next couple of weeks, I'm believing God that we're going to not give way to fear any longer, because God has not given a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and a sound mind, and we're going to step out in faith and do what God has called us to do, because the truth is, even if you think, I'm living a nice, safe, comfortable life, you have to understand that just living is risky. Just being alive, you can't avoid risk if you try. Woven into the very fabric of our finite being is this whole idea of risk, because we're all of us are, no matter what, so no matter what happens, our body is dying from the moment that it's born, so you cannot avoid risk.
Look, how many of us could avoid a natural disaster if we tried? You can't. No one can. You see hurricanes that hit, cyclones that hit, tornadoes that hit. You can go and hide in your bed and pull up the covers, but you know what, if that tornado's going to hit, it's going to hit. And I think a lot of us, we try to live our Christian lives like we're in bed with the covers, and if we don't know it's going to hit, then it's not going to hit us. It's going to bypass us. But that isn't exactly the case of life. You cannot stop any kind of natural disaster, you cannot control the weather. We can control a lot less than we ever think that we can control. Most of all, you can't control other people. I know you think you can control your spouse, but let me tell you, you could be married for two and a half seconds, and you will realize that you cannot control anybody but yourself. And so what we have to do is learn to take steps of faith.
I was flying, you know, I fly hundreds of thousands of miles every year, it's what I do, I travel the world and teach. And so as one day I was flying from Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, and I remember that the plane took off, everything seems normal, I do, you know, at least two or three flights a week, so this is very normal for me. The plane goes up above the clouds, which is kind of where you want the plane to be up there, and then after about five minutes, the captain comes over the loudspeaker, and he says, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to panic". To which I was thinking, I actually wasn't panicking until you just made that announcement, I was not panicking, I was really happy drinking my water with no ice. And so at that moment, this is what he said. He said, "We are having problems with the landing gear". He said, "We can't get the gear up. We do not know what is still attached, so we're going to turn around and try to land in Chicago".
Now, can I just tell you at 35.000 feet, there are certain words you do not want in the same sentence. One of those is try to land, you know? It's like, landing would be nice. Well, let me just tell you, at that moment, the spirit of atheism left the airplane. It really did. From the back to the front, I could hear people crying out, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, Mary, the donkey, I mean, everything, everyone was freaking out at that moment. And you know what I found out that day? Flying is risky, I couldn't avoid it. So what do I do? Do I not do what God has called me to do because flying is risky? I went on a ski vacation and I told you I snapped my ACL and fractured my whole knee, you know what I found out about vacations? They're risky. So what do you do?
Do you never go on a vacation because it's risky? You know, we rescue the victims of human trafficking through A21 and there was one of the cases where one of the traffickers was convicted and sentenced to jail. And so then the next day four of the people from that trafficking ring came into one of our offices with guns and threatened to kill our staff and said, if you keep putting traffickers in jail, we're going to kill you, because obviously once they go to jail you've stopped that economic supply in that line. Well, what I discovered is helping to rescue the victims of human trafficking is risky. So what do you do? Do you not do it? Because a lot of us, we just kind of think, that's risky, I'm not going to do it. So much of our life is, that's dangerous, so I'm not going to do it, that's risky, I'm not going to do it.
I discovered in a very real, tangible way that life is finite, that life is risky, that living is risky, that there is no way that you get out of life alive. Life is terminal and life is risky, so you have one of two choices. You can either live this thing called life, because you're not getting out of life alive. As in the words of George Bernard shaw, he said, death is the ultimate statistic, one out of one dies. I bet you are glad you tuned in to TBN today. The fact is that it happens to all of us, but here's the good news, that you don't have to die before you're dead because the thing that's killing a lot of people is this unused life that they're carrying around on the inside of them. What we want to do is live this passionate, purpose-driven life that Jesus Christ died to give each and every one of us.
The book of James chapter four verse 13 and 14, James writes this, he says, "Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring". Don't you laugh at all those people who think, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to predict, we don't even know what we're going to think tomorrow, let alone what wall street's going to think, you know? I'm just like, really? Really? Everyone's just going, I predict this is going to happen. Well I flew down to Dallas to do this recording, and they predicted that we were going to have rain and storms every day and we've had beautiful weather the whole time that I've been here. We can't even predict the weather right, so I don't know how we think we're going to predict any of the future.
But here James is saying you don't know what tomorrow's going to bring, what is your life? "For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes". This just cracks me up. You know, we stress about so much stuff, and life is but a vapor, the Bible says. Like this, it's just a vapor. All that stress. Is my kid going to get a four point oh? Vapor. You know? What's going to happen with all the stocks? Vapor. Who's going to be in government? Vapor. All the things you're losing, is that guy going to like me? Vapor, vapor, vapor. Honestly some of the stuff, you know, if I eat that chocolate cake I'm going to put on another pound! Vapor. We lose so much sleep over, what's going to happen? And what about this, and what about that? And God's like, vapor. You're going to waste all your vapor? You are freaking out, 99% of what you freak out about doesn't happen anyway. That's the bottom line.
Some of you have lost so much sleep. You have stayed up and you've worked out plan a, B, C, D, X, Y, Z, and nothing has happened that you thought was going to happen. 99% of the stuff that we freak out over doesn't even happen. Some of you have tuned in today, you have been so stressed and so anxious and so worried, and you're worried about, what is going to happen tomorrow? What is going to happen with that child? What is going to happen with this relationship? Am I ever going to get married? Am I ever? You know, in light of eternity, you have to know that God is in control, and so much of what we're stressing out about, some of the things like am I going to have a bigger house? I need a bigger car, what about a better job, what about position, what about, the Bible says vapor. You're freaking out over stuff that really doesn't matter. So your kid doesn't clean up their room or pick up their dirty underwear, vapor vapor.
