Psalm 78:40-41, “How often they provoked Him in the wilderness, And grieved Him in the desert! Yes, again and again they tempted God, And limited the Holy One of Israel.” Here we see that although ‘all powerful’, sufficient to rescue an entire nation from slavery and destroy their opressors, God is limited in His desires to bless His people because of their restrictive thinking.
Genesis 3:8, “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” The ‘all powerful’ God had provided Adam and Eve with everything they could need; food, companionship, access to His very being. And yet their thoughts not only hid them from God, but lost them all of the blessings of the Garden, gave them over to the captivity of Satan, their warped minds, and the hardships they now had to endure. Their perverted thinking limited the outpouring of their Father’s love.
Matthew 13:58, “Now He did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” We accept that Jesus is LORD of all, and has power and authority, and yet in this verse we see that even He did not have the power (or perhaps the desire) to perform ‘mighty works’ because of the people’s lack of acceptance of the truth which limited Him.
2 Corinthians 6:12, “You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections.” Although Paul is possibly speaking in this verse about the relationship between himself and the people of Corinth, we can easily see that it can equally apply to our reception of the Truth as well, especially if you read the rest of that chapter. An interpretation could be, ‘Because of your focus on your physical senses and the false words of the ignorant, you are missing the Truth about your true position in God. And thus you are limiting the fulness of the blessings available to you’.
Therefore, we can state that we do not see the extravagant blessings and promises God has towards us because of our own limited and limiting mindsets, both individually and corporately. Perhaps the most terrifying scripture for me is when Jesus asks, “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?”, for have we not set boundaries around our minds and declared ourselves ‘naked’, no longer seeing ourselves wrapped in the truth of being ‘in the image and likeness’ of God.
