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Growing In God with Gary Hargrave


May 22, 2024

Web Description: In this day we need the power of God to be moving in us and through us. Yet we are often so conditioned by our past experiences that we do not believe in that power or, at the very least, lose the edge of our faith. The Passover shows us that God does deliver His people, and He does move in power. By thanking God for the lessons of the past, forgiving others, and moving into the love of Christ, we can move into God’s fullness and the knowledge of His power that works within us.

 

Show Notes: When Moses came to them, the children of Israel had spent four hundred years in bondage to the Egyptians. Then they suddenly had to believe in the miracle power of God. Their conditioning made it very difficult for them to trust in God’s concern for them, let alone believe that He would deliver them from bondage and give them their own land. We too, as people who have walked with God, have been conditioned by what we have gone through in the past.

 

We may have been led by God to pray for certain things or to be involved with certain people. Then after years of never seeing answers to our prayers or of having problems in relationships, we find that past experiences have worn away at our own ability to believe that we will see the power of God working in our lives. But the Passover is a reminder that God moves in power, and an aspect of the Passover was God moving to deliver the children of Israel from their past.

 

We need this aspect of Passover to work deeply in our lives to free us from the conditionings of the past. And a key to being free from the past is forgiveness. As probably every Christian knows, forgiving others is one of the most difficult things we must do in our walk with God. Yet Paul tells us to know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge. Clearly this divine love requires a divine enabling, but it is available to us in Christ. And we loose ourselves to appropriate it until we are filled up to all the fullness of God and are able to know the power of God that is above and beyond anything we can ask or think.

 

Key Verses:

 

       Isaiah 43:19. “Behold, I will do something new …; will you not be aware of it?”

       Exodus 5:20–21. “They met Moses. … ‘May the Lord … judge you.’”

       Genesis 50:20. “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

       Psalm 105:19. “Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him.”

       Hebrews 5:8–9. “He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.”

       Ephesians 3:14–19. “Know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”

       Ephesians 3:20–21. “To Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think.”

       Hebrews 12:26–27 “Those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”

       Ephesians 1:19–20. “His power toward us who believe … when He raised Him from the dead.”

       Philippians 3:13–14. “… forgetting what lies behind.

       Isaiah 55:6. “Seek the LORD while He may be found.”

 

Quotes:

 

       “I want Him not just to forgive me; I want Him to forget those things. We look for that thoroughness in our relationship with Him. But it means we’ve got to be that thorough in our relationship with others.”

       “We not only want to be aware of the new day; we want to be free in our spirits to walk in the new day.”

       “When we know the love of Christ, we will be filled up to all the fullness of God.”

 

Takeaways:

 

1.    If after being led by the Lord, circumstances happen to you that seem like a bondage to you, it does not mean that God did that. But God allowed it for the ongoing perfection of your heart and spirit before Him.

2.    We all stand before God as individuals. We can choose to be one in our hearts with others and walk with God together, but that only works because each of us walks with Him individually.

3.    We are in a new day, and we must be able to walk with Him in the new things He is doing. And so we want to be freed from all our conditionings and paradigms from the past. We must be totally free in our spirits from any judgment, any criticism, any lack of forgiveness and come into the love of Christ.

4.    We reach in to know the love of Christ that is beyond understanding, whereby God can fill us up to all the fullness of God. We must know that God can do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think and that His unlimited power, which is continually beamed toward us, will work in us and through us to accomplish His will.