Live Free with Josh Howerton - Embracing the Pain of Recovery • Christine Caine | Ep. 272 | Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

As we continue looking at Joshua 5, we see that the people of Israel needed a time for healing. It was part of God’s purpose for Israel. We too often need seasons of healing from hurts or sins in our lives. The degree to which we are willing to embrace the pain of recovery is the degree to which we will truly recover. Where do you need healing and wholeness today? For more information, visit lakepointe.church/dailydrive

Thanks for tuning in to today's Daily Drive with Lake Point Church, a daily dose of God's word for your morning drive. When the word, not the world, becomes the majority of your week, your life will start to change. For that reason, our prayer is that God will speak to you through today's devotional. For more digital content to feed your faith, visit lakepoint.combe.com slash daily drive. In this week's episodes, we will be hearing from our special guest. Christine Kane. And now let's dive in to today's devotional. Hey, Lake Point Church, my name is Christine Kane, and I am so excited to be joining you this week on the Daily Drive with Lake Point Church podcast. Now, I hope you had a chance to join us yesterday

where we just launched into the text in Joshua Chapter 5 and spoke about the fact that the children of Israel were just about to go in and finally possess the promised land that God had spoken to them about that God had promised them and for 430 years of bondage and captivity, they had held onto this promise and here we are. So what do you and I do on the edge of our promised land? Because as followers of Jesus, we're going from faith to faith, we're going from grace to grace, we're going from glory to glory, we continue to step up and into the purpose of God as we run our race and we want to lay hold of all of that for which Christ Jesus has laid a hold of us. So as we continue to grow and we continue to develop, there are certain things we need to do.

Now, yesterday on Monday, we talked about the fact that there are things we need to cut away. There are weights and there are sins that we need to cut away. Like any athlete, you need to get rid of excess baggage. I mean, you're not going to run a sprint carrying a backpack. You are going to drop that backpack and you're going to get into your lane and you're going to run your race. So that's really what yesterday was all about. And today we're going to talk about the second thing that you need to do if you're going to step into the promise of God. Remember yesterday we talked a little bit about a lot of circumcisions.

I'm glad I'm a woman, but we're going to jump in now and pick up the text from verse 6. It says, for the people of Israel walked 40 years in the wilderness, until all the nation, the men of war who came out of Egypt, perish because they did not obey the voice of the Lord. The Lord swore to them that he would not let them see the land that the Lord had sworn to their fathers to give to us a land flowing with milk and honey. So it was their children, whom he raised up in their place, that Joshua circumcised, for they were uncircised because they had not been circumcised on the way. Sorry, I didn't think we were going to do more of this, but we are. When the circumcising of the whole nation was finished,

they remained in their places in the camp until they were healed. I want you to catch this. There was a time of cutting and there's a time of healing before you step into the promise that God has for you. You know, in our kind of Instagram, social media generation, a lot of us, man, we want to be catapulted into our God-given destiny and our God-given purpose. without allowing a time for God to bring healing and wholeness into our life. And the fact is that if we don't allow God to heal the wounds and the brokenness of the trauma of our past and our lives, then what will happen is when we get to the place where God

has been preparing for us, we are going to not be able to have the spiritual weight and capacity to stay where God has placed us. If there's a disparity between our character and our position, eventually we are going to flounder and fall. You know, by the grace of God, my husband and I have the opportunity to run a global anti-trafficking organization. And we're able to travel and teach around the world and help to build up the church and do a lot of evangelism and mission. But the truth is, I come from a background of many, many years of childhood sexual abuse. I was left in a hospital unnamed and unwanted when I was born.

I was adopted and just carried a lot of trauma, obviously, from the rejection and the pain and the brokenness of that kind of background. Now, God had this purpose for me to help to set free those that are in bondage and captivity, to help bring freedom to women around the world and to speak life and hope. But the truth is that I didn't just recover from all of that brokenness of my past overnight, although God had gifted me and God had called me, I needed a season of healing and I needed to tend to those broken places in my life with some great Christian counseling, of course, being planted in the house of God with the Word of God and having great strong Christian community.

For decades, I want you to hear that, for decades. I'm nearly 40 years into this thing. It wasn't an overnight healing. So here, the Lord said, you know what? There's a cutting that comes. And that cutting is for the purpose of healing. And then he said to them, you've got to stay in the camp. I know you've got this promised land.

That's like a lot of us, you know, we're scrolling through someone else's life on social media. We're like, I want that. I believe God's promised that for me. And then we want to bypass the process. But here's the deal. When I snap my ACL and skiing, I'd like to say I was like a ski champion, but I really was not. I was a ski loser. And I fell and I snapped my ACL in my meniscus and fractured my knee.

I had to have a surgery. And then the PT came into me right there in my hospital recovery room. And he said, Christine, we're going to do, you've had a hamstring graft. So your right knee is now stronger than your left knee. But here is the deal. Most people don't recover from your kind of injury, not because they can't. But he said these words to me, the pain of recovery is much greater than the pain of the injury. And you're going to have to go through months and months of recovery.

And it's going to be really painful. So here is the deal. You can recover quickly or slowly. You can recover completely or partially. It's entirely up to you. The degree to which you are willing to embrace the pain of recovery is the degree to which you will recover. And so the deal is in our life, in our walk with Jesus. We all carry wounds, we all carry trauma, we all carry residue from things that have

happened to us or things that we have done ourselves. Let's not try to fast track and get ahead of where God is taking us because we're so eager to get into the promise that he has for us that we don't allow time to heal and be whole so that then when we're ministering to people, it comes out of a place of wholeness and healing, or when we're in a certain position that our character is forged and strong enough to carry us into the purpose that God has. We don't want to get to a place that a character can't keep us. So we need to heal. And we see right here in the text in Joshua chapter 5 that there was a cutting, but then there was a healing.

So I wonder today where you might need healing in your life. And I would love to invite you to invite the Holy Spirit into those broken places and allow him to come and bring healing and wholeness into your life. You don't want to miss tomorrow. We're going to step into point number three of what we need to inherit the spiritual promises that God has for our lives. I'll see you then. Thanks for tuning in today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our church online live weekend services

on Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 9.30 and 11 a.m. Central Standard Time. For more information, visit lakepoint.com. dot church slash daily drive.