some of you watching this right now i don't know who you are but you're feeling the stretch and i
need you to know you're not going to snap you feel like you're going to snap you feel like you cannot
trust god and so you want to just let it go but the truth is snapping back is going to hurt you
a whole lot more than embracing the stretch of moving forward there's always more in us
we're looking at the book of isaiah chapter 54 right here in isaiah 54 it says sing o barren one
who did not bear break forth into singing and cry aloud you who have not been in labor for
the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married says the lord
enlarge the place of your tent i love that and let the curtains of your habitations
be stretched out do not hold back lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes
for you will spread abroad to the right and to the left and your offspring will possess the
nations and will people the desolate cities it goes on i love this part fear not for you will
not be ashamed do not be confounded for you will not be disgraced you will forget the shame of your
youth and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more for your maker is your husband
the lord of hosts is his name and the holy one of israel is your redeemer the god of the whole
earth he is called we could just keep reading i love isaiah 54 sandwich right there between
the atoning work of jesus and this great end time revival in isaiah 55 is this chapter about
the church and at a time of babylonian captivity when it did not look like in any way the children
of israel were flourishing it was one of the darkest hours in israel's history the temple
had been burnt to the ground had been destroyed it didn't look like there was any hope or any future
in the midst of all of that god said guess what it's expansion time and i love that because you
could take that for a word for you in your heart right now sometimes we look around us and it seems
like everything's fallen apart our relationships our finances perhaps even our health and things
going on around us and we think god what can you do and god says in the midst of all of that
this is growth time this is expansion time this is a time to enlarge this is a time to stretch
i loved it because last week we looked at what it was to enlarge to magnify to make god bigger than
your problems to make god bigger than your past to make god bigger than your circumstances it is
a discipline it's not easy to enlarge that's why most people like to just live very small
and we keep our eyes focused on ourselves we keep looking at ourselves we keep looking at the past
we keep looking at the world around us and god says no no i need you to lift up your gaze i need
you to magnify me make me bigger than anything else going on in your life and so you can step
into the purpose of god and then i love the second word right here we're looking at the five words
it says to stretch now to stretch is to be made or capable of being made longer or wider
without tearing or breaking now here is the truth that you've got to be willing to stretch
for increase and stretching can be quite painful but the gap between where you are and where god
wants to take you you're going to have to stretch to get there most of us we want god to catapult us
into our destiny but god says no no i need you to stretch my promises are just out of
reach but you're going to have to stretch to get them now you might have seen you know at the gym
i love to go to to the gym and i've discovered these stretch bands which are absolutely awesome
now you look at this and you go wow and i'm going to call my husband into to help me right now and
i know many of you have not met nick so nick come up here and this is i always love to call
him my most ravishing piece of masculine flesh on planet earth can i think this could be your first
time saying hello to all the tvn audience okay this is my man of nearly 21 years so
over here if you grab this now we just without we won't put any tension in it it's this is how
long this seems but the truth is there's more in it and if we just pull you could see if you hold
one that's a lot longer when we started so we'll start at a normal length if you could just hold
it at the end there that's right and now just even pull it there look how much more is in it i want
you to know that you're starting here watching this today but i need you to know that god says
there's all this there's all this still in you now the fact is it hurts to go like this i go to the
gym a lot and i don't stretch very much i remember a few years ago thanks nick a few years ago i went
uh skiing for one of the very first times in my life and i wasn't very good at skiing i didn't
really start skiing until i was in my 40s and it was during the time of the vancouver olympic games
now what was really funny about that was i would watch the olympic games during the night and then
the next morning because we had gone with five other american families up to colorado to ski
the next morning i would feel a moral obligation to represent australia when i and the fact that i
couldn't ski was incidental that really didn't matter but i was going to represent australia
and so i would get off the ski lift and remember i was on the flat green slope because i was a
beginner well this one day uh all the boys had gone on this like double black diamond suicide
run kind of um you know i can't even understand how any human being can actually stay upright
down those cliffs but i was on my flat green slope and i'd convinced my husband nick to come
with me and so we were skiing away and i said to him i'm thinking this is awesome i said hey babe
if you were with all of the boys right now you would not be having a better time than you're
having with me in this moment would you now of course anyone watching this broadcast if you're
married and you want to stay married um you would know that if your wife ever asked you