Honestly it is not going to be the end of the world. So what, they don't want to eat broccoli and they want to eat more, you know, sprinkled sandwiches, whatever you call those little hundreds and thousands sprinkles, what do you call them in America? Fairy bread. Do you have fairy bread in America? I need to educate the Americans, oh! This is like unbelievable. Well you know what, let's go, 'cause you're American. Peanut butter and jelly, okay. So you're like, my kid, what's going to happen if they eat more peanut butter and jelly? Don't worry, vapor. Knock yourself out. This smells so good, I'm looking for excuses to keep spraying it. It's, like, awesome. I wish you could smell it on the other side of the screen. It's awesome. But the truth is, can I just say, you know, what if I try, some of you are like, I don't want to step out in faith because what if I fail? Vapor.
So what if you do? Big deal! You know, I feel maybe the Lord's leading me to try this, but what if, vapor! Vapor! Just a few months ago I stood at my mother's graveside and they buried her right, you know, in the same graveside where my dad was, and it was just like as I watched that coffin go down, I said to the Lord, Lord, am I doing everything you've called me to do? Because life is so short. Life is so short. It was 30 years before this I was standing here for my dad. Now I'm standing here for my mum. And if I live long enough, one day I'm going to die too. That's the way it just happens. And so don't waste your life. Most of us are dead before we die, and the thing that kills us is all of this unused life that we carry around. We're so busy trying to stay safe that we never live the life that Jesus put us on this earth to live.
And so I want to encourage us to understand that God appoints the times and the seasons in which we are to live. I want to remind you, and I want you to know at home right now, that God is not freaking out over what has happened in the political election process. It's not that God is in heaving going, OMG, O-M me, whatever. You know, he's not like freaking out, going, "I don't know what to do, I'm so surprised! Bartholomew, why didn't you warn me"? He's okay. He's okay. And God actually put you and I on this earth at this time to be salt and light in the midst of a broken world right now. The Bible says in the book of acts chapter 17 verse 26, "From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth: and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands".
You're not here by accident. God knew what would be happening economically, politically, morally, socially, environmentally. God knew where the hole in the ozone layer would be up to when he dropped you on planet earth. You are not a product of time, you're a product of eternity. You've been plucked out of eternity, you have been positioned in time, and we've been given gifts and talents for the purpose of serving our generation. This is not a time to go into hiding. You do not hide salt and light. You pour it out in a lost and a broken world, you illuminate the darkness, and you bring hope and life and liberty in the midst of darkness and in the midst of brokenness. We were called to live a life of risk. That's what faith is. Everything about faith is risk. So without faith it's impossible to please God. You've got to ask yourself, are you living in faith? Or is your Christianity so predictable and boring I could set my watch by it?
I know when you get up, how you go to work, what you do, what you eat, when you eat, how it works, and if God decided to turn up and interrupt your routine, you would be offended. Because that's how a lot of Christians are. And so it's like, hi ho hi ho, it's off to church I go, and I live a boring Christian life. And that's never what God called us to do. He called us to take risks of faith and a daring adventure. Ephesians two, verse eight to 10. "For by grace you have been saved through faith". I love this. "And this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are," this is probably my favorite verse in the Bible, "we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand," in eternity, "that we should walk in them". Where? Here, on earth. So before we ever got here, God prepared something for us to do.
Now when you go home to heaven, are you going to say, "God, I did what you put me on the earth to do. Oh God, what did you put me on the earth to do"? And I think a whole lot more Christians are going to be, "What on earth was I doing down there"? And God's like, "I was trying to tell you. You were too busy freaking out, you never did the thing that I called you to do. You never did what I purposed for you to do". Now here is the deal, God created us on purpose for a purpose and no demon in hell and no person on earth can stop the purpose of God for your life. You may have been hurt or violated or abused, but I am living proof that the devil can come at you and try to take you out. But greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world and God can redeem all the broken pieces of your post to give you an awesome destiny and an awesome future. No one can stop the work of God in your life. The cross of Jesus Christ gives us a life beyond our past.
You might be watching this and you may have blown it, and you may think, I would love to fulfill the purpose of God but Christine, you don't know what I've done. And you are exactly right, I don't know what you've done, but I know what he did 2.000 years ago. And my Bible says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You can have a life beyond your past, your history does not need to define your destiny, you can still step into the purpose of God. If you woke up this morning and there was not a white chalk Mark around your body, it means you're alive, just in case you're wondering what you're doing here on the earth. So stop praying to go to heaven, 'cause God doesn't want you yet. You've got too much to do here on earth. The Bible tells us in John 15 verse eight, "By this my father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and prove to be my disciples".
So if we are going to bear fruit, we have got to step out in faith. I was the kid that was left unnamed and unwanted, abused and adopted, I could've had every excuse for not stepping out in faith. But you know what, it took a step of faith to say, I am not going to allow my history to define my destiny, so God I'm going to use all the broken pieces of my past to give other people a future. If I did not take a risk, there would be no propel today. There would be no A21 today. There would be no Equip and Empower TV program today. I wouldn't be married today, I wouldn't have children today. Everything I've done involves risk and faith. God has not called us to a safe life. He's called us to a life of faith and risk. Let's determine, we're going to take a risk in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name, amen, amen.
So Father, I thank you, that you have called us to an abundant, purpose-driven, passionate life full of faith and full of risk, and Lord I pray that those of us that have been trapped and caught in this false sense of comfort and security and ease that we would have the strength and courage to break out of our comfort zones and step into our God-given purpose and destiny in Jesus' name. And all God's people said, amen, amen.