Forward to Zion: Ohio Hometown Camp Meeting 2016: Sharing the Truth in a Dangerous World

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Forward to Zion

Danielle Harrison

Purified and Preserved

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we have already had such a rich day.

It's been full and it's been a blessing to many of us.

Many have come and gone throughout the course of the day and and many still remain.

And so I'm glad to look out and see the faces here, Lord.

And I trust that the people that need to be here are here because I've been asking you to provide that, that you would bring the people that need to hear this message.

And I thank you for bringing each and every 1 of us here safely.

Lord, I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit to speak through me and into these hearts in a mighty way that's profound, Lord, and help me to share this presentation like it's the very first time I've ever shared it.

And I pray that the true message will come through and that I will not get in the way and that you will just be able to speak, that I will just be a conduit through which your message of truth can flow.

And Lord, I just turn again to your word and I claim again, like I did the first night, Exodus 4.12 and Isaiah 51.16, Lord, for your promises to put your words in my mouth and covered you under the shadow of mine hand because you made my mouth and you even divided the waters that Israel could cross over on dry ground.

So if you're powerful enough to do that, then you're powerful enough to speak even through me today.

And so I thank you for what you're about to share with us.

So when I share my testimony, I always share at the end how the day that I was baptized, I wore a red dress all day before my baptism and I wore a white dress all day after my baptism.

And I did that as an object lesson of the cleansing that I believed that God had given to me because he promised it in his word in 1 John 1, 9.

And so I asked him, Lord, to please forgive me of my sins and to cleanse me of all unrighteousness.

And I said, Lord, I had made promises of purity when I was younger and I knew that I couldn't keep those and I had tried in my own strength and failed.

And so I said, Lord, may I enter into a new covenant with you now, and may you hold me in that state of purity.

May you wash me clean like a virgin in your eyes and to hold me in that state of purity.

How can a transformation like who you used to be come to be who you are?

How can this kind of transformation take place?

Well, I can tell you with stronghold addictions of many years and of different forms that it's only by God's grace that this kind of transformation can take place.

And that's what I hope you hear from from this message tonight.

But it takes more than just an intellectual knowledge of him and a surface reading of his Bible.

And we've talked about that this weekend, or this week.

And it takes more than just human effort.

It takes human effort coupled with divine aid.

And that's what we're gonna talk about tonight as well.

There are those who profess to serve God while they rely upon their own efforts to obey his law, to form a right character, and secure salvation.

Their hearts are not moved by any deep sense of love of Christ, but they seek to perform the duties of the Christian life as that which God requires of them in order to gain heaven.

When Christ dwells in the heart, the soul will be so filled with His love, with the joy of communion with Him, that it will cleave to him.

And in the contemplation of him, self will be forgotten.

Love to Christ will be the spring of action.

Those who feel the constraining love of God do not ask how little may be given to meet the requirements of God.

They do not ask for the lowest standard, but they aim at perfect conformity to the will of their Redeemer.

With earnest desire, they yield all and manifest an interest proportionate to the value of the object which they seek.

A profession of Christ without this deep love is mere talk, dry formality, and heavy drudgery.

Maybe some of us have experienced this in our Christian walk, where it just becomes a burden, a drudgery, going through the motions.

But for me, every time that I started to have lasting change in my life, it was when I started to understand this concept.

And every time I started to experience victory in a certain area of my life, it came as a change in my perspective.

We talked about seeing things from God's perspective, right?

Walking away from the perspective that I had and the way that I looked at the topic and started to see it from God's perspective.

So let me ask, what do you see when you look at this photo?

2 faces, right, made up with the black here.

And a goblet in the center, made of the white, right?

Some people look at the photo and first they see the faces and some people look at it and first see the goblet.

Some of them don't see the other image unless someone else mentions it to them.

Some of them, some people see it very quickly, both of them.

But I think 1 thing is for sure, that once we've seen both of them, we can't unsee them, right?

We have to come to see our sins from God's perspective.

