The Power of God
Jeremiah 32:17
When God begins a new work in our lives He does something powerful. He delivers us from sin and self and it seems as if the whole world is a different place. The birds sing differently. The sky is bluer. The clouds are bigger and more than three dimensional. Time and people have a way of eroding away the grandeur of God. The longer we are around the status quo “Christian,” the more we become like them. I have seen this in my own life as I try to help someone see the glory of God, I lose my own luster and become like the people I am attempting to influence.
Have you lost something? Despite God’s provision for power, we may suffer a power shortage. There is a way back, but we must first admit that we have lost the power and glory of God.
When He began to deal with Israel He did so by demonstrating the kind of God He really is. They were a discouraged group of people living as slaves to the Egyptians. They had lost touch with the God of their fathers and had resigned themselves to be worthless in their own eyes. Their view of God was greatly affected, hindering them from seeing Him as able to change their situation. In our lives we do the exact same thing. Some see God as chairman of the board, a kind of businessman, needing our vote of confidence to move forward. The God portrayed in many of our churches demands little respect and is restricted to our low view of ourselves.There is a desperate need today of getting back to the God of the Bible. The God of Isaiah who saw the power of God. The God of the burning bush from whom Moses saw and heard. The God of Elijah, Abraham, Noah, Joseph, Daniel, John, and Paul is the same today that He was back then. God desires to be an experience to us that causes us to trust Him to accomplish the unexplainable right before our eyes.
That is what He is doing in Romania. I just returned from spending a week with Romanian pastors teaching at Covington Seminary Extension. I witnessed firsthand the power of God at work in the lives of these men, their churches and their country. These men have an insatiable hunger for the Word of God. They want to proclaim the life changing power of God more than any group of men I have ever met.
In a similar way God desires to pour out His power on each of us. Not for fame or notoriety but for His glory alone. He desires to endue us with power to reflect Himself (Col.1:11), to spread the Gospel (Acts 1:8), to overcome evil and temptation (1John 5:4-5; 2 Cor.10:3-5; 1Cor.10:13) and for us to know and do the will of God. We basically have three resources for this power: the Word of God, Prayer and the Holy Spirit. If we neglect these three resources God has given to us we can only read about the power of God or see it displayed in the lives of others. It is like looking inside the window of an airplane and never going inside. If we neglect our needful time in the Word and closet prayer we will never know the Spirit filled power that is made available to all of us. Many Christians who are deeply engrossed in ministry will go to their grave never having experienced God doing exceedingly abundantly above all that they could ask or think (Eph.3:20). All of us feel ordinary at times, but God’s power in us makes all the difference. When Christ lives in and through us the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to s. A godly Christian woman once told me, “When God, as big and powerful as He is, and you, as little and helpless as you are, meet you will know it.”
Ephesians 1:18-20 “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may
know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his
mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated
him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.”