a loaded question like that if you were looking for any action that night you would of course say
of course your right answer would be babe the pinnacle of my skiing life is on this
flat slope with you that's what you would actually say but my husband being a man
of incredible integrity turns around and he says you know babe if i was with the guys right now
i'd probably be having a whole lot more fun well i need to tell you that's like putting a red rag
in front of a ball and so i looked back at him and i just went famous last words well honey
eat my snow and with that i pointed my skis straight downhill and i looked straight down
and about 20 seconds later i knew that i was in massive trouble on my second somersault that
was not intentional when upside down i heard the loudest pop pop pop you have ever heard
and i snapped my acl i tore my mcl i tore my meniscus and i fractured my knee i did it all
so in that moment um i couldn't get back up i couldn't move and nick had to call the ski
patrol you know they come they take you they put you in that little coffin where you assume death
posture and then they take you down the mountain and everyone everyone is pointing who is that nerd
who is that nerd and it was no doubt it was me and then you know you've got to understand i come from
a greek family and greeks are essentially fatalists it does not matter how bad life
is it can always get worse and so my mother would always say negative things to me like it's dinner
you can't go skiing you're going to break a leg who's dinner you can't go skiing because you know
you're going to die you know it'll be really life uplifting words like that well she would always
say to me every day before i left the house when i was growing up because dinner are you wearing good
clean underwear to which i would always say mum why she would say christina because if you end up
in an accident and you are in the back of an ambulance you must be wearing good underwear
to which i would always say to my mother mum if i am going to have the kind of accident where i end
up in the back of an ambulance the last thing i will care about is the condition of my underwear
well all i want to say to you all today is as the ski patrol was lifting me up into that ambulance
i have just lived long enough yet again to utter the words my mother was right and so anyway
when all this happens i had to have a hamstring graft i had to have full surgery had a hamstring
graft and the physical therapist in sydney came over to me and said to me once my surgery was
finished he said christine he said most people he said you've had serious surgery but technically
your right knee is now much stronger than your left knee but the point is that most
people don't actually fully recover from the surgery that you've had and you see that with
a lot of professional athletes they're gone and maybe some people will walk with a limp for the
rest of their life not that they need to but he said your accident happened in a split second
it was painful but it was only painful for that moment he said the truth is the recovery process
is going to take several months and he said this kind of recovery from this kind of injury
is extremely painful much more painful than the injury ever was and he said this to me he said
christine you can either recover quickly or slowly completely or partially it's entirely up to you
the degree to which you embrace the pain of recovery is the degree to which you will recover
and what we find is many of us we don't want to stretch to embrace the pain to recover from our
past or our offenses or the hurt or the fear or the doubt or the negativity because it takes a
huge stretch to grow now i come from a background of abuse and many people go well christine
why are you stepping into your destiny and other people are not it's not that i'm more gifted
it's not that i'm more talented it's not that god favors me anymore it's just that as difficult as
it has been and hear me it has been difficult but as difficult as it has been i have been willing to
embrace the pain of recovery willing to say i will go through what i need to go through
in order to recover so that i can be healed just like in that injury i think a lot of us many times
we just think that god is going to snap us whole but he's not going to snap us whole in
fact he's going to stretch us whole that's the whole you're going to have to stretch beyond
anything that you're comfortable with in any sphere of life when i started the a21 campaign
i did not know anything about human trafficking i did not know how trafficking rings worked i didn't
know about how you prosecute traffickers i didn't know where we were going to rescue women and
children from i didn't even know where to begin so god said okay we're going to start a stretch we're
going to go here from here to here and slowly i got myself educated slowly i met more people
he opened door after door when i started propel women it was the same thing i had to stretch way
out of my comfort zone i mean it was not anything i ever thought that i was going to do it wasn't
anything i ever thought i wanted to do but god said let's just stretch your capacity and just
when you think you can fit nothing more in god goes oh no there's more of us and there always
it's just you notice as it gets it hurts more for me to even pull this more it actually hurts
more and so the degree to which you're willing to embrace that some of you watching this right now
i don't know who you are but you're feeling the stretch and i need you to know you're
not going to snap you feel like you're going to snap you feel like you cannot trust god
and so you want to just let it go but the truth is snapping back is going to hurt you
a whole lot more than embracing the stretch of moving forward there's always more in us
friends with your faithful partnership tbn is reaching over 175 nations that's why for your
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