And 1 of the things that God helped me to come to realize and to understand was the simple concept that self-service is idolatry.

When I choose to serve self and go my own way instead of walking in the light that God has given, I am putting myself up on a pedestal and saying, I know better, or whatever the case may be.

I am setting myself up as an idol in my life because I'm choosing to serve myself instead of God.

And when I started to see that, that was pretty profound.

And there's a myriad of different things that God helps us to come to see from his perspective.

But once we start to acknowledge, once we start to realize that what we're doing, the way that we're living, is not in harmony with God and his desire, in comes the conviction, right?

And conviction isn't very comfortable, which makes things a little bit complicated when you live in a world that tells you to follow your feelings and follow your heart.

When we approach the Bible and the word of God pricks us, it convicts us, it makes us uncomfortable, our natural inclination is to get away from that thing that's making me uncomfortable, right?

But you see, God created a narrow path to heaven, right?

And he lined that path with a hedge of protection.

He lined that path on either side so that we don't turn to the left or to the right, because we can go too far in the wrong direction or we can actually become overzealous in the right direction, and we can go wrong in that way too, right?

So he placed a hedge on either side, and we see in Genesis 3 that as a result of sin, thorns and thistles came upon creation, right?

And so as we're traveling along the narrow way, if we turn and we start venturing off in our own direction, then we get into that hedge and we feel those thorns that were pricked, it's not designed to create us or force us away from God to run away from him and his word, it's to warn us it's designed to be uncomfortable, to help us to see that we're in danger and that we need to get back into the center path, the only path that's gonna take us to where we really wanna go, and where God wants us to go.

The Lord has given his holy commandments to be a wall of protection around his created beings and those who will keep themselves from the defilement of appetite and passion may be partakers of the divine nature.

They will know how to preserve every faculty in health so that it will be preserved to God in service." So as I went out to the Black Hills and I started to learn things on the farm, remember I was all into energy healing and everything was energy.

And it was really my hippie phase in my life.

And so when I go in there and they're cutting off parts of the plant.

And I was just reading in my energy healing book that just how you can see auras of people, you can also see auras of plants.

And if you look at a plant that's had a part broken off, you will see the outline of where the leaf used to be or the stem used to be, and it'll be a different color than the rest of the aura and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, this is what I'm reading, right?

So I'm going in there and they're cutting off parts of the plants and I'm like, oh no, this isn't good, you shouldn't be doing this.

And the farmer, he was very patient, and he started to describe to me why they were doing such a silly thing, right?

He said, you know, Danielle, if you just let the plant grow how it naturally would grow, you're gonna have an abundance of branches.

You're going to have way more branches than are necessary to the productivity of the plant.

And so if you come in and you take away some of those needless branches, then you won't have so much extra foliage, all the extra leaves, that all of the energy of the plant is going to.

Instead of all those extra leaves, the energy can go right to the fruit.

And so if you prune the plant and you keep the branches that are necessary, then you will have bigger and sweeter fruit as a result.

And this is what God is striving to do for each and every 1 of us.

If we allow ourselves to grow the way that we naturally will, we will have so many things that come into our lives and distract our energies away from productivity for God and His kingdom.

And so God, by His grace, He comes into our life, and he starts to show us these branches that are needless and distracting and taking away the energy that can go to the fruit that will make it big and sweet and he starts to prune those away and it might be a little bit uncomfortable to be pruned of God.

Oftentimes it's very uncomfortable, right?

But if we will submit, then we will become more productive, not just in this world, but for the kingdom of Christ.

So I remember when I was very first going through a prayer class that I actually now offer in ministry, we were reading through some verses about claiming the promises of God.

And I was talking about how not only can we find promises where God says he will do this, you know, but even the commands are also promises.

And this actually started to change the way that I looked even at the 10 Commandments.

Because I approached the 10 Commandments the same way all of my life.

I'd read them, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not, not, not.

And when I was younger, I just hated that.

Purified and Preserved

